Post by flashman on Dec 12, 2014 15:41:28 GMT -5
This is a personal reading experience report. I don't have to couch my findings in diplomatic language and I am going to be very open on the subject matter.
Dog Soldier Justice: The Ordeal of Susanna Alderdice in the Kansas Indian War (Paperback)
There are two principal schools of thought in the history of the West. The older one builds directly on William Jackson Turner's 1890 frontier thesis and basically tells a story of the triumph of European-style white civilization over Native savagery. It's a triumphalist and teleological narrative of progress. Hence, this perspective is also dubbed "progressivist". The settler, the buffalo hunter, the cavalryman and the cowboy are the heroes of this narrative. The Indian is often relegated to the role of a brutal, somewhat less than human creature who lacks what is the only acceptable civilization as well as the only acceptable religious faith. He is not only hopelessly backwards in terms of cultural and technological advancement (which alone makes his demise already a foregone conclusion); his lack of Christianity also renders him hopelessly morally deficient which makes his disappearance from the face of the earth much less lamentable. The year 1890 is the Francis Fukuyama moment in this historical narrative. With the official closing of the frontier, the history of the West is also closed.
A newer approach to the history of the West which has developed in the last 40 - 50 years is the so-called New Western History. This approach tries to look beyond the triumphalist settler perspective, looks much closer at the experiences of Natives, Mexicans and other non-native groups and makes even interdisciplinary side-looks into economics, ecology and even gender issues. Since historiography couldn't be more "pro-settler" than the traditional "progressivist" view, the New Western History is, by comparison, more "pro Indian".
As recent academic works on the Indian Wars have generally stressed much more the "plight of the Indians", some people are discontent with what they consider too little focus on the plight of settlers in the "winning of the West". Jeff Broome is without doubt one of them.
This book of his focuses on victimization experiences of Kansas and Colorado settlers in 1868 and 1869 at the hands of chiefly Cheyenne warriors. Since the 1868 raids were the prelude to and justification for the winter campaign that featured Custer's destruction of Chief Black Kettle's village on the Washita, I was always eager to learn more about this. Likewise, the 1869 raids led to the destruction of the Hotamitaniu a.k.a. Dog Soldiers. The story of the latter is incomplete without knowing more about the former. Many historical books nowadays focus more on the victimization of the Indians and seem to hush about these Indian raids. Jeff Broome seems to be filling that void. So, off I went and ordered Dr. Broome's book! Let me tell you how reading the book worked for me!
Good history books don't just preach to the choir. Good history books manage to take you by the hand, lead you in a convincing way down a certain, well-lit path and ultimately may give you a new perspective on something you already thought you knew.
Did Jeff Broome's book do that job for me? The chances weren't so bad.
In the afterword of the book, Jeff Broome writes that the two most important things for a historian is to get the facts straight and to interpret them correctly. Can't argue with that. But what does he really mean by that? Apparently he means that the older, i.e. closer to the actual events historical narratives are, the more reliable they are. He labels the "New Western History" as "paternalistic", criticizing that members of this school believe they can better understand history than the people who actually lived through it and claim to understand their experiences better than the people who had these experiences. Now, what could be bad about taking people and their first-hand experiences seriously? Arguably nothing. But at this point there is a crucial twist to the story. Jeff Broome always claims that he limits his efforts to describing the settler experience. What about the Indian side of the story? Jeff Broome leaves that to someone else to write about. Fair enough? Well, in effect that renders him a proponent of the (very) old "progressivist" school of historiography - the one which has been telling merry stories since the 1600s of felling trees and Indians.
Jeff Broome promises to paint only half of the picture, but that one very well and with a passion. Does that work if you want to "get the facts straight and interpret them correctly"?
I hate to say it but... it's a complete failure. It can't work. If you are determined to be really, really biased from the start, you won't... surprise, surprise, arrive at a balanced and objective picture. I have listened to many of Jeff Broome's audio lectures on ITunes, I think I like the guy. I wanted to like his book. I really tried. I couldn't. This is why:
1.) The book Title is "Dog Soldier Justice". It shows the large. barely lit profile of a painted-up Indian, presumably a "Dog Soldier". I open the book and I'm all giddy to learn who the Dog Soldiers were, what injustice they perceived and what they would have considered justice. I presume it's going to get ugly but I'm expecting to learn who they are and why they are doing what they are doing.
Sadly, that meant asking for way too much. Remember Jeff Broome's self-limiting perspective? Settlers period perspectives only? This is what he gives us on who those mysterious "Dog Soldiers" were:
"Indians driven out of various tribes for cowardice and other crimes, who having banded themselves together until they have become a dangerous tribe. They are called Dog Soldiers because the vilest word an Indian can use is to call a man a dog, hence these freebooters are thus designated, and by reason of their excellent drill they are called soldiers."
That's from a 1868 newspaper clipping from the Junction City Weekly Union. Very period, pure, undiluted settler perspective. Great. There is but one problem with that, and this is exemplary for Broome's whole approach. It may tell us very well what an 1868 newspaperman in the West thought he knew about these Indians. That's fine. But maybe we also want to know who and what the Dog Soldiers really were. And that's where Jeff Broome, very early in the game, leaves us completely in the lurch. On purpose. He doesn't comment on that quote. That's his introduction of the Dog Soldiers, that's all he thinks his readers need to know about the Dog Soldiers.
You may have sensed I'm a tad unhappy with that. That's because I happen to know already a thing or two about the Dog Soldiers and I realize with some amusement that this definition doesn't include a shred of correct facts. To wit:
Even the casual reader of readily available online resources will know that the Hotamitaniu of the years 1868/69 were not outcasts but revered role models. They were both a warrior society and a band, having four seats in the Cheyenne supreme political entity, the council of 44. They were known for their bravery, not their cowardice. All of them wore the "dog rope", a sash with a picket pin at its end which was driven into the ground as a mark of resolve in combat. When a Dog Soldier was staked to the ground in order to cover the retreat of his companions, he was required to remain there even if death was the consequence. The Dog Man could pull the pin from the ground only if his companions reached safety or another Dog Soldier released him from his duty. Such an example of gallant self-sacrifice in the defense of others occurred at Summit Springs, but that's not the kind of subject matter Jeff. Broome is interested in and thus it isn't mentioned in his book. The claim that the name "Dog" indicates contempt from other Indians is equally ludicrous. Among the Northern Cheyenne there was another society with a somewhat similar name, the "Crazy Dogs". There were "Dog Men" societies among various tribes. The claim that they had excellent drill doesn't fit well with the claim of prevalent cowardice. And lastly, the distinct term "soldier" doesn't even exist in the Cheyenne language. A warrior is called a "nótaxe". A white man, a spider or a trickster is called a "vé'ho'e". A soldier is called "nótaxevé'ho'e", i.e. a white-man warrior. Obviously, the word Hotamitaniu, derived from hótame (dog), has nothing to do with that.
