Category Archives: U.S.

by | 20 April 2017 · 4:15 pm

Okinawa Diary, 1975: Birds

My late brother worked as a guide at the U.S. Pavilion at the Ocean Expo in Okinawa in 1975. While there he typed up many pages of observations about people, places, and words of interest there. I scanned and edited the pages, added Japanese kanji for some of the words, and publish them here as a series.

Today was Thanksgiving and so the paper was full of bird stories. One Mr. Stovall opened his freezer to get ice for a drink and out flew a drake that he had shot the day before in the neck and wing before wrapping it in tinfoil and sealing it with tape to put it in the icebox. A Houdini trick if I’ve ever heard of one. The Stovalls took the bird to a man who raises ducks, impressed by his “will to live.”

Billy, a friend of mine here, was talking about the kinds of pigeons here in Okinawa. There are JUNPAKU [純白] ‘pure white’, KUROTEN [黒点] ‘black-specked (only the wings), CEMEN [セメン] ‘cement-colored’ (an interesting long-term foreign loanword), CHAIRO [茶色] ‘tea-colored’ (brown), and ZANPAN [残飯] ‘leftovers’ (from a meal, also ‘pig feed’ or ‘mixed slosh’). What Billy really said was janpan(g) or chanpan(g), which is the local Okinawan word following the rule that Z often goes to CH or J. This ZAN morpheme is a nice and handy one used in combinations like ZANZOO [残像] ‘after-image’, ZANSHOU [残照] ‘after-glow’, ZANGYOU [残業] ‘overtime (extra) work’, and ZANNEN [残念] ‘after-sense (regret)’. But his ZANPAN pigeon is the most expensive, being a mix, or cross-bred species, ‘pigfeed’ being similar in that it is a cross-breed of supper slop but different in that it is cheap.

So what did Billy have to do with pigeons, or HATO [鳩], which in Japanese take the place of ‘cuckoo’ in ‘pigeon clock’, HATODOKEI [鳩時計]. He had a HATOKOYA [鳩小屋] ‘pigeon hut (dovecote)’. At first pulling their feathers off starting at the wing-tip, he would do so until he got down toward the wing-pit area that had more blood and was pulpier. When he began to draw blood defeathering his doves then he stopped, any further being harmful. Letting them out of the cage at a time that they were hungry and unable to fly, he taught them stay close to home, to become homing pigeons. At first he would shove them one by one back into the cage thru a BATAN [バタン] as he called it, which is one of those doors used on fish and animal traps a lot that opens as you push your way in but shuts after you, never to let you leave by the same way. No one else that I asked knew what this BATAN was, but it’s interesting that BATAN is the ‘bang’ with which a door shuts in such expressions as BATAN TO DOA O SHIMERU [バタンとドアを閉める], or backwards literally, ‘shut the door with a bang’. I can well imagine that the spring-held door to the HATOKOYA does just that as the pigeons push thru it to get to their food, as they have been taught they could by Billy.

Billy is also a birdcatcher and birdcaller. He does a one-man turkey-shoot demonstration complete with horrified turkey-talk. One bird he likes to catch is the Zosterops japonica, Japanese white eye, which he says is a lot like a little yellow parakeet. You have to have one for bait to start with, putting it in a cage on a tree in the mountains where it will sing-a-ling until another comes down to land on the end-shaven bamboo branch which has got TORIMOCHI [鳥黐] ‘birdlime’ on it. Just like the tar-baby, he lands and is yours for the trouble of caging him. The only thing to watch for is those good-for-nothing birds that go down to the ground, or the bottom of the cage. Billy says they are worthless, stupid, and to throw them away. A MEJIRO [目白] ‘white eye’, doesn’t scavenge like a sparrow.

