by 1864-1898 Indian War Veterans: Memories of Army Life;Campaigns in the West
Major Forts and Encounter Sites, 1864-1898
Major Forts and Encounter Sites, 1864-1898
Part I
Army Life in the West
Much of the army presence in the West during the post-Civil War period (1865-1898) was occasioned by activities other than campaigning. The troops variously conducted security patrols along established routes of travel; protected settlers and ranchers; aided law enforcement in the pursuit and arrest of criminals; helped out citizens during floods, insect invasions, and drought conditions; labored to improve roads and trails and to renovate, maintain, and rebuild (or build) forts, camps, and cantonments; maintained drill and target-shooting proficiency; encouraged business and economic development (many communities sprang up around army posts); guarded Indian camps and reservations; protected Indian lands against trespassers; oversaw treaty assemblies and civil elections; and otherwise acted as domestic overseers to settlement and progress. The pursuit of Indians occupied a relatively minor amount of the time of the average soldier stationed west of the Mississippi River. Indeed, most enlisted men passed the majority of their time under hard labor conditions and few experienced the rigors of campaign; fewer still took part in skirmishes or battles with Indians during their service.
In the passages that follow, Indian war veterans (the term here includes all of those who served in the West—the broadest possible zone for service to classify for such designation), and in one case a veteran’s dependent, reminisce about their non-combat experiences on the frontier. Several describe the years of their enlistments, discussing the routine aspects of army life at posts spread across the Plains, the Northwest, and the Southwest in statements of duty in post and field that reflect the tedious reality of their service—a veritable kaleidoscope of military existence of the period. Included are incidents at a recruit depot, the army life of Buffalo Soldiers (members of one or another of four segregated black units—the Ninth and Tenth cavalry and Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth infantry regiments), descriptions of the posts at which frontier soldiers served out their careers, and non-battle and campaign activities in which they took part. Among the special remembrances are a social dance at Fort Custer, Montana Territory, in 1885, a remarkable Christmas at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1882, and accounts of the historic trek of the Eighth Cavalry in its transfer from West Texas to Dakota in 1888, an event often likened to a campaign experience in the annals of the regiment.
Barracks squad-room interior at Fort Yellowstone, Wyoming, circa. 1892. Note the iron bunks, footlockers, and heating stoves. An arms rack stands at the end of the room beneath the wall clock. National Archives
A Press Interview with Five Veterans
(From Winners of the West, July, 1940)
Last month Camp 36, [National Indian War Veterans, ] Philadelphia, gained national interest anew. It all came about in this manner: a columnist of the Philadelphia Inquirer voluntarily commented upon the Indian War Veterans’ rally held May 12 [1940] at the home of their State Commander, Ralph Edwards of Malvern, Pennsylvania. The comment, though brief, was followed by a series of interviews which were published in the Evening Bulletin. These interviews included all of the veterans that the Bulletin could reach in and around Philadelphia. These interviews translated the veteran from a shadowy figure into a hero of valiant deeds worthy of attention. Following are some extracts from each of the interviews. Each interview has been cut down considerably as they were quite lengthy and accompanied by several pictures, as published originally in the Evening Bulletin of Philadelphia.
Privates of Company D, Twenty-fifth Infantry, at Fort Custer, Montana Territory. The man at lower right wears Grand Army of the Republic membership badges, besides his membership badge in the Regular Army and Navy Union. The man standing at right likewise wears his RA&NU badge, and also marksman and sharpshooter qualification pins. Courtesy of James B. Dahlquist
Extract of Interview with Comrade Harry Conver [on pursuing Geronimo, 1885]:
I see where they’ve made a movie hero of old Geronimo,” says Harry Conver, retired lieutenant of Philadelphia police. “And I saw a picture the other day of a monument the WPA has erected to his memory at Douglas, Arizona. I’d like to put my idea of a monument to the old buzzard. It would be a crowbar, like the one I saw in New Mexico….” Conver, who lives now at 2048 Boston Ave., traded shots with Geronimo, and thinks he got the worst of the bargain. His left shoulder has a wound that still hurts occasionally, though the bullet has been out for fifty-five years. Conver was a lively youngster with a taste for trouble back in 1883. Grandson of two Pennsylvania preachers, grandnephew of Henry Ward Beecher, he too heard “a call,” but his was the call of the Far West. And that’s how it happened that he was at Fort Clark, Texas, on the Rio Grande, when the border, in 1885, got an electrifying message: “Geronimo has gone out!”