An 1868 journalist from the Junction City Weekly Union was probably unlikely to know most or much of this. But we do. So why does Jeff Broome replace the knowledge of today with the venomous stereotypes of colonialist war propaganda of 1868? How does he think will this enhance our understanding of the history? I wonder how many people have already walked away from this book having a completely distorted idea of who or what the “Dog Soldiers” were. Obviously Jeff Broome is neither getting the facts straight here nor is he interpreting them correctly. Jeff Broome is getting the facts wrong because he leaps back at period ignorance and stereotypes and gives historical interpretation a pass. Please bear with me when I’m annoyed.
So what about this justice/injustice thing? I’m getting hesitant but I am not asking for too much since it’s in the bloody book title, right?
Why were the Cheyennes so brutal and mean towards the settlers on the Saline, Solomon and Republican in 1868 and 1869? Broome cannot dodge the question without leaving even a book with a scope as limited as this one obviously incomplete. In fact he does tackle the question but only in a few sentences, and terribly superficially.
Writes he on page 129:
"But by far, the main motive for capturing frontier women was profit. Dodge: 'Indians always prefer to capture rather than kill women, they being merchantable property. White women are unusually valuable, one moderately good-looking being worth as many ponies as would buy from their fathers three or four Indian girls.' As Rister succinctly noted, 'The profit to be derived far outweighed Indian grievances - misdeeds of the whites, slaughter of the buffalo, and settler occupation of favorite hunting grounds - as a motive for raids and outbreaks' ".
The latter statement, taken from a 1940 book on Indian captives, concludes the question of motives for Broome, not just for taking captives but for Indian raids on white settlers in general. Apart from the fact that it maliciously misrepresents all women in Plains Indian societies as mere chattel, this statement, astonishingly, claims that Indians wouldn't really reflect much about their own destruction at the hands of the whites. Allegedly, they wouldn't act out of such understandable or even noble motifs as the defense of their means of existence, their homeland or revenge for the loss of their loved-ones, of resources or of their entire way of life. No, they would just behave as mindless robbers who were committing robbery because that was simply their nature (together with universal habitual gang rape, as we will learn at the topical climax of the book, pun intended).
That is, obviously a very convenient "analysis" for any settler and therefore as old and popular as white encroachment on Indian lands: "We are taking your land, pushing your people towards obliteration. What you do to us, occasionally, has all the look and feel of retribution and fighting back. Fortunately, it isn't. Because you are too sub-human intellectually to designate your actions as such."
As one can see from amazon-reviewer comments on Broome's book on the subject, such claims, together with the characterization of the Hotamitaniu as a bunch of cowardly renegade outcast robbers, murderers and gang-rapers, have a strong and lasting impact on the readers. It is at points like this one where Jeff Broome clearly fails to meet the standards of scholarly intellectual honesty.
For decades, the Hotamitaniu lived and hunted in the region of the Republican, Saline and Solomon Rivers which remained intact Buffalo Range ecosystems even years after their defeat. Their political position, told in straight forward words, never changed and often communicated within the Cheyenne nation as well as towards the Whites was that they wouldn't leave their land and were determined to defend it. While Council chiefs of the Arkansas Bands which started to starve as early as 1860 became "appeasers" towards the whites early on, willing to sign literally every peace treaty the whites were presenting to them, the Hotamitaniu represented until the end the "resisters" who were never willing to sacrifice essential freedom for the hollow promise of some comfort and security. They weren't party to the unauthorized sellout treaty of 1861 and vehemently denounced it; they were guaranteed hunting rights in the established borders of 1851 in the 1865 Fort Wise Treaty (which was, once again, signed without their knowledge by Black Kettle and his supporters); they reiterated this non-negotiable element at Medicine Lodge in the fall of 1867. It was here were Senator Henderson, head of the US peace delegation, secured their "x"-marks under the latest treaty with the explicit assurance of continuing hunting rights between the Platte and the Arkansas as long as the buffalo roamed.
Broome mentions none of this. The only mention of the Medicine Lodge treaty in the book is in the preface by Monnett where somehow the erroneous statement has slipped through that the Cheyennes had agreed only to hunt south of the Arkansas. That’s what Congress finally wrote into the treaty text but not what the Cheyennes had agreed upon and been guaranteed in the talks (compare the relevant volume of “Witness to the Indian wars” and Henderson’s first official report to Congress upon his return from the treaty talks).
Unknown to the Hotamitaniu and the Southern Sutaio, who usually camped with them, Henderson didn't include the guarantee of hunting rights between the Platte and Arkansas in the final treaty text. He fraudulently obtained the signatures of the Hotamitaniu and other chiefs by denying them, who couldn't read the treaty text, in the final treaty text the only thing that mattered to them. Much worse, as the Cheyennes were smoking the peace pipe with the government down south at the Arkansas, a veritable settler invasion along the Saline, Solomon and Republican Rivers was unfolding. Many thousands of homesteaders were fanning out across the buffalo range, marking out their claims, building crude dugouts and simple farmsteads and breaking up the prairie ground for crop-raising. A change in weather in early 1868 delayed the usual northward migration of the Buffalo into these areas. Thus it wasn't until August 1868 that the first Cheyennes returned to their summer hunting range, a war party which was actually just passing through on its way to the hated Pawnees. What they suddenly saw was no longer an open buffalo range but a landscape broken up by brand new farms and ploughed fields. To put it into science-fiction speak: the Alien terra-formers had started to occupy their last refuge during their absence. The sense of shock, doom and hate must have been overwhelming.