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by | 18 April 2017 · 4:35 pm

Okinawa Diary, 1975: Sailing & Tattoos

My late brother worked as a guide at the U.S. Pavilion at the Ocean Expo in Okinawa in 1975. While there he typed up many pages of observations about people, places, and words of interest there. I scanned and edited the pages, added Japanese kanji for some of the words, and publish them here as a series.

Everyone knows that the turtle beat the hare and the lesson that is to be learned by it. But when the American ship Sorcery (mahou [魔法] or majutsu [魔術] in Japanese) came across the finish line here at Expo the other day, it had to wait almost a week to see if it won the Hawai‘i–Expo Okinawa race. The likely winner will be the last to cross the tape, the Japanese entry, Musou. I asked how to say ‘finish line’ in Japanese and got the answer, gooru [ゴオル], from our English goal. To ‘breast the tape, or reach the winning post’ is, interestingly enough, gooru-in suru. Another use of this phrase is when one says, medetaku gooru-in suru, or more completely, medetaku kekkon ni gooru-in suru [めでたく結婚にゴオルインする], meaning to ‘be happily married’. Actually, the word kesshouten [決勝点] ‘decide-win-point’, is the trueblood Japanese word.

The good ship Musou ([夢想] ‘daydream, vision’) will win, if it does, because of a healthy handicap: in Japanese furi na tachiba ni aru ([不利な立場にある] ‘be at a disadvantage’) allowing it to come five days later than Majutsu and still win.

One of the small one-manned racing yachts is missing, the captain being famous Kenichi Horie, who, I am told, first crossed the Pacific alone in a yacht such as this. “Hajimete oudan shita” my friend said, the oudan [横断] meaning ‘crossing’ and being used in such delightful expressions as ‘jaywalking’, which the Japanese render quite longwindedly as douro o naname ni oudan suru [道路を斜めに横断する], literally, ‘road+ diagonally+ traverse’. An oudan hodou [横断歩道] is a ‘crosswalk’. And like all good Boy Scouts should know, ‘to help an old lady across the street’ is roofujin o annai shite douro o oudan saseru [老婦人を案内して道路を横断する].

Anyway, one of the members of the U.S. crew aboard the Majutsu wanted to know if there was a place to get a tattoo ([入れ墨] irezumi). The last two syllables sumi (z=s) mean ‘India ink, ink stick, ink (of a squid)’. Sumie [墨絵] is ‘black and white drawing, or India ink drawing’, and sumizome no koromo [墨染の衣] means ‘black robe of a priest’, literally, ‘ink-dyed clothes’. She was told that only the dregs of society get tattoos and that there was no place in Okinawa to get one. Yet on further inquiry, I found that several of the older women of two generations or more past had tattoos, and these very often conspicuously on their fingers or back of hands. Mr. Pogue, who runs the U.S. concession here, then said that about 70 years or so ago, when the mainland Japanese came down to raid and rule the island people here, they often took off many of the young girls to the cities in Japan, as maids, prostitutes, or whatever. But some of the Okinawans quickly made use of the mainlanders’ aesthetic aversion to visible (or any) tattooing, and colored up the hands of their beloved daughters with sumi.

There are many euphemisms for prostitution in Japanese, it being an old profession there as elsewhere. Especially prevalent are compounds with ‘sell’ in the first position, e.g., ‘sell-spring’ ([売春] baishun), ‘sell-color’ ([売色] baishoku), ‘sell-laughter’ ([売笑] baishou), ‘sell-lewdness’ ([売淫] baiin), and so on.

The last baiin is usually followed the suffix for ‘woman’, fu [婦], and all the others can be followed by fu as well.

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by | 18 April 2017 · 11:38 am

Okinawa Diary, 1975: Pretending

My late brother worked as a guide at the U.S. Pavilion at the Ocean Expo in Okinawa in 1975. While there he typed up many pages of observations about people, places, and words of interest there. I scanned and edited the pages, added Japanese kanji for some of the words, and publish them here as a series.

