New Mexico’s Old Times & Old Timers

by Don Bullis, New Mexico Author DonBullis.biz

By the time General Ulysses S. Grant assumed the office of President of the United States in March 1869, the debate about how the Indians of the American West should be treated had reached a crescendo.

Military men, especially those serving in the western states and territories, believed that on-going military action would ultimately bring the “hostiles” to bay and thus solve the problem. Many in the civilian population on the western frontier agreed with that position; many towns maintained militias solely for defense against Indian attack. Military commanders were certain that their opinions would reach a friendly ear with General Grant in the White House.

Many easterners, and members of various humanitarian groups, on the other hand, were appalled at the bloodshed of Indians at the hands of the U. S. Army, including George A. Custer’s attack on

Cheyenne Indians at Washita, Oklahoma, less than a year before, in November 1868. They charged the army with aggravating the situation by provoking unnecessary violence and with failing to make a distinction between hostile and peaceful Indians. These people were worried about what General, now President, Grant would do.

But, as one historian noted, President Grant was not General Grant, and he seemed unexpectedly receptive to some of the suggestions made by the humanitarians. The result was a number of measures collectively called “Grant’s Peace Policy.”

The basic tenet of the Policy was “conquest by kindness;” controlled by civilians from the eastern United States. A Board of Indian Commissioners, made up of unpaid philanthropists, and the like, was to be established for the purpose of overseeing Indian appropriations and the abolition of the old treaty system of dealing with the tribes. All Indians were to be placed on reservations, Christianized, educated and reoriented toward agricultural, and therefore economic, independence.

The military, though, got its own piece of the pie. The “conquest by kindness” and oversight by the Indian Commission applied only to those Indians living on reservations. Those found elsewhere were to be considered hostile, and subject to action by the army. One problem was that there were no reservations just then. The Bosque Redondo experiment near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, had failed and closed in June 1868.

Before the program really got a chance to succeed or fail, a fly flew into the ointment. In late January 1870, Major Eugene Baker and the Second Cavalry attacked a Piegan Indian village in Montana and all but reduced it to nothing. The army, Generals W. T. Sherman and Phil Sheridan in particular, defended Baker’s action, citing proof

that the Indians had been guilty of depredations. Humanitarians called it a massacre of peaceful Indian people. This doomed the army’s chances of participating in policy-making on Indian affairs in Washington. The humanitarians were in charge.

But that was a decision made at the national level. The people living on the frontier, close to the problem, were not pleased that military operations had been curtailed. In late April 1871, a band of about 150 civilians, described as “Papago Indians, Mexicans and white Americans,” attacked a band of Apaches at Camp Grant in Arizona and wiped them out (casualty figures vary from 85 to 150). One effect of this massacre was the dispatch of Vincent Colyer to the region to make peace with the Apaches.

Colyer, 47 and a native of New York, was an artist who’d earned his living painting portraits and landscapes. He’d commanded a regiment of Black troops during the Civil War and had become enamored of numerous benevolent organizations in the years afterwards. Colyer was the Secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners and his mission, helped along by a $70,000 appropriation, was to establish reservations for the Apache, to feed them, and educate them. He arrived in the summer of 1871 and visited with Apaches in New Mexico and Arizona and concluded that reservations at Tularosa, New Mexico, and at a half dozen locations in Arizona would be appropriate. He returned to Washington in October of the same year, convinced that he’d solved the Apache problem.

Things are just never quite that simple.

Some Apaches did gravitate toward Colyer’s reservations, but local folks were not placated. Other Apaches continued to raid, with the accompanying robbery and murder. From September 1871 to September 1872, more than 50 documented Indian raids were executed, which took the lives of more than 40 people and resulted in the loss of more than 500 head of livestock. “Cold-blooded scoundrel” and “treacherous black-hearted dog” were among the milder epithets cast at Colyer. Even the Indian Commission at last recognized that military action was required.

General George Crook’s 1872-73 offensive against the Apache and the Yavapai Indians was the turning point in the southwest. By the fall of 1873, more than 6,000 Indians were living on the reservations as established by Vincent Colyer. Here is what one Indian leader said of Crook’s campaign, paraphrased by an American officer:

“General Crook had too many cartridges… They [the Indians] had never been afraid of the Americans alone, but now that their own people were fighting against them they did not know what to do; they could not go to sleep at night, because they feared to be surrounded before daybreak; they could not hunt—the noise of their guns would attract troops; they could not cook because the flame and smoke would draw down the soldiers…. They wanted to make peace, and to be on terms of goodwill with the whites.”

Even though his peace initiative failed, what Colyer left to us is the reservation system that basically remains in place today, for better or worse.

Recall, too, that the Apache were not completely subdued until the surrender of Geronimo in August of 1886. ▫