"Imagine the fury of the Cheyennes when their eyes first gazed upon the new settlement they believed would not yet be present in the middle of their last great summer hunting range. These hunting lands that Senator Henderson had assured them were still theirs were now carved into units of private property that whites had suddenly transformed to agriculture." (John H. Monnett,"Reimagining Transitional Kansas Landscapes: Environment and Violence", Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 34 (Winter 2011–2012): pp. 258–79).
“Imagine the fury…” Monnett asks this one starting question which Broome is unwilling to even think about. I can only strongly recommend reading this article to augment the reading of Broome's book, it's available in PDF online. It contains everything important about the subject matter which Jeff Broome leaves out of the picture. Remember, Monnett is the very man who wrote the preface to this book.
Writes Monnett:
“A more realistic explanation for the Dog Soldiers’ venomous assaults on white civilians and their families in north central Kansas in August 1868 was the sight of agriculture spreading swiftly across the plains. The appearances of farms north of the Smoky Hill River was surely an unexpected sight for the Cheyenne, representing the worst possible kind of immediate and all-consuming threat to their geodialectic. Railroads, forts, and stage roads were one thing, but fields of corn and permanently settled white families were another.
The unanticipated plowing of the last remaining viable summer buffalo ranges was nothing short of a catastrophic destruction of the Cheyennes’ summer micro-biome.”
The Cheyennes realized that the final assault on their existence had started while they had been talking peace in the South. In a spasm of wild rage they commenced to destroy what was destroying them, and indeed they did it with a vengeance. Broome describes what that looked like at the receiving end, and that is the true merit of an otherwise deeply flawed study. Monnett, however, describes the root causes and the mechanisms of violence convincingly. Broome doesn't even bother to engage in such a kind of analysis. His narrative is akin to a Japanese historian lamenting about US atrocities like the firebombing of Tokyo without ever mentioning the Rape Nanjing or Pearl Harbor. And thus he also fails to deliver on "Justice".
2.) "The Ordeal of Susanna Alderdice" [and Maria Weichel]
This is where the narrative of the martyrdom of the center figures, Susanna Alderdice of Ohio and Maria Weichel from Lueneburg, Germany, reaches its inevitable climax. Enter the savage sex fiend, the Cheyenne Warrior as the habitual torturer cum (lots of cum) gang rapist.
Spoiler alert: Jeff Broome fails to tell us a convincing story on this one as well. Allegedly Susanna Alderdice was definitely gang-raped, as Broome states in gruesome colors and with utmost certainty. There is only one tiny problem here. There is no reliable evidence for that. Alderdice didn't live to tell her story, Weichel never mentioned Alderdice being raped and those Cheyennes that had not been slaughtered at Summit Springs were never interviewed.
Instead there is stuff like a statement by Carr that “both women were pregnant and both were no doubt raped by a dozen of the savages”. It is for the reader to decide what magic Indian medicine would make the belly of a woman swell so impressively within six weeks, the duration of the women’s captivity (both women were already pregnant when taken captive). Another source Broome presents claims that Maria Weichel later said that Tall Bull treated her “pretty well” but not the women, which is then used to hint at sexual jealousy of the women towards the captive. The closer and more desperate you look, the less clear the perceived trail becomes until it finally disappears right under your nose. How typical of those Indians.
Desperately, Broome resorts to making the boldest of bold claims that in every case of Cheyennes taking a white woman captive, there would be incessant gang-raping. The beauty of that argument is that you have a general rule and needn’t prove your facts on the ground any more. Clever, innit?
How does he support that case? He starts by firing his argumentative super weapon, a page-long quote from the 1877 book "The Plains of the West and its Inhabitants" by Colonel Richard Irving Dodge in which Dodge, with the authority of a learned man who has "lived for decades among the Indians", tells the inclined reader of 1877:
"The rule is this. When a woman is captured by a party she belongs equally to each and all, so long as that party is out..."
He then goes on to describe how the warriors always put a captive woman on a robe and gang-rape her as long as they want, howling and dancing around her all the time etc. Native women, he elucidates the civilized reader, know about this custom and pay no resistance, thus "getting away relatively easy". "The white woman naturally and instinctively resists, is ‘staked out’ and subjected to the fury and the passions fourfold increased by her being white and a novelty. Neither the unconsciousness nor even the death of the victim stops this horrible orgie [sic]". The description carries on in this way for quite a while. You're getting the picture.
Broome, never prone to questioning the credibility of such anti-Indian period sources, just writes: "Dodge's chilling account of rape of female captives, it will be seen, was devastatingly accurate", followed by four cherry-picked cases where rape has been alleged to and hopes that four cases, formulated convincingly enough, will be enough to let you lose sight of the forest for all the (four) trees. Documented counter-examples were no rape was ever claimed or the victims became subject to a short spasm of anger rape but were then immediately escorted back to their homes are carefully left out of his choice of case material. That’s cheap, sorry.
I have to thank Jeff Broome because he made me read Colonel Dodge's book. Dodge's book was back then considered a top notch source of Information on Indians. People like Mark Twain used it as source material (presumably the major reason for Twain's extremely villainous and unsympathetic portrayals of Indian characters in his novels compared to portrayals of other people of color)and it was even translated into German and marketed in Europe. Space doesn't permit to retell what highs of laughter and lows of indignation I went through when reading it. In the end I was really depressed. I had had no Idea before how high the level of ignorance about Indians was even among so-called frontier experts.
