Comanche

• Would travel to the Arkansas' hot springs to gather together with other tribes to hunt, trade, and take the healing waters. Even when their peoples were at war, individuals of opposing tribes could come together here in safety and peace.
  
• The Comanche nations were from central Texas east of the Pecos River and north of the Plains Apache. More than 30 native nations once ranged freely across the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, which stretch from Alberta in the north to Texas and New Mexico in the south.
  
• The first view that the Comanche had of horses, according to their tradiion, was with men on their backs. The Indians initially believed that horse and rider were a single animal-and when a Spanish-speaking man dismounted from one, they were astonished. Secretly they observed how the Spaniards watered the horses, let them roll on the grass before eating, used soft pads on their backs and secured their legs with rawhide every night. Then the Comanche stole the horses and over the years returned for many more.
  
  Raiders prided themselves on their stealth, their ability to sneak into an enemy camp as silently as smoke. An old Indian fighter, Col Richard Dodge, remembered how Comanches got away with his soldiers' horses. They crept into tents where a dozen men were sleeping, each with a horse tied to his wrist by a lariat. The Indians simply cut each rope within six feet of the sleeper and got away with the horses without waking a soul.
  
• In 1840 the Comanche and the Kiowa, who had stopped fighting each other in 1790, forged a potent alliance. For the next quarter-century the swift horsemen and stealthy warriors of these southern tribes descended like hawks on the slow-moving pack trains along the Santa Fe Trail and also launched regular rustling forays against the cattle ranches that were proliferating in western Texas and eastern New Mexico.
  
• During the 1700's and early 1800's, Mexican authorities conducted a thriving trade in Indian slaves-bartering arms, whiskey and other goods for women and children destined for servitude in the homes of landowners and colonial officials. They encouraged native tribes to raid one another for slaves, assuring a lively commerce and fanning hostilities between tribes that might otherwise unite against them. No one was safe. Apaches, Utes, Comanches, and Navajos raided each other, as well as the more peaceable Pueblos, Pawnees, and Wichitas.
  
• In 1853, Thomas "Broken Hand" Fitzpatrick, the mountain man who in 1851 had organized the Great Indian Treaty Council at Ft Laramie in Wyoming Territory, arranged a similar gathering with sourthern Plains tribes at Ft Atkinson on the Arkansas River now present-day Dodge City, KS. He met there with Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache representatives, who had been leery of attending the Ft Laramie session-because, as one delegate put it, "We have too many horses and mules to risk among such notorious horse thieves as the Sioux and Crow." The agreement they reached called for the tribes to give up buffalo hunting and take up ranching and farming on lands that the government would rent for them in the Leased District, an unsettled portion of Choctaw lands in Oklahoma that the tribe leased back to the government for the relocation of other Indians.
  
  For all the lofty speeches urging intertribal amity at Ft Laramie and Ft Atkinson, this would be the last time that feuding Plains tribes would sit down together peacefully for years. Many of the delegates who signed the treaties were only headmen of individual clans, with no authority to speak for the widely dispersed and highly independent subgroups that were part of the same tribes. The government also failed to take into account how deeply the warrior ethic was ingrained in the Plains culture. Personal honor and tribal territory were prizes to be gained through combat-and such a legacy would not be removed by a few scratches of a white man's pen.
  
  Not surprisingly, the paperwork from Ft Laramie and Ft Atkinson had hardly made it back to Washington before the agreements began to unravel....war-painted Sioux were pouring into Kansas territory to strike at their old enemies, the Pawnee....the Crow were vehemently protesting Sioux aggression and finally, in 1868, were given protection by US troops on their own reservation....In the southern Plains, the Leased District in Oklahoma became a staging area for the relocated tribes to launch raids against Texas settlers and northern Mexico homesteads. The government was only temporarily successful in persuading the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho to cease their raiding, while even a full-scale military campaign against the Kiowa and Comanche could not control their marauding along the Texas frontier.
  
• The last major peace treaty negotiations between the US government and the Plains Indians were held in the valley of Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas, where Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa-Apache delegations convened once again with white peace commissioners on the full moon of October 1867.
  
