Frontier Regulars
Page 13
If this record exhibits a less than appealing life style, it is notable that almost all veterans of the frontier army—ladies and officers, that is, not enlisted men—looked back on it with not only a vast relief that it lay in the past but also with strong feelings of nostalgia. It was a nostalgia evoked by images of the harsh beauty and sweeping vistas of desert and plains, of dazzling sunsets, of pine-clad high country and snowy peaks, of the ever-changing moods of a land repulsive yet also strangely inviting. It was a nostalgia, too, born of hardships endured, of obstacles overcome, and of human bonds forged by shared privation, danger, and tragedy. All who served on the frontier could appreciate the sentiments of Maj. Anson Mills and his associates as the steamer bearing them to a new station cast off from Fort Yuma: “We took off our shoes and beat the dust of Arizona over the rail, at the same time cursing the land.”43 But they could also unite with Martha Summerhayes in a softer judgment: “With the strange contradictoriness of the human mind, I felt sorry that the old days had come to an end. For, somehow, the hardships and deprivations we have endured, lose their bitterness when they have become a memory.”44
NOTES
1. Lansing B. Bloom, “Bourke on the Southwest,” New Mexico Historical Review, 9 (1934)) 52.
2. Reeve, “Frederick E. Phelps: A Soldier’s Memoirs,” pp. 50–51.
3. House Reports, 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 384, p. 3.
4. A War Department order of 1868 specified that no permanent buildings could be erected except on authority of the Secretary of War. Temporary buildings were permitted, but no contracts could be concluded or materials purchased except on War Department authority. The 1872 appropriations act carried a rider that no permanent post costing more than $20,000 could be built without congressional authorization. SW, Annual Report (1869), p. 231; (1872), p. 36.
5. Ibid. (1884), p. 89.
6. Sheridan’s Troopers on the Borders: A Winter Campaign on the Plains (Philadelphia, 1891), p. 59.
7. Rickey, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, chap. 6, describes the daily routines in detail.
8. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, p. 7.
9. Senate Reports, 45th Cong., 3d sess., No. 555, pp. 487–88. See also Army and Navy Journal, 5 (March 14, 1868), 474.
10. SW, Annual Report (1877), p. 67.
11. Ibid. (1870), p. 5; (1879), pp. 67, 84; (1881), pp. 76–77. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56., pp. 36, 87–88.
12. Ellen McG. Biddle, Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife (Philadelphia, 1907), pp. 28–29.
13. Discipline and military justice are well treated in Rickey, chaps. 8 and 9; and Foner, The United States Soldier between Two Wars, pp. 8–10, and chaps. 2, 4, 5.
14. Such a drumming-out, at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, in 1868, is described in Baldwin, Memoirs of the Late Frank D. Baldwin, pp. 154–55.
15. Calling for reform, President Grover Cleveland in 1885 counted 2,328 general and 11,851 regimental and garrison court cases. More than half the army had thus been tried in one year, and all too often, he noted, for frivolous offenses. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 8, 348.
16. “Every worthless man in the Army,” declared the writer of a letter to the editor, “appears to have his political protector standing by him with shield broad enough to ward off the just sentence of the most solemnly constituted tribunal.” Army and Navy Journal, 15 (Jan. 12, 1878), 362.
17. Foner, passim, traces the reform movement in detail. See also SW, Annual Report (1867), p. 416; (1868), p. 24; (1886), p. 317; (1890), pp. 4–5; and House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 22.
18. Rickey, pp. 116–20. Foner, pp. 21–22.
19. Senate Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 47.
20. SW, Annual Report (1876), p. 75; (1878), p. 418; (1887), pp. 82–83. Army and Navy Journal, 12 (Feb. 20, 1875), 443.
21. Charles Braden, “The Yellowstone Expedition of 1873,” Journal of the U.S. Cavalry Association, 16 (1905), 240–41. See also SW, Annual Report (1868), p. 23.
22. An excellent view of sanitary conditions at a typical post is David A. Clary, “The Role of the Army Surgeon in the West: Daniel Weisel at Fort Davis, 1868–1872,” Western Historical Quarterly, 3 (1972), 53–66.
23. Based on analysis of statistics presented in the annual reports of the Surgeon General in annual reports of the Secretary of War.
24. SW, Annual Report (1889), pp. 621–870, contains an unusually detailed analysis of the health of the army. See also Rickey, pp. 130–34.
