Chief Flying Hawk – A Great Native American in Troubling Times

Flying Hawk was an important Native American as white settlers moved across the western US in the latter half of the 19thcentury. He met 10 US presidents and later became part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe. Alec Marsh explains.

Alec’s new book, Ghosts of the West, is now available here: Amazon US | Amazon UK

Chief Flying Hawk, Oglala Lakota.

He fought at Custer’s Last Stand and counted the warrior Crazy Horse as a close friend, as well as his cousin. He met ten US Presidents and ranked Teddy Roosevelt above them all. He was present at the death of Sitting Bull in 1890 and attended the massacre of Wounded Knee. He then travelled the world as a star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe.

And before dying at 77 in 1931, Chief Flying Hawk also acted as translator for the writer John Neihardt, thereby helping him to create a seminal work in Native American culture, Black Elk Speaks. More than this, Flying Hawk also produced his own history of America, finally published in 1946, ‘so that the young people would know the truth. The white man’s books about it did not tell the truth’.

So if you haven’t already, I believe it is high time you acquainted yourself with the Native American chief, Flying Hawk, a renaissance man who was a leader, an educator and warrior in equal measure. The son of Chief Black Fox of the Oglala Lakota – a leader who lived for decades with an arrow lodged in the back of his sky before dying in his eighties, Flying Hawk was born in 1854 at a time when the Sioux’s traditional way of life was still largely unaffected by white men.

The buffalo herds upon which the Sioux’s civilization depended still roamed abundantly across the great plains of the West. And when European-Americans did come, they came to trade – not to necessarily to live, or to dominate. That, however, was all about to change.

But as a result Flying Hawk grew up in a way that would have been familiar to those who had gone before him: learning the art of warfare by fighting skirmishes against rival tribes – the Crow and Piegan. He took part in his first battle aged ten, against soldiers protecting a wagon train. ‘I do not know how many we killed of the soldiers, but they killed four of us,’ he would say later. ‘After that we had a good many battles, but I did not take any scalps for a good while. I cannot tell how many I killed when a young man.’

Red Cloud’s war

More fighting was to follow. Just two years later, in 1866, armed conflict broke out between the Sioux and the US, over the latter’s decision to build forts along the Bozeman Trail, a road through the Powder River country in modern day Wyoming and Montana – land belonging to the Sioux and a prime hunting ground. What followed – known as Red Cloud’s War – was a two year guerrilla conflict in which the Native Americans, led by another Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, were able to outwit and outmaneuver their better-armed opponents. In December 1866, Crazy Horse, who would come to world’s attention for his part in defeating Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn ten years later, commanded a small party of warriors to lure out a large body of soldiers from one of the forts – leading them into a deadly ambush. The Fetterman Fight or Massacre, left 81 men under the command of Captain William J Fetterman dead and was the biggest military defeat suffered by the United States at the hands of the Plains Indians until Custer’s Last Stand in 1876. Red Cloud’s war concluded in victory for Sioux with a peace treaty signed 1868 at Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming. It is still recognized as an international treaty in law today.

Moreover its an international treaty which the United States breached in 1876 with the invasion of the Black Hills, the Sioux’s last great hunting ground, following the discovery of gold there in 1874.

The Sioux, now led by Sitting Bull, Flying Hawk’s uncle, and Crazy Horse, fought back: and so began the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. Red Cloud, whom Flying Hawk described as ‘the Red Man’s George Washington’, had been to Washington and New York after the peace of 1868 and now knew what the Native Americans were up against. He did not join the call to arms in 1876. Flying Hawk was there every step of the way.

Custer’s last stand

The defining moment of this war was the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, where Flying Hawk fought alongside Crazy Horse, the architect of the victory. In his graphic account of the battle he described how it began with the US cavalry firing on their village, and how the Native Americans quickly had the soldiers on the back foot. ‘When we got them surrounded the fight was over in one hour,’ Flying Hawk recalled. ‘There was so much dust we could not see much, but the Indians rode around and yelled the war-whoop and shot into the soldiers as fast as they could until they were all dead. One soldier was running away to the east but Crazy Horse saw him and jumped on his pony and went after him. He got him about half a mile from the place where the other soldiers were lying dead.’ 

