[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 two particularly striking details about the “last battle of the Indian Wars.”
I have to imagine I’m far from alone in being quite surprised to learn, as I did while researching options for the posts in this weeklong series, that the last time U.S. Army soldiers fought an armed conflict against Native Americans took place while millions of other U.S. soldiers were serving in World War I Europe. That battle took place just west of Nogales, Arizona, in an area known as Bear Valley that was a frequent passage across the border between the U.S. and Mexico (a highly relevant detail, on which more in a moment). On January 9th, 1918, a few dozen warriors from the Yaqui tribe (at least one of whom, according to an account written by the U.S. commanding officer Captain Frederick H.L. “Blondy” Ryder, was an 11-year-old boy) faced off against a similar number of soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 10th Cavalry Regiment. After a brief battle which resulted in just one confirmed death (of a Yaqui warrior), the Yaqui surrendered, ending not only this conflict but also, at least in terms of military clashes, the more than 150 years of “Indian Wars” that I’ve traced across this series.
Perhaps the most striking detail about this battle, although it’s not a surprising one to anyone who knows the history of the U.S. military in the post-Civil War West, was that the U.S. forces involved were entirely African American, part of the Buffalo Soldiers who had been among the most active units throughout the West since the immediate aftermath of the Civil War (in which most of the original Buffalo Soldiers had served). Certainly that fact makes Captain Ryder’s nickname of “Blondy” particularly ironic, although that’s a minor detail of course. Far more significant, at least in a symbolic way, is that this final battle of the Indian Wars pitted Black soldiers against Native American warriors. I’m not suggesting that the Buffalo Soldiers didn’t have choice or free will in their service, nor that their race renders them fundamentally distinct from all of the other U.S. soldiers who had fought against indigenous communities throughout these conflicts. But nonetheless—the generation of white Americans raised on Hollywood Western films would no doubt have their perspectives significantly shifted if they were presented with a recreation of this culminating battle of the kinds of cultural conflicts which so many Westerns featured.
Apparently the Yaqui warriors were likewise surprised at the racial identity of their military opponents—at least according to statements they made while being held as prisoners of war after the battle, when they argued that they had only fired on the approaching soldiers because they believed them to be Mexican. And that’s the other and even more striking detail about the Battle of Bear Valley: the Yaqui tribe had by this time been at war with Mexico for many years, as the Yaqui had been attempting to create an independent state in Sonora (the Mexican state just across the border from Nogales) and as a result had been funneling weapons and supplies through Bear Valley. It’s quite something, and ultimately quite telling, that the final battle of the Indian Wars wasn’t really a conflict between the U.S Army and an indigenous community at all, but rather a case of mistaken identity. That’s not to say that far too often—indeed almost always—these wars were not driven by the U.S. Army and government’s purposeful, violent, white supremacist intentions, as they most definitely were. But they were also and especially (and relatedly) tragically unnecessary, and perhaps no single battle reflects that reality better than does the culminating Battle of Bear Valley.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
Leave a Reply