Spotted Tail
Spotted Tail was a Sichangu Lakota tribal chief. Famed as a great warrior since his youth, warring on Ute, Pawnee and Absaroke, and having taken a leading part in the Grattan Massacre, he led his warriors in the Colorado and Platte River uprising after the massacre perpetrated by John M. Chivington's Colorado Volunteers on the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camping on Sand Creek, but declined to participate in Red Cloud's War.
After spending almost two years as a prisoner in Fort Leavenworth following the Grattan affair, Spotted Tail was able to speak the English language well, and to deal with the "Wasichu" without an interpreter, whom he did not trust. He had become convinced of the futility of making war to oppose the white incursions into his homeland; he became a statesman, speaking for peace and defending the rights of his tribe by using his knowledge of “wasichu” language and system to increase his political capability to hinder their tricks and deceptions.
He made several trips to Washington, D.C. in the 1870s to represent his people, and was noted for his interest in bringing education to the Sioux. General Anson Mills, who knew Spotted Tail well, called him "a fine-looking man, with engaging manners, perfectly loyal to the government, a lover of peace, knowing no good could come to his people from war," a man who had both a high respect for and confidence in U.S. Army officers as well as a good sense of humor.
He was shot in the back and killed by Crow Dog, a Sichangu Lakota subchief, in 1881 for reasons which have been disputed.
Early years
Spotted Tail was born about 1823 in the White River country west of the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota. He was given the birth name of Jumping Buffalo. Two of his sisters, Iron Between Horns and Kills Enemy, were married to the elder Crazy Horse, in what was traditional Sioux practice for elite men. Spotted Tail was the uncle of the famous warrior Crazy Horse, which meant he was a relative of the notable Touch the Clouds as well. The young man took his warrior name, Spotted Tail, after receiving a gift of a raccoon tail from a white trapper; he sometimes wore a raccoon tail in his war bonnet.During the previous 40 years, the Lakota or Teton Sioux had moved from present-day Minnesota and eastern South Dakota to areas west of the Missouri. They had differentiated into several sub-tribes or bands, including the Saône, Sichangu and Oglala. During this time the people adopted the use of horses and expanded their range in hunting the buffalo across their wide grazing patterns.
Marriage and family
Spotted Tail married and had children. He gained his first wife in 1842, after a deadly fight against chief Mahto Wakuwa, and, the killed chief being a famous warrior, young Spotted Tail's reputation probably greatly increased. Eugene Fitch Ware, a Fort Laramie army officer, wrote that Spotted Tail's daughter, Ah-ho-appa named also Hinzinwin or even Monica, "... was one of those individuals found in all lands, at all places, and among all people; she was misplaced." He suggested that she adopted some European-American practices, and that she was thought to be secretly in love with one of the officers at the fort. When she was dying in 1866, Fallen Leaf made her father promise that she would be buried on a hillside overlooking Fort Laramie. The entire garrison at the post helped Spotted Tail to honor her request by arranging for a ceremonial funeral, including a Christian service and Sioux ceremony. Many years later, Spotted Tail had her remains transported to the Rosebud Indian Agency in South Dakota and re-interred.Grattan and Ash Hollow battles
In the late summer of 1854, about 4,000 Sichangu and Oglala were camped near Fort Laramie, in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of 1851. On August 17, a cow belonging to a Mormon traveling on the nearby Oregon Trail strayed and was killed by a visiting Miniconjou Lakota warrior named High Forehead.Lt. Hugh Fleming, the senior officer of the small garrison, consulted with the chief, Matȟó Wayúhi or Scattering Bear, to discuss the loss of livestock, the officer was evidently unaware, or chose to ignore, that such matters were, by the terms of the Treaty of 1851, to be handled by the local Indian Agent, in this case John Whitfield, who was due to arrive within days with annuities with which restitution could be made.
Aware that the matter was not under the purview of the military, Scattering Bear still attempted to negotiate, offering a horse from his personal herd or a cow from the tribe's herd but the cow's owner persisted in demanding $25 instead. Lt. Fleming asked the Sioux to arrest High Forehead and deliver him to the fort, which Conquering Bear refused; he had no authority over the Miniconjou and did not want to violate his people's tradition of hospitality. The day's talk ended in stalemate.
On August 19, 1854, Second Lieutenant John Lawrence Grattan, of the U.S. 6th Infantry Regiment, a recent graduate of West Point and supernumerary waiting for a vacancy in the regiment, led an armed detachment into the Indian encampment to take custody of High Forehead and bring him back to the fort. The aspiring Grattan, eager to gain a military reputation, was inexperienced and described as contemptuous of the Lakotas' ability as warriors. This was his first encounter with the Sioux.
By the time the detachment reached the encampment, Lucian Auguste, Grattan's interpreter, was intoxicated from drinking along the way, as he feared the encounter; the Lakotas disliked him and he disliked them, moreover he spoke only broken Dakota, and had little grasp of other dialects. As they entered the encampment, he began to taunt the Sioux, calling their warriors women, and saying the soldiers were not there to talk, but to kill them all, and failed to fully or accurately translate Conquering Bear and Grattan's comments; according to the trader James Bordeaux, Lt. Grattan began to realize the risk and stopped to discuss the situation with the trader; Bordeaux advised him to talk directly with Conquering Bear and let him handle the situation, and Grattan seemed to not understand and continued on into the encampment, going first to the lodge of High Forehead, whom he ordered to surrender to the US forces. High Forehead said he would die first.
