- Announcer: Funding for this program was made possible
by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by the annual financial support
of viewers like you.
[wind whistles]
[weighty music]
- Dave Iverson: These are hallowed grounds,
lands that in our past were marked by bloodshed and battle.
[gun pops]
These are America's battlegrounds,
places that have been witness to conflict,
[gun pops]
conflict that has shaped our country's history,
shaped our nation's character.
[gunshots]
Tonight, on America's Battlegrounds:
the Whiskey Rebellion
the subject was taxes;
the outcome was bloody;
the court case of Dred Scott,
his fight for freedom split the nation;
the Battle of Poison Springs,
the story of a Civil War massacre still in dispute today;
the Battle of the Bear's Paw, the last brave stand
of Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce tribe;
Cairo, Illinois, the story of a city torn in two
in the battle for civil rights;
the stories of America's battlegrounds.
You can look around almost any town in this country
and find the reminders and relics of war,
the conflicts that define American history.
I'm Dave Iverson,
and this particular town is Galena, Illinois.
Over there, you'll find a monument
to one of Galena's most famous residents,
Ulysses S. Grant.
Grant's battleground, of course,
was America's greatest conflict,
the Civil War.
But every chapter in American history
has been marked by battle
from the time of the Civil War to the era of civil rights.
Labor uprising, student protests,
battles over land and race,
these American battlegrounds
have altered and sometimes rerouted
our national experience.
Tonight, we bring you some of those stories.
We begin with a story from the hills
of Western Pennsylvania.
[moody music]
[crickets chirp]
[birds tweet]
Mingo Creek Cemetery near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
among the markers placed here over the centuries
are two weathered headstones
inscribed with the names John Hollcroft and James McFarland.
One was an agitator,
the other, a casualty,
in a nearly forgotten battle known as
the "Whiskey Rebellion." [kindly music]
By the end of this conflict,
George Washington would lead more troops
against a group of American farmers
than he'd led into any battle against the British.
It was a struggle that helped shape our country,
a struggle some say still isn't over.
- Retta Campbell: States' rights versus a strong central government
has never been resolved as an issue.
And so that makes it important as the first manifestation
of that conflict in political thought in this country.
- Rev. Richard Davies: We were a United States of America,
and the Whiskey Rebellion was the initial tragic challenge
that we were going to be a United States.
[wagon rattles]
- Dave: In 1791, Philadelphia in Eastern Pennsylvania
was the capital of the new American government.
Western Pennsylvania was still Frontier Country;
the town of Pittsburgh, little more than a fortress outpost
of 1,200 residents.
As these early settlers toiled to survive,
the country struggled [anvil clangs]
to recover from its expensive War of Independence,
a war that had left Americans
with its first national deficit.
- The national debt that we had
as a result of the American Revolution
was the equivalent of $11 trillion today.
The national debt that all of us wring our hands over
is $3 trillion.
- Dave: 200 Years ago,
Alexander Hamilton came up with his deficit solution.
It included imposing a tax on whiskey.
- Had to do a major job,
namely, to establish the Federal Treasury.
And they had to establish the right of the government
to levy taxes on anything.
And so, that was Hamilton's choice.
[kindly music] And he sought to put that tax
on a commodity that he knew was everywhere.
It was nationwide.
And so, it was a very fair tax, in his mind, on the populace.
- Dave: The tax was resisted all along the western frontier
but especially in Southwestern Pennsylvania,
where even the smallest farm had a still.
Whiskey was the best way to turn grain into profit.
It wasn't only a libation.
It was an all-purpose medicine and commodity for trade.
- This was not a currency society here on the frontier.
They did not have paper money,
and the biggest barter item was whiskey.
Even the preachers were paid in whiskey.
- Dave: And whiskey would serve
to reignite the still-unfolding debate
over two new documents,
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
- There were those who did not want the Constitution,
because they did not want to give up their state's rights.
They were the ones that fought for the Bill of Rights,
which followed in three or four years
after the Constitution.
They simply did not want
to have that Constitution and a United States of America.
They wanted states' rights.
[crowd roars]
- Dave: Into this unpopular arena,
the government sent excisemen to collect the tax
along the frontier.
They often left wearing tar and feathers.
And any farmer who paid the tax might expect a visit
from Tom the Tinker,
whose remains probably rest under the name John Hollcroft
in that cemetery at Mingo Creek.
- He was probably the most rabid radical
on the side of the Whiskey Rebels.
And what he'd do, quite simply, was
if you were making whiskey and paying the tax on it,
he would first advise you by anonymous letter
that if you didn't stop, he would tinker with your still.
And by tinkering with it,
that meant he would shoot it full of holes or destroy it.
[fire crackles]
Not only did he destroy people's stills.
He burned barns.
He did a lot of damage to people who paid the tax.
[birds tweet]
- Dave: It was at this location on July 15th, 1794,
that the protest became a full-scale rebellion.
On that date, a local revolutionary war hero,
General John Neville,
came to this cabin to help collect the whiskey tax
from a local farmer.
