Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Sheridan regarded the Battle of the Washita only as the opening gun. He intended to march to the Washita, pick up the Indian trail, and try for another fight. He lost a few days refitting the Kansas troops, who had finally been found struggling blindly in the snow-choked gorges of the Cimarron. The ordeal had ruined their horses and converted them for the most part into infantry. On December 7, fifteen hundred strong, the column took up the march in subzero temperatures, followed two days later by another blizzard sweeping down from the north. On the Washita a detachment examined Custer’s battleground and found and buried the butchered corpses of Major Elliott and his party. On the twelfth the command resumed the march, following an Indian trail that led down the Washita toward Fort Cobb.30

  Five days and seventy-six miles later the pursuit reached its objective. But here the Sherman-Sheridan strategy of sword and olive branch, so appealingly simple and sensible in prospect, fouled on the old dilemma of how to distinguish a friendly Indian from a hostile. The Indians were Kiowas led by Lone Wolf and Satanta, and they presented Sheridan with a document signed by General Hazen attesting to their peaceful character. Sheridan thought this “a pretty good joke.” He had just followed their trail from the Washita battlefield and was certain that, after the battle of November 27, they had rushed into Fort Cobb and duped Hazen into certifying their good conduct.

  Actually, Hazen was substantially right. Since his arrival at Fort Cobb on November 8, some 6,000 Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa-Apaches had assembled in the Washita and Canadian Valleys within 20 to 100 miles of the fort and had begun to draw rations. That the blandishments of the Cheyennes failed to induce them to join in the war is amply revealed by evidence gathered by Hazen’s efficient intelligence network. After the Washita fight, in which some of them unquestionably had participated, the Comanches and about half the Kiowas fled with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes southward to the North Fork of Red River, just west of the Wichita Mountains. Here, in a grand council early in December, the Cheyenne persuasions were rejected in favor of rations at Fort Cobb. By December 10 the runaway Kiowa and Comanche bands had begun to return hesitantly to the Washita Valley. Hazen gave them his protection.31

  Sheridan’s appearance on December 17 badly frightened the Kiowas, and they prepared for instant flight should the soldier chief disregard Hazen’s testament to their character. Although convinced that the Kiowas richly deserved punishment, Sheridan had to be content with ordering Lone Wolf and Satanta to move their village at once to Fort Cobb. When they gave evidence of duplicity in responding to the order, Sheridan had them seized as hostages. Still, even after the column reached Cobb the next day, the village failed to appear. He then “put on the screws.” The chiefs would be hanged if the village had not surrendered within forty-eight hours. The threat produced enough of a compliance to allow Sheridan to lift the ultimatum, although by no means all the Kiowas came in.32

  Nor did all the Kiowas and Comanches who had been on the Washita at the time of the Custer battle return after the Red River convocation. Horse Back’s Nakoni Comanches and Woman’s Heart’s Kiowas stayed on the North Fork of Red River, the Comanche village of sixty lodges at Soldier Spring and the Kiowa village a short distance downstream. Carr and Evans had been wandering around the wintry plains to the north and west for several weeks performing their assigned mission as “beaters in” for Custer. On Christmas Day Evans discovered the Comanches, cleared out their village with howitzer fire, and quickly seized it. He had about 300 Third Cavalrymen; the rest guarded the supply train and the base camp he had planted back on the Canadian. The Comanches, reinforced by the Kiowas, brought some 200 warriors to the counterattack. All day the two sides skirmished while the troops burned the village and its stores, including several tons of dried buffalo meat. Finally the Indians drew off, and Evans, hampered by broken-down horses, declined to pursue. He had but one casualty and estimated that the enemy had lost twenty-five to thirty. Like the Washita battle, however, the chief significance of the Battle of Soldier Spring lay in the destruction of the camp and the further notice to the Indians that winter no longer was a time of security. Part of these bands went to Fort Cobb. The rest sought succor with the Kwahadi Comanches on the Staked Plains and almost at once surrendered at Fort Bascom.33