  In attendance were upwards of 5,000 Indians, led by a virtual roll call of the most celebrated southern Plains chiefs....From the Kwahade Comanche, the half-white Quanah Parker showed little interest in the prodeedings and would remain a scourge of frontier towns and settlers for another seven years. But also in attendance was Ten Bears of the Yapparika Comanche, who pleaded for a lasting peace.--

"My heart is filled with joy when I see you here, as the brook fills with water in the spring. Two years ago I came upon this road, following the buffalo, that my wives and children might have their cheeks plump and their bodies warm. But the soldiers fired upon us, and since that time there has been a noise like that of a thunderstorm. Why do you ask us to leave the rivers and the sun, and live in houses?"


Yet even the eloquence of Ten Bears could not prevent the tightening of the territorial noose around his people. The final Medicine Lodge Creek treaty created two large reservations in Indian Territory-one for the Kiowa and Comanche in the Leased District, and one for the Cheyenne and Arapaho in the Cherokee Outlet-for containment and pacification of these southern tribes. On paper, at least, the peace chiefs agreed to stop interfering with rail and wagon traffic across the Plains and to conform to the rules and routines of reservation life controlled by an Indian agency. This would include, among other things, compulsory church attendance, white-run schooling for their children, periodic subsidies of flour and sugar and cattle-and, most alien of all, learning to till the soil for a living.

Angry over the promised but undelivered cattle and blankets at their new Ft Cobb Agency, Kiowa and Comanche warriors raided the herds of their reservation neighbors to the east. A vast cultural gulf separated these frustrated Plains newcomers from the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, which had been removed to Indian Territory from the Southest 30 years earlier. In response to all the raids, brawls, and war parties, Gen Philip Sheridan waged a harsh campaign in the winter of 1868-69 that drove most of the renegade Southern tribes back onto their reservations, although breakaway Comanche and Kiowa bands continued to harass Texas settlers along the Red River well into the 1870's.


• When Geronimo was released from confinement in 1894, the old guerrilla accepted an offer from the Kiowa and Comanche to share their reservation in Indian Territory where he spent his final years as a farmer outside Oklahoma's Ft Sill.
  
• On the northern Plains, the patterns of allotment, cession, and leasing often conspired against Indian cattle ranching. The federal government may have pressed the Indians to show economic initiative, but the activities of competing whites continually stymied it. Local moneymen conspired to lease reservation lands at cut-rate prices, and they colluded with all-too-willing government agents on other backroom deals. Even so, cattle ranching took hold on nearly all the reservations in this region, and it fourished-intermittently, at least-as the century progressed.
  
  In the southern Plains, Indian cattle ranchers faced comparable problems, but there were some who achieved at least temporary success. Quanah Parker, the famous Comanche leader, was one. Texas cattlemen had discovered the grasses of Comanche country in the 1870's and promptly began to trespass on them. Quanah, as he is more properly known (Parker was the name of his white mother, a captive of the Comanche), lobbied against such invasions but also knew an opportunity when he saw one.  He obtained cattle from the local agent and from the Texas ranchers, and he put together mutually profitable leasing deals with them. Gradually enlarging his herd and his lands, Quanah became prominent in the newly established Native American Church, the controversial Indian religious organization whose rituals included the consumption of peyote.
  

Quanah Parker was dismissed from his post as a judge on a court dealing with Indian offenses-possibly because one of the court's responsibilities was to combat polygamy, and Quanah kept as many as five wives.


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Cree

• Snowshoes gave Plains Cree buffalo hunters a vital advantage over their prey, whose mobility was hampered by early spring snow.
  
• The Cree nations populated north in the Canadian area, stretching from the Rocky Mountains to east of the Hudson Bay. They spoke the Algonquian language.
  
• As horse-rich tribes staked out their favored roaming and hunting territories in the Plains, they forged military alliances based sometimes on shared cultural traditions and sometimes purely on the existence of common enemies. An early partnership arose between the Assiniboin people and the Plains Cree. Opposing them was the mighty Blackfeet alliance, whose three constituent tribes-Piegan, Blood, and Northern Blackfeet (also called Siksika)-had long-standing bonds of language and custom. A third alliance, that of the earth-lodge communities along the middle Missouri River, was less a military than a self-protective and cultural coalition.
  
