Indian Peace Commission


The Indian Peace Commission was a group formed by an act of Congress on July 20, 1867 "to establish peace with certain hostile Indian tribes." It was composed of four civilians and three, later four, military leaders. Throughout 1867 and 1868, they negotiated with a number of tribes, including the Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, Kiowa-Apache, Cheyenne, Lakota, Navajo, Snake, Sioux, and Bannock. The treaties that resulted were designed to move the tribes to reservations, to "civilize" and assimilate these native peoples, and transition their societies from a nomadic to an agricultural existence.
As language and cultural barriers affected the negotiations, it remains doubtful whether the tribes were fully informed of the provisions they agreed to. The Commission approached the tribes as a representative democracy, while the tribes made decisions via consensus: Indian chiefs functioned as mediators and councilors, without the authority to compel obedience from others. The Commission acted as a representative of the United States Congress, but while Congress had authorized and funded the talks themselves, it did not fund any of the stipulations that the commissioners were empowered to negotiate. Once treaties were agreed to, the government was slow to act on some, and rejected others. Even for those treaties that were ratified, promised benefits were often delayed, or not provided at all. Congress was not compelled to support actions taken in its name, and eventually stopped the practice of treaty making with tribes in 1871.
The Indian Peace Commission was generally seen as a failure, and violence had reignited even before it was disbanded in October 1868. Two official reports were submitted to the federal government, ultimately recommending that the U.S. cease recognizing tribes as sovereign nations, refrain from making treaties with them, employ military force against those who refused to relocate to reservations, and move the Bureau of Indian Affairs from the Department of the Interior to the Department of War. The system of treaties eventually deteriorated to the point of collapse, and a decade of war followed the commission's work. It was the last major commission of its kind.

Establishment

During the 1860s, national preoccupation with the ongoing American Civil War and the withdrawal of troops to fight it, had weakened the US government's control of the west. This, in addition to corruption throughout the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the continued migration of the railroad and white settlers westward, led to a general restlessness and eventually armed conflict. Following the Sand Creek Massacre on November 29, 1864, where troops under John Chivington killed and mutilated more than a hundred friendly Cheyenne and Arapaho, half or more women and children, hostilities intensified. Congress dispatched an investigation into the conditions of Native American peoples under Senator James R. Doolittle. After two years of inquiry, Doolittle's 500-page report condemned the actions of Chivington and blamed tribal hostilities on the "aggressions of lawless white men".
On December 21, 1866, yet another conflict, the Fetterman Fight, saw the killing of an entire unit commanded by William J. Fetterman at the hands of Lakota, Sioux and Arapaho warriors as part of Red Cloud's War. William T. Sherman personally wrote to the Secretary of War and assured him that "if fifty Indians are allowed to remain between the Arkansas and Platte" they would "checkmate three thousand soldiers" and that action had to be taken. For Sherman, it made "little difference whether they be coaxed out by Indian commissioners or killed."
After four days of debate, Congress responded by establishing the Peace Commission on July 20, 1867, with a stated purpose "to establish peace with certain hostile Indian tribes." Their work was organized around three main goals in an effort to solve the "Indian question":
  1. to remove, if possible, the causes of war;
  2. to secure, as far as practicable, our frontier settlements and the safe building of our railroads looking to the Pacific;
  3. to suggest or inaugurate some plan for the civilization of the Indians.
Owing to the high cost of waging war in the West, Congress concluded after much debate that peace was preferable to extermination, and empowered a seven-man commission of four civilians and three military officers to negotiate with the tribes on behalf of the government, work to confine them to reservations, and if unsuccessful, raise a volunteer army of 4,000 men to move them by force.

Members

The members of the commission included:
Taylor, Tappan, Henderson, and Sanborn were explicitly named in the legislation which created the commission. From the army, the president appointed three officers, adding Sherman, Terry, and Harney, and later Augur.

Work

The commission met at St. Louis and directed the military and civilian forces under their collective command to begin gathering tribes at Fort Laramie in the north, and Fort Larned in the south. The commission then traveled westward. They conferred with civilian and military authorities at Fort Leavenworth, St. Germain has the commission meeting at Fort Sully although many of their meetings in late August 1867 actually took place aboard the river steamer "St. John" close to Fort Sully in the Dakota Territory. They did meet on August 31, 1867, with various Lakota at Fort Sully. Later that Fall they also met with Sioux and Cheyenne delegations at the new town of North Platte at the terminus of the Union Pacific Railroad near the North Platte River. These early meetings resulted in no formal agreements, and the commissioners made plans to return and negotiate further at Fort Laramie in November.
The members of the commission returned to St. Louis, before continuing to Fort Larned, where they arrived on October 12, 1867, and then continued with an escort of local chiefs on to Medicine Lodge River. The commission themselves had some 600 men and 1,200 animals of their own accompanying them. This included a press corps, two companies of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, and "an entourage of aides, bureaucrats, camp attendants, teamsters, cooks, interpreters, and other camp followers."
While en route to Medicine Lodge, Sherman was recalled to Washington D.C. and replaced by Christopher C. Augur.

Medicine Lodge Treaty

Negotiations began on October 19, 1867, with the Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Kiowa-Apache at Medicine Lodge, where around 5,000 from the various tribes were encamped. Following two days of resistance to the proposition of leaving their land, treaties were signed on October 21, that moved the tribes to reservations in Oklahoma, promised a "token amount" of annual subsidies from the government, and contained various provisions designed to transition the tribes to a "foreign world of sedentary farming", for which the commissioners bestowed upon them goods and gifts worth tens of thousands of dollars.
On October 27, 500 warriors of the Cheyenne, who had been camped some away, arrived, and agreed to a treaty of similar provisions, creating and moving them to a reservation between the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers south of Kansas. Gifts were again distributed and negotiations concluded.

First visit to Fort Laramie and report

The commission departed immediately for North Platte and Fort Laramie in the hopes of negotiating with Red Cloud, who was leading an open revolt. Disappointingly, they found only the Crow, who were already well known for their friendly relations with whites. Before leaving in failure, they received communication from Red Cloud with assurances that once the army left the forts on the Bozeman Trail near the Powder River, in the heart of Sioux land, the ongoing war he was waging could be ended. They returned a message proposing a meeting in the following spring or summer. After the departure of the other Commissioners, Commissioner Tappan met in late November 1867 with Spotted Tail and other Brule Sioux chiefs.
The commissioners disbanded to return in December with a report for the government, which was submitted on January 7, 1868. In it they detailed their successful negotiations, blamed the current and recently concluded conflicts on whites, and urged congressional action on a number of issues. These included the ratification of the treaties of the prior year, and the creation of districts where the tribes could turn to agriculture, "barbarous dialects" could be "blotted out and the English language substituted," and government subsidies eventually withdrawn entirely. Here they envisaged that in a span of 25 years, the buffalo on which many tribes depended would be gone, the nomadic natives would be assimilated, tribal identity eliminated and replaced with "one homogeneous mass", and the commission could avert "another generation of savages". They looked forward to the coming year and negotiations with the Navajo, at the time imprisoned at Bosque Redondo, and with the Sioux with whom the government remained at war.