Porcupine (Cheyenne)
Porcupine (c. 1848–1929) was a Cheyenne chief and medicine man. He is best known for bringing the Ghost Dance religion to the Cheyenne. Raised with the Sioux of a Cheyenne mother, he married a Cheyenne himself and became a warrior in the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.
Porcupine fought against the U.S. in Hancock's War in 1867 in which the Cheyenne resisted moving to a reservation. Porcupine's group was pursued by the 7th Cavalry from Kansas to Nebraska. In Nebraska he succeeded in derailing and wrecking a train, the first time this had been done by Indians. At the conclusion of the Great Sioux War of 1876, the Cheyenne surrendered and were deported to Oklahoma. Porcupine took part in the Northern Cheyenne Exodus in which a part of the starving tribe fought their way back to their homeland in Montana. Porcupine was one of a group of Cheyennes who were subsequently arrested on charges of murdering settlers as the Cheyennes crossed Kansas. After spending most of 1879 in prison, the charges were dismissed without a full trial taking place.
In 1889, Porcupine undertook a long journey to Nevada to visit Wovoka, the prophet of the new Ghost Dance religion. Porcupine believed that Wovoka was the Messiah who would save the Indians and rid the continent of the white men. Porcupine returned to preach the new religion to the Cheyennes and began baptising converts into his church. The Ghost Dance spread throughout the plains tribes. The U.S. Army suppressed the Ghost Dance because of settler concerns that it would lead to a new Indian uprising. While the Cheyenne did not suffer tragedy on the scale of the Sioux at Wounded Knee, Porcupine could only perform the dance in secret from 1890 onwards. In 1900 he was imprisoned for attempting to revive the religion.
Porcupine, like Wovoka, preached peace and took no part in the violence associated with the Ghost Dance elsewhere. He was a chief representing the Cheyenne in several treaty councils with the U.S., including leading a delegation to Washington.
Early life
Porcupine was born c. 1848 and was raised with the Sioux. His father was Sioux and his mother was Cheyenne. He married a Cheyenne and became a member of the Cheyenne tribe,[1] since it was the normal custom for a husband to live amongst the band of his wife's family, usually in a lodge adjacent to her parents.[2] Like virtually all Cheyenne young men, Porcupine joined a warrior society, in his case, the Dog Soldiers.[3]
Hancock's War
At the end of the
The Indians were wary of approaching the fort. A joint camp of Southern Cheyenne and
Hancock ordered George Armstrong Custer to take the 7th Cavalry in pursuit. This was Custer's first action in the Indian wars. It was not very successful, the scattered Indians were hard to follow and when Custer stopped at Fort Hays for forage for his horses he found there was none to be had and he became stuck there. On 19 April Hancock ordered the camp at Pawnee Fork to be destroyed in retaliation and sparked an Indian war,[4] unnecessarily so according to many commentators both contemporary and modern.[5] One of the Indians being pursued by Custer from Pawnee Fork was the nineteen-year-old Porcupine.[6]
Train attack
Porcupine fled northward from Custer with a companion, Red Wolf. By the time they reached the
Encouraged by this success, the Indians then tried to do some more substantial damage to the track. The rails were unfastened, lifted, bent aside and a more substantial barricade built. Late into the night, early 7 August, two freight trains approached. Some of the Indians came out of hiding and pursued the first train on horseback. They fired at it and even attempted to stop it by
In the morning the train was thoroughly looted and then burned. Bolts of calico from the train were tied to the tails of the warrior's ponies so that they unrolled into colourful flags. These were taken back to their camp for the women there.[10] Porcupine's actions that day had resulted in the first train derailment by Indians.[11]
Escape from Oklahoma
Following the Indian surrender at the end of the
A number of Kansas settlers had been killed during the Indians' journey north. There were calls to put the whole band of Cheyenne on trial as a group, but this had dubious legal standing. As a compromise, the military sent seven Indians, Wild Hog, a war chief of the Northern Cheyenne Elk warrior society,
Ghost Dance apostle
The
In November 1889 Porcupine led a Cheyenne mission to visit the
Porcupine describes the visit to Wovoka as a fortuitous side benefit of the visit to the Arapahoes. He mentions only the Cheyenne delegation as if they came alone. However,
White reaction
The Ghost Dance religion was not limited to the Cheyennes. It spread throughout the plains tribes. Settlers living close to reservations became concerned that it would lead to a new Indian uprising and called on the army to intervene. Indian dances had been made illegal by the Indian Religious Crimes Code, 1883, and remained so until 1934.[24] White fear of the movement resulted in confrontation between the army and the Sioux and led to the killing of the Hunkpapa Sioux chief Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890.[note 7] At Porcupine's location on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, reinforcements were sent from Fort Keogh to the Lame Deer agency. The army sent Sgt. Willis Rowland, a mixed-blood Cheyenne-white scout, to gather intelligence on Porcupine's preaching. Rowland joined Porcupine's church and was baptised into it. Rowland disliked the deceitfulness of his mission; "I hated to do this, but it seemed like it was the best way." After three days, he reported back to his superiors that Porcupine's preaching was entirely peaceful and that nobody was talking about fighting whites.[25] Nevertheless, the Ghost Dance was stopped by the government.[21] The Northern Cheyenne sometimes succeeded in holding an illegal Ghost Dance by convincing soldiers trying to break it up that it was some different dance.[26]
Some time after the Ghost Dance was stopped, Porcupine moved to the
