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"The government was privy to the slaughter of the buffalo. A man. . . could get all of the government ammunition he wanted for nothing-provided he could show he was going to use it on buffalo. " FRANK MAYER ENERALS PHIL SHERIDAN and William Tecumseh Sherman, in charge of the Indian-fightin' Army, commanded soldiers who rode herd on the redskin to keep him on the reservation, to track him down when he wandered from it and punish him. One way of keeping these people home, the generals knew, was to destroy the buffalo. Once gone, the roving tribes would have to conform or starve. When in 1875 General Sheridan, then Commander of the Military Department of the Southwest, heard that the Texas State Legislature was considering a bill to protect the buffalo, he rode straightway to Austin, Texas. Only six years before at Fort Cobb, Indian Territory, he had spat out an answer to Chief Toch-a-way's claim "Me Toch-a-way, me good Indian" with his famous "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead." Now he chided the joint session of Texas legislators for considering such a foolish bill and suggested , instead, they vote to give unanimous thanks to the buffalo hunters and to provide them each with a medal, a discouraged Indian on one side and a dead buffalo on the other. He went on to say, "Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring a lasting peace and allow civilization to advance." I Similarly, Colonel Richard 126 Irving Dodge, in 1867 commander at North Plattewho later tried to appear an ardent buffalo conservationist -attempted to quash Sir W. F. Butler's remorse over thirty buffalo slain with, "Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone."z Subjugation of the Plains Indians-that's what the Army wanted but couldn't accomplish. They'd tried protecting wagon trains and making the Overland Route safe for stagecoach travel only to find the cavalry chasing an enemy who, unencumbered by supply wagon and caissons, hit and ran, and lived on buffalo. The men in blue, according to a plainsman, "blow the bugle to let the Indians know they are going to sleep. In the morning they blow the bugle to let the Indians know they are going to get up. Between the bugle and their great trains, they manage to keep the red-skins out of sight." 3 By 1868 the troopers had pacified the tribes so little that the Commissioner of Indian Affairs ironically complained that under the present extermination policy the Army was killing about one Indian a month, a rate at which it would finish the job in about 25,000 years. Furthermore, he said, each Indian killed cost the government $1 million; worse still, for every redskin that bit the dust, twenty-five soldiers died. The Commissioner wryly reckoned extermination would cost $300 billion, and 7,500,000 General Miles and his men, in Montana, move through dinner-on-the-hoof. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, October IB, [B79' Cour/es), T~ Library Compan)' of Philadelphia. American soldiers would have to die if such Indian wars continued" And by 1870 Secretary J. D. Cox of the Department of the Interior agreed-he reponed to President Grant that "as a mere question of pecuniary economy," it would be cheaper to feed the Indian "to sleepy surfeiting," while educating his children, than "to carryon a general Indian war for a single year." j Before the Civil War and immediately after it, destroying the buffalo had seemed unnecessary. Then the generals thought their trOOps to be the equal of any savage fighters, and the politicians in Washingron felt that the buffalo should be saved to feed the Indians once they all had been settled on reservations. But now that the boys in blue were losing the Indian wars, Congress and the generals and the Secretary of the [nterior- the government- became "privy to the slaughter of the buffalo." The Army made Sharps and Spencer rifle cartridges "available" if the taker would "swear to shoot it into a buffalo. "6 Furthermore, in 187B. in order to starve Silting Bull and his band. safely in exile in Canada, the Army used a cordon of Indians, half-breeds and soldiers to fire the grass ahead of the north-moving herds, harass them and keep them from entering Canada and their favorite winter grazing grounds...

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