Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 131-54.
Abstract
In mid-October of 1855, Blackfoot Treaty commissioner Isaac 1. Stevens, governor of Washington Territory and ex-officio its superintendent of Indian Affairs, and his co-commissioner Colonel Alfred Cumming, head of the Central Superintendency including Nebraska Territory, finally assembled the Blackfoot Peace Council just below the confluence of the Judith and Missouri Rivers. The federal government through the Office of Indian Affairs by then had already pieced together a new reservation policy for the West. This "new order of things," largely designed by Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny, hoped to reduce white conflicts with Indians, to prevent, if possible, expensive military actions, and above all to extinguish Indian land title by purchase, thereby enabling "legitimate" white settlement. In doing so, the new policy went well beyond the government's earlier and more limited goals of keeping immigrant trails free of hostile Indians and of creating a peaceful, federal dispensation or order on the Great Plains by means of annual compensation.1
The Blackfoot Council and the treaty that emerged from it, often termed Lame Bull's Treaty, however, did not fit the new reservation policy. It extinguished no aboriginal land title through land sales or cessions, nor did it provide for Indian removal to reservations where the government could establish schools, hospitals, and mills and provide farming instruction and moral guidance. Nor did the treaty advance the division of communal lands in order to allot small parcels to individual Indians. It was not a so-called land treaty at all; it was a peace treaty. And it contained a surprise-the federal creation of a common hunting ground. This designated area was to be shared "in peace" by the Blackfoot tribes and what were termed the "Western Indians," those who had come from west of the Rocky Mountains, across the continental divide, from the drainages of the Columbia River. These Western Indians were the Nez Perce, Yakima, Walla Walla, Cayuse, Kootenai, Spokane, and numerous Salish speakers, most prominently the Flathead and the Pend d'Oreille.
The formal establishment of such a common hunting ground in October of 1855 flew in the face of much of the emergent reservation policy. Instead of being encouraged to establish fixed and permanent homes, namely reservations, for exclusive tribal use, and to stay put, Stevens's federal recognition and formal establishment of a "buffalo commons" stimulated the bison hunters of the Columbia River drainages to continue their long, seasonal migrations to the contested buffalo plains centered at the headwaters of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers just as they had always done.
Where did the Blackfoot Treaty commissioners find the precedent for such a common hunting ground and what lay behind their willingness to establish it on the buffalo plains? Could this divergent, if not contradictory, regional determination in the Far West be reconciled with the prevailing federal reservation policy as determined by the Office of Indian Affairs? Or was that unnecessary, given that American reservation policy in the 1850s was by its nature contradictory, little more than a series of regional improvisations?2
Commissioners Stevens and Cumming, of course, did not actually "create" the common hunting ground. They simply acknowledged and restructured the reality of a preexisting Indian common hunting ground, a sort of buffalo commons, that gradually over the years had been constructed through war, treaties, and diplomacy on the part of the tribes themselves. Stevens had first encountered this dynamic tribal creation with its shifting boundaries and alliances when he led a congressionally funded transcontinental railroad survey through the middle of Blackfoot territory in 1853. Two years later, not only did treaty commissioners Stevens and Cumming recognize this Indian construction in the treaty provisions in 1855, they gave it an inordinate amount of attention. What were their goals and expectations regarding the federal definition, limitation, and reshaping of this preexisting regional Indian commons? How did these purposes relate to possible repercussions for a bison population, already perceived to be dwindling on the Northern Plains?
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln