Scholarly research over the past decades has massively changed our ideas of what the western North American Indian world and its inhabitants were like before the incursion of white people. Instead of a few wandering tribes in a vast, untamed wilderness, which is what I learned as a child, there was a large population of many, many tribes who practiced advanced agriculture and deliberate control of wild animals, made landscape modifications through fire and irrigation, built a variety of houses and shelters, in the southwest erected enormous building complexes and supported sophisticated religions and mythologies.
The ecological historian James C. Malin, on the subject of whether or not Indians lived in pure harmony with the natural world, inflicting no change or scars on the land, wrote: “The conventional or traditional concept of the state of nature must be abandoned—that mythical idealized condition, in which natural forces, biological and physical, were supposed to exist in a state of virtual equilibrium, undisturbed by man. The role of aboriginal man within the ecosystem must be recognized as a major ecological fact.”3 In short, there was no sustained “balance” of nature, just ongoing, incremental, shifting change in which humans played a central role.
Trying to understand Wyoming’s landscape where I could see the remains of Indian trails, stone flakes from their tool-making, the tools themselves, images scratched into the dark desert varnish of rock faces, cairns and fire pits forced recognition: where there are humans there is always ecological change. In the southwest we are stunned by the huge abandoned buildings of Chaco, Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, Comb Ridge and the Mogollon Rim. Any visitor immediately wonders, What happened here? Who built these fantastic structures? In Wyoming and Utah the extraordinary rock art of the Fremont people, about whom little is known, urges the same questions.
The general statement is sometimes made that North American Indians had not reached the point where their numbers exceeded natural resources when Europeans arrived. But overpopulation as well as the severe droughts that struck the southwest in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may have greatly contributed to the emptying of the large cultural center of Chaco in north-central New Mexico. Aridity may also have forced out the Fremont people in Utah and Wyoming. Climate studies for the past two millennia show extreme droughts lasting as long as fifty years hit the southwest roughly every five centuries. Twenty-year droughts came roughly every 275 years.4 We are beginning to learn a little about the effects of climate change on species, including our own.
The ancestral people who built Mesa Verde’s and Chaco’s kivas and great houses with hundreds of rooms likely did not disappear in some supernatural mystery, the stuff of bad “science” television. We wonder today how they could leave these magnificent buildings, but without water the most exquisite palace is worthless. When their world began to shrivel they apparently fought and killed each other, perhaps over tiny water seeps. As their descendants know, these disparate people eventually evolved into today’s Hopi and regional Pueblo populations who laugh at the myth of a mysterious ancestral disappearance.
American Indians invented more than twenty kinds of housing—wigwams, tipis, brush huts, plank houses, pueblos, grass houses and pit houses. The plains and mountain tribes did not build permanent structures such as the great stone and cliff houses of the southwest. In the Archaic period, pit houses, which took advantage of passive solar sites, were warmer in winter and cooler in summer than aboveground structures. Essentially these were rectangular or circular holes dug in the earth with deeper fire pits, roofed with frameworks of willows and brush, then covered with hides and perhaps more soil. Because they were fixed, they may indicate a population of relatively sedentary people. Later, with the coming of the horse, the portable tipi better suited the swiftly moving tribes that flowed across the landscape like the meltwater from winter snows.
Prehistoric Indians (and all people who live by hunting and gathering) had bone-deep knowledge of their enormous and seasonally elastic habitat. Local animals and people recognized one another, a kind of familiar awareness where species understood each other’s body language and behavior to a considerable extent. If there is one word that describes western Indians before whites came it is “flexible.” The most important trait in humans is adaptability, the power to change and exploit difficult situations. Somewhere deep behind the gauzy layers of the past this attribute helped humans develop the ingenious mind that characterizes the species.
The Indian world was diversely layered. The sky and its inhabitant birds and stars made the overarching highest layer. On the horizon, mountain ranges, constantly in sight, were the place for the plains tribes to cut poles for travois and lodge, and to find the best wood for bows. The Sierra Madre (the Utes’ Shining Mountains) on Bird Cloud’s south horizon had the reputation among plains tribes of being mysterious and dangerous to outsiders. Only the Utes knew the passes and trails of their stronghold. The rock maze canyon lands, cliffs and mesas of the southwest, remote and nearly inaccessible, offered sanctuary to beleaguered and shifting tribal groups.5
Cottonwoods along the rivers made the tallest vegetative layer, and on the surrounding prairies grew shoulder-high sage and greasewood, punctuated by the bunchgrasses close to the ground. Below the earth were the tunnels of plowing and burrowing badgers, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, mice, foxes, skunks, marmots, thirteen-striped chipmunks and ground squirrels, their subterranean work loosening and aerating the soil, allowing rainfall and snowmelt to recharge the water table below. Both humans and animals dug and ate a vast variety of tubers and roots. Both humans and animals scavenged each others’ kills. The humans followed migratory animals, understood the growth stages of plants, perhaps coming to the wetlands below Bird Cloud’s cliff to gather cattail shoots and later, the golden pollen, to the slopes at the top to dig and collect sego lily root, biscuit-root, yucca root, to gather wild grains where the Indian ricegrass still grows in the blow sand on the north side of the property. Slough grass was used as thatching, sweetgrass and sage were burned in ceremonial rituals. The tips of porcupine grass (Stipa spartea) could be bound together and the awns burned off to make small, stiff-bristled hairbrushes.6 We know that trade—in chert, obsidian, seeds, plants, special woods for bows and arrows, food, shells, furs and hides, and from the distant tallgrass prairie, red clay stone catlinite for medicine pipes—was vigorous and extensive even before the horse arrived.
