American Rifle - Alexander Rose [86]
Government efforts largely succeeded in staving off the threat that caches of surplus Civil War weapons would reach the Indians. But still a steady, if leisurely, stream of firearms flowed westward. Not all of them were illegal; some were in fact sold to Indians by government-licensed traders operating through the Interior Department’s civilian Indian Bureau. That policy was dictated by the bureau’s effort to reward compliance: tribes that promised to use firearms solely for hunting would be allotted more, if not better, guns, than those that didn’t. For this reason Agent Edward Wyncoop in Kansas provided the Arapahoes with eighty muzzle-loading rifles while the less accommodating Apaches received just twenty.23 The army, echoing Charles King’s suspicions about Washington’s collusion with insurgents, was less enamored of such art-fulness and demanded the cessation of all arms transfers whatsoever.
Eventually the two institutions reached a tenuous accommodation that would prevent the distribution of newer and more powerful weapons yet allow limited numbers of older ones to be used for legitimate purposes. Reflecting the new arrangement, Agent A. J. Simmons of the Milk River Agency in Montana Territory informed traders in his jurisdiction that they were no longer “permitted to dispose of . . . any breechloading fire arms, cartridges, or fixed ammunition .. . to any Sioux Indians.” Only muzzle-loaders “in quantities sufficient for hunting purposes”—twenty-four maximum at a time—plus sufficient gunpowder (25 pounds per month) and lead for ammunition (75 pounds)—were allowed.24
The agreement proved unworkable. There were plenty of traders, licensed or not, willing to work off the books for favored clients. Joseph Taylor knew that “the great Durfee & Peck trading company” did an excellent trade selling illegal arms and munitions to the Sioux.25 Because the new restrictions raised the black market price of firearms, profits were easy—and tempting. At Fort Phil Kearny, of all places, the Sioux pestered soldiers to sell them powder and ammunition: at one point they were offering $4 (about $61 in current dollars) for a single charge, or $40 for four ounces of powder.26 Andrew Garcia, a dubious if entertainingly self-aware operator—he swore he had only ever one friend, “a man I was low-down enough to stab in the back”—reminisced about the time when the Blackfeet gave him thirty-six buffalo robes (worth $360 back east) in return for just four old muzzle-loading rifles and a dozen boxes of cartridges.27
In the Southwest, buffalo robes were rarely used as currency. Instead, Mexican black marketeers and American merchants used rifles and pistols to pay Kiowas and Comanches for horses stolen in Texas. According to John Cremony, a former U.S. boundary commissioner, “not a few [of these weapons had been] sold by immigrants to obtain food and other supplies while crossing the continent.”28 Up north Louis Boucher, a French Canadian married to the daughter of Chief Spotted Tail, ran guns hidden under sacks of flour for his father-in-law—all unwittingly courtesy of the Union Pacific Railroad.29
Just as the New England and Appalachian tribes had particularly esteemed rifles over muskets as being better suited to their style of fighting and the terrain, especially prized among later Indians were Colt revolvers and repeater rifles. One major stationed at Fort Dodge loudly complained that for a Colt, Indians were offering “ten, even twenty times its value, in horses and furs.”30 Plenty Coups, chief of the Crows, said that