General Neville lived nearby, had his own still,
and had previously opposed the tax.
But his friend George Washington had persuaded him
that the new government needed the tax to survive.
- John Neville did not wanna pay the tax.
He had his own still, and as a wealthy man,
he didn't wanna pay any money that he didn't have to pay.
But when he received a call from George Washington,
the President of the United States now,
the patriotism in this man welled up
over his own individual preference.
- Dave: Patriot or not,
General Neville's efforts infuriated the anti-tax farmers.
Led by John Hollcroft, or Tom, the Tinker,
they descended on the general's mansion at Bower Hill.
During the confrontation, a 16-year-old boy was shot.
[gun cracks]
- And when they saw that somebody had been killed,
when blood had been spilled,
they did go wild, as any mob is prone to do.
[crowd roars] [gun cracks]
- Dave: The next day, 600 rebel farmers returned
to the general's mansion.
[snare drum blasts] This time, the rebels were led by James McFarland,
the other Whiskey Rebellion fighter
who's buried at Mingo Creek.
- Somewhere during the mid-fighting,
a truce flag was flown from General Neville's house,
although the Federalist defenders deny this.
McFarland stepped out
to accept what he believed a commonsense surrender.
There were 600 people fighting against 10 or 20.
And he was shot.
He was shot point blank
from one of the windows in the mansion
and died almost instantaneously.
[kindly music]
- Dave: When the rebel leader McFarland was killed,
his followers looted the general's estate
and burned it to the ground.
The Whiskey Rebels now flew their own flag.
The tax was splitting the new nation
into two opposing camps.
- Washington himself wrote in his own writings
that if this rebellion could not be put down,
then they had fought the revolution for nothing
and we might as well all go back to the king.
- Dave: In August of 1794,
a mob rallied at Braddock's Field for a march on Pittsburgh,
a place local folks called Sodom for its sinful ways.
But this time, that old demon whiskey
actually prevented any fighting.
- About 5,000 of 'em marched through them.
The citizens of Pittsburgh were smart enough
to humor them and cajole them
and offer them free whiskey and drinks,
and that pretty much diffused the situation.
- Dave: Still, the government in Philadelphia was alarmed.
Alexander Hamilton urged President Washington
to send troops to Southwestern Pennsylvania
and crush the rebels once and for all.
- Hamilton insisted that the military be sent,
and only reluctantly did Washington agree.
- Dave: Washington personally led the force of 13,000 men.
And on October 20th, 1794, the overwhelming federal troops
sliced through the region virtually unopposed.
Little happened until the night of November 13th,
an evening that would become known as "the Dreadful Night."
[horse whinnies]
- Without warning, arrest squads went out
and arrested several hundred people
without warrants or anything that we would consider today
as legal process
and dragged them out of their beds, some of them,
put them up in makeshift jails, unfinished log cabins.
It was extremely cold winter.
And a lot of these people suffered exposure.
Some of them died.
[snow crunches]
- Dave: The army marched 20 farmers
to trial in Philadelphia.
Only two were actually convicted,
and Washington pardoned them both.
200 years later, in the countryside
that surrounds the graves of the Whiskey Rebels
at Mingo Creek,
the subject of the rebellion is still debated:
were the rebels anarchists or patriots?
- No, now, they were, basically, hardworking people
who thought that the tax was wrong.
They were tax protestors.
Now, that's probably the tax protest.
It just got a little out of hand; that's all.
- We had to stop this problem,
and Washington, and his vice president,
and all of his officers
had to make sure that we learned
how to be a United States of America.
[kindly music]
- Dave: The whiskey tax never collected much money,
and it was later repealed by Thomas Jefferson.
But the significance of the rebellion lives on.
It was America's first crisis over states' rights,
a crisis that helped define an emerging nation.
[crickets chirp]
[glowering music]
- This was very much
a common, everyday, garden-variety courthouse.
And probably, one of the more important trials
that were held here
was the Dred Scott case,
which started here in the circuit courts
of St. Louis County.
[wind murmurs]
In some respects,
even though Dred and Harriet Scott didn't know it
at the time that they filed for their freedom
in the old courthouse,
they made of the old courthouse,
virtually, the first battlefields of the Civil War.
[thoughtful music] - Nineteeth century St. Louis
was a crossroads
of the North and South,
of the established East and expanding West.
Missouri's entry into the Union as a slave state
was the result of the 1820 compromise
over the expansion of slavery
into new states and territories.
Some 37 years later,
the Supreme Court would take the Dred Scott case
and try to settle that issue once and for all.
All Dred and Harriet Scott had asked for was freedom
for themselves and their two daughters.
- It lasted for 11 years,
involved five separate trials.
What should have been a very simple case
when Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet,
walked up the steps of this building
and came in to sue for their freedom in 1846,
turned into a very complex thing
that started to involve politics
and the larger social issues of the day
until the case went all the way
to the United States Supreme Court.
- Dave: Dred Scott was owned by Dr. John Emerson,
an army surgeon stationed
at the Jefferson Barracks Military Post in St. Louis.