25. SW, Annual Report (1867), p. 12.
26. Carr, “The Days of the Empire,” pp. 13–14.
27. Merrill J. Mattes, Indians, Infants and Infantry: Andrew and Elizabeth Burt on the Frontier (Denver, Colo., 1960), p. 148.
28. The Army’s medical history in this period is treated in P. M. Ashburn, A History of the Medical Department of the United States Army (Boston, 1929). See also the published annual reports of the Surgeon General. For the organization of the Medical Department after each pertinent army act, see Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, 2, 602–15. Surgeons ranked as major, assistant surgeons as first lieutenant for three years and captain thereafter.
29. Foner, pp. 28–30, 70–80. Rickey, pp. 200–4. Forsyth, The Story of the Soldier, pp. 140–41. Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie, p. 420. SW, Annual Report (1870), p. 35; (1881), pp. 45, 79; (1884), p. 83. Bigelow, William Conant Church and the Army and Navy Journal, p. 193. For Hayes’ executive order, see Richardson, 7, 640.
30. SW, Annual Report (1875), pp. 4–5. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 272.
31. Rickey, pp. 198–99. Roe, Army Letters from an Officer’s Wife, pp. 142–45, 185–90. Elizabeth B. Custer, Boots and Saddles, or Life in Dakota with General Custer, ed. Jane R. Stewart (Norman, Okla., 1961), pp. 83–84. Mrs. M. A. Cochran, Posey; or From Reveille to Retreat, An Army Story (Cincinnati, 1896), pp. 160–62. Army and Navy Journal, 8 (Jan. 7, 1871), 330.
32. Rickey, pp. 197–98. Army and Navy Journal, 8 (March 8, 1871), 490; (Jan. 14, 1871), 347; 20 (June 2, 1883), 992.
33. Parker, The Old Army Memories, p. 26. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Aug. 19, 1876), 22; (May 19, 1877), 652. Duane N. Greene, Ladies and Officers of the United States Army; or, American Aristocracy, A Sketch of the Social Life and Character of the Army (Chicago, 1880), p. 183.
34. Post libraries were usually paid for from the post fund, which came mostly from money saved on the soldier’s bread ration. Secretary of War McCrary believed that Congress should authorize subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. General Pope waged an unsuccessful campaign for years to get part of the fines levied on soldiers as punishments diverted from the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C., to the enrichment of post libraries. SW, Annual Report (1872), p. 49; (1876), pp. 453–54; (1877), pp. vii-viii, 64–66.
35. Rickey, pp. 161–63. Foner, pp. 29, 79–80. Army and Navy Journal, 8 (March 18, 1871), 491; 21 (Nov. 17, 1883), 309. The army contained thirty post chaplains and a regimental chaplain for each of the four black regiments. They attracted much criticism as a “useless and worthless set of drones and idlers,” as Col. Innis Palmer phrased it. House Reports, 44th Cong., 1st sess., No. 354, p. 52. General Sherman thought so too. House Reports, 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 384, p. 283.
36. Roe, p. 216.
37. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, p. 505.
38. Whitman, The Troopers, chap. 10, is an excellent statement of the role of women. For laundresses, see SW, Annual Report (1874), p. 96; (1875), pp. 5, 175; (1879), p. 33; House Reports, 44th Cong., 1st sess., No. 354, pp. 198, 204; Senate Reports, 45th Cong., 3d sess., No. 555, Pt. 2, pp. 450–51; 20 Stat. 150 (June 18, 1878); Army and Navy Journal, 12 (Feb. 27. 1875). P. 459.
39. Forsyth, pp. 133–34.
40. Army and Navy Journal, 15 (June 15, 1878), 721.
41. Greene, p. 31.
42. Notably: Elizabeth B. Custer, Boots and Saddles; Following the Guidon (New York, 1890)
; and Tenting on the Plains, or Gen’l Custer in Kansas and Texas (New York, 1893). Biddle, Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife. Summerhayes, Vanished Arizona. Mrs. Orsemus B. Boyd, Cavalry Life in Tent and Field (New York, 1894). Lydia Spencer Lane, 1 Married a Soldier (Philadelphia, 1893).
