Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  NOTES

  1. From Fort McPherson, Nebraska Territory, Aug. 21, 1866, House Ex. Docs., 39th Cong., 2d sess., No. 23, p. 6.

  2. From Omaha, May 14, 1866, ibid., p. 2.

  3. Annual report, Nov. 5, 1866, in SW, Annual Report (1866), pp. 21–22.

  4. The regulations, which provoked considerable protest from travelers delayed or inconvenienced, were drawn up and issued by General Pope on February 28, 1866, while he still commanded a Department of the Missouri that embraced most of the Great Plains. Sherman confirmed the orders on March 26. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 2.

  5. The best reference work on military installations, used throughout this volume, is Francis Paul Prucha, Guide to the Military Posts of the United States (Madison, Wis., 1964). Also useful to supplement Prucha is Robert W. Frazer, Forts of the West (Norman, Okla., 1965).

  6. I have dealt with these wars and treaties in Frontiersmen in Blue, chaps. 14 and 15. The treaties are printed in Charles J. Kappler, comp., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1904), 2, 883–908.

  7. From Fort Union, N.M., Aug. 11, 1866, in SW, Annual Report (1866), p. 30.

  8. Margaret I. Carrington, Absaraka, Home of the Crows, ed. Milo M. Quaife (Chicago, 1950), pp. xli-xlix, 39–40. Frances C. Carrington, Army Life on the Plains (Philadelphia, Pa., 1910), p. 61. In 1866 Margaret was Carrington’s wife. She took Sherman’s advice, and her book is the result. First published by Lippincott in 1868, it went through at least eight editions. I have used the Lakeside Classics edition. After Margaret’s death in 1870, Carrington married Frances Grummond, widow of a lieutenant killed in the Fetterman disaster. With help from her husband, she wrote the second book cited.

  9. Senate Ex. Docs., 50th Cong., 1st sess., No. 33, p. 6. This is Carrington’s official history of his Bozeman Trail operations and includes most of his official communications. Although submitted to a special commission investigating the Fetterman debacle in 1867, it went unpublished until 1887, when Carrington, fighting for vindication, got the Senate to call for its publication. (Hereafter cited as “Carrington History.”)

  10. This is my own assessment, adduced from study of the voluminous documentation of Carrington’s Bozeman Trail record, but cf. Robert A. Murray, “Commentaries on the Col. Henry B. Carrington Image,” Denver Westerners Roundup, 24 (March 1968), 3–12, and Michael Straight, “Carrington: The Valor of Defeat,” Corral Dust (Potomac Westerners, Washington, D.C.), 4 (December 1959), 25–27, Straight’s Carrington (New York, 1960) is an excellent novel that gives further characterization of Carrington. My account is based on the following sources: the “Carrington History” cited in n. 9 above; official records of the War and Interior departments, including the report of the Sanborn investigation, published in Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13; and Carrington’s report of the Fetterman disaster in Senate Ex. Docs., 49th Cong., 2d sess., No. 97. The books by Margaret and Frances Carrington cited in n. 8 above are also important. Excellent secondary accounts are Dee Brown, Fort Phil Kearny, An American Saga (New York, 1962); J. W. Vaughn, Indian Fights: New Facts on Seven Encounters (Norman, Okla., 1966), chap. 2; and Roy E. Appleman, “The Fetterman Fight,” in Potomac Westerners, Great Western Indian Fights (New York, 1960), chap. 10. Rich in detail and careful analysis is Robert A. Murray, Military Posts in the Powder River Country of Wyoming, 1865–1894 (Lincoln, Neb., 1968), Part I. For the Indian side, see James C. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem (Lincoln, Neb., 1965), chaps. 3 and 4; George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians (Norman, Okla., 1937); and George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes (2d ed., Norman, Okla., 1956). Badly outdated but still helpful if used with caution is Grace R. Hebard and E. A. Brininstool, The Bozeman Trail (2 vols., Cleveland, Ohio, 1922).

  11. Sources for the council and its background are Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13; CIA Annual Report (1866), pp. 204–13. Olson, chap. 3, has an excellent analysis of this and other, unpublished, evidence.

  12. “Carrington History,” p. 5.