But in the 1830s, Emerson took Scott
to live at a military post in Illinois, a free state,
and then, to the Wisconsin territory, now Minnesota,
where Congress had banned slavery
under the Missouri Compromise.
Here Scott married Harriet Robinson, also a slave.
Dr. Emerson brought his slaves back to St. Louis
where Dred and Harriet Scott were told about the doctrine
of, "Once free, always free,"
and that the courts would properly release them from bondage
because they had resided in free territory.
With Dr. Emerson now dead, they took his widow to court.
After some delays, the county court
awarded the Scotts and their two daughters freedom in 1850.
- Many other slaves had been freed previously.
Dred Scott had a clear-cut case.
It was an ironclad case.
He definitely had lived in free territories.
There was even a state supreme court decision
based on another case with the exact same particulars.
[thoughtful music]
- Dave: In 1852, the state supreme court,
responding to the national tensions,
ignored its own precedent and overturned the decision.
No longer would freedom in one state
mean freedom in Missouri.
Under this new doctrine,
the Scotts, once free, were slaves again.
Their lawyers moved to get the issue
before the United States Supreme Court.
As more time passed
and the bitter feud over slavery intensified,
what had been a routine and obscure court case
took on far greater significance.
The public, desperate for a solution,
now eagerly looked to the court.
- Lee Epstein: It comes at a time when the Union is on the brink.
It comes at a time
when legislatures were having trouble compromising.
It comes at a time
when compromise still seemed possible.
- Dave: On March 6th, 1857,
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issued the majority opinion.
It upheld the Missouri decision
and left Dred Scott in slavery.
Taney wrote that Blacks had no rights in federal court
and that the writers of the Constitution never intended
to include Negros as citizens.
"On the contrary," he wrote,
"they were at the time considered
"as a subordinate and inferior class of beings
who had been subjugated by the dominant race."
And that was just the beginning.
- Bob Moore: It's generally thought that Justice Taney was trying
to calm matters in the country,
that he felt that he,
by rendering his decision in the Dred Scott case,
was actually going to settle once and for all
the question of slavery in the United States
and render a fair decision for everyone.
- Dave: Taney's opinion struck
at the very heart of the debate,
the powers of the state and federal governments.
He wrote that Congress was powerless to exclude slavery
from the federal territories
and the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional.
It was only the second time
since the founding of the country
that the Supreme Court had struck down a federal law.
- The Civil War itself was fought over that nature
of that relationship:
what is the relationship of the states
to the federal government?
And certainly, slavery was the substantive issue
but at a theoretical level,
that is just critical
to understanding this period in our history.
- Dr. John Wright: It had a major impact on this nation.
When you think about this chief justice
who said Blacks had no rights that whites were bound
to observe or respect,
that had a bearing on the way the nation began
to look at Blacks.
[thoughtful music] - For Dred Scott
and for all Blacks, slave and free,
it was a total loss of human rights;
for slave owners, a total victory
for the rights to their property
and protection from federal power.
But that victory was only on paper.
For the abolitionists,
it was ammunition for the cause.
"This decision," they said, "was treasonous
and would lead to the legalization of slavery
throughout all of the United States."
"Now," they said, "You must decide.
Which side are you on?"
- Both sides started to feel very much on edge,
and it polarized the country to the extent that people felt
that there was no going back,
that there had to be some sort
of a dramatic resolution to this,
and probably, it would not be through compromise.
[march-like snare drum music]
- Dave: The compromises of the founding fathers,
the political maneuvers of the Congress,
and now this legal battle in the nation's highest court
all had failed to end the conflict.
[cricket chirps]
The next battles would be far more costly.
Dred Scott did win his freedom,
not from the courts, but from a local white man,
a supporter whose father had owned Scott years before.
After the Supreme Court decision,
this man obtained ownership of the Scotts, and,
back in the St. Louis County Courthouse, where it all began,
officially set them free.
Dred Scott went to work [thoughtful music]
in a St. Louis hotel
but lived only a year and a half as a free and famous man,
dying of tuberculosis in 1858.
He gave his name to a case that changed American history,
but he was buried in an unmarked grave.
[birds tweet]
Another hundred years would pass
before his name was inscribed in stone.
[glowering music]
[birds twitter]
Southwest Arkansas, an ocean of pine and hardwood forests
rolling for miles in every direction.
Under this canopy of green,
at the foot of an old oak tree,
water flows from underground and runs across a shady valley.
The locals call this place Poison Springs.
The peacefulness of the setting belies the fact
that during the Civil War, 130 years ago,
something terrible happened here.
And to this day, it remains a place
that generates strong feelings and bitter disagreement
about how the story should be told.
The controversy involves this small roadside park
and whether its historical markers accurately tell the story
of what happened to the 400 Black soldiers
who fought here. [boots clop]
When the park was dedicated,
Dr. Gregory Irwin was there as a Civil War re-enactor.
