Remembering the good times

It had been a heckuva close election, but James K. Polk squeaked by Henry Clay, of the Whigs by less than two percent of votes cast. Polk had run on expansion, which was on everybody's mind in 1844--first, Texas, a slave-holding state, and then Oregon. That's right--Oregon, a far northwest territory owned and run by Great Britain.

Just didn't seem right, people thought, that the Brits had control over  a spot on the continent that should belong to the United States of America. Polk made it clear that, should the people vote him in, he'd see to it that Oregon would belong to its rightful owners.

That rightful owners idea is what became a kind of national doctrine, something called "Manifest Destiny," the firm belief that because God almighty had created this continent in one piece, Washington should own it all and run it all. 

Let it be never forgotten that "Manifest Destiny" was no Native American rallying cry. 

Since it had been a plank of his platform, James K. Polk set to work on his promise, recruited Stephen W. Kearney to hammer home his promises on Oregon. Kearny had been a star in the Mexican War (1846-48) and had spent most of his life on frontier duty.

The frontier was opening up during the 1840s. What seemed very clear to the Native tribes who lived on the plains was that there were more and more trespassers all the time, all of them moving west. 

Kearney had the idea to get together hundreds of Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and just talk about what was going on. His mission was populating Oregon, after all, not killing indigenous people--that would come later.

Maybe if the white man's cavalry, all spiffed up in full battle gear, would show up in Indian territory, Kearney reasoned, James K. Polk and the rest of Manifest Destiny crew could find a way through to Oregon for thousands of white folks. 

And he was right, sort of. In what may well have been the very first formal exercise in cross-cultural education, the first nations were star-struck; they had never seen a whole military outfit, cleaned up nice, shiny metal hanging off their bright blue uniforms. Those Native people were stunned. 

But then right during the confab, from somewhere just outside the circle of hundreds of  people, a pronghorn flushed. Just like that dozens of young warriors got aboard their saddle-less mounts and took after that poor creature, who took a dozen arrows from riders who didn't even have reins. All those handsome cavalrymen were gob-smocked.

There was a certain innocence to the parley that day, maybe shown most memobly when a bespectacled recruit leaned over to examine some young woman's beadwork. When she looked up, she ran, terrified, as did most of the other young women, shrieking and  hollering and pointing at the white man's glasses. 

They believed--and who could blame them--that the glasses that red-headed soldier wore enabled him to see them without their clothing.

As everyone knows, there's far more to the story, but just for a moment it does no one no harm to remember the good old days down at Ft. Laramie.