The wiliest, most bloodthirsty chief in American history had broken from the Apache reservation where he had been nursing his wounds for two years. With a band of ninety, he had celebrated his first day of freedom by wiping out an Arizona ranch family. And now he was heading for the border, murdering as he went. “There is no describing the savagery of the man,” says Conver today. “His tribe, the Apaches, were the cruelest and most heartless of all the Indians. And Geronimo was feared and shunned even by his own people. Conver saw a sample of Geronimo’s technique just after his troop reached Fairview, New Mexico, to take up the trail. A group were on scout duty when they heard shots a mile or two away. “We turned and raced to the spot,” he says, “but flames were already destroying the ranch buildings. At the door we found the rancher and his family, horribly mutilated. A half-mile away we found five cowboys. They had been digging holes for a fence and their rifles were stacked against a post. They had been shot from ambush, then hacked to pieces. A little black dog at their feet had been shot more than fifty times. And one of the men, as an artistic touch, had been pinned to the earth with his own crowbar, plunged through his abdomen…. And that was the work of the man they’re building monuments for!”
A bloody game of hide-and-seek followed that horror, as the Apache chieftain and his band dodged the troopers through canyons and desert wilds of Arizona, New Mexico, and Old Mexico. Conver’s troop of the Eighth Cavalry tracked the savages across one 100-mile stretch of alkali desert in southern New Mexico that is still marked on maps as “El Journado del Muerto”—the “Journey of Death.” And they nearly gave that desert new claim to its title when their canteens went dry. But they got through, and not long afterward they had Geronimo trapped—they thought! Scouts found the Apaches in a wild New Mexico canyon, and with utmost caution a circle was thrown around the spot. At a signal the troop closed in. But Geronimo’s uncanny knowledge of the mountains saved him again. The troop, closing in, found that the warriors had escaped through a secret gap in the hills. Left in their camp were only a dozen squaws.
With George Morris [on the Crow Rebellion, 1887]:
Gnawing on a part of the roasted leg of an army mule, a young Englishman who was 5, 000 miles from home sat on the frozen ground of the Big Horn Mountains and cursed his own folly. And today, fifty-three years later, George Morris, ex-burgess of Darby, and for twenty-nine years a fire insurance broker there, still remembers that blizzard. It was Wild West stories in London’s penny-dreadfuls—stories of the Custer Massacre and Rain-in-the-Face—that lured young George Morris out of Victorian England to search for painted redskins. Four months later, Private Morris, Troop I, First U. S. Cavalry, was facing 3, 000 hostiles at the Battle of Crow Agency, Montana, November 5, 1887.
They were the same warriors who had massacred Custer less than a dozen years before [sic—These were Crows, some of whom, in fact, had scouted for the army in 1876.]. On the warpath again, they had murdered the Indian agent and his staff at Crow Agency, burned the agency buildings, and stampeded off the reservation. “We went out from Camp Crook [Fort Custer],” says Morris, “and met them on the same battlefield where they had wiped out Custe
r’s force [sic—The confrontation occurred about one to three miles north of the battlefield.]. Odd, wasn’t it, coming all the way from England to find myself fighting on that very spot? And for a while it looked like fun, too. Three thousand Indians, a few hundred of us. But Brigadier General Thomas H. Ruger handled it like a master. He sent word to the Indians that we would attack at noon. Indians who wanted to be our friends were to move their camp to the neighborhood of a certain tall birch. The rest would be considered hostiles, and destroyed.
It was a tense morning as we watched the slow drift of the Indians toward that birch tree. Those who went there were disarmed, and a guard posted. But at noon there were still some 600 left in the hostile camp. General Ruger gave word for the attack. The cavalry charged, and took a volley from the Indian camp. At 200 yards we leaped from our horses and flattened out behind clumps of sagebrush. We traded shots for a while, until two Hotchkiss field guns on the hill began dumping two-inch shells into the Indian camp. That broke them.”
