KEN BURNS’ THE WEST—EPISODE 6

“FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER”

IntroductionMy father was the first to see through the schemes of the white men....He said: “My son...when I am gone...you are the chief of these people....Always remember that your father never sold his country....This country holds your father's body. Never sell the bones of your father and mother."I pressed my father’s hand and told him I would protect his grave with my life....A man who would not love his father's grave is worse than a wild animal.

Chief JosephBy 1874, railroads had brought millions of new settlers to the West and the federal government began consolidating its control over the region as never before. Washington mounted still another assault on the Mormons, forcing their prophet to choose between saving his church or sacrificing a spiritual son. Meanwhile, the American army pressed its campaign against the Indians, forcing most tribes onto reservations where they were dependent on government rations that often did not arrive, and on the whims of government agents who often did not care. But a few bands still held out, determined to live as they wished in a West that was already transformed. On the plains, a Lakota medicine man, who saw the Americans as his mortal enemies, would become a symbol of this defiant spirit and win the greatest victory of the Indian wars, only to see his people shattered by an avenging nation. While in the mountains, a Nez Percé chief, who had struggled all his life to keep peace with whites, would find himself helping to lead one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in American history. To subdue them, the government would call on an unlikely army made up of immigrants, fugitives, social outcasts -- and a dashing young hero of the Civil War, who came West pursuing a vision of invincibility and discovered there an enemy with visions stronger than his own

Yellow Hair“It is an island...there in this vastness of the great Plains. But it is rich...full of timber, full of game. It's a place where thunder resounds more than in other places, and so it's thought to be the place of the deities. When you see the Black Hills you understand something about the spiritual aspect of it.” N. Scott MomadayIn the summer of 1874, an army of more than 1,000 soldiers left

Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory and marched straight into the Black Hills -- the Lakota's most sacred ground.

Officially, they were looking for a site on which to build a new fort. Unofficially, they were looking for gold. At the head of this expedition rode the army's most celebrated Indian fighter, George

Armstrong Custer, commander of the Seventh Cavalry. An Ohio blacksmith's son who graduated at the bottom of his class at West Point, at 23 Custer had become the youngest general in the Union Army. Impulsive and high-spirited, he had led the charge at Gettysburg, Winchester, Five Forks. Oh, could you have but seen some of the charges...we made!...I never expect to see a prettier sight....While thinking of them I cannot but exclaim, “Glorious War!” George Armstrong Custer

“He was a self-promoter ...a man who rode to the top over the backs of fallen comrades... and a lot of men fell...because Custer was leading them into situations that he shouldn't have been leading them into.” Stephen AmbroseIn the West, Custer wore a distinctive buckskin uniform, meant to catch the eye of reporters. And he caught the eye of his enemies as well, who began to call him "Yellow Hair." But during his first campaign against the Cheyenne in 1867, his career had very nearly come to an end. Out hunting one day in the heart of Indian country, he galloped after a buffalo, aimed his revolver -- and somehow shot his own horse through the head. On foot, bruised and totally lost, he had to be rescued by his own men. Then, in 1868, he mounted a surprise attack on Black Kettle's camp along the Washita River that re-established his reputation as a hero. Now, Custer was again in the heart of Indian country, leading an army into the Black

Hills. August 15, 1874We have discovered a rich and beautiful country...and I have the proud satisfaction of knowing that our explorations have exceeded the most sanguine expectations. And I have reached the hunter's highest round of fame...I have killed my grizzly. George Armstrong Custer

In the Black Hills, Custer's men fished, hunted, played baseball -- and found gold; not a real bonanza, but more than enough to inspire wild-eyed stories of pay dirt "from the grass roots down." From every corner of the country, gold-hungry whites rushed in and soon banged together a dozen mining camps -- Deadwood, Blacktail, Golden Gate -- and Custer City. But the miners' invasion violated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which had brought peace to the Northern Plains after years of bitter warfare. In the treaty, the Lakota had agreed to stop harassing travelers, raiding settlers, attacking army units, and in exchange, the United States had promised that the Black Hills would be Lakota land forever. “So many times, the Indians were promised that they could keep the land...and so many times those promises were broken....I think that the Indians understood the meaning of the treaties. And wanted very much to live by them. But the cumulative effect was one of distrust. Betrayal.” N. Scott MomadayThe whites who followed Custer's path into the Black Hills called it the "Freedom Trail." The Lakota called it "Thieves' Road." Either way, it would lead to disaster.

Tatanka-IyotankaI will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie mice, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak. Sitting BullThe Lakotas had many leaders -- Black Moon, Four Horns, Gall, Crazy Horse.But the man to whom even these veteran fighters now looked for guidance was Sitting Bull, a chief and holy man who was determined to keep the Black Hills. Their bands still hunted the remaining buffalo herds, and Sitting Bull scorned those Indians who depended on the government to feed them. Look at me! See if I am poor, or my people, either. The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then. You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hard-tack, and a little sugar and coffee. Sitting BullAmong the Lakota, no one had a greater reputation for bravery. Once, on the Yellowstone River in 1872, he and four other warriors had strolled out between the lines in the midst of a battle with soldiers guarding a railroad crew. Sitting Bull calmly sat down. With the bullets pattering around him, he filled his pipe, smoked it, passed it back and forth to his companions until

the bowl was empty. Then he reamed it out and walked away. His Lakota name -- Tatanka-Iyotanka -- described an intractable buffalo bull, sitting on its haunches, resolute in the face of danger. “Sitting Bull was...an epitome of everything a Lakota man would want to be. Young men would follow him hoping that it would still be possible, somehow, to remain in some...Lakota homeland in which they really would be free. ” Jo Allyn ArchambaultBy the winter of 1875, some 15,000 miners had crowded into the Black Hills, and under the Fort Laramie Treaty, it was the army's task to drive them out. But their growing numbers made that politically impossible. So a Senate commission was sent West to renegotiate the treaty, prepared to offer $6 million for the Black Hills. The Lakota said they would need a sum large enough so that their people could live off it forever. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other defiant warriors stayed away from the council entirely, unwilling even to discuss a sale of their most sacred place. To resolve the impasse, Washington decided to clamp down, and ordered all the chiefs to report to reservation headquarters by January 31, 1876. When Sitting Bull and the others refused, George Armstrong Custer and a large part of the U.S. Army in the West were ordered to bring them in.

The United States army had an impossible job in the West -- policing some 2.5 million square miles between the Missouri and the eastern slope of the Sierras.

There were never more than 15,000 men, scattered among 100 forts and outposts, yet they were somehow expected to defend settlers, ranchers, miners, and railroad crews; keep thousands of Indians confined to their reservations -- and keep tens of thousands of whites out of Indian lands.

Even though army pay was low -- just 13 dollars a month -- steady jobs were scarce during the economic slump that followed the Civil War. Army ranks filled with immigrants, some of whom could speak almost no English. And there were drifters, men with assumed names and men escaping bad marriages or the law.

Some of the recruits had no doubt served in some penitentiary before enlisting, and I shouldn't wonder that some went back to their old prisons as a haven of rest and decent treatment.

Private C. C. Chrisman 13th Infantry

Boredom was all the men could depend upon, three to five years of it. They quarreled, drank, pitted red ants against black ants just to stir things up. And waited for news from home.

Army food was almost always unpalatable, sometimes inedible. Hardtack -- flour and water biscuits -- delivered to the Seventh Cavalry was six years old, and had to be shattered with a hammer.

Whisky was the soldier's curse: forty men out of every thousand were hospitalized for alcoholism. Twice as many killed themselves. But disease was the worst killer. In just two years, the Seventh Cavalry lost 51 men to cholera.

Most soldiers never met an Indian in battle. Some never saw an Indian at all.

Dakota Territory March 5, 1876 Dear Sister,...I think we will have some hard times this summer. The old chief Sitting Bull says that he will not make peace with the whites as long as he has a man to fight...As soon as I get back...I will write you. That is, if I

do not get my hair lifted by some Indian.From your loving brother, T.P. Eagan Seventh Cavalry

A Good Day to Die

Some time in the early spring of 1876, Sitting Bull climbed to a hilltop, seeking a vision. In his dream, a great dust storm swirled down upon a small white cloud that resembled a Lakota village. Through the whirlwind, Sitting Bull could see soldiers marching. The little cloud was swallowed up for a time, but the storm eventually dissipated and the village emerged unharmed. It was an encouraging dream. And in the spring of 1876, the

Lakota needed encouragement, for General Philip Sheridan had already drawn up a plan that would send three columns of soldiers to find Sitting Bull and drive him and his followers onto the reservations. One column, led by Brigadier General George Crook, was to move north from Fort Fetterman; another, under Colonel John Gibbon, was to march east from western Montana; and the third, commanded by General Alfred Terry, would march west from Fort Abraham Lincoln. With Terry went the 566 enlisted men and 31 officers of the Seventh Cavalry, led by

George Armstrong Custer. They moved out to the tune of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." May 14, 1876General George A. Custer, dressed in a dashing suit of buckskin, is prominent everywhere....The General is full of perfect readiness for a fray with the hostile red devils, and woe to the body of scalp-lifters that comes within reach of himself and his brave companions in arms. Bismarck Tribune On June 6th, some 3,000 Lakota and Cheyenne were camped

along Rosebud Creek in Montana. There they held their most sacred ritual -- a sun dance -- in which prayers were offered and vows made to Wakan Tanka, their Great Spirit. Sitting Bull slashed his arms one hundred times as a sign of sacrifice. Then he had another vision: The soldiers came again to attack his people -- "as many as grasshoppers," he said -- but this time they were upside down, their horse's hooves in the air, their hats tumbling to the ground as they rode into the Lakota camp. “He has this tremendous vision...that there's going to be this great victory. And armed with this vision the warriors go out looking for somebody to fight.” Rick WilliamsOn the morning of June 17th, General Crook's column had stopped to brew coffee on the bank of the Rosebud, sure that no Indians would dare attack so large a force as theirs. Then, suddenly, Crazy Horse and more than 500 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors rode down upon them. Crook's command included Crow and Shoshone scouts, eager to fight the tribes that had once taken their lands, and in the desperate fight that followed, the Indian scouts twice rescued the soldiers by riding through the Lakota and Cheyenne ranks. Unnerved by the

enemy show of force, Crook withdrew the next morning. The Lakota and Cheyenne moved north and formed a new camp, where for six days they celebrated their victory along a winding stream they called the Greasy Grass. Whites called it the Little Bighorn. On June 21st, Custer met on the Yellowstone River with Colonel John Gibbon and their superior, Brigadier General Alfred Terry. They knew nothing of Crook's retreat.