He added: ‘It was a big fight; the soldiers got what they deserved this time. No good soldiers would shoot into the Indian’s tepee where there were women and children. These soldiers did, and we fought for our women and children. White men would do the same.’

Despite the victory the chiefs quickly realized that the game was up: Washington put the Sioux reservations under the authority of General Sherman and all Native Americans were henceforth to be treated as prisoners of war. Those that were off their reservation would be treated as hostiles. Rather than submit to this, Sitting Bull led his band to Canada; Crazy Horse was killed in a scuffle after handing himself over at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. ‘He was honored by his own people and respected by his enemies,’ said Flying Hawk. ‘Though they hunted and persecuted him, they murdered him because they could not conquer him.’ The murder of Crazy Horse proved to the harbinger of the treatment that Sitting Bull would receive 13 years later on his return from Canada.

By this point the Great Sioux Reservation had been broken into five reserves occupying perhaps half the original land promised to them, having been appropriated for white settlers by the US government. In 1890 the Ghost Dance, a religious movement swept across the hungry and cold Sioux people, prompting fears of an uprising among the authorities. Once again Flying Hawk was close to the action: his brother Kicking Bear, a holy man and chief, was a leading figure of the movement, and Flying Hawk was among the first to witness the results of the massacre at Wounded Knee, when soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry machine-gunned more than 200 mainly Sioux women and children camped in the winter snow outside the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Flying Hawk described seeing the bodies of women and children lying under a blanket of snow – and asserted that the attack was retaliation for the ‘Custer affair’ 13 years before.

Extermination of the buffalo

By now the way of life that he had grown up with was gone – including the last great herds of the buffalo, wiped out by the mid-1880s. The whites, Flying Hawk claimed, ‘could not fight them fairly and win’.

And then, having lived through all of this calamity and change, in the years that followed, Flying Hawk turned to show business. Following in the footsteps of Sitting Bull and Red Cloud, he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1898 and while it is said he initially chafed at being asked to perform the displays of the battles he had taken part in, he soon made peace with the life on the stage. Not only was there was money in it, but the shows celebrated performers like him; it also allowed them to communicate something of their way of life to the outside world. Flying Hawk spent the next three decades ‘Wild Westing’, as it was known, touring the US and Europe with Colonel William Cody’s show and later joining the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch show and Sells Floto circus. He finally retired from touring in 1930, the year before he died. That was also year he acted as an interpreter for the writer and ethnographer John G. Neihardt in his interviews with the Oglala medicine man Black Elk, which remains a powerful and important testimony to this day.

Flying Hawk also toured schools speaking about Native American history, which became part of his effort to tell the story of his people from the Native American perspective. This he achieved most comprehensively through a series of interviews with his friend Major Israel McCreight, becoming Firewater and Forked Tongues – A Sioux Chief Interprets US History, published in 1946 under McCreight’s name. When each age was finished, McCreight would read it to Flying Hawk who would apply his thumbprint approving the pages individually.

In a foreword to Firewater, Ohitika, or Benjamin Brave, ‘a member of the Sioux tribe’, who tells us that his grandfather fought at the Little Bighorn, says this of Flying Hawk: ‘Perhaps no other Indian of his day was better qualified to furnish reliable data covering the period of the great Sioux war, beginning with the ruthless exploitation by rum-sellers, prospectors and adventurers, of their homes and hunting grounds pledged to them forever by sacred treaty with the Government, and ending in the deplorable massacre of Wounded Knee.’ Quite possibly.

Certainly Flying Hawk was at the center of the action, and somehow lived to tell the bloody tale, which he did. He also inspired those he met and remained unequivocal about what he witnessed. ‘Nowhere in the history of mankind is there to be found a parallel,’ Flying Hawk said, ‘nothing so cruel, un-American and wholly inhuman. Cortez in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru carried on their wars of extermination in the name of religion... But the white man had no justification for this ruthless campaigns against the red race.’

The cover of Alec’s new book. Imaged provided by and included with the permission of Headline Accent.

You can read Alec’s new book, Ghosts of the West, here: Amazon US | Amazon UK

It is published by Headline Accent.

