Broad Perception
How State newspapers reflect National and Regional Perception
The previous sections that examined the newspapers of various regions of the United States provided examinations of how the Cavalry, Indians, and Sheridan were displayed in the news. In the American West newspaper publication emphasized the confrontations between the Native Americans and the Army as the Indians because these conflicts were nearby and threatened the safety of the people. The Indians were displayed negatively as the violent and hostile group on the tribes which attacked them. In the Midwest the conversation of the cavalry continued to present them as the front line of defense against the Natives and began to include more tales of the officers involved in these units. The Indians were also villainized by these papers. In the South reconstruction kept newspapers focused on the south and displayed their different cultural views towards the land they were from and their concerns for it. These works as well praised the cavalry while showing some new takes on the negative perception of the Indians. While they continuously are displayed in a negative way, the vocabulary used changes over time. Lastly in the North it can be seen how the cavalry and their officers were given more detail in their publication. The Native Americans were discussed in more terms in the North than in other regions showing how the conversation diversifies over time.
If any of the Voyant Tools below do not load, please click on the tool title to see an image file of the results, or go to the Sources page where all the visuals for this project are listed on the left hand side of your screen.
The TermsBerry in Figure 46 above is an excellent visual tool for this selection of data because it show how frequently these terms were used but also in which buttons. The terms Indians, Indian, and Cavalry appear the most and are in almost every document. It is also interesting that he various officers ranks like lieutenant, Captain, and Bvt appear often overall but not in every document. This illustrates a trend first shown in the Illinois papers as they began to give more attention and credit to lower ranking officers instead of a focus on high ranking officers like history often portrays. It is also interesting that term killed appears as often as it does in these documents, appearing over 100 times in 34 of the 45 articles. The papers were showing the loss of life in the West to the public and newspaper consumer which also would include lists of those lost in campaigns. There is also an emphasis on the Sioux in these articles which is reflective of the Great Sioux War that took place in 1876-1877. The Great Sioux War was a climax of problems taking place between the US and Sioux people throughout the 1870s. Ultimately these sources bundled together yields similar results to the previous examination, but the papers in the North and Mid-West had slight differences in vocabulary used.
Figure 47 shows the BubbleLine and how often the terms "Sheridan", "Indian", and "Cavalry" appear in these documents. The BubbleLine not only quantifies how many times these terms appear, like the TermsBerry, but also shows where these words appear in the span of each article. This tool breaks down where these words appear in each of the documents and at the end of it there is a list how many of them were used in total. As the BubbleLine shows, most of the newspaper articles tend to mention these three terms all together between twenty and thirty times but there are some outlies in this. One example is the Chicago Tribune article from October that mentions the Indians fifty times. By looking at these and other terms on the BubbleLine it is possible to visualize where these important words are being used in these articles and how various terms correspond to each other in the text. The Indian and Cavalry often overlap with each other in these documents showing the ties between these two forces portrayed by the papers. Sheridan often appears with the Cavalry but not always, this shows how he is still in ways attached to the cavalry from his leadership of them in the Civil War but that is going away by this point. There was a firm connection established in these papers between the Cavalry and the Indians in the West and as coverage of the Indians continued so too did the cavalry's association with not only them but the West as well.
National Perception, Newspapers controlling not only the Indian narrative but the Cavalry as well
Other historians have already proven the impact that newspapers have on shaping national and local opinions. Coward's work shows the extensive role nineteenth-century American newspapers had in creating lasting images of Native Americans. Coward argues that, "Ultimately the cultural gap between white American and Native American was so fundamental and so wide that it could not be closed by nineteenth-century journalism" (Coward, 233). Coward makes a valid argument that journalism helped widen the gap between the whites and the Native Americans and this is proven correct in the newspapers analyzed throughout this section. This analysis does not only corroborate the arguments of Coward and the works of other historians, but it builds upon them by examining how the cavalry and Indians were both depicted across the nation in print media. The newspapers show how the conversation on these topics remained relatively stagnant with regard to the Native Americans and the cavalry. The basic conclusions drawn from all the news articles examined in this section show that the cavalry were established as an important part of the defense of the plains. The Cavalry was constantly reported on as being out there in the West fighting the Native Americans and dying in pursuit of them. These efforts by the cavalry to obtain success are reflective of the military strategy in the West and how it relied on the cavalry to combat the Native Americans. The newspapers from across the nation at this time had a relatively unifying view of the Native Americans as: hostile, wild, murderers on the plains that need to be removed. While the conversation around these Native Americans changed over time in the officer corps, the public opinion remained the same since the articles reported the same tropes. Ultimately it turned out that Sheridan is relatively non-existent in these works. This is arguably because officers in the field began to recieve more attention when they led Army forces in engagements with the Native Americans. Comparatively during this period the opinions of the people did not correspond to the opinions of the officers. The officers were shaped by their interactions with the Native Americans on the plains and sought ways to end the conflicts while the common person was mostly influenced by newspaper editors trying to sell papers.