The other day I walked casually up to the femme fatale guide in our module # two and began to make like I was going to change into my bathing suit right there in her presence. The upper part of the aquarium is in that spot, so swimming was a real possibility. She naturally went thru the gestures of shock playfully, and then I scolded her for even thinking that I would do such an etchi thing (dirty ol’ manish thing), in front of all the guests and herself. But, “omowaseburi o shita ja nai ka,” she retorted. This means loosely, ‘but you made me think so didn’t you?’, or ‘you put on as if you were, didn’t you?’. The key element of interest to me is this -buri, or -buru [振る furu] in the verb form. This -buru means ‘set up for, pose as’. Actually, in this case, the omowase means to ‘make or let a person think’, and omowaseburi is a noun meaning ‘mystification, or coquetry’. So let’s look at some more examples.

Gakushaburu [学者ぶる] means to ‘act like a scholar’, or to ‘put on like you’re quite learned’. Senseiburu [先生ぶる] means to ‘act like a teacher’. Otonaburu [大人ぶる] is to ‘carry on like an adult (when in fact you aren’t one)’. Mottaiburu [勿体ぶる] means to ‘put on airs, assume an air of importance’, the mottai part alone meaning ‘(undo) importance’, usually used in the phrase ‘to attach undo importance’, in Japanese, mottai o tsukeru. Digressing a bit, I should mention that this mottai is used in another glued form, mottai-nai [勿体ない], to mean most often ‘waste’ or as an exclamation: ‘What a waste!’ I hear this all the time.

Kyoosaikaburu [恐妻家ぶる] means to ‘make like you’re a henpecked husband’, for instance, in case you want to cut out of a party and you act like you better get home early or your wife will let you have it. Kyoo ‘fearsome’ + sai ‘wife’ + ka ‘household’ itself implies ‘henpecked hubbie’. Akusaiburu [悪妻ぶる] means to ‘act like a bad wife’.

Shittakaburi [知ったかぶり] o suru means to ‘act as if you do know something’. It is often found in the phrase shittakaburi o shita ikan yo! or ‘you better not act like you know!’

A friend of mine here is fairly fluent in both languages, but who went thru a U.S. base school, and therefore has a lot of English words jammed into his Japanese. When he went up to Tokyo and goofed around down in what is called the Shitamachi area, the fast-talking, slick, street-living young crowd larfed at my friend and accused him of acting like a gaijin ‘foreigner’. “Gaijinbutteru,” they teased. It wasn’t hip to use so much of the English loanword vocabulary that has found itself so much more soluable in the Japanese mother tongue lately.

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by | 18 April 2017 · 10:19 am

Okinawa Diary, 1975: Knives

My late brother worked as a guide at the U.S. Pavilion at the Ocean Expo in Okinawa in 1975. While there he typed up many pages of observations about people, places, and words of interest there. I scanned and edited the pages, added Japanese kanji for some of the words, and publish them here as a series.

On the way home I asked the driver to drop me off at a KANAMONOYA [金物屋], or hardware store, to let me see if they had some switchblade knives in stock. My sister’s husband is a collector of knives and had specifically requested a Japanese switchblade, if possible. The KANAMONOYA did not carry them seeing as how the police do not encourage their sale, and only ruffians and gangsters have or make any use for them. But I did notice some unusual knives and bought a few which I thought he would not have even in his extensive collection.

One was a KAWAHAGI [皮剥ぎ], or skinning knife: KAWA = skin, and the verb HAGU meaning ‘tear off, peel off, rip off, strip off, skin, flay and disrobe’, definitely a transitive verb. It is the intransitive form HAGERU ‘come off, fade, discolor’ that has been used so unmercifully on me to describe my deeply receding hairline and thinned bush on top. The KANJI for this deprived concept is also read SUKI in the popular Japanese beef meal, SUKIYAKI, and in the case of a ‘meat or fish slicer’ SUKIMI [剝き身], which brings us back to blades. The KAWAHAGI has a curved blade like a Persian dagger that fans out a bit toward the end before coming to a gradual point.