Terry ordered Gibbon to march to the mouth of the Little Bighorn, while Custer and the Seventh Cavalry would try to locate the Indians and drive them down the valley toward Gibbon and annihilation.

As Custer rode off, Gibbon called out to him, "Now Custer, don't be greedy. . . . wait for us."

"No," he said, "I will not."June 21, 1876I now have some Crow scouts with me. They are magnificent-looking men, so much handsomer and more Indian-like than any we have ever seen, and jolly and sportive; nothing of the gloomy, silent red-man about them....they said they [had] heard that I never abandoned a trail; that when my food gave out I ate mule. That was the kind of man they wanted to fight under; they were willing to eat mule, too. George Armstrong Custer“I know five of those scouts, they were old men when I was a young fellow, including my grandfather, White Man Runs Him. Why would a tribe of Indians decide to fight other tribes in behalf of the white man? Sioux won't

let us forget that. They always say, “You Crows are no good. You're white lovers, you help them fight against us.” But they forget the fact that they came out here to annihilate us, take our land away from us, so there was a matter of protection.” Joe Medicine CrowFearful that Sitting Bull would elude him, Custer pushed his column hard -- 12 miles the first day, 33 the second, 28 the third. The exhausted troopers began to grumble about the man they privately called "Hard Ass." As they followed the Indians' trail, they did not grasp the full meaning of the fresh pony tracks that seemed to cross and recross it. In the last few days, 3,000 more Indians -- Lakotas, Arapahoes and Cheyennes -- had left the reservations to join Sitting Bull. His encampment now stretched out for three miles along the Greasy Grass, a gathering of more than six thousand Indians, eighteen hundred of them warriors. On the evening of June 24th, Sitting Bull made his way to a ridge that overlooked the encampment, gave offerings to the Great Spirit and prayed for the protection of his

people. Wakan Tanka, pity me. In the name of the [people] I offer you this sacred pipe. Wherever the sun, the moon, the earth, the four points of the wind, there you are always....save the [people], I beg you...We want to live. Guard us against all misfortune....Pity me. Sitting BullThe next day was June 25th, a Sunday, cloudless and hot. Custer's Crow scouts spotted the village from a distant hilltop and called Custer up to have a look. Even with a telescope, he was unable to see much more than a white blur on the valley floor. His only concern was that he had already been spotted,

that unless he attacked right away, the Indians would split up and flee in so many directions that he could never stop them. “Custer had never yet encountered an Indian band that wouldn’t run when the cavalry attacked. So he pushed to an attack as quickly as it could be mounted -- a dreadful mistake on his part because his men were exhausted. He should have bivouacked, given them a night’s sleep, sent out some scouts to find out how far that village extended in this direction and that, because much of it was hidden by woods along the Little Bighorn.” Stephen AmbroseCuster knew nothing of the terrain and could not tell how many Indians awaited him. But it had been a surprise attack that had destroyed Black Kettle's Cheyenne on the Washita eight years earlier. With the weapon of surprise, a victory seemed just as likely here.

Custer hurried toward the Little Bighorn. He saw dust rising over a ridge just ahead of him and thought the Indians were already on the move to escape.

It was now or never. Some 40 warriors appeared, then began racing back toward their camp. Custer sent Major Marcus Reno and three companies -- 140 men -- in pursuit, promising to support them. The Battle of the Little Bighorn was about to begin. Reno's men crossed the river, formed a thin skirmish line, and began firing into one edge of the village, assuming that Custer would reinforce them. They were soon outnumbered and Reno ordered a retreat. The soldiers were falling into the village, just as Sitting Bull's

vision had predicted. More warriors swarmed out of the village, but still Custer did not come. Instead of following Reno, he had led his five companies of 210 men toward a ridge, convinced the Indians were fleeing and that by charging down into the village from there, he could cut them off. “He sent some of his scouts to go look over the hill. And they came back and told him, Well, they're still there, so he decided to go look himself. He went over there and pretty soon he beat it back. He was all shook up, as they say, you know. My grandfather used to say, Custer looked whiter than ever.” Joe Medicine CrowCuster was outnumbered more than four-to-one, but he led his troops down toward the village, firing as they came. Cheyenne warriors led by Lame White Man, Hunkpapa Lakotas under Gall, and Oglalas under Crazy Horse rode out to turn Custer back. Stunned at the sight of hundreds of warriors headed right at them, Custer and his men stopped short and began a headlong retreat toward the summit of a long, high ridge. Some of the Indians remembered later that the legs of the men and the horses

trembled as they scrambled up the slope. I called to my men: “This is a good day to die: follow me.”...As we rushed upon them the [soldiers] dismounted to fire, but they did very poor shooting. They held their horse's reins on one arm while they were shooting, but their horses were so frightened that they pulled the men all around and a great many of their shots went up into the air and did us no harm. Low DogI charged in. A tall, well-built soldier...saw me coming....when I rushed him, he threw his rifle at me without shooting...We grabbed each other and wrestled there in the dust and smoke...He hit me with his fists on the jaw and shoulders, then grabbed my long braids with both hands, pulled my face close and tried to bite my nose off....I yelled as loud as I could to scare my enemy, but he would not let go. Finally, I broke free. He drew his pistol. I wrenched it out of his hand and struck him with it

three or four times on the head, knocked him over, shot him in the head and fired at his heart... Ho hechetu! That was a [good] fight, a hard fight. But it was a glorious battle, I enjoyed it. White BullThe soldiers, one Lakota remembered, "were as good men as ever fought." But the fighting, recalled another, had lasted no longer than a hungry man needed to eat his lunch. In the end, all of the men in Custer's command -- 210 of them -- lay dead. It was the greatest Indian victory of the Plains wars. Two Cheyenne woman were said to have found Custer's body.

The women...pushed the point of a sewing awl into each of his ears, into his head. This was done to improve his hearing, as it seemed he had not heard what our chiefs in the South had said when he smoked the pipe with them. They told him then that if ever afterward he should break that peace promise and should fight the Cheyennes, the Everywhere Spirit surely would cause him to be killed....I often have wondered if, when I was riding among the dead where he was lying, my pony may have kicked dirt upon his body. Kate Big-HeadAmericans were celebrating their centennial that summer, proud

of 100 years of independence. The news that Custer and all his men had been killed by Indians was greeted with disbelief: How could native warriors with absurd names -- Low Dog, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull -- have defeated so gallant a soldier? General Philip Sheridan, architect of the plan that had ended in disaster, promised Custer would be avenged, and 2,500 additional cavalrymen hurried west. Fresh blue columns commanded by Crook, Terry and Colonel Nelson A. Miles crisscrossed the Powder River country hunting down the bands that had split up after the Custer fight. One by one, all were forced to surrender. “If you look at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it was Custer's Last Stand, but in a lot of ways it was the last stand for Indian people as a free people, as a people that were living on the Plains and in the lifestyle that was going to change because of that victory.” Rick WilliamsIn retribution, Congress took back the Black Hills, despite the Fort Laramie Treaty, and took another forty million acres of Lakota land as well. The

reservation chiefs were forced to accept all of it. But Sitting Bull would not accept defeat. He and his followers had fled beyond the reach of American troops, across the border into Canada, which he called the "Land of the Grandmother," in honor of Queen Victoria. When General Alfred Terry traveled north to offer him a full pardon on the condition that he settle on a reservation, Sitting Bull angrily sent him away. This country is my country now, and I intend to stay here and raise my people to fill it. We did not give our country to you; you stole it. You come here to tell lies; when you go home, take them with you. Sitting Bull

Center My HeartI feel like a father with a great family of children around me, in a winter storm, and I am looking with calmness, confidence and patience, for the clouds to break and the sun to shine, so that I can run out...and say, “Children, come home....I am ready to kill the fatted calf and make a joyful feast to all who will come and partake.” Brigham YoungFor 30 hard years, Brigham Young had attended to every detail of life in Mormon Utah, where he had tried to fashion a distinct society based on communal economics, polygamy, and one-

party politics -- all run by the church. But now he felt besieged. Congress was again trying to assert control over Utah with an 1871 law that gave federal courts, not Mormons, jurisdiction over criminal cases.

