[June 25th marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Little Big Horn, one of countless fraught moments across the long history of the so-called “Indian Wars.” There are few more frustrating, more tragic, nor more tellingly American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of those conflicts, leading up to a weekend post on Little Big Horn.]
On three figures who together help tell the story of a Northwestern war—and much more.
- William Danilson: The biography of Danilson on that Historical Society page tracing the history of his Idaho store (which he co-operated with freight depot owner and future Judge Fred S. Stevens) makes clear how much his time as a federal “Indian Agent” was just one of many money-making schemes that this Civil War veteran pursued once he moved West. It’s long been my sense that many of those who served as “Indian Agents” did so for precisely such self-interested reasons, and Danilson seems to have been no exception. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t exert a significant influence on the Shoshone-Bannock (as well as some of the neighboring Paiute) indigenous communities for whom he served as agent on the Fort hall Reservation; and indeed, Danilson’s push to have the individual or individuals who had shot white settlers in August 1877 turned over to the U.S. government was perhaps the single most precipitating factor in the exploding tensions that resulted in the Bannock War of 1878.
- Chief Egan (Ehegante): The first Chief who led the Bannock warriors when that military conflict between the tribe and the U.S. Army began in May 1878 was Chief Buffalo Horn. But Buffalo Horn was killed in action just a month into the war, and the multi-tribal Chief Egan took his place. As that hyperlinked biography traces, Egan had been born to members of the Umatilla tribe before being adopted into the Paiute, and so it makes sense that when a party of Umatilla warriors (who were allied with the U.S. Army in this conflict) approached his camp under a flag of peace, Egan allowed them to enter. But they betrayed his trust and murdered Egan and a number of others, dramatically changing the course of the war in the process. That particular fraught moment highlights the complex relations among indigenous communities as well as between each and the U.S. government and army, factors in every “Indian War” to be sure. But Egan’s own heritage also reminds us that, like that of every other American, Native American identities are cross-cultural in one way or another.
- Sarah Winnemucca: I wrote at length about Winnemucca’s role in the Bannock War as part of that hyperlinked We’re History piece on the tribal leader, translator and mediator, activist and author, and all-around badass and inspiring American. Although she could not stop the war and its tragedies from unfolding (a failure she laments at length in her excellent autoethnographic book, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims [1883]), she continued to fight for not only the Paiutes but all of these indigenous communities, and succeeded in helping a number of them return to the Malheur region (home to Fort Hall Reservation) after they had been banished to Washington State’s Yakama Reservation at the war’s end. I know this weeklong blog series is a pretty bleak one, although of course these are histories we desperately need to better remember; but the more we can also remember the impressive and inspiring individuals like Sarah Winnemucca as well, the better still.
Last conflict tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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