Wyoming has 43 federal places with 'squaw' in the name. A recent order will change that.

Reviewing the Wounded Knee Medals of Honor.

Sgt. Toy receiving the Medal of Honor in 1891.  Sgt. Toy was cited for "bravery while shooting Indians" at Wounded Knee.  He is known to have shot two during the engagement, which is about all that his citations and the supporting material relates.

 Tribes Want Medals Awarded for Wounded Knee Revoked.

While this isn't a Wyoming item per se, the Battle of Wounded Knee has been noted here before, as its a regional one.

It would likely surprise most readers here that twenty Medals of Honor were awarded to soldiers who participated in the actions at Wounded Knee.  The odd thing is that I was under the impression that the Army had rescinded these medals long ago, and I'm not completely certain that they haven't.  Having said that, I can't find that they were, so my presumption must have been in error.

To put this in context, the medals that were rescinded, if any were, weren't rescinded because Wounded Knee was a massacre.  They were rescinded because they didn't meet the post April 1917 criteria for receiving the award.

The Medal of Honor was first authorized in 1861 by the Navy, not the Army, following the retirement of Gen. Winfield Scott, who was adamantly opposed to the awarding of medals to servicemen, which he regarded as a European practice, not an American one.  The award was authorized by Congress that year, at the Navy's request.  The Army followed in 1862 in the same fashion.  The medals actually vary by appearance, to this day, depending upon which service issues them, and they've varied somewhat in design over time.

During the Civil War the award was generally issued for extraordinary heroism, but not necessarily of the same degree for which it is today.  Because of this, a fairly large number of Medals of Honor were conferred after the Civil War to servicemen who retroactively sought them, so awards continued for Civil War service for decades following the war.  New awards were also issued, of course, for acts of heroism in the remaining decades of the 19th Century, with Army awards usually being related to service in the Indian Wars.  Navy awards, in contrast, tended to be issued for heroic acts in lifesaving, a non combat issuance of the award that could not occur today.  Indeed, a fairly large number were issued to sailors who went over the sides of ships to save the lives, or attempt to, of drowning individuals, often with tragic results to the sailors.

At any rate, the period following the war and the method by which it was retroactively issued may have acclimated the Army to issuing awards as there are a surprising number of them that were issued for frontier battles.  This does not mean that there were not genuine acts of heroism that took place in those battles, it's just surprising how many there were and its clear that the criteria was substantially lower than that which would apply for most of the 20th Century.

Indeed, in the 20th Century the Army began to significantly tighten up requirements to hold the medal. This came into full fruition during World War One during which the Army made it plain that it was only a combat medal, while the Navy continued to issue the medal for peacetime heroism.  In 1917 the Army took the position that the medal could only be issued for combat acts of heroism at the risk of life to the recipient, and in 1918 that change became official.  Prior to the 1918 change the Army commissioned a review board on past issuance of the medal and struck 911 instances of them having been issued.  I'd thought the Wounded Knee medals had been stricken, but my presumption must be in error.

Frontier era Medals of Honor, as well as those issued to Civil War era soldiers after the Civil War, tend to be remarkably lacking in information as to why they were conferred.  This has presented a problem for the Army looking back on them in general.

Indeed, the Wounded Knee medals have this character.  They don't say much, and what they do say isn't all that useful to really know much about what lead them to be awarded.  There is a peculiar aspect to them, however, in that they don't reflect what we generally know about the battle historically.  

Wikipedia has summarized the twenty awards and what they were awarded for, and this illustrates this problem.  The Wounded Knee Wikipedia page summarizes this as follows

·         Sergeant William Austin, cavalry, directed fire at Indians in ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mosheim Feaster, cavalry, extraordinary gallantry at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Mathew Hamilton, cavalry, bravery in action at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Joshua Hartzog, artillery, rescuing commanding officer who was wounded and carried him out of range of hostile guns at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Marvin Hillock, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Bernhard Jetter, cavalry, distinguished bravery at Wounded Knee for "killing an Indian who was in the act of killing a wounded man of B Troop."

·         Sergeant George Loyd, cavalry, bravery, especially after having been severely wounded through the lung at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant Albert McMillain, cavalry, while engaged with Indians concealed in a ravine, he assisted the men on the skirmish line, directed their fire, encouraged them by example, and used every effort to dislodge the enemy at Wounded Knee;

·         Private Thomas Sullivan, cavalry, conspicuous bravery in action against Indians concealed in a ravine at Wounded Knee;

·         First Sergeant Jacob Trautman, cavalry, killed a hostile Indian at close quarters, and, although entitled to retirement from service, remained to close of the campaign at Wounded Knee;

·         Sergeant James Ward, cavalry, continued to fight after being severely wounded at Wounded Knee;

·         Corporal William Wilson, cavalry, bravery in Sioux Campaign, 1890;

·         Private Hermann Ziegner, cavalry, conspicuous bravery at Wounded Knee;

·         Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy;

·         Lieutenant Ernest Garlington, cavalry, distinguished gallantry;

·         First Lieutenant John Chowning Gresham, cavalry, voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein. He was wounded during this action.

·         Second Lieutenant Harry Hawthorne, artillery, distinguished conduct in battle with hostile Indians;

·         Private George Hobday, cavalry, conspicuous and gallant conduct in battle;

·         First Sergeant Frederick Toy, cavalry, bravery;

·         Corporal Paul Weinert, artillery, taking the place of his commanding officer who had fallen severely wounded, he gallantly served his piece, after each fire advancing it to a better position

For quite a few of these, we're left without a clue as to what the basis of the award was, at least based on this summation. But for some, it would suggest a pitched real battle.  A couple of the awards are for rescuing wounded comrades under fire.  Others are for combat actions that we can recognize.

Indeed, one historian that I know, and probably only because I know him, has noted the citations in support for "it was a real battle", taking the controversial, albeit private, position that Wounded Knee was a real, pitched, engagement, not simply a slaughter.  This isn't the popular view at all, of course, and its frankly not all that well supported by the evidence either.  But what of that evidence.

A popular thesis that's sometimes presented is that Wounded Knee was the 7th Cavalry's revenge for the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  Perhaps this is so, but if it is so, it's would be somewhat odd in that it would presume an institutional desire for revenge rather than a personal one, for the most part.  Wounded Knee was twenty four years after Little Big Horn and most of the men who had served at Little Big Horn were long since out of the service.  Indeed, some of the men who received awards would have been two young for service in 1890, and while I haven't looked up all of their biographies, some of them were not likely to have even been born at the time.  Maybe revenge was it, but if that's the case, it would demonstrate a 19th Century retention of institutional memories that vastly exceed the 20th and 21st Century ones.  Of course, the 7th Cavalry remains famous to this day for Little Big Horn, so perhaps that indeed is it.

Or perhaps what it reflects is that things went badly wrong at Wounded Knee and the massacre became a massively one sided battle featuring a slaughter, something that the Sioux on location would have been well within their rights to engage in. That is, once the things went wrong and the Army overreacted, as it certainly is well established that it did, the Sioux with recourse to arms would have been justified in acting in self defense.  That there were some actions in self defense which would have had the character of combat doesn't mean it wasn't combat.