  Except for the perennially isolationist Kwahadis, most of the Kiowas and Comanches had come in by the end of December. With thousands of Indians and soldiers camped around Fort Cobb, the sparse winter grass all but vanished. Rain fell constantly and turned the ground to deep mud. Early in January Sheridan moved troops, Indians, and agency thirty miles to the south and established them on a pleasant grassy site at the eastern base of the Wichita Mountains, selected earlier by Bvt. Maj. Gen. Benjamin H. Grierson, colonel of the Tenth Cavalry and commander of the district. Grierson’s black troopers began erecting substantial stone buildings for a post that Sheridan soon named Fort Sill, in honor of a West Point classmate slain in the Civil War.34

  The Cheyennes and Arapahoes remained west of the Wichita Mountains. Using Black Kettle’s captive sister as an emissary, Custer coaxed some of the chiefs in for a parley and learned that the fugitives were hungry, destitute, and in large part favorable to surrendering. Late in January Custer and fifty-seven cavalrymen circled the Wichita Mountains and started Little Raven’s Arapahoes, sixty-five lodges, toward Fort Sill. The Cheyennes, however, had withdrawn farther west, toward the Staked Plains. Sheridan determined to temporize with them no longer but to run them down and compel them either to surrender or to fight.35

  On March 2 Custer led the Seventh Cavalry and the Nineteenth Kansas west from Fort Sill. Sheridan had gone to Camp Supply to arrange for the logistical support of the expedition from there instead of Fort Sill. He intended to meet Custer on the North Fork of Red River. But on the very day that Custer left Fort Sill Sheridan received orders at Camp Supply to hasten to Washington. On March 6, as he neared Fort Hays, a courier handed him another dispatch. Two days earlier, Ulysses S. Grant had been inaugurated President of the United States. He had promptly appointed Sherman General of the Army and Sheridan Lieutenant General. It fell to Custer, therefore, to wrap up the winter campaign.36

  The Cheyennes had scattered over the rolling plains at the eastern edge of the Staked Plains escarpment, leaving Custer almost no promising trails to follow. Sending part of the command to rest on the Washita, he took 800 men and the strongest horses and got on the trail of a single lodge. On March 15 he found a large Cheyenne village under Little Robe and Medicine Arrow strung along Sweetwater Creek just west of the present Texas-Oklahoma boundary. With two white women held captive in the camp, Custer forebore to attack but in a parley seized three chiefs as hostages. After three days of tense negotiation, the Cheyennes gave in, surrendered the prisoners, and promised to follow him to Camp Supply as soon as their ponies grew stronger.

  Custer could not wait to escort the Cheyennes because his horses were dying from want of forage and his men were beginning to subsist on mule meat. As an encouragement to the Indians to keep their word, however, he retained the three hostages and promised to release them and the prisoners taken at the Battle of the Washita, now held at Fort Hays, when the Cheyennes surrendered at Camp Supply. Ragged and exhausted, his troopers reached Camp Supply on March 28.37

  The other columns had long since returned to their stations. After the fight at Soldier Spring on December 25, Evans had marched almost to Fort Cobb, reprovisioned, and returned to his supply base on the Canadian. This he abandoned on January 26 and was back at Fort Bascom by February 7.38 Carr and Penrose had passed December and January scouting the two branches of the Canadian and their tributaries. They found no Indians and dissipated all their energies in an unequal contest with winter storms and uncertain supply lines before returning, badly used up, to Fort Lyon on February 19.39 With the arrival of Custer’s column at Fort Hays on April 6, Sheridan’s winter campaign officially closed, and the Nineteenth Kansas was disbanded.

  Although the winter campaign ha
d ended, it had yet to produce clear results. The Kiowas and Comanches had been consolidated at Fort Sill and the Arapahoes cowed. The Cheyennes procrastinated. Most of them declared for peace, but they could not bring themselves to report at Camp Supply, even after the Fort Hays prisoners were liberated in June. And the Dog Soldiers, refusing to accept the peace decision, headed north to join the Sioux. By early May they were once more in their old haunts on the upper Republican. The summer offered every prospect of duplicating the previous two summers.40

  From Omaha General Augur appealed for more cavalry to help meet the threat. Orders went out for Major Carr and the Fifth Cavalry, recuperating at Fort Lyon from their winter’s ordeal, to march to Fort McPherson, on the Platte. To the full-bearded cavalryman, it was a welcome summons. Although rare command qualities studded his career with combat achievements, a generously proportioned and highly sensitive ego also made it a tedious chronicle of invidious comparison and petty contention. At the moment, the honors heaped on Custer and the Seventh Cavalry for the Washita rankled, the more so because his own winter campaign, so full of hardship and bereft of spectacle, had gone largely unnoticed. Tall Bull offered an opportunity to even the score with the Seventh.41

