After One Hundred Winters

In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands

Margaret D. Jacobs

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691226644
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A necessary reckoning with America's troubled history of injustice to Indigenous people After One Hundred Winters confronts the harsh truth that the United States was founded on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and asks what reconciliation might mean in light of this haunted history. In this timely and urgent book, settler historian Margaret Jacobs tells the stories of the individuals and communities who are working together to heal historical wounds—and reveals how much we have to gain by learning from our history instead of denying it.Jacobs traces the brutal legacy of systemic racial injustice to Indigenous people that has endured since the nation's founding. Explaining how early attempts at reconciliation succeeded only in robbing tribal nations of their land and forcing their children into abusive boarding schools, she shows that true reconciliation must emerge through Indigenous leadership and sustained relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people that are rooted in specific places and histories. In the absence of an official apology and a federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ordinary people are creating a movement for transformative reconciliation that puts Indigenous land rights, sovereignty, and values at the forefront. With historical sensitivity and an eye to the future, Jacobs urges us to face our past and learn from it, and once we have done so, to redress past abuses.Drawing on dozens of interviews, After One Hundred Winters reveals how Indigenous people and settlers in America today, despite their troubled history, are finding unexpected gifts in reconciliation.

PART ONE

Our Founding Crimes

CHAPTER 1

Blood

When I was growing up in the mountains west of Colorado Springs, it didn’t seem there was any history to be learned about this place where I lived. History, as I was taught in school, was something that happened in far-distant places. It was a parade of presidents, a litany of wars, a series of unconnected dots, all to memorize. If my teachers ever taught our local or state history, I don’t remember it. Somehow, though, I absorbed a View-Master version of Colorado’s history filled with stock characters: explorers, mountain men, miners, cowboys.

It was understood that Colorado’s founders were white and male, although not all of them were (in fact, some of the earliest gold seekers in Colorado were Cherokees from Indian Territory, and James Beckwourth, a freed slave, helped to found Pueblo, Colorado). A few women gained the stage now and then. I remember hearing of Baby Doe Tabor—wife of a silver magnate who lost his fortune in 1893. She ended up as a notorious madwoman in a Leadville cabin.

American Indians did not figure much at all in my education. My grade school class took a field trip every year to a museum where we listlessly traipsed past glass cases of Indian relics—pottery shards, baskets, cradleboards, even skeletons. So, I vaguely knew that Indians had once lived in the area I now inhabited. Place-names gave a hint to their past presence: we lived up Ute Pass; Cheyenne Mountain loomed large over Colorado Springs; and I careened recklessly down the slopes at Arapaho Basin as a teenager.

But from grade school to high school none of my classes ever studied or talked about why the Utes no longer lived up Ute Pass, why the Arapahos and Cheyennes no longer occupied the Front Range: those sheltered foothills, bountiful river valleys, and grassy plains that unfurl eastward from the Rocky Mountains. Indians, firmly contained in the past, just provided a little local color to the region where I grew up, another potential draw for tourists. Like nearly all settler descendants, I lived in a state of ignorance, and innocence, about the true history of where my family had settled.

For many centuries before it became squared into a state, Colorado had been the homelands and hunting grounds of many different Indigenous groups, from the Ancestral Puebloans and their cliff dwellings in the southwest corner of the state to the Utes in the mountainous western part of the state. Several Plains tribes vied fiercely for control of the plains east of the Rockies. In the early 1800s the Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas had become power players on the southern plains, and the Lakotas had gained dominance in the north. The Arapahos and Cheyennes were latecomers to the Front Range, having migrated from the area that became northern Minnesota. In 1840, these tribes negotiated a “Great Peace” and designated the vast central plains a common hunting and camping terrain of a “broad alliance of former enemies.” Europeans had also set their sights on this land. Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, from their base in New Spain, and later New Mexico, had sought to colonize it. French fur traders and trappers had ventured into the region, eager to exploit its bountiful wildlife for profit.

But up until 1858, few Americans had been interested in Colorado. Most saw it as a mountainous hurdle or hostile crossroads on their way to California or Oregon Territory. Only a handful of Americans had lingered in the area, mainly working as fur traders or trappers. One of these was William Bent. William was born to an affluent family in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1809, one of eleven children of Silas Bent, who became a Missouri Supreme Court judge, and Martha Bent.