And that raises the sticky moral issues of the Congressional efforts to rescind the medals.  Some of these medals are so poorly supported that the Army could likely simply rescind them on their own, as they have many others, and indeed, I thought they had.  Some seem quite unlikely to meet the modern criteria for the medal no matter what, and therefore under the practices established in 1917, they could be rescinded even if they were regarded as heroic at the time.  Cpl. Weinert's for example, unless there was more to it, would probably just merit a letter of commendation today.

Indeed, save for two examples that reference rescuing wounded comrades, I don't know that any of these would meet the modern criteria. They don't appear to.  So once again, most of these would appear to be subject to proper unilateral Army downgrading or rescission all on their own with no Congressional action.

But what of Congressional action, which has been proposed. The Army hasn't rescinded these awards and they certainly stand out as awards that should receive attention.  If Congress is to act, the best act likely would be to require the Army to review overall its pre 1917 awards once again.  If over 900 were weeded out the first time, at least a few would be today, and I suspect all of these would.

To simply rescind them, however, is problematic, as it will tend to be based neither on the criteria for award today, or the criteria of the award in 1890, but on the gigantic moral problem that is the Battle of Wounded Knee itself.  That is, these awards are proposed to be removed as we regard Wounded Knee as a genocidal act over all, which it does indeed appear to be.

The problem with that is that even if it is a genocidal act in chief, individual acts during it may or may not be. So, rushing forwards to rescue a wounded comrade might truly be heroic, even if done in the middle of an act of barbarism.  Other acts, such as simply shooting somebody, would seem to be participating in that barbarism, but here too you still have the situation of individual soldiers suddenly committed to action and not, in every instance, knowing what is going on.  It's now too late to know in most cases.  Were they acting like William Calley or just as a regular confused soldier?

Indeed, if medals can be stricken because we now abhor what they were fighting for (and in regard to Wounded Knee, it was questioned nearly immediately, which may be why the Army felt compelled to issue medals to those participating in it, to suggest it was a battle more than it was), what do we do with other problematic wars?

Eighty six men, for example, received the Medal of Honor for the Philippine Insurrection.  In retrospect, that was a pure colonial war we'd not condone in any fashion today, and it was controversial at the time.  Theodore Roosevelt very belatedly received the Medal of Honor for leading the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry up Kettle Hill during the Spanish American War, and he no doubt met the modern criterial, but the Spanish American War itself is morally dubious at best.  

Of course, none of these awards are associated with an act of genocide, which takes us back to Wounded Knee.  As noted above, maybe so many awards were issued there as the Army wanted to to convert a massacre into a battle, and conferring awards for bravery was a way to attempt to do that.

Certainly the number of awards for Wounded Knee is very outsized.  It's been noted that as many awards have been issued for heroism at Wounded Knee as have been for some gigantic Civil War battles.  Was the Army really more heroic at Wounded Knee than Antietam?  That seems unlikely.

Anyway a person looks at it, this is one of those topics that it seems clear would be best served by Army action.  The Army has looked at the topic of pre 1917 awards before, and it removed a fair number of them.  There's no reason that it can't do so again. It was regarded as harsh the last time it occurred, and some will complain now as well, but the Army simply did it last time.   That would honor the medal and acknowledge the history, and it really shouldn't be confined to just Wounded Knee.

Dead men and horses at Wounded Knee following the conflict.

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea. An added footnote

Something I really should have footnoted in this item from the other day:

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea: Mural in the Montana State House by Edgar Paxson depicting Sacagawea and the Corps of Discovery in Montana.  Sacagawea's actual appearan...

When the Corps of Discovery went into winter camp after their first year of trekking across the western half of the continent they voted on the location and decided it by majority vote.

Both Sacagawea and York were given a vote.

Wyoming Myths. Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

Okay, we recently discussed Sacagawea and, in that context, discussed Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.  Surely we have this covered?

Well, mostly. But to complete the story we really need to address Jean Baptiste as, just like his famous mother, he's the subject of a Wyoming myth. And indeed, it's the same myth.

And its illustrative as to both, as the later life of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau is very well known, and demonstrable with finality.  We know where he went to school, what he did as a young man, a middle aged man, and in the context of his times, as an old man.  

And what he did not do is to go to the Wind River Reservation with his very aged mother.

But that's the myth.

It's hard not to feel sad about the life of Jean Baptiste, even though he probably didn't see it as sad himself.  He wasn't even one year old when he was packed by his mother, as slave to his father, across the western half of North America as his famous mother acted as a guide and interpreter for the Corps of Discovery.  He was a young boy when his mother gave him up to William Clark to be educated, and Clark in fact enrolled him in two successive schools, the first a Jesuit school and the second another private school, at great expense.  He was therefore well educated for this time and became even more so when met Duke Friedrich Paul Wihlem of Wurttenberg in 1823 while he was traveling in the United States.  Jean Baptiste was working at a Kaw trading post on the Kansas River at the time.  The Duke was being guided by Toussaint Charbonneau on a trip to the northern plains.  He invited the younger Charbonneau to return to Europe with him, which he did.  He apparently traveled with the Duke in Europe and Africa while his guest.

Upon returning to North American he resumed a Western life and worked as a trapper, hunter and guide.  He was later a gold prospector.  In 1866 he died in Oregon after some sort of accident which threw him into a frigid river and left him with pneumonia.  He was 61 years old at the time.

He lived a rich and varied life, and a fairly well documented one. That he died in Oregon is something for which there is no doubt.

None the less, Grace Raymond Hebard placed his death in 1885 on the Wind River Reservation, and the work of Dr. Charles Eastman likewise places him there. And this all dates to the the stories associated with Porivo, and her adult son who entered the Reservation with her.  As with his mother, who died in North Dakota, there is a grave marker for him on the Reservation.

His actual grave is known as to location, and is in Oregon.

As with his famous mother, his reconstructed myth does not serve him well, although unlike his mother he lived a fairly long life.  He would have lived a longer one if the Wyoming myth was correct, but that would not do his life justice.  It was remarkably adventuresome right up to the point of his death, and like his mothers it crossed back and forth between two worlds in a way that makes contemporary readers uncomfortable.

Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea

Mural in the Montana State House by Edgar Paxson depicting Sacagawea and the Corps of Discovery in Montana.  Sacagawea's actual appearance, of course, is known only by description, but Paxon was a Montana artist particularly noted for his attention to close detail.  Having said that, she was just a teenager at this time and likely appeared younger than the female figure in this depiction.

Wyoming has an association with Sacagawea, sort of.

But not quite as close as we sometimes like to claim.

Route of the Corps of Discovery.  It wholly avoided Wyoming.

Sacagawea, the Corps of Discovery's justifiably famous guide, or pilot, or interpreter, has a real world close connection with our state in that she was a Shoshone.  Having said that, she was a Lemhi Shoshone. a name they would not have recognized.  To her band, and her times, she was a Akaitikka meaning "Salmon Eater".*  At the time of her birth in 1788 the Shoshone were widely spread throughout Wyoming, Montana and Idaho and, if you consider that their split with the Comanche had already occurred, but that the Comanche are an extension of the Shoshone people, they were widely spread indeed.**

She was born in Idaho what is now near the Idaho-Montana border.  No such border existed at the time, of course, and the Shoshone, including the Lemhi, ranged over wide territories.  Her band most likely ranged into northwest Wyoming, with it being certain of course that other Shoshone bands inhabited the area.

