Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  “Some of what are called military posts,” declared General Sherman in 1874, “are mere collections of huts made of logs, adobes, or mere holes in the ground, and are about as much forts as prairie dog villages might be called forts.3 This condition resulted from laws and regulations decreeing that virtually all frontier posts be erected by the troops themselves from whatever materials could be obtained in the vicinity.4 Since the Indian frontier shifted so frequently and was expected to disappear so soon, ran the argument, the expense of more substantial installations could not be justified. As it turned out, the Indians held out longer than expected, and the “temporary” posts continued to be used year after year, even after strategically obsolete, simply because there was nowhere else to shelter the troops. Sherman constantly lamented the abominable habitations in which his men had to live, but not until the 1880s, as the concentration program gathered momentum (see p. 47), did conditions begin to improve. As late as 1884, soldiers quipped that if they wanted to be well cared for, they must become inmates of either the military prison or a national cemetery.5

  To the perceptive journalist DeB. Randolph Keim, the frontier fort suggested “the peculiar inspiration of a ship at sea; isolation within and desolation without.”

  The same rigid enforcement of discipline unremittingly exacted, as if in the face of the enemy. The commandant, a sort of supreme authority, executive, legislative, and judicial. All the forms of military etiquette observed. The flag hoisted every morning at sunrise and dropped at sunset, attended by the same roll of the drum, and the same reverberations of the evening gun. A furlough of brief “leave” was one of those pleasures in anticipation, which seemed to compensate for the lack of other mental relief. If there be any who deserve the sympathies of those who enjoy comfortable and secure homes in the settlements, they are the officers and soldiers condemned to the isolation of duty on the plains.6

  Rigid stratification, both official and social, and precise definition of roles characterized the military community. Rank ordered privilege, authority, and social standing. Under the post commander, each officer and enlisted man had his part to play. The post adjutant and sergeant major were the administrative voices of the commanding officer, with whom they shared offices at post headquarters. Most of the commander’s orders were transmitted through these men. The post quartermaster officer and sergeant were responsible for clothing, housing, and supplying the garrison, the post commissary officer and sergeant for feeding it. They occupied offices in the quartermaster and commissary warehouses. The post surgeon, aided by a noncommissioned hospital steward, presided over the hospital and looked after the sanitary conditions of the fort. Company officers could be found supervising their units in the field or occupied with paper work in the company orderly room in the barracks. Sergeants and corporals of the line usually stayed with the troops. Numerous enlisted specialists—blacksmith, farrier, saddler, wagoner, wheelwright—worked in shops that formed part of the quartermaster and cavalry corrals. An infantry bugler or cavalry trumpeter regulated the daily routine of the military community.7

  The principal pastime was “fatigue,” a military euphemism for manual labor. “This ‘labor of the troops’ was a great thing,” observed Capt. John G. Bourke. “It made the poor wretch who enlisted under the vague notion that his admiring country needed his services to quell hostile Indians, suddenly find himself a brevet architect, carrying a hod and doing odd jobs of plastering and kalsomining.”8 A petition to Congress drawn up by a group of disenchanted soldiers in 1878 set forth the complaint in detail:

  We first enlisted with the usual ideas of the life of a soldier; … but we find in service that we are obliged to perform all kinds of labor, such as all the operations of building quarters, stables, storehouses, bridges, roads, and telegraph lines; involving logging, lumbering, quarrying, adobe and brick making, lime-burning, mason-work, plastering, carpentering, painting, &c. We are also put at teaming, repairing wagons, harness, &c., blacksmithing, and sometimes wood-chopping and hay-making. This in addition to guard duty, care of horses, arms, and equipments, cooking, baking, police of quarters and stables, moving stores, &c., as well as drilling, and frequently to the exclusion of the latter.9

  General Pope complained that his posts were “garrisoned by enlisted laborers rather than soldiers.”10 They made poor laborers, and labor prevented them from being made into good soldiers. It also helped sustain the high desertion rate. Most officers saw the answer to the problem in hired civilian labor, but this solution found little favor with War Department and congressional economizers.11 Throughout the frontier period, drudge labor occupied most of the time and energy of the troops.