  13. Frances Carrington, pp. 46–47.

  14. George E. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux (Norman, Okla., 1961), pp. 115–17.

  15. Olson, p. 38. In November 1866 Secretary of the Interior Orville H. Browning removed Taylor. “Some of the rogues in partnership with Taylor in robbing the Indians had made the President believe that Taylor was his friend and ought not to be removed,” Browning wrote in his dairy. “I undeceived him—satisfied him that Taylor was a political hypocrite and a faithless officer, …” James G. Randall, ed., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning (2 vols., Springfield, Ill., 1933), 2, 107.

  16. See Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue, pp. 325–30. General Connor established the post in August 1865 as Fort Connor, but its name was changed in November to Fort Reno. Two companies of the Fifth U.S. Volunteers—“Galvanized Yankees”—held it during the winter. Verging on mutiny over their delayed discharge, they were relieved by Carrington and sent east to be mustered out.

  17. According to the Sanborn investigation, between July 26 and December 21 the Sioux on the Bozeman Trail and in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny killed 5 officers and 91 enlisted men, killed 58 civilians and wounded 20, and stole 306 oxen and cows, 304 mules, and 161 horses. They made 51 separate hostile demonstrations against Fort Phil Kearny. These figures include losses in the battles of December 6 and 21. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1 st sess., No. 13, p. 62.

  18. The unpublished testimony taken by the Sanborn investigation and the army court of inquiry portrays these conditions clearly. See Murray, “Commentaries on the Col. Henry B. Carrington Image”; and Vaughn, pp. 24–28.

  19. Testified Adjutant Bisbee: “Troops were in the habit of dashing helter-skelter over the stockade whenever an Indian appeared, without regard to orders, and generally before the Commanding Officer knew there were Indians about.” Vaughn, p. 28.

  20. Murray, p. 9. Vaughn, p. 25.

  21. Correspondence between Carrington and Cooke is in the “Carrington History.”

  22. Ibid., pp. 31, 37.

  23. Murray, pp. 165–66. The infantry were in Companies A, C, E, and H of the Eighteenth and Company K of the new Twenty-seventh, the last being the forty-five recruits. The cavalry were in Troop C of the Second. In reckoning the strength of Fort Phil Kearny, the civilian quartermaster and contractor employees should not be overlooked; there were more than 150, many better armed than the soldiers. Murray, pp. 83–84.

  24. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, p. 66.

  25. The other officers, besides Carrington, were Lts. Wilbur F. Arnold (adjutant), Winfield S. Matson (quartermaster), Alexander H. Wands, and Horatio S. Bingham (cavalry commander). Surgeon Samuel M. Morton was assisted by two civilian contract surgeons, C. M. Hinds and a Dr. Ould.

  26. “Carrington History,” pp. 34–36.

  27. This action is carefully reconstructed in Vaughn, pp. 32–43. Carrington’s official report is in the “Carrington History,” pp. 36–38; Fetterman’s in Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, pp. 37–38.

  28. “Carrington History,” pp. 20–21, 29–30. This word reached Carrington from some friendly Cheyennes and also by way of the Crow Indians near Fort C. F. Smith. See also the report of N. B. Buford, member of the investigating commission, of an interview with some Indian participants in Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, p. 59.

  29. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk, pp. 146–49.

  30. In his official report Carrington chronicled the mutilation in candid detail: “Eyes torn out and laid on the rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers; brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out from sockets; private parts severed and indecently placed on the persons; eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spearheads, sticks, and arrows; ribs slashed to separation with kni
ves; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms, and cheek taken out.” “Carrington History,” p. 41.

  31. All the sources cited in n. 3, contain important material bearing on the Fetterman disaster. The most authoritative reconstructions of the action and the main reliance for my account are those of Vaughn and Appleman, who have carefully studied the evidence on the battlefield itself.

  It has been customary to place sole blame on Fetterman for flagrantly disobeying orders and leading his men into an ambush. The weight of the evidence still supports that conclusion. As Vaughn has pointed out, however, by the time Fetterman was observed ascending Lodge Trail Ridge the attack on the wood train had been broken off and Carrington had ample time to recall him if he regarded the movement as improper. Also, Fetterman may have intended to go no farther than the Lodge Trail crest, but found himself drawn beyond it when the cavalry made an unauthorized charge.