A KAWAMUKI [皮剥き] is ‘paring-knife, a barker, or a (potato) peeler’. The MUKI of this knife and the HAGI of the above are the same KANJI.

Another knife I bought was a YASAIGIRI [野菜切り], or vegetable cutter. It has an almost rectangular blade with only the hint of a point at one corner and a slow-rounding curve at the bottom forward blade-edge that is always rocking back and forth on the cutting board when this HOOCHOO is in action. HOOCHOO [包丁] means a ‘kitchen knife or cleaver’, and. is extended in usage to mean the cooking or cuisine of a restaurant. ANO RYOORIYA WA HOOCHOO GA YOI, or literally, ‘That restaurant (+topic marking particle) carving knife is good’.

A digression on the suffix CHOO of HOOCHOO might be fun. CHOO [丁] is one of the many Japanese counters of seemingly unrelated objects: in this case, ‘guns, tools, leaves, or cakes of something’ and is also a symbol for ‘even number’. I suppose a knife is a kitchen (HOO) tool (CHOO), tending toward a weapon at times, and shaped like a leaf often enough. As for the meaning of ‘even number’, it comes up in ‘dice game’, ‘gambling’, i.e. CHOOHAN [丁半] (‘even-odd’).

Lastly, it should be mentioned that this CHOO is the second KANJI in Nelson’s dictionary, being only of two simple strokes, like a T with a curl at the bottom. So we have TEIJI [丁字] ‘the letter T’, TEIJIKEI [丁字形] ‘T-shaped’, TEIKEI JOOGI [丁形定規] ‘the T-square’, all of which use the TEI reading of this KANJI, which is, after all, closer to our own Tee.

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Filed under family, food, Japan, language, U.S.

by | 23 March 2017 · 5:32 pm

Wild Young Geronimo

From The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens (Knopf, 2016), Kindle Loc. 7351-7381:

MANY YEARS after the Apache Wars were over, Chatto, who was a rising Chokonen leader in the early 1880s, would declare, “I have known Geronimo all my life up to his death and have never known anything good about him.” The daughter of the Chokonen chief Naiche agreed. “Geronimo was not a great man at all. I never heard any good of him. People never say he [did] good.” A reliable interpreter and licensed trader who lived on good terms with the Chiricahuas for two decades said they distrusted and feared Geronimo, especially when he was inebriated. Once while hopelessly drunk, he berated a nephew, “for no reason at all,” so severely that the young man committed suicide. After sobering up, a shamed Geronimo packed up his family and bolted from the reservation for several months.

Army officers otherwise sympathetic to the Apaches detested Geronimo. Lieutenant Bourke found him “a depraved rascal whose neck I should like to stretch.” He was a “thoroughly vicious, intractable, and treacherous man,” agreed Lieutenant Britton Davis, who would come to know him all too well. “His only redeeming traits were courage and determination.”

And “power,” Davis might have added, had he understood the concept. What the whites dismissed as superstition was quite real to the Chiricahuas. That Geronimo possessed mystic attributes uniquely valuable in raids and war, few Apaches doubted. Rifles were said to jam or misfire when aimed at him. Some warriors thought the mere act of riding with Geronimo would render them impervious to bullets, a belief this consummate troublemaker heartily encouraged. Many Chiricahuas also attributed to him the gift of divination. Others thought him able to make it rain or to prevent the sun from rising. Geronimo also enjoyed a reputation as a master herbalist and surgeon. Despite his supposed powers, he was too strongly disliked to ever become a chief. His baleful countenance, locked in a perpetual scowl, probably didn’t help. All told, Geronimo’s personal following never exceeded thirty warriors.