With Comrade John R. Nixon [on Wounded Knee, 1890]:
He hadn’t got the taste of Schuylkill water out of his mouth before he was up to his ears in painted Indians at Wounded Knee. That was in December, 1890—the month when Ghost Dancing burst into flames on every reservation in the Dakotas. The outbreak brought the Seventh Cavalry—Custer’s old regiment—roaring up from Fort Riley, Kansas, on the double-quick. Private Nixon, of Troop I, was with them.
Our job,” he relates, “was to round up Big Foot and his gang of Oglala [Minneconjou] Sioux. We got word of them on the 28th and ran them down at Wounded Knee Creek, five miles from the Pine Ridge Indian Agency. There was a parley, and Big Foot surrendered—but he had his fingers crossed. They let us herd them into camp as peaceable as you please, but next day, when we started to disarm them, the fun began. With five troops stationed in a circle around the camp, the braves were ordered to pile their weapons in front of their tepees. They were sullen and painted up as if they were looking for trouble. They put down a few rusty guns, and said that was all they had. Then they stood around while the soldiers searched their tepees. From my post in the ring of guards, I watched the medicine man—a sour-puss old duck—standing with folded arms in front of his tepee.
Then I saw him reach down and pick up a handful of dirt. I was trying to figure that out when he threw the dust high in the air. And that was the signal. In a split second all hell broke loose. Every Indian whipped a repeating rifle from beneath his blanket and cut loose. One shot went through my right side, though I hardly felt it at the time—I thought a pin was sticking me. Captain Wallace went down in the first thirty seconds. I turned just in time to see a Paiute bash his brains out with a war club. I let go one shot at the Paiute, and that emptied my carbine. Then I had troubles of my own. A Sioux with a face like a Mummer jumped me. He grabbed my revolver with his left hand. His right had a knife that looked two feet long, and he struck for my jugular. He missed, and I grabbed for his wrist. All I got was the blade of his knife—but right then I wasn’t particular. I held on until I could get my revolver loose. And then—well, he turned into a good Indian mighty quick.”
The battle went on for a half hour, until there was only one wounded Indian sniper left, hiding in a trooper’s tent. He dropped four soldiers. Then came a Hotchkiss shell—and silence. That night the Seventh Cavalry returned to Pine Ridge with the bodies of twenty-four of its men. But behind, in a deep trench, it left the bodies of 128 Sioux. One of them was Big Foot.
With Richard F. Watson [on pursuing the Apache Kid, 1893-95]:
Geronimo wasn’t the last of the Apaches. There was the Apache Kid, too. Richard F. Watson, book and novelty salesman now living in retirement at 1627 Summer Street, traded lead with the Kid for nearly three years back in the ‘90s. “And those who knew the Kid,” he says, “say he could have given Geronimo cards and spades for sheer downright insane cruelty.”
The Apache Kid was a renegade, never a chief, whose career in blood began abruptly at Fort Grant, Arizona, just a few years before Watson, a Camden boy from the White Horse Pike section, reached that post in 1893. The Kid had been a well-liked sergeant of scouts at the post until one day an Indian named Old Rip got to brooding over the fact that the Kid’s uncle had stolen one of Old Rip’s squaws—a little matter of forty years earlier. Old Rip decided on revenge, and killed the Kid’s uncle. The Kid, in turn, brooded Apache-fashion for a month or two, and then killed Old Rip. His career of murder was on. Cavalrymen caught him, with ten followers, and he shot his way free. A few days later he needed a change of horses and wiped out a family of six whites to get them. He had a quaint conceit—when he had ridden a horse to exhaustion he would stab it to death in the left shoulder as a reward for its services. No squaw would stay with him willingly, so he captured new ones frequently, holding them by force and tying them to trees when he went on his raids. He was captured a few months after Watson reached Fort Grant and sentenced to death with five followers. But on the way to Yuma in custody of Sheriff Glenn Reynolds, of Phoenix, he caught the officers off guard.