In 1800, at age 12, she was taken in a Hidatsa raid.  The Hidatsa are a Siouan people who are closely related to another Siouan people, the Crows.  Some consider the tribes to be the same, with the Hidatsa the parent tribe to the Crows.  It's important to note, however, that when the Sioux are referred to, its typically the Lakota and Dakota, and related groups that are meant. Indeed the Sioux and the Crows would be bitter enemies in the 19th Century, as would the Sioux and the Shoshone for that matter.

The Hidatsa were wide ranging and she was taken to a location that today is near Washburn, North Dakota. This means that the raiders had effectively traversed what is now Montana, an impressive feat for a raiding party.  The taking of captives in this manner was not unusual, and while this undoubtedly meant that the very young Shoshone girls life had taken a disastrous turn, her captivity by the Hidatsa, while real, was probably not terribly harsh.  In other words, she was a captive, but a captive with domestic duties that were likely not far removed from that of Hidatsa girls of the same age.

At age 13 she was sold to Toussaint Charbonneau as a "wife".  

Histories have sometimes addressed this in various ways, including using such terms as "non consensual wife", but there is no such thing.  Indeed, it's remarkable that even though the circumstances of her initial union with Charbonneau are well known, she's still usually routinely referred to as Charbonneau's "wife."  Effectively she was purchased as a slave, and if the niceties are stripped off of it, she was kept as a involuntary concubine at first, basically, or if you really want to strip the niceties off of it, as sort of sex slave with domestic duties, at first.  She was Charbonneau's second such slave, the first being the equally juvenile Otter Woman who was probably also a Shoshone captive of the Hidatsa.***

Edgar Paxon's depiction of Toussaint Charbonneau, notable perhaps in that its a flattering illustration.  In reality, of course, we have no period depiction for Charbonneau and his reputation has never been what can be called flattering.

In 1804 the Corps of Discovery visited Hidatsa villages in the fall in anticipation of their press across the the upper West to the Pacific the next Spring. They were in search of guides, and in that context hoped to find somebody who knew the territory. They were visited by Charbonneau, who was a French Canadian fur trapper.****  William Clark noted in his journal:

french man by Name Chabonah, who Speaks the Big Belley language visit us, he wished to hire & informed us his 2 Squars (squaws) were Snake Indians, we engau (engaged) him to go on with us and take one of his wives to interpret the Snake language.…

Spelling obviously had yet to be standardized and Clark puzzled out Charbonneau's last name.  He also used a lot of colloquialisms for the names of Indian bands.  The Snakes referred to the Shoshone, which is of course not what they call themselves (like most Indian bands, they call themselves "The People").  

It's of note, fwiw, and noteworthy without trying to be "woke", that the commanders of the Corps of Discovery did not appear bothered that  about Charbonneau's irregular situation with the two teenaged Indian girls.*****  They also didn't claim, as other writers have, that either of his girls were his "wives".  They only claimed that they were his "Squars", meaning his Indian women.  Polygamy was of course illegal in the United States, and Louisiana, the vast newly acquired territory, was within the United States, but there's no good evidence in this early entry that they regarded Sacagawea or Otter Women as wives, but rather simply his held women.  And of course Lewis and Clark were both fully acclimated to slavery, something they did not regard as abnormal nor wrong, and they had a slave with them of their own, York, who belonged to Clark and who was Clark's lifelong body servant.******

On that date in 1804 Charbonneau was contracted to be a guide that following spring and to bring one of his teenage women along with him as an interpreter.  They had no apparent early preference which one that would be.

Charbonneau apparently did, as that following week he'd bring Sacagawea into the Corps of Discovery camp and they took up residence there.  He did not bring Otter Woman.*******  Prior to the Spring she'd give birth to their son, who was named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, who'd live into his sixties and whom would have an adventuresome life and be the subject of his own Wyoming myth.  We'll get to that one later.

Otter Woman disappeared from history.  She was left with the Hidatsa and while there are oral history references to her, the story grows thin and her fate is unknown. She likely merged into the tribe that captured her and lived the rest of her life as part of the Hidatsa, but its of note that her story does not resume when Charbonneau returned to the Hidatsa for a time after completing his role with the Corps of Discovery.

Charles Russell's painting of the Corps of Discovery arriving at the camp of her native band, which was then lead by her brother.  This reunion occurred, in real terms, only a few years after she had been kidnapped by the Hidatsa.  Note that Russel, who was keen on detail, depicts one of the Shoshone as already being armed with a rifle, which was no doubt correct.

Everyone is of course familiar with the yeoman role that Sacagawea performed for the Corps of Discovery and therefore we'll omit it here.  Suffice it to say, she became the star critical guide, and a sort of diplomatic delegate for the expedition, outshining Charbonneau who seems to have been widely disliked, although the full degree to which he was disliked can be at least questioned as he'd retrain an occasional guiding role for the US Army into the 1830s, that coming to an end when Clark died.  Prior to that, he and Sacagawea would briefly live on a farm in Missouri, where she gave birth to a second child by him, named Lizette.  The invitation to live in Missouri came from Clark.  About Lizette little is known, and she's believed to have died in childhood.

Russell painting depicting the Corps of Discovery on the lower Columbia, with Sacagawea with arms outstretched.  One of the impacts of her presence on the trip was the effect it had on Indian bands they encountered, which convinced them that their intent was not hostile.

Following the experiment with farming, the couple, which by that time they seem to have been, returned to the Hidatsa.  Sacagawea died of what was described as "putrid fever" in 1812.^ At the time, it seems that she left the security of Fort Manual Lisa, where they were living, to return to the Hidatsa in what would have been sort of a premonition of death.  It also seems that she had a daughter with her at the time, who may have been Lizette, or who may have been a subsequent child about whom nothing else was known.  Jean Baptiste was left in Missouri at a boarding school which had been arranged for by Clark.

And with Sacagawea's death in 1812, the myth starts to kick in.

Truth be known, in the 18th and early 19th Centuries deaths in the United States were not well tracked in general and they certainly weren't in the West.  Birth Certificates and Death Certificates were not issued.  Nobody made really strenuous efforts, moreover, to keep track of the deaths of Indians up until the Reservation period, which was far in the future in 1812.  That we know as much as we do with the post 1804 life of Sacagawea is testimony to how important in the Corps of Discovery, and hence notable, she really was.  Period recollections on her fate can be regarded as beyond question.

None of which has kept people from questioning it.

Grace Raymond Hebard, educator, suffragist, feminist, and mythologist.

In the early 20th Century the remarkable University of Wyoming political economy professor, Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard, took an interest in Sacagawea and, with scanty evidence, concluded that she had not died in 1812 but rather had traveled to the Southwest and married into the Comanche tribe, and then came to Wyoming after her husband was killed. These claims surrounded a woman who was known by various names, including "Chief Woman", or Porivo.

