Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  15. The quotation is from Sherman to Sheridan, Oct. 15, 1868, Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, pp. 3–5. See also Sherman to Schofield, Sept. 17, 1868, in Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 13, pp. 24–25. A relic of the prewar military frontier, Fort Cobb offered no more facilities than a pair of rundown barracks and a warehouse.

  16. Thorndyke, Sherman Letters, p. 322. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, p. 203. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 13, pp. 22–23. SW, Annual Report (1869), p. 44. Sheridan, 2, 297, 307, 310. Sheridan, Record of Engagements, p. 14. For the Navajo campaign, see Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue, pp. 241–45.

  17. Oct. 15, 1868, Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, pp. 3–5.

  18. SW, Annual Report (1868), p. 17. George F. Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry (2d ed., New York, 1959), pp. 128–32. Crawford, Kansas in the Sixties, pp. 317–21. Sheridan, 2, 299.

  19. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 17–18. E. S. Godfrey, “Some Reminiscences, Including an Account of General Sully’s Expedition against the Southern Plains Indians, 1868,” Cavalry Journal, 36 (1927), 417–25. Lonnie J. White, “General Sully’s Expedition to the North Canadian, 1868,” Journal of the West, 11 (1972), 75–98. Berthrong, Southern Cheyennes, pp. 318–20. Nye, Plains Indian Raiders, pp. 123–24. Sheridan, Record of Engagements, pp. 8, 11, in Peters. This source erroneously lists the Sully fights in August.

  20. SW, Annual Report (1869), p. 18. Berthrong, pp. 310–14. George A. Forsyth, “A Frontier Fight,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 91 (1895), 42–62. L. H. Carpenter, “The Story of a Rescue,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 17 (1895), 267–76. Hyde, Life of George Bent, pp. 297–308. Considerable first-hand source material is in Cyrus Townsend Brady, Indian Fights and Fighters (New York, 1912), chaps. 5–7.

  21. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 16–21; (1869), pp. 44–45. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, pp. 2–3. Price, pp. 131–33. Berthrong, pp. 314–17. James T. King, War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), pp. 81–87. Brady, chaps. 8–9. Almost forty years later Generals Carr and Carpenter engaged in a public controversy over who commanded at Beaver Creek and who deserved the credit for the successful defense. See Brady. For Custer’s court-martial, see p. 128, n. 26.

  22. CIA, Anntial Report (1869), p. 388. SW, Annual Report (1868), p. 19. Richardson, pp. 317–18. Hazen had to take a circuitous route via the settlements and did not reach Cobb until November 8. The Kiowas later explained that they had not returned to Larned because they feared treachery and disliked the idea of traveling with soldiers. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, pp. 6–8.

  23. SW, Annual Report (1869), pp. 44–51. Sheridan, 2, 307–12. Sheridan, Record of Engagements, pp. 14–15. Custer, Life on the Plains, pp. 261–80. The characterization of Evans is from John F. Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac (Norman, Okla., 1961), p. 34. Another officer quoted Lt. Col. William B. Royall as characterizing Evans as “the most even-tempered man in the Army … always cross.” William S. Bisbee, Through Four American Wars (Boston, 1931), p. 215.

  24. Sheridan, 2, 311–12. SW, Annual Report (1869), pp. 45–56. E. S. Godfrey, “Some Reminiscences, Including the Washita Battle, November 25, 1868,” Cavalry Journal, 37 (1928), 487, tells of the dispute over rank, which is delicately ignored by Sheridan and Custer in their official reports and personal reminiscences. Sheridan indicates merely that Sully left because the command was moving out of his district.

  25. Principal sources for the Battle of the Washita (including official reports) are: Sheridan, 2, 310–22; Sheridan, Record of Engagements, pp. 15–17; Custer, chap. 10; Melbourne C. Chandler, Of Garryowen in Glory: The History of the 7th U.S. Cavalry (privately published, 1960), pp. 13–25; Keim, Sheridan’s Troopers on the Border, chaps. 17–19; Berthrong, pp. 325–29; Godfrey, “Some Reminiscences, Including the Washita Battle, November 27, 1868,” pp. 481–500; Grinnell, Fighting Cheyennes, chap. 22; Hyde, Life of George Bent, chap. 12; Nye, Carbine and Lance, pp. 60–70; Nye, Plains Indian Raiders, pp. 134–37.