• Scattered bands of Cree, the largest tribal group of the Subarctic, roamed the vast spruce and fir forests around Hudson Bay. They moved seasonally through the woodlands, usually in well-defined territories, tracking moose, bear, and caribou. Each summer they met at campgrounds by lakes or rivers to fish, gather herbs and berries, and socialize with fellow tribe members. The forest was their larder and tool kit. Bark from birch trees could be fashioned into tent covers, water pails, and the skins of canoes. White cedar poles, lashed together with spruce roots, served as frames for both canoes and toboggans. Spruce, birch, or willow branches could be bent into loops and laced with leather webbing, transformed into snowshoes.
  
  Survival meant constant struggle, however.  Winter snows come early, drifting deep and lingering far into spring. Tree limbs shatter with the intensity of cold. Caught in a blizzard without shelter, a Cree hunter ran serious risk of freezing to death. Starvation was never far away. Animal populations fluctuated from year to year, and when larger game grew scarce, hunters would turn to rabbit, muskrat, porcupine, even vermin. Sometimes in late winter these, too, were hard to come by. If no small animals found their way into a hunter's snare, he and his family might be reduced to gnawing leather clothing or tent covers for nourishment.
  
  The conditions of life could also be harsh in the lands...in the territory west of Hudson Bay. Here the forests of spruce and fir stretch out across a marshy labyrinth of lakes, rivers, and muskeg swamp, past the huge Mackenzie River watershed, finally ascending the slopes of the snow-clad Shining Mountains (a native name for the Canadian Rockies) some 1,000 miles to the west. Winters are piercingly cold; swarms of black flies and mosquitoes plague the hot, brief summers. To the north, the trees grow stunted and bent, then give way to the open tundra.
  
• Other creatures also shared the forest, no less real for being invisible.  The most terrifying were the Windigos, superhuman beings with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. Thirty feet tall, with slavering lipless mouths and hearts of ice, Windigos began stalking the forest at the onset of winter, searching for human prey. If a hunter failed to return home,the inescapable fear was that he had been caught and eaten. No manmade weapon could destroy one of these monsters; only the secret rituals of a powerful shaman would lay him to rest. But come spring, the warm weather would send all Windigos fleeing north.
  
• No clear division marked the boundaries between the various Athabascan groups. Through most of the Subarctic, local bands ranging anywhere from 10 to 75 members in size roamed from fishing camp to favorite hunting area, and one group blended almost imperceptibly into its neighbor. All spoke the same language, with minor variations. Bands with strong links to one another might form regional groups of up to several hundred peope. No overall tribal structure unified them-except farther west, where groups like the Ingalik...were influenced by the more formalized societies of the Pacific Coast. Still, these regional groups usually provided the closest thing there was to a tribe or nation with which people could identify themselves. The term Athabascan refers to a linguistic, not a tribal, grouping; it comes from the place-name for Lake Athabasca-"where there are reeds," in the Cree language. Those to whom it refers always thought of themselves simply as Dine: "The People."
  
• Into this demanding world came the Hudson's Bay Company traders, and with them came opportunities...The Cree were the first to profit. By the early 1700's, the Company had built some half-dozen trading posts on large rivers emptying into Hudson Bay, all in Cree territory. Cree trappers would paddle downstream from the interior, their canoes laden with a season's harvest of beaver pelts and other furs. Pitching their tents next to the fortresslike Company "factory," they would begin bartering for the trade goods inside. As the furs changed hands, the trappers acquired a rich store of new and useful marvels: steel tools, firearms, cooking pots, heavy wool blankets, tobacco, foodstuffs such as flour, sugar, tea, and lard. Prices were figured in "made beavers" a monetary unit pegged to the value of a prime-quality adult beaver pelt.
  
  For people accustomed to life in a very demanding environment, the fur trade brought the Cree material comforts never before imagined. Using a knife of hardened steel, a Cree woman could scrape a caribou hide in a faction of the time it took with a flint or obsidian blade. She could cook a meal directly over the fire in an iron pot, rather than having to boil up water by dropping heated rocks into a container of birch bark or woven grass-which she first had to make herself.
  
