When he finally signed a treaty with federal representatives on November 6, after two years of guerrilla assaults against three Powder River forts and the Bozeman Trail, the Oglala chief Red Cloud became the only leader in any of the Indian wars ever to win any kind of concession from the United States government. Red Cloud traveled to Fort Laramie to sign the treaty following the abandonment of Fort Reno and the partial burning of Forts Kearney and C. F. Smith. The three forts were supposed to have secured the Bozeman Trail, which wound through Powder River country, home to the Brublé, Oglala, and Teton Sioux, Arapahos, and Cheyennes who had joined together under Red Cloud for the campaign. Such an alliance of native peoples was rare in the history of the Indian wars and—along with the later defeat of Custer—uniquely effective. Wagon trains along the Bozeman Trail and even government mowing details outside the forts weren’t safe from attack during Red Cloud’s campaign, from the end of 1866 to November 1868.
On December 21, 1866, a group of Oglalas and Cheyennes had destroyed a command of eighty men led by Capt. William J. Fetterman. His men scared off travelers along the Montana Trail through much of the fall of 1867, skirmished several times at Crazy Woman’s Fork on the Powder River, and then fought again in sight of Fort Kearney in mid-December. A peace commission, headed by N. G. Taylor and including Gen. William T. Sherman, was gotten up during the summer of 1868 to deal with hostile tribes, and a request went to Red Cloud, as to other fighting chiefs, for a chance to discuss terms. He missed his November 1 rendezvous at Fort Laramie but sent a messenger named Man Afraid to explain that he could consent to no meeting until the Powder River hunting ground was secured and the three forts were relinquished. The generals, more annoyed than beaten, eventually agreed.
Having made the commissioners wait for him to finish his autumn buffalo hunt, Red Cloud came to the treaty talks in November full of confidence. But although he was led to believe that he was permanently gaining land, the Sioux claim on the Bighorn and Powder river areas was left tenuous by the agreement, and it would be meaningless once the Union Pacific Railroad was finished. In return for the land “north of the North Platte River and east of the summits of the Big Horn Mountains,” Red Cloud permitted railroad construction to continue south of the Platte. Growing disappointment with the results of his victory eventually led Red Cloud to visit New York City, in 1870, where he made a successful appeal about government reservation policies from the famous stage of the Cooper Union. By the time of the great agitation along the Little Bighorn six years later, he had retired to the Pine Ridge Agency, in South Dakota.
1918Seventy-Five Years Ago
False Dawn
The greatest war in history came to an end on November 11, but not without a final cruel twist. On November 7 Roy W. Howard, president of the United Press Association, received what he thought was the scoop of the year from a group of jubilant French sailors docking at Brest Harbor, while he himself was waiting to sail for America. Using the offices of La Dépêche, Howard cabled the incredible news to New York, adding the name of his Paris office manager, Philip Simms, to the cable out of courtesy: “URGENT. ARMISTICE ALLIES GERMANS SIGNED ELEVEN [THI]SMORNING HOSTILITIES CEASED TWO [THI]SAFTERNOON. SEDAN TAKEN [THI]SMORNING BY AMERICANS.”
Simms’s name gave the local rumor a credence it might not otherwise have had. The Brest censor assumed the story had originated in Paris and passed it on; in New York the United Press office in the Pulitzer Building on Park Row received the “urgent” cable at noon. The message had apparently come from Paris, and it received the censor’s okay at eleven fifty-nine. The story was immediately fed by wire to hundreds of subscribing newspapers in time to make their early-afternoon editions. Even as Arthur Hornblow, Jr., of the American Expeditionary Forces intelligence staff in Brest, was calling Paris to confirm the story for Howard, every city in America was starting to ring out the peace. No one in military intelligence in the French capital could verify; news of the signing, now common knowledge in delirious Brest, was Howard’s to tell.
The UP story unleashed happy riots in New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and a thousand small towns in between. The gates of the shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, were shoved aside as soon as word got out, and ten thousand shipyard workers paraded through town, waving their picks and shovels. In Minnesota a celebratory shot from a cannon injured carousers; in Chicago police clubbed revelers to keep order. Bells, air-raid sirens, and factory whistles signaled the armistice in New York at 1:00 P.M., and the streets filled immediately. Shop owners shut down for the day, posting signs that read TOO HAPPY TO WORK or CLOSED FOR THE KAISER’S FUNERAL, and impromptu parades carried makeshift “coffins” for the German leader. Many schools and courts were dismissed; the stock exchange closed.
By dusk the streets were ankle-deep in tons of ticker tape, wastepaper, and torn-up telephone books; hundreds of calls were placed to the sanitation commission complaining about windowsills clogged with the confetti. At the Knickerbocker Hotel one elated couple—a portly man and a woman in furs—swung large Italian and American flags above the commotion at Forty-second Street. They were the Enrico Carusos. (He would soon be singing in Verdi’s La Forza del Destina at the Met.) When the house band from the Rialto Theater was coaxed over to the hotel, the tenor sang “The StarSpangled Banner” from his balcony, then dropped an armful of red roses down on the crowd.