  26. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, pp. 24–25.

  27. The Quaife edition of Custer’s My Life on the Plains, pp. 353–55, contains a good analysis of the evidence of the number of Indians in the villages along the Washita. Quaife concludes that Custer could not have been surrounded by more than 1,500 warriors and probably by less. Moreover, at no time did they press him aggressively.

  28. Cheyenne participants told Vincent Colyer in April 1869 that thirteen men, sixteen women, and nine children had been killed. CIA, Annual Report (1869), p. 83. George Bent, who was not present but had good Cheyenne connections, set the figures at eleven men, twelve women, and six children killed. Hyde, Life of George Bent, p. 322.

  29. House Ex. Docs., 41st Cong., 2d sess., No. 240, pp. 4–5.

  30. For the march to Fort Cobb see Sheridan, 2, chap. 14; Custer, chaps. 13 and 14; Sheridan’s and Custer’s reports in SW, Annual Report (1869), pp. 49–50, and House Ex. Docs., 41st Cong., 2d sess., No. 240, pp. 153–62; Nye, Carbine and Lance, pp. 70–75; Keim, chaps. 20–22; and Sheridan, Record of Engagements, pp. 16–17. The adventures of the Kansas Volunteers in the campaign are detailed in David L. Spotts and E. A. Brininstool, Campaigning with Custer and the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry (Los Angeles, 1928); and Lonnie J. White, “Winter Campaigning with Custer and Sheridan: The Expedition of the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry,” Journal of the West, 6 (1967), 68–98. Custer states that he commanded the expedition and made all the decisions with the approval of Sheridan, who merely accompanied. Sheridan’s accounts portray him as exercising the command rather than Custer.

  31. Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 18, Pt. 1, pp. 6–11, 13–18, 23–25 30–31. 33, 35–38. Ibid., No. 40, pp. 13–15. CIA, Annual Report (1869), PP. 391–92.

  32. In My Life on the Plains, pp. 429–35, Custer charged Hazen with allowing himself to be victimized by the Kiowas and thus preventing their merited chastisment. Hazen, whose career no less than Custer’s was marked by contention, published a rebuttal, Some Corrections to My Life on the Plains (St. Paul, Minn., 1875), reprinted in Chronicles of Oklahoma, 3 (1925), 295–318.

  33. This engagement has been overshadowed by the Battle of the Washita and has found few chroniclers. Nye, Carbine and Lance, pp. 78–83, gives a fairly good account, but much more detailed is Evans’ unpublished report, Jan. 23, 1869, 6/1560M-AGO-1869, in Record Group 94, National Archives. The Indians say they suffered no casualties at Soldier Spring.

  34. Nye, Carbine and Lance, pp. 75–77, 84–89.

  35. Berthrong, pp. 334–35. Custer, chap. 15. Chandler, pp. 28–29.

  36. Sheridan, 2, 345, 347.

  37. Custer, chaps. 16 and 17. Spotts and Brininstool, pp. 135–99. Chandler, pp. 28–31. In the March operations the Nineteenth Kansas was commanded by Col. Horace L. Moore; Crawford had resigned in February to work to get his men paid. The women liberated by Custer were Mrs. Anna Morgan and Miss Sarah White. They had been captured in the Saline and Solomon raids of the previous August. The three chiefs—Big Head, Fat Bear, and Dull Knife—were placed in the prisoner compound at Fort Hays. Without an interpreter to explain his intentions, the commanding officer tried to move them to the guardhouse. Supposing they were to be executed, they resisted. Dull Knife and Big Head were killed and Fat Bear wounded.

  38. Evans’ report, cited in n. 33 above. Sheridan, unaware that Evans was not still on the Canadian, had ordered him to move eastward against the Cheyennes in concert with Custer’s March expedition.

  39. King, pp. 87–93. Don Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill (Norman, Okla., 1960), pp. 110–16. Armes, Ups and Downs of an Army Officer, pp. 278–96.

  40. Berthrong, pp. 338–40. CIA, Annual Report (1869), pp. 82–83, 391–92. George Bent (Hyde, Life of George Bent, pp. 327–28) says the Dog Soldiers remained on the R
epublican throughout the winter of 1868–69. Some probably did, but it is clear, in light of Custer’s encounter on the Sweetwater, that at least 200 lodges wintered in the South.

