Life on the Plains and Other Struggles
So where were the Indians being removed to? West of the Mississippi (and sometimes north of Texas).
The expansion of White settlement pushed the Commanches and the Kiowas up from the south and those tribes, from the Southeastern portion of the United States, Cherokees and Creeks, among others into Indian Territory south of Arkansas.
Winter on the Great Plains is brutal! There was a very good reason settlers going west didn't travel during the winter months (November-February ). "It is one of the harshest and most dangerous environments in the United States. Periods of moderate temperatures punctuated by storms with thick swirlings of snow and powerful frigid winds that sweep across the landscape and threaten even the best adapted creatures." (34) Indians who had been living in that region had long ago worked out ways of living within the environment. Even the "shaggies" (buffalo) knew when to move into little groves of trees for protection for any that got caught out there alone would freeze to death in that cold. "Every environment interacts with whatever is around it, setting limits for other life and having limits set for itself."(35)
Two groups of peoples with very different life-ways moved into and across the central plains between the 1820's and the 1860's - Indians and Whites. (36) For years the land itself had been under assault from wagons traveling along the Arkansas River, which began numbering around twenty-five to about one hundred thirty in 1820. By 1850 the numbers were about 500-600 and then by the end of the 1850's "more than eighteen hundred wagons were lumbering back and forth along the road with all the old loads, plus mining equipment, canned goods and bottled beer." (37) Those old loads consisted of items like calico groceries and a heavy scarlet colored cloth that Mexican women used to make petticoats called bayeta. Then the gold rush added in more wares such as "ammunition, whiskey, flour and hardware".(38) Keep counting. Dear Reader, we haven't added in people yet. White emigrants were part of the great overland migrations who were crowding into parts of the country on their way further west. Even though they weren't putting down roots, they were still taking a toll on the earth. The gold rush alone sent 185,000 emigrants over the trail in just four years-up from about twenty thousand the previous eight years (1841-1848). Because of this constant, crushing traffic, the grasses on the plains could not recover fast enough for the Indians' animals to graze properly. Gamma and Buffalo Grasses had long ago adapted to the weather which was so erratic by "greening out" at a later time". Shortgrass, available in May or early June, while not as dense, was highly nutritious and provided an excellent gigantic grazing pasture where the Indians could gather along with their horses all summer. (39) This was also when the Indians went on the great bison hunts. Many camps and bands would come together to perform their religious ceremonies and when that season was done, they would break into small camps and return to the stream valleys. Indians and their horses had to be fed. Their horses would number in the area of around 100,000 to 150,000.
The horse culture dictated four conditions: adequate forage, potable drinking water timber for fuel and sheltering land forms which all had one common denominator- they were found along watercourses. (40) These places were where Indians struck their winter camps. One problem was that these places were not plentiful in the millions of acres on the central plains. Secondly, guess who else was using these same sheltering places? The Overlanders. When those winter blizzards hit the region, both people and animals crowded into those sheltering places and within the groves of trees: trees that provided wood for cooking and warmth. When the winter ordeal was over, those horses that survived had to be fattened and strengthened and the Indians depended on the early spring grasses to take care of that.
