Grant proposed another solution, pursuing Lincoln’s idea to buy a new state that would be a safe home for southern black people from ‘the crime of Ku Kluxism’. When Congress failed to ratify the treaty, he sent Douglass down to the Caribbean to investigate the US annexation of the Dominican Republic, the formerly Spanish colony that had won its independence after defying attempts by Haitian President Boyer and Emperor Faustin to conquer their own little empire. Supported by Douglass, Grant bought it for $1.5 million, but Congress stymied the purchase. Douglass was both disappointed and infuriated by the betrayals of the civil war victory.
During his two-term presidency, Grant’s noble work in the south and his decent intentions towards Native Americans were undermined by his personal naivety in high politics, and by his inability to restrain America’s imperial voracity in the west. He backed a Peace Plan, offering the Native Americans ‘civilization, Christianization and citizenship’ when what they wanted was freedom to hunt and raid. The civil war had reinvigorated the Lakota and Cheyenne in Colorado and the Dakotas, while in the south the Comanche had returned to raiding.
Now both fronts deteriorated in tandem. Grant was sympathetic but many of his generals shared the view of General Sherman: ‘The more Indians we kill this year, the less we’d have to kill next.’ In early 1870, US cavalry burned alive and hacked to pieces 173 Piegan Blackfeet, mainly women and children, in Montana, exposing the army’s genocidal instincts.
On 27 June 1874, Quanah Parker, son of Peta Nocona and his Anglo wife Cynthia Ann, led a unit of 300 fighters to attack a hundred buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. Quanah was accompanied by a new spiritual leader, Isa-tai, a medicine man who in May had envisioned during a sun dance the destruction of the white settlers, uniting many of the Comanche into a newly powerful war band of a thousand fighters. ‘There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight,’ recalled Billy Dixon, one of the buffalo hunters. ‘Hundreds of warriors, the flower of the fighting men of the southwestern Plains tribes, mounted upon their finest horses, armed with guns and lances, and carrying heavy shields of thick buffalo hide, were coming like the wind.’ But their buffalo guns held Quanah at bay and a lucky shot by Dixon killed Isa-tai; Quanah was wounded.
Out west, army predation and a gold rush of settlers raised tensions and forced a reluctant Grant to order the removal of the Lakota. In November 1864, at Sandy Creek (Colorado), US troops killed and scalped 160 Cheyenne. In 1868, a treaty recognized the Black Hills, sacred land, as territory of the Lakota people, the Oglala Sioux, but six years later the army sent in a flashy colonel, George Armstrong Custer, and a thousand troopers of the Seventh Cavalry who confirmed the presence of seams of gold. Prospectors poured into the Hills, founding Deadwood and other raucous mining camps. In June 1876, Sitting Bull, supreme chief of the Sioux and holy man, performed a sun dance and in his trance saw ‘soldiers falling into his camp like grasshoppers from the sky’. He and fellow leader Crazy Horse put together a multitribal alliance and launched a war.
Down south, in Texas, the Comanche kidnapping of a white boy now provoked military action. America, said General Sherman, must not ‘submit to this practice of paying for stolen children. It is better the Indian race be obliterated.’ Troops, backed by Tonkawa scouts, attacked Comanche villages, hunting down Quanah, whose surrender marked the end of Comancheria.*
In the Dakotas, several army columns converged on Lakota villages. Grant loathed the insubordinate, narcissistic self-publicist Custer, a daredevil with long blond hair and fringed buckskin costumes, who had opposed Reconstruction, had been court-martialled for shooting deserters and had recently murdered more than 100 southern Cheyenne women and children. Grant banned this ‘not very level-headed man’ from the expeditions, but acquiesced when the general in command requested his presence.
On 17 June, Crazy Horse defeated a column under General Crook. At Greasy Grass, on 25 June, the overconfident Custer and his men were ambushed by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and several hundred braves and wiped out in thirty minutes, with 267 killed. Custer was found shot in the head, stripped naked, an arrow through his penis.
