Mad Hatters and Centaurs Part III

Crazy Horse, Custer and Coal

Continuing story in several installments tracking our energy transition from fossil fuels today, by looking at the last energy transition, of horses and steamships in the 19th century.

Check Part I and Part II if you want to catch up, otherwise we’re picking up the story as the Lakota go from a pedestrian tribe in the Great Lakes to a mounted empire on the Great Plains…

Contested Plains

By the middle of the century, the Mexican-American War had ended. With the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo California, Texas and the entire Southwest was annexed to the United States.

This brought new pressure to bear on the plains tribes. But it did nothing to constrain their mobility, tactics, or dominance for several decades to come.

“Sioux warfare followed a logic that was strange to the Americans, who aimed simply to kill Indians.” Oxford historian Pekka Hamalainen explains.

“By contrast, for the Lakotas every fight that did not result in large-scale loss of life for their side increased their odds of winning. The Americans were operating in an alien environment, struggling to sustain themselves, and Lakota maneuvers drew them farther and farther from their forts.”

Like Brer Rabbit taunting Brer Fox to toss him into the briar patch where he’d actually been born and raised, the Lakota baited, feinted and provoked the U.S. Cavalry to chase them into the “barren wastelands” where they were most at home.

Since Coronado and the earliest Spanish conquistadors, these vast grasslands had confused and threatened Europeans. They were more accustomed to the boreal forests and river valleys of their home countries.

Devoid of trees, mountains, and topographical variation of any kind, early explorers expressed feelings of desolation and oppression as they roamed the prairie. Unlucky soldiers who wandered off looking to bag some small game, or find another trail sometimes got lost, never to be heard from again.

Exploring parties took to piling up giant mounds of driftwood or bones to serve as mile-markers and signposts. Something, anything to remake this landscape into something more legible.

But the Lakota could read the land perfectly well, and they exploited that literacy to the fullest.

While the Europeans clung to the obvious and prominent features of cottonwood-lined rivers like the Platte and Arkansas, the Lakota (and all their neighbors) knew where every invisible spring, seep and watering hole lay.

The soil of the High Plains was mostly sand and gravel. Seasonal rain and spring snowmelt quickly disappeared beneath the surface, giving the appearance of a grassy desert.

But beneath those porous topsoils a layer of shale and clay caught all that runoff and funneled it into the Ogallala Aquifer.

This massive underground cavern is one of the largest aquifers on the planet, stretching from the Dakotas to Texas. Today, and despite a century of over-pumping ( the time bending of “fossil” water), it still supports more than a quarter of all irrigated farming in the country.

(That’s where all the water to grow all that grass to support all that buffalo was actually coming from).

Even the Indian ponies were better adapted for their new life on the plains than their American challengers. The stock that the Spanish had originally put on wooden ships and transported from Europe weren’t really European at all.

During the eight centuries of Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula, the Muslim conquerors had brought North African ponies along with them.

Bred to survive in harsh desert conditions, on little water, and rough feed, while displaying tremendous endurance–this stock adapted perfectly onto the Great Plains of North America.

After the Plains tribes acquired these horses and began selectively breeding them, they became known as “Indian ponies.”

Fast, efficient, fearless and effective.

The Americans dismissed these ponies as too small to be useful for farm labor and formal military use. Instead they preferred the heavy, awkward “gas guzzling” Thoroughbreds and Morgans deployed by the U.S. Cavalry during the Civil War.

They were hungrier, thirstier, and quicker to tire, and kept the Cavalry tethered to their forts and wagon re-supplies. They were consistently unable to match the mobility and endurance of their enemies.

In the early 1860s, as the United States was distracted and depleted by its own civil war, the plains tribes delivered a string of humiliating defeats.

“The U.S. Army had not only failed to subdue the Lakotas; it had also created an enemy that it could not afford to face.” Hamalainen writes. “In the summer of 1864, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho horse soldiers attacked Americans—soldiers, overlanders, prospectors—across a massive war zone extending from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains, much of it uncharted by the Americans.”