  32. Dec. 27, 1866, Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, p. 29. Also, Cooke’s endorsement on Carrington’s official report pictured the troops rushing “helter-skelter” in pursuit of the Indians and even “leaping over the stockade” in their eagerness to join battle. This was published with Carrington’s report in 1887, Senate Ex. Docs., 49th Cong., ad sess., No. 97. Years later, Cooke apologized to Carrington for this hasty and ill-considered language with the explanation that it had been framed by a staff officer—almost certainly Captain Bisbee, who had just joined Cooke’s staff. Hebard and Brininstool, 1, 340. Straight.

  33. Dec. 26, 1866, Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, p. 28. That the orders were more than routine is indicated by Cooke’s telegram of the same date to Grant’s chief of staff requesting that if this transfer were disapproved Wessels be kept at Fort Reno and assigned to command the district in his brevet grade of brigadier general, which would have placed Carrington under an officer his junior in lineal rank. Ibid., p. 27.

  34. To Gen. C. C. Augur, Feb. 28, 1867, quoted in Athearn, p. 99.

  35. Athearn, p. 100. Olson, p. 53, n. 56. Augur, colonel of the Twelfth Infantry, was assigned in his brevet grade.

  36. Murray, “Commentaries on the Col. Henry B. Carrington Image,” p. 11.

  37. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, p. 66.

  38. For evidence of this attitude see particularly General Augur’s views in Olson, p. 55, n. 67; and the account of Maj. Alfred E. Bates in T. F. Rodenbough, From Everglade to Cañon with the Second Dragoons (New York, 1875), pp. 376–77.

  39. For recent scholarship based on the unpublished testimony before the two investigating bodies, see Murray, Vaughn, and Straight.

  Hancock’s War, 1867

  THE FETTERMAN DISASTER shocked and outraged the army. “We must act with vindicative earnestness against the Sioux,” Sherman telegraphed Grant, “even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”1 At the frontier posts attitudes hardened into undiscriminating hostility toward all Indians.2 Westerners shared the army’s militancy and went still further in demanding retaliation. Their newspapers called for extermination of the Indians; some even scored the army for timidity. Railroad and stagecoach interests reinforced Sherman’s aggressive designs.3 Military contractors and freighters joined in the clamor, although army officers recognized their motives as hardly disinterested.4

  Such sentiments sprang from the same climate of opinion that had made possible the Sand Creek butchery in 1864, and Sherman’s utterances made him appear no more inclined than the discredited Colonel Chivington to distinguish between hostile and peaceful or combatant and noncombatant. The Regular Army had taken great pains to dissociate itself from the excesses of the Colorado militia. Now the army itself helped blur the distinction.

  Sand Creek had dramatized the Indian problem to the nation’s humanitarian community, mobilizing religious and reform groups and stirring Abolitionists in search of a new cause. Sand Creek and the expensive war it ignited on the Plains gave rise to a peace policy that flowered in the profusion of treaties concluded in the autumn of 1865. Even after the Fetterman disaster, the spirit of conciliation glowed warmly in Washington offices and eastern parlors. An influential body of opinion held that negotiations in good faith offered a surer means than naked force of bringing peace to the West. Both Secretary of the Interior Orville H. Browning and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Lewis V. Bogy favored sending out peace emissaries to restore harmonious relations and gather data to support a comprehensive program for assembling all western tribes on reservations.5

  On this and other issues the army and the Indian Bureau feuded openly during the winter of 1866–67. Much of the contention centered on whether licensed traders should be allowed to sell arms and ammunition to peaceful Indians. Secretary Browning and Commissioner Bogy contended that they were necessary for hunting purposes. The army, aware that the Indians had got along fairly well with bows and arrows for generations, vigorously condemned such sales. General Cooke had banned arms sales in the Department of the Platte in July 1866. General Hancock, sustained by Sherman and Grant, followed in January 1867.6