  Discipline varied from regiment to regiment and post to post, but rarely could be called lax. As suggested by Captain Russell’s welcoming speech at Fort Selden, the slightest infractions might bring swift and harsh retribution. “Drastic measures had to be used in those days,” recalled an officer’s wife. “The men, both foreign and domestic, were a hard set.” Her husband brought two bullies to heel by physically throwing them out of a squadroom in which they had provoked a riot, then marching them about the post in a barrel with the top and bottom knocked out and a heavy log on their shoulders.12 Among punishments prohibited by regulation but commonly meted out by officers and NCOs were bucking and gagging, spread-eagling, confinement in a sweatbox, repeated dunking in a stream, marching to exhaustion carrying a log or a knapsack full of bricks, and suspension by thumbs, wrists, or arms. More acceptable penalties were extra duty, restriction of liberty or privilege, and for NCOs reduction in rank.13

  Courts-martial fortified the disciplinary practices of officers and NCOs. General courts-martial, convened by department commanders, tried enlisted men accused of serious crime and officers charged with any offense. Regimental and garrison courts dealt with minor transgressions. The most common offenses, defined in the Articles of War, were desertion, drunkenness, insubordination, disobedience, malingering, neglect of duty, and the “Devil’s Article”—“disorders and neglects … to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” Typical sentences awarded officers were suspension from rank and pay for a specified period or dismissal from the service. Before the U.S. miiitary prison opened at Fort Leavenworth in 1874, soldiers convicted for major crimes were confined in state or territorial penitentiaries. For minor offenses, hard labor and forfeiture of pay were the only punishments authorized. Although branding and tattooing had been proscribed along with flogging, desertion still might earn the traditional drumming-out ceremony to the strains of the “Roecue’s March”:

  Poor old soldiers! Poor old soldiers!

  Tarred and feathered and sent to hell,

  because they wouldn’t soldier well.14

  Critics both in and out of the army pointed to serious flaws in the system of military justice. The Articles of War, dating from 1806, were ambiguous, vague, and badly outdated. They left most punishments to the discretion of the courts, which resulted in widely varying sentences for the same offense. Also, they required the confinement of the accused until a verdict had been reached and approved by the reviewing authority, which often kept innocent men in the guardhouse and at hard labor for months even after they had been found innocent. Aggravating the inherent defects were faults of administration—unconscionable delays in bringing an accused to trial, excessive use of courts-martial as an instrument of discipline and misuse as a means of pursuing personal controversies,15 political interference with judicial findings,16 promiscuous mixing in confinement of first offenders with hardened criminals, and frequently uninformed, arbitrary, and capricious conduct of court members. Truly did many a soldier look on the machinery of military justice as a dispenser merely of punishment rather than of justice. Not until the late 1880s, however, did a reform movement get underway.17

  The soldier’s ration left much to be desired. Mainstays were range beef of dubious quality served sliced and in hash and stew, salt pork, beans, rice, bread or hardtack, an
d coffee. Dried vegetables and fruit occasionally appeared on the mess tables but were not well received.18 These rations, drab enough to begin with, invariably suffered in preparation. Each company handled its own mess. Under army regulations, company commanders detailed men for ten-day tours as cooks and bakers, with the result, declared an investigating board in 1878, that “the food is, as a general rule, miserably cooked, while the man is in the kitchen long enough to ruin his clothing, without extra pay to replace it.”19 This board produced a cooking manual and endorsed a movement, already underway, to have cooks and bakers specially enlisted and trained. Although repeatedly urged by leading officers, this sensible reform did not win approval until after the frontier period.20

