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Civil War to end of treaty making

Armed conflicts, unfettered aggression drive treaty making

Civil War to the end of treaty making

The Civil War was not the only armed conflict that engaged the U.S. during the 1860s. ​​U.S. policies throughout the decade antagonized Indigenous nations, resulting in wars throughout the west. Corruption and mismanagement in the Bureau of Indian Affairs sparked the ​Dakota War of 1862. Though that war ended quickly, resistance to U.S. expansion spread throughout the plains as white emigration to the Pacific Northwest continued to increase. With the secesion of the South, northern industrialists agressively pushed for the construction of a railroad through Indigenous territories in heavyhanded treaties that were often fraudulent. With the discovery of gold in Idaho, an old pattern was repeated: miners invaded Indigenous territories by the thousands and a U.S. military presence followed. Relations were also exacerbated by the U.S. policy of confining Indigenous nations to reservations, in effect turning their homelands into concentration camps.

Men who negotiated and witnessed treaties in this final period of the treaty-making era included railroad executives, owners of newly-formed mining companies, and military officers, some of whom were the authors of famous massacres. In the last half of the decade, members of itinerant Peace Commissions wandered the west, attempting to address the consequences of these conflicts.

Railroad Treaties, 1860-1868

In the 1860s railroad companies entered their ascendancy, exploiting political networks to combine transportation and land speculation. Some treaties in this decade read like advertisements for the railroad companies that engineered them. U.S. commissioners and signers of these treaties included Thomas Gladding and Thomas Ewing, Jr. (directors of the Leavenworth, Pawnee and Western Railroad); George A. Reynolds (director of the Leavenworth, Lawrence and Fort Gibson Railroad); H. W. Farnsworth (director of the Atchison and Topeka Railroad); Charles B. Keith, who was described as “a minion of the railroads;” and Thomas Sykes, who secured power of attorney for the Delaware to further the interests of railroad interests. The Indian Affairs bureaucracy in this period was also remarkably corrupt.  Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Dole and and Indian agent Luther Palmer acquired and speculated in the ceded lands. Agent Douglas H. Cooper misappropriated $134,000 dollars from the Choctaw before joining the Confederacy

Delawares 1860 

Delawares 1861

Potawatomi 1861

Kansa 1862

Kickapoo 1862

Osage 1865

Potawatomi 1866

Delawares 1866

Sauk and Foxes 1867

Potawatomi 1867

Restricted Western Reservations, 1861-1865

In addition to agreements engineered for the direct benefit of specific railroads, a number of treaties in the west in the 1860s focused on securing other U.S. trade and wagon-train routes. These treaties involved sometimes vast land cessions from Indigenous nations, generally restricted the movement of Indigenous people within reservation boundaries, and in most cases led to continued armed conflict. S. D. Howe, one of the incorporators of the Northern Pacific Railroad, “negotiated” a particularly onerous treaty with the Nez Perce after gold was discovered on their reservation. Signers of treaties with the Shoshoni and Utes included James Duane Doty, Wisconsin’s most active land speculator and ex-governor, who had been appointed Governor of Utah Territory; P. E. Conner, who had conducted the Bear River Massacre months before signing treaties; and John Chivington, who would conduct the Sand Creek Massacre a year after his treaty-signing. In the Pacific Northwest, treaties were signed by members of the aggressive Oregon and Washington militias.