[sergeant speaks indistinctly]
He's also a professor of history
at the University of Central Arkansas.
- Dr. Gregory Urwin: My initial response to the exhibit
at Poison Spring was emotional.
I was very angry.
It was as if those Black troops were being murdered again,
this time in the history of that event.
[wind whistles]
- Dave: It happens during the last year of the Civil War.
The fighting in Arkansas has degenerated
into vicious guerrilla warfare.
By now, the Union Army occupies all the major towns
along the Arkansas River Valley.
North of the river,
the Federals maintain a tenuous control,
but Southwestern Arkansas is still a Confederate stronghold.
[sky rumbles]
Into this hostile territory, in the rainy spring of 1864,
the Union Army launches a campaign
motivated more by greed than military strategy.
[bird tweets] [cricket chirps]
The goal is cotton, vast stores of it
rumored to be held in Texas and Louisiana
by the Confederates.
But three weeks into the campaign,
the Union commander General Frederick Steele
finds himself bogged down with 10,000 hungry troops
in a countryside decimated by war.
[crickets chirp]
He sends out a train of 200 wagons
to bring back corn from neighboring farms.
400 of the soldiers guarding the wagon train
are members of the First Kansas Colored Infantry,
ex-slaves who have joined the Union Army.
- The whole concept of using Black men as soldiers
was just something that was unthinkable.
- Dave: Ronnie Nichols is an historian
and director of the Old State House Museum in Little Rock.
- A lot of these former slaves had been mistreated,
had been divided up as far as families were concerned,
and now they had an opportunity to carry rifles
and carry rifles for the other side,
which again was very scary and very dangerous
for the white citizens.
- Sergeant: Forward.
- Dave: On April 18th, 1864,
the Union wagon train is returning
from its foraging expedition
loaded with corn and other items
taken from residents of the area.
By now the Confederate army is aware
of the slow-moving Union caravan,
stretching for more than a quarter-mile
along a road that will pass by Poison Springs.
Seeing the opportunity
to surprise and cut off the Union wagon train,
Confederate General John Marmaduke acts quickly.
He gathers a collection
of troops from Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas,
along with two regiments of Choctaw Indians from Oklahoma
who are fighting for the Confederates.
The rebel force outnumbers the Union soldiers
guarding the wagon train
three to one,
and they're waiting at Poison Springs.
[cannon blasts, man shouts indistinctly]
- Man: Whoo!
- Dave: The Confederates attack.
The First Kansas Colored is brought to the front
and bears the brunt of the Confederate assault.
They're soon overwhelmed and in retreat.
The rebels take no Black prisoners.
[horse whinnies]
- As certain Union troops / Union officers left the field,
they looked back and saw Black soldiers wounded
and prisoners being murdered by Confederate troops.
One Black soldier
who was lying wounded on the field, feigning death,
later came back and said
how the men of the 29th Texas rode around hooting,
"Where's the First Nigger"...
That's what they called the First Kansas:
"Where's the First Nigger now?"
as they killed anybody who showed a sign of life.
After they were dead,
they were scalped, chopped up,
stripped of their clothes.
Some Confederate soldiers lined up dead Black soldiers
and took captured wagons
and tried to see how many heads they could crush.
The dead white officers in the regiment
were turned on their faces as a sign of dishonor.
And they were circled by the corpses of the dead Blacks.
Some Blacks were buried up to their waists
to serve as headstones for dead white officers.
Others were buried head-down up to their waist
to serve as footstones in a parody of a cemetery.
It was very, very bloody.
One Confederate soldier said that he couldn't take a step
on certain portions of that field
without stepping on Black bodies.
- Dave: How that field of blood and carnage
should be remembered
is still the subject of debate today.
[keyboard clacks]
- Gregory: To be brutally Frank,
the new exhibit at Poison Spring is a piece of garbage,
an example of history distorted to please the sensibilities
of white racists.
- Dave: Dr. Irwin refers to one
of the original six plaques at the Poison Springs exhibit.
It explained that the high death toll
among federal Black troops
was compounded by Confederate outrage
at the collection of, quote,
"unscrupulous other plunder found on the Union train."
Professor Irwin then led the effort
to remove the original plaque.
- It more or less said the Blacks had had it coming,
that their mistreatment, the atrocities, the murders
of wounded men / unarmed prisoners,
that those acts were justified
because the Confederates found plunder,
stolen personal items,
in the forage train.
Of course, why white Union prisoners,
who made up a majority of the escort...
Why they were not subject this kind of treatment,
why only Blacks were treated in this manner,
that was not explained.
- Bill: It was the 129th anniversary
of the Battle of Poison Springs
That's when the markers were dedicated, the bronze plaques.
Sometime later, I was in that area,
and I stopped just to re-read the plaques again,
and panel number five was gone.
- Dave: Bill Thompson is another Civil War re-enactor
and a lifelong resident of Southern Arkansas.
- Bill Thompson: I was heartbroken because I was so proud
to see the plaques there.
I'd been in and out around Poison Springs for a long time,
and it was just a campsite, ya know?