One of the first actions of the Federal prosecutors was to arrest Young's devoted follower, John D. Lee, and put him on trial for the Mountain Meadows massacre of twenty years before, when more than a hundred men, women and children -- emigrants on their way West from Missouri -- had been slaughtered in cold blood. It had been the darkest event in Mormon history. “John D. Lee was one of my great-grandfathers and, until recent times, he was considered the leader who carried out the Mountain Meadow Massacre. Actually, he was about third in line in the chain of command of a militia that carried this out. He later then was sent to southern Utah and kind of out of the immediate orbit of Brigham Young, but there was a father-son type relationship between those two men.” Stewart UdallFor years, Young tried to protect Lee from capture and prosecution, sending him to exile in the Arizona wilderness, near the Grand Canyon. Prosecutors now offered him money and leniency if he

would implicate others in the killings. It is told around for a fact that I could tell great confessions and bring in Brigham Young and the heads of the church...[But] I will not be the means of bringing troubles on my people, for...this people is a misrepresented and cried-down community. [Yes, a people scattered and peeled...] and if at last they did rise up and shed the blood of their enemies, I won’t consent to give ’em up. John D. LeeWhen Lee's trial began, orders went out that no Mormon should testify. The four Gentiles on the jury found Lee guilty, but all

eight Mormons held out for acquittal. Across the nation, the case became a symbol for everything Americans despised about Mormonism. Pressures mounted for the government to strip Brigham Young and the church of their authority in Utah. “And I think a decision was made, Well, if we sacrifice Lee, maybe the pressures will go away, because at the second trial, the word was sent down to the Mormons that this had to be completed, and that they should vote for conviction. He was singled out as the perpetrator, and the Mormons even put it in their Sunday school lessons -- which bothered my family for a long time -- and he was in effect the scapegoat.” Stewart UdallAt Lee's second trial, all the members of the jury were Mormons and all voted to convict. No one else who took part in the massacre was ever brought to trial. Under Utah law, Lee was allowed to choose whether he wished to be shot, hanged or beheaded. He chose to face a firing squad. On March 23, 1877, John D. Lee was escorted to the site of the Mountain Meadows massacre, seated on a coffin and photographed. He made arrangements for each of the two wives who remained true to him to get a copy of the picture. Then he spoke to the little crowd that had come to see him die. I have but little to say this morning. Of course I feel that I am upon the brink of eternity...I feel as calm as a summer morn....I am ready to meet my Redeemer....I do not believe everything that is now being taught and practiced by Brigham Young. I do not care who hears it....I studied to make this man’s will my pleasure for thirty years. See, now, what I have come to this day! I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner...What confidence can I have in such a man! I have none, and I don’t think my Father in heaven has any... John D. LeeThen, Lee shook hands with his executioners, handed his hat and overcoat to a friend. His last words were to the firing squad: "Center my heart boys," he said. "Don't mangle my body."

Five months later, Brigham Young was on the brink of eternity. For days, surrounded by his huge family, he floated in and out of consciousness. Then, on August 29th, he called out the name of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith, and died. Now his

followers would have to face the world without him. Salt Lake City, Utah TerritoryTo the New York HeraldDear Sir:I can’t undertake to explain Brigham Young to your Atlantic citizens, or expect you to put him at his value. Your great men Eastward are to me like your ivory and pearl handled table knives...more shiny than the inside of my watch case; but with only edge enough to slice bread and cheese...and all alike by the dozen, one with another.Brigham is the article that sells out West with us -- between a Roman cutlass and a beef butcher knife, the thing to cut up a deer or cut down an enemy every bit as well. You, that judge men by the handle and the sheath, how can I make you know a good Blade?

Jedediah M. Grant

Good WordsThe first white men of your people who came to our country were named Lewis and Clark....All the Nez Percés made friends with Lewis and Clark and agreed to let them pass through their country, and never to make war on white men. This promise the Nez Percés have never broken. It has always been the pride of the Nez Percés that they were the friends of the white men. Chief Joseph

By 1877, most Nez Percé were living on a reservation along the Clearwater River in Lapwai, Idaho, where many had converted to Christianity, wore white men's clothes, and had taken up farming. But some still held fast to their old way of life, among

them a band that lived in the Wallowa Valley of eastern Oregon. Their "village chief" -- responsible for the welfare of his people -- was a tall, reserved man whose Nez Percé name -- Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht -- meant "Thunder Rolling From the Mountains." Whites called him Chief Joseph. As a young man, Joseph had promised his dying father that he would never sell their homeland, and for six years he had refused to move when government agents tried to enforce a treaty that his band of Nez Percé had never signed. Do not misunderstand me [and] my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who has created it. I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to live on yours. The earth is the mother of all people and all people should have equal rights upon it. Chief JosephWe do not wish to interfere with your religion, but must talk about practicable things. Twenty times over you repeat that the earth is your mother...Let us hear no more, but come to business at once. General Oliver O. HowardGeneral Oliver Otis Howard was a one-armed Civil War hero who had founded Howard University for emancipated blacks

in Washington D.C. Now he was dispatched to deal with the Nez Percé. After investigating, Howard became convinced that Joseph was right about the treaty, and he offered to buy the Wallowa Valley on behalf of the government. But Joseph refused. Finally the order came to move the Nez Percé one way or another, and Howard told Joseph and the others that if they weren't on the Lapwai reservation within a month, his soldiers would force them to go. I knew I had never sold my country, and that I had no land in Lapwai; but I did not want bloodshed. I did not want my people killed. I did not want anybody killed....I said in my heart that, rather than have war, I would give up everything rather than have the blood of white men upon the hands of my people. Chief JosephJoseph and the other chiefs began moving their people toward Idaho, but a handful of young warriors, seeking revenge for the way the Nez Percé had been treated, slipped away and killed eighteen whites. For the first time in their history, Joseph's people suddenly found themselves at war with the United States. Howard sent two troops of cavalry to bring the young warriors and the rest of the Nez Percé in. He wired his superiors: "Think we will make short work of it." Catching up with Joseph's band at White Bird Canyon on the Salmon River, Howard's

troops attacked. The Nez Perce hurled them back. Those soldiers did not hold their position ten minutes. Some soldiers...were quickly on the run. Then the entire enemy force gave way...We counted thirty-three dead soldiers. We did no scalping. We did not strip them naked. We did not hurt the dead. Only let them lie. Yellow WolfOnly three Nez Perce warriors had been wounded in the battle, but Perry had lost a third of his command and been driven from

the field. "I have been in lots of scrapes," one army scout remembered, but "I never went up against anything like the Nez Percé in all my life." News of the stunning defeat at White Bird Canyon, almost one year after Custer's death at the Little Bighorn, shocked the country. Howard called for more troops, and for the next three months they would pursue Joseph and his people as they carried out one of the most remarkable military retreats in history. On July 3rd, the Nez Perce wiped out an army scouting party of thirteen men that got too close. On Independence Day they fought off an attack at an old stage stop called Cottonwood, A week later, on the Clearwater River, they killed thirteen more of

Howard's men who sought to stop them. Then they began climbing the Bitterroot Mountains, led by a war chief named Looking Glass, following the same trail through Lalo Pass that had brought Lewis and Clark to them three quarters of a century earlier. There were about 700 of them -- only 200 warriors, the rest women, children and old people, all in Joseph's care. Still, they moved quickly, believing that if they could make it to Montana and join their allies, the Crow, they would be safe. When they reached Montana, the Nez Percé turned south along the Bitterroot River, paying for food and supplies from white settlers -- but the frightened townspeople of Missoula, Butte,

Bannock, and Virginia City demanded army protection. On an elevated plateau surrounded by mountains, called the Big Hole, Looking Glass convinced the weary Indians they could rest for several days. Howard, he said, was too far behind them to worry about.

But Colonel John Gibbon had assembled all the available soldiers in western Montana and, with the help of Bannock scouts, had tracked the unsuspecting Nez Percé to the Big Hole. On August 9, his troops attacked at dawn. In the first moments, between 60 and 90 Nez Percé were cut down -- many of them dead before they could kick free of their blankets. But the survivors regrouped, women and children and

old men fighting alongside the warriors with such fury that they drove the soldiers from the camp. Few of us will soon forget the wail of mingled grief, rage, and horror which came from the camp four or five hundred yards from us when the Indians returned to it and recognized their slaughtered warriors, women, and children. Above this wail of horror we could hear the passionate appeal of the leaders urging their followers to fight, and the war whoops in answer which boded us no good. Colonel John GibbonThe enraged warriors pinned Gibbon's men down with their fire, while Joseph led the others away from the fighting. The Nez Percé now slipped back into Idaho, then turned east again, toward the Yellowstone plateau, which had recently been set aside as a national park. William Tecumseh Sherman himself had assured visitors there was no danger from marauding Indians in the park. Indians, he said, were too superstitious to venture near the geysers. But the Nez Percé swept right through, capturing more than a dozen horrified tourists and killing two of them, before the chiefs told the warriors to let the others go. They moved on, still hoping to join forces with their longtime friends, the Crows. But the Crows were now pursuing them as scouts for the U.S. Army. Many snows the Crows had been our friends. But now...turned enemies. I do not understand how the Crows could think to help the soldiers. My heart was just like fire... Yellow WolfThe Nez Percé were alone. The West they had once known had vanished.Yet there remained one last chance for escape: Sitting Bull had found safety in

Canada. They headed north across Montana to join him. By late September, when they finally crossed the Missouri River, the Nez Percé had come more than 1,500 miles; fought in seventeen engagements against more than 2,000 troops; suffered hardships, disappointments, and the loss of loved ones. But they had beaten or eluded every army sent against them. Now, Canada -- and freedom -- were only 40 miles away. Before crossing the border, the Nez Percé camped on Snake

Creek, near the Bear Paw Mountains. General Howard, they knew, was more than two days' march behind them. They did not know, however, that Colonel Nelson A. Miles had mercilessly pushed his troops all the way from eastern Montana to intercept them. The Nez Percé were quietly slumbering in their tents...When the charge was made...The tramp of at least six hundred horses over the prairie fairly shook the ground, and, although a complete surprise to the Indians in the main, it must have given them a few minutes' notice, for as the troops charged against the village the Indians opened a hot fire upon them. Colonel Nelson A. MilesNez Percé warriors drove off one attack -- then a second, and a third. They killed or wounded 53 of the soldiers, but all their horses had been driven off. They could not

escape. Miles dug in for a siege. The weather turned colder. Most of our few warriors left from the Big Hole had been swept as leaves before the storm....A young warrior, wounded, lay on a buffalo robe dying without complaint. Children crying with cold. No fire. There could be no light. Everywhere the crying, the death wail....I felt the coming end. All for

which we had suffered lost! Thoughts came of the Wallowa where I grew up. Of my own country when only Indians were there. Of tipis along the bending river. Of the blue, clear lake, wide meadows with horse and cattle herds. From the mountain forests, voices seemed calling. I felt as dreaming. Not my living self. Yellow WolfFor five more days, the siege went on. A few Nez Percé slipped away and straggled into Canada, where Sitting Bull welcomed them, but would send no warriors to rescue the others. Under a white flag, Miles opened negotiations. Joseph was selected to talk with him. Turn over your rifles, Miles said, and in the spring, you will be allowed to return home. My people were divided about surrendering...[But] I could not bear to see my wounded men and women suffer any longer; we had lost enough already. Colonel Miles...promised that we might return to our own country with what stock we had left. I thought we could start again. I believed Colonel Miles, or I never would have surrendered. Chief JosephOn the afternoon of October 5, 1877, Joseph rode out to the foot of a bluff where