The woman in question seems to have come on to the reservation in advanced old age and to have arrived with an adult son.  White figures on the Reservation at the time, including a prominent Episcopal missionary, became fascinated with the elderly woman.^^  Of note, resident Shoshone had a difficult time speaking to her, which was a clue to her actual probable origin.  Be that as it may, her advanced aged and presence with an adult son lead the European American figures on the reservation to believe that she must be the famous female "pilot", Sacagawea, and the adult son, must be Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, apparently not aware that Jean Baptiste's life was very well recorded, including his travels abroad and ultimate death in his early 60s.  No matter on any of that, those in question wanted to believe that the figures must be Sacagawea and Jean Baptiste.

In reality, they were almost certainly surviving Sheep Eater Indians.  

The Tukudeka, or Sheep Eaters, are a Shoshone band who ranged in the mountainous regions of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.  Like the Lemhi, they were named by outsiders for their principal foods source, which in their case was Mountain Sheep.  

The Sheep Easters are the Shoshone band about which the least is known.   They always lived in what European Americans regarded as remote areas.  They were highly adapted to their lifestyle and remains of their sheep traps and other high mountain artifacts are fairly common, but encounters with them were actually very rare.  They did not routinely share their existence with other, lower altitude, Shoshones. Their encounters with European Americans were fairly rare, and they didn't have hostile encounters with them until very late in the Indian War period.  The Sheep Eater War of 1879 was the last major Indian War in the Pacific Northwest for that reason.

Sheep Eaters were a presence on the Wind River Reservation as early as 1870, when the Federal Government acknowledged them as a band entitled to the Shoshone allotment, and Shoshone Chief Washakie accepted them as a Shoshone group, but they had no high incentive to come onto the reservation voluntarily and generally only did very late, as the era of Indian free ranging was drawing down.  In spite of their enormous success in their environment, they were not numerous and generally melted into the Reservation populations when they came in, but they were different at first.  Included in their uniqueness was a linguistic one.  Their language varied from other Shoshones to an extent.

Most likely the elderly woman and her son who came in onto the Reservation and were noted by the Episcopal and Reservation figures were Sheep Eaters.  Their language was different and they just showed up.  By the time that they did, the Sheep Easter era was drawing very much to a close.  Most likely the adult man and his elderly mother decided that they couldn't make it as a solitary two.  Or some variant of that, as in the son deciding that caring for his mother in the mountains had become too burdensome.

The figures noted very much took to them, although conversing with them proved difficult.  The degree to which they adopted their view of what she was saying to fit their romantic conclusion of the rediscovery of Sacagawea or that the elderly woman.  Whomever she was, she passed away in 1884.  If she was Sacagawea, which she was not, she would have been 96 years old, certainly not an impossibly old age, but certainly an old one, both then and now.

Dr. Charles Eastman.

By 1919 the myths regarding Chief Woman had spread sufficiently that they were referenced in a 1919 account on the Corps of Discovery in a second hand way, noting that that a sculptor looking for a model of Sacagawea had learned of her 1884 death on the Wind River Reservation and her supposed status as Sacagawea.  In 1925 Dr. Charles Eastman, a Sioux physician, was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to locate Sacagawea's remains.  He also learned of Porivo's 1884 death and conducted interviews at Wind River.  Those interviews, conducted nearly forty years after her death, included recollections that she had spoken of a long journey in which she's assisted white men and, further, that she had a sliver Jefferson Peace Medal such as the type carried by the Corps of Discovery.  He also located a Comanche woman who claimed Porivo was her grandmother.  He claimed that Porivo had lived at Fort Bridger, Wyoming for sometime with sons Bazil and Baptiste and that ultimately that woman had come to Fort Washakie, where she was recorded as "Bazil's mother"  It was his conclusion that Porivo was Sacagawea.

Not all of Porivo's reputed accounts, if taken fully at face value, are fully easy to discount at first, but by and large they become so if fully examined.  Long journeys are in the context of the teller, and peace medals were much more common than might be supposed.  None the less, the retold story was picked up by Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard who massively romanticized it.  Hebard's historical research has been discredited, but her 1933 book caused a widespread belief to exist that Sacagawea didn't die in her late 20s but rather in her 90s, and not in North Dakota, but in Wyoming.  That suited Hebard's Wyoming centric boosting of her adopted state, and her feminist portrayal of an Indian heroine.  It provides a massive cautionary tale about the reinterpretation of history in the context of ones own time and to suit a preconceived notion of how the past ought to be a perfect prologue for hte future.

It is, however, simply, if unknowingly, false.

And the falsity of it gives Wyoming a claim on Sacagawea that it frankly doesn't merit.  One that lead to monuments in the state to Sacagawea, to include a tombstone or over Porivo's grave that identified her as Sacagawea, which is a sort of tourist attraction.

Indeed, there's no actual indication that Sacagawea ever set foot in Wyoming.  She may have, as a young girl, as the Lemhi Shoshone ranged over the mountainous regions of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.  Be that as it may, the Lemhi Valley of Idaho is named after them for a reason.  They're not one of the Shoshone bands that distinctly associated with the state prior to the Reservation era.  Be that as it may, during the known established period of her life, we can place her in Idaho, Montana and North Dakota, in terms of regional states, but not Wyoming. . . at any time.

That does not mean, of course, that she's not an admirable and important figure.  Nor does it mean that she was not an important Shoshone figure, and the Shoshone are an important people in Wyoming's history.  Its almost certainly the case that relatives of her, but not descendants, live on the Reservation today, although that claim would be even better for the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho.  Through her son, Jean Baptiste, she likely has living descendants today, although not ones who would identify as Shoshone.

But giving people a long and romantic life rather than a short and tragic one doesn't do them or history any favors.  In reality, Sacagawea's life was heroic, tragic and short.  She was just a girl when she was kidnapped from her family, and still just a girl when she was sold to a man a good twenty years older than she was and of an alien culture to be a type of domestic slave, kept along with another similarly youthful domestic slave he already held.  In that capacity she went across half the continent and back with an infant, and did come to be hugely admired by the members of the Corps of Discovery.  It was that respect that lead, in part, to the post expedition opportunities afford to her and Toussaint Charbonneau, who seems to have evolved into her actual husband over time.  That also lead to the education of her son at the behest of William Clark.  It didn't save her, however, form a 19th Century death, still in her twenties.

She was a remarkable young woman by all accounts, and deserves to be remembered as such, and accurately.

*Lemhi comes from Fort Lemhi, which was a Mormon mission to the Akaitikka.

**Comanche is a Shoshone word meaning "Arguer"  The argument was over the adoption of horses, and the argument took place in southeastern Wyoming at the time that the Shoshones first encountered horses.  The Comanches were the early adopters of horses.

***The details regarding Otter Woman are extremely obscure.  It's known that she was in an identical status to that of Sacagawea in 1804 and the best evidence is that she was a captive Shoshone.  There are other claims for her tribal origin, however and additional assertions as to her fate.  Like Sacajawea, her history suffers from an unfortunate association with the work of Dr. Grace Raymond Hebert who places Otter Woman in the Corps of Discovery camp in the winter of 1804 and who even has her remaining in domestic union with Charbonneau in later years, along with Sacajawea.  In reality, she seems to have simply been abandoned in 1804 or 1805.  Charbonneau's reasoning for this isn't clear, but Sacajawea was pregnant at the time that Charbonneau was hired by the Corps of Discovery.  It is clear that the Corps desired that one of Charbonneau's wives accompany them to act as interpreter, and he may have chose her due to her pregnancy, not wishing to abandon her in that condition.