So you have all of this activity happening simultaneously, with some Indians who had earlier been lured by what once had been a bountiful space into areas where other Indians had been living for generations. Then add in the Eastern bands of Indians being pushed out by removal policies and displacing and or crowding into areas with other Indians, and Whites moving into and over some of these same areas; both Indians and Whites being dependent upon, and relying on the same resources, grazing animals both belonging to settlers and Indians chewing up the land, competition for life saving areas, native grasses for forage disappearing and being unable to recover,and timber being cut for fuel. In the river woodlands in 1820 it was noted that there was "considerable wood". In1839, reports of only "occasional willows". In 1849, a traveler reports that "any tree might be looked on as a curiosity"; by the "late 1850's an emigrant wife worried in her diary that her cattle were nearly starved for grass" (41) What a disaster! If you were White and you ran out of supplies, you could get more from back east. And, if the land was too unforgiving or the climate too hard for you, you could go back home. But not if you were Indian! When the weather turned nasty Whites for the most part, weren't there.(42) They didn't know. The men who went out ahead of removal to survey the area designated for Indian removal were gone by the time those conditions set in. In fact, temperatures on the plains can drop to -61 degrees farenheit in winter and go up to 118 degrees farenheit in summer. (43)
Life on the Plains was a fight with nature to survive. In the1800's, the climate provided extreme temperatures— hail storms which are still responsible for millions of dollars of crops being destroyed; tornadoes and blizzards caused by thrusts of extremely cold polar air, were moving across the Plains and brought with them high winds, intense cold and heavy snows that lasted for several days at a time. These were the conditions the Indians had to deal with as a result of the United States policy of opening lands to Whites hungry for land and who would not wait. As soon as those lands became available, Whites poured into what had been Indian Country. The belief of Manifest Destiny, no longer an idea, was driving the engine of white progress. Then, Mother Nature dealt yet another blow. The central plains experienced terrible droughts between the years 1848 and 1862. From 1825 to 1849, rainfall was extremely abundant, even called a "monsoon" by Merlin Lawson. The Indians and Whites who witnessed this saw "greener, lusher pastures". (44) But then the overcrowding and competition for available resources was coupled with a slackening rainfall that went from modest rains to poor to "...devastating drought 1859-1861".(45) The Indian response was to head for the river regions, which in turn increased the wear and tear on those water systems.
"The Indians of the central plains had become a people in crisis...and those that had earlier been lured by such a bounteous place watched the steady disappearance of what had brought them there in the first place".(46) Many were starving and reduced to begging white travelers and freighters.(47) While enormous amounts of food and livery were being transported along the rivers, none of it was offered to the Indians and in fact was exacerbating the destruction of what they had to have. With the discovery of more gold the Indians plight became desperate. While most Indian populations were suffering devastating declines in their numbers having been battered by diseases introduced by Euro-Americans, on the Central Plains there were more Indians due to the numbers of them coming into the region. And then, in 1849, disease hit the region—hard.
As Whites were migrating, so were diseases and microbes. In The Way To The West, Elliott West describes the overland trails as "one big petri dish". After 1848 the area around the rivers was "one of the most biologically treacherous areas in North America ". (48) Once again a sort of "Columbian Exchange" took place, but this time it was: contaminated water sources, close sleeping and eating quarters with the "rot of one another's garbage, offal and excrement".(49) The Southern Cheyennes in 1849 lost almost half of their people to cholera. Their own native remedies were no match for smallpox, measles, cholera, or any of the other diseases and microbes carried in by the crowds of emigrants moving along the trails. The contagions affected anyone who didn't have a resistance to them; and the Indians didn't. (One blanket brought in from New Mexico infected first an Arkansas village, then spread out to the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Sioux and the Arkaras).(50) These are just some of the afflictions swooping down on the health of the tribes on the plains with the final blow being a dramatic drop in their fertility, birth rates, and an increase in infant mortality rates. None of this was foreseen when the treaties were struck: these unintended consequences. Oh Dear Reader, this is but a brief summary here as the larger stories of what happened are too great for my small endeavor.
You see, Andrew Jackson had a vision of "Americans from every state and territory in the Union indissolubly bound together in a common destiny unfolding before them by expansion across the continent without direction from the federal government". (51) Jackson felt that the southern tribes were an obstacle to this end and he was determined that they would be removed —out of the way of Whites who were fulfilling their ideas of liberty and freedom by staking their claim on property (land), and being self sufficient. An earlier President, Thomas Jefferson, felt that one of the ways government could "enhance the liberty of its subjects" was to award everyone of full age fifty acres of land. (52) Jackson wanted the Indians to emigrate, hopefully, to lands outside of the boundaries of the states in the Union. He felt that they didn't own the land, they only had a possessory right to the land they lived on and therefore were subject to American sovereignty.(53) He also felt that he was securing our borders as he still perceived Indians as a threat to national security (lest they link up with any other foreign powers). He wanted to them to exchange the lands that they had been living on for eons; that held the bones of their families and ancestors; that were tied to their lives in their creation stories; for a permanent title to some other land in the trans-Mississippi West. Jackson, in my mind, was a bit like Lincoln in this respect: he had nothing personal against the Indians in his views on Indian policy. His concern was for the "nation's growth, unity, and security".(54) So here is his dillema—devise a plan where everybody wins: the government will provide for "justice to the Citizen, the interest and security of the United States, and the peace and happiness of the Indians".(55)
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