Colonel Miles and General Howard were waiting for him. Joseph threw himself off his horse, draped his blanket about him...and with a quiet pride, not exactly defiance, advanced toward General Howard and held out his rifle in token of submission. Lieutenant Charles Erskine WoodI am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are all killed. Looking Glass is dead....The old men are all dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no food. No one knows where they are....I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. Chief JosephJoseph and his people were loaded onto a riverboat and sent down the Missouri to Fort Abraham Lincoln, where they expected to spend the winter. But while they were on the way, the promise that they could return home had been over-ruled by General Sherman. The Indians throughout displayed a courage and skill that elicited universal praise. They abstained from scalping; let captive women go free; did not

commit indiscriminate murder of peaceful families, which is usual, and fought with almost scientific skill.... Nevertheless, they would not settle down on lands set apart for them...and when commanded by proper authority, they began resistance by murdering persons in no manner connected with their alleged grievances.... They should never again be allowed to return to Oregon. William Tecumseh ShermanMiles and Howard could not change Sherman's decision. The Nez Percé had been betrayed again. When the Indians arrived at the fort, its cannon greeted them, and the steam engine of a Northern Pacific train blasted its whistle three times. They had never seen a train before, and the Nez Percé began a mournful song. It sounded, one onlooker said, like a "death chant." Then, Joseph and his people were loaded onto the train. They were not going home, they were now told, but far away, into exile in the northeastern corner of Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma -- nearly 2,000 miles from their beloved Wallowa Valley. Once there, they found conditions unsanitary, medicine scarce. Sixty-eight of them perished in the first year alone. Soon, they had a cemetery set aside solely for babies, with 100 graves.

Among the Nez Percé who died in exile was an old man named Halahtookit, or Daytime Smoke. According to Joseph's people, he was the half Indian son of William Clark, the American explorer the Nez Perce had sheltered more than 70 years earlier,

the man who had first promised that the United States would always be their friend. Good words do not last long....Good words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by white men....Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and broken promises. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases... Chief Joseph

KEN BURNS’ THE WEST—EPISODE 7 SCRIPT

“THE GEOGRPAHY OF HOPE”

Introduction“Americans aren't wrong in seeing the West as a land of the future, a land in which astonishing things are possible. What they often are wrong about is that there's no price to be paid for that, that everybody can succeed, or that even what succeeds is necessarily the best for all concerned. The West is much more complicated than that." Richard WhiteBy 1877, the American conquest of the West was nearly complete. For every Indian in the West, there were now nearly

40 whites, and as the Indian wars drew to a close, the last obstacles to American domination dropped away, and the country readied itself to assert control over the entire region. Between 1877 and 1887, four and a half million more people came West. Almost half settled on the western Plains, creating new towns in a region once thought too harsh for human habitation: Bismarck and Champion, Epiphany, Wahoo and Nicodemus. Some came seeking freedom, land of their own -- and opportunities they couldn't find in the East, while others found in the West a place to change themselves -- become someone else, to start over. But as more and more Americans arrived, there was less and less room for those who

didn't conform. Indians were expected to change overnight -- to forget their old ways and make themselves over in the image of their conquerors. The Chinese, who had done more than almost anyone to connect the West to the rest of the nation, would be told that they were no longer welcome in the United States.

Mexican-Americans were overwhelmed by the newcomers, even in towns where they had lived for centuries. While the Mormons were forced to surrender part of their religion in order to save the rest of it. But even as Americans tried to “tame” the West, they preferred to remember a gaudier version -- full of violence, adventure, and most of all, romance -- a “Wild West.” And yet, between 1877 and 1887, Americans would come to learn firsthand just how “wild” the West could really be -- and that no conquest could ever be complete.

The Exodusters

What's going to be a hundred years from now ain't much account to us.... The whites has the lands and the sense, an' the blacks has nothin' but their freedom, an' it's jest like a dream to them. Benjamin “Pap” SingletonWhen the last Federal troops left the South in 1877 and Reconstruction gave way to renewed racial oppression, a former slave named Benjamin “Pap” Singleton began urging blacks to

form their own independent communities in the West. Those who followed his advice called themselves “Exodusters,” because they believed the West would prove their promised land. "Kansas seemed like an ideal place for people who were disillusioned with the black codes that had been passed in the South, the meanness of the Ku Klux Klan, the meanness of the sharecroppers who really weren't sharing the way they had agreed, and these are the people who paid five dollars, five bucks to Pap Singleton to come up the river to a new life in Kansas.” Bertha Calloway"The West has always been seen as a place of opportunity. And this was certainly as true for people of African descent as for anybody else. Singleton and other leaders weren't necessarily doing it for purely altruistic reasons. Like a lot of great westerners they were speculators in land and hoped to make their fortunes. But they did have a vision of a place where people of color could breathe free..."

Bill GwaltneySoon these early Exodusters’ hopeful letters home were being read aloud in black churches across the South, and in the spring of 1879, word spread that the Federal government had set all of Kansas aside for former slaves. The rumor was false, but it sparked a genuine Exodus that brought more than 15,000 African Americans into Kansas within the next year. When I landed on the soil [of Kansas] I looked on the ground and I says this is free ground. Then I looked on the heavens and I says them is free and beautiful heavens. Then I looked within my heart and I says to myself, I wonder why I was never free before? John Solomon Lewis

Rain Follows the Plow"The West has always been and always will be a place where there's a struggle to survive, and where nature strikes heavy blows at you. . . That's geography. And I think part of that conquering of the West seeped into the American character. In many ways, the West has been a geography of hope for the country as a whole." Stewart Udall

For forty years, homesteaders had passed over the western prairies on their way to better land, but now even this rough, arid soil was desirable, thanks in part to railroad company advertisements that described it as lush farmland and to a growing belief that settlers had actually changed the onetime "Great American Desert" by plowing the earth. God speed the plow.... By this wonderful provision, which is only man's mastery over nature, the clouds are dispensing copious rains ... [the plow] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a

desert into a farm or garden.... To be more concise, Rain follows the plow. Charles Dana WilberDuring the 1870s and early 1880s, unusually heavy rainfall made these claims sound plausible, and within ten years nearly 2 million people had sunk their roots into the prairie soil. But when the wet years finally came to an end, the high plains became

again a place where only the most determined could hang on. "When we look at these people sitting in front of their sod houses ... we think, What squalor, living in a dirt house. We see women in maybe an elegant dress but without shoes on and we think, These people were poor. But what I see is pride. What they’re really saying is, Look how rich we are. We’re stinking rich, our muskmelons are this big.... These are not people who are embarassed by their situation. They are drenched in pride.

Roger WelschAh, Nebraska Land, Sweet Nebraska Land!Upon thy burning soil I stand.And I look away, across the plains,And I wonder why it never rains.

A Hard Time I Have"The noblest part of the West is the fact that it gave hope to people in ways that we had not been able to have before. It was a force in the shaping of the national character, and an important one.... [But] there is very little that is presumably dear to the American psyche... that was not at one time or another systematically violated during the history of the West. And sometimes in ways that had never been matched before."T. H. WatkinsOn July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull, his people nearly starving, crossed the border from Canada to surrender. He asked for the right to cross back into Canada whenever he wished, for a home near the Black Hills and the right to hunt wherever he pleased. Instead, the army sent him east to Standing Rock Reservation, where he found his daughter and many who had fought with him at the Little Bighorn reduced to living on rations, forbidden to speak their own language, and denied their religious customs. "The idea was that if we couldn't pray, if we couldn't behave the way we do, have our social customs, and we couldn't speak, we'd very quickly become white people, and we would no longer be a military problem. So the idea was to corrupt them from the inside, you know, make them give up who they are." Charlotte Black ElkThe Lakota lived in log cabins at Standing Rock, as well as tipis. They worked as farmers, or as policemen hired to enforce the Indian agent's rules. In 1883, when a delegation of U.S. Senators arrived with a plan to open part of the reservation to

white settlement, Sitting Bull confronted them: Do you know who I am? I want to tell you that if the Great Spirit has chosen any one to be the chief of this country, it is myself. Sitting BullBut his objections were brushed aside. From his cabin on the Grand River, Sitting Bull could see the very place where he had been born more than fifty years ago, into an entirely different world. "A warrior I have been," he sang. "Now it is all over. A hard time I have."

BarbariansWe are taught to believe... that your government is founded and conducted upon principles of pure justice and that all of every... race and creed are here surely protected in person, liberty and property. Chung SunWhen he came to Los Angeles in October of 1871, Chung Sun had $600 and dreams of becoming a wealthy tea planter in Southern California. But soon after his arrival, he became caught

up in a violent race riot that brought mobs of European immigrant workers -- French, German, Irish -- storming into the Chinese section of town. When it was over, 23 Chinese had been hanged, stabbed or shot to death, and Chung Sun had been

beaten and robbed of his savings. Throughout the 1870s, similar riots erupted across the West, as an economic depression led American workers to accuse Chinese immigrants of taking away their jobs. We intend to try and vote the Chinaman out, to frighten him out, and if this won't do, to kill him out, and when the blow comes we won't leave a fragment for the thieves to pick up.... The heathen slaves must leave this coast, if it costs 10,000 lives. Denis Kearney The Workingman's Party In Rock Springs, Wyoming, whites murdered 28 Chinese during

an all-day riot. In Tacoma, Washington, the state militia had to be called in to restore order after rioters burned and looted the Chinese part of town. And in Seattle, Washington, Chinese were rounded up, forced onto ships and sent out to sea. Chung Sun, meanwhile, took a job as a ditch digger, but when the ditch was finished, he could find no work at all. A new California law made it illegal to hire Chinese workers. Then, in 1882, western politicians and labor unions persuaded Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited nearly all immigration from China for a period of ten years. "For the first time in the history of the United States, the government decided to exclude a group of immigrants on the basis of race. And it set a precedent ... because for the first time you have this new thinking introduced ... We can not only determine who could become citizens in this country, but we could determine who could come to this country."