Or you knew that the battle took place,
but that was about it.
Any information, you had to go research it.
And here was these excellent bronze plaques
that told the whole story.
And now one of 'em is missing.
When they told me who was behind it and all,
then I was very angry
because these people did not have the right.
It's like they're rewriting history.
They're wanting you to see what they want you to see.
They're covering up the truth.
- Dave: The truth, according to Thompson,
is that the First Kansas Colored infantry
committed equally atrocious acts
against the Confederate-allied Choctaw Indians,
who had sided with the South in an earlier battle.
The same tribe was alongside the Confederates again
at Poison Springs.
- It was payback time for the Indians,
the Choctaw Indians.
They were able to get their revenge there at Poison Springs.
And it's unfortunate that it happened,
but these people that are the ones
that got the plaque changed
and that continue to talk about what an atrocity it was,
they fail to mention what an atrocity
that these same troops inflicted on the Indians.
- That's just something that, again, is ludicrous.
This is something they would not do,
nor would their commanders allow
anything like this to happen.
- Dave: And Professor Irwin believes
something else happened in that earlier battle
that may have triggered the massacre at Poison Springs.
- These troops had faced each other in the past.
The First Kansas Colored had been engaged
the Battle of Honey Springs in Oklahoma in July of 1863,
where it defeated, in an open fight, the 29th Texas Calvary.
The 29th Texas Calvary would be attacking the First Kansas
from the south at Poison Spring.
And those Texans, they had a score to settle
because Black men had made them look bad.
And that was something
that white Southerners found intolerable
during the Civil War era.
[birds tweet]
- The victor always writes the history book.
Does not mean the history book is correct.
When somebody goes to Poison Springs now
and looks at the plaque,
they get part of the story.
They don't get all of the story.
[sighs] In the South,
we feel like our Southern heritage...
We're losing it.
It's being taken away from us a little at a time.
It has been ever since the war was over with.
- When it comes to the Civil War, a lot of people,
especially from the South, where it was fought,
where the scars are still felt,
they confuse history with ancestor worship.
There's a tendency to try to cover up and glorify
what was a very dirty bloody ugly war.
By pretending certain unpleasant things did not occur
in the past,
it makes it easier for us to ignore unpleasant things
that happen in the present,
makes it easier for us to ignore problems
that still plague our society,
makes it more difficult for us to understand
where these problems came from,
and thus, makes it impossible
for us to put together workable solutions.
[moody music]
[birds tweet]
- Dave: By the banks
of the Snake, Salmon, and Clearwater Rivers
to the Wallowa Valley of Oregon,
for thousands of years,
these lands were home to the Nez Perce.
They lived in separate bands,
but their common voices,
past as well as present,
still tell the story of their tribe's struggle to survive.
[wistful music]
The most famous Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Chief Joseph.
He remembers how life began to change
with the arrival of the white man.
- Joseph: It has always been the pride of the Nez Perces
that we were the friends of the white man,
but we soon found
that the white men were growing very rich very fast
and were greedy to possess everything the Indian had.
- Dave: The white men and the Nez Perce
signed a treaty in 1855, making most
of the traditional homelands of the tribe a reservation.
But when gold was discovered eight years later
on those same homelands,
the U.S. government wanted a new treaty.
- That treaty was imposed to accommodate the influx, mainly,
of the gold being discovered on the reservation
and also to legalize the settlers who had come in
onto the reservation.
And this was called the Steele Treaty,
and what it did, it cut down the reservation
to about a 10th of the size it was.
- Dave: It was signed by those bands, primarily Christian,
who accepted the boundaries.
Other, more traditional bands refused to sign.
- The non-treaty and the non-Christian
who wanted to practice their own religion
stayed off the reservation.
- Dave: General Otis Oliver Howard was dispatched in 1877
to move the non-treaty bands
onto the now-reduced reservation.
Several council meetings were held
until Howard grew impatient and threatened to use force.
- So the order came in April 1877
that Joseph, they give him 70 days
to vacate Wallowa Valley.
That was just like [chuckles] taking orders
at the gunpoint.
- Dave: Howard's threats worked.
Most of the Nez Perce gathered here at Tolo Lake in 1877
to move on to the reservation.
But anger towards white settlers
who had gone unpunished for previous deeds
sparked an uprising.
- There was a lotta killings,
isolated incidents of murder here and there,
that the federal government would not take
into prosecution or anything of that sort
under the white man's law.
And the young warriors just wanted
to get even, take revenge.
- Dave: The Nez Perce warriors' revenge
left 17 settlers dead.
The army took it as an act of war.
Troops from Fort Lapwai battled the Nez Perce
here at White Bird Canyon
in a short fierce encounter that left 33 soldiers dead
but not a single Nez Perce casualty.
- The troops, the commanders,
including General Howard,
felt he was going against an inferior force.
So obviously, the Nez Perce people were
better fighters than they thought.
- Dave: The army's effort to move
the Nez Perce off their land
became a full-scale war.