General Sheridan complained that there was simply no way for the Army to match the mobility and lethality of the Sioux on their home ground.

“No other nation in the world would have attempted reduction of these wild tribes and occupation of their country with less than 60,000 to 70,000 men, while the whole force employed and scattered over the enormous region…never numbered more than 14,000 men…Every engagement was a forlorn hope.”

By 1868, the United States had thrown up the white flag.

As the defeated party it had no real leverage, and both they and the Lakota knew it.

Before even agreeing to a cease-fire Chief Red Cloud insisted that all the forts along the Bozeman Trail be preemptively dismantled.

The treaty they then signed at Fort Laramie in Wyoming gave the Lakota everything they were asking for and more: the establishment of a protected homeland, including the transfer of thousands of square miles of additional territory already belonging to other tribes.

In a little over a hundred years, the centaurs of the High Plains had utterly dominated their enemies, foreign and domestic.

They had freed up the power locked in the shortgrass prairie since the retreat of the last ice age.

They had harnessed the metabolic energy of both horse and buffalo to the expansionist strategies of their people.

They had adapted faster and better to that newly reconsidered landscape than their European rivals in every way.

They had taken the annual solar energy of nearly five-hundred atom bombs, and built a rocket-ride to empire.

“After four centuries of colonialism, the extent of Indigenous power was still staggering,” Hamalainen writes. “The Lakotas alone had extended their dominions over an enormous chunk of the continent and much of the American West…[while] U.S. officials were putting out fires all across the West. ”

Markets, Motion and the Military

But even at the height of their century-long rise to domination, other inexorable forces were beginning to shape the contest for the Great Plains.

Starting slowly, and then gathering momentum over time, rival strategies began to undermine and erode the Lakota advantage.

And it all came down to bending time, shrinking space, and heating starstuff.

In 1848, as the Mexican American War limped to a close, gold was discovered near Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento, California.

American settlers and prospectors (soon to be joined by a huge influx of Chinese, South American and European fortune seekers) took overland and overseas routes to the West Coast.

Four billion years ago, gold was originally birthed in the explosion of ancient and distant neutron stars. It slammed into the Earth’s crust, and had been lying mostly buried ever since.

As a simple element on the periodic table, soft enough to easily work, impervious to rust and decay, shiny and reflecting light, gold’s not nearly as materially significant as the grasses-to-horses-to-hunters trophic cascade we’ve just been exploring.

Can’t eat it. Can’t burn it. Can’t build much with it.

But digging it up from streambeds and mountainsides, and converting it into economic currency recognized across an interdependent global market economy as a portable and universal store of value?

That changed the balance of energy (and with it, power) in every region it connected.

The ensuing California Gold Rush pumped so much new money into the U.S. system that it created an inflationary boom in spending and investment that rippled around the world.

Farmers from as far away as Chile, Australia and Hawaii found huge new markets for their food.

British textiles and finished goods, even prefab houses shipped all the way from China, flowed into the United States in record quantities.

The closest contemporary example we have of such an influx of capital is the massive quantitative easing following the 2008 financial crash and 2020 Covid relief efforts.

That flood of capital prompted one of the largest wealth transfers in history, bankrupted some industries while birthing others, and set up an inflationary economic hangover we’re still wrestling with today.

South Dakota’s Homestake Mine, near the famed boomtown of Deadwood, was the richest mine in United States history. It pumped out over eighteen billion dollars worth of gold.

And it sat squarely within the Lakota’s sacred Black Hills.

If the European market for felt hats had been enough to upend the ecological and political equilibrium of the Northeast a few centuries earlier, the global market’s hunger for gold was orders of magnitude more disruptive.

***

Just a year after their triumphant 1868 treaty at Fort Laramie, the Lakota heard reports of a curious event in the neighboring Utah Territory.

