In September of 1874, the great
Cheyenne “Sweet Medicine Chief” Little Wolf made the long overland
journey to Washington, D.C., with a delegation of his tribesmen for
the express purpose of making a lasting peace with the whites.
Having spent the weeks prior to his trip smoking and softly
discussing various peace initiatives with his tribal council of
forty-four chiefs, Little Wolf came to the nation’s capital with a
somewhat novel, though from the Cheyenne worldview, perfectly
rational plan that would ensure a safe and prosperous future for
his greatly beseiged people.
The Indian leader was received in
Washington with all the pomp and circumstance accorded to the
visiting head of state of a foreign land. At a formal ceremony in
the Capitol building with President Ulysses S. Grant, and members
of a specially appointed congressional commission, Little Wolf was
presented with the Presidential Peace Medal—a large ornate silver
medallion—that the Chief, with no intentional irony, a thing
unknown to the Cheyennes, would later wear in battle against the
U.S. Army in the Cheyennes’ final desperate days as a free people.
Grant’s profile appeared on one side of the medal, ringed by the
words: LET US HAVE PEACE LIBERTY JUSTICE AND EQUALITY; on the other
side an open Bible lay atop a rake, a plow, an ax, a shovel, and
sundry other farming implements with the words: ON EARTH PEACE GOOD
WILL TOWARD MEN 1874.
Also in attendance on this historic
occasion were the President’s wife, Julia, who had begged her
husband to be allowed to attend so that she might see the Indians
in all their savage regalia, and a few favored members of the
Washington press corps. The date was September 18,
1874.
Old daguerreotype photographs of the
assembly show the Cheyennes dressed in their finest ceremonial
attire—ornately beaded moccasins; hide leggings from the fringe of
which dangled chattering elk teeth; deerskin war shirts, trimmed at
the seams with the scalps of enemies and elaborately ornamented
with beads and dyed porcupine quills. They wore hammered silver
coins in their hair, and brass-wire and otter-fur bands in their
braids. Washingtonians had never seen anything quite like
it.
Although over fifty years old by this
time, Little Wolf looked at least a decade younger than his age. He
was lean and sinewy, with aquiline nose and flared nostrils, high,
ruddy cheekbones, and burnished bronze skin that bore the deep
pockmarks of a smallpox epidemic that had ravaged the Cheyenne
tribe in 1865. The Chief was not a large man, but he carried
himself with great bearing—head held high, an expression of innate
fierceness and defiance on his face. His demeanor would later be
characterized by newspaper accounts as “haughty” and
“insolent.”
Expressing himself through an
interpreter by the name of Amos Chapman from Fort Supply, Kansas,
Little Wolf came directly to the point. “It is the Cheyenne way
that all children who enter this world belong to their mother’s
tribe,” he began, addressing the President of the United States,
though he did not look directly in Grant’s eyes as this was
considered bad manners among his people. “My father was Arapaho and
my mother Cheyenne. Thus I was raised by my mother’s people, and I
am Cheyenne. But I have always been free to come and go among the
Arapaho, and in this way I learned also their way of life. This, we
believe, is a good thing.” At this point in his address, Little
Wolf would ordinarily have puffed on his pipe, giving all those
present a chance to consider what he had thus far said. However,
with usual white man bad manners, the Great White Father had
neglected to provide a pipe at this important
gathering.
The Chief continued: “The People [The
Cheyennes referred to themselves simply as Tsitsistas—the People] are a small tribe,
smaller than either the Sioux or the Arapaho; we have never been
numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a
certain number of the People, just as it can only carry a certain
number of the bears, the wolves, the elks, the pronghorns, and all
the rest of the animals. For if there are too many of any animal,
this animal starves until there is the right number again. We would
rather be few in number and have enough for everyone to eat, than
be too many and all starve. Because of the sickness you have
brought us (here Little Wolf touched his pockmarked cheek), and the
war you have waged upon us (here he touched his breast; he had been
wounded numerous times in battle), we are now even fewer. Soon the
People will disappear altogether, as the buffalo in our country
disappear. I am the Sweet Medicine Chief. My duty is to see that my
People survive. To do this we must enter the white man’s world—our
children must become members of your tribe. Therefore we ask the
Great Father for the gift of one thousand white women as wives, to
teach us and our children the new life that must be lived when the
buffalo are gone.”
