The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - ii

Big Foot's Band

There’s no escaping the fact that reservations were debilitating to the Lakota people. The adjustment to daily life without freedom—that central American ideal—was far more difficult than anyone, then or now, could imagine. As Joseph Marshall says in The Day the World Ended at Little Big Horn, “People who once felt their spirits expand because they knew their lands went far beyond the Horizon now felt their spirits shrink within the incredibly small physical boundaries imposed upon them” (141).

Some thirty years later, and a dozen years after Greasy Grass, the battle at Little Big Horn, a band of Minneconjou led by a 65-year old tribal headman named Big Foot, left the Cheyenne River Reservation and headed south in a winter that seemed abnormally warm.

Big Foot was a man not given to making war. It was early winter, 1890, and his people—the majority of them women and children--were on their way to the Pine Ridge Agency. By reputation and experience, Big Foot was not a fighter. He was known throughout the Lakota bands as someone who could engineer peace, someone capable of working at reconciliation. Even though Big Foot was adamant about holding to traditional beliefs and practices, he advocated education for the children of the band, his way of bridging the immense changes that were clearly arriving with the hundreds of thousands of white people moving through and into Lakota homelands.

Because Big Foot had a reputation as someone who could make peace where there was disorder, Red Cloud had asked him—and his people—to come south to Pine Ridge Reservation, where the government had moved Red Cloud and the Ogallalas. What was likely just as strong a motivation was that Big Foot, sensing the promise of trouble at Standing Rock and Cheyenne River, determined that taking his people to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge meant going where a proven leader like the old chief could help him—and them—understand and deal with the disturbances all around.

When two young Hunkpapas, beaten and hungry, came into Big Foot’s band and told them Sitting Bull had been murdered and his people scattered, Big Foot offered them, and others of Sitting Bull’s followers, sanctuary. It was that group—Big Foot’s band, maybe 200 people, and a number of Hunkpapas who’d been with Sitting Bull—who were moving south toward Pine Ridge in December of 1890. Those were the people—men, women, and children--who would, by order and under the watch of the U. S. Seventh Cavalry, end up camped along a creek called Wounded Knee.

Why were they there? To answer that question and to understand why General Nelson A. Miles’ cavalry was hovering over them, far south of their home at Cherokee River, the word treaty is required because treaties created the reservation system. At least among the Siouan people, the reservation system created cause-and-effect sequences that inevitably led to unspeakable suffering.

The contracts of all treaties written up throughout North America were essentially the same: Native people—Comanche, Kiowa, Lakota, Santee--would give up land for the promise of sustenance. Sustenance wasn’t simply a gift horse. Sustenance meant the necessities of life. Along with the brutish slaughter of thirty million bison or more, reservations—enclosed land, distinct property lines—not only robbed Native people of the culture that had served them well on the Great Plains, but ravaged it. The disappearance of that magnificent animals (in May of 2016, President Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act, making the buffalo “the national mammal’) purposefully destroyed the cultures of dozens of First Nations.

It wasn’t simply the love of the hunt that led to the disappearance of the buffalo, the slaughter was deliberate and despicable. Buffalo Bill Cody used to tell people he’d killed as many as 5000 bison himself. 

Eastern adventurers and old world royalty packed passenger trains on newly laid tracks out West to savor the excitement of a buffalo hunt, even though such excursions often ended up to be little more than target shooting with rifles powerful enough to bring down a bull bison hundreds of yards off. The slaughter of the buffalo not only robbed Native people of their primary source of meat and protein, it decimated the rhythms and ritual life of the Lakota people. 

That the slaughter of all those bison was an act of war can be proven by hundreds of statements of politicians and generals: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every dead buffalo is an Indian gone.” The demise of the buffalo was itself a campaign in the wars Euro-Americans fought against Native people.

When there were no more buffalo, a tribe’s source of nourishment and sustenance, disappeared, and Native people found themselves dependent on foodstuffs Washington promised with the signed treaty, promised but rarely brought in the quantity and condition they had sworn to deliver.