Of course, if Otter Woman was in fact not Shoshone, but Mandan or some other tribe as has been claimed, that would also explain why she was not chosen.  

What occurred to her is not realistically capable of being known.

****Toussaint Charbonneau was probably born in 1767 and was from a town that is near Montreal.  His first name means "All Saints Day" or "All Saints".  He had been a fur trapper for an extended period of time by 1804.  His reputation has never been particularly good and for good reason.  One of the earliest records regarding him, prior to his time as a trapper, notes him being stabbed by a woman in defense of her daughter whom Charbonneau was attempting to rape.  

Charbonneau appears to be almost uniformly disliked by people who associated with him over the course of his long life.  He appears to have been temperamental.  He also seems to have a predilection for young women as he had four or five Indian "wives" during his lifetime, all of whom were teenagers at the time of their "marriages".  This includes one who was a teen at the time of his death , which is notable as he was in his 76 at the time, assuming the 1767 birth year is correct (if it isn't, he would have been 84, which seems unlikely).  The name of at least one of his wives is unknown (the name of another was Corn Woman, leaving at least one, or perhaps, unknown as to name).  It's known that two of the four or five where Shoshone, if Otter Woman was Shoshone, and one was Assiniboine.

His estate was settled by his son Jean Baptiste, which is interesting in that it would indicate that he was in some sort of contact with his son at the time of his death in about 1843, at which time he was back in North Dakota.  It's also interesting in that it would suggest that Jean Baptiste may have been his only survivor.  The existing information confirms that he had at least two children, both by Sacagawea, and may have had a third by her.  Only Jean Baptiste is known to have survived but the information about the possible third is very limited.  This is notable as his having four or five native women in domestic arrangements, with only one bearing children, would seem to be unlikely.

Charbonneau's long life is testament to his lifestyle in the wild being of a generally healthy nature.

*****Nor were they apparently bothered by the fact that the enlisted men of the Corps of Discovery indulged themselves with the favors of Indian women, making treatment for venereal disease a medical necessity for the expedition.  This was at least in part due to the fact that some Indian tribes of the period offered Indian women as favors to visitors, although I'm not noting that in regard to the Shoshone but rather to other bands the Corps encountered early in its trip across the western half of the continent. This is significant here only in noting that while Clark in particular came to really respect if not outright adore Sacagawea, the overall view of the men of the Corps was of a rather isolated and not egalitarian nature.

******York had been a slave in the Clark household and had grown up with Clark.  His post Corps of Discovery fate is poorly documented but it seems that Clark likely freed York at some point, probably a decade or so after the expedition, and due to repeated York requests that he be set free.  During the expedition he became a fairly participating member and his slave status, therefore, would have started to wear off.  He seems to have entered the freighting business upon being freed, and it further seems that Clark had granted him a status approach freedom sometime prior to actually freeing him.  York died at approximately age 60, apparently from cholera.  His death in his sixties came a few years prior to Clark's in his sixties.

*******Hebard says that Otter Woman spent the winter of 1804/05 win camp with Sacagawea and Charbonneau and was reunited with them upon the Corps of Discovery's return. She has Otter Woman going to Missouri with them and then returning to North Dakota with Lizette.

In short, it seems that Hebard disliked abandonment and death, and who likes them?  She was an important Wyoming figure and educator, and a suffragist.  Never married, a person is tempted to see in some of this a large element of projection of a period feminist sort in which not only is Sacagawea an important figure in the Corps of Discovery, but a feminist herself, with Otter Woman as an unconventional companion, associate and friend.

The reality of it was much more harsh.  Charbonneau abandoned Otter Woman upon obtaining employment with the Corps of Discovery, which at least left the pregnant Sacagawea with support.  As noted above, her pregnancy may explain why she was chosen over Otter Woman.  At least some oral histories indicate that Otter Woman later married an Indian man, and irrespective of their accuracy this is likely.  Given her slave status, Charbonneau's abandonment of her may have been a better fate for her in real terms.

^There's always a temptation to speculate about what a disease like "putrid fever" is, but in the context of the times its impossible to know.  While in a year like this one its easier to understand than others, even routine diseases could be lethal at the time and a disease like influenza was a real killer.

On an unrelated topic that fits in to this period, it might be worth noting that the actual story of Sacagawea, like that of several other 18th and 19th Century Indian women heroines, was uncomfortable for their European American contemporaries as well as for later generations, and therefore its continually recast.  Sacagawea is, like Pocahontas or Kateri Tekakwitha, an uncomfortable example of a Native American who was acculturated to more than one culture.  This was much more common among Indians than modern Americans would like to believe.

In her case, she had spent the first twelve years of her life about as isolated from the European Americans culture for an Indian as would have been possible south of the 48th Parallel and perhaps about as much as possible outside of far northern North America. This would have changed once she was with the Hidatsa, particularly upon her enslavement to Charbonneau.  It would have changed even more upon her accompaniment with the Corps of Discovery and its notable that at the time of her reunion with the Lemhi she made no apparent effort, nor did they, to rejoin them.  By that time, of course, she had a child and in the reality of the 19th Century her die may have been caste, if not by her own will.  Indeed, her fate was was at that point similar to that of the Sabean women who plead for their attackers after becoming pregnant by them in legend.

But only a few years later she was found in Missouri, a farmer's wife, with the farmer being Charbonneau.  She felt sufficiently comfortable with European American society to surrender Jean Baptiste to Clark before returning to North Dakota.  Her going back and forth between the Indian world and the European world is not seamless, but its not absent either.  This is true of many other period Native Americans including some very well known ones.

^^The Episcopal connection is what caused this thread to be written, although we'd debated doing it for years.  On one of our companion blogs, Churches of the West, a recent comment was posted about the Episcopal church in Atlantic City, with it being noted that the church had been moved from another location and that "Sacagawea" had been baptized there.

It's perfectly possible that the church had been moved from the Wind River Indian Reservation or some other locality in Fremont County, but Sacagawea wasn't baptized there.  Porivo may very well have been, given her close connection with the resident Episcopal missionary at the time.  It isn't known if Sacagawea was ever baptized, but if she was, and its quite possible that in fact this occurred, she would have been baptized as a Catholic.  Charbonneau had been baptized as a Catholic in his infancy.  It's additionally clear that Charbonneau, in spite of his lifestyle, gave his children distinctly French Catholic names and that a known descendant of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was baptized as a Catholic.

The Bates Battle, July 4, 1874

We were fortunately recently to be able to tour one of Wyoming's little known battlefields recently, thanks due to the local landowner who controls the road access letting us on.  We very much appreciate their generosity in letting us do so.

Our Jeep, which should have some clever nickname, but which does not.  Wrecked twice, and reassembled both times, it gets us where we want to go.  But we only go so far. We stopped after awhile and walked in.

The battlefield is the Bates Battlefield, which is on the National Registry of Historic landmarks, but which is little viewed. There's nothing there to tell you that you are at a battlefield. There are no markers or the like, like there is at Little Big Horn.  You have to have researched the area before you arrive, to know what happened on July 4, 1874, when the battle was fought.  And even at that, accounts are confusing.

