Prairie Imperialists. Katharine Bjork
have helped us in our Indian wars, might have claimed sovereignty of the West.
—”The United States and the Philippines,”
Address of Secretary of War Elihu Root,
Canton, Ohio, October 24, 1900
On the afternoon of July 21, 1898, a flotilla of thirteen American ships set off from Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, “majestically plowing the waters of the deep in the direction of Puerto Rico,” as the commander of the expedition later wrote.1 For the troops traveling belowdecks, conditions were far from majestic. In spite of the intense heat and close atmosphere on board, the transports steamed toward the island with lights extinguished and portholes closed so as to avoid detection.2 A hundred of the 3,554 men who had embarked for the mission were sick; some would die of typhoid. The high incidence of disease and death due to loosely diagnosed tropical fevers had already proved more deadly to American troops fighting in Cuba than the Spanish enemy.3
Three days earlier, Santiago’s central plaza had been the site of military pageantry as Spain’s General José Torál formally ceded control of eastern Cuba to the Americans. As the Sixth Cavalry band played “Hail Columbia” and the Ninth Infantry presented arms, Spain’s flag, which had flown over the island for almost four centuries, was hauled down and the Stars and Stripes hoisted above the provincial palace. From these rituals solemnizing Spanish surrender, the Cuban Army of Liberation, America’s erstwhile ally, was conspicuously absent, deliberately excluded from participation in the ceremonies by the American occupying force. In authorizing its Declaration of War against Spain in the interest of liberating Cuba from Spain’s colonial grasp, the U.S. Congress had disavowed any intention to exert its own claim of sovereignty over the island, but this did not mean that the United States meant to allow the Cubans unmediated self-rule. Exclusion of the Cuban military leadership from Santiago foreshadowed the ways the Americans would circumscribe Cuba’s hard-won freedom well into the next century.4
With Spanish surrender of all of Cuba seemingly imminent, the commanding general of the army, Nelson A. Miles, who had arrived in Cuba only the week before, was personally leading the hurried assault on Puerto Rico. “It was important to seize Puerto Rico and make secure some of the substantial fruits of victory, before the enemy, seeing the hopelessness of the struggle, sued for peace,” explained Captain Henry H. Whitney.5 Disguised as a British sailor, Whitney had traveled to Puerto Rico two months earlier under the direction of the Military Intelligence Division. He had spent ten days reconnoitering in the southern part of the island, gathering information on Spanish troop strength and likely landing places. With information gleaned from Whitney’s mission, Miles opted to land his forces at Guánica, which was the deepest harbor on the south coast for which the United States possessed a chart.6
For the fifty-nine-year-old Miles, the naval assault on Puerto Rico presented a very different prospect from the kind of campaigning that had propelled his rise to the top rank of the Army. Like the rest of the frontier army following the Civil War, Nelson Miles had spent most of his career pursuing Indians who defied the government’s policy of confining them to reservations. In the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn, Miles was one of the officers who had carried out General Philip Sheridan’s call for total war against the Plains Indians most implacably. During the fierce Montana winter of 1876–77, Miles determined he would follow “the Indians … where they think we can not go,” as he wrote to his wife. “It is only in that way that we can convince them of our power to subjugate them finally.”7 Miles outfitted his troops in special winter gear: buffalo robe coats, leggings, mittens, and face masks cut from woolen blankets as well as pants, overcoats, and caps fashioned from robes by Cheyenne women they had captured. Thus fortified against the subzero cold and blizzard conditions, Miles’s men had relentlessly pursued the Cheyenne and Lakota (Sioux) hunting bands who searched for game and camped with their families along the river bottoms of the remote Yellowstone country. The Lakota named him Bear Coat for the long overcoat trimmed in bear fur he wore under his military cape when he met the Indians in council to demand that they disarm and give up their ponies.8
Map 1. Greater Antilles: Cuba and Puerto Rico during the War of 1898.
The following year, Miles had intercepted Chief Joseph and about four hundred Nez Percé in their epic 1,700-mile flight from Eastern Oregon to seek refuge in Canada, compelling their surrender just forty miles south of the border. Nine years after that, he commanded the forces that brought in Geronimo on the Mexican border and sent the Chiricahua Apache into exile in the East. Miles had also marshaled the massive force that converged on the South Dakota Badlands, leading to the massacre on Wounded Knee Creek in 1890.
Now Bear Coat Miles stood poised to lead an invasion of Puerto Rico. Even transported to the Caribbean in summer, Miles’s perceptions reflected the indelible frontier imagery inscribed by his years spent in Indian Country. Describing the ships’ stealthy approach along Puerto Rico’s south coast he wrote: “One familiar with the western plains of a quarter of a century ago might well have been reminded of a pack of large gray wolves cautiously and noiselessly moving in the shades of night, or the dim light that ushers in the dawn, upon their prey.”9
Indian Country—doctrinal and discursive—has been at the center of American imperial expansion and nation building for two and a half centuries. In this book, I examine how the historical experience of domestic Indian Country shaped efforts to bring new areas where sovereignty was contested under American control following the war with Spain. The book traces the trajectory and dynamics of U.S. expansion by following and contextualizing the colonial careers of a cohort of army officers from the frontier to overseas posts. More broadly, it examines how the army’s conquests in the North American West generated a repertoire of actions and understandings that structured encounters with the racial others of America’s overseas empire during and after the Spanish-American War. In the vanguard of that movement overseas, soldiers served as diplomats and colonial administrators with a range of portfolios, from economic development to education. They also performed the role of interpreters of primitive culture and arbiters of the capacity for self-government of the alien peoples who were incorporated into the expanded empire. The men profiled in this book also mirrored the ideas of the nation that sent them to implement its policies—and reflect its prejudices—overseas.
The book focuses on the role of the military in an ongoing colonial project, closely analyzing the actions and attitudes of a handful of officers in particular, while situating them in the larger frameworks that structured the practice of empire. In tracing the colonial careers of the men on whom my analysis centers, I have therefore paid close attention not only to the influence of their careers in the army but also to how class, regional, and family backgrounds contributed to the actions they took in their roles as colonial administrators. Most important for my analysis is an examination of how the army’s patterns of interaction with Indians at home played directly into the actions and habits of mind its officers directed toward the resistant subjects of the new overseas empire.
The American state project of consolidating territorial control over the continent entailed more than purely military conquest. And the same is true of the next phase of its expansion overseas at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus it was that General Miles, once established on Puerto Rican soil, addressed the island’s residents in a register familiar to him from his days of conciliating and coercing Indians in the West. Following an uneventful landing at Guánica, Miles’s forces moved on to take control of Ponce, the principal town on Puerto Rico’s south coast.10 On the morning of July 28, General Miles raised the American flag over his headquarters in the customs house and issued a proclamation “to the inhabitants of Puerto Rico” in Spanish and English,
In the prosecution of the war against the kingdom of Spain by the people of the United States, in the cause of liberty, justice, and humanity, its military forces have come to occupy the island of Puerto Rico…. We have not come to make war upon the people of a country that for centuries has been oppressed, but, on the contrary, to bring you protection, not only to yourselves, but to your property; to promote your prosperity, and bestow upon you the immunities