Did Settlers Commit Genocide in America?

There were several great periods of migration across America. The settlers performed various cruel activities; however was there genocide? Here, Daniel L. Smith returns and presents his views on the question. 

Daniel’s new book on mid-19th century northern California is now available. Find our more here: Amazon US | Amazon UK

"Protecting The Settlers". Illustration by JR Browne for his work "The Indians Of California", 1864. Portraying a massacre by militia men of a Native American camp.

It was certainly polarization issues that made the 19th century a true “wild west," and I really find "wild west" fits in every sense of the phrase.

​The American Settler’s from the east came over the Rocky Mountains with both broken dreams and real optimism for a new successful life. Each miner, settler, businessman (or woman), and government employee had their own personal reasons for leading a new life in California. The financial burden of the 1837 financial collapse was a national hardship, and encouraged the soon-to-be settler headed out west.[1] American economist Martin Armstrong wrote, “The U.S. entered a serious economic depression following the failure of the New Orleans cotton brokerage firm, Herman Briggs & Co in March of 1837. Inflated land values, speculation and wildcat banking contributed to the crisis, which became known as the “Hard Times of 1837-1843.” New York banks suspended payments in gold on May 10th and financial panic ensued. At least 800 US banks suspended payment in gold and 618 banks failed before the year was out.”[2]

With the discovery of gold in California and the resulting influx of immigrants, it seemed almost inevitable that the U.S. government would openly authorize the 1862 Homestead Act. This decree would guarantee all American citizens permanent private ownership of newly acquired territory west of the Mississippi River.[3]  Economic growth would boom for the nation given the limitless resources of the newly acquired land. Timber, hunting, fishing, mining, commercial business, and government would take over. It was the principal economic body that California would come to offer a rapidly expanding nation, which was recovering from a financial meltdown. This new economic and cultural opportunity didn’t just benefit the legitimate law-abiding settlers, but this new world also opened up to the criminal and unprincipled elements of American society as well. This was a somber reality to the preceding historical events throughout the mid-19th century.

Violence

This same reality applies to the cultural similarities in unprincipled behavior that both settlers and Native Americans exhibited between each other, as both played a part in antagonizing the other. I stand with Michael Medved by saying that the word genocide does not truly apply to the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American Settlers. Further, in “the 400 year history of American contact with the Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness --- just as the Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery. In fact, reading the history of the relationship between British settlers and Native Americans its obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked blood thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that listed with scant interruption for several hundred years.”

“But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality. Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.”[4]

Guns, Germs, and Poor Ethics

UCLA professor Jared Diamond, author of the acclaimed bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, writes:

"Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Colombian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdom's, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600's, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River.” (page 78)

“The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the killers.” (page 212)

“As for the most advanced native societies of North America, those of the U.S. Southeast and the Mississippi River system, their destruction was accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European explorers and advancing ahead of them" (page 374)

Obviously, the decimation of native populations by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based largely on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Native American populations (including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox, and there is no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result of British policy. Medved writes, “For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they first arrived.”[5]

Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way requires a belief in European or American genocide. As Jared Diamond's book (and countless others) makes clear, the mass migration of Europeans to the New World and the rapid displacement and replacement of Native populations is hardly a unique interchange in human history. On six continents, such shifting populations – with countless cruel invasions and occupations and social destructions and replacements - have been the rule rather than the exception.

Finding evidence

I have found a lot of evidence difficult to obtain through large institutions bureaucratic archives. These are crucial for a more thorough and explicit observation on specific events that had occurred in relationship to the unprincipled behaviors and actions of those few individuals or groups. Some of the evidence that I have been able to successfully retrieve truly illustrates this particular viewpoint. Is this finally a small beam of light on the topic of relational nuances that occurred on both sides of the cultural aisle? The truth of the matter is that all of the overall regional hostility came down to certain specific cultural customs or traditions, which also included the erosion (or complete absence) of any personal ethical and moral values.

The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents America’s "original sin" fails to put European contact with these often struggling societies in any context and only serves the purposes of those who want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in all Americans ignorant of the facts.