There, California governor (and future founder of the university bearing his name), Leland Stanford drove a ceremonial golden spike joining two sections of railroad track together.

Linking the east coast to the west coast via a single railway line, this new track reduced a journey that used to take six treacherous months to travel by horse, to as little as one week.

All in the relative comfort of a railroad car.

The United States had just collapsed time and space in a way that the Lakota simply could not match.

Within sixty seconds of Stanford swinging his silver hammer, news of the event raced down freshly erected telegraph wires of copper and iron (also dug up from mountainsides and refined in furnaces) all the way to New York and San Francisco.

The historic message contained the single word, “DONE!”.

Information routed through the telegraph (in its most lethal form–military intelligence and troop movements), plus the coal-fueled movement of both trains and steamships nullified the Lakotas’ superior strategies and mobility almost overnight.

Information and motion were no longer bound by the metabolism of runner or rider.

Just a few years earlier, the Lakota had parlayed their intimate knowledge of the landscape and the superior speed and range of their mounted warriors into military and political dominance.

Now they were at a distinct disadvantage on both counts.

The Lakota had sparked a revolution and built an empire by unlocking the energy embedded in the grasslands of the Great Plains. But the carbon they had access to was limited to the sunshine and plant growth in any given year.

As massive as those grasslands were, the buffalo and horses could only eat and metabolize what had sprouted between that spring and the snows of the next winter.

But coal was something else again.

It contained more than twice the available energy of hay or grass!

By digging it up out of the ground and setting it on fire Americans were able to bend time–taking the concentrated photosynthesis from a million years in the past, and redirect it to their goals in the present.

“By the early 1870s,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gilbert King, “the United States boasted a transcontinental railroad grid, a coast-to-coast telegram network… that together enabled the army to stage fast and massive mobilizations. Fortified by powerful infrastructure—a long-distance train had an average of twenty ten-ton railcars—the government could, at long last, negotiate from a position of strength.”

***

And it wasn’t just the railroads that unlocked motion for the United States, its army and its settlers. Steamboats did too. And with steamboats, they were able to not just bend light (in the form of concentrated fossil fuels). They also bent water to their aims.

Every high school physics class learns that 19th century steam engines worked so well because they exploited the phase change of water from liquid to vapour. At 99 degrees Celsius water is good for making tea. But at 100 degrees Celsius, it vaporizes into another form entirely–steam.

These engines borrowed energy from coal-bound sunlight that had fallen to earth eons ago, heated water to its boiling point, and vaporized it into energy.

Millions of years of metabolic muscle converted into motion via gears, pistons and paddles.

And for the steam engines bolted into boats (rather than mounted on rails) they not only rejiggered the phase changes of water to do all that work. They upended the hydrologic water cycle itself.

For tens of thousands of years, people had always relied on rivers, lakes, seas and oceans for travel and transport.

Free from the need to bushwack through forests, cross canyons and climb mountains, water had offered open passage for anyone with the courage and skill to push off from shore.

Plus, it also takes only one-tenth the energy to float cargo rather than dragging or rolling it over ground.

Even today, half of the world’s population lives within two-hundred kilometers of the coast, and half of the world’s population lives within a couple of miles of a body of freshwater.

That’s how central water-transport has been to the broader civilization project.

Rivers always served as arteries for transport and highways for trade. And they got their power from basic hydrology.

Water starts out as snow high in the mountains, melts into creeks and rivers and flows steadily downhill to the sea.

(but never the other way).

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, trade to Mississippi River towns like Memphis and New Orleans came downstream via keel boats.

Once the traders had unloaded their goods, they often dismantled their boats and sold them for parts. They then turned around and walked or rode back north to begin the preparations again for next year’s trip.

Poling or dragging their boats upstream was out of the question. The entire round trip took as long as nine months.

(I’d walk back upstream with you anytime, Jeremiah Johnson, you hunka chunka Sundance love)

But harnessing the power of energy-dense coal and steam allowed new shallow draft steamboats to carry large loads and people in both directions.

