When Gold Led to War

In an effort to clean out my bookshelves and discard “research” materials I no longer need now that I’ve retired and no longer engage in academic scholarship, I did a speed reading of Larry McMurtry’s short biography of Crazy Horse, part of the Penguin Lives series. Even though I knew nothing about Crazy Horse going into the book, and have already forgotten most of what I read, I came away with some interesting general understandings about American history and the Indian Wars in the West. Perhaps it's because this bit of "cause and event" is tied too closely to modern phenomenon, a world where the desire for money or things that can be translated into money within a system of Capitalism can be a cause of war. 

My takeaway from the very short book …

Historian Stephen Ambrose argues that General Sherman foresaw the coming of the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific Railroads, and expected the trains would be a free ride into Indian territory for soldiers and buffalo hunters alike. Sherman’s was still a scorched earth policy, but now it would be paid for by the railroad barons. Apparently the inability to “put enough men in the field to scorch the vast earth of the west” was quite troublesome to the hero of the Civil War. It further frustrated him that fellow military veterans such as General Hancock and George Armstrong Custer had spent a good deal of money on campaigns that got some buffalo killed, earned the army a bit of publicity back east, but did very little militarily other than stirring up the anger of the southern Cheyenne who hitherto had managed to stay clear of hostilities. These endeavors had proven that “large forces of soldiers, dragging mostly useless equipment, could rarely catch up with the hostile Indians; the army was far more likely to blunder onto peaceful villages of Indians who were merely minding their own business.”

All that blundering was bad for business. The Federal government was actually forced to consider peace and offerings of money to tribes, financial reimbursements that apparently were hard to come by for a government mired in not only war debt but a miserably economy. For an economy based on the gold standard, the Depression of 1873 had sent a wave of panic throughout the bureaucracy in Washington D.C. and the major Eastern cities.

Years earlier in 1868 the government had signed a treating giving unequivocal and irrevocable ownership of the Black Hills to the Sioux, with “unusually clear provision that … the whites, were to be kept out.” But that U.S. economy craved gold.

Interestingly, it was Custer who was sent out to provide protection for the railroad geologists who scoped the land for future track laying, and he was sent again with an expedition of miners to “find gold in sufficient quantities to quench the thirst of the starving markets.” (78)

Unfortunately for the tribes, Custer announced in 1875 that the Black Hills were rich with gold. The citizen-led invasion of the Black Hills by miners, some as individuals and some as corporate mining employees, began in earnest. Conflicts between miners and the legal tribal land heirs also started in earnest, and the gold-hungry United States government had an excuse to start another war to drive the Native Americans from their land.

Too many thoughts come spinning into my mind from this, but what’s the right way to handle them, order them, control them? For that I will take up a fountain pen and a notebook. Sometimes that’s the only way I can get a hold on the hydra.