​Arapaho Cheyenne 1861

Nez Perces 1863

Eastern Shoshoni 1863

​Shoshoni NW 1863

Western Shoshoni 1863

Utah Tabeguache 1863

Shoshoni Goship 1863

Klamath etc. 1864

Snake 1865

Middle Oregon 1865

Ojibwe and Minnesota, 1860s

In 1862, Dakota people and Minnesota militia engaged in the Dakota conflict. Following a statement by Governor Alexander Ramsey that the Dakota should be exterminated, a punitive expedition co-led by Henry Sibley hunted Dakota people into the Dakotas. Ex-Governor Alexander Ramsey capitalized on this military presence to secure cessions from the Ojibwe in 1863 of a large territory alongboth banks of the Red River, and of reservations held throughout the State. (Both treaties were re-negotiated the following year.)​  Signers included corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs officials: Comissioner William Dole and Indian agents Ashley Morrill, Clark Thompson and his brother Benjamin, who speculated in land, pocketed annuity payments and represented the interests of timber and railroad companies.Other “ Indian traders,” and timber company executives also witnessed the treaties. After a false gold strike at Lake Vermillion in 1866, political and financial leaders in Minnesota pressured a land cession from the Bois Fort Ojibwe; no actual gold was found by the armies of settlers that invaded the area, but men such as Henry Sibley incorporated gold mining companies that attracted eastern capital. In 1867, the White Earth reservation was created in a treaty that U.S. negotiators intended as the home of all Ojibwe people within the State’s boundaries. One of the signers became at agent an White Earth and fraudulently extracted millions of board feet of timber from the reservation.

Chippewa Miss. etc. 1863

Chippewa Red Lake 1863

​Chippewa Red Lake 1864

Chippewa Miss. etc. 1864

Chippewa Bois Fort 1866

Chippewa Miss. 1867

Other Civil War Era Treaties, 1861-1865

Five treaties coinciding with the Civil War involved reservation lands in Kansas and Nebraska. A month before the War began in 1861, the once-vast Great Nemaha reservation on the Kansas-Nebraska border was reduced in the last of a series of land cession treaties. Traders John and Harvey Forman, signers of the treaty, later incorporated the town of Doniphan, Kansas on the ceded land. In 1862 the Ottawa in Kansas ceded their reservation for compensation that included funds for education; U.S. treaty signer C. C. Hutchinson and Ottawa signer John T. Jones then colluded in the formation of the fraudulent Ottawa University. Months before the Civil War officially ended in 1865, a series of treaties in Washington, DC resulted in land cessions by the Omaha, Ponca and Ho-Chunk, and their consolidation in a single reservation in northeast Nebraska. Signers of these treaties included the corrupt Commissioner of Indian Affairs, William P. Dole, and his nephew Stephen;  corrupt Indian agent Clark Thompson; Charles Sims, a Missouri lawyer who spent the war in the east engaged in Wall Street speculation; J. N. H. Patrick, a director of the Union Pacific Railroad; and the speculator/banker Augustus Kountze, who was on his way to vast fortunes in timber, land and banking. In another Civil War treaty, parts of the Isabella Reservation in Michigan were ceded by the Saginaw band of the Ojibwe in 1864; treaty signer C. H. Rodd, a supervisor of the nearby town of Isabella, later bribed a Congressman to sponsor legislation that supported his spurious claim to 12,000 acres of Michigan land.

Sauk and Fox, etc. 1861

Ottawa Blanchford etc. 1862

​Chippewa Saginaw 1864

Omaha 1865

Winnebago 1865

Ponca 1865

Civil War End Treaties, 1865-1868

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the U.S. signed treaties to reestablish relations with Indigenous nations that had fought with the Confederacy; reconstitute nations that had been split by conflicting alliances during the war; resolve issues related to now-outlawed chattel slavery among Indigenous peoples; and address war-caused economic disruption among Indigenous nations that sided with the North. A succession of U.S. commissioners of Indian Affairs – D. N. Cooley, Lewis Bogy, and Nathaniel G. Taylor, and future commissioner Ely S. Parker – signed these treaties with a cadre of clerks and Indian agents; the Indian agents included J. B. Abbott (later accused of involvement in questionable land deals); George Reynolds (railroad owner and founder of Fort Scott, Kansas); Perry Fuller (perhaps the most corrupt individual ever involved in U.S.-Indian relations); and Douglas Cooper (who had misappropriated $134,000 from the Choctaw).

​Cherokee etc. 1865

Seminole 1866

Choctaw Chickasaw 1866

Creeks 1866

Cherokee 1866

Seneca etc. 1867

Cherokee 1868

Dakota Territory Treaties, 1865-1866

In October of 1865, a U.S. treaty delegation signed nine treaties with Lakota bands at Fort Sully. Their purpose was to broker the end of ongoing armed conflict and open Indigenous land in Dakota Territory to white settlement. The same U.S. delegates met the following year at Fort Berthold with the Mandan, Gros Ventres and Arikara. The U.S. commissioners included Newton Edmunds, the Territorial governor; several military officers with ties to railroads (Henry Sibley, E. B. Taylor and Samuel R. Curtis); a missionary/Indian agent named H. W. Reed; and Orin Guernsey, a brother-in-law of the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Other treaty signers included sons of Guernsey and Curtis; Montana Chief Justice Hezekiel Hosmer, a rancher and mine owner; and Iowa Congressman A. W. Hubbard.