It was “a delirious carnival of joy” beyond comparison for the city, claimed The New York Times, one of the few papers that never ran Howard’s story and “stuck to less romantic realities.” Although the fake was discovered by late afternoon, many newsboys continued to hawk the good news, and people kept buying the earlier editions into the evening. JUBILANT THRONGS REJECT ALL DENIALS AND TEAR UP NEWSPAPERS CONTAINING THEM, chided the paper of record the next day.
The British papers had largely been more cautious, but in France, Australia, Argentina, and even Cuba people were celebrating. In Washington President Woodrow Wilson was drawn out of the White House long enough to smile for a cheering armistice crowd, even though he knew that the news was untrue. Mrs. Wilson traveled into the capital to see the ecstatic mobs and said nothing discouraging from her open car. Meanwhile, the State Department (through the Navy censor) had intercepted and stopped Roy Howard’s less confident second cable to New York, leaving the UP office there with a false confidence in its armistice. Secretary of State Lansing released a denial at 4:00 P.M., but outside, the party raged on.
Howard was not the only reporter spreading peace rumors that day: patrons in the Paris press bars sang and toasted the peace all afternoon on the basis of a story that supposedly began with the American Embassy, which later made an official correction. The British Bureau of Information in New York also received word of an armistice that day, in a cable from an excited British lieutenant.
The real thing came four days after the enormous rehearsal; it was signed by the defeated Germans at five in the morning, to take effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month. Malcolm Cowley, who had disbelieved the first armistice, hailed the real one when it came. “We danced in the streets,” he recalled, “embraced old women and pretty girls, swore blood brotherhood with soldiers in little bars, drank with our elbows locked in theirs, reeled through the streets with bottles of champagne, fell asleep somewhere.”
Dear John Smith
At war’s end—a comparatively brief war for the Americans—there were at least 100,000 men named Smith left in the Army, 1,500 of them answering to “William Smith,” plus 1,000 John Smiths. Some 15,000 Millers were also serving, along with as many Wilsons and 1,000 John Browns. And of the 262 John J. O’Briens, 50 were returning to wives named Mary.
With the peace, a slew of the year’s best martial tunes were doomed to become strange old songs that fathers sang in the backyard. Nineteen-eighteen had been the year of the bellboy hat, the ditty of an infatuated boy entitled “K-K-K-Katy,” and the instructional “Ev’rybody Ought to Know How to Do the Tickle Toe.” Soldiers brought back the war’s popular marching tune, “Hinky-Dinky Parlez-Vous,” and that year on Broadway the songwriters had turned out “Hello, Central! Give Me No Man’s Land,” “I’d Like to See the Kaiser With a Lily in His Hand,” “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!” and scads of other martial anthems.
1968Twenty-five Years Ago
Lesbian Chic
The revolution in film that had begun the year before with the institution of a ratings system had brought immediate effects: swearing and increasingly naked and exotic situations in American film. November saw the release of The Killing of Sister George, a seduction story about two women (Coral Browne and Susannah York). What was different about the film was its established director, Robert Aldrich (known for another offbeat story about two women, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), and its presentation as mainstream cinema. In Life magazine Richard Schickel reviewed the film as the biggest and boldest of the recent “flock of films on lesbianism,” which included Les Biches and Thérèse et Isabelle. Aldrich hoped to dare Americans into the theater by promising that Sister George’s wicked denouement, “Scene 176,” was “the most erotic, provocative English-language sex scene ever filmed.”
Nixon Redux; Fighting Shirley
Despite President Johnson’s popular Vietnam bombing halt and a closing surge by the Democratic nominee and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Republican candidate, Richard MiIhous Nixon, won the Presidency- barely—on November 5. Mr. Nixon, who had lost to John Kennedy by 120,000 votes eight years before, edged out Humphrey by a mere 800,000 this time around, with George Wallace a distant third.
In Brooklyn Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. “I am an historical person at this point,” she told a reporter shortly after, “and I’m very much aware of it.” With her rapid verbal barrages, Shirley Chisholm had gone up against the civil rights hero James Farmer for the seat from New York’s new Twelfth Congressional District and won against all expectations. Chisholm promised not to be “a quiet freshman congressman.” And from her first assignment—to the forestry and rural-villages subcommittee—she wasn’t.
Birth of the Yale Woman
Although Yale University would not announce its plans to go fully coeducational until November 14, the college allowed seven hundred young women to visit for Coeducation Week beginning November 4. More than eighteen hundred women had applied in a two-week period for the simple honor of this limited experiment, which did not guarantee admission the next fall but was meant to convince older alumni of the relative harmlessness of coeducation. The visitors were given empty boys’ rooms and permitted to roam the campus as they might as students- hearing lectures, sampling cafeteria food, growing oblivious of the fauxGothic architecture. “This is a really serious thing,” one senior told a reporter. “We hope the sexes will meet over coffee, over lunch or whatever, and just get accustomed to each other.” Women already attended the graduate schools, and after a week of the finest representatives from Vassar and Bryn Mawr touring the undergraduate facilities, nothing terrible seemed to have happened.
