Just a little more on Doc Saville

[Just a little more on Dr. Saville, the Civil War doctor buried in Sioux City's Floyd Cemetery--see yesterday's post.]

There'd been gunshots, more than a few, buzzing bullets all around but, or so the agent argued, nothing yet to get angry about. J. J. Saville had what some thought to be an extremely high boiling point, so high no one in the neighborhood had yet seen it. Some claimed his dealing with Red Cloud and his people nothing less than cowardice; some called it weakness; others believed the new agent to be worthless as Sandhill sand, Saville himself a walking/talking example of the idiot silliness of President Grant's new Indian policy. 

Just one of the nutty changes involved was who would be sent to the reservation as the agent. Saville had never been administrated anything; he was a doctor, for heaven sakes, a Yankee medic who'd served on the far reaches of the Civil War's western front. Dr. J. J. Saville was chosen to be "Indian Agent" by President U. S. Grant. Saville hailed from Sioux City, Iowa. 

Grant chose Dr. Saville for the testy, even dangerous job of Indian Agent at the Red Cloud Agency because the the Episcopal Church had forwarded his good name. For a time in the 1860s, theory morphed into a new policy constructed on the determination that the needs of Native populations would be more humanely met if the agents were missionaries and not robber barons. 

Dr. Saville understood only too well that the job the President had asked him to do was not Sunday School superintendent. By 1870, intercontinental railroads had burst their way through traditional Native lands bringing thousands of eastern foreigners west, seeking their fortune on land they'd assumed to be unoccupied. Red Cloud and his people were not amused.

The Lakota were not alone; dozens of Native bands were not thrilled at the invasion of white folks, especially when they realized the whites weren't at all convinced all those trespassing strangers should be nice to what they considered savage redskins. A decade of conflict would still have to pass before Custer and 300 of his men would die on a hill above the Little Big Horn. During the early 1870s, the whole region was a tinder box.

Dr. Saville, who might have built a solid medical practice in Sioux City, chose otherwise and took the job offered him as administrator of the Red Cloud Agency in a region of the Great Plains where acts of violence occurred with perilous frequency. Saville leaped into a hot spot because he and the progressives believed that bringing Native people into the American family would occur most smoothly if Sioux and Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho would just learn to be cowboys and farmers, would herd cattle and forget the dang buffalo, who were rapidly disappearing anyway.

Easier said than done, of course. Saville was a liberal, a progressive. He tried everything  to bring real change to the Native West, including erecting a flag pole to fly the red, white, and blue, thereby proclaiming it's sovereignty. To Red Cloud's people, making that case was a stretch. 

So, at noon the day Saville had his people ready to raise the flag over what became Camp Robinson, as many as 50 mad-as-heck warriors rode up to Red Cloud Agency in blankets and waistcloths, armed to the teeth, and wasted no time in cutting that brand new flagpole down.

The flags were meant to portray what they meant to Saville and an entire brood of white American westerners--proud and youthful nationhood--let freedom ring! 

But on that October 23, before those beloved colors had cleared the ground, Lakota warriors and their hatchet-toting friends had cut those new flag posts up like firewood because to them the stars-and-stripes were a battle flag, nothing more than a symbol of white man's aggression, and in all likelihood, for them at least, a prelude to much larger war. In the autumn of 1867, Sioux City's own Dr. J. J. Saville, lasted only two years in the office of agent of the Red Cloud Agency before he was shown the door.

Fair or not, Dr. Saville was shown the door for his failure to understand the people he'd been appointed to serve.