43. Mills, My Story, p. 152.
44. Vanished Arizona, p. 206.
Fort Phil Kearny, 1866
GENERAL SHERMAN’S summer tour of the Plains in 1866 gave him direct knowledge of his new command. It extended from Canada to Texas and from the Mississippi to the summits of the Rocky Mountains. The largest portion was the Great Plains—a vast expanse of rolling, treeless grasslands, drained by the great river systems of the Missouri and Arkansas, seared by summer heat and swept by awesome winter storms, home of powerful horse-mounted tribes that hunted the buffalo from the Canadian prairies to the West Texas deserts.
With the wartime Volunteers dissipating before the Regular Army could be recruited and posted, Sherman needed a year or two of peace on the Great Plains. His strategy for 1866 was therefore frankly defensive, aimed only at holding the lines of communication, shepherding the season’s emigration safely to the mountains, and averting incidents likely to trigger into open hostility the “universal feeling of mistrust on both sides” so evident during his western tour. “All I ask is comparative quiet this year,” he wrote Grant’s chief of staff, “for by next year we can have the new cavalry enlisted, equipped, and mounted, ready to go and visit these Indians where they live.”1
Time favored Sherman in another way, perceived by none more clearly than he. Every mile the railroads penetrated the Plains simplified the military problem. Troops could be moved more rapidly. Forts could be provisioned more efficiently and cheaply. Supplies adequate to support large-scale offensive operations could be stockpiled at advanced bases in a fraction of the time consumed by slow-moving wagon trains. “I hope the President and Secretary of War will continue, as hitherto, to befriend these roads as far as the law allows,” he wrote to Grant in the spring of 1866.2 For his own part: “It is our duty, and it shall be my study, to make the progress of construction of the great Pacific railways … as safe as possible.”3
Meanwhile, there were emigrant and freight trains and stagecoaches to protect as well as railroad builders. Sherman applied himself during 1866 to this task and to recruiting and distributing the Regular Army units assigned to the Division of the Missouri. Detailed instructions were published regulating the season’s travel. Trains were to assemble at designated rendezvous points, and military commanders along the roads were to insure compliance with stipulated requirements of strength, organization, and armament.4 Regulars marched forth to replace Volunteers as guardians of the Plains travel routes.
In the Department of the Missouri (commanded by General Pope until General Hancock took over in August) lay the Smoky Hill Trail and the older Arkansas River route, formerly known as the Santa Fe Trail. Denver-bound travelers used both routes. Branches of the latter led to Santa Fe and other destinations in the Southwest. A string of forts guarded both roads. Tracing the Smoky Hill Trail were Forts Riley, Harker, Hays, and Wallace. Forts Zarah, Larned, Dodge, and Lyon watched over the Arkansas Road as far as eastern Colorado. In New Mexico Fort Union drew together the Mountain and Cimarron branches of the road to Santa Fe.5
The other major routes lay in General Terry’s Department of Dakota and General Cooke’s Department of the Platte. From his headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, Terry concerned himself chiefly with the Missouri River pathway to the Montana mines. This was both a land and a water route. Steamboats carried travelers from St. Louis, Leavenworth, Omaha, and Sioux City as far as the old trading station of Fort Benton, the head of navigation. Overland emigrants made their way from Minnesota along the upper reaches of the Missouri to the mountains. To guard the river and watch the Sioux, Terry had garrisons at Forts Randall, Sully, Rice, Berthold, and Union in Dakota and at Camp Cooke in Montana.
General Cooke, headquartered at Omaha, was responsible for the most heavily used of the Plains thoroughfares—the Platte Road (the old Oregon-California Trail). Guarding its main stem, now teeming with Union Pacific work crews, were Forts Kearny, McPherson, and Sedgwick. At Fort Sedgwick the road forked, one branch running up the South Platte by Fort Morgan to Denver, the other up the North Platte by Fort Mitchell to Fort Laramie, thence by Forts Casper and Bridger to Utah, Oregon, and California.
Also falling within Cooke’s department was a new road connecting the Platte route with Montana. The Bozeman Trail, angling northwest from Fort Laramie along the eastern base of the Bighorn Mountains to Bozeman and Virginia City, offered travelers the shortest route to the Montana gold fields. At the forks of the Powder River stood Fort Reno, a reminder of the army’s failure to crush Sioux opposition to the road and a platform for future attempts to extend military protection to it.