  The “Republican River Expedition” marched out of Fort McPherson on June 9. It consisted of eight troops of the Fifth Cavairy and a three-company battalion of Pawnee Indian scouts, nearly 500 men in all. Frank North commanded the Pawnees, and Bill Cody, by now a fixture with the regiment, went along as chief scout and guide. Early in July, far up on the Arikara Fork, near Forsyth’s battlefield, Carr found a large, warm trail. It had been made by Tall Bull’s main camp, augmented by some Sioux and Arapahoes, eighty-four lodges altogether. The Indians had decided to abandon their traditional range and join the Sioux north of the Platte. They had halted at Summit Springs, in a narrow valley bordered by sand hills, some sixty miles up the south Platte from Fort Sedgwick. They were waiting for high water to subside before crossing when Carr spotted them on July 11.

  With some 250 troopers and 50 Pawnees, Carr swept through the tepees. Not until the command was within fifty yards did the victims discover its approach. Indians poured from the village. Most fled, but some took cover in ravines and depressions and held out to the last. The Pawnees fought with memorable ferocity. Tall Bull was cut down—by Bill Cody, some say, by Frank North, according to others. Carr, who had but one soldier wounded, reported fifty-two Indians killed, sex unspecified, and prisoners totaling seventeen women and children. In the village when the cavalry attacked were Mrs. Susanna Alderdice and Mrs. Maria Weichell, captured on the Saline on May 30. Mrs. Alderdice had been slain at the opening shot, but Mrs. Weichell, though badly wounded, survived. Carr destroyed the camp and its contents and with a pony and mule herd of more than 400 head marched to Fort Sedgwick.

  Although destined not to command the public interest of the Washita, Summit Springs proved of more lasting consequence. Together with some further pressure from the Fifth Cavalry, it broke the grip of the Dog Soldiers on the upper Republican and Smoky Hill for all time. It also shattered the cohesiveness of the Dog Soldiers, ending their days of effective resistance as a group. Some of them, under White Horse, went north to join the Northern Cheyennes. Most, under Bull Bear, drifted south during the fall months and, with their less belligerent brethren, surrendered piecemeal at Camp Supply.

  The operations of 1868—69 went far toward attaining Sherman’s goal of clearing the belt of territory between the Arkansas and the Platte of Indians. The southern Plains tribes had been permanently shifted southward, concentrated in Indian Territory, and locked to the institutions of control and acculturation envisioned by the peace commission of 1867. They had not acquiesced in these institutions or lost their spirit of independence, but a large step had been taken toward their ultimate conquest.

  How much of this result may be ascribed to Sheridan’s winter campaign is difficult to say, since not until after Carr’s summer victory did it become clearly apparent. One may fairly conclude, however, that the winter campaign deserves the larger credit. The damage it wrought was less material than psychological. On the Washita and Sweetwater and at Soldier Spring, the army demonstrated that it could seek out the Indians during their most vulnerable season. The constant fear of waking one morning to the blare of bugles and crash of carbines came to seem even more intolerable than accommodating to the government’s demands. Yet for the Cheyennes, even after this admission, fear of treachery and reluctance to give up their freedom caused delay. Thus, it remained for Summit Springs to bring the Dog Soldiers belatedly to this conclusion and to catalyze the rest of the Cheyennes into acting on it.

  The army had learned some lessons from the experience, too. It had learned that winter operations could be hazardous and costly. Snow, mud, and cold inhibited movement and caused suffering and exhaustion to man and beast. The logistical implications were also serious. Sheridan’s large force camped at the site of Fort Sill depended on a 200-mile supply line back to Fort Gibson by way of Fort Arbuckle, and muddy roads kept his command constantly at the brink of a supply crisis. The diminishing flow of supplies from Fort Bascom to the Canadian River depot contributed to Major Evans’ decision to close out his campaign, and the impossibility of keeping Carr supplied from Fort Lyon was the crucial factor in his premature withdrawal from the field.42

  More consequential, however, was the effect on the stock, both cavalry horses and draft mules. None of the columns could stockpile sufficient forage to sustain the animals, and winter grass and cottonwood boughs provided an expedient that made up almost none of the deficiency. Forced to unusual exertions by snowy or muddy footing and unsheltered from the elements, they succumbed by the hundreds to starvation, exhaustion, and exposure.