In 1824, when he was just fifteen, William and his older brother Charles left home to make their fortunes as fur trappers in the West. In 1833, the Bents gave up their traps and their wandering for a more lucrative and less grueling lifestyle. Together with a French trader named Ceran St. Vrain, they set up a trading fort—known as Bent’s Fort—in southeastern Colorado, along the Santa Fe Trail, shuttling goods from St. Louis all the way to Mexico City and back. They exchanged pots, knives, axes, cloth, and other manufactured goods with the local Cheyennes for bison robes, horses, and mules.

When William came to the area that became Colorado, he did not seek to take over Indigenous land or to re-create American society in the West. Instead he became thoroughly enmeshed within Cheyenne society. In 1835, he married Owl Woman, daughter of an influential Cheyenne man named White Thunder, who was the tribe’s Keeper of the Arrows, an esteemed religious and healing role. William became a member of the tribe, even a sub-chief. In 1844, he also married two of Owl Woman’s sisters, Yellow Woman and Island. Polygamy was customary for high-status men in Cheyenne society.

Just a generation later, William Bent’s model of becoming kin with Indigenous peoples was rare. Most white settlers who came to the West in the 1850s and 1860s sought not to integrate into the Indigenous groups that already lived there but to transplant their families to and re-create white settler communities in the West. Unlike Bent, they did not regard this as Indian country to be respected but as settler territory to be claimed.

The year 1858 was a pivotal one. As historian Elliott West tells it, the Cheyennes and Arapahos had been out on the plains for their annual bison hunt that summer and into the early autumn. When they moved back to the Front Range, as they did every winter, they found settler men building cabins and laying out streets in the tribes’ usual haunts. They found miners setting up camps in the foothills and along the streams where the tribes relocated in the winter. A few prospectors had found veins of gold in 1858 in the creeks along the Front Range. Now a gush of miners—60,000 the first year—poured into the Cheyenne and Arapaho lands.

Settler horses were eating up the grass that the tribes’ horses needed. The invaders were cutting down all the cottonwoods that provided shelter to Indian bands in the winter. And less visibly, the newcomers brought epidemics that would ravage the Cheyennes and Arapahos. The miners saw only the potential money they could make. They were heedless of the havoc they were wreaking on the Cheyenne and Arapaho people.

William Bent, with his long experience in the area, sought to inform the government about the injustice that was occurring against the people who had become his family. He wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs that developers were gridding out and erecting new towns in the most coveted areas without compensating Native people. As thousands more miners and settlers poured into the area, he raised the alarm about the growing crisis:

The prominent feature of this region is the recent discovery and development of gold.… I estimate the number of whites traversing the plains across the center belt to have exceeded 60,000 during the present season. The trains of vehicles and cattle are frequent and valuable in proportion; post lines and private expresses are in constant motion. The explorations of this season have established the existence of the precious metals in absolutely infinite abundance and convenience of position. The concourse of whites is therefore constantly swelling, and incapable of control or restraint by the government.… [The] numerous and warlike Indians, pressed upon all around by the Texans, by the settlers of the gold region, by the advancing people of Kansas and from the Platte, are already compressed into a small circle of territory, destitute of food, and bisected athwart by the constantly marching lines of emigrants. A desperate war of starvation and extinction is therefore imminent and inevitable, unless prompt measures shall prevent it.

In short, Bent was telling the government that many Indian people had been reduced to starvation during the Colorado Gold Rush.

This is not the story we usually tell about gold rushes. Our settler lore likes to recount fables of striking it rich, winning it big. We tell colorful tales of lucky miners and heart-of-gold saloon girls, a chapter in our larger progressive epic of “winning the West.” But there is perhaps no better illustration of how settler opportunity and benefit was inversely connected to Indigenous disadvantage than the history of the Colorado Gold Rush.

And the government did not act as a neutral arbiter of competing interests. Instead it lent its hefty weight to the miners and the settlers. It had erected only four forts in the area before 1858. Six years later there were fifteen, even at a time when the government’s resources were stretched thin by fighting the Civil War. The government also strung telegraph lines and built other settler infrastructure to make it possible for miners and settlers to flood into Colorado, to pursue new economic opportunities.

At the same time, the government failed utterly to meet its obligations under the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty: to protect Cheyenne and Arapaho lands from encroachment and to provide rations to replace their traditional food supply. The Office of Indian Affairs was chronically late with the food and tools that were guaranteed by the treaty. Corrupt Indian agents also sometimes sold Indian rations to others to supplement their income. When foodstuffs finally arrived, they were often spoiled or inadequate. As a result, the Cheyennes and Arapahos were starving at the very time and in the very place that some miners were striking it rich.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho people faced an impossible bind. They wanted to maintain their lands and their way of life. Barring that, they wanted to at least survive this onslaught of settlers who had made them starving strangers in their own lands. They divided over the best course of action.