That world not only was arranged in multiple layers, each layer with its own set of meanings and uses, but flowed outward and inward in expansive, large regions, very differently ordered than the white man’s small-space cadastral categories of acre, plot and township. It was a world curved rather than rectilinear, outlined by streams, particular habitats, trails and geophysical landmarks. Running through everything these people thought or knew, like the vast root systems of grasses that extend deep beneath the surface, as intricate as the lacework of billions of spiderwebs, were spiritual filaments that guided behavior and nourished rich mythologies. We today can barely comprehend the interconnectedness of their observations of the natural world, their ideas and lives.
Custer’s Crow scout, Curley, a survivor of the Battle of Greasy Grass, spoke in council in 1907 when pressure was on to sell part of the Crow Reservation to outsiders. He said, “The soil you see is not ordinary soil. It is the dust of the blood of the flesh and bones of our ancestors. We fought and bled and died to keep other Indians from taking it and fought and bled and died, helping the whites. You will have to dig through the surface before you can find the earth, as the upper portion is Crow. The land as it is, is my blood, and my dead; it is consecrated, and I don’t want to give up any portion of it.”7 White people never understood this. They thought buying land made it theirs. To the Indian selling land was a bizarre and impossible idea—how could one sell what belonged to all, the repository of family and tribal ancestors, the source of life? What might Curley think today when corporations aggressively take control of and commodify running water that for a
ll of human and animal history has been as free as sunlight and air?
Emigrant traffic of the 1840s and ’50s cut through major Indian hunting grounds and alarmed and angered the Indians because the white incursion frightened away the game and threatened tribal existence. Again and again the Indians raised this point in the endless treaty negotiations with the U.S. government. Treaties were the grossly flawed instruments for transferring Indian lands to the United States. But treaties could not and did not work because of the vastly different cultural perceptions of the opposing parties.
Indians were masters of oratory. In council they spoke at great length, and objectors to the proposed business voiced their concerns. The discussions continued—for hours, for days—until they reached consensus, possible only when all objections had ceased. In treaty council with whites the Indians put forward their objections to the proposals before them, usually with rich similes drawn from the natural world. The white men listened through a translator, and generally failed to make an oratorical response, their silence interpreted by the Indians as recognition of and acquiescence to Indian objections. But when the Indians signed the treaties their objections were not incorporated in the text. Even worse, signing was meaningless as the U.S. Senate had the post facto power to change the treaty provisions. White men never understood the Indian way of consensus and insisted on dealing with a tribal leader or “chief,” another concept alien to Indians who learned to greatly distrust the lying, devious white men whose treaties were worthless. On the other side, most whites regarded Indian oratory as a kind of obstructionist filibustering, boring harangues, though some admired them and saw them as akin to classical Roman oratory.8
There was, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the United States, as the tribes were defeated, moved, killed and warehoused, a widespread belief that these were doomed people on the way to extinction. Part of this belief came from the oratory wherein the Indian speaker would describe the wrongs and injustices done them by the whites in poetic and mournful language to paint a picture of oppression and decimation. Newspaper misinterpretations of these speeches usually showed the Indians as poetically and mournfully bowing to their own inevitable demise.9
Lawrence Counselman Wroth (1884–1970), the librarian of the John Carter Brown library at Brown University, believed that nineteenth-century “supporters of American literary independence . . . could . . . suggest that Indian speech making would provide some of the basis for a distinctive American heritage of letters.”10 There are not many champions of this view that Indian oratory was the country’s first indigenous literature, but it is an observation that deserves some respect.
It didn’t help the Indians’ situation that one of the most rotten and corrupt systems of graft and profit taking in American history characterized the so-called Indian Ring after the Civil War, a hierarchy extending from high government officials and politicians down to fort sutlers, traders and Indian agents whose rapacity and venal grasping beggar description. Criminal stealage extended to such businesses as the railroads, the Wells Fargo freight line, private citizens and settlers. The criminal behavior tainted the Territorial history of Wyoming.11
Indian populations were not randomly mobile, although the picture of aimless wandering is still embedded in white people’s minds. Travel and movement into new frontiers and territories, climate change and herd migrations and breakups of groups caused an ebb and flow in clans and tribes, in languages and mythologies so complex it is nearly impossible to link tribes with definite territories. Matching languages and words give clues, and this is how we know, for example, that one group left the northern Shoshone and went to the southwest where they metamorphosed into the Comanche. We don’t know what kinds of discussions, arguments or feelings went into these separations.