Then Grattan went to Conquering Bear, saying the Sioux should arrest the guilty party and turn him over; but Conquering Bear refused and tried to negotiate, offering a horse as compensation for the cow. Conquering Bear asked for the trader Bordeaux to act as interpreter, as the Sioux trusted him and his language ability. Called by the Sioux, Bordeaux rode to the meeting place; later he said he could see the situation was out of hand; as Grattan persisted in pressing Conquering Bear, numerous Sioux warriors moved into flanking positions around the soldiers.
Ending the discussion, Grattan was walking back to his column, when a nervous soldier fired his gun, shooting a Sioux, and the warriors started shooting arrows while leaders tried to take control. Conquering Bear was mortally wounded and died nine days later near the Niobrara River. The Sichangu Lakota warriors, led by Spotted Tail, then a rising war chief within his people, quickly killed Grattan, 11 of his men, and the interpreter. A group of some 18 soldiers retreated on foot trying to reach some rocks for defense, but they were cut off and killed by overcoming warriors led by Red Cloud, a rising war chief within the Oglala Sioux. One soldier survived the massacre but later died of his wounds.
Conquering Bear was the only Lakota who was killed. The Sioux spared Bordeaux, both because he was married to a Sichangu Sioux woman, and because he had a friendly relationship with the tribes. The enraged warriors "rampaged throughout the night, swearing to attack other whites." They rode against Fort Laramie the next morning but withdrew; they looted the trading post but did not harm Bordeaux. On the third day after the US attack, the Sichangu and Oglala abandoned the camp on the North Platte River and returned to their respective hunting grounds. On the fourth day, the military asked Bordeaux to arrange a burial party and found that the slain soldiers had been ritually mutilated.
The U.S. press called the event the "Grattan Massacre", and reports generally ignored the US soldiers' instigation of the event by their failure first, to leave it up to the Indian agent to settle the matter, as called for in the treaty, and second, shooting chief Conquering Bear in the back; punctually, when news of the fight reached the War Department, officials started planning retaliation to punish the Sioux. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis characterized the incident as "the result of a deliberately formed plan.
Col. William S. Harney was recalled from Paris in April 1855 and sent to Fort Kearny, where he assembled a command of 600 troopers, consisting of men from the 6th Infantry, 10th Infantry, 4th Artillery, and his own 2nd US Dragoons. In all he had four mounted companies led by Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke and five companies of infantry under Maj. Albemarle Cady. They set out on August 24, 1855, to find the Sioux and exact retribution. Harney was quoted as saying, "By God, I'm for battle—no peace."
Warned by the Indian agent Thomas S. Twiss that the army had put a force in the field, half of the Lakota camped north of the Platte went into Fort Laramie for protection as "friendlies". The other half, generally led by Conquering Bear's successor Little Thunder, remained at large. They considered themselves peaceful but knew that Harney was out with a force. They continued to harbor warriors sought by the Army. Harney engaged them in the Battle of Ash Hollow on September 3, 1855. U.S. soldiers killed 86 Sichangu Sioux, half of them women and children, in present-day Garden County, Nebraska. The New York Times and other newspapers recounted the battle as a massacre because so many women and children were killed. The village of 230 persons was caught between an assault by the infantry and a blocking force by the cavalry. Spotted Tail, principal war chief of the Sichangu, surprised and initially unarmed, was seriously wounded four times having had two bullets pass through his chest, but reportedly managed to kill or wound 13 "long knives".
Harney returned to Fort Laramie with 70 prisoners, most of them women and children, including Spotted Tail's mother, wife and three children and Iron Shell 's wife. To make the Sichangu Women and children free, Harney claimed the delivery of the leaders of Grattan Fight, and Spotted Tail, Red Leaf, Long Chin and, some days later, Standing Elk and Red Plume went to Fort Pierre escorted by Iron Shell and the whole Sichangu crowd. On October 25 the three warriors sought by the expedition surrendered, were held for a year at Fort Leavenworth, and were released. Harney ordered the tribes to send representatives to a treaty council at Fort Pierre in March 1856, where a treaty was signed on terms dictated by the War Department. Twiss tried to undermine the treaty, and Harney had him removed from office, although he did not have the authority to do so. Commissioner of Indian Affairs George W. Manypenny successfully lobbied the Senate to reject the treaty, and Twiss was reinstated. Harney's actions against the Lakota restrained them for nearly ten years.
The US Army was soon involved in the American Civil War, and did not have resources to fight on the Great Plains. The Lakota could concentrate on their wars against old enemies as the Pawnee and Absaroke. In the spring-summer 1860, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho repeatedly assaulted the Pawnee villages on Loup Fork ; the Pawnee asked the Army for protection, and, in August 1860, Captain Alfred Sully reached the Agency with a small detachment and a howitzer, which was placed overstanding north the villages; when, Captain Sully being temporarily on duty at Fort Kearny, on September 14, 250 Lakota braves attacked one of the villages, the Pawnee stood at defence and receiving reinforcements from the other two villages and from the Army encampment, suffering an unknown number of losses, but killing 13 Teton. In the summer and fall 1862 Spotted Tail at least three times led his Sichangu braves against the hated Pawnee, two times attacking their encampments, and fighting a company of 2nd Nebraska Volunteers Cavalry, and the third time attacking the Pawnee agency too.