Forts around the West would send nearly 2,000 soldiers.
And scores of citizen volunteers and 10 Indian tribes
would side with the army.
Over the next four months,
there would be more than a dozen battles and skirmishes
along a trail nearly 1,800 miles long,
finally culminating in an encounter
at the Bear's Paw battleground in North Central Montana.
Although Looking Glass assumed overall command,
the Nez Perce were not led by one leader.
Each band had different chiefs for different purposes.
Joseph was a people chief, one of many,
and decisions were made not by one
but by consensus, together.
Looking Glass convinced the Nez Perce
to start this long journey
by crossing the Bitterroot Mountains
and seeking refuge in the buffalo country
with their old allies, the Crows.
- It was sad for them to leave,
because they know they was leaving a lot
of their ancestors' burial grounds
and all their homesteads.
And it was a sad time.
- Dave: At first, the army and the settlers
in the Bitterroot Valley
allowed safe passage,
and the Nez Perce group of 800 traveled in peace.
On their way to the buffalo country,
they rested at a traditional camping place
along the Big Hole River.
- Looking Glass said, "Well,
the white people down at Bitterroot Valley
treated us good.
They traded us all these things.
The war is over.
General Howard's gone.
It's done with.
Little did they know that Colonel John Gibbon
came out of Fort Shaw,
came to Missoula, forced-marched all the way there,
and arrived August 9th, 1877,
about two o'clock the morning.
- Dave: Looking Glass was wrong.
The war was far from over.
Gibbon's soldiers attacked the camp
as the Nez Perce were sleeping,
killing 30 warriors.
But the Nez Perce quickly regrouped
and drove the soldiers back.
In the attack, the army killed 50 women and children.
Joseph was outraged.
[gun cracks]
- Joseph: Nez Perce never make war on women and children.
We would feel ashamed to do so cowardly an act.
[gun bangs] [bullet whistles]
- Dave: The remaining Nez Perce continued eastward
through what is now Yellowstone National Park.
On reaching the buffalo country,
the Nez Perce were refused sanctuary by the Crow,
who feared war with the government.
- So once they got over Crow country,
it's rather unfortunate
because the Crow people were divided themselves.
The Crow said, "No, we can't help you."
- Dave: The Nez Perce then turned north,
hoping to join up with Sitting Bull,
who had been forced from his land
and found refuge in Canada.
They were just 40 miles from the Canadian border,
two days away,
when Looking Glass again underestimated
the army's relentlessness.
As they stopped to hunt buffalo,
Colonel Nelson A. Miles and 400 soldiers and scouts
were racing to intercept them.
The great battle is remembered
by He-mene-mox-mox, Yellow Wolf.
- Yellow Wolf: A wild stir hit the people,
great hurrying everywhere.
From the south came a noise,
a rumble like stampeding buffaloes,
hundreds of soldiers charging in two wide circling wings.
They were surrounding our camp: "Fight!"
- When Colonel Nelson Miles made his attack,
he tried an all-out calvary charge,
same type of charge that overwhelmed many other tribes.
The Nez Perce did something very unique in that sense
is that they held their fire.
And all of a sudden, they opened up the last minute.
Then all of a sudden, they were shooting at stripes.
NCOs and officers were the main target.
- Dave: By targeting the buglers and officers,
the Nez Perce destroyed communication among the soldiers,
but Colonel Miles quickly changed tactics.
He stopped the attacks and laid siege to the camp,
preventing the Nez Perce from escaping once again.
The bands had lost many chiefs and warriors.
It was October, and the snow had already begun to fall.
Yellow Wolf remembers the first night after the attack.
- Yellow Wolf: Wild and stormy,
the cold wind was thick with snow.
Guns flashed through it all.
I felt the end coming,
all for which we had suffered, lost.
- Dave: The end would come soon for Looking Glass.
Thinking he had spotted a messenger from Sitting Bull,
he stood up in his rifle pit
and was killed.
Joseph, the people chief, who had met with Miles earlier,
was forced to seriously contemplate surrender.
- Joseph: Miles said to me in plain words,
"If you will come out and give up your arms,
"I will spare your lives
and send you back to the reservation in Idaho."
I could not bear
to see my wounded men and women suffer any longer.
We had lost enough already.
We could've escaped from Bear Paw Mountain
if we had left our old people and children
and wounded behind.
We weren't willing to do this.
We had never heard of a wounded Indian recovering
while in the hands of the white man.
- I think it took a brave man to stand up and say,
"I'm gonna surrender for my people."
- Dave: For his people.
On October 5th, 1877, with several warriors at his side,
Joseph rode into the army camp.
- Joseph: I went to General Miles and gave up my gun.
I said, "From where the sun now stands,
I will fight no more."
- Dave: Joseph claimed that this was all he said
to General Miles.
His famous speech was probably delivered to other Nez Perce
during a council meeting held early year in the day
as a way to explain his decision to give up his rifle.
The complete surrender speech was probably delivered
by Nez Perce Scouts
as a message to General Miles.