  Both officers and enlisted men constantly sought ways to add variety to the diet. The post trader sold tinned delicacies and, at times, fresh foods at prices that customers eagerly paid, even though exorbitant. In some localities hunting and fishing provided keen sport as well as opportunities for enriching the menu; buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope, grouse, pheasant, and wild turkey, trout and bass could go far toward easing the perennial discontent over rations. Officers’ families frequently kept chickens, pigs, or even a cow, usually to the irritation of neighbors and the indignation of the post surgeon, who was charged with maintaining standards of sanitation. Finally, most garrisons attempted to cultivate vegetable gardens, but more often than not drouth, hail, frost, or locusts wrought disaster. An inventive old officer explained what happened to his garden at Fort Rice, Dakota, in the summer of 1873: “The damn hoppers came along, by God, and ate my garden, by God, then the birds ate the hoppers, by God, and we killed and ate the birds, by God, so that we were even in the long run, by God.”21

  Sanitary conditions at the typical frontier post rarely fostered good health. Water, frequently of doubtful purity, came from the nearest spring or stream or was caught and stored in cisterns. Pit toilets and “honey wagons” received human waste, often in disconcerting proximity to the water supply. Improper storage and preparation of food invited disorders of stomach and bowels. Notions of personal hygiene were primitive and facilities for satisfying them equally so. Some post surgeons struggled manfully to improve conditions and enforce standards, but without notable effect until the late 1880s, when the larger posts began to receive water and sewage systems, modern kitchens, and other amenities of civilization.22

  Not surprisingly, disease produced many more casualties than Indian arrows and bullets. Medical records disclose that each year, for every 1,000 men, surgeons treated about 1,800 cases, of which about 1,550 were for disease and 250 for wounds, accidents, and injuries. About 13 of each 1,000 died, 8 from disease and 5 from wounds, accidents, or injuries. And approximately 30 of each 1,000 received disability discharges.23 Venereal diseases led all others in incidence, with malarial, respiratory, and digestive following closely.24 Cholera swept the West in 1867.25 Isolated garrisons suffered severe consequences from improper diet. At Fort McDowell in 1866 dysentery sent fifteen men to their graves wrapped in blankets or nailed in improvised coffins bearing such inscriptions as “40 Pairs Cavalry Trousers.”26 At Fort Phil Kearny a soldier recorded: “The Spring of 1867 was the time the effects of the spoiled flour and bacon showed up. All of the men that were at the fort at the time it was established got the scurvy. Some lost their teeth and some the use of their legs. In the spring when the grass was up there were lots of wild onions and the scurvy gang was ordered out to eat them.”27

  The Medical Department never attained a strength or competence commensurate with the need. Every post and fixed detachment rated a surgeon or assistant surgeon. The army acts of 1866 and 1869 provided for 222 medical officers, a figure roughly comparable to the need. But the section of the latter act stopping staff appointments and promotions, combined with the perennial difficulty of attracting qualified doctors, drove vacancies to a high of 64 in 1873. In 1874 Congress removed the ban on staff appointments and promotions, but in 1876 cut the medical staff to 192. To close the gap between the need and the supply, the Surgeon General contracted with as many as 175 civilian doctors. Unless seeking a regular commission, however, contract surgeons were not very reliable, and to make matters worse, in 1874 Congress limited their number to 75. Whether regular or contract, moreover, most army surgeons lacked the competence of their brethren in civil life. Low pay and frontier discomforts discouraged able doctors from seeking a military career.28

  For diversion, officers and enlisted men alike turned heavily to drinking and gambling. Both pastimes were constant scourges for which the army never found a remedy. Until 1881 the post trader dealt in spirits, but on February 2 of that year President Hayes, an ardent temperance advocate, banned such sales on military reservations. “Hog ranches,” offering whiskey of scandalous content, card tables, and often feminine pleasures, had always spotted the fringes of every reservation. Throughout the 1880s, thanks to Hayes’ prohibition, they flourished as never before. The rise of the post canteen, a recreation center offering beer and light wines as well as wholesome amusements, gradually put the hog ranches out of business in the early 1890s.29