Fortunately for the researcher, a really good write up of what is known was done when Historic Site status was applied for. Rather than try to rewrite what was put in that work, we're going to post it here.  So we start with the background.

And on to the confusion in the accounts, which we'd note is common even for the best known of Indian battles.  Indeed, maybe all of them.

The text goes on to note that the Arapaho raided into country that what was withing the recently established Shoshone Reservation, which we know as the Wind River Indian Reservation.  It also notes that this was because territories which the various tribes regarded as their own were fluid, and it suggest that a culture of raiding also played a potential part in that. In any event, the Shoshone found their reservation domains raided by other tribes.  Complaints from the Shoshone lead, respectively, to Camp Augur and Camp Brown being established, where are respectively near the modern towns of Lander and Ft. Washakie (which Camp Brown was renamed).

The immediate cause of the raid was the presence of Arapaho, Northern Cheyenne, and Sioux parties in the area in June and July 1874 that had an apparent intent to raid onto the Reservation.  Ironically, the Arapaho, who were involved in this battle, had separated themselves from the Cheyenne and the Sioux and had no apparent intent to participate in any such raids. They thereafter placed themselves in the Nowood River area.  Indian bands were known to be in the area that summer, and they were outside of those areas designated to them by the treaties of 1868.

Given this, Cpt. Alfred E. Bates, at Camp Brown, had sent scouts, including Shoshone scouts, into the field that summer to attempt to locate the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho bands.  On June 29, Shoshone scouts reported at Camp Brown that they'd sited an Arapaho village.  We here pick back up from the text:

The expedition took to the field on July 1, 1874, and remarkably, it traveled at night.

A few days later, they found what they were looking for.

Let's take a look at some of what Bates was seeing:

This is the valley which was below the ridge that Bates was traveling up, the night he found the Arapaho village when he passed it by.  It's not clear to me if he backtracked all the way back past this point and came back up this valley, or if he came from another direction.  Based upon the description, I suspect he rode all the way back and came up from this direction, but from the high ground, not down here in the valley.

Here's the spot that Bates referenced as being the area where two ravines joined.  Not surprisingly, in this wet year, the spot is fairly wet.  But to add to that, this area features a spring, known today, and probably dating back to the events of this battle, as Dead Indian Springs.  The "gentle slope" from which Cpt. Bates made his survey, is in the background.

And here we look up that second ravine, with its current denizens in view.

And here we see the prominent bluff opposite of where Cpt. Bates reconnoitered.  It was prominent indeed.

Bates chose to attack dismounted down the slope of the hill he was on, described above, with thirty troopers and twenty Shoshones.  At the same time, Lt. Young, meanwhile, attached down the valley from above it on the watercourse, in an apparent effort to cut the village off and achieve a flanking movement.

The slope down which Bates and his detail attacked, and the draw down which Young attacked.

The draw down which Young attacked.

The slope down which Bates attacked is depicted above.

The fighting was fierce and the Arapaho were surprised.  They put up a good account, however, and were even able to at least partially get mounted.  Chief Black Coal was wounded in the fighting and lost several fingers when shot while mounted.  The Arapaho defended the draw and the attack, quite frankly, rapidly lost the element of surprise and became a close quarters melee.

The slope down which Bates attacked.

The valley down which Young attacked.

High ground opposite from the slope down which Bates attacked.

Fairly quickly, the Arapaho began to execute the very move that Bates feared, and they retrated across the draw and started to move up the high ground opposite the direction that Bates had attacked from.  Young's flanking movement had failed.

The high ground.

The opposing bluff.

The opposing bluff.

Bates then withdrew.

Bates' command suffered four dead and five or six wounded, including Lt. Young.  His estimates for Arapaho losses were 25 Arapaho dead, but as he abandoned the field of battle, that can't be really verified.  Estimates for total Arapaho casualties were 10 to 125.  They definitely sustained some losses and, as noted, Chief Black Coal was wounded in the battle.

Bates was upset with the results of the engagement and placed the blame largely on the Shoshone, whom he felt were too noisy in the assault in the Indian fashion.  He also felt that they had not carried out his flanking instructions properly, although it was noted that the Shoshone interpreter had a hard time translating Bates English as he spoke so rapidly.  Adding to his problems, moreover, the soldiers fired nearly all 80 of their carried .45-70 rifle cartridges during the engagement and were not able to resupply during the battle as the mules were unable to bring ammunition up.  This meant that even if they had not disengaged for other reasons, they were at the point where a lock of ammunition would have hampered any further efforts on their part in any event (and of course they would have been attacking uphill).

After the battle the Arapaho returned to the Red Cloud Agency. Seeing how things were going after Little Big Horn, they came onto the Wind River Reservation in 1877 for the winter on what was supposed to be a temporary basis, and they remain there today.  They were hoping for their own reservation in Wyoming, but they never received it.  Black Coal went on the reservation with him, and portraits of him show him missing two fingers on his right hand.  His people soon served on the Reservation as its policemen.  He himself lived until 1893.

Alfred E. Bates, who had entered the Army as a private at the start of the Civil War at age 20.  Enlisting in the Michigan state forces, he soon attracted the attention of a politician who secured for him an enrollment at West Point, where he graduated in the Class of 1865. He missed service in the Civil War but soon went on to service on the plains. His name appears on two Wyoming geographic localities.  He rose to the rank of Major General and became Paymaster of the Army, dying in 1909 of a stroke.

After Appomattox. The Civil War's impact on Wyoming.

 

 Grand Army of the Republic memorial, Casper Wyoming.

We recently posted this item on the Civil War in Wyoming:

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming in the Civil War: I posted this item on our other blog, Lex Anteinternet, very recently for a variety of reasons: Lex Anteinternet: The Stars and Bars as ...

That's not where Wyoming's story with the Civil War ends, however.  When the guns fell silent at Appomattox (which of course didn't really end the war everywhere), changes kept on coming.  And indeed it was inevitable that they would, given the operation of Holscher's Fourth Law of History, War Changes Everything.  So here we'll look at that part of the history of our state, which again is a very significant one we've heretofore overlooked.

To a degree, with our earlier thread on the Civil War in Wyoming, we've already started to look at that to a degree.  We concluded our examination there with noting three (actually two) battles that occurred in Wyoming in the summer of 1865, just after the war ended with the last battle of that war, ironically in the west, at Palmito Ranch in May 1865.  Just two months later cavalrymen from Ohio, Kansas, and infantrymen from southern states serving as paroled Confederates, fought in central Wyoming at Platte Bridge Station. Soon thereafter Patrick Connor's troops fought in northern Wyoming at the Battle of Tongue River.  Starting shortly after that, however, these state troops were sent home and the Regular Army started coming back in.

 Aggressive campaigner in the West during the Civil War, Patrick E. Connor.

They didn't come back in to peace, however.  What began, in some ways, as a Cheyenne uprising in 1864 in reaction to Col. Chivington's attack on peaceful Black Kettle in Colorado spread to a Sioux campaign in 1865 under the leadership of Red Cloud.  But why was Red Cloud fighting the Army in 1865?  European American expansion into the Powder River Basis was the reason why.