Ronald TakakiIn California, Chung Sun set sail for home.I hope you will pardon my expressing a painful disappointment. The ill treatment of... [my] countrymen may perhaps be excused on the grounds of race, color, language and religion, but such prejudice can only prevail among the ignorant. In civility... [Americans] are very properly styled barbarians. Chung Sun

The Romance of My Life

Theodore Roosevelt entered the West at 2 in the morning on September 8, 1883, stepping down from a train in the heart of Dakota Territory. A 24-year-old New York assemblyman with a reputation as a reformer -- near-sighted, Harvard-educated, asthmatic -- he seemed the quintessential dude as he set out to shoot a buffalo

before the species disappeared. Still, despite freezing rains so fierce that even his seasoned guide urged him to abandon the chase, Roosevelt got what he

had come for -- and fell in love with the West as well. Like all Americans, I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads and herds of cattle, too.... I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner. Theodore RooseveltLike many others, Roosevelt saw the prospect of quick riches on the Dakota plains, where cattle could graze freely, fattening from $5 calves into $45 heads of beef at virtually no expense. European fortune-seekers and American magnates like Marshall Field, William K. Vanderbilt and Joseph Glidden were investing in cattle herds, and before he left, Roosevelt himself bought a Dakota ranch. But the West would become more than another source of income to Theodore Roosevelt. In 1884, when both his young wife and his mother died within hours of one

another, the West became his refuge from despair. Nowhere else does one feel so far off from mankind; the plains stretch out in deathless and measureless expanse, and . . . will for many miles be lacking in all signs of life.... Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough. Theodore RooseveltOver three summers of ranching, Roosevelt transformed himself, driving cattle, chasing rustlers, hunting and camping across the

rugged landscape. "Here," he said later, "the romance of my life began."

The Barrio“It was the custom... in all the families of the early settlers, for the oldest member of the family... to rise every morning at the rising of the morning star, and at once to strike up a hymn.... From house to house, street to street, the singing spread; and the volume of musical sound swelled, until it was as if the whole town sang.”

Century Magazine, 1883Los Angeles in the 1870s still seemed the Hispanic farming town it had been when the United States took California from Mexico in 1846. But for its Californio natives, life had changed. Bullfighting and bear-baiting had been outlawed; baseball was now the most popular sport. And political power had long since passed into the hands of the Anglos. Then, in 1885, the Santa Fe Railroad reached Los Angeles and touched off a fare war with the Southern Pacific, which had brought the first line into the city nine years before. Rates were

slashed daily until, at one point, travelers could make the trip from St. Louis for as little as one dollar.

Trainloads of newcomers came pouring in -- 120,000 in 1887 alone -- drawn by extravagant claims for the “purity of the air” and the prospect of making a fortune in the real estate boom. By 1888, sixty new towns had sprung up in Los Angeles County, and two years later, the Anglo population was five times what it had been just a decade before. In the heart of the old city, now called the barrio, Mexican-Americans who had live there for generations suddenly found themselves surrounded. "The change was so drastic, we had to turn inward.... And one way to do that is to fall back into the community, into the family, into the barrio, and try to hang on to what you have of your history.... What's outside is an alien land, where the color of your skin makes a difference, where the way you speak makes a difference. In the barrio... you're accepted, and out there is another world." Rudolfo Anaya

I Must Lose Myself AgainFor nearly half a century, the Mormons had struggled to create their own unique society in Utah. Their church owned the territory’s biggest businesses, controlled the ruling political party, often enforced its own laws in defiance of the federal courts, and resisted federal control at every turn. But in 1882, the same year Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a basic tenet of Mormonism -- polygamy, or plural marriage -- was declared a federal crime. Polygamists were barred from voting, holding office and serving on juries, and

those found guilty of the practice could be jailed for up to five years. "The thing to keep in mind is that polygamy was a sacred calling... a commandment of God.... they were fulfilling a very important church principle in doing this, and that was more important than the law." Stewart UdallTwo months after polygamy was outlawed, David King Udall, the 30-year-old leader of a newly founded Mormon colony in Arizona, married Ida Hunt, his second wife. Today I have made the most solemn vows and obligations of my life. Marriage, under ordinary circumstances, is a grave and important step, but entering into plural marriage in these perilous times is doubly so. Ida Hunt UdallLocal newspapers attacked the couple, calling Ida a prostitute, and in 1884, when she learned that federal marshals were in Arizona to crackdown on polygamy, Ida Hunt Udall fled into what the Mormons called the “Underground.” Already two months pregnant, she traveled under assumed names from one hiding place to the next, and

after more than half a year in exile, gave birth to a daughter alone. Dear David:... today I have had a letter... saying that the Apostles will not consent for me to return and say that I must lose myself again if possible.... Oh Dade, I never missed you as I do tonight!... How long will the Lord require His poor weak children to be thus tried? Ida Hunt UdallMy Dear Girl:... Better... that I had suffered imprisonment than to have you going by another name and running here and there for fear of being known. It touches the manly feelings of any man to such a degree that it is almost

unbearable.... God bless you in your wandering. David King UdallDavid Udall did go to jail for a time, as did many Mormon leaders. By 1887, the federal government had denied voting rights to all Mormons, polygamists or not, and federal marshals were preparing to confiscate church property. Then, in 1890, Wilford Woodruff, the church president, issued a Manifesto in which he advised all Mormons to obey the law and refrain from plural marriage. "The church was being driven toward bankruptcy. It was clear they had to make a change and I think this was a very pragmatic decision to say, Polygamy is dragging the church down, and we're going to have to give it up." Stewart UdallOver the next few years, Woodruff and other church leaders disbanded the Mormon's political party, divested many church businesses and drew up a constitution that not only separated church and state but even banned polygamy. In return, on January 6, 1896, Utah was admitted to the

Union as the 45th state. But in Arizona, David and Ida Udall remained committed to their marriage and to each other. When she finally returned from hiding in 1887, they went on to have five more children together -- three of them after their church had renounced polygamy. The Church could not undo what had been done in practicing plural marriage... Those who lived that order of marriage righteously will have glory added to their posterity. David King Udall

Friends of the IndianLet us forget once and forever the word "Indian"and all that it has signified in the past, and remember only that we are dealing with so many children of a common Father. Charles C. PainterContainment had been the goal of federal Indian policy throughout much of the nineteenth century, but in 1883 a group

of white church leaders, social reformers and government officials met at Mohonk Lake, New York, to chart a new, more humane course of action. Calling themselves “Friends of the Indian,” they proposed to remold Native Americans into mainstream citizens and to begin this process by re-educating the youngest generation at special Indian schools. They were trying to make white people out of 'em. When they took the children away from the mothers, they just knew they'd never see their children no more.... they didn't think about school. They were thinkin', they didn't know whether or not they really went to school, or were going to be killed.

Mildred CleghornThe United States Indian Training and Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the model for this re-education movement, a military-style institution which housed students as young as five years old brought from half a continent away. Many Indians -- including even Sitting Bull --

sent their children to such schools willingly, believing they would help prepare the next generation to live successfully in the white man's world. Unfortunately, this was rarely the case. Still, by century's end, there would be 24 off-reservation boarding schools like Carlisle, plus 81 boarding schools and 147 day schools on the reservations themselves, all striving to eradicate their students' tribal identities and educate them "not as Indians, but as Americans." When I went to Concho... we all spoke our dialect and we were told not to talk it, speak English.... our Matron [was] a big, husky white lady, her name was Garrett, and [one day] somebody said, Mother Garrett's coming! Well, we all tried to keep quiet, but she heard me. Mother Garrett jerked me by the collar of my dress and dragged me into the bathroom. That lye soap was about that big and about that high. She broke off a piece and she washed my mouth with lye soap. She said, Don't you ever speak Indian again or I'm going to wash your mouth again. And my tongue got blistered from that lye. Mary Armstrong

Frank Hamilton CushingFrank Hamilton Cushing was 22 years old when he arrived at the Zuni pueblo in New Mexico in 1879, the same pueblo Coronado had attacked at the start of his expedition more than three and a half centuries before. Cushing was there on an expedition as well, as part of a U. S. Bureau of Ethnology team sent out to survey tribal life before the West's native peoples and their customs disappeared. But Cushing thought the best way to understand Indians was to live as they did, so rather than observe life at the pueblo, he moved in. Over the next five years, Cushing learned Zuni pottery-making and the Zuni language, grew his hair long and had his ears pierced, wore Zuni clothing and adopted a Zuni name: Tenatsali,

which means "Medicine Flower." The Zuni admitted him to their sacred Priesthood of the Bow, after he went through the rigorous initiation rites that included taking an enemy's scalp, and they brought him along on war parties against Navajo raiders, despite the local Indian agent's stern objections. Mr. Galen EastmanNavajo Indian AgencyFort Defiance, Arizona TerritorySir: It is quite true that I fired, not twice, but three times into two different bands of horses belonging to the Navajo Indians. It is possible that, as I intended, I killed one or two of them, although of this I cannot be certain.... Rest assured, sir, that... when all of our grievances are set right by the Navajos, we shall be then very ready to say amen, and to act all things aright on our side. Very respectfully, Your Obedient Servant F. H. Cushing 1st War Chief of Zuni U. S. Ass’t Ethnologist In 1884, Cushing exposed a scheme by relatives of a U. S. Senator to build a ranch on Zuni land, and this finally prompted his superiors back in Washington to bring him home. He died in 1900, but even as late as 1938, when an archeologist visited Zuni pueblo, there were some among them who still wondered why their old friend Medicine Flower had never returned.