According to Dodge, Cheyennes in particular and Plains Indians in General grow up without any moral education whatsoever safe robbery and murder. “Virtue, morality, generosity, honor, are words not only absolutely without significance for him, but are not accurately translatable into any Indian language of the plains.” According to Dodge, every plains Indian boy, when he reaches the age of the warrior, is subjected to a sun dance procedure. If he flinches but once, he has failed the test of manhood and has to live as a transvestite among the women. That's how he explains how Cheyenne two spirit people come about, all six who allegedly live in the tribe. He claims that each Plains tribe is ruled by a head chief. Those allegedly used to be hereditary, but nowadays the US government sometimes imposes head chiefs who are more manageable. Bands are each ruled by a sub-chief. He has heard of tribal councils but has no knowledge as to their function. All the hunters, i.e. able-bodied men, are members of the Dog Soldiers. Space doesn't allow me to explain on how many levels each and every of these statements are false. Later Dodge tackles religion and claims the Cheyennes believe in a duality of a Good God and a Bad God who alternately rule every aspect of their lives. That sounds rather like Persian Manichaeism. In fact it has nothing to do with Cheyenne religion. There is no such thing there as a duality of good/bad god. Whatever key elements of Cheyenne religion there are to describe, no matter how superficially, Dodge doesn't even land a lucky shot at any of those. Always the expert on any aspect of Indian Life in general and Cheyenne life in particular, Dodge also tells us how Cheyenne Indians are clothed. Men only wear Moccasins and a breechclout, consisting of "one end of a very dirty piece of cloth, six or eight feet long by four inches wide" plus a buffalo robe in winter. That's it.
I suggest this period expert knowledge finally be put to use in the next Little Bighorn battle re-enactment. It will not only free the chronically cash-starved native re-enactors from unnecessary costume procurements but also finally remedy the unfortunate outcome of the battle script because the Native re-enactors will be busy covering their private parts with their hands (no matter how you try tweaking it, four inches of cloth just don't do the job) instead of fighting and will also keep stumbling while constantly stepping on their breechclouts. I'll spare you the female clothing description. Suffice to say that Indian women don't seem to have the kind of dresses I have seen in so many museums, books and online archives and instead show their boobs most of the time.
By now I haven’t even touched upon the chapters dealing with “Indian Warfare” and “Indian Cruelty”. I could go on for pages about his glaring distortions and fabrications about every aspect of Indian life in general and Cheyenne life in particular. Apparently Dodge mixed up his own fleeting impressions of Indians in the field with whatever camp talk he heard about "Injuns" and added the usual stereotypes which were flowing around plus his very own Victorian-age obsessions about the human body and sex. The result is certainly entertaining and an interesting illustration of how completely ignorant the US army was about the indigenous cultures they were fighting. Right until the very end, they had no idea who the people were they were fighting and destroying.
Enough about Dodge as Broome's central expert witness. How can it happen that Broome selects such insufferable period propaganda junk as prime evidence? I'm afraid it's simply because Dodge delivers the kind of generalizing account Broome is looking for and Broome didn't bother to look any further. At any rate, that's the result of Jeff Broome's approach to settler history, taking period sources as the gospel and anxiously avoiding the findings of later generations of "paternalistic" ethnographers and historians. It's a complete train wreck...
A final word on the story climax, the “battle” (body count 52 : 0, had the tables been turned, nobody would ever talk about anything else than a massacre) of “Susanna” [Summit] Springs: Having just dragged the reader through 150 pages of heartrending stories of terror and death due to sudden attacks, often filled with emphatic speculations were known facts from sources are wanting, the silence over the details on the sudden and violent deaths of (at least) 52 Cheyenne people in one spot is indeed deafening. He elicits to omit entirely the quite detailed descriptions by Grinnell or Powell (books in his own bibliography) of the fates of Cheyenne women and children of all ages who were desperately but futilely running for their lives and condenses his reading of these fates to a mere statistic (the very thing he so vehemently criticizes when Cheyenne depredations are dealt with only briefly by other historians). By contrast, Broome spends more than 5 pages on the trophy talk of who killed Tall Bull, making again extensive use of direct quotes from a rich selection of primary sources. Broome, never to leave a nice anecdote untold at the expense of the flow of the narrative, had also ample access to several pages worth of anecdotal stories about who Tall Bull was. But that would turn villainous cardboard Indians into fully-fleshed human beings, and that is, obviously not the purpose of this book. Instead Broome dwells on letters of recommendation for Tall Bull found in the captured village at Summit Springs, thus hinting at his duplicity. Again, Broome creates a distortive impression as he fails to explain that such letters were issued at a time when Tall Bull had reason to believe that the Whites would honor Senator Henderson’s Medicine Lodge Conference guarantees.
A final note on categories of Good and Evil and "Justice". You can't even start to write about that if you choose to focus on only one perspective in a conflict. Jeff Broome writes that Susanna Alderdice was innocent and killed unnecessarily by "hate". Quite possibly there was quite some hate involved at that moment. But consider this simple question posed from the opposite perspective: would any army unit ever allow an Indian to escape or get freed by his tribesmen when these are launching a devastating attack on white men, women and children? Hardly. I could mention several cases where Cheyenne prisoners were killed as a matter of course. How scandalously slanted Broomes ethical assessments can get is already illustrated early on in the preface where Broome writes that a 1871 Kansas massacre of 20 Pawnee scouts happened in a "justified" manner. These Pawnees had been freshly discharged from Army service, were showing their papers but got nevertheless surrounded and murdered by local Whites - among them the very relatives of the women their fellow tribesmen and Army scouts would be rescuing at Summit Springs only weeks later. This mass-killing, as per Broome, would have been perfectly justified because the discharged scouts had been begging for food. Previously other Pawnees had, as Broome claims, perpetrated "depredations" (whatever that means) after having begged for food, and therefore the settlers were, as Broome explains, "justified in doing everything necessary to protect themselves and their families" - by perpetrating a murder-spree against Pawnee Army scouts for begging for food. It is in moments like these where the reality of Broome's writings on Indian wars history surpasses any possible satire.
Summing up, Jeff Broome delivers 19th century propaganda junk about the “Dog Soldiers”, fails to deliver what Dog Soldier [Hotamitaniu] “justice” could have been about and delivers cherry-picked and slanted case-presentations plus a clownish “expert” on horror-tale Indians but nothing specific about “the ordeal of Susanna Alderdice”.
What did I get out of this read? The Hotamitaniu attacked homesteads (I knew that), they used surprise here and tricks there (that was to be expected), I didn't get any statistics (regrettably) or an operational assessment of the Cheyenne campaigns against settler takeover of their hunting grounds but lots of emphatic individual stories, often bordering on the melodramatic. The enormous empathy for the settlers coupled with the 19th century style disregard for the Indian side put me off emotionally and didn't work analytically at all. In my view this is how not to write a history book on the Indian wars.