And this came about in part as part of the increased immigration west that started with the Civil War.  In popular memory, when the Civil War broke out men left their homes to join the fight for four years.  But that's not really true.  Many men did, of course (often for shorter terms of service, however) but some men, and some families, indeed quite a few, simply picked up and moved west to remove themselves from the strife.  Men and women from all over the country found themselves on immigrant trails leading west, hoping for a new, and more peaceful life, somewhere else.  And, with men again, some just yielded to a seeming American migratory instinct and placed themselves in the west, looking for something, with that something often being gold and silver. Given all of this, just as Indian tribes were becoming increasingly militant, an increase in European Americans in the west was being experienced as well.  This was, in part, a direct result of the war.

It didn't stop with the end of the war, however.  The war had put thousands of people in motion, some through military service, and some as refugees.  Following the war most people just went home, but some had no homes to return to, or didn't wish to, and a minority of servicemen just couldn't.  So following the war war they joined the immigrant trail.  The passage of the Homestead Act in 1862 further in creased this, as people made newly mobile found the inducement of land more than amply balanced against the difficulties of travel, particularly when they'd become accustomed to that, or had their backs forced up against the wall in any event.  This yielding to a migratory impulse would impact Wyoming and the entire country for years, with in Wyoming people moving to, or more often across, the state going on for a very long time.

It's easy to disregard the war in this context, but it shouldn't be.  Contrary to what Americans generally think about their history, Americans did move prior to the Civil War, but not usually very far. Seven miles per generation is the general figure for the pre Civil War advancement of the Frontier. But the war changed that, by force in part, and in part by acclimation.  It can be argued that the United States, as a mobile society, began with the war.

Tombstone of Illinois Civil War veteran, in Casper's Highland Cemetary. Such markers are not uncommon in the cemetery, an indicator of the many men who chose not to return to their homes after the Civil War or who ultimately left them.

All of this increased European American presence in the state (aided by the advancing Union Pacific Railroad, ran right into an increased Indian militancy, as already noted, and the Army found itself confronting a more difficult situation in 1865 than it had in 1860.  Added to this, the war ended up changing over the rank and file, and the officer corps, of what had been a fairly stable career Army.  Many men who would have continued on as career enlisted men in the tiny pre war Army either left it after years of intense combat, or were casualties of the war.  The post war Army therefore had many new men in it, including oddly enough even quite a few who had not served in the Civil War, having barely missed it.  The officer corps, for its part, was now heavily dominated by men who had cut their teeth in the Civil War and had risen up to high ranks, only to be reduced in rank in many instances to fill slots in the post war Army.  Added to their numbers were officers who had not come though West Point but rather who'd been wartime commission holders who were now accepted into Regular Federal service at the insistence of Congress, which required the Army to make room for a certain number of them.

The Army had gone into the Civil War as a very small institution, but one that had quite a bit of Frontier experience and which was very rough and ready.  After half a decade of modern war in the East, the Army that emerged in the 1865 to 1866 time frame quickly evolved from a Frontier force with experience into one that was almost entirely new and somewhat green.  The battles of the immediate post war period sometimes demonstrate this.  The Fetterman Fight in December 1866 epitomized this.  Troops from Ft. Phil Kearney, which was commanded by a pre war lawyer turned wartime officer, Col. Carrington, found themselves badly lead by former Lt. Colonel, now Captain, William J. Fetterman who failed to appreciate that fighting the Sioux was going to be different than fighting Confederates.  This lead, of course, to the destruction of his command in the worst Frontier Army disaster of the immediate post war period, which wouldn't be eclipsed until former General, now Lt. Colonel, George A. Custer lead his troops into a worst disaster in 1876 in Montana.

Monument to the troops of William J. Fetterman's detail.

The Army, practically a new Army, did learn how to engage in its new role, but it wasn't as quick or proficient as it as might generally be believed.  Red Cloud actually managed to win his war in 1868, giving us the only example of a Plains Indian War in which the native combatants emerged with a wartime victory.  A war weary and distracted United States yielded to the Sioux in this singular example in Wyoming, making this Wyoming experience unique, albeit temporary.  Hardly noticed is that the 1868 victory came only a few years before the campaigns of the 1876, which would see a spectacular Sioux battlefield victory but which would result in the ultimate Sioux and Cheyenne defeat.

 Red Cloud

Part of this story, of course, is that Col. Chivington's attack on the Cheyenne in 1864 caused a war with the Cheyenne that was fought in Wyoming and Nebraska.  The Cheyenne were Sioux allies and would fight with the Sioux into the 1870s before they experienced the same results.  In some ways, the Wyoming Indian Wars of the late Civil War period were more dominated by the Cheyenne than the Sioux, while the larger Sioux wold dominate the wars from 1866 on.

The collapse of the Indian effort was a feature of Wyoming's history and Wyoming featured prominently in the campaigns on the Northern Plains.  And of course a result of that collapse was a vast expansion of the reservation system in the West.  That expansion would see the Cheyenne and Sioux, who had entered Wyoming in the first half of the 19th Century taken back out and removed as a demographic in Wyoming.  The Crow, who had ranged into and contested for Wyoming as well would also find themselves outside of the state, although only barely given their reservation in southern Montana (the Cheyenne also have one of their reservations in southern Montana near the Wyoming border).  The Wind River Reservation was established at the request of the Shoshone in 1868 (again, a unique Wyoming fact, given that it was unusual for an Indian tribe to ask for a Reservation).  The Arapaho's, a small tribe allied to the Sioux and  Cheyenne (and who had members of their tribe at Sand Creek at the time of Chivington's attack) came on to the reservation in 1878 as a result of the increasingly desperate straits the collapse of Indian efforts following 1876 entailed.

It would be a stretch, of course, to say that the Indian Wars of the 1866 to 1890 time frame are all the result of Civil War, but not much of a stretch.  Some of this strife would have happened anyhow, but it cannot be denied that the tribes were activated and made militant by the events of the Civil War and that the increase of European American immigration into the West which the war fueled played a major part in making that strife what it was.  Likewise, the Army effort was heavily impacted by the loss of the pre war soldiers who knew Frontier campaigning.

Part of the influx of immigration into Wyoming which hasn't been addressed, and which has to be addressed as a separate topic, is that of post war cattlemen. This was, in fact, a direct result of the Civil War.

Wyoming had seen very little in the way of agriculture prior to the Civil War.  Small agricultural units did pop up around the advancing Union Pacific to serve it, but they weren't much.  Prior to that, farming had been introduced by Mexican immigrant labor around Ft. Laramie, when the "Mexican Hills" were farmed by families that had come up after the Mexican War to work on the new buildings at the fort.  The war changed all of this.

During the Civil War enormous herds of feral cattle had grown up in Texas, as those cattle were simply abandoned by those who owned them as they went away to Confederate service.  After the war, these wild cattle were basically free for the taking, or rather for the taking for those who would expend the effort.  Without a market however, they were of very low value.

 Branding cattle in Texas, approximately in the 1860s.

