Prairie Imperialists - Katharine Bjork America in the Nineteenth Century

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had been defeated, but the war for control of Dakota Territory and eastern Montana was just beginning. In the aftermath of the attacks on Minnesota River settlements, the state’s leaders joined with federal forces to mount massive punitive expeditions to chase the renegades who had fled onto the western plains. There, the exiles from Minnesota joined with bands of the Teton Sioux (Hunkpapa and Blackfeet) who were engaged in the crucial summer activity of hunting and drying meat to secure a food supply for the coming winter.

      The Dakota (or Santee Sioux) of Minnesota represented the easternmost tribe in a loosely confederated and widely dispersed people who recognized common descent from seven ancestral political units called council fires.65 The Lakota in turn were one of seven tribes of the Teton Sioux: the Lakota, Hunk-papa, Brule, Miniconjou, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Sihaspas. In the course of making war on the Dakota who had sought refuge in the lands of their kinsmen, the Lakota, the United States attacked the Lakota indiscriminately as well. Just as significantly, the punitive campaigns into the Dakotas were intrusions into a country where the soldiers had no right to be, according to the Lakota view of the proper relations between their people and the wasichu (whites) who had recently begun encroaching on areas they had long viewed—and fought to defend—as their own.

      Like other punitive wars fought for control over territory inhabited by people deemed to be savages by expansive colonial powers, the expeditions to punish the Dakota launched from Minnesota in 1863 and 1864 combined a rhetoric of righteous retribution with the strategic goal of extending sovereignty claims over contested territory. They were also intended to intimidate and serve as a warning to Indians further west, like the Lakota, and discourage their active resistance to white-settler expansion.

      While punitive actions are associated with volatile and primal emotions, such as anger and the desire for vengeance, the military rationale for such wars stresses their role in disciplining the adversary; punitive actions are launched not just to punish but also to “teach a lesson.” Not surprisingly, the military literature on the history and theory of punitive wars often discusses them in the context of colonial warfare. The theory behind punitive wars is that “primitive, less organized enemies” cannot be dissuaded from unwanted behaviors by the mere knowledge that their actions may elicit the wrath of a more powerful adversary.66

      The concept of a military action whose primary objective is to punish implies the arrogation of the moral authority to mete out justice to the other side. Similarly, expeditions are one-sided actions in which the initiative to invade and pursue is claimed by the punitive authority, the one in pursuit. Such inherently asymmetrical language reveals the presumption that the great power possesses a monopoly on moral authority to act in a way that is intended to teach a lesson. Moral right is assumed to lie with the greater power that is in pursuit. This is an unquestioned premise of punitive actions. Indeed, one might say that the rhetorical force of acting with punitive intent is in itself an act that asserts the moral high ground and overwhelms contesting claims of justice and moral authority.

      The punitive expeditions of 1863 and 1864 represented the largest forces yet assembled against western Indians as they pursued the remnants of the Dakota fleeing as far as the Missouri River. Led by Henry Hastings Sibley, a fur trader who had become Minnesota’s first governor, and by Alfred Sully, a general redirected from the Civil War to lead the effort, the punitive raids penetrated deep into the Coteau du Missouri country, a land of elevated rolling plains stretching from close to the Canadian border generally east of the Missouri River and south into what is today north-central South Dakota. This was a hot, dry, and inhospitable region, which Sully famously described as “Hell with the fires put out.”67