• Several Cree leaders seized the opportunity and switched from trapping to trading-and gained wealth and prestige as middlemen between the Company forts and native communities deeper in the forest. Cree warriors, armed with the firepower of English guns, pushed west into the hunting grounds of the Chipewyan, Slavey, and Dunne-za. But as in most Indian-white exchanges, the Cree ended up losing. Hunters intent on harvesting pelts neglected the game that had been their traditional food supply. It takes different skills to trap marten and beaver than to track a moose or a caribou-animals that provided hides and meat, but which were of no use to Company fur buyers. Gradually the Cree began to loose their ability to support themselves in the way of their ancestors. Families became dependent on the trading posts for food, clothing, rifles, ammunition, and for the steel traps that were the basic tools of their new life.
  
  In time, intensive trapping in the lands around Hudson Bay reduced the number of fur-bearing animals, and the fortunes of the Cree slid into decline. The inevitable afflications of white civilization came crowding in. Smallpox, whooping cough, and other European diseases swept through the region. The temptations of alcohol took their toll.
  

Creek

• "When the first white man came over the wide waters, he was but a little man...very little. His legs were cramped by sitting long in his big boat, and he begged for a little land. But when the white man had warmed himself at the Indian's fire, and had filled himself with the Indian's hominy, he became very large..."-Tomo Chachi (Speckled Snake), member of a Creek trade delegation to London.
  
• The Creek collected acorns, chestnuts, wild strawberries, and blackberries from the forests and fields in the hill country of Alabama and Mississippi. With the Cherokee territory to the north in the Appalachian Mountains, the Creek existed directly south down to as far south as Florida, around the Chattahoochie River, east and west. They spoke the Muskogean language.
  
• The Creek tell of a battle long ago when their warriors hid in an earthen mound to surprise and defeat a Cherokee war party.
  
• The Creek crumbled tobacco into the postholes a new houses, believing it would drive away ghosts. Among the Creek, an infusion of tobacco increased the potency of the black drink.
  
• In 1670, a group of English colonists founded Charles Town (later Charleston) on the Carolina coast. From there traders made their way west to contact the Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. The Creek-so named by the English because of the countless watercourses that crisscrossed their territory-were actually a sprawling confederacy of Muskogean-speaking groups that occupied most of Alabama and Georgia. During the period of trade with the English, they numbered perhaps 30,000 people, living in some 50 towns situated mainly along the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers (tributaries of the Alabama River) and the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers.
  
  Commerce was something the Southeastern peoples understood and relished. Since the earliest times tribes of all regions had traded with one another...and most native communites were eager to acquire the European products: metal pots that did not crack in cooking fires; they had knives, hatchets, and hoes to ease the labor of clearing fields and skinning animals; they had colored cloth for new clothing. And they had guns. Muzzle-loading firearms of the 17th century were scarcely an improvement on bows when it came to killing deer-they were slow to reload, not especially accurate, and often failed in wet weather. But in times of war, guns terrorized enemies with their thunderous noise, smoke, and fire. To most Southeastern peoples, exchanging ordinary deerskins for these potent weapons and other prized items was almost too good a deal.
  
  At first, trading between Europeans and Indians followed customs that had governed the exchange of tribal goods for centuries....If at any point the headmen detected hostility or bad faith..commerce ceased and the visitor might be sent on his way. But if he behaved properly and ate heartily, his hosts would offer him lodging and perhaps female company for the night. For the most part, however, commerce worked to the short-term advantage of both Indians and whites. It was what came next that did the real damage. By the early 1700's the peoples of the deep Southeast discovered what the Powhatan had learned newly a century earlier: prolonged contact with whites eventually brought terrible disruption.
  
• During the early 1700's various bands of Muskogean speaking people-many of them Creeks displaced by wars with white settlers in Georgia and Alabama-filtered south to take refuge in the deserted Florida territory. The refugees adapted to living in the tropical flatlands there, and gradually the separate bands coalesced into a new, larger tribal grouping-in effect repeating the process that had produced most of the major tribes and confederations of the Southeast. By about 1775 traditional Creek communities were using the Seminole-"runaways" or "untamed people" for this new coalition.
  
• In the 1810's Gen Andrew Jackson had stormed into national view with a series of resounding victories against a coalition of Creek tribesmen in Alabama and Georgia. War had broken out in 1812 between the United States and Britain, and a number of Indian leaders across the eastern part of North America had seized the opportunity to assert their own national independence. In the Southeast a faction of Red Stick Creeks-so called for the color of their war clubs-began attacking American frontier settlements there. The Creek War flared up in sharp, sudden assaults that ranged from the Ohio River south to the Gulf of Mexico.
  