© 2014 Sven Oliver Roth
Dog Soldier Justice: The Ordeal of Susanna Alderdice in the Kansas Indian War (Paperback)
There are two principal schools of thought in the history of the West. The older one builds directly on William Jackson Turner's 1890 frontier thesis and basically tells a story of the triumph of European-style white civilization over Native savagery. It's a triumphalist and teleological narrative of progress. Hence, this perspective is also dubbed "progressivist". The settler, the buffalo hunter, the cavalryman and the cowboy are the heroes of this narrative. The Indian is often relegated to the role of a brutal, somewhat less than human creature who lacks what is the only acceptable civilization as well as the only acceptable religious faith. He is not only hopelessly backwards in terms of cultural and technological advancement (which alone makes his demise already a foregone conclusion); his lack of Christianity also renders him hopelessly morally deficient which makes his disappearance from the face of the earth much less lamentable. The year 1890 is the Francis Fukuyama moment in this historical narrative. With the official closing of the frontier, the history of the West is also closed.
A newer approach to the history of the West which has developed in the last 40 - 50 years is the so-called New Western History. This approach tries to look beyond the triumphalist settler perspective, looks much closer at the experiences of Natives, Mexicans and other non-native groups and makes even interdisciplinary side-looks into economics, ecology and even gender issues. Since historiography couldn't be more "pro-settler" than the traditional "progressivist" view, the New Western History is, by comparison, more "pro Indian".
As recent academic works on the Indian Wars have generally stressed much more the "plight of the Indians", some people are discontent with what they consider too little focus on the plight of settlers in the "winning of the West". Jeff Broome is without doubt one of them.
This book of his focuses on victimization experiences of Kansas and Colorado settlers in 1868 and 1869 at the hands of chiefly Cheyenne warriors. Since the 1868 raids were the prelude to and justification for the winter campaign that featured Custer's destruction of Chief Black Kettle's village on the Washita, I was always eager to learn more about this. Likewise, the 1869 raids led to the destruction of the Hotamitaniu a.k.a. Dog Soldiers. The story of the latter is incomplete without knowing more about the former. Many historical books nowadays focus more on the victimization of the Indians and seem to hush about these Indian raids. Jeff Broome seems to be filling that void. So, off I went and ordered Dr. Broome's book! Let me tell you how reading the book worked for me!
Good history books don't just preach to the choir. Good history books manage to take you by the hand, lead you in a convincing way down a certain, well-lit path and ultimately may give you a new perspective on something you already thought you knew.
Did Jeff Broome's book do that job for me? The chances weren't so bad.
In the afterword of the book, Jeff Broome writes that the two most important things for a historian is to get the facts straight and to interpret them correctly. Can't argue with that. But what does he really mean by that? Apparently he means that the older, i.e. closer to the actual events historical narratives are, the more reliable they are. He labels the "New Western History" as "paternalistic", criticizing that members of this school believe they can better understand history than the people who actually lived through it and claim to understand their experiences better than the people who had these experiences. Now, what could be bad about taking people and their first-hand experiences seriously? Arguably nothing. But at this point there is a crucial twist to the story. Jeff Broome always claims that he limits his efforts to describing the settler experience. What about the Indian side of the story? Jeff Broome leaves that to someone else to write about. Fair enough? Well, in effect that renders him a proponent of the (very) old "progressivist" school of historiography - the one which has been telling merry stories since the 1600s of felling trees and Indians.
Jeff Broome promises to paint only half of the picture, but that one very well and with a passion. Does that work if you want to "get the facts straight and interpret them correctly"?
I hate to say it but... it's a complete failure. It can't work. If you are determined to be really, really biased from the start, you won't... surprise, surprise, arrive at a balanced and objective picture. I have listened to many of Jeff Broome's audio lectures on ITunes, I think I like the guy. I wanted to like his book. I really tried. I couldn't. This is why:
1.) The book Title is "Dog Soldier Justice". It shows the large. barely lit profile of a painted-up Indian, presumably a "Dog Soldier". I open the book and I'm all giddy to learn who the Dog Soldiers were, what injustice they perceived and what they would have considered justice. I presume it's going to get ugly but I'm expecting to learn who they are and why they are doing what they are doing.
Sadly, that meant asking for way too much. Remember Jeff Broome's self-limiting perspective? Settlers period perspectives only? This is what he gives us on who those mysterious "Dog Soldiers" were:
"Indians driven out of various tribes for cowardice and other crimes, who having banded themselves together until they have become a dangerous tribe. They are called Dog Soldiers because the vilest word an Indian can use is to call a man a dog, hence these freebooters are thus designated, and by reason of their excellent drill they are called soldiers."
That's from a 1868 newspaper clipping from the Junction City Weekly Union. Very period, pure, undiluted settler perspective. Great. There is but one problem with that, and this is exemplary for Broome's whole approach. It may tell us very well what an 1868 newspaperman in the West thought he knew about these Indians. That's fine. But maybe we also want to know who and what the Dog Soldiers really were. And that's where Jeff Broome, very early in the game, leaves us completely in the lurch. On purpose. He doesn't comment on that quote. That's his introduction of the Dog Soldiers, that's all he thinks his readers need to know about the Dog Soldiers.
You may have sensed I'm a tad unhappy with that. That's because I happen to know already a thing or two about the Dog Soldiers and I realize with some amusement that this definition doesn't include a shred of correct facts. To wit:
Even the casual reader of readily available online resources will know that the Hotamitaniu of the years 1868/69 were not outcasts but revered role models. They were both a warrior society and a band, having four seats in the Cheyenne supreme political entity, the council of 44. They were known for their bravery, not their cowardice. All of them wore the "dog rope", a sash with a picket pin at its end which was driven into the ground as a mark of resolve in combat. When a Dog Soldier was staked to the ground in order to cover the retreat of his companions, he was required to remain there even if death was the consequence. The Dog Man could pull the pin from the ground only if his companions reached safety or another Dog Soldier released him from his duty. Such an example of gallant self-sacrifice in the defense of others occurred at Summit Springs, but that's not the kind of subject matter Jeff. Broome is interested in and thus it isn't mentioned in his book. The claim that the name "Dog" indicates contempt from other Indians is equally ludicrous. Among the Northern Cheyenne there was another society with a somewhat similar name, the "Crazy Dogs". There were "Dog Men" societies among various tribes. The claim that they had excellent drill doesn't fit well with the claim of prevalent cowardice. And lastly, the distinct term "soldier" doesn't even exist in the Cheyenne language. A warrior is called a "nótaxe". A white man, a spider or a trickster is called a "vé'ho'e". A soldier is called "nótaxevé'ho'e", i.e. a white-man warrior. Obviously, the word Hotamitaniu, derived from hótame (dog), has nothing to do with that.
