The Trace of the Southern Arapaho

All right, all right! I know it! (Wohei, wohei) (Heein’nowoo!) Yes (Hee), a few of our Southern Arapaho brothers did remain hostile after their chiefs signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty in 1867 in which they agreed to live on the Oklahoma territory reservation. With certainty, the Southern Arapahos would have attacked Custer’s troops after the 1868 Washita massacre had the federal troops not been sheltered by fifty-three women and children captives.¹ Furthermore, a few did join the Lakota and Cheyenne in 1868 and made raids in Kansas and a few did join the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne in the Red River War of 1874-75. But the operative word here is “few” in that most Southern Arapahos honored their agreement to live on the reservation and were living there when the agency’s first agent, Brinton Darlington arrived at Camp Supply on July 6, 1869 and established the agency just east and north of present day El Reno in May 1870.

Mister Darlington, a Quaker, had large shoes to fill in achieving the goals of President Ulysses Grant’s 1869 “Quaker Peace Policy” and his Executive Order establishing the reservation: to get the Plains Indians to learn and practice farming skills, remain peacefully on the reservation, and to educate and Christianize each nomadic soul. All of the behaviors comprising these goals were foreign to roaming Indians whose cultural practices, religion and ways of life were uniquely different from those of the whites. What an arduous task: transforming 3,500 to 4,000 indigenous souls into your image! On top of these objectives, he had to construct buildings and institutions from scratch. Agent Darlington made inroads in civilizing his charges though he was not successful in keeping most Indians close to the agency headquarters. This said, the Arapaho and Cheyenne people respected him. This feeling was witnessed when, after less than three years as agent, large numbers of Indians openly mourned at his funeral in May 1872.²

John D. Miles was, in 1872, selected as the replacement for the deceased Brinton Darlington. Under the circumstances, Miles should have been impressed with Darlington’s achievements as the reservation’s first agent. One milestone was the 1871 opening of the agency’s first school under the sponsorship of the Orthodox Friends.³ Though opened, the animosity between parents of the two tribes--especially by the Cheyennes, resulted in low attendance. Even a partition down the middle of a classroom was not adequate to satisfy the Cheyennes. A second school was thereafter constructed for the Cheyenne children, one mile north at Caddo Springs. The Darlington school continued to serve the Arapaho.

The Arapaho Tribe further intensified the Cheyennes’ resentment toward them, in 1872, by requesting a separate reservation for the Cheyenne Tribe. This request was partially based on the Arapahos’ belief that the Cheyennes were continually “getting their young men into trouble.” With the insulted Cheyennes equally agreeable to a separation, the matter reached the treaty stage in 1873, but was never ratified.⁴

This squabbling between the two tribes was a relatively minor problem for Agent Miles compared to the Indians’ troubles adjusting to reservation life where they suffered from hunger and privation. With reservation rations being inadequate and the Indians’ commissary, the buffalo, being gravely diminished, there is little wonder that the 1650 Arapahos remained on the reservation when most of the Cheyenne joined the Comanche and Kiowa in winter camping in the Texas Panhandle. There, while the Indians attempted to keep whites off their favorite hunting grounds, federal troops under the leadership of Colonel Nelson A. Miles and Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie defeated the southern plains Indians. Through fourteen pitched battles, the Indians supplies and tipis were burned forcing the tribesmen to scatter. From the five villages destroyed, the federal forces captured an impressive number of horses: Fourteen hundred. ⁵Several Cheyenne bands attempted to reach their northern Cheyenne cousins rather than return to their assigned reservation. By June, the Red River War of 1874-75 had ended with most all members of the three tribes having returned to their designated reservations.

The whites, in the 1870s, had began killing the buffalo in appalling numbers. Some killings were justifiably used to feed railroad crews building new lines across the plains and by soldiers staffing the forts. But buffalo killing became a fashionable sport among wealthy easterners and European aristocrats who rode luxurious railroad coaches across the plains from which they, their servants, and train crews shot buffalo for sport--leaving the animals to rot.

However, the massive slaughtering began a few years later when hunters realized a vast market for the animals’ hides--again, leaving the carcasses to rot. Remembering that the United States was at war with the Indians, General Philip Sheridan praised the hunters’ slaughtering of the buffalo, his justification being that by eliminating the Indians’ commissary, the army would defeat the Indians: “…let them [the hunters] kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.” ⁶

With the Red River War over and the Cheyenne back with their Arapaho ally under the auspices of the Darlington Agency, agent John Miles could hope for, but not expect pacification among the Indians. Too few buffalo, too few rations, and hungry bellies do not make people tolerable of privation. Likewise, children are not motivated to learn, nor are adults motivated to learn and tend agricultural practices when hungry; therefore, these goals for the Indians were temporarily abrogated. More food must be forthcoming!

With this introduction, a chronological regression is made to agent Brinton Darlington’s 1872-1873 Annual Report, after which the Southern Arapahos’ lives on the reservation will continue to be primarily viewed through interpretations of the various agents’ Reports.