Hell Without HeatBy 1886, the cattle business was in trouble. Overgrazing had depleted the grasslands, herds of sheep were competing for what remained, and farmers were beginning to stake off parts of the open range. Beef prices were falling, and during the hot, dry months of summer, the herds grew thin and weak. Then came the worst winter anyone had ever seen. The first snow came on November 13 and fell continuously for a

month. Then, in January 1887, the temperature dropped even farther, and blizzards came howling over the prairie, blasting the unsheltered herds. Some cattle, too weak

to stand, were actually blown over. Others died frozen to the ground. It was all so slow, plunging after them through the deep snow that way..... The horses' feet were cut and bleeding from the heavy crust, and the cattle had the hair and hide wore off their legs to the knees and hocks. It was surely hell to see big four-year-old steers just able to stagger along. Teddy Blue AbbottSpring revealed the scope of the disaster. Dead cattle littered

the countryside and bobbed in the freshening rivers. [I saw] countless carcasses of cattle going down with the ice, rolling over and over as they went, sometimes with all four stiffened legs pointed skyward. For days on end . . . went Death's cattle roundup. Lincoln LangCattlemen called the winter of 1886-87 the "Great Die-Up." It marked the end of open range ranching, that supposedly sure way to riches which Theodore Roosevelt called "the pleasantest, healthiest and most exciting phase of American existence." And it proved again that, in the West, nature could at any moment shatter all sense of human control.

Gunpowder EntertainmentFor thirty years, beginning in 1883, Buffalo Bill brought his gaudy version of the Wild West to the world. As William F. Cody, he had done nearly everything a man could do in the West: he'd been a gold-seeker, buffalo hunter, cattle rancher and an Indian fighter. But it was as Buffalo Bill that he found his true calling -- as a promoter of the West, and of himself. Buffalo Bill's Wild West promised "a year's visit West in three hours." Every show included Indian attacks on a wagon train (saved by Buffalo Bill), a lonely homestead (saved by Buffalo

Bill) and the authentic Deadwood Stagecoach (also saved by Buffalo Bill), plus a buffalo hunt, Pony Express riders, Mexican vaqueros, and for the finale, a re-enactment of "Custer's Last Stand," with Buffalo Bill himself charging onto the battlefield at the end while the tragic words "TOO LATE" were projected onto a screen behind him.

"This is a show about the conquest of the West, but everything that the audience sees is Indians attacking whites. It's a strange story of an inverted conquest... a celebration of conquest in which the conquerors are the victims. And there's something... deeply weird about this.... It's conquest won without the guilt. We didn't plan it; they attacked us, and when we ended up, we had the whole continent." Richard WhiteEven Libby Custer, the widow of the Little Bighorn, proclaimed Buffalo Bill's Wild West "the most realistic and faithful representation of a western life that has ceased to be," and for millions around the world it transformed William F. Cody into an embodiment of the American Frontier. Buffalo Bill I think is the one true genius the 19th century West really produced. Buffalo Bill is an incredible self-creation. What Buffalo Bill knew about the West is that, in fact, it gave you the opportunity to make yourself over, and then once you've made a role for yourself, to inhabit it. The lines between reality, the lived experience in the West, and the mythic West, that Buffalo Bill portrayed for a living, become very, very blurred Richard White

Final VisionIn 1885, another mythic figure of the American West -- Sitting Bull -- joined Cody's show. Billed as "the slayer of General Custer," he earned $50 a week, plus the profits from the sale of his autograph, for riding once around the arena at every performance. Touring from city to city, Sitting Bull saw another side of American life -- and of his own life as well. "I think he was probably in turns amused and humiliated by the experience. This was so much unlike the reality that he had lived as a young man, and

yet it was a bizarre reflection of that reality too. So he must have seen his experience from a different angle when he was in the Wild West Show." N. Scott MomadaySitting Bull left the Wild West show after only four months, having given much of his pay to newsboys, hoboes and beggars -- destitutes for whom white America seemed inexplicably to feel no compassion. He returned to his home at Standing Rock Reservation, and there had another of his mystical visions, like the ones that had

foretold his people’s victories in 1876. This time he saw himself walking near his home when a meadowlark fluttered down onto a little hillock and spoke to him: “Your own people, Lakota, will kill you,” it said. Sitting Bull knew that his visions had always proved true before.

IntroductionBy 1887, the West was changing faster than ever before. Americans were moved by the same impulses that had always

moved them, to better their own lives and transform the region in the process. Now their numbers soared, and they brought with them the tools of the new industrial age. Mining still lured people to the West from every corner of the globe, but it was a full-scale industry now. And the cities it created seemed little different from the grimy factory towns of the east. Homesteaders and fortune-seekers still arrived, even though much of the best land had already been claimed. And the frenzy over what was left touched off human stampedes, while whole towns opened for business overnight. But for the first inhabitants of the West, it seemed that a way of life that had lasted for generations was ending. As they saw their remaining land stripped away, some Indians sought refuge in a religion that promised it had all been a bad dream. "If you stop and think about the kind of prejudice a lot of people suffered, a lot of the destruction that took place as a consequence of war and conquering, then it wasn't such a pretty picture. But I have to say that I think we have to recognize that that's a story of all places, of all nations. No matter where in the world, it is a story of conquering, great sacrifice, great loss, and a lot of times a taking away of things that really belong to someone else. But even knowing all of that, and wishing that part of it were not there, cannot take away the spirit, and the idealism, and the excitement that the people felt that actually did it, and that we still feel when we think about them doing it." Ann Richards

GuthrieOn the morning of April 22nd, 1889, some 100,000 eager would-be settlers surrounded what was called the "Oklahoma District" on the southern Plains, preparing to storm in and stake their claims. Two million acres in the heart of Indian Territory were being opened for homesteading. All along the district's borders, soldiers held back the swarm of excited pioneers who were poised for the signal that the land rush could begin. At precisely noon, the bugles blew and the huge crowd surged

ahead. Many headed for towns about to be born: Oklahoma City, Stillwater, Kingfisher, Norman -- and Guthrie. The last barrier of savagery in the United States was broken down. Moved by the same impulse each driver lashed his horses furiously... each man on foot caught his breath and started forward. Harper's WeeklyBy the end of the day, all 1,920,000 acres in the Oklahoma District had been claimed. But the choicest lots had already been taken by settlers who had illegally slipped through the army lines the night before. They called themselves "Sooners." Men who had expected to lay out the town-site were grievously disappointed at their first glimpse of their proposed scene of operations. The slope east of the railway at Guthrie station was already dotted white with tents and sprinkled thick with men running about in all directions. Harper's WeeklyBy noon of the following day, the 15,000 new citizens of the brand-new town of Guthrie began choosing their mayor. It wasn't easy. There were two candidates and no ballots. Two lines were formed and each man's vote was tallied, but so many voters ran to the back of the line to vote again that the whole

business had to be done over. Lawyers went to work, filing land claims for a fee. Three men without a cent between them opened a bank. Deposits were kept in a pot-bellied stove until they could afford to buy a vault. A blacksmith soon saw the need for a dentist, declared himself one and advertised his skills by hanging the teeth he extracted on a string outside his tent. Within five days, wood-frame buildings were being banged

together along Main Street. And by the time Guthrie was only one month old, it had a hotel, general stores, three newspapers -- and fifty saloons. In the years that followed, there would be more land rushes throughout the West, bringing in settlers and creating new towns in numbers never before imagined. "I am a being of the West, I am an heir to the richest possible heritage that anybody could have. I think of those people who were ready to take on anything, and to do so with the commitment and the dedication that no matter, come hell or high water, they were going to succeed. I think I'm a part of that. And I love the notion of being somewhere in that lineage, and know that my

children are too." Ann Richards

The Outcome of Our Ernest EndeavorsThe Indian may now become a free man; free from the thraldom of the tribe; free from the domination of the reservation system; free to enter into the body of our citizens. This bill may therefore be considered as the Magna Carta of the Indians of our country. Alice FletcherBack in 1887, well-meaning reformers had persuaded Congress to pass the Dawes Act. It provided for each head of an Indian family to be given 160 acres of farmland or 320 of grazing land. Then, all the remaining tribal lands were to be declared

"surplus" and opened up for whites. Tribal ownership -- and the tribes themselves -- were meant simply to disappear. "The Dawes Act was a way to break up the whole tribal structure of Native American nations. Instead of saying you are a group of people, all of a sudden you are individual land owners, you are Americans. And so it was designed to break up community, to civilize people, make us farmers, and also break up our tribal structure." Charlotte Black ElkIn 1889, the same year as the Oklahoma land rush, two Eastern women arrived at the Nez Percé reservation in Idaho determined to implement the Dawes Act. Alice Fletcher was a leader of the group that called itself the "Friends of the Indians," a pioneer in the emerging field of ethnology, and one of the architects of the new law. Her companion was Jane Gay, a sometime poet who had learned the art of photography to document their time with the Indians. They had come, they believed, to "save" the Nez Percé from themselves -- by dividing up their land and making them homesteaders. Alice explained... the land allotment... and her wish that the whole people would see the wisdom of the great change... At length one man stood up, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow... He said, "We do not want our land cut up in little pieces..." A groan of assent ran along the dark line of Sphinxes... "We must come together and decide whether we will have this law..." She told them that there is nothing for them to decide... The law must be obeyed. Jane GayAlice Fletcher immediately set to work marking off the new boundaries on the reservation. The Nez Percé came to call her the "Measuring Woman." Chief Joseph himself came to pay a visit. After his long flight from the army in 1877, he had been exiled to Oklahoma, and then allowed to return to a reservation in eastern Washington -- but not to his beloved homeland, the Wallowa Valley in Oregon. Using a new device -- a wax cylinder -- Fletcher convinced Joseph to record one of his traditional songs. But she could not talk him into taking an allotment of land. He will have none but the Wallowa Valley, from which he was driven; he will remain landless and homeless if he cannot have his own again. It was good to see an unsubjugated Indian. One could not help respecting the man who still stood firmly for his rights, after having fought and suffered and been

defeated in the struggle for their maintenance. Jane GayAlice Fletcher kept at it for four long years, trying to divide Indian lands fairly while fending off whites who sought to persuade her to leave the best land for them. By the time she was finished, she had made more than 2,000 Nez Percé allotments -- over 175,000 acres. Then she and Jane Gay started east to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Fletcher had been awarded a fellowship at Harvard's Peabody Museum. In the week's journey home across the continent, we shall have time to review the outcome of our earnest endeavors... But if it has been well for us, and well for the Indian... is not for us to know. We can only leave the question among the unsolvable, whose multitude grows ever greater as life goes on.

