1865 treaty the ‘beginning of the end’ for Plains Indians

By the autumn of 1865, the nation’s long Civil War had ended.

But out West, trouble was brewing.

The Indian problem, as government officials viewed it, was escalating. Through the Homestead Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln three years earlier, the West was open for settlement, and thousands of ex-soldiers and their families headed there.

The only problem was that the West, which included Kansas, was fully populated – by American Indians.

The Kansas treaties of 1865 and 1867 shaped and divided the state into an often violent, thundering clash of cultures, in the end forcing American Indians from the state and spurring European-American settlement onto the prairie.

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Little Arkansas Treaty, which was signed between Oct. 14-18, 1865, near what is now 61st Street North and Seneca, near Valley Center.

Old West icons such as Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle, Kiowa Chief Satanta, Kit Carson, William Bent and Jesse Chisholm came to Sedgwick County, and all signed – or at least made their marks – agreeing to the treaty.

The 1865 Little Arkansas Treaty tried to make amends for the Sand Creek Massacre in the fall of 1864 and ward off potential violence, said Kansas historian Leo Oliva. But it also established boundaries for the tribes in Kansas – relegating them to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, yet letting them continue to hunt buffalo in Kansas.

As long as there were buffalo, Oliva said. And that’s one of the reasons the treaty of 1865 was short-lived.

Within a decade, most of the buffalo and Indians were gone from Kansas.

Why the treaty was written

Many of the Southern Plains Indian tribes considered the land in central and western Kansas their sacred home.

For 19th-century settlers, both the Indian and the buffalo were a nuisance. They stood in the way of garden-like farms that early settlers quickly homesteaded.

The federal government launched a campaign in the 1860s to eradicate the buffalo. In less than a decade, the buffalo culture was replaced by cow towns and cowboys.

The 1865 treaty was designed to create peace for white settlers traveling in the West, Oliva said. It accelerated the expansion of the railroads and gave the U.S. government authority to sequester Indians on reservations.

Indians were given flour, beans, sugar, clothing, blankets and bugles and were moved into Indian Territory.

“The treaties were signed but ineffective,” Oliva said. “It is all part of an ongoing process of trying to find a solution to what they called the ‘Indian problem.’ The whole attitude of many whites was that the Indians were not human beings, they were inferior to European people.”

A ‘man of peace’

The treaty conference in 1865 began with an apology by the chairman of the peace commission, J.B. Sanborn, to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho for the Nov. 29, 1864, Sand Creek Massacre.

On that day a 700-man militia led by U.S. Army Col. John Chivington attacked and massacred a Southern Cheyenne village in eastern Colorado led by Black Kettle. As many as 163 men, women and children may have died.

Black Kettle’s wife, Medicine Woman Later, was shot nine times. Black Kettle took her and many of the survivors into Kansas to heal.

Milton Youngbird Hamilton of Towanda is a great-nephew of Black Kettle, who signed both treaties.

“What good did it do to make those treaties?” Hamilton asked. “He was a man of peace. He tried to be peaceful to everybody – with other tribes, within his family, within society. That was the greatest gift he had was peace.”

Black Kettle would continue to remain a man of peace even in 1868 when George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry attacked Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River in what is now Oklahoma. The troops killed Black Kettle, his wife and more than 100 of the chief’s followers.

What went wrong

What happened in Kansas in the mid-1860s was more than a simple clash of cultures, said DeWitt Domebo, a 53-year-old Kiowa who is a retired aerospace inspector and lives in Wichita.

“They tried to teach us how to farm; the Kiowa people don’t believe in turning ground over because it is sacred,” Domebo said. “They never took to heart this farming business.

“Because of negligence of Indian agents in making sure all this was done the right way, the whites gave them tainted beef, (blanket) rolls that had smallpox and measles. Children died. There was no game anywhere.

“When the Indian saw these teams of wagons crossing land (Indian territory), they started back with the aggression. That’s why it all broke out again.”

There were other Indian chiefs besides Black Kettle who sought peace in 1865.

“My great-grandfather was a peacemaker,” said Wichitan Eugene “Louie” Stumbling Bear, a Kiowa, whose family was forced from Kansas in the late 1860s into Oklahoma and brought back in the 1940s when workers were needed to fill Wichita’s aircraft plants.

His great-grandfather was Chief Stumbling Bear. His great-uncle was Satanta, called not only a fierce warrior by some reporters of the day but also the “Orator of the Plains.” Both attended the signing of the 1865 treaty.

“It was really the beginning of the end as far as the Plains Indians,” Stumbling Bear said of the 1865 treaty. “One of the Kiowa chiefs said the white man was like blades of grass. You cut them down and four or five more are there as soon as they are gone.

“The chiefs realized there was no end to it and the white man was going to win.”

Any peace gained from the 1865 treaty was short-lived; two years later, the U.S. government called a second meeting at Medicine Lodge.

And after that, there was an escalation in the Indian Wars.

150 years later

When the tribes were forced from Kansas, most were forbidden for decades to speak their native languages or dance traditional dances. Their children were sent to boarding schools.

But in the past four decades much of the Native American culture has started to make a comeback, through powwows and places such as Wichita’s Mid-America All-Indian Center.

“Chief Stumbling Bear realized that in order to compete you had to have an education,” Louie Stumbling Bear said. “He sent his son and daughter to school.

“My grandfather, Andrew Stumbling Bear, went to Haskell and was one of the first Indians to get a government home. He always slept outside on the ground because that was what he was used to – everybody else slept inside.”

Many of the descendants of families who were present at the treaties – Kiowas, the Cheyenne, Comanche and Apache – have assimilated in Wichita.

“We have many people who are doctors, astronauts, lawyers and judges,” Domebo said. “We have come quite a ways with education. It is great and wonderful.

“But the thing that hurt us more than anything is that we lost our way. Back then, we were constantly Kiowa. We were around each other.

“Because of our society now, we have lost our way and our direction. We still keep traditions and know our ways, but it doesn’t mean today what it meant back then.”

This story was originally published October 13, 2015 at 7:06 PM with the headline "1865 treaty the ‘beginning of the end’ for Plains Indians."