The Ghost Dance religion faded when the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead failed to appear as predicted. It did not, however, die completely and a rump remains into the present day. Porcupine tried to revive the religion in 1900. Indian agent James C. Clifford gathered a petition from Northern Cheyennes demanding that he be imprisoned. Porcupine was arrested in October and given hard labour at Fort Keogh. He was released on 28 February 1901 on promising to behave.[28] In 1918 there was a Messianic inspired attempt to organise a revolt on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. Whites at the agency were afraid enough to carry guns at all times and stockpile ammunition. However, the attempt was nipped in the bud with strongly worded threats to the Indians. Porcupine took no part in this, or any other, Messiah-connected attempted rebellions. He remained peaceful throughout the period.[29]
Political leader
Porcupine was a chief of the Northern Cheyenne but never recognised as such by the U.S. government, probably because of his connection to the Ghost Dance.[30] He was also a powerful medicine man; according to Marquis he had more influence than the highest status medicine man in the tribe, the Keeper of the Sacred Tepee.[31] He was involved in four separate treaty councils with the U.S. which resulted in formal treaties, all of which he considered had been abrogated by the U.S. Porcupine was most troubled by the U.S. reneging on the treaty agreement over the Black Hills after gold was discovered there, which was the immediate cause of the 1876 war. Porcupine was the spokesman for a Cheyenne delegation to Washington during the presidency of Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893), the purpose of which was to seek reparations for treaty violations.[32]
Character
Porcupine in his preaching phase, in contrast to the young warrior, was a man of peace. Historian
As a "bad Indian" he was of the most gentle type. The high regard for him was not restricted to his own people ... Even the missionaries liked him, their only condemnation being that he was an apostle of paganism.[33]
Porcupine had two sons. Both died of tuberculosis, a common disease amongst the Cheyenne of the reservation period, for which they had little resistance. Porcupine died in 1929.[34]
Notes
- ^ Marquis, citing Grinnell, says both Handerhan and Thompson were killed. The sources for both Marquis and Grinnell were Cheyennes, who thought that Thompson was dead (Marquis, p. 125).
- ^ As well as Dodge City being closer to the scenes of the crimes, there was a distinct difference between the western frontier attitudes in West Kansas and the liberal attitudes in the east of the state, which was seen by West Kansans to aid the defence side (Powers & Leiker, pp. 92–93).
- ^ Wovoka was often accused in newspapers of claiming to be Christ. When interviewed by Mooney, he made no such claim, only claiming to be the prophet of the Messiah with the power, given him directly by God while he was in heaven, of being able to control the weather (Mooney, p. 773). However, many of his followers, including Porcupine, believed that he was the Messiah, Christ returned to Earth (Mooney, pp. 784–785, 795–796).
- hunter-gatherers, they were no longer able to sustain this lifestyle on the plains and were forced to remain on the reservations (Isenberg, pp. 2–3).
- ^ Wovoka originally predicted the resurrection to occur in the Autumn of 1890 (Mooney, p. 796; Marquis, p. 130). The prediction was adjusted when that date passed. See Marquis (Marquis, pp. 130–131) for even later resurgences of this religion. See Hittman (Hittman, pp. 259–267) for a list of newspaper accounts of continuing Ghost Dance activity running into the mid-1920s.
- ^ See Hittman for a discussion on the possible connection between the ghost shirts of the Sioux and Mormon holy garments, a theory first proposed by Mooney (Hittman, pp. 84–88).
- ^ The Ghost Dance religion had lost some of its peaceful nature amongst the Sioux. The ghost shirts of the Sioux warriors were supposed to repel bullets. Wovoka disclaimed any connection to the ghost shirts (Mooney, p. 772).
- ^ The sale of the Sioux reservation land was instigated by President Harrison, keen to create two new Republican voting states, he needed the Indian land to make the newly created South Dakota state viable with enough room for settlement. The Indians had previously successfully opposed such a sale, but then Harrison sent a commission headed by General George Crook to ensure it happened. According to treaty, 75% of adult male Indians had to agree to a treaty change, which was needed for the land sale. Crook used a raft of dubious methods to gain the necessary signatures. He threatened that the land would be taken anyway and that they would then get nothing, he made promises that he was in no position to keep, and he kept hostile chiefs away from the talks. He even allowed non-Indians to sign the petition to artificially boost the numbers (Richardson, pp. 102–105).
References
- ^ Marquis, p. 124
- ^ Grinnell, p. 52
- ^ McLaughlin, p. 63
- ^ a b c
- O'Neill & Robinson, pp. 40–42
- Utley, pp. 111–120
- Kraft, pp. 170–194
- ^ Coates & Kennedy, pp. 21–22
- ^ Marquis, p. 142
- ^ Marquis, p. 124
- ^
- McLaughlin, p. 63
- Marquis, pp. 124–125
- ^
- Marquis, p. 125
- Williams, p. 34
- ^ Marquis, p. 125
- ^ Angevine, p. 180
- ^ Powers & Leiker, pp. 12, 76
- ^ Marquis, p. 126
- ^ Powers & Leiker, p. 13
- ^ Hardorff, p. 84
- ^ Powers & Leiker, pp. 91–94
- ^ Mooney, pp. 771–772, 774
- ^ Marquis, p. 127
- ^ Marquis, p. 128
- ^ Mooney, pp. 795–796 citing Porupine's statement to Major Carroll
- ^ a b Stands in Timber, p. 61
- ^ Mooney, pp. 793–794
- ^ Mooney, pp. 817–818
- ^ Crawford & Kelley, p. 211
- ^ Marquis, pp. 129–130
- ^ Stands in Timber, p. 149
- ^
- Stands in Timber, pp. 144–145, 151, 250
- Richardson, pp. 95–106
- ^ Marquis, p. 130
- ^ Marquis, p. 131
- ^ Marquis, p. 132
- ^ Marquis, p. 124
- ^ Marquis, pp. 133–134
- ^ Marquis, pp. 131–132
- ^ Marquis, p. 136
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