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As the U.S. government and its restless people looked to expand westward after the Civil War, they started to infringe upon Indian lands. During the Plains Indian Wars, as the U.S. Army attempted to drive Indians off the Plains and into reservations, the Army had little success because the warriors could live off the land and elude them\u2014wherever the buffalo flourished, the Indians flourished. But pressure on the Army to contain the Indians increased in the 1860s when gold was discovered in the Montana Territory, and part of what is now eastern Wyoming became the route of the Bozeman Trail, the quickest way to get to the mines in Montana. This trail cut through sacred ground for the Sioux, as well as their prime hunting grounds\u2014the \u201cbest game country in the world,\u201d according to one veteran trapper. The Sioux regularly attacked travelers on the Bozeman Trail, and Army forts were set up to protect travelers through the Powder River Basin. During the Indians\u2019 clashes with settlers, prospectors and U.S. Cavalry to protect a last bastion of their food supply in what became known as Red Cloud\u2019s War, U.S. Army Captain Fetterman bragged, \u201cWith 80 men I could ride through the whole Sioux Nation.\u201d He soon got the chance to back up that boast: Captain Fetterman and his men met with some representatives of the Sioux Nation and their allies, led by Crazy Horse, on December 21, 1866, in the Powder River Basin, and the result of that battle is remembered in history books as the Fetterman Massacre\u2014all 81 men in his party were slain. It was the Army\u2019s worst defeat on the Plains until the Battle of Little Bighorn, 10 years later, and forced it to pull out of the area after the Fort Laramie Treaty was signed in April 1868.
General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had broken the back of the South during the Civil War with his ruthless March to the Sea, helped negotiate the Fort Laramie and 1867 Medicine Lodge treaties that were supposed to end U.S. hostilities with northern and southern tribes. But that\u2019s when officers started thinking about a new strategy. Sherman knew that during the Civil War the Confederates\u2019 means and will to fight were extinguished by his brutal\u2014and brutally effective\u2014\u201dscorched earth\u201d policy that decimated the infrastructure of the South. Why couldn\u2019t the same strategy be applied to Indians and their buffalo? Greymorning said, \u201cThe government realized that as long as this food source was there, as long as this key cultural element was there, it would have difficulty getting Indians onto reservations.\u201d
A pile of hides in Dodge City, Kansas, ready to be shipped back to the East Coast.
A pile of hides in Dodge City, Kansas, ready to be shipped back to the East Coast.
Isenberg said, \u201cSome Army officers in the Great Plains in the late 1860s and 1870s, including William Sherman and Richard Dodge, as well as the Secretary of the Interior in the 1870s, Columbus Delano, foresaw that if the bison were extinct, the Indians in the Great Plains would have to surrender to the reservation system.\u201d Colonel Dodge said in 1867, \u201cEvery buffalo dead is an Indian gone,\u201d and Delano wrote in his 1872 annual report, \u201cThe rapid disappearance of game from the former hunting-grounds must operate largely in favor of our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas, and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs.\u201d
\u201cAs a policy statement, I think that\u2019s pretty clear,\u201d Isenberg said. The Army had already used a similar strategy\u2014In its 1863-1864 campaign against the Navajos, led by Colonel Kit Carson, the Army destroyed tens of thousands of sheep in a successful effort to subdue the Navajos.
There was one tactical flaw with this strategy: too many buffalo. But while it wasn\u2019t feasible for the U.S. Army to kill tens of millions of bison, it was feasible for the Army to let hunters use their forts as bases of operation and stand by as they slaughtered the animals in staggering numbers. Another key strategy here was that the Army made no effort to enforce all those treaty obligations forbidding whites to hunt on Indian lands. Whites could needlessly kill a bison for \u201csport\u201d but when an Indian killed cattle for food for his family because of the growing scarcity of bison, he was severely reprimanded.