The East provided that market, and it was a market for beef. Prior to the 1865, the United States was really a pork eating nation, not a beef eating one.  Cattle in Texas were raised in the Mexican market fashion, for their hides.  Meat was only a locally consumed byproduct.  The expansion of rail into the West, however, which had commenced before the war and which continued on during it, brought railhead within long distance trailing of Texas herds, and that meant that they could now be driving, as difficult as that was, to railheads for shipment to the hungry East.

It's already been addressed here, but nearly as soon as it became evident that money could be made driving cattle to railheads in Kansas, it became evident that the cattle industry could expand into the plains regions of the West profitably.  This took off rapidly and Wyoming the cattle industry was reaching far up into Wyoming by the mid 1870s, although with difficulty.  Following the collapse of Indian resistance in the late 1870s, the door was open and it really took off in the 1880s.

The story of the early cattle industry is a complicated one, but one of the prominent but lesser noted aspects of it is the extent to which it reflected Southern livestock raising practice.  In the Antebellum South, and indeed well after it, cattle had been turned out into the woods, which while owned were largely unexploited.  This meant that cattle were effectively grazed in "commons" by men who necessarily had to be mounted.  Following the Southern defeat in the war, the use of the wooded commons became increasingly restricted as the timber lands owners, often of the planter class, actively acted to deprive Southern yeomen of the use of them.  Already having suffered the impacts of defeat, some of these men simply took off and went where cattle were otherwise raised, such as in Texas or ultimately elsewhere in the West, taking their mounted lives and practices with them.  This reflected itself in the practices of the cattle industry, even though it is difficult to find the stories of individual cowboys who reflect this. But, for that matter, the stories of individual Mexican cowboys, or black cowboys, who made up 1/3d of that class, is also difficult to find.

Which brings us to another aspect of this story, the addition of African Americans to the Wyoming demographic.  They did not come in huge numbers, but they did come, and even ended up being incorporated into Wyoming's civic life very quickly.  At least one black juror served in a capitol murder jury early in the 20th Century, a remarkable fact for the United States that time, and Casper elected a black Civil War veteran as its mayor during the 1890s.

Something often omitted, oddly, in the popular recollection of the early cattle industry is that this is an economic story. That is, the cattle industry was and is an industry, not some sort of exotic hobby.  The cattle industry in the West differed markedly from cattle raising efforts east of the Mississippi as those efforts, prior to the Civil War, had been much less market oriented for practical reasons.  Most meat was butchered and consumed locally, as there there was no practical means of preservation other than salting or corning (and hence the widespread consumption of bacon, ham, corned beef, and sausages in that era).

I note this as one of the hugely significant aspect of the Civil War is that it accelerated, partially through political actions, the industrialization of the United States, and that had a big impact on the early history of Wyoming.  Indeed, while very poorly understood, that impact still lives on today, although its ironically contested by the same forces that brought it about.

The Civil War did not cause the Industrial Revolution in the United States. That had been ongoing for quite some time.  However, the Industrial Revolution had not come to all o the United States prior to the war, and that impacted the war and its results.  Industrialization had occurred much more significantly in the North.  The South provided 25% of the nation's exports prior to the war, but nearly 100% of that 25% were agricultural products.  The South, famously, had no arms industry at all when it chose to take on the North, which had a significant one.

This is not to say, as is sometimes implied, that everyone in the North was working in a factory.  That view was somewhat popular in the South at the time, which is one of the things that gave Southerners false comport, feeling as they did that a bunch of pasty faced factory workers would not be able to take on the hardy yeoman of the South.  In fact, most Northerners were from farms as well and many were also Yeoman.  One of the rude shocks of the war that the South experienced was to learn that, as they did for example taking on the Michigan Brigade early in the war where they were stunned to find that Michigan's troops weren't bothered by the rain.

The industrialization of the North, however, is important to this story as industry had widely developed and was supported politically in the North. While a majority of Northerners were yeomen, as in the South, Yeoman in the North had not retained a huge cultural identity as they did in the South.  Southerners were not only mostly yeomen, in outlook they were hostile to industry.  This wasn't the case in the North.  Because the Democratic Party identified with the  South, and the political class in the South was Democratic, and because the Whigs had folded into the Republican Party in the North, this impacted politics.

The GOP of this period, and all the way through World War One, is an interesting mix of views that are sometimes difficult to reconcile. Basically, however, the GOP inherited the pro industry view of northern Whigs, while also having what we'd regard today as strong pro civil rights platform. The party was simultaneously radical and conservative, depending upon which aspect  of its politics you are looking at.  What this meant in practical terms, however, is that the party tended towards strongly supporting government support of business, while also being strongly supportive of individual rights.

The Civil War caused the fortunes of the Democratic Party to fall enormously, and the early history of Wyoming as well as most of the rest of the West was marked by the Republican Party being the dominant political party.  That party favored industry and it favored government support of industry, which directly impacted Wyoming.  The GOP favored retention of the public domain by the Federal government for direct claim by homesteaders and mineral entrants, something that the states had not done so generously. The GOP sponsored railroad through the granting land to them.  The GOP backed land grant universities. The GOP dominated the early political history of Wyoming, and it was both pro civil rights and pro business.  Wyoming, by extension, reflected those values, being remarkably progressive at least as to black residents and through also being a backer of women's rights in the context of the 19th Century. That latter movement, notably, had grown directly out of the the abolition movement.

The acceleration of the fortunes of industry during the war, and the decline of the Democratic party which had backed a more agrarian view of the economy, also meant that the entire country progressed into a more industrial era at a more rapid pace than it otherwise would have.  The region of the United States that remained resistant to that evolution remained the South, and as late as the 1930s the Southern Agrarians would push back against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal with their manifesto I'll Take My Stand. That was well after the era we are discussing, of course, but it is the case that the fortunes of industry advanced remarkably for at least a couple of decades after the Civil War, during that same period of time during which the  Wyoming Territory was created, and Wyoming became a state.  Wyoming itself did not participate in heavy industry, but almost from its onset as a territory, in spite of it being primarily agricultural, it looked towards mineral development very favorably, and that mineral development could only have taken place in the context of a large national industrial economy.

Also in the context of politics, Wyoming's early political history featured many individuals who had been Union soldiers during the Civil War.  Francis E. Warren provides a prominent example, as he not only had been a Civil War era solider, he had been  a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Not too surprisingly, almost all of the Wyoming's early politicians were immigrants to the state, and a fair number of those men had served in the Union's forces during the war.  Confederates were notably absent in this category.

 

Francis E. Warren wearing his Congressional Medal of Honor.

All this goes, in part, to the fact that the settlement of Wyoming and its obtaining of statehood in 1890 is itself a direct byproduct of the war.  Without the cattle industry's expansion in the 1880s, which really started in Texas in the late 1860s, it just wouldn't have happened in the same manner or nearly so quickly.  If pre war trends had continued, its hard to see the same event taking place in 1890, and foreseeing a different future in which statehood came about in the 20th Century is more likely.  Indeed, Wyoming itself wasn't recognized as a territory until 1868, and its doubtful that would have occurred at the same pace, if at all.  The Indian Wars of the 1860s and 1870s probably wouldn't have occurred as well, and it's possible that Indian fortunes would have played out more favorably than they did.

 

Ft. Caspar Cemetery.