Now a collective gasp rose from the
room, peppered with scattered exclamations of astonishment. To
interrupt a man while he was speaking, except to utter soft murmurs
of approbation, was an act of gross impoliteness to the Cheyennes,
and this outburst angered Little Wolf. But the Chief knew that
white people did not know how to behave, and he was not surprised.
Still, he paused for a moment to let the crowd settle and to allow
his chiefly displeasure to be registered by all
present.
“In this way,” Little Wolf continued,
“our warriors will plant the Cheyenne seed into the bellies of your
white women. Our seed will sprout and grow inside their wombs, and
the next generation of Cheyenne children will be born into your
tribe, with the full privileges attendant to that
position.”
At exactly this point in Little Wolf’s
address, President Grant’s wife, Julia, fainted dead away on the
floor, swooned right from her chair with a long, gurgling sigh like
the death rattle of a lung-shot buffalo cow. (It was unseasonably
hot in the room that day, and in her memoirs, Julia Dent Grant
would maintain that the heat, not moral squeamishness at the idea
of the savages breeding with white girls, had caused her to
faint.)
As aides rushed to the First Lady’s
side, the President, reddening in the face, began to rise
unsteadily to his feet. Little Wolf recognized that Grant was drunk
and, considering the solemnity of the occasion, the Chief felt that
this constituted a fairly serious breach of etiquette.
“For your gift of one thousand white
women,” Little Wolf continued in a stern, louder voice over the
rising clamor (although at this point interpreter Chapman was
practically whispering), “we will give you one thousand horses.
Five hundred wild horses and five hundred horses already
broke.”
Now Little Wolf raised his hand as if
in papal benediction, concluding his speech with immense dignity
and bearing. “From this day forward the blood of our people shall
be forever joined.”
But by then all hell had broken loose
in the room and hardly anyone heard the great leader’s final
remarks. Senators blustered and pounded the table. “Arrest the
heathens!” someone called out, and the row of soldiers flanking the
hall fell into formation, bayonets at the ready position. In
response, the Cheyenne chiefs all stood up in unison, instinctively
drawing knives and forming a circle, shoulders touching, in the way
that a bevy of quail beds down at night to protect itself from
predators.
President Grant had also gained his
feet, swaying slightly, his face scarlet, pointing his finger at
Little Wolf, and thundering, “Outrageous! Outrageous!” Little Wolf had
heard that the President was a great warrior and a man much
respected by his enemies. Still, the Sweet Medicine Chief did not
care to be pointed at in this impertinent manner, and if he’d had
his quirt with him, he’d have knocked the Great Father, drunk or
not, to his knees for this behavior. Little Wolf was infamous among
his people for his temper—slow to be aroused but grizzlylike in
ferocity.
Order was finally restored. The
Cheyennes put their knives up, and the guards quickly ushered the
Indian delegation out of the hall without further incident, the
great chief striding proudly at their head.
That night doors were locked all over
Washington, shades pulled, wives and daughters forbidden to go
outside as word of the Cheyennes’ blasphemous proposal swept the
capital. The next day’s newspaper headlines further fanned the
flames of racist fears and civic hysteria: “Savages Demand White Women Love Slaves!,” “White Brides for
the Red Devils!,” “Grant to Swap Injuns: White Girls for Wild
Horses!” In what must surely have been every
nineteenth-century American man’s worst nightmare, those few
citizens who did venture out with women on their arms over the next
few days cast furtive glances over their shoulders, keeping an
anxious watch out for the hordes of mounted redskins they secretly
feared might swoop down upon them, wailing like banshees as they
lifted scalps with a single slash of glinting knife blade, to carry
off their shrieking womenfolk and populate the earth with
half-breeds.
Official response to Little Wolf’s
unusual treaty offer was swift; a tone of high moral outrage
dominated the proclamations of the Congress, while the
administration itself moved quickly to assure a nervous citizenry
that no, white women would
certainly not be traded to the heathens and, yes, immediate steps were being taken by the
U.S. military to ensure that the virtue of American womanhood would
be well protected.
Two days later Little Wolf and his
entourage were packed inside a cattle car and escorted by armed
guard out of the nation’s capital. Word of the Indians’ peace
initiative had leaked out over the telegraph wires, and angry
citizens wielding denunciatory placards turned out in lynch
mob—like crowds along the way to taunt the Cheyennes as they
passed, pelting their train car with rotten fruit and racist
epithets.