Handcuffed, the Kid threw his arms over Sheriff Reynolds’s head and pinioned his arms. His companions overpowered Deputy “Hunky-Dory” Holmes. With the officers’ guns, they shot Reynolds, Holmes, and the stagecoach driver, took the handcuff key from Reynolds’s pocket, and fled. So the hunt was on again and for two years Watson and his troop followed a trail that was marked by the blood of ranchers and their families. Twice, Watson caught sight of the Kid and they exchanged shots across deep canyons in the Table and Superstition mountains. Twice, the troopers drove the Kid out of his favorite haunts in the Superstitions [and] far into the wilds of Old Mexico. But each time the Kid returned and announced his arrival with a succession of blood massacres. In the end, it was a miner named Wallapai Clark who ended the career of the only Apache the troopers couldn’t bring in.
With Major Wilkinson [on the killing of Sitting Bull, 1890]:
Nearly fifty years after he had tossed the bullet-riddled body of Sitting Bull into an army dump cart, Major William G. Wilkinson, a soft-spoken ex-army man who now lives in Long Lane Court, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, rode by automobile to Fort Yates, North Dakota. His car whirled past a tiny knoll in a moment, but for that moment Major Wilkinson’s mind’s eye saw once more a bright clear morning in September, 1888. Troop G, Eighth U. S. Cavalry, was completing probably the longest continuous march ever made by a body of troops. It had marched 2, 200 miles in fifty-eight days, from Fort Davis on [near] the Rio Grande [sic]. And as the weary troopers swung through the gap in the hills, their destination only a few miles away, they found their road leading through a temporary Indian village where the Sioux had camped while drawing their semi-monthly government rations.
That very summer brought the “Messiah Craze.” To the throb of tom-toms, Sitting Bull was proclaiming a holy war against all whites. He had talked with the Great Spirit. A divine leader was coming, marching at the head of an army of ghosts—the spirits of all the warriors who had died battling the Paleface! And in December, 1890, Sitting Bull was ready for his war of extermination. “From Lieutenant Bull Head, chief of the Indian police,” says Major Wilkinson[, then an enlisted man], “came word that the old medicine man was about to give the signal for a break to the Black Hills. His arrest was ordered—a ticklish job and one that could only be handled, it was felt, by the Indian police. So a plan was worked out. Lieutenant Bull Head and his men moved secretly on Sitting Bull’s village with orders to lie in wait until the ghost dancing stopped for the night. Then, it was thought, they could enter quietly, surprise Sitting Bull, and remove him without arousing the village.
“But when we reached Oak Creek, after a twenty-mile march through a blizzard, there was no sign of the police. We pushed on, and were only two miles from Sitting Bull’s village when we met a courier. His message: ‘All police dead.’ Lieutenant Bull Head was still alive when I found him. He was terribly wounded, obviously dying, but he showed no sign of his
agony, and while a doctor gave him opiates I held his head and he told me what had happened. The police had managed to enter Sitting Bull’s house without disturbing the village and woke the old medicine man to tell him he was wanted. He consented at first to go with them, but he spoke in a loud voice that woke some squaws and Catch-the-Bear. In an instant, Catch-the-Bear was arousing the whole village. A few minutes after giving me this story, Lieutenant Bull Head passed away in my arms. Later, he and the other slain Indian police were buried with full military honors in the Fort Yates Cemetery. But there were no honors for Sitting Bull. His body was put into a dump cart, a hole dug in the ground in the military cemetery, and his body tossed into the hole. The ground was leveled over and no mark whatever was left to show where the body of Sitting Bull, last of the great Indian chiefs, rested.
A Typical Entry in Winners of the West, appearing March 30, 1928
I enlisted at Jefferson Barracks on August 24th, 1876, and was sent from there to Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming. Was there for thirty days and then sent to Camp Robinson, Nebraska, where I was attached to Troop D, Fourth U. S. Cavalry, and fitted out for a winter campaign after the Northern Cheyennes.
Was in the Battle of Powder River in the Little Big Horn Mountains [sic], and from there we came back to Camp Robinson in the spring of 1877. Then ordered to Fort Sill where we stayed until the spring of 1878, then going to Fort Clark, Texas, then to Fort Duncan, and in the fall of 1879 to Fort Garland, Colorado. In the spring went out after the Utes but did not have much luck. Went to Fort Hays, Kansas, and in the spring of 1881 took the field again after the Utes, and this time we captured them. Was discharged as ranking sergeant on August 24, 1881. Am now getting a pension of $30.00 per month.