David Cook
In the spring of 1874, one hundred and thirty-one years ago, a US general named George Custer led 1,200 men on a 60-day expedition through the hard woods and thundering mountains of South Dakota’s Black Hills.
On paper, Custer and the US government claimed it was looking for a site to construct a new fort. Yet Custer, nicknamed “chief of thieves’’ by American natives, was looking for something else.
Gold.
To the Sioux, the mountains of the Black Hills were holy, sacred, where the Divine lived. For hundreds of generations, the South Dakota mountains gave refugee to vision-questing men, seeking identity and meaning from God. Seeing a thousand soldiers marching into the Black Hills looking for gold would be akin to seeing the US Marine Corps ransack our hometown church.
“There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature,’’ wrote Charles Eastman, a mixed-blood Sioux, in his book “The Soul of an Indian.’’ “Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it a sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky!’’
The story of the Black Hills ends, as all American-native stories do, in violence and betrayal: Custer killed at Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse assassinated in an army guardhouse, and the Black Hills lost to the Sioux, when, on February 28, three years later, the US government seized that sacred territory.
One hundred and thirty-one years after Custer first marched into the Black Hills, we must ask ourselves: Why is history written this way?
Why is there story after story, as numerous as the night stars, of early “palefaces’’ trampling the natives under their heels, breaking treaties like twigs, in their search for land, power and money?
What lay gnawing inside the heart of Custer and the US government that drove them to search for gold in the Black Hills? Surely they were wealthy enough already. Surely the early Americans had enough land on their hands.
What is it that lay inside the American heart to behave this way?
William Apess was a Pequot Indian who was indentured to New Englanders and later became a literate Methodist minister. In 1833, he addressed an audience of white Americans and created a haunting image where all the colored peoples of the earth come together to be judged for their sins.
“Have you the folly to think that the white man [is] the only beloved images of God? Assemble all nations together in your imagination, and then let the whites be seated among them…Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it.
“Which skin do you think would have the greatest?’’
In answering his question, we must not make the naïve mistake that declares all early Americans greedy, just as we must not we believe all natives were peaceful and just. Yet in studying American history, we must perform an autopsy of sorts, and ask ourselves two specific questions: what led early Americans to treat the native people they encountered in such a way?
And second, to prevent further death: do we still behave in such a way today?
To answer the first question, let us turn to the natives who were there firsthand.
“When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory,’’ said Chiksika, a Shawnee. “But if they lose it is called a massacre.’’
“Why not sell the air, the clouds and the great sea?’’ asked Tecumseh, another Shawnee. “White people are never satisfied…they have driven us from the great salt water, forced us over the mountains.’’
Consider the buffalo, the sacred animal of the Plains Indians. In 1850, there were twenty million buffalo roaming mid-America. Fifty years later, there were less than one thousand living buffalos. Stories are told that American cavalrymen and hunters would often hunt buffalo in ruthless ways, shooting and shooting until they ran out of bullets.
Why?
On Tuesday, the US Mint will place into circulation a redesigned nickel: on the front, a picture of Thomas Jefferson. On the back, a buffalo, the American bison.
Should we be pleased, or saddened? It is an accident, or a subtle irony, that the buffalo, which flourished under Indian care and reached near-extinction under American care, is now memorialized through money?
It seems as there was a restlessness that marked the early Americans. Arriving at a continent that stretched for thousands of miles, and greeted by natives who, generally, would have agreed to live in peace, sharing the land, the Americans responded with a restlessness that pushed them farther and farther, chasing the god of More who came under various disguises: gold in California, land along the Mississippi, all Indians removed.
Today we live in an America that is markedly different. Such outright violence is illegal, and there are, of course, property laws. Yet deep in the American psyche, there still exists something Custer-like, something that drives us to race past our own spiritual Black Hills in search of the fleeting.
We are restless for More. And believing that we will be satisfied by such riches is another form of the American Dream.
In Marion County, the lands of the Chickamaugas are possibly up for sale by TVA. A Chattanooga developer wishes to land-swap with TVA for 576 acres near Little Cedar Mountain to build a $250 million resort and neighborhood on Nickajack Lake.
The riverfront land is home to the legacy of Chief Dragging Canoe, who fought against the encroaching Americans in the late 1700s, and whose descendants battle today against another form of encroachment: land development.
Are there not enough resorts already? May we not honor the legacy of the Chickamaugas and Chief Dragging Canoe by leaving the land the way it is? Why must we buy, build and develop, time and time again?
It has been reported that Americans work an average of 51 hours each week, the highest workweek in the world. What is it that we chase?
We are surrounded by advertisements and billboards, wherever we turn. One pregnant woman sold the space on her stomach for a few thousand dollars: a temporary tattoo spots a brand name across the outside of her womb.
Would a pregnant Lakota do this?
Perhaps we should look back to the Lakota Sioux for answers. In 1980, the US Supreme Court awarded $105 million to the Lakota tribes as compensation for the Black Hills.
Yet again, the issue was confused, the US Supreme Court believed money would salve the wounds, which it would not. Time and time again, the Lakotas have refused the money. It remains collecting interest in the federal treasury, where it has ballooned to over $500 million, according to a 2001 report.
Apparently, some things are worth more than money.
Do we, as Americans, agree?
(David Cook is a former journalist with the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. He currently teaches American History at Girls Preparatory School.)