University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Winter 2008 U.S. Indian Policy, 1865-1890 As Illuminated Through the Lives Of Charles A. Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman Gretchen Cassel Eick University in Wichita, Kansas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Eick, Gretchen Cassel, "U.S. Indian Policy, 1865-1890 As Illuminated Through the Lives Of Charles A. Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman" (2008). Great Plains Quarterly. 1397. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1397 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. u.s. INDIAN POLICY, 1865 .. 1890 AS ILLUMINATED THROUGH THE LIVES OF CHARLES A. EASTMAN AND ELAINE GOODALE EASTMAN GRETCHEN CASSEL EICK Rapid change, passionate convictions, acute Plains, to protect the thousands of migrants regional differences, ethnic conflict, and an enticed there by Congress's offer through the army looking for a mission characterized the Homestead Act of 160 acres-free, contingent United States from 1865 to 1890. The Civil upon living on it and making improvements­ War was over and most of the soldiers had and by the marketing campaigns of railroads mustered out and gone home. The others that promised prosperity to those who followed were assigned either to the South to oversee the rails. reconstruction or, the larger number of them, These twenty-five years were a watershed to the area between the Mississippi and the time for two regions-the South and the Great Rocky Mountains-the Great Plains. The U.S. Plains. In the South the federal government Army's new mission was to "pacify" the Great would struggle with what to do with four mil­ lion freed people and shift policy frequently from 1865 to 1877, Washington, DC, would Key Words: Charles A. Eastman, Elaine Goodale award citizenship rather than land to black Eastman, Lakota/Dakota, Native American history, men through the Fourteenth and Fifteenth U.S. colonization amendments to the Constitution in 1868 and 1870, but ultimately trade away federal gov­ ernment protection of citizenship rights for Gretchen Cassel Eick is Professor of History at Friends black Americans for Republican control of the University in Wichita, Kansas. Her book, Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the White House in February 1877, three months Midwest, 1954-72 (University of Illinois Press, 2001) after the nation's most contentious election. won three awards, and the paperback edition was This infamous election gave home rule to published in fall 2007. Dr. Eick was a Fulbright scholar southern states, allowing them to determine in 2000 and received a Fulbright-Hays Award to South who voted and who didn't and to set their own Africa in 2004. regulations for their largest minority group even when those regulations violated the U.S. [GPQ 28 (Winter 2008): 27-47] Constitution. Beginning in 1877, for the next 27 28 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 2008 eighty years federal troops would not be dis­ to Flandreau, SD, with his father and began patched to the South to ensure enforcement acquiring "white education" that took him east of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments' to university and medical school while some of guarantees of equal protection, due process, his family members participated in the Great and the right to vote to all citizens, without Sioux War resisting colonization. In 1890 he regard to color or race. returned to the Great Plains to be the first In the Great Plains the federal govern­ Indian physician at Pine Ridge Agency where ment engaged in a parallel struggle over what he experienced the Wounded Knee Massacre. to do with 300,000 Native Americans.! That He would later become the best known Native struggle preoccupied the Department of War, American of his era, author of eleven books the Department of the Interior, Congress, and and several dozen articles, lecturer, lobbyist, Indian reformers from 1865 to 1890.2 Congress and civil servant. Elaine Goodale was a Euro­ established federal agencies in both the South American teacher living among the Lakota and in the Plains to implement policy toward in the late 1880s. She knew participants in blacks and Indians, respectively: the Bureau for the Ghost Dance revival and Euro-American Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands reformers like General Richard H. Pratt who in the South and the Bureau of Indian Affairs started the Indian boarding school movement. for the West. Ultimately the Great Plains, like Before and after marrying Ohiyesa/Charles the South, would be awarded home rule, and she wrote and spoke about how Indians were those reformers who promoted citizenship and treated and her firsthand experiences among assimilation as the answer