Some Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders insisted that they must fight against the settlers to defend what was theirs. They charged migrants tolls through their land, they raided settler livestock, they killed some settlers and took others captive, and they fought against soldiers. Bent could understand their response. He told the commissioner of Indian affairs that a “smothered passion for revenge agitates these Indians” because of “the failure of food, the encircling encroachment of the white population, and the exasperating sense of decay and impending extinction with which they are surrounded.” Most other newcomers to Colorado were outraged. They failed to understand how the Cheyennes and Arapahos were simply trying to defend their land, homes, and families. They agitated for the government to protect them from what they called Indian “depredations.”

Other leaders argued that war with the Americans would be disastrous, and they sought to make peace. Southern Cheyenne chief Black Kettle and a few other peace-seeking Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs signed a new treaty with the United States in 1860 at Fort Wise (which later became Fort Lyon). U.S. negotiators demanded that the tribes cede most of the rest of their land and agree to confine themselves to a small triangular reservation, Point of Rocks, between Sand Creek and the upper Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. The tribes were to move to the new Point of Rocks Reserve in 1861 and to abandon their nomadic hunting life and adopt sedentary farming and ranching.

In return for their land, the federal government made many of the same promises it had made in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. It pledged to protect the tribes, provide livestock and farming equipment, plow and fence fields, build a sawmill and mechanic shops, and provide dwellings for the tribes’ members. Plus, it guaranteed fifteen years of annuities. Black Kettle and other peace leaders signed the treaty because they sought to avert a war, fearing they would most certainly lose and pay a heavy price.

Northern Cheyenne and most of the Arapaho leaders refused to sign the treaty. They were deeply disillusioned and did not trust the government to follow through on its promises. And they were right. The government violated the terms of the new treaty almost immediately, just as it had the prior one. Settlers still encroached on the new reservation. Rations were still late, inadequate, or inedible. Epidemics compounded the misery. To survive, small hunting groups struck out from the new reservation in the spring and summer to hunt bison. Officials accused them of becoming hostile, rather than simply trying to feed themselves.

If the Cheyenne and Arapaho people were divided over the best course of action, incoming settlers were almost completely united in their indignation at ongoing conflict with Indians. The crisis grew more intense in the summer of 1864. In June residents of Denver learned about the gruesome murder and mutilation of Ward Hungate, his wife, and two young daughters at a ranch along Running Creek, about twenty-five miles southeast of Denver. (The murders have remained unsolved, but Coloradoans assumed the perpetrators were Indians.)

Angry settlers brought the bodies of the Hungate family to Denver and put them on display, fueling calls among the local populace for vengeance against the Cheyennes and Arapahos. The Weekly Commonwealth opined, “Those that perpetrate such unnatural, brutal butchery as this ought to be hunted to the farthest bounds of these broad plains and burned at the stake alive.”

Colorado newspapermen and leaders increasingly cast settlers as the defenseless victims of Indian aggressors. Governor John Evans, for example, issued a proclamation in August 1864, in which he declared, “The conflict is upon us, and all good citizens are called upon to do their duty for the defence of their homes and families.” This enabled Evans and his supporters to justify an all-out attack on the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, at least those who were considered “hostile.” Evans authorized “all citizens of Colorado, either individually or in such parties as they may organize, to go in pursuit of all hostile Indians on the plains, … also, to kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found, all such hostile Indians.” Thus, Evans deputized the entire adult male population of Colorado and made it legal for them to kill Indians.

Although Evans called for settlers to “scrupulously avoid” Indians who had obeyed his orders “to rendezvous at the points indicated,” the governor must have known that few settlers would make such a distinction between peaceable and resistant Indians. In August, in fact, after some militant Cheyennes raided freight stations, cut off supplies to Denver, and took a few white women captive, the Rocky Mountain News reported that all the tribes “on the plains are combined in a war on the whites.”

Violence and land appropriation went hand in hand. Evans gave settlers free rein to confiscate Indian property. He proclaimed, “As the only reward I am authorized to offer for such services, I hereby empower such citizens, or parties of citizens, to take captive, and hold to their own private use and benefit, all the property of said hostile Indians that they may capture, and to receive for all stolen property recovered from said...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Our Founding Crimes
• Part Two: Promoting Reconciliation in Nineteenth-Century America
• Part Three: Searching for Truth and Reconciliation in the Twenty-First Century
• Part Four: A Groundswell for Reconciliation
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index