[wistful music]
After the end of the fighting,
some bands slipped away north into Canada.
General Miles' promise of a return to the reservation
was overruled by the general of the army,
William Tecumseh Sherman.
Joseph and the other survivors were sent
to the Indian territory in Oklahoma.
Yellow Wolf remembers the place they called
Eeikish Pah, Hot Place.
- Yellow Wolf: We had fought the army to a standstill.
We did not expect being sent to the Eeikish Pah.
Had we known of the army's intentions,
we never would've surrendered.
- Dave: The unfamiliar climate became another brutal enemy.
The Nez Perce desperately wanted to return to their land.
- Nature placed us in this land of ours,
land that has been taken from us.
I am telling my story that all may know
about the war we did not want.
War is made to take something not your own.
- Dave: After successful lobbying by Joseph,
the Nez Perce were returned to the Northwest in 1885,
but only those who accepted Christianity were allowed
to go to the reservation at Lapwai, Idaho.
Those that kept the traditional ways
were exiled to the Confederated reservation
at Colville, Washington.
Although Joseph longed to return to his home
in the Wallowa Valley,
he would never be allowed to live there again.
These lands remain a testament to Joseph's last brave stand
to save his people, to lay down his rifle for their safety.
It remains his legacy to the tribe.
[somber music]
* Ain't gonna let-a nobody
* Turn me round * Yeah
* Turn me round * Whoa, yeah
* Turn me round
* Ain't gonna let nobody
In 1969, a young Jesse Jackson came to Cairo, Illinois,
for a rally.
* Keep on a-walking
* Walk enough to take all day
He came to lend his support in a battle for civil rights,
a battle that divided this town in two.
* Yeah
* Turn me round [siren wails]
For over 140 nights in 1969,
Cairo was torn apart by gunfire.
Two people were left dead; dozens, injured.
- Firebombings, shootings, some of everything went on
during that time.
It had gotten so terrible
you would think that you was in Vietnam.
* Turn me round
* Keep on a-walking
* Keep on a-talking
* Waking on to Freedom Day
* Ain't gonna let-a no jail tale *
* Turn me round * Yeah
- There was so much gunfire coming
in and around my mother-in-law's apartment,
and we lived in the back,
that my wife and I even got in the bathtub
and slept in there a few nights.
- Dave: Cairo became the stuff of national headlines.
A "New York Times" reporter wrote, "Probably,
no other American locality in recent years has lived
through such persistent, systematic,
and stubborn racial violence
as this tiny city at the southern tip of Illinois."
[sirens] - We'd get phone calls 2:00 a.m.
from people in the hospital, for example,
and they say, "They're firing at us."
We could hear the bullets in the background.
- Dave: United States Senator Paul Simon was then
the lieutenant governor of Illinois.
- Cairo was a battleground.
There's no question about it.
People were being killed.
Blood was being shed.
People lived in fear.
* I'm gonna keep on a-walking
* Yeah
* Keep on a-talking
* Walking on to Freedom Day
- Dave: Cairo is located at the confluence
of the two largest rivers in the country,
the Mississippi and the Ohio.
Cairo, then a town of 10,000,
was caught between currents,
a Southern city in a Northern state,
a fiercely segregated city in the land of Lincoln,
a city with vast disparities between its citizens,
and a city that, since 1913,
had what is described as an at-large voting system
that effectively shut out African Americans
from city government.
A young Cordell McGoy explains.
- The houses we live in.
Employment, there is no employment,
no justice at all in our court system.
Negros are shot at here in Cairo as dogs.
At that time, that 18-year-old man felt he had nothing.
He was just outta high school.
He saw his community going nowhere,
lotta turmoil, lotta racism both sides,
lotta frustration, lotta anger,
no hope, and I was a very angry young man at that time.
- Dave: That anger, that frustration
felt by Cordell McGoy and other Blacks in Cairo,
was sparked to violence
by the death of Private Robert L. Hunt.
Hunt died under suspicious circumstances
while held in the city jail.
Hunt's death was ruled a suicide,
but many in the Black community,
including his cousin Floretta Simelton,
didn't believe it.
- Robert Hunt was arrested and as being arrested,
he was hung in jail
by the police department [chuckles] in Cairo.
Meanwhile, after he was hung,
they say he hung himself with a T-shirt,
but he also was beaten first.
- Dave: The next day, Cairo exploded.
A rash of firebombings caused hundreds of thousands
of dollars in damage.
The National Guard was called out
to enforce a curfew and restore order.
Taking a cue from the national civil rights movement.
Cairo's Black residents founded
their own civil rights organization called the United Front,
their symbol a gun on the Bible.
The Front turned to the power of the purse
and began a boycott of Cairo's downtown businesses.
- Why are we the target?
I think it's because
the top boys calling the shots
in this national or international conspiracy
are trying to break down our government.
I think that they pick us as a good target area.
- Jesse: I'm Black. - Audience: I'm Black.
- I'm beautiful. - Audience: I'm beautiful.