Only a handful of the outposts on the Plains highways dated from before the Civil War. The rest had been called into being by the bloody Indian war of 1864–65, the legacy of which still hung forebodingly over both the northern and southern Plains. A series of treaties with all the warring tribes in the autumn of 1865 had restored peace. In the south, Kiowas, Comanches, Kiowa-Apaches, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes had agreed to withdraw to the territory south of Kansas and east of New Mexico. In the north, all seven tribes of Teton Sioux—Oglala, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Brulé, Two Kettle, Blackfeet, and Sans Arc—together with the Upper and Lower Yanktonai Sioux tribes, had agreed to leave the warpath and “withdraw from the routes overland already established, or hereafter to be established through their country.”6
Officials of the Indian Bureau were sure that this comprehensive set of treaties would bring lasting peace to the Great Plains. But the chiefs who signed treaties did not always fully represent all bands of the tribes thus bound. Nor did the chiefs always understand everything they agreed to. Nor, in the highly democratic and individualistic tribal society, were they always able to make their people comply with the engagements they did understand, especially when the customs of generations were surrendered. Nor did they always see good reason for keeping promises while the other party to the agreement so often broke promises. No less than earlier treaties did those of 1865 paper over such obstacles to genuine agreement.
On the southern Plains, although signed by an impressive array of chiefs, the Little Arkansas treaties seemed to military observers unlikely to keep the Indians in their newly designated homeland. Kiowas and Comanches had raided the Texas frontier—Spanish, Mexican, then Anglo-American—for more than a century. Cheyennes and Arapahoes had hunted for generations in the buffalo ranges now bisected by the Smoky Hill Trail in western Kansas and eastern Colorado. From the first years of the Santa Fe Trail, nearly half a century earlier, all the tribes had been irresistibly drawn to the white man’s roads. And the bitterness engendered by the recent hostilities still burned deeply—Sand Creek in particular. Even though the treaty with the Cheyennes expressly repudiated Sand Creek and provided indemnification, Cheyennes would never forget or forgive the wanton butchery of Black Kettle’s band by Col. John M. Chivington’s Colorado Volunteers on November 29, 1864. Even so, the summer of 1866 passed with only minor incidents, attributed chiefly to the warlike Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.
On the northern Plains, the chiefs who signed could claim to represent no more than a few friendly bands along the Missouri River, a fact the peace commissioners concealed, if indeed they even knew. Farther west, in the Powder River country, the warriors who had confounded Gen. Patrick E. Connor’s heavy columns the previous summer subscribed to no such sweeping concession as withdrawal from any road “hereafter to be established”; they had just fought a war to prevent the opening of the Bozeman Trail. Moreover, like their friends in the south, the Southern Oglalas and Southern Brulés were accustomed to hunt on the south side of the great Platte Road. Finally, again like their southern friends, many Indians in the northern tribes had succumbed to the lure of the treasure
to be obtained through barter or theft along the white man’s roads. Tacitly acknowledging the softness of their 1865 treaties, the peace commissioners went back up the Missouri in 1866 to find some more chiefs to sign. Other commissioners journeyed to Fort Laramie on the same mission.
A veteran of many years’ frontier duty and also an outspoken critic of the treaty system, General Pope had no illusions about lasting peace. “I do not consider the treaties lately made with the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Comanches worth the paper they are written on,” he informed Sherman on August 11, 1866. “I have myself no doubt that hostilities will again break out on the Platte, the Smoky Hill, and the Arkansas rivers before the beginning of winter.”7 At this very time, as Sherman was traveling up the Platte, hostilities had already broken out with the Sioux north of the Platte. Even at Fort Laramie, however, the edge of the zone of hostilities, the full magnitude of the war did not register with Sherman. In truth, the Teton Sioux not only had no intention of withdrawing from the Bozeman Trail to Montana, they had no intention of allowing the whites to use it at all.
Among the travelers on the Platte Road in 1866 were two battalions of the Eighteenth Infantry. One of the three-battalion regiments, soon to be broken into three regiments by the army act of July 28 (see Chapter Two), the Eighteenth had fought well under Sherman in Georgia. Attrition had wasted it, but an infusion of recruits in April 1866 filled the Second and Third Battalions to authorized strength. They marched from Fort Kearny on May 13, the Third Battalion to garrison posts along the Platte Road to Utah, the Second to protect the Bozeman Trail. Seven hundred strong, the Second Battalion included a contingent of 200 men mounted on the horses of discharged Volunteers and the superb regimental band armed both with musical instruments and seven-shot Spencer repeating carbines. Standard armament for the rest of the battalion, however, was the now-obsolete Springfield muzzle-loading rifle-musket.