  Ingenuity and labor, of course, produced other diversions. Although the army act of 1869 abolished regimental bands, almost every regiment maintained one, consisting of detailed men and paid for from the regimental fund or by subscription.30 At posts with a regimental headquarters, the band presented concerts, lent distinction to dress parades, and inspired frequent balls and hops. At posts not so favored, ensembles were improvised, and dances occurred with scarcely less regularity.31 Minstrels, charades, and theatricals were carefully planned and rehearsed and proudly presented, sometimes to the citizens of nearby communities.32 Horse-and foot-racing, baseball, and other athletic competitions were frequent.33 Hunting and fishing found enthusiasts. Newspapers and magazines, rare and always out of date, traveled through the garrison until read to shreds. Post libraries of varying quality offered other fare.34 Temperance societies and church groups occupied some men.35 Along officers’ row, formal dinners, with fine silver, china, and linen assembled from several households, and with champagne and tinned delicacies purchased from the post trader, were common occurrences.36

  Special occasions such as weddings, holidays, courts-martial, and visits of generals prompted detailed planning, lavish decoration, and elaborate ceremony. Christmas dinner was a splendid feast, the culmination of months of preparation. Independence Day featured strenuous celebration, exemplified in the journal entry for July 4, 1882, of an officer at Fort Stockton, Texas:

  I got up a big affair today. Invited ranchmen and cowboys to take an active part in the performances. My company put up a greased pole, and we had a pig shaved and greased. Got up a wheelbarrow race and sack race, Major McClellan excusing his whole command in order that they might enjoy the fun. Had several splendid horseraces. … I treated the cowboys to plenty of beer, made a short speech and invited them to vote for Hon. John Hancock as the best man they could send to Congress. He was duly elected.37

  A garrison’s ladies played a special role in the life of the military community. Regulations made no provision for officers’ wives, but almost every post contained at least a few, and the larger and more accessible often boasted a full complement. Also, each company rated four laundresses who received rations and compensation. In 1875 there were 1,316, mostly the wives of enlisted men. In 1878 Congress, reflecting a growing but not unchallenged opinion in the army that laundresses caused more bother than justified, struck them from the rolls.38

  Of the laundresses, one distinguished veteran recalled, with perhaps a touch more sentiment than warranted, “They were good, honest, industrious wives, usually well on in years, minutely familiar with their rights, … which they dared to maintain with acrimonious volubility, … and they were ever ready for a fight, yet they were kind at heart if rough in manners, always ready to assist in times of distress.”39 Another observer, scanning officers’ row, identified these types: the “female C.O.,�
�� who “organized her staff, openly criticized the position of officers at dress parade, received reports and marvelled at the magnanimity that allowed a soldier ‘seven nights in bed’ the “picturesque little lady” with “plenty to wear but nothing to do”; the “late sergeant’s wife,” her husband now an officer thanks to the war, “who displayed a better development of muscle than brain”; the “beauty in laces and jewels”; the “aristocratic dame”; and of course “the charming conversationalist and delightful hostess and ‘good Army woman.’”40

  Greatly outnumbered by the men, revered, protected, and exalted as mandated by Victorian mores, army women enjoyed a prominence in the frontier milieu unintended by the authors of army law and regulation. Women introduced an element of grace, refinement, and comfort to garrison life conspicuously lacking at the few especially primitive posts to which none would go. They took the lead in planning, promoting, and staging entertainments. They brought to them the indispensable element of feminine participation. They formed an extremely close-knit society cemented by common hardship, sacrifice, and adventure. At the same time, all too many of them indulged in petty gossip, contention, and jealousy, whose harmful effects were magnified by their isolation from outside relationships. “The most discordant garrisons are those comprising the greatest number of ladies,” remarked a disgruntled officer, who entitled the first chapter of his book “Ladies in the United States Army to the Prejudice of Good Order and Discipline.”41 Finally, to a handful of the ladies posterity is indebted for its record of life at the frontier army post.42