Wikipedia:VideoWiki/Indian Peace Commission

Introduction
The Indian Peace Commission was a group formed by an act of Congress on July 20, 1867, in order to "establish peace with certain hostile Indian tribes."



Background
During the 1860s, national preoccupation with the ongoing American Civil War and the withdrawal of troops to fight it, had weakened the US government's control of the west.



This in addition to corruption throughout the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the continued migration of the railroad and white settlers westward, led to a general restlessness and eventually armed conflict.



Sand Creek and Doolittle
Following the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, where troops under John Chivington killed and mutilated more than a hundred friendly Cheyenne and Arapaho, half or more women and children, hostilities intensified. Congress dispatched an investigation into the conditions of Native American peoples under Senator James Doolittle. After two years of inquiry, Doolittle's 500-page report condemned the actions of Chivington and blamed tribal hostilities on the "aggressions of lawless white men".



The Fetterman Fight
On December 21, 1866, yet another conflict, the Fetterman Fight, saw the killing of an entire unit commanded by William Fetterman, at the hands of Lakota, Sioux, and Arapaho warriors as part of Red Cloud's War. William Sherman personally wrote to the Secretary of War and assured him that "if fifty Indians are allowed to remain between the Arkansas and Platte [rivers]" they would "checkmate three thousand soldiers" and that action had to be taken. For Sherman, it made "little difference whether they be coaxed out by Indian commissioners...or killed."



Establishment
After four days of debate, Congress responded by establishing the Peace Commission on July 20, 1867. Their work was organized around three main goals in an effort to solve the "Indian question". to remove if possible, the causes of war. to secure as far as practicable, our frontier settlements and the safe building of our railroads looking to the Pacific. and to suggest or inaugurate some plan for the civilization of the Indians.



Owing to the high cost of waging war in the West, Congress concluded after much debate that peace was preferable to extermination, and empowered a seven-man commission of four civilians and three military officers to negotiate with the tribes on behalf of the government, work to confine them to reservations, and if unsuccessful, raise a volunteer army of four thousand men to move them by force.