An 1868 journalist from the Junction City Weekly Union was probably unlikely to know most or much of this. But we do. So why does Jeff Broome replace the knowledge of today with the venomous stereotypes of colonialist war propaganda of 1868? How does he think will this enhance our understanding of the history? I wonder how many people have already walked away from this book having a completely distorted idea of who or what the “Dog Soldiers” were. Obviously Jeff Broome is neither getting the facts straight here nor is he interpreting them correctly. Jeff Broome is getting the facts wrong because he leaps back at period ignorance and stereotypes and gives historical interpretation a pass. Please bear with me when I’m annoyed.
So what about this justice/injustice thing? I’m getting hesitant but I am not asking for too much since it’s in the bloody book title, right?
Why were the Cheyennes so brutal and mean towards the settlers on the Saline, Solomon and Republican in 1868 and 1869? Broome cannot dodge the question without leaving even a book with a scope as limited as this one obviously incomplete. In fact he does tackle the question but only in a few sentences, and terribly superficially.
Writes he on page 129:
"But by far, the main motive for capturing frontier women was profit. Dodge: 'Indians always prefer to capture rather than kill women, they being merchantable property. White women are unusually valuable, one moderately good-looking being worth as many ponies as would buy from their fathers three or four Indian girls.' As Rister succinctly noted, 'The profit to be derived far outweighed Indian grievances - misdeeds of the whites, slaughter of the buffalo, and settler occupation of favorite hunting grounds - as a motive for raids and outbreaks' ".
The latter statement, taken from a 1940 book on Indian captives, concludes the question of motives for Broome, not just for taking captives but for Indian raids on white settlers in general. Apart from the fact that it maliciously misrepresents all women in Plains Indian societies as mere chattel, this statement, astonishingly, claims that Indians wouldn't really reflect much about their own destruction at the hands of the whites. Allegedly, they wouldn't act out of such understandable or even noble motifs as the defense of their means of existence, their homeland or revenge for the loss of their loved-ones, of resources or of their entire way of life. No, they would just behave as mindless robbers who were committing robbery because that was simply their nature (together with universal habitual gang rape, as we will learn at the topical climax of the book, pun intended).
That is, obviously a very convenient "analysis" for any settler and therefore as old and popular as white encroachment on Indian lands: "We are taking your land, pushing your people towards obliteration. What you do to us, occasionally, has all the look and feel of retribution and fighting back. Fortunately, it isn't. Because you are too sub-human intellectually to designate your actions as such."
As one can see from amazon-reviewer comments on Broome's book on the subject, such claims, together with the characterization of the Hotamitaniu as a bunch of cowardly renegade outcast robbers, murderers and gang-rapers, have a strong and lasting impact on the readers. It is at points like this one where Jeff Broome clearly fails to meet the standards of scholarly intellectual honesty.
For decades, the Hotamitaniu lived and hunted in the region of the Republican, Saline and Solomon Rivers which remained intact Buffalo Range ecosystems even years after their defeat. Their political position, told in straight forward words, never changed and often communicated within the Cheyenne nation as well as towards the Whites was that they wouldn't leave their land and were determined to defend it. While Council chiefs of the Arkansas Bands which started to starve as early as 1860 became "appeasers" towards the whites early on, willing to sign literally every peace treaty the whites were presenting to them, the Hotamitaniu represented until the end the "resisters" who were never willing to sacrifice essential freedom for the hollow promise of some comfort and security. They weren't party to the unauthorized sellout treaty of 1861 and vehemently denounced it; they were guaranteed hunting rights in the established borders of 1851 in the 1865 Fort Wise Treaty (which was, once again, signed without their knowledge by Black Kettle and his supporters); they reiterated this non-negotiable element at Medicine Lodge in the fall of 1867. It was here were Senator Henderson, head of the US peace delegation, secured their "x"-marks under the latest treaty with the explicit assurance of continuing hunting rights between the Platte and the Arkansas as long as the buffalo roamed.
Broome mentions none of this. The only mention of the Medicine Lodge treaty in the book is in the preface by Monnett where somehow the erroneous statement has slipped through that the Cheyennes had agreed only to hunt south of the Arkansas. That’s what Congress finally wrote into the treaty text but not what the Cheyennes had agreed upon and been guaranteed in the talks (compare the relevant volume of “Witness to the Indian wars” and Henderson’s first official report to Congress upon his return from the treaty talks).
Unknown to the Hotamitaniu and the Southern Sutaio, who usually camped with them, Henderson didn't include the guarantee of hunting rights between the Platte and Arkansas in the final treaty text. He fraudulently obtained the signatures of the Hotamitaniu and other chiefs by denying them, who couldn't read the treaty text, in the final treaty text the only thing that mattered to them. Much worse, as the Cheyennes were smoking the peace pipe with the government down south at the Arkansas, a veritable settler invasion along the Saline, Solomon and Republican Rivers was unfolding. Many thousands of homesteaders were fanning out across the buffalo range, marking out their claims, building crude dugouts and simple farmsteads and breaking up the prairie ground for crop-raising. A change in weather in early 1868 delayed the usual northward migration of the Buffalo into these areas. Thus it wasn't until August 1868 that the first Cheyennes returned to their summer hunting range, a war party which was actually just passing through on its way to the hated Pawnees. What they suddenly saw was no longer an open buffalo range but a landscape broken up by brand new farms and ploughed fields. To put it into science-fiction speak: the Alien terra-formers had started to occupy their last refuge during their absence. The sense of shock, doom and hate must have been overwhelming.