      The massive expeditions that set forth into the Dakota Territory each included thousands of soldiers and hundreds of Indian scouts drawn from the Winnebagos and also from among the Dakotas. Sully and Sibley ranged up the Missouri River and across the hot arid grasslands in search of Indian encampments to chastise. The brigades were supported by hundreds of wagons and mule teams, as well as herds of cattle brought along to furnish meat for the soldiers.68 During the summers of 1863 and 1864, the forces of Sully and Sibley attacked Indian villages camped at Big Mound (northeast of present-day Bismarck) as well as at Whitestone Hill to the south and Killdeer Mountain further west. Made up of different Sioux bands who had come together to hunt, the number of lodges ranged from hundreds to an estimated fifteen hundred at Killdeer. In each of these major engagements, the Indians fought first to cover the retreat of women and children from their encampments. Estimates of the number of casualties in each battle vary widely, but run into the hundreds. At Whitestone alone, it is thought that 150 to 300 Santee, Yanktonai, and Teton Sioux were killed, including women and children. The number of soldiers killed is better known; in the same battle, Sully’s forces lost twenty-two men killed and fifty injured. At Killdeer Mountain, about forty U.S. soldiers died.69

      The punishment the forces applied to the Indian villages they encountered was intended both to demonstrate the army’s ability and determination to inflict damage and to make life and even survival difficult not just by killing them but also by destroying their shelter and especially the meat they were gathering for the winter. Lodges, meat, robes, utensils: the soldiers methodically burned it all. After the battle of Whitestone Hill (September 3, 1863), it took a hundred men two days to gather up and destroy all the provisions and possessions left behind by the Santee, Yanktonai, and Teton Sioux as they fled. This included plunder the Dakota had brought from their attacks on settlements in the Minnesota valley along with three hundred lodges and 400,000–500,000 pounds of buffalo meat (roughly 1,000 butchered buffalo). All of it was burned. Captain Mason, a wagon master for the expedition, remarked that “fat ran in streams from the burning mass of meat.”70

      Following the Killdeer fight, Sully’s troops systematically destroyed everything the fleeing Indians had left behind (which they had intended to return to recover). It took a thousand men a whole day to burn forty tons of pemmican (dried buffalo meat packed in buffalo skins), dried berries, tanned buffalo, elk, and antelope hides, brass and copper kettles and mess pans, saddles, travois, and lodge poles. “Even the surrounding woods were set afire.” Soldiers also shot the three thousand dogs left tied to pickets in the village. Two toddlers discovered in one of the abandoned lodges were also killed, their skulls bashed with tomahawks by Winnebago scouts.

      The Indians had been severely punished, while their property loss had reduced them to a state of destitution. “Not the least of their losses was the exhaustion very largely of their supply of ammunition,” commented one observer, “for upon this they must depend principally for their subsistence.”71 In a war intended to strike a blow at the Indians’ will to resist and ability to survive through the region’s notoriously hard winters, Sully was quoted as saying: “I would rather destroy their supplies than to kill fifty of their warriors.”72

      In the fights at Big Mound, Whiteside Hill, Dead Buffalo Lake, and Kill-deer Mountain as well as in smaller engagements and skirmishes, the superior weapons of the U.S. forces were decisive. Even when some of Sibley and Sully’s forces were confronted by superior numbers, the punitive forces used artillery to kill and disperse the enemy. Forerunners of the howitzers on display in Philadelphia a decade later were decisive in winning engagements. The hunting villages the punitive forces tracked and attacked also had to fight covering actions to protect the retreat of their women and children.

      Following the Killdeer Battle, as Sully’s forces pursued the fleeing Sioux across the Missouri and onto the western edge of the Badlands, the two sides again engaged in battle. After several days of skirmishes in the choking dust of the grassless buttes, a thirty-year-old Hunkpapa warrior called Sitting Bull engaged some of the Indian scouts serving with Sully in shouted conversation. Why were they fighting with the whites, Sitting Bull wanted to know. “You have no business with the soldiers,” he told them. “The Indians here have no fight with the whites,” he shouted to them. “Why is it the whites come to fight with the Indians?” In Sitting Bull’s estimation, sovereignty over the country into which the punitive forces had penetrated lay entirely with its native owners. The soldiers were interlopers. If the whites would only recognize this simple truth, there need be no grounds for war. If they would not recognize it, Sitting Bull would resist all their efforts to encroach on the Lakota homeland.73 Sitting

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