James McLaughlin

James McLaughlin 1910

Sitting Bull (1885)

Ghost dance with the Oglala Lakota in the Pine Ridge Reservation

Indian mass grave at Wounded Knee 1890

Chief Spotted Elk (also called Big Foot in literature ) dead in the snow at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890)

James McLaughlin (born February 12, 1842 in Ontario Canada , † July 28, 1923 Washington DC ) was an American Indian agent and agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

He became known for his involvement in the arrest (which led to his death) of Chief Sitting Bull in the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 1890, and the massacre at Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the same year. He is also considered to be one of the oppressors of the Indian spirit dance movement . He was sympathetic to the Native Americans throughout his life. So he was married to an Indian woman. In 1910 he published his memoir entitled My Friend the Indian .

Life

James McLaughlin was born to Northern Irish immigrants in Avonmore, Ontario, Canada. He was the 6th of 9 children. There he learned the trade of a blacksmith. When he was 21, he emigrated to St. Paul , Minnesota , USA , where he worked as a blacksmith. In 1864 he married Louise Buisson, a Dakota Indian from the Mdewakanton tribe . The couple had 7 children. He was granted American citizenship relatively quickly. In 1871 the couple moved to Fort Totten, North Dakota , where he had been given a job as a farrier in the US Army. At the same time he was in charge of the local BIA agency. In the fort he was preparing for the Indian agent exam. He really wanted to work for the Home Office. He was on good terms with the natives. In 1876 he officially got the post as Indian agent of the Devil's Lake Agency, today's Spirit Lake Indian Reservation .

In 1881 he was transferred to the much larger Standing Rock Sioux Agency, which looked after what is now the Standing Rock Indian Reservation . At that time, the agency was one of four overseeing the Great Sioux Indian Reservation . Like many of his white contemporaries, McLaughlin believed that Indians should adapt to the lifestyle and culture of whites. Hunters and gatherers were to become sedentary farmers. The reservations were to be divided into parcels and given to individual Indians as property, as was done in other states by the Homestead Act . At the time, it was not generally known that the soils of the Dakotas were unsuitable as farmland. The soils consisted primarily of sand after clearing prairie grass with its deep roots, which led to terrible sandstorms after the land was cleared and plowed. See Dust Bowl . The Indians also resisted giving up their culture.

In 1888 McLaughlin accompanied a large delegation of Sioux Indians to Washington, DC, to discuss the implementation of the Dawes Act , a law for the subdivision of Indian land, with representatives of the BIA. Sitting Bull was among the delegates. Then the Indian agents began to register the members of the individual tribes in order to be able to assign them individual parcels.

In 1890 a new movement emerged among the Plains Indians, the Ghost Dance Movement . Originally this movement came from Nevada and California but quickly spread throughout the western United States. The movement stood in the spiritual tradition of the trance dances of North American natives and represents a final, largely peaceful rebellion of the vanquished against the submission and destruction of the Indian livelihoods and tribal culture within the USA. The ghost dance was only one of many, ultimately unsuccessful restoration efforts, but achieved the greatest popularity and is therefore today in the general perception erroneously as an integral part of the Indian religion and culture.

After the ghost dance began in April 1890 in the Lakota reservations and was promoted by the still respected leaders like Sitting Bull , who surrendered with some loyal followers after years of exile in Canada and lived in the reservation after two years of imprisonment, tensions arose. The reservation authorities saw the mass movement as a political and religious protest by the 25,000 Sioux living in reservations and reacted with coercive measures to stifle a possible impending uprising in advance.

President Benjamin Harrison ordered an army investigation and restricted food rations for uncooperative Indians, adding to tensions. McLaughlin had long viewed the ghost dancers with suspicion and feared a riot. Sitting Bull, who had fiercely refused to ban the movement and was considered one of its leaders, was to be arrested by the Indian police in a deliberate provocation on December 15, 1890. When his followers resisted the old man's rough treatment, Sitting Bull was shot in the head by Indian sergeant Red Tomahawk. Besides him, another 14 people died: five tribal policemen and seven supporters of the old chief, including Sitting Bull's 14-year-old son. Sitting Bull's body was desecrated by the brother of a slain policeman while it was being transported away. The refusal of the burial in the Christian cemetery caused further displeasure. The dead chief was eventually buried in a simple wooden box in the Fort Yates cemetery.