"Imagine the fury of the Cheyennes when their eyes first gazed upon the new settlement they believed would not yet be present in the middle of their last great summer hunting range. These hunting lands that Senator Henderson had assured them were still theirs were now carved into units of private property that whites had suddenly transformed to agriculture." (John H. Monnett,"Reimagining Transitional Kansas Landscapes: Environment and Violence", Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 34 (Winter 2011–2012): pp. 258–79).
“Imagine the fury…” Monnett asks this one starting question which Broome is unwilling to even think about. I can only strongly recommend reading this article to augment the reading of Broome's book, it's available in PDF online. It contains everything important about the subject matter which Jeff Broome leaves out of the picture. Remember, Monnett is the very man who wrote the preface to this book.
Writes Monnett:
“A more realistic explanation for the Dog Soldiers’ venomous assaults on white civilians and their families in north central Kansas in August 1868 was the sight of agriculture spreading swiftly across the plains. The appearances of farms north of the Smoky Hill River was surely an unexpected sight for the Cheyenne, representing the worst possible kind of immediate and all-consuming threat to their geodialectic. Railroads, forts, and stage roads were one thing, but fields of corn and permanently settled white families were another.
The unanticipated plowing of the last remaining viable summer buffalo ranges was nothing short of a catastrophic destruction of the Cheyennes’ summer micro-biome.”
The Cheyennes realized that the final assault on their existence had started while they had been talking peace in the South. In a spasm of wild rage they commenced to destroy what was destroying them, and indeed they did it with a vengeance. Broome describes what that looked like at the receiving end, and that is the true merit of an otherwise deeply flawed study. Monnett, however, describes the root causes and the mechanisms of violence convincingly. Broome doesn't even bother to engage in such a kind of analysis. His narrative is akin to a Japanese historian lamenting about US atrocities like the firebombing of Tokyo without ever mentioning the Rape Nanjing or Pearl Harbor. And thus he also fails to deliver on "Justice".
2.) "The Ordeal of Susanna Alderdice" [and Maria Weichel]
This is where the narrative of the martyrdom of the center figures, Susanna Alderdice of Ohio and Maria Weichel from Lueneburg, Germany, reaches its inevitable climax. Enter the savage sex fiend, the Cheyenne Warrior as the habitual torturer cum (lots of cum) gang rapist.
Spoiler alert: Jeff Broome fails to tell us a convincing story on this one as well. Allegedly Susanna Alderdice was definitely gang-raped, as Broome states in gruesome colors and with utmost certainty. There is only one tiny problem here. There is no reliable evidence for that. Alderdice didn't live to tell her story, Weichel never mentioned Alderdice being raped and those Cheyennes that had not been slaughtered at Summit Springs were never interviewed.
Instead there is stuff like a statement by Carr that “both women were pregnant and both were no doubt raped by a dozen of the savages”. It is for the reader to decide what magic Indian medicine would make the belly of a woman swell so impressively within six weeks, the duration of the women’s captivity (both women were already pregnant when taken captive). Another source Broome presents claims that Maria Weichel later said that Tall Bull treated her “pretty well” but not the women, which is then used to hint at sexual jealousy of the women towards the captive. The closer and more desperate you look, the less clear the perceived trail becomes until it finally disappears right under your nose. How typical of those Indians.
Desperately, Broome resorts to making the boldest of bold claims that in every case of Cheyennes taking a white woman captive, there would be incessant gang-raping. The beauty of that argument is that you have a general rule and needn’t prove your facts on the ground any more. Clever, innit?
How does he support that case? He starts by firing his argumentative super weapon, a page-long quote from the 1877 book "The Plains of the West and its Inhabitants" by Colonel Richard Irving Dodge in which Dodge, with the authority of a learned man who has "lived for decades among the Indians", tells the inclined reader of 1877:
"The rule is this. When a woman is captured by a party she belongs equally to each and all, so long as that party is out..."
He then goes on to describe how the warriors always put a captive woman on a robe and gang-rape her as long as they want, howling and dancing around her all the time etc. Native women, he elucidates the civilized reader, know about this custom and pay no resistance, thus "getting away relatively easy". "The white woman naturally and instinctively resists, is ‘staked out’ and subjected to the fury and the passions fourfold increased by her being white and a novelty. Neither the unconsciousness nor even the death of the victim stops this horrible orgie [sic]". The description carries on in this way for quite a while. You're getting the picture.
Broome, never prone to questioning the credibility of such anti-Indian period sources, just writes: "Dodge's chilling account of rape of female captives, it will be seen, was devastatingly accurate", followed by four cherry-picked cases where rape has been alleged to and hopes that four cases, formulated convincingly enough, will be enough to let you lose sight of the forest for all the (four) trees. Documented counter-examples were no rape was ever claimed or the victims became subject to a short spasm of anger rape but were then immediately escorted back to their homes are carefully left out of his choice of case material. That’s cheap, sorry.
I have to thank Jeff Broome because he made me read Colonel Dodge's book. Dodge's book was back then considered a top notch source of Information on Indians. People like Mark Twain used it as source material (presumably the major reason for Twain's extremely villainous and unsympathetic portrayals of Indian characters in his novels compared to portrayals of other people of color)and it was even translated into German and marketed in Europe. Space doesn't permit to retell what highs of laughter and lows of indignation I went through when reading it. In the end I was really depressed. I had had no Idea before how high the level of ignorance about Indians was even among so-called frontier experts.
