Thirsting for war, hungering for peace: Drought, bison migrations, and native peoples on the southern plains, 1845-1859

Journal of the West

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 71-78

  Sweeney, Kevin ^a  

^a Wayland Baptist University   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952522545     PISSN: 0025169     EISSN: 19300115     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Whitefield to Alfred Cumming, Sept. 27, 1854, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854), 90
2. F. Todd Smith, The Caddos, the Wichitas, and the United States, 1846-1901 (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1996), 52, 54
3. Mildren P. Mayhall, The Kiowas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 217
4. The Comanche and other Plains tribes thought that the presence of tribes removed from the East and growing white settlement resulted in the over-hunting of the bison herds. Government documents reflected this opinion, and the early histories of the Comanche nation were influenced by these sources to agree that the growing Indian and white populations in the tallgrass prairie had resulted in over-hunting the staple of the Plains natives. Rupert Norval Richardson, The Comanche Barrier to the South Plains Settlement: A Century and a Half of Savage Resistance to the Advancing White Frontier (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1933), 177
5. Grant Foreman, Advancing the Frontier, 1830-1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1933), 279
6. During the Cold War, military explanations became more popular, influencing some scholars to conclude that a strong military presence acted as a deterrent to Comanche aggression. Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel's The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 301
7. Leo E. Oliva, "Fort Atkinson on the Santa Fe Trail, 1850-1854," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 40 (Summer 1974): 232
8. The Vietnam War triggered a reaction by many in the United States to reach a better understanding of native cultures throughout the world. More sympathetic interpretations became common, pointing to the effects of the Gold Rush, which pulled thousands of white migrants from the Eastern United States to the West Coast through the heart of Comancheria, bringing with them pathogens that wrought havoc on the native population and scaring off the bison supply. The Comanche retaliated with increased warfare aimed at either avenging their losses or obtaining horses to trade with the trail travelers for goods not produced by the tribe. T. Ferenbach, Comanches: The Destruction of A People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 388-391
9. Thomas W. Kavanagh, The Comanches: A History, 1706-1875 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 387
10. Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800-1850," Journal of American History, 78 (Sept. 1991): 479, 483
11. Elliot West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 62, 61, 65
12. T. J. Blasing, D. W. Stahle, and D. N. Duvick, "Tree Ring-Based Reconstruction of Annual Precipitation in the South-Central United States from 1750 to 1980," Water Resources Research, 24 (Jan. 1988): 168
13. The National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) web site that includes climate reconstructions based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index can be accessed at www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/pdsiyear.html
14. Tom D. Dillehay, "Late Quaternary Bison Population Changes on the Southern Plains," Plains Anthropologist, 19 (1974): 185
15. Timothy Baugh, "Ecology and Exchange: The Dynamics of Plains-Pueblo Interaction," in Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists, Katherine Speilmann, ed. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 121
16. Timothy Baugh, "Holocene Adaptations in the Southern High Plains," in Plains Indians, A. D. 500-1500: The Archaeological Past of Historic Groups, Karl Schlesier, ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 287
17. Message from the President of the United States Communicating the Discoveries Made in Exploring the Missouri, Red River, and Washita by Captains Lewis and Clark, Doctor Sibley, and Mr. Dunbar (Washington, D.C.: A. & G. Way, 1806), 75
18. Wallace and Hoebel, The Comanches, 74
19. Francis Levine, "Economic Perspectives on Comanchero Trade," in Farmers, Hunters and Colonists, ibid., 157
20. Andrew McKee Jones, "Comanches and Texans in the Making of the Comanche Nation: The Historical Anthropology of Comanche-Texan Relations, 1803-1997" (Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1997): 122-123
21. Ferenbach, Comanches, 388
22. John C. Ewers, "The Influence of Epidemics on the Indian Populations and Cultures of Texas," in Native American Demography in the Spanish Borderlands, Lark Spencer Larson, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1991), 170
23. Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State: Or Recollections of Old Texas Days (Austin, TX: Gammel Book Co., 1900), 188
24. Kavanagh, The Comanches, 345
25. Richardson, The Comanche Barrier, 173-174
26. Charles Latrobe, The Rambler in North America (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), 203
27. Armstrong to T. Hartley Crawford, Sept. 30, 1841, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, (Washington, D.C.: A.O.P. Nicholson, 1841), 316
28. George F. Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains (London: J. Murray, 1847), 266
29. U.S. Congress. Senate. Report of Captain R. B. Marcy. 32nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1853)
30. in Foreman, Advancing the Frontier, 261
31. The Standard (Clarksville, TX), May 28, 1853
32. Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy," 479
33. Elliot West, The Way to the West, 62
34. Dan Flores, Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 267
35. Dan Flores, Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest Ibid., 39
36. Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, 266
37. Ruxton, Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains, Ibid., 299
38. The PDSI plots can be accessed via the National Geophysical Data Center at www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/pdsiyear.html
39. In 1850, Joseph Smith, a 19-year-old from Buffalo, New York, accompanied a unit ordered to survey the boundary between the Cherokee and Creek lands. Smith's diary is full of expectations of adventure: the treeless prairies, buffalo, Indians. Yet what he found was a very dry and hot grassland and hardly any buffalo. The lack of water threatened to terminate the survey and force the party to return to Fort Gibson. Joseph R. Smith, "Diary of Joseph Smith," Western History Collection, Norman, OK, 10 and 23; 21 and 22
40. Lieutenant Heth, an officer at Fort Atkinson near present-day Dodge City, Kansas, wrote that from August 1850 to August 1851 it had not rained in any noteworthy amount within 100 miles of the post leaving very little grass for the animals to eat. Heth to Henry Stanton, Aug. 4, 1851, "Consolidated Correspondence File," Quartermaster General's Office (Record Group 92), National Archives
41. In that same year Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Indian agent for the Upper Arkansas Agency, wrote that his journey out to Fort Atkinson was marked by "a very unusual scarcity of water." When his group came upon the Arkansas River they found two small, stagnant pools of water emitting an extremely offensive smell due to the number of dead fish lying on the dry river bed. Of interest, Fitzpatrick claimed that same year that buffalo abounded to the west in the region between the Arkansas River and Fort Laramie. Thomas Fitzpatrick to L. Lea, Sept. 22, 1851, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 71
42. Not surprisingly, Charles Halleck, a visitor to Fort Atkinson in 1852, claimed that "buffalo chips' . . . once found in great abundance, are now quite scarce." Charles Halleck, "The Siege of Fort Atkinson," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 15 (Oct. 1957): 638
43. quoted in Oliva, "Fort Atkins," 217. The drought of 1850-1851 extended further south as well including the Creek and Choctaw agencies
44. John Drennan to Luke Lea, Oct. 15, 1852, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, ibid., 101
45. Whitefield to Manypenny, Sept. 4, 1855, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, ibid., 117
46. Drew to Manypenny, Mar. 24, 1855, in Foreman, Advancing the Frontier, 282
47. Capron to Howard, Sept. 30, 1852, United States Indian Office, Interior Building, Washington, D.C., Letters Received (I.O., L.R)., H 112, in Richardson, Comanches, 212-213
48. Thomas Fitzpatrick to A. Cumming, Nov. 19, 1853, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 123
49. Robert C. Miller to John Havery, Oct. 14, 1857, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 143
50. J. L. Collins to C. E. Mix, Sept. 27, 1858, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, ibid., 185-186
51. T. Smith, Caddos, Wichitas and the United States, 52
52. Smith, The Caddos, 54
53. Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ibid., 98-99