We rely largely on nineteenth-century sources to give us hints of which tribes were where. Albert Gallatin’s 1836 “Map of the Indian Tribes of North America” shows that in the larger area north of the Saratoga Valley were Blackfeet, Crow, Cheyenne, Sioux, Shoshone.17 The Belgian “Black Robe” Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, who spent many years among the Indians of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, made an important map for the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty.13 For Bird Cloud’s area he named Crow, Utah Indians, Arapaho, Cheyenne and, to the east in present-day Nebraska, the Sioux. The Shoshone were farther northwest. Judging from local settler and traveler sources, several tribes used the Saratoga Valley—Bird Cloud is at the northern end of the valley—as a prime hunting ground and for the curative hot springs now owned by the town of Saratoga. Local sources name Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, Snakes (Shoshone) and Crow as the tribes that were in the region.14 The valley was a borderland place used by both plains tribes and mountain people. The mountain people—Utes—came into the valley to hunt and perhaps fight. For millennia Elk Mountain (altitude 11,156 feet), to the northeast of Bird Cloud, has been the great regional landmark, and several sources claim the lands around this mountain were a favored site for annual warfare.
But were these confrontations “fights to the death” as historical lore has it? Several local engagements were described by old settlers. The earliest so-called battle was a reference to Charles Fremont’s second expedition in 1843–1844 through the Rocky Mountains. By early August the party was on the Laramie plain heading for the Medicine Bow range after an encounter with “a war party of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians about thirty strong.”15 On August 2 they camped on Medicine Bow River near Elk Mountain, about thirty miles from Bird Cloud. They went through the pass south of the mountain and killed a bison in the Saratoga Valley. As they were drying the bison meat, “the camp was thrown into a sudden tumult by a charge from about 70 mounted Indians . . . a war party of Arapaho and Cheyenne . . . [who] informed us that they had charged upon the camp under the belief that we were hostile Indians, and had discovered their mistake only at the moment of attack.”16 This was a nonviolent encounter rather than a battle, but old settlers’ tales hashing and rehashing earlier events puffed it up.
The Saratoga historian Gay Day Alcorn stated that the Saratoga Valley was “a treasured hunting ground” where lookouts on the top of Old Baldy mountain surveying the valley sent messages directing the hunters to the herds.17 The general region around the hot springs was regarded as neutral territory, but “the springs was surrounded by a fierce war ground in which the Sioux, Cheyenne, Snakes, Crow, Arapaho, and Utes battled to the death.” By the 1850s and ’60s the “Utes seem to have become the foremost tribe.”18 Alcorn describes “one of the last full-scale Indian battles . . . in the late 1860’s” in which five hundred Sioux and fifteen hundred Utes fought east of Bird Cloud and east of present-day Saratoga. “The Utes completely decimated the Sioux in the Pass Creek Basin. Pioneer forefathers recalled that wagon loads of skeletons were everywhere in that section.”
One of the pioneer forefathers referenced was Taylor Pennock who enlisted in the 16th Regiment of the Illinois Volunteer Cavalry in 1862 and traded with the Pawnee near Fort Kearney, Nebraska, after the war. He found civilian life too tame and came west to Wyoming, got a government contract to supply ten thousand telegraph poles, batted around a few years, went back to Illinois and didn’t like it, returned to Wyoming Territory, shot elk for the railroad tie-hack camp, trapped beaver, mined gold, tended bar, built a hotel that burned down, guided hunting trips and hauled supplies to the tie-hack camps. His centers of operation were Fort Steele, about thirty miles northwest of Bird Cloud as the crow flies, and the nascent settlement of Saratoga. Pennock got the story of the big Ute-Sioux fight from a Mr. Wilcox—perhaps the cowboy named Wilcox who worked for the big L7—who heard it from Tom Sun, a very tough local rancher from Vermont by way of Québec where he had been Tom Soleil.19
These accounts of pitched battles and hundreds of corpses have entered the local mythology and the history books but should be taken with a handful of salt. Terrific battles and decimation of the enemy, wholesale slaughter and wagonloads of corpses were not the Indian st
yle of warfare according to hundreds of sources from the period. Although war was extraordinarily important to Indian men, individual achievement and valor, not killing, was the goal. Wrote military historian John D. McDermott, “War was absolutely necessary for the men. Without recognized competence in it, a man could not expect to gain prestige or a mate. Historians generally group Indian reasons for going to war into four categories: to acquire horses, to protect themselves and their territory from intruders, to exact revenge, and to gain respect.”20 Among the Sioux, eagle feathers represented enemies killed. A greater proof of courage than killing was counting coup—physically touching, or scalping an enemy, striking a dead enemy, or riding directly and alone into an enemy camp and touching a lodge with one’s weapon. Red Cloud claimed to have counted coup eighty times.