- I'm God's child. - Audience: I'm God's child.
- Soul power. - Audience: Soul power.
- It's an honor to be called an agitator.
- Soul power. - Audience: Soul power.
- What function does an agitator serve on a washing machine?
It shakes the dirt outta things.
And we meant to come to shake the dirt outta things,
to shake the racism out,
shake the fear out,
to shake the intimidation out,
and to demand equal protection under the law.
- Dave: Blacks saw the boycott
as the only non-violent recourse
to fight the city's racism. - And it gon' stay on,
and it gon' be on. - As the weeks dragged
into months, Blacks used the boycott to articulate a list
of demands whites saw as unreasonable.
- And it might be on forever.
- Interviewer: What do you think that they might feel
that they had to gain by this?
- I don't know.
The demands they make are rather outlandish.
They want to have criminal cases dismissed.
They demand
that chain stores put in Black managers
and things of that sort.
- This is one of the confrontations between the Blacks
during a march and members of the Cairo Police Department.
And it was one of the main conversations.
- Preston Ewing was present with his camera
during many of the confrontations.
- Preston: This was the police commissioner
with his double-barreled shotgun
standing in front of the stores in downtown Cairo.
- Dave: As the boycott went on, tensions increased,
and out of frustration, both sides took up arms.
- Well, there were nights where there was an exchange
where there were focus targets,
but there were many nights
where the gunfire was psychological.
It was just to be heard from one section of town.
And then you would hear the other section of town respond
almost as if you were in a battle
and the enemy is saying, "Listen to what we have,"
and the other side: "Well, we have something too."
- Dave: Those lines blurred when as many as 450 whites
were designated volunteer deputies.
Many were members of the White Hat,
a private citizens' patrol.
The White Hats began in 1967 under the leadership
of Alexander County State's Attorney Peyton Berbling.
- This thing of people living in fear has to be resolved,
and you have to have law and order to do it.
- And Peyton Berbling,
he formed this group known as a White Hats
to more or less threaten Negros
and put 'em in a position where they have no say
so if any Negro in the community speaks out
or tries to start any kind of racial trouble,
he will be killed, shot upon as a dog or something,
and there will be no action taken
against the person who kills him.
And the people that will do that are the White Hats.
- Dave: Cairo's current mayor, Jim Wilson,
attended high school with Cordell McGoy.
He looks back on the White Hats
and sees a very different history.
- Like I say, I wasn't old enough
to be a member of the White Hats.
You had to be 18 years of age, and I wasn't 18 at the time,
but I think
every person in the community, in the white community,
and I'm saying these are good rational people,
participated in a White Hat movement.
[crowd murmurs, birds tweet]
- The whole picture given to the public and the nation
was of a community filled with hatred
and a community filled with stupid people.
And that was possible
because the people who weren't stupid
and the people who weren't filled with hatred
weren't standing up and speaking up.
- Dave: In time, hatred gave way to exhaustion
as nearly every city institution came under legal attack,
The White Hats were disbanded under court order.
A lawsuit changed Cairo to an aldermanic form of government.
Eventually, three African Americans were elected
to city council,
including Cordell McGoy.
The boycott finally died out,
but half of Cairo's businesses permanently closed.
- Downtown Cairo businesspeople never saw the advantage
in one community.
They were willing to hurt themselves
just to hurt somebody else.
- Dave: 25 Years after the protests and boycotts,
much of downtown Cairo remains deserted.
- If the Blacks wanna say that they won the battle
by closing down stores
and retail merchants going outta business,
well, you can say that was a victory.
But when all that was over
and there was no plan to revitalize the community,
you lost a war,
because we in worse shape now than we've ever been in.
This is what's left of downtown Cairo today.
I guess it's the results of the boycott,
the troubled times in Cairo,
and the dying out of downtown America.
- Dave: It is that bleak economic environment
that Cairo's integrated city council
is now working to change.
Councilman Cordell McGoy is leading an effort
to bring in a poultry-processing plant.
- I had that sign erected so the people could rally
behind seeking industry for Cairo
that would benefit all of Cairo.
- Dave: In Cairo, the battle for economic opportunity
is a continuing struggle.
For some, like Cordell McGoy,
the American dream is still alive.
For others, the dream remains distant.
- Middle-income African Americans
have really improved their lot in our country.
There is, however, an underclass in our country.
And because we're increasingly segregated
on the basis of economics,
we're not paying attention to that underclass.
And that is potential dynamite.
- Man: Better run.
Think I wouldn't notice.
- Man: Don't [indistinct].
- Man [indistinct]. [uneasy music]
- Dave: From Cairo, Illinois,
to the hills of Western Pennsylvania,
America's battlegrounds have often altered
our national direction.
They are conflicts that have been staged
in farmers' fields, city streets,
and county courtrooms.
Together, they've helped shape our history and our time.
[uneasy music]
[bright jingle]
- Announcer: Funding for this program was made possible
by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
and by the annual financial support of viewers like you.
[blissful music] * Ah
- Announcer: This is PBS.