5 - Native-American sacrifice in an age of progress

Summary

“The love of possessions is a disease among them,” said Sitting Bull, summarizing with powerful conciseness the essential difference he saw between whites and Native Americans. One could argue that this statement provides as apt an explanation as any for the plight of America's original inhabitants in the late nineteenth century. In 1865 at the end of the Civil War there were over 300,000 Native Americans in the United States, a figure that excluded those who had avoided enumeration. During the war, Native-American loyalties were divided regionally. Southeastern Native Americans, including Cherokees, Chocktaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Creeks sided with the South, inspired by a promise of their own state after the war. The Five Civilized Tribes, as they were called, were themselves slaveholders, and this fact together with their bitterness over the government's consistent failure to honor treaties, drew them to the Confederacy. Four thousand Native Americans from other tribes fought for the North. Native Americans on both sides suffered during and after the war from the pillaging of their territory, burning of their villages, and slaughter of their cattle. At the war's end, Native Americans who had been loyal to the Confederacy were punished by the triumphant Union more harshly than the Confederacy itself. Reconstruction treaties commandeered Native-American lands for railroads and white settlement, and the Native Americans in the gold-rush territories barely survived the invasion of fortune-hunters. Lincoln's promise to improve government and tribal relations after the war, renewed in the 1867 Doolittle report, confirmed the gap between rhetoric and reality in white–Native-American affairs.