to the region's mix the Lakota. of ethnic groups would be succeeded by new This article lays out U.S. Indian policy reformers and politicians ready to relegate toward the Great Plains during the twenty­ Native Americans, like black Americans, to five years after the Civil War by examining an inferior status unprotected by the federal chronologically specific "players" that shaped government and at the mercy of the new west­ and reshaped that policy: the US. Army, the ern state governments. This change in Indian President and Interior Department, Congress, policy, however, came later than the parallel religious organizations, whites in the Indian change in African American policy. reform movement, settlers surging west, rail­ In this essay I examine US. Indian policy roads, and the native nations of the Great from the end of the Civil War to 1890 and Plains, particularly the Lakota. Into the narra­ how it is illuminated by the life and writings of tive of this changing policy the experiences of physician, author, and Indian activist Ohiyesa, the Eastmans are interjected, marked in italics, a.k.a. Charles Alexander Eastman, and the to illustrate how this changing colonial policy author and activist he would marry in 1891, affected those being colonized. The macro is Elaine Goodale Eastman. intersected by the micro, as it were, to provide The Eastmans experienced the US. gov­ a different way of "seeing" Indian policy and its ernment's Indian policy directly during these impact by viewing it through the eyes of these years, and both wrote extensively about their two people. experiences. Ohiyesa became a refugee at age four when a desperate war by his Dakota nation GRANT'S PEACE POLICY IN THE SOUTHERN against the US. in 1862 resulted in the Dakota PLAINS being expelled from Minnesota and losing pay­ ment for the 23 million acres of land they had In mid-1867, two years after the end of the ceded by treaty to the US. He lived in desper­ Civil War, Congress established a commission ate poverty in exile in Canada for eleven years. of military men and civilians to make peace He experienced the US. policy of assimila­ with Plains tribes and get their agreement tion beginning at age fifteen when he moved to move to reservations. This U.S. Indian U.S. INDIAN POLICY, 1865-1890 29 Commission would negotiate treaties with Moreover, only three of the seven council fires chiefs and select reservations for those not of the Lakota/Sioux signed. In what would already on reservations; if they failed to secure become typical of colonial strategies, US. gov­ peace through negotiations, Congress autho­ ernment officials ordered the Sioux to choose rized the secretary of war to suppress Indian a "head chief," which violated their collabora­ hostilities with volunteer soldiers called up tive, horizontal political structure for decision for this purpose.3 The commission included making and was confusing to say the least.5 the army general in charge of maintaining Consequently, in the years that followed, the peace on the frontier, Gen. William Tecumseh Lakota occasionally harassed settlers traveling Sherman, nationally known for his massively through their land, and in 1855 Gen. William destructive march across Georgia and through S. Harney moved into the area with 600 armed the Carolinas in the last year of the Civil War. soldiers to punish "hostile" Sioux and ordered The commission negotiated a peace agreement them to convene and to sign a treaty he would with the Kiowa, Kiowa-Apache, Arapaho, dictate. The Lakota in turn held a council in Comanche, and Cheyenne at Medicine Lodge 1856 attended by at least 5,000 and possibly as Creek at Medicine Lodge in Kansas in 1868. many as 10,000. There they agreed that only The commission, however, was less success­ traders could travel in the area and no roads or ful with the Lakota, the western Sioux of the forts could be constructed; they would defend northern Great Plains. Sioux is an umbrella their western territory, and their bands would term invented by French trappers to refer to sign no future treaties.6 With the US. Army the Lakota (western), Nakota (central), and preoccupied with subduing Indian resistance in Dakota (eastern or Santee) people who spoke the Southern Plains, an uneasy impasse char­ a common language and shared a common acterized the Northern Plains. In the 1860s culture. Deconstructed, "Sioux" means "the impasse changed to full-scale war'? enemy," not an objective descriptor. I use Dakota/Lakota interchangeably with Sioux to THE NORTHERN PLAINS AFTER THE US. refer to these people who populated the area CIVIL WAR from Minnesota west to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada south to Kansas. By 1865 Euro-Americans commonly viewed the Sioux/Lakota as the "enemy" because the US.