Jane GayThe Dawes Act, meant to help Indians, devastated them instead. In 1895, the remaining half million unallotted acres of Nez Percé tribal land were declared "surplus" and opened for homesteading. By 1910, there would be 30,000 whites within the Nez Percé reservation -- and just 1,500 Nez Percé. Across much of the West, the story would be the same. Before the Dawes Act, some 150 million acres remained in Indian

hands. Within twenty years, two-thirds of their land was gone.

ButteBy the 1880s, the great American West was not a matter of cowboys, Indians, mountain men, and explorers, but in fact, a land largely urban, largely industrial, and riven with many of the same problems that assaulted the industrialized east. The mining industry, probably more than any other single industry was designed specifically to get into the West, find what resources it had, dig 'em out, leave a wreck behind, and get out and move on someplace else." T. H. WatkinsButte, Montana, was always a mining town. It had been born during a gold rush in the 1860s and was given a second lease on life with a silver strike in the 1870s. Then, in 1881, 300 feet below the ground, miners made an even more important discovery -- the largest deposit of copper the world had ever seen. It was just what the new electrical age required: copper for conductors, machines, wires. By the mid-1880s, Butte's mines were yielding almost 2,000 tons of silver and copper ore every day, well over a million dollars every month. Its citizens boasted they lived on the "richest hill on earth." "Butte had a kind of collective energy that I suspect no other western town could have matched. The mines never closed, the bars never closed, certainly the red light district did not close. I've always thought of it as an eastern town, as a misplaced eastern town, a kind of downsized Pittsburgh located in the middle of The Rocky Mountains." David EmmonsMost of the Butte miners were Irish, but there were also Finns and Japanese and Italians, Croatians, Mexicans and Swedes -- 38 different nationalities in all, so many

that the "No Smoking" signs in the mines had to be printed in fourteen languages. All the men were working steadily toward one goal: take as much ore as possible from the mines 4,000 feet below the surface. It was the most dangerous job in America. In the hot, airless tunnels, temperatures stayed above 90 degrees all year round. Mine shafts collapsed or caught fire. And there was the perpetual threat of silicosis, caused by inhaling dust, which tore at the miners' lungs and led thousands to die young from

pneumonia and tuberculosis. "The elevation to ground level in the middle of a Butte winter was the cause of great elation among the school children of Butte, because men being raised from a hundred degree mine would be covered with sweat, and as they reached the surface, as their sweat-drenched work clothes would strike 40-degree-below air, they would disappear in a plume of evaporation. So the school children used to gather on the hillside and watch the men raised, and it was their afterschool pleasure to watch them literally disappear in this cloud, this puff of smoke."

David EmmonsIn approaching Butte I marvelled at the desolation of the country. There was no greenery of any kind; it had all been killed by the fumes and smoke of the piles of burning ore. Bill Haywood

Just four trees survived within Butte itself, and all the nearby hillsides had long since been stripped of wood to fuel the smelters that roared on, all day and all night. Thick, reeking smoke hung perpetually over the city and the raw-boned mining settlements around it -- Cabbage Patch, Anaconda, and a place called Seldom Seen. "Butte had an air pollution problem that was such that it would be literally dark at noon. The prevailing winds usually would carry the smoke away. But in dead air conditions Butte was literally obliterated. It disappeared from view."

David Emmons"Much of mining that goes on in the West today is still operating under a law signed by Ulysses S. Grant called the General Mining Law of 1872, which was designed specifically to encourage mining in the West. It encouraged exploitation. It literally gave away enormous chunks of American land at almost no price. Imposed no restrictions on how the mines would be

developed, required no reclamation work afterwards, no monitoring of whatever acids and other garbage might get spilled into the local watertables, and gave away, no one even knows how much, precisely, gold and silver, with no royalties paid to the government at all. The West is a fairly fragile environment. Unlike the well-forested East, the scars last longer, the damage is of a longer duration. And yet, we still continue to use the West the same way, as if what we did was impermanent. But in human terms, it is not impermanent at all; it lasts a very long time. Generations." T. H. Watkins

Like Grass Before the SickleBy 1890, no Indian people anywhere in the West lived freely on their own land -- and even the reservations on which they struggled to survive were being broken up under the Dawes Act. Congress had cut appropriations. Rations were drastically reduced.

There were deadly epidemics of measles, influenza, whooping cough. On the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, the Lakota medicine man Sitting Bull was living quietly in his cabin He was still regarded with respect by those Lakotas who remembered the eerie accuracy of his visions during the days when they had fought Custer. But the Lakota were divided now, as they struggled to come to terms with the white man's world. And Sitting Bull had had another, more disturbing vision. This one told him that the worst fate that could befall a Lakota

awaited him -- to die at the hands of his own people. That fall Sitting Bull had a visitor, a Miniconjou Lakota named Kicking Bear, just back from a train trip to the far West and bearing remarkable news. A ceremony called the Ghost Dance was sweeping through many tribes of the West. It was part of a message of hope for all Indian peoples being preached by a Paiute medicine man and prophet named Wovoka. My brothers, I bring you word from your fathers, the ghosts, that they are marching now to join you, led by the Messiah who came once to live on earth with the white man but was killed by them... I bring to you the promise of a day in which there will be no white man to lay his hand on the bridle of the Indians' horse; when the red men of the prairie will rule the world. WovokaWovoka's gospel of salvation was filled with Christian as well as Indian elements. Men and women were first to purify themselves and forswear alcohol and violence. Then they were to dance in a large circle, chanting and appealing to the spirits of their ancestors. When they did, Wovoka promised, the whites would vanish, the buffalo would cover the earth again. "The Ghost Dance, I think, was a desperate prayer. They thought that, well, it may be possible that all of this has been a bad dream, or all of this is passing and there will be the restoration of the world we knew and loved." N. Scott MomadayLike most Indians, Sitting Bull remained skeptical of the ceremony's promised powers. But he agreed to let the Ghost Dance be taught to those people at Standing Rock who wanted to learn it. In the Lakota version of the ceremony, the dancers wore special shirts, said to be stronger than the white man's bullets. The people, wearing the sacred shirts and feathers, now formed a ring. We boys were in it. All joined hands. Everyone was respectful and quiet, expecting something wonderful to happen... The leaders beat time and sang as the people danced, going round to the left in a sidewise step. Occasionally, someone... fell unconscious into the center... As each one came to, she, or he slowly sat up and looked about, bewildered, and then began wailing inconsolably.

Pine Ridge Agency November 12th, 1890We need protection and we need it now. Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy... The leaders should be arrested and confined at some military post until the matter is quieted, and this should be done at once. Daniel F. RoyerResponding to the pleas of a frightened Indian agent, Washington dispatched General Nelson A. Miles with 5,000 troops, including the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's old command. At Pine Ridge and Rosebud in South Dakota, the ghost dancers feared that the soldiers had come to attack them, and fled to a remote plateau surrounded by

cliffs which nervous whites soon began calling "the Stronghold." Meanwhile, at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, Indian police -- charged with keeping peace among their own people -- heard a rumor that Sitting Bull was about to join the Ghost Dancers. Forty-three Lakota policemen were dispatched to bring him in. Two troops of U.S. cavalry followed at a distance. Before dawn on December 15th, 1890, the police burst into

Sitting Bull's house, ordered him to his feet, and pushed him toward the door. Outside, Sitting Bull's followers began to gather, taunting the Lakota police, vowing to keep them from taking their leader. Sitting Bull hesitated, unsure what to do. Then, one of his supporters raised his rifle and shot one of the policemen. Both sides began firing. A Lakota policeman put a bullet through Sitting Bull's head. The last of his great visions had come to pass. Sitting Bull had been killed by his own people. "My grandfather's mother was one of the people who was from Sitting Bull's camp. And my grandfather would tell me that when Sitting Bull was killed they had very few horses, so the few horses they had, they put the young children on, and they walked to Big Foot's camp, and she wept as she walked. And she wept not only for Sitting Bull being killed the way he was, but also wept because she feared that she would not live to have children. And if she did have children, would they be Lakota?" Charlotte Black ElkSitting Bull's grieving followers fled toward the Cheyenne River Reservation where they joined a Miniconjou band led by a chief named Big Foot. He had once been an enthusiastic Ghost dancer but he was no longer certain that the world would be transformed. Big Foot decided to take his band in to Pine Ridge and see if there wasn't some way to reconcile things. But General Miles misunderstood what Big Foot was doing and ordered the 7th Cavalry under Colonel John Forsyth to intercept him. They caught up with Big Foot three days after Christmas. The chief was riding in a wagon, too ill with pneumonia even to sit up, but he flew a

white flag to show his peaceful intentions. The soldiers transferred Big Foot to an army ambulance and then led his band down to a little creek for the night. It was called Wounded Knee. There were 120 men and 230 women and children. The soldiers distributed rations. An army doctor did what he could for Big Foot. But the soldiers also posted four cannon on the top of a rise overlooking the camp. The following morning, Charles Allen,

a reporter for a Nebraska newspaper, watched from the hilltop. At the southeast edge of the group of standing Indians there was a fair-sized plat of grass where, in all the exuberance of early youth, were eight or ten Indian boys dressed in the gray school uniforms of that period. The fun they were having as they played "bucking horse," "leap frog," and similar

games, carried the mind for a fleeting moment back to the days of boyhood. Charles AllenTroops began moving from tipi to tipi, confiscating knives and axes from the women, sometimes seizing a rifle. A medicine man began to dance. "Do not fear," he told the warriors,"but let your hearts be strong. Many soldiers are about us and have many bullets, but I am assured the bullets cannot penetrate us." Suddenly, scooping up a handful of dirt, he tossed it scattering in the air, and with eyes turned toward heaven, implored the Great Spirit to scatter the soldiers likewise. Charles Allen"Almost simultaneously with him throwing a handful of dirt into the air, soldiers tried to disarm a man who was deaf. And he hung on to his rifle and they kind of struggled over it and it went off. These two things happened at the same time and -- bang -- I mean, it just blew everything up."