Finally, a nation ashamed of its past will fear its future. "One of the most urgent needs in culture and education for the United States of America is discarding the stupid, groundless and anti-American lies that characterize contemporary political correctness. The right place to begin is to confront, resist and reject the all-too-common line that our rightly admired forebears involved themselves in genocide. The early colonists and settlers can hardly qualify as perfect but describing them in Hitlerian, mass-murdering terms represents an act of brain-dead defamation."[6]

You can read a selection of Daniel’s past articles on: California in the US Civil War (here), Spanish Colonial Influence on Native Americans in Northern California (here), Christian ideology in history (here), the collapse of the Spanish Armada in 1588 (here), early Christianity in Britain (here), the First Anglo-Dutch War (here), and the 1918 Spanish Influenza outbreak (here).

Finally, Daniel Smith writes at complexamerica.org.

References

[1] Smith, Daniel L. "New American Settlers." In 1845-1870 An Untold Story of Northern California: The American Settler's First Documented Accounts of their Unwelcome Arrival, 20. Publication Consultants, 2019. Print.

[2] Armstrong, Martin A. "Panic of 1837." Princeton Economic Institute. Last modified January 12, 2014. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/panic-of-1837/. 

[3] "Act of May 20, 1862 (Homestead Act), Public Law 37-64 (12 STAT 392); 5/20/1862; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789 - 2011; General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11; National Archives Building, Washington, DC." DocsTeach, 20 May 1862, www.docsteach.org/documents/document/homestead-act. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

[4]Medved, Michael. "Reject the Lie of White "Genocide" Against Native Americans." Townhall. Last modified September 19, 2007. https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelmedved/2007/09/19/reject-the-lie-of-white-genocide-against-native-americans-n989275.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

How American Colonial Law Justified the Settlement of Native American Territories

TThe nature of constitutions of Native Americans is a debated topic in American history, particularly as those constitutions played a role in the ‘legitimacy’ (or otherwise) of the settling of Native American lands. Here, Daniel Smith discusses Western colonial law, property rights, and the constitutions of Native Americans - and how the constitutions are seen to have altered with Western concepts of property rights.

You can read Daniel’s past articles on California in the US Civil War (here) and Medieval jesters (here).

Major Ridge, a leader of the Cherokee in the nineteenth century who was to play a major role in ceding Cherokee lands to European-American settlers.

The idea of independent sovereignty with full “property rights” observed is a Western concept that Native Americans adopted. The Cherokee Constitution, for example, was a purposeful effort by the Cherokee to adopt Western ideals, as through their observations they felt a sense order, structure, justice, and liberty. Hence, they moved to partition the Cherokee Nation from tribal culture, and establish a more formal and legal presence within North America. 

In Article 2, section 1, “The power of the Government shall be divided into three distinct departments---the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judicial.”[1] This is the same wording as the American Federal Constitution, in article 1, section 1. This leads me to believe that the Cherokee established their constitution under the same formatting as the Federal Government for reasons of: 1.) Tribal Security, 2.) Tribal Continuity, and 3.) Regional Relief of Tensions.

According to todayingeorgiahistory.org, “It was designed to solidify the tribe’s sovereignty and resist white encroachment and removal -- and to counter American citizens stereotyping of Indians as savages. The Cherokee constitution proved controversial with both other Cherokee, who saw it as a threat to tradition, and the state of Georgia, which thought it threatened its sovereignty over the tribe. Georgia continued, and succeeded in, its relentless pursuit of Cherokee removal, despite the Constitution adopted on July 26, 1827” [2] 

That is made worse when you learn that the Cherokee were attempting to assimilate into American society as best as they could while maintaining their own sovereign identity. Oppositely though, I find it hard to believe that there was not misconduct between Georgia and the Cherokee – on both sides. Typically, as in geopolitics, there is always a reaction to an action whether negative or positive in outcome.

I had an argument where a peer said, "A constitution that has been in practice since before the upstate settlements in the 1600s and may hold partial responsibility in the development of the settlers nation. As proof, they cite records kept by the colonists. An Onondaga named Canassatego, suggested that the colonists form a nation similar to the Iroquois Confederacy during a meeting of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania in Lancaster on June 25, 1744.”