According to Dodge, Cheyennes in particular and Plains Indians in General grow up without any moral education whatsoever safe robbery and murder. “Virtue, morality, generosity, honor, are words not only absolutely without significance for him, but are not accurately translatable into any Indian language of the plains.” According to Dodge, every plains Indian boy, when he reaches the age of the warrior, is subjected to a sun dance procedure. If he flinches but once, he has failed the test of manhood and has to live as a transvestite among the women. That's how he explains how Cheyenne two spirit people come about, all six who allegedly live in the tribe. He claims that each Plains tribe is ruled by a head chief. Those allegedly used to be hereditary, but nowadays the US government sometimes imposes head chiefs who are more manageable. Bands are each ruled by a sub-chief. He has heard of tribal councils but has no knowledge as to their function. All the hunters, i.e. able-bodied men, are members of the Dog Soldiers. Space doesn't allow me to explain on how many levels each and every of these statements are false. Later Dodge tackles religion and claims the Cheyennes believe in a duality of a Good God and a Bad God who alternately rule every aspect of their lives. That sounds rather like Persian Manichaeism. In fact it has nothing to do with Cheyenne religion. There is no such thing there as a duality of good/bad god. Whatever key elements of Cheyenne religion there are to describe, no matter how superficially, Dodge doesn't even land a lucky shot at any of those. Always the expert on any aspect of Indian Life in general and Cheyenne life in particular, Dodge also tells us how Cheyenne Indians are clothed. Men only wear Moccasins and a breechclout, consisting of "one end of a very dirty piece of cloth, six or eight feet long by four inches wide" plus a buffalo robe in winter. That's it.
I suggest this period expert knowledge finally be put to use in the next Little Bighorn battle re-enactment. It will not only free the chronically cash-starved native re-enactors from unnecessary costume procurements but also finally remedy the unfortunate outcome of the battle script because the Native re-enactors will be busy covering their private parts with their hands (no matter how you try tweaking it, four inches of cloth just don't do the job) instead of fighting and will also keep stumbling while constantly stepping on their breechclouts. I'll spare you the female clothing description. Suffice to say that Indian women don't seem to have the kind of dresses I have seen in so many museums, books and online archives and instead show their boobs most of the time.
By now I haven’t even touched upon the chapters dealing with “Indian Warfare” and “Indian Cruelty”. I could go on for pages about his glaring distortions and fabrications about every aspect of Indian life in general and Cheyenne life in particular. Apparently Dodge mixed up his own fleeting impressions of Indians in the field with whatever camp talk he heard about "Injuns" and added the usual stereotypes which were flowing around plus his very own Victorian-age obsessions about the human body and sex. The result is certainly entertaining and an interesting illustration of how completely ignorant the US army was about the indigenous cultures they were fighting. Right until the very end, they had no idea who the people were they were fighting and destroying.
Enough about Dodge as Broome's central expert witness. How can it happen that Broome selects such insufferable period propaganda junk as prime evidence? I'm afraid it's simply because Dodge delivers the kind of generalizing account Broome is looking for and Broome didn't bother to look any further. At any rate, that's the result of Jeff Broome's approach to settler history, taking period sources as the gospel and anxiously avoiding the findings of later generations of "paternalistic" ethnographers and historians. It's a complete train wreck...
A final word on the story climax, the “battle” (body count 52 : 0, had the tables been turned, nobody would ever talk about anything else than a massacre) of “Susanna” [Summit] Springs: Having just dragged the reader through 150 pages of heartrending stories of terror and death due to sudden attacks, often filled with emphatic speculations were known facts from sources are wanting, the silence over the details on the sudden and violent deaths of (at least) 52 Cheyenne people in one spot is indeed deafening. He elicits to omit entirely the quite detailed descriptions by Grinnell or Powell (books in his own bibliography) of the fates of Cheyenne women and children of all ages who were desperately but futilely running for their lives and condenses his reading of these fates to a mere statistic (the very thing he so vehemently criticizes when Cheyenne depredations are dealt with only briefly by other historians). By contrast, Broome spends more than 5 pages on the trophy talk of who killed Tall Bull, making again extensive use of direct quotes from a rich selection of primary sources. Broome, never to leave a nice anecdote untold at the expense of the flow of the narrative, had also ample access to several pages worth of anecdotal stories about who Tall Bull was. But that would turn villainous cardboard Indians into fully-fleshed human beings, and that is, obviously not the purpose of this book. Instead Broome dwells on letters of recommendation for Tall Bull found in the captured village at Summit Springs, thus hinting at his duplicity. Again, Broome creates a distortive impression as he fails to explain that such letters were issued at a time when Tall Bull had reason to believe that the Whites would honor Senator Henderson’s Medicine Lodge Conference guarantees.
A final note on categories of Good and Evil and "Justice". You can't even start to write about that if you choose to focus on only one perspective in a conflict. Jeff Broome writes that Susanna Alderdice was innocent and killed unnecessarily by "hate". Quite possibly there was quite some hate involved at that moment. But consider this simple question posed from the opposite perspective: would any army unit ever allow an Indian to escape or get freed by his tribesmen when these are launching a devastating attack on white men, women and children? Hardly. I could mention several cases where Cheyenne prisoners were killed as a matter of course. How scandalously slanted Broomes ethical assessments can get is already illustrated early on in the preface where Broome writes that a 1871 Kansas massacre of 20 Pawnee scouts happened in a "justified" manner. These Pawnees had been freshly discharged from Army service, were showing their papers but got nevertheless surrounded and murdered by local Whites - among them the very relatives of the women their fellow tribesmen and Army scouts would be rescuing at Summit Springs only weeks later. This mass-killing, as per Broome, would have been perfectly justified because the discharged scouts had been begging for food. Previously other Pawnees had, as Broome claims, perpetrated "depredations" (whatever that means) after having begged for food, and therefore the settlers were, as Broome explains, "justified in doing everything necessary to protect themselves and their families" - by perpetrating a murder-spree against Pawnee Army scouts for begging for food. It is in moments like these where the reality of Broome's writings on Indian wars history surpasses any possible satire.
Summing up, Jeff Broome delivers 19th century propaganda junk about the “Dog Soldiers”, fails to deliver what Dog Soldier [Hotamitaniu] “justice” could have been about and delivers cherry-picked and slanted case-presentations plus a clownish “expert” on horror-tale Indians but nothing specific about “the ordeal of Susanna Alderdice”.
What did I get out of this read? The Hotamitaniu attacked homesteads (I knew that), they used surprise here and tricks there (that was to be expected), I didn't get any statistics (regrettably) or an operational assessment of the Cheyenne campaigns against settler takeover of their hunting grounds but lots of emphatic individual stories, often bordering on the melodramatic. The enormous empathy for the settlers coupled with the 19th century style disregard for the Indian side put me off emotionally and didn't work analytically at all. In my view this is how not to write a history book on the Indian wars.
© 2014 Sven Oliver Roth