At the same time that the Northern
Cheyennes were being booed from train platforms across the Midwest,
another parallel, and far more interesting national phenomenon was
gaining momentum. Women from all over the country were responding
to the Cheyennes’ marriage proposal—telegraphing and writing
letters to the White House, volunteering their services as brides.
Not all of these women were crackpots, and they seemed to cut a
wide socioeconomic and racial swath: everything from single working
girls in the cities looking to spice up their drab lives with some
adventure; to recently emancipated former slaves hoping to escape
the sheer drudgery of post-slavery life in the cotton mills, sweat
shops, and factories of newly industrialized America; to young
women widowed in the War Between the States. We know now that the
Grant administration did not turn a deaf ear to their
inquiries.
In private and after the initial
uproar had abated, the President and his advisors had to admit that
Little Wolf’s unprecedented plan for assimilation of the Cheyennes
made a certain practical sense. Having already implemented his
Indian Peace Policy, which gave over management of the Indian
reservations to the American Church, Grant was willing to consider
any peaceful solutions to the still explosive situation on the
Great Plains—a situation that impeded economic progress and
promised yet more bloodshed for frontier settlers.
Thus was born the “Brides for Indians”
(or “BFI” program, as its secret acronym became known in the
President’s inner circle). Besides placating the savages with this
generous gift of brides, the administration believed that the
“Noble American Woman,” working in concert with the church, might
also exert a positive influence upon the Cheyennes—to educate and
elevate them from barbarism to civilized life.
Other members of the President’s
cabinet continued to champion the original plan for resolution of
the “Indian problem,” and it was understood by all concerned that
any recaltrant tribes would still be subject to the “final
solution” of military annihilation.
Yet while the genocide of an entire
race of native people was considered by many to be morally
palatable and politically expedient, even the more progressive
members of the Grant cabinet were aware that the notion of white
women interbreeding with the savages would never wash with the
American public. Thus, in a series of highly secretive, top-level
meetings on the subject, the administration decided, in age-old
fashion, to take matters into its own hands—to launch its own
covert matrimonial operation.
Grant’s people assuaged their
political conscience with the proviso that all of the women
involved in this audacious experiment be volunteers—really little
different than mail-order brides—with the added moral legitimacy of
being under the wing of the church. Official rationale had it that
if these socially conscientious and adventuresome women chose to go
West and live with the Indians of their own volition, and if in the
process, the Cheyennes were distracted from their warlike ways,
then everyone benefited; a perfect Jeffersonian example of
government greasing the wheels of social altruism and individual
initiative.
If the “Brides for Indians” program
had an Achilles’ heel, the administration knew that it lay in its
plan to supplement an anticipated shortage of volunteers by
recruiting women out of jails, penitentiaries, debtors’ prisons,
and mental institutions—offering full pardons or unconditional
release, as the case might be, to those who agreed to sign on for
the program. One fact that the government had finally learned in
its dealings with the natives, was that these were a literal people
who expected treaties to be fulfilled to the letter. When the
Cheyennes negotiated for one thousand brides, they meant exactly
that number—and in return would deliver exactly one thousand horses
to fulfill their end of the bargain. Any discrepancy in these
figures would be sufficient cause to send the Indians back on the
warpath. The administration intended to ensure that this did not
occur—even if it meant early release of a few low-level felons or
minor mental defectives.
The first trainload of white women
bound for the northern Great Plains and their new lives as brides
of the Cheyenne nation left Washington under a veil of total
secrecy late one night the following spring, early March 1875—just
over six months after Chief Little Wolf made his startling public
request of President Grant. Over the next several weeks trains
departed stations in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Chicago.
On March 23, 1875, a young woman by
the name of May Dodd, age twenty-five years to the day, formerly a
patient in the Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum, a private facility
thirty miles north of Chicago, boarded the Union Pacific train at
Union Station, with forty-seven other volunteers and recruits from
the Chicago region—their destination Camp Robinson, Nebraska
Territory.
[NOTE: The following journals are largely unedited, and, except for very minor corrections in spelling and punctuation have been here transcribed exactly as written by their author, May Dodd. Contained within May Dodd’s journals, are several letters addressed to family members and friends. There is no indication that any of these letters were ever mailed, and they appear to have served the author primarily as a way for her to “speak” to individuals in her notebooks. It is also probable that May left this correspondence, as she says of the journals themselves, to be read later by her family in the event that she not survive her adventure. These letters, too, are presented in the order and form in which they appear in the original notebooks.]