The minatory shaman of the Bedonkohe band was born Goyahkla, meaning “He Who Yawns,” in 1829. Because he was saddled with such a singularly uninspiring name, it is little wonder he assumed the name Geronimo, which the Mexicans had bestowed on him. The Spanish equivalent of Jerome, it lacked the verve of Victorio but certainly was a better name than Goyahkla. Unlike Victorio, Geronimo felt no compelling ties to the place of his birth. He fought not to defend a homeland but to avenge the murder of his mother, first wife, and children by Mexican soldiers and because he enjoyed taking lives. “I have killed many Mexicans; I do not know how many. Some of them were not worth counting,” he said shortly before his death. If he were young again, Geronimo added, “and followed the warpath, it would lead into Old Mexico.”

Geronimo’s forays into Mexico often led him to the Sierra Madre, home to the Nednhi Chiricahua band of Chief Juh, one of his few real friends. Although a better war leader than Geronimo, Juh lacked the shaman’s gift for oratory. When excited, particularly in battle, Juh stuttered so badly that he had to use hand signals to communicate or rely on Geronimo to make his intentions known. Both men were wary of Americans. Juh had had little contact with them; he was naturally suspicious of everyone. Geronimo’s distrust derived from personal experience—first the murderous betrayal of Mangas Coloradas in 1863, and then his own humiliating arrest at Ojo Caliente and lockup at San Carlos by Agent John Clum in 1877.

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by | 23 March 2017 · 5:29 pm

Tame Old Geronimo

From The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens (Knopf, 2016), Kindle Loc. 8022-8037:

Geronimo lived for twenty-three years after his surrender. In 1893, the government resettled Geronimo and the Chiricahuas—still prisoners of war—at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home to the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation. They received plots of land to farm, and the men were taught the techniques of the range cattle industry. Geronimo went through something of a metamorphosis, becoming a model farmer and impressing his growing circle of white friends as a “kind old man.” He said he had learned much of the whites during his long years of captivity, finding them to be “a very kind and peaceful people.” In his later years, Geronimo also enjoyed celebrity. He appeared regularly at fairs and festivals, including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, where at age seventy-five he joined in calf-roping contests and sold signed photographs of himself. In 1905, Geronimo rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade and dictated his autobiography, which, over the army’s objection, was published with Roosevelt’s permission.

Although he never lost faith in his personal power, Geronimo embraced Christianity, more to supplement than to supplant traditional Apache beliefs. “Since my life as a prisoner has begun I have heard the teachings of the white man’s religion, and in many respects believe it to be better than the religion of my fathers. However, I have always prayed, and I believe that the Almighty has always protected me.”

Geronimo’s divine protection ran out on a cold day in February 1909, when he rode into Lawton, Oklahoma, alone to sell some bows and arrows. With the proceeds, the old shaman bought whiskey, for which he had never lost his fondness, and began the return ride after dark deeply intoxicated. He was almost home when he fell off his horse beside a creek. A neighbor found him the next morning, lying partially submerged in the freezing water. Four days later, at age seventy-nine, the man whom no bullet could ever kill died in bed of pneumonia.

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by | 9 February 2017 · 7:27 am

U.S. Army Decline, 1870s

From The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens (Knopf, 2016), Kindle Loc. 1154-1167:

Even as the Indian Wars intensified, Congress—intent on paying down the massive national debt incurred during the Civil War—repeatedly reduced the rolls of the regular army. From an authorized strength of fifty-four thousand men in 1869, the army would plummet to just twenty-five thousand by 1874. Reconstruction duties siphoned off a third of the army and sucked the institution into partisan politics. As Southern states were readmitted to the Union, their representatives made common cause with the budget balancers in order to emasculate their blue-coated former oppressors, and the frontier army became a skeleton force.