Many Lakota, including many ghost dancers, fled to the nearby badlands . Among the refugees was Chief Big Foot with ghost dance fans from the Cheyenne River Reservation . The army pursued and captured Big Foot and his people. Big Foot, believed to be peaceful, surrendered, and the group was to be transferred to the Pine Ridge Reservation . On December 29, 1890, Big Foot's group was to be disarmed near Wounded Knee Creek. A shot was fired, probably accidentally on the part of the Indians. The soldiers of the 7th Cavalry then shot at the defenseless Indians indiscriminately and carried out a massacre of men, women and children. Even after hours, the wounded were still killed. Even the horses of the dead Indians were shot. A total of between 150 and 300 Indians died that day.

McLaughlin moved to Washington DC in 1895 and continued to work for the BIA until his death in 1923. He worked as an inspector for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in this role got to know many Indian reservations and their problems. His autobiography 'My Friend the Indian' was published in 1910. He died in 1923 and was buried in a settlement named after him in South Dakota.

Web links

• An Account of Sitting Bull's Death by James McLaughlin Indian Agent at Standing Rock Reservation (1891) (English)
• Major James McLaughlin Papers (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ He died in Washington in 1923 at the age of 81 and was buried at the South Dakota reservation town that bears his name.
2. ↑ He's become known as the man inadvertently responsible for the death of Sitting Bull, he was a prominent Indian agent by the name of James McLaughlin.
3. ^ ^{A b} Politicians, federal reservation agents, and townspeople began to demand that the federal government take action to stop the Ghost Dance. President Benjamin Harrison asked the Army to investigate the Ghost Dance at Standing Rock. Sitting Bull was still considered the most powerful leader of the Standing Rock Lakotas. Major James McLaughlin, the agent at Standing Rock, agreed that if Sitting Bull were not on the reservation, the people would no longer follow the Ghost Dance.
4. ^ Letter from McLaughlin to Welsh dated January 12, 1891, "He being in open rebellion against constituted authority, was defying the Government, and encouraging disaffection, made it necessary that he be arrested and removed from the reservation, and arrangements were perfected for his arrest on December 6th, and everything seemed favorable for its accomplishment without trouble or bloodshed at that time; but the question arose as to whether I had authority to make the arrest or not, being subject to the military "
5. ↑ digitized version
6. ↑ In 1871 he was hired by Major WH Forbes as blacksmith and general overseer of the Devils Lake Agency which was in North Dakota (at that time North Dakota was not a state, the Devils Lake Agency was just in the Dakota Territory). He developed excellent relations with the local tribes and was officially appointed to the position of agent in 1876.
7. ↑ In October, 1890, Sitting Bull invited Kicking Bear, an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge Reservation, to come to Standing Rock to teach the Ghost Dance to the Hunkpapas.
8. ↑ But the government continued to distrust Sitting Bull, also because he promoted the ghost dance movement: the indigenous people, crammed into reservations, danced this rite by the thousands. He should rise up fallen warriors, let herds of buffalo roam the prairie again, and sweep away the whites. Therefore, Native American reservation police were supposed to arrest Sitting Bull on December 15, 1890 on behalf of federal authorities. But there was a shootout and the chief died.
9. ↑ It has been estimated that nearly 300 of the original 350 men, women, and children in the camp were stain. Twenty-five soldiers were killed and thirty-nine wounded
10. ↑ In the end, at least 150 Sioux were dead, according to other estimates up to 290. Spotted Elk, the 64-year-old leader, was one of the first to be shot at close range. The army left the corpses frozen in a three-day blizzard.
11. ↑ Two weeks after the charismatic chief was assassinated, the US Army slaughtered more than 200 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee. This massacre finally breaks the resistance of the Sioux
12. ^ In 1895, McLaughlin moved to Washington, DC, where he became an inspector for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He eventually became familiar with Indians all around the nation, leading him to write a 1910 memoir entitled, My Friend the Indian.