And that combination of fuel and furnace proved stronger than gravity.

Or the flow of water itself.

“Without changing physically in the slightest way a great river became something else,” Elliot West notes, “not a muscular rush of energy to be temporarily ridden but a two-way avenue of commerce, a broad path of free movement.”

These steamboats didn’t just transform trade and transport. They also changed military mobilization.

While the U.S. Army had paused its campaign after the Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Lakota had kept expanding.

By the early summer of 1876 their warriors had started to gather on the banks of the Greasy Grass, or Little Big Horn river.

In the last week of June, 1876 the cavalry used a paddle steamer to get up the Yellowstone River and gain the advantage of surprise.

But Crazy Horse confounded the army’s effort to trap his warriors. He forced the battle to his advantage, and dictated a roving fight that prevented the soldiers from ever getting organized.

Then he led a band of his warriors more than a mile downstream to outflank the Americans.

Which he did, with ruthless efficiency.

It wasn’t long until less than a hundred cavalry remained, including General Custer.

The Lakota methodically dispatched the soldiers with clubs and axes, noting in their winter count that they “did not take a single soldier prisoner, but killed them all; none of them were alive for even five minutes.

They left Custer’s body unscalped.

Some historians have speculated that the vain general’s flowing golden locks, carefully combed and scented with cinnamon oil, had begun to desert him in his later years.

By the time of his final battle, he’d abandoned a comb-over or any less dignified remedies, and had cut what remained of his trademark ‘do short.

Not enough to bother scalping, apparently.

The Lakota warriors still made their opinion of the man clear.

Crazy Horse was well aware of Custer’s role in the recent Washita Massacre and his captaining the expedition that had discovered gold in their sacred “Pahá Sápa” Black Hills.

So they shoved an arrow through his penis, and left his body on the battlefield for the crows.

***

A week later, on July 4th 1876, in the midst of massive patriotic celebrations of the young nation’s centennial, word of the Battle of the Greasy Grass finally reached Washington D.C.

Buffalo Bill Cody and countless newspapers quickly refashioned the rout into the mythically glorious “Custer’s Last Stand.”

#hegsethwouldgo

But carnival prose could not cover up the facts of the matter. This humiliation demanded a massive and totalizing response from the Union army.

The United States was a lumbering giant. Clumsy at first, slow to mobilize, and easy to outmaneuver, it started inflicting damage that the Plains tribes could not endure indefinitely.

After Little Big Horn, extermination of “the Indian problem” became its singular focus.

And they did it by repeating the same strategies that Generals Sherman and Sheridan had deployed defeating the Confederacy during the Civil War.

They stopped trying to win on the battlefield and set out to destroy the ecological foundations of life on the plains.

They leveraged the market in gold to fund their army, and motivate hunters and miners.

They exploited the heightened mobility of rails and rivers to move troops and supplies.

They harnessed the power of coal, steel and copper to fuel their engines, lay their tracks and string their telegraph cables.

And still, all of that was not enough to defeat the Centaurs of the Spirit, the nomadic empires of the grasslands!

To do that, they had to neutralize the two elements that had allowed the Lakota to so successfully unlock the energy of the high plains–horses and buffalo.

They neutralized the mobility of the nomad warriors by confining them onto reservations.

They neutralized the centrality of the buffalo with a wholesale massacre that took decades to complete.

Rather than seeking a decisive military victory, the U.S. Army engaged in a brutal war of attrition. And they did so via one of the more destructive and effective public-private partnerships in history.

***

Next week stay tuned for the wrap up of this tale, where we’ll learn how Golden Hills, Golden Spikes and Golden Hair all conspired to get us to Wounded Knee.

Then we can (finally!) share all the analogues and insights that revisiting this history sheds on our present moment.

For those still following along—thanks for playing, and hope it’s been a decent way to invest your morning coffee time!