Declining numbers were not the army’s only problem. Gone were the sober and purposeful volunteers who had restored the Union. In their place was a decidedly inferior brand of soldier. Not all were “bummers and loafers,” as the New York Sun alleged. There were also a disproportionately large number of urban poor, criminals, drunkards, and perverts. Few soldiers were well educated, and many were illiterate. Unskilled laborers in search of a steady job flocked to recruiting depots, usually to desert when better-paying work became available. One-third of the frontier army consisted of recent immigrants, mostly German and Irish, some of whom had seen service in European armies and proved an asset, and sprinkled among the American undesirables were good men who had fallen on hard times. Nevertheless, as one general observed, while the army had a greatly improved rifle, “I rather think we have a much less intelligent soldier to use it.”

Incentives to enlist were few. By the 1870s, regulars earned just ten dollars a month, three dollars less than had Civil War volunteers a decade earlier.

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by | 7 February 2017 · 7:09 am

U.S. Pawnee Battalion vs. Cheyenne Dog Soldiers

From The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens (Knopf, 2016), Kindle Loc. 1565-1570, 2266-2281:

The only force that had proven able to best the Oglalas and the Cheyennes was Major Frank North’s Pawnee Battalion. North’s command was an experiment in recruiting friendly Indians as soldiers that paid handsome dividends. Uniformed in regulation blue and well armed, the two hundred warriors of the Pawnee Battalion protected Union Pacific work crews far more effectively than the army. They marched and drilled as cavalry but fought in the loose formations of Plains warriors. In early August, a Pawnee company attacked a large Cheyenne war party that was plundering a derailed freight train, killing by North’s estimate seventeen warriors. Cheyenne sources disputed the numbers, but the blow kept their war parties away from the railroad.

…

The Pawnees did most of the killing at Summit Springs, and they killed without mercy. The Cheyennes expected as much. “I do not belittle the Pawnees for their killing of women or children because as far back as any of us could remember the Cheyenne and Sioux slaughtered every male, female, and child they could run across of the Pawnee tribe,” said a Dog Soldier survivor. “Each tribe hated the other with a deadly passion and savage hearts [that] know only total war.” Sherman and Sheridan’s notion of total war paled beside that of the Plains Indians.

Carr achieved complete victory at Summit Springs. He reported fifty-two Cheyennes killed (sexes and ages unspecified), an unknown number wounded, and seventeen women and children captured. No soldiers died, and only one was wounded, barely scratched by an arrow. Carr burned eighty-six lodges and captured 450 ponies. Remnants of Tall Bull’s village reached the Lakota camps in the Black Hills, but the Dog Soldiers as a band had ceased to exist. In those twenty terrifying minutes at Summit Springs, their world ended. For all their truculence, the Dog Soldiers had not sought war with the whites. Tall Bull had spoken truthfully when he told General Hancock in 1867 that the Dog Soldiers wanted only to live unmolested in their Republican River home. When the Union Pacific Railroad began its inexorable way toward their country, bringing thousands of settlers and driving off the buffalo, the Dog Soldiers had fought to save their country and their way of life the only way they knew how—with horrific raids calculated to terrorize the whites into keeping away. Few whites understood the Dog Soldiers’ behavior, and fewer still could excuse the atrocities. The Dog Soldiers were likewise unable to comprehend the social and economic forces that impelled the whites to take their country. Nevertheless, it was a brutal fate that decreed the Dog Soldiers’ annihilation after they had given up the struggle.

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by | 7 February 2017 · 7:05 am

U.S. Betrayal of Pawnee Allies

From The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens (Knopf, 2016), Kindle Loc. 3858-3875:

After Sitting Bull’s investiture as head of the non-treaty Lakotas, his uncle Four Horns advised him to “be a little against fighting but when anyone shoots be ready to fight him.”