INFLUENCES

There is an argument that the ideals for some Native American nations, such as the Cherokee, predate any influence provided by the Europeans. Where we see the most similarity is in how these Native Americans formatted their laws to reflect that of the settlers. This may have been done in the attempt to most effectively convey their already sovereign nations to these foreigners in a way that most effectively would do so.

I would humbly disagree that "the ideals for some Native American nations, such as the Cherokee, predate any influence provided by the Europeans." There is a lack of evidence that Western-style Native American political ideals predated European Influence, especially when it comes to the Constitution of National Governments. Here is why: colonial law and property ownership is a particularly Western concept (even though all cultures understand ownership over physical items).

An example here would be the Magna Carta of 1215. The Magna Carta was a signed document and statement that embodied the principle that both sovereign nations and sovereign people are beneath the law and subject to it. Later, both Englishmen and American Colonists cited the Magna Carta as a source of their freedom. Native Americans did not have access to this document.

Even before 1215, Alfred the Great, an English King from 871-899, was a strict follower of Catholic Saint Patrick. After many Viking invasions, Alfred the Great instituted Christian reforms in many areas of life, including government. These reforms were based on the Ten Commandments as the basis of law and adopted many other patterns of government based on religious texts. My point here is that, it is very difficult, if not impossible, that Native Americans could have established a style of Western or "Christian Constitution" without direct Western European influence.

EVIDENCE EXPLAINED

According to the Michael P. Gueno, “English common law jurists expounded upon the argument for the English monarchy’s right to conquer non-Christian territories, most articulately described in Lord Chief Justice Edward Coke’s dicta in Calvin’s Case. Coke argued that all non-Christians were perpetual enemies, of the Christian and by their very nature are in a state of war with Christian nations.[3] However, despite the general consensus that Native American tribes lacked any rights to the territories that they occupied, in practice, colonists often felt compelled to obtain at least some formal semblance of legal consent from the tribes through treaties or purchase agreements to assert their claim upon tribal lands”. This shows that, despite how the settlers took the lands, there was still a desire to have a legal basis for taking the lands.

Mr. Gueno continues to state that, “Some colonists even denounced the unilateral rights and universal sovereignty of European Christians over the Native Americans. Colonial theologian Roger Williams rejected the assumption that being white and Christian were sufficient conditions to legitimize colonization or conversion. He argued that since Native Americans clearly believed that they owned the land, Native American–inhabited territories could not be legally treated as vacuum domicilium and settled without regard for tribal presence.” This helps to show that property ownership was understood. [4] 

Gueno concludes, “Europeans continued to debate conflicting religious interpretations of Indian rights during the early North American colonial era. Yet, whenever Native Americans were numerous, proximate, and potentially threatening, colonizing peoples felt pressed to seek Indian consent for new settlements. Thus, European powers ascribed, to some extent, in practice and in theory a sufficient degree of sovereignty to Native tribes to legitimately transfer claim of lands and administer their own communities.”[5]

How Native American lands were taken by Europeans, and how legal this was, is a complex issue in North American history. Interpretations are one of the major battles in presenting history, but I hope this article helps to explain more about Colonial Law and Native America.

What do you think of the arguments in the article? Let us know below.

Finally, Daniel Smith writes at complexamerica.weebly.com.

Sources

[1]"1839 Constitution." Cherokee Nation, www.cherokeeobserver.org/Issues/1839constitution.html. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018.
[2] State of Georgia. "Cherokee Constitution." Todayingeorgiahistory.org/, 2013, www.todayingeorgiahistory.org/content/cherokee-constitution. Accessed 26 Nov. 2018
[3] David H. Getches, Charles F. Wilkinson, Robert A. Williams, Jr., Matthew L. M. Fletcher, & Kristen A. Carpenter, eds., Cases and Materials On Federal Indian Law, 7th ed. (Saint Paul, MN: West Academic Publishing, 2017), 63.
[4] Henry S. Commanger, ed., Documents of American History, 9th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), 5–10.
[5] Gueno, Michael P. "Native Americans, Law, and Religion in America." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, 10 Nov. 2017, religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-140. Accessed 10 June 2018.