  In one attack, in August 1813, a force of 1,000 Red Sticks swooped down upon the US stronghold of Ft Mims, killing some 400 white defenders. The victims also included a number of White Sticks, members of a more peaceable and Europeanized Creek faction that had hoped to remain neutral during the conflict. The Ft Mims Massacre (as whites liked to call it) inflamed American opinion. In response the government called in Jackson to smash the Red Stick coalition. Moving quickly, he assembled 3,500 Tennessee mitiliamen and a force of Cherokee, Choctaw, and White Stick Creek allies. By November Jackson was ready to march.
  
• Jackson's antagonist was a remarkable Creek patriot of mixed blood who is sometimes referred to as William Weatherford in history books. At an early age, so the story goes, Weatherford had been given a choice: to grow up white, like his Scottish father, or to remain with his Creek mother. He had picked the latter and proudly assumed his tribal name: Lumhe Chati, or Red Eagle. Inspired by the dream of Creek independence, he now led the Red Sticks into battle.
  
  Jackson thrust deep into Creek country-Sharp Knife, the Indians called him-determined to eradicate the Red Stick challenge. For nearly four months he stalked them, winning a few skirmishes but never finding the pitched battle he sought. Finally, in March 1814, he cornered the main force of warriors at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama. The bloodshed began in early morning, and it lasted all day. By dusk some 750 of the 900 Red Stick defenders lay dead or dying.
  
  Red Eagle was not among them. By chance, the Creek war leader had been traveling elsewhere and missed the battle entirely. But he knew defeat when he saw it. Several days later he strode into Jackson's compound, stony-faced, and surrendered. These were his words:
  

"I am in your power. do with me what you please. I have done the white people all the harm I could; I have fought them, and fought them bravely: if I had an army, I would yet fight...but I have none; my people are all gone. I can now do no more than weep over the misfortunes of my nation."

Jackson was seldom known to show leniency toward a captured or defeated Indian. But perhaps because of Red Eagle's eloquence, the American general was moved to pardon him. Red Eagle retired to a plantation in Tennessee where, until his death in 1822, he worked for peace between his people and the whites. Jackson, meanwhile, soon reverted to form. That summer he called the chiefs together to dictate the terms of peace. The resulting Treaty of Horseshoe Bend forced all Creek factions, including those who had fought beside him, to hand over some 23 million acres of tribal land-about 60% of Alabama and 20% of Georgia.

• While Jackson rode to triumph in the Creek War, most Indian leaders met disaster. William McIntosh, a White Stick Creek commander who fought beside Jackson, was later assassinated for betraying his tribe. Red Stick war chief Menewa took eight enemy bullets at Horseshoe Bend, then recovered-only to lose all his lands and possessions to the whites.
  
• Removal of the Creek began in 1836, but it did not go smoothly. Eneah Emathala, a Creek leader in his eighties who had fought with the Red Sticks, refused to move. He and about 1,000 followers somehow acquired guns and took refuge in the Alabama back country. The army sent Gen Winfield Scott to ferret them out. Scott finally caught up with Emathala and arrested him. Designated as "hostile" because of their resistance to removal, Emathala and the thousand men, women, and children with him were shackled hand and foot and marched 75 miles across Alabama to Montgomery. Its job not finished, the federal government then forcibly removed some 14,000 more Creeks, a process finally completed in December 1837. More than a thousand died before reaching the Western territory.
  
• Between 1830 and 1842, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole had been forcibly removed from their homelands in the Southeastern United States and resettle in Indian Territory, part of what would become the state of Oklahoma. Overcoming that trauma-and the internal divisions it aroused-the exiles began to re-create their communities with remarkable speed and get on with their lives.
  
  Before the deportations, they had shown themselves willing, even eager, to embrace the trappings and values of white society. When whites referred to them as the Five Civilized Tribes, there was no hint of irony or sarcasm; it was a name that expressed respect. The theft of their lands in the Southeast did not rob the Five Tribes of their ambitions. They built substantial homes, re-established their own institutions and laws...and established themselves as successful farmers and ranchers.