Robert UtleyThe soldiers opened fire -- with rifles, revolvers, and finally, the cannon that hurled exploding shells into the tipis. The Lakotas did their best to fight back. When the shooting finally stopped, some 250 men, women and children were dead. I walked around viewing the sad spectacle. On reaching the corner of the green where the schoolboys had been so happy in their sports but a short time before, there was spread before me the saddest picture I had seen or

was to see thereafter, for on that spot of their playful choice were scattered the prostrate bodies of all those fine little Indian boys, cold in death... The gun-fire had blazed across their playground in a way that permitted no escape. They must have fallen like grass before the sickle.

Charles AllenFor several days the dead Lakotas were left where they had fallen. While the army contended with sporadic fighting that broke out on the reservation. Finally, after a heavy snowfall, a burial party arrived at Wounded Knee, dug a pit, and dumped in the frozen bodies.  In the shine of photographs are the slain,frozen and black on a simple field of snow.

They image ceremony.Women and children dancing,old men prancing, making fun.In Autumn there were songs,long since muted in the blizzard.In summer, the wild buckwheat shone like foxfur and quillwork.And dust guttered on the creek.Now in serene attitudes of dance,the dead in glossy death are drawn in ancient light.N. Scott MomadayOn January 15th, 1891, the 4,000 remaining Ghost dancers finally surrendered to General Miles. Armed Indian resistance in the West had ended. "Wounded Knee happened yesterday. For Lakota people, Wounded Knee is today. Wounded Knee represents all the frustrations of those years and years and years on the reservation. Even though it happened in 1890, it's fresh in Lakota peoples' minds and in their hearts. That tragedy, that destruction, that devastating thing that happened to them, it exists today. It exists in our hearts and our minds, the way we think when we see about, when we talk about Indian-White relations, that's the first thing that comes to mind. We'll never forget Wounded Knee."Rick Williams

P.S. I Like You Very Much

I know a land where the gray hills lieEternally still, under the sky,Where all the might of suns and moonsThat pass in the quiet of nights and noonsLeave never a sign of the flight of timeOn the long sublime horizon line --Ethel Waxham

On October 20th, 1905 the Rawlins-to-Lander stagecoach rattled north toward the Sweetwater River in central Wyoming. On board was an unusual passenger, a 23-year-old named Ethel Waxham.

She was a city girl from Denver, a graduate of Wellesley College who had spent a summer doing volunteer work in the slums of New York. Schooled in four languages, she dabbled in poetry, enjoyed staging amateur theatricals, and was voraciously curious about the world.

Just a few weeks earlier, she had been offered her first full-time job -- as a teacher in a remote one room school in the center of Wyoming.

"My mother, who was always great for adventure, decided she would take the job. Of course, the adventure started when the Mills family, with whom she would live and whose three children she would teach, wrote her and told her what things to bring and what kind of clothing and what to expect. But there was no mention of how beautiful the ranch was, and what the scenery was like, and what the people were like. So, all those things were a surprise and a revelation to her." David Love

She moved into the Red Bluff ranch and started recording her observations of the remarkable new life she'd begun to lead. And she began teaching -- seven students in all, ages 8 to 16.

The first fifteen minutes or half hour are given to reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "Kidnapped," while we all sit about the stove to keep warm. Usually in the middle of the reading the sound of a horse galloping down the frozen road distracts the attention of the boys.

A few moments later, six foot George Schlichting opens the door, a sack of oats in one hand, his lunch tied up in a dishrag in the other. Cold from his five mile ride, he sits down on the floor by the stove, unbuckles his spurs, pulls off his leather chaps... unwinds three red handkerchiefs from about his neck and ears, takes off one or two coats, according to the temperature, and straightening his leather cuffs, is ready for business. Ethel Waxham

Visitors to the ranch where Ethel lived were few -- sometimes no one for days. But among those who came by with increasing regularity, despite a difficult eleven hour ride, was a rugged sheep rancher named John Galloway Love.

Mr. Love is a Scotchman about thirty-five years old... His face was kindly, with shrewd blue twinkling eyes... But his voice was most peculiar and characteristic. Close analysis fails to find the charm of it. A little Scotch dialect, a little slow drawl, a little nasal quality... and a tone as if he were speaking out of doors... He is

full of quaint turns of speech, and unusual expressions. For he is not a common sheepherder, it is said, but a sheep baron, or "mutton-aire." Ethel Waxham

"My father was unmarried and he was beginning to make a little money and he wanted a wife. And here was this beautiful school marm and so, of course, he fell in love with her. But she did not fall in love with him. No bells and whistles rang. But she was intrigued." David Love

John Love was born in Wisconsin, to Scottish parents. He was bright and resourceful, but high spirited and got himself expelled from the University of Nebraska in 1891. Then he had invested what little money he had in two horses and a buggy, and headed for Wyoming. When his horses died after drinking poisoned water, Love abandoned his belongings and went the last hundred miles on foot.

Since then, he had spent seven years on the range, herding other people's sheep, caring for their cattle, saving up enough money to start a sheep ranch of his own in Fremont County on a treeless stretch of land along Muskrat Creek.

"I have asked him many times why that Godforsaken country would be his home. He knew about the Red Bluff Ranch and other places along the Wind River Front. But he chose that because, as he said simply, he needed a lot of room. He wanted his outfit to grow." David Love

Ethel Waxham enjoyed Love's wit and his stories about ranching, but when he proposed marriage, she turned him down and went on with her work.When the school year ended, Ethel left Wyoming and entered the University of Colorado, and began to work towards a master's degree in literature. Then letters began to arrive.

Muskrat, WyomingSeptember 12th, 1906Dear Miss Waxham,Of course it will cause many a sharp twinge and heartache to have to take "no" for an answer, but I will never blame you for it in the least, and I will never be sorry that I met you. I will be better for having known you. I know the folly of hoping that your "no" is not final, but in spite of that knowledge... I know that I will hope until the day that you are married. Only then I will know that the sentence is irrevocable. Yours Sincerely, John G. Love

 

November 12th, 1906Dear Miss Waxham,I know that you have not been brought up to cook and labor. I have never been on the lookout for a slave and would not utter a word of censure if you never

learned, or if you got ambitious and made a "batch" of biscuits that proved fatal to my favorite dog... I will do my level best to win you and... If I fail, I will still want your friendship just the same. Yours Sincerely, John G. Love

 

February 15th, 1907Dear Mr. Love,I am fortunate in having two letters from you to answer in one... The days have been comparatively dull... I am too busy for dances here, if I care to go, which I do not... The seven months I spent at the ranch I would not exchange for any other seven months in my life. They seem shorter than seven weeks, even seven days, here. Sincerely yours,Ethel Waxham

 

Dear Miss Waxham,I for one am glad that your curiosity led you to drift up here to Wyoming, and now my supreme desire in life is to persuade you to come back. With love and kisses,Ever yours,John G. Love

 

Dear Mr. Love,Since you began to sign your name as you do... you must have known that I would not like it and would not continue, since we are only friends. I wrote you not to expect any more letters from me unless you stopped it. Ethel P. Waxham

 

Dear Miss Waxham,I will always sign all letters properly in the future. Please forgive my errors of the past. I suppose that I ought to be satisfied with your friendship, but I won't be. Yours sincerely,John G. Love

 

In 1907, Ethel Waxham received her master's degree, took a job teaching in Wisconsin for a year, then came back and spent another year in Colorado. Everywhere she went, John Love's letters pursued her. 

April 3, 1909Dear Mr. Love, There are reasons galore why I should not write so often. I'm a beast to write at all. It makes you -- (maybe?) -- think that "no" is not "no," but "perhaps," or "yes," or anything else... Good wishes for your busy seasonfrom E.W.P.S. I like you very much.

 

For years, John Love slept outdoors, fighting against the terrain and climate to keep his herds alive, struggling to build his ranch. He scoured the countryside for abandoned buildings and hauled them over rough roads to Muskrat Creek. A saloon and an old hotel became bunkhouses, sheds, and a blacksmith shop. He hauled the logs for the main house from the Wind River Mountains a hundred miles away. Each trip took him two weeks. 

October 25th, 1909Dear Miss Waxham,There is no use in my fixing up the house anymore, papering, etc., until I know how it should be done, and I won't know that until you see it and say how it ought to be fixed. If you never see it, I don't want it fixed, for I won't live here. We could live very comfortably in the wagon while our house was being fixed up to suit you, if you only would say yes.John Love

 

Dear Mr. Love,Suppose that you lost everything that you have and a little more; and suppose that for the best reason in the world I wanted you to ask me to say "yes." What would you do?E.

Dear Miss Waxham,If I were with you, I would throw my arms around you and kiss you and wait eagerly for the kiss that I have waited over four years for. Yours Sincerely,John G. Love

Finally, in the spring of 1910, Ethel Waxham agreed to be John Love's wife.

"When my father was sure that my mother was going to marry him, he had a sheep wagon built especially to his order. And that was to be the honeymoon sheep wagon. They were married on June 20th, in 1910, and it was pretty hot, so they started out for the mountains, and from then on there is a blank in our knowledge. Mother rarely discussed it, except in times of crisis. And my father never discussed it. But apparently it rained a great deal. The horses got away and they were marooned, and they never got to the mountains.David Love

It was the first test John and Ethel Love would face together, but it would not be the last.