  The Nineteenth Kansas was all but unhorsed even before reaching Camp Supply to begin the campaign. At Sill Custer endured a month’s delay in launching his final movement against the Cheyennes because his horses had to recuperate at Fort Arbuckle, where Sheridan had bought some cornfields from the Chickasaws and Choctaws.43 In March a New York visitor to Fort Sill noted at Custer’s abandoned camp site that “the dead carcasses of dozens of horses … lay scattered about, tainting the fresh spring air with their disgusting stench.”44 Even after reducing his command to weed out the weak horses, Custer reached the Sweetwater with two-thirds of his remaining 800 men dismounted. During the march from there to Camp Supply his mules perished in such numbers that he had to burn nearly all his wagons. The three-day trek from Supply to Dodge cost the column 276 horses.45 Evans and Carr suffered similar losses—Evans 172 horses and 64 mules in a ten-day march from the Washita back to his depot early in January.46 Time and again worn-out animals forced Custer, Carr, and Evans to modify their plans or forego opportunities.

  Despite the staggering logistical obstacles, the hardships, and the ever-present danger of a norther of such proportions as to bring disaster to an isolated command, the winter campaign of 1868–69 had largely confirmed Sheridan’s assumptions. Sustained, large-scale winter operations were possible, and they offered opportunities for high returns that justified the higher risks. Neither Sheridan nor Sherman would forget this precedent as the army faced future Indian troubles.

  NOTES

  1. Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan (2 vols., New York, 1888), 2, chap. 11.

  2. The Earl of Dunraven, quoted in Marshall Sprague, “The Dude from Limerick,” The American West, 3 (Fall 1966), 54.

  3. Personal Memoirs of Major General D. S. Stanley, U.S.A. (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), p. 23.

  4. Sheridan’s postwar career is dealt with in C. C. Rister, Border Command (Norman, Okla., 1944).

  5. Sheridan, 2, 290–95. Sherman in Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 13, pp. 84–25.

  6. CIA, Annual Report (1868), pp. 2, 257–58. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 13, pp. 11, 16.

  7. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 13, pp. 16–17, 26–27.

  8. CIA, Annual Report (1
869), pp. 82, 58, 391. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 10–12.

  9. Cf. Hyde, Life of George Bent, pp. 286–87.

  10. CIA, Annual Report (1868), pp. 249–54. There were about 350 lodges of Brules, 350 of Oglalas, 150 of Northern Cheyennes, and 150 of Northern Arapahoes. Both Indian and white evidence clearly establishes that a substantial portion of these Indians fought with the Cheyennes against the army columns that campaigned on the Republican in September and October, for which see below (pp. 147–49).

  11. Or at least so charged the army, with compelling logic. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 3–4, 10–12.

  12. Sheridan’s annual report, Oct. 15, 1868, SW, Annual Report (1868), p. 20. For a tabulation of depredations from August 10 to October si, see ibid., pp. 13–16. See also Sheridan, Record of Engagements, p. 8 and passim, in Peters, Indian Battles and Skirmishes.

  13. House Misc. Docs., 41st Cong., 2d sess., No. 139, pp. 5–8. CIA, Annual Report (1868), pp. 287–88. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, pp. 18–21. W. S. Nye, Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill (Norman, Okla, 1937), pp. 46–48. Rupert N. Richardson, The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement (Glendale, Calif., 1933), pp. 312–17. In November General Hazen gave the following estimate of Kiowas and Comanches of whom he had knowledge: Comanches, 5,000 (500 Penatekas, 500 Nakonis, 750 Yamparikas, 600 Kotsotekas, 2,000 Kwahadis, 650 in small scattered bands); Kiowas, 1,500; Kiowa-Apaches, 500. The Kiowas and Yamparikas had come down from the Arkansas, bringing with them the Kiowa-Apaches. The rest had remained in Indian Territory during the summer. Few of the Kwahadis had ever been to an agency. They ranged westward to the Staked Plains of the Texas Panhandle and into eastern New Mexico.

  14. SW, Annual Report (1868), p. 12.