Sioux Miniconjou 1865

Sioux Lower Brule 1865

​Blackfeet Sioux 1865

Sioux Two Kettle 1865

Sioux Hunkpapa 1865

Sioux Sans Arc 1865

Sioux Yanktonai 1865

Sioux Oglala 1865

Sioux Up. Yanktonai 1865

 

Fort Berthold 1866

Peace Commission Treaties, 1865-1868

The aggressive lead miner Henry Dodge, whose armed takeover of Ho Chunk land had led to violence and Ho Chunk removal, was appointed the first governor of Wisconsin Territory in 1836. Within months he started making treaties. In September of 1836, the Menominee ceded tracts in Wisconsin and Michigan; the treaty was attended by one of Wisconsin’s most prominent bankers and land speculators, J. P. Arndt, and his business partner, Territorial Attorney General Henry Baird. Later in the month, the Sauk and Fox ceded a reservation and a strip of land in eastern Iowa; Antoine Leclaire, who would found the site of Davenport weeks later, and George Davenport himself were in attendance.

The U.S. failure to deliver on promises made at the three treaties that October only exacerbated ongoing conflicts. Alarmed at the rising cost of war in the west, Congress appointed a Peace Commission to make new treaties. The commissioners at the Little Arkansas River formed the nucleus of this group. They were joined by men such as U.S. Representative and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel G. Taylor; General William T. Sherman, who was aggressively “protecting railroad lines” from Indigenous attacks; vigilante and Colorado Territory governor Alexander Hunt; and Samuel Tappan, the founder of Lawrence, Kansas who led the military inquiry into the Sand Creek Massacre. As peace commissioners traveled by railroad, in large and small groups — to Medicine Lodge in 1867; Fort Bridger, Fort Sumner, Fort Laramie and Washington, D.C. in 1868 – they “embedded” sympathetic journalists in their delegation, including Henry Stanley who would later find Dr. David Livingstone and cause havoc in Africa. 

​Cheyenne Arapaho 1865

Comanche Kiowa 1865

Apache Cheyenne Arapaho 1865

Kiowa Comanche 1867

Kiowa Comanche Apache 1867

Cheyenne Arapaho 1867

Ute 1868

Crow 1868

N. Cheyenne and Arapaho 1868

 

Navaho 1868

E. Band Shoshoni Bannock 1868

 

Nez Perces 1868

 

Fort Laramie 1868

Sisseton Wahpeton​, 1867-1873

After the Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people were tried for murder in perfunctory, 5-minute trials; 38 were hanged in the largest mass execution in US history. The Dakota were exiled from Minnesota, transported on steam boats to prison elsewhere, and chased from the state by a U.S. military campaign.  In 1867, recognizing that many Dakota had not participated in the War and that many had in fact saved the lives of white people, the U.S. negotiated the establishment of a Dakota reservation in present-day South Dakota. The signers of this treaty included trader and land speculator Joseph R. Brown and two of his relatives; U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Lewis Bogy (who had married into the Chouteau family); and Bureau of Indian Affairs Chief Clerk Charles Mix and his son. Three years later, the treaty-making era ended in a budgetary dispute between the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. U.S.-Indian Affairs thereafter were carried on through “agreements,” executive orders, and other political actions, which had always been part of U.S. policy. Two such agreements were negotiated to clarify details related to the establishment of the Sisseton Reservation. One of the U.S. signers of these agreements was George Faribault (son of Alexandre, a trader and land speculator who signed the massive Dakota land cession treaties in 1851; grandson of J. B. Faribault, who attended the first treaty with the Dakota in 1805). Another signer was William Forbes, who had served as provost marshal during the military trials of combatants after the Dakota War. 

​Sioux Siss. Wahpeton 1867

​Sioux Siss. Wahpeton 1872

Certain Sioux 1873​​​