Four Horns’s counsel, however, applied only to whites; Crows continued to be fair game. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led the push to dispossess the Crows of their remaining hunting grounds in the early 1870s, but many from the treaty bands fought with them, as did the Northern Cheyennes and, to a lesser degree, their Northern Arapaho allies. The architects of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 had included Crow land within the Unceded Indian Territory, which made Lakota aggression perfectly legal. But it threatened the citizens of southwestern Montana, who had counted on the Crows as a buffer between themselves and Lakotas, and the governor appealed for federal intervention. Generals Sherman and Sheridan made it a matter of unofficial policy to supply the Crows with arms. Each side benefited: settlers felt safer, and the army winked at Crow retaliatory raids against the Lakotas.

The Crows had it hard, but none suffered more for their fidelity to the Great Father than did the Pawnees. Agency Oglala and Brulé warriors raided Pawnee villages in central Nebraska with the implicit support of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, who saw nothing amiss in young warriors sating their hunger for war honors at the expense of tribal enemies. Certainly it was preferable to unwinnable wars with the whites. In August 1873, at least eight hundred Lakota warriors, perhaps led by Spotted Tail himself, fell upon a Pawnee hunting party in southwestern Nebraska, killing a hundred, of whom nearly half were women and children. Only the timely appearance of a cavalry detachment prevented a greater slaughter.

The massacre broke the spirit of the Pawnees. Nebraskans who recalled the protection that the Pawnees had afforded Union Pacific work crews in their state were outraged and demanded the government give the Pawnees the best available arms in order to meet the Lakotas on an equal footing. Instead, the Indian Bureau banished the Pawnees to Indian Territory. In their single-minded ambition to remake the hostile tribes into white men, the eastern humanitarians did not lift a finger to forestall this unpardonable act of bad faith.

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by | 6 February 2017 · 12:32 pm

U.S. Grant’s New Indian Bureau, 1868

From The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, by Peter Cozzens (Knopf, 2016), Kindle Loc. 2321-2341:

The election of Ulysses S. Grant as president in November 1868 seemingly boded well for the army. After all, as commanding general he had defended Sherman and Sheridan’s hardfisted approach to the Indian problem and decried civilian meddling. But President-elect Grant was not General Grant, and to the surprise of the generals he welcomed ideas from the reformers, particularly the Quakers. Embracing their suggestion that religious men replace spoilsmen as agents, Grant gave the Quakers control over the two most critical—and difficult—Indian Bureau field operations: the Northern Indian Superintendency, comprising six agencies in Nebraska, and the Central Superintendency, which embraced Kansas and the “uncivilized” portion of Indian Territory (that is to say, the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho, and the Kiowa and Comanche agencies). The apportionment of these superintendencies to the Society of Friends became known as Grant’s Quaker Policy. To run the remaining superintendencies and agencies in the West, Grant selected honest and reliable army officers.

Grant also wanted to establish independent oversight of the Indian Bureau. To achieve it, he persuaded Congress to create the Board of Indian Commissioners. Composed of wealthy philanthropists, the board was given wide authority to scrutinize the operations of the Indian Bureau in Washington and in the field. And then Grant did something even more remarkable: he appointed an Indian to be commissioner of Indian affairs.

The new commissioner was Ely S. Parker, a full-blooded Seneca Iroquois sachem from upstate New York and a civil engineer who had risen to the rank of brevet brigadier general on Grant’s staff during the Civil War. Parker was a man of proven integrity. Although he subscribed to the prevailing view that the Indians’ future lay in acculturation, he nonetheless could be counted on to make it as painless as possible. In June 1869, Parker instructed his staff on their duties under the Grant administration: Indian agents and their superintendents were to assemble Indians in their jurisdictions on permanent reservations, get them started on the road to civilization, and above all treat them with kindness and patience. Indians who refused to settle on reservations would be turned over to military control, however, and treated as “friendly or hostile as circumstances might justify.”

Grant saw no humane alternative to his administration’s carrot-and-stick body of principles that the press labeled the “Peace Policy” and its concomitant policies of concentrating the Indians on reservations far from whites and of consolidating small reservations into larger ones populated by two or more tribes, which meant that tribes promised exclusive homes stood to lose them regardless of treaty guarantees.

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