  Both Browning and Bogy regarded this prohibition as the chief cause of Indian hostility and the army’s intervention not only uncalled for but unlawful. Bogy complained that his greatest burden was “the constant interference on the part of the military with all Indian affairs.” It was “unwarranted” and “imperious,” and unless checked it would lead to “nothing less than the destruction of our entire western settlements, and the entire column of western emigration.” Bogy went so far as to attribute the Fetterman disaster to the army’s inhuman denial to Red Cloud’s people of the arms necessary for laying in their winter’s meat. “Almost in a state of starving,” he explained, “having made repeated attempts at a conference [with Carrington], that they might make peace and obtain supplies for their families, and the rescinding of the order prohibiting them from obtaining arms and ammunition, [the Sioux] were rendered desperate, and restored to the stratagem which proved too successful.”7

  Such fantasy lent color to charges of army officers and westerners that the peace proponents were impractical visionaries. Far better to return responsibility for Indian management to the War Department and do away with the ambiguous and demoralizing division of authority between civil agents and army officers. General Pope, the army’s wordy, self-appointed expert on Indian policy, had publicly championed this move for three years. Both Sherman and Grant officially recommended it in their annual reports in November 1866. In the wake of Fetterman’s annihilation the time seemed propitious for bringing about such a change. Pope wrote an elaborate justification. So did Col. Ely S. Parker, Grant’s Seneca Indian aide, who also drafted a bill that was introduced in the Senate on February 9, 1867.8

  But the peace proponents commanded considerable political strength, and they ticked off an impressive list of Indian outbreaks they credited to army blunders. Powerful support of their position came on January 25, 1867, with publication of the report of a special joint committee of Congress chaired by Sen. James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin. The committee had been formed almost two years earlier as a result of the furore over Sand Creek and had conducted an exhaustive investigation into “the condition of the Indian tribes and their treatment by the civil and military authorities of the United States.” The Doolittle Report piled up a mountain of authoritative testimony showing the fate overtaking the Indian at the hands of the white man, tracing most Indian wars to white aggressions, and favoring policies of moderation and conciliation.9

  Although the transfer measure carried in the House of Representatives, buttressed by the Doolittle Report, the peace elements blocked it in the Senate, where Sherman’s words about crushing the Sioux with vindictive earnestness were quoted to show that the army, in its present frame of mind, could not be trusted with Indian management.10 At the same time, Secretary Browning persuaded President Johnson and most of the Cabinet to approve a conciliatory approach to the hostiles
rather than the “crude” policies urged by Stanton and Grant. The result was another peace commission, appointed by the President and reporting to Browning. The commissioners were not only to look into the causes of the Fetterman affair but also to hold friendly talks with the Plains tribes, test their temper and disposition to settle on a reservation, and find out whether they really had to have arms and ammunition to hold off starvation.11 Angry and discouraged over the turn of events, Sherman drew small comfort from the fact that four of the six commissioners, including chairman Alfred Sully, were military men; their character as peace emissaries could not help but seriously complicate his plans.12

  By March 1867 these plans had been developed. In the Department of the Platte General Augur was to organize a striking force of 2,000 cavalry and infantry under Col. John Gibbon to punish the Sioux and Cheyennes in the Powder River country. “No mercy should be shown these Indians,” Sherman declared, “for they grant no quarter nor ask for it.” In the Department of the Missouri General Hancock was also to form an expedition to show the flag to the Cheyennes and Kiowas south of the Arkansas River. Reports reaching Hancock suggested that these tribes planned to take the warpath in the spring, and his assignment was “to confer with them to ascertain if they want to fight, in which case he will indulge them.”13

  Even as he reported his plans, Sherman conceded that Colonel Gibbon’s expedition would have to be postponed. General Sully and his fellow commissioners were already in Omaha on their way to talk with the Sioux. Sherman could hardly avoid instructing Augur not to launch Gibbon until the commission had demonstrated its inability to negotiate the Sioux into submission. No such obstacle blocked Hancock. He set forth to bully the southern Plains tribes. Instead he touched off a bloody and perhaps needless war, portrayed the army to the public even more sharply in the image of Colonel Chivington, and insured that the legacy of Sand Creek rather than of the Fetterman disaster would shape Indian policy in 1867.