  41. For the Republican River Expedition and the Battle of Summit Springs, see King, chap. 5; Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, pp. 41. 35–41; Russell, chaps. 9 and 10; Sheridan, Record of Engagements, pp. 20–23; Berthrong, pp. 340–44; Hyde, Life of George Bent, chap. 13; Grinnell, Fighting Cheyennes, chap. 23; and Danker, ed., Man of the Plains, chap. 5.

  42. For Sheridan’s problems see his memoirs, 2, 340–42; for Carr see King, p. 92; for Evans, his report cited in n. 33 above.

  43. Sheridan, 2, 340.

  44. CIA, Annual Report (1869), p. 83.

  45. Chandler, p. 29.

  46. King, pp. 90–91. Evans report.

  Beyond the Plains, 1866–70

  THE HEARTLAND of the Indian problem was the Great Plains. There the tribes were larger, more powerful, and better organized than elsewhere. There they threatened more sensitive national interests—the principal transcontinental arteries of travel and communication. The Great Plains were closer to the nation’s population centers, more familiar to Americans, and more accessible to journalists and others who molded opinion. Relations with the Plains tribes, both military and diplomatic, featured an intensity, a drama, and a coherence lacking in more remote corners of the West, and easily overshadowed confused and sporadically reported events in distant Arizona or Oregon. Thus the assumptions, policies, and institutions that governed Indian relations for half a century or more emerged mainly from the Plains experience of 1866–70.

  Yet during these years almost half the frontier army served elsewhere. Though dimmed in the public eye by their headline-winning colleagues on the Plains, the troops stationed in Texas, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest faced opponents no less challenging and conditions of climate and topography often far more physically demanding.

  Before the Civil War Texas enjoyed the West’s most comprehensive and strongly manned defense network. Two chains of forts extended nearly 400 miles from Red River to the Rio Grande, another down the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico, and still another westward along the 600-mile emigrant and mail road from San Antonio to El Paso. In i860 almost 3,000 soldiers, one-fifth of the Regular Army, held twenty-five Texas installations. They had contended valiantly but with doubtful results against Kiowa and Comanche raiders from north of the Red River who regularly ravaged frontier communities all the way into Mexico, and against Mescalero Apaches from New Mexico and Coahuila who struck repeatedly at trains on the El Paso Road. Texas forfeited the federal garrisons by joining the Confederacy. During the war frontier settlers who did not abandon their homes “forted up,” organized “minuteman” militia companies, and looked for protection to the “Texas Frontier Regiment,” which sought ineffectually to cover the whole line from the Red River to the Rio Grande.1

  At war’s end the Confederate frontier defense effort, little more than token at best, collapsed altogether. Indian raiders poured into the void. From north of Red River the Kiowas and Comanches came with mounting frequency. Whether at war or peace with Americans on the Arkansas, they had never relaxed their pressure on Texas. A generation of Indian agents had tried unsuccessfully to convince them that Texans were Americans; the Texan course in the Civil War hardly lent credibility to this effort. Now there was fresh incentive for raiding. Cattlemen edged westward to the frontier. The era of the long trail drives opened. Kiowas and Comanches took advantage of the new opportunities, for they, too, had a market—Comanchero traders from New Mexico who came regularly to rendezvous on the Staked Plains. The temptation easily overcame the promises so solemnly recorded in the Little Arkansas and Medicine Lodge treaties.2

  In the south the principal menace came from another source—raiders from the mountains of Coahuila and Chihuahua, Mexico, beyond the international boundary. Mescalero Apaches had preyed on the western end of the El Paso Road since 1850, and Lipans had terrorized the Nueces settlements southwest of San Antonio even longer. With the postwar surge of travel to El Paso and the burgeoning of the cattle industry on the Nueces Plain, Mescalero and Lipan raids quickened. And now a third group joined in the pastime. Early in the century Mexico had enticed bands of Kickapoos to her northern frontier to serve as buffers against Comanche and Apache raiders. Unsettled by Civil War conditions in Kansas, some of their kinsmen decided to migrate, too. En route in January 1865, they were set upon at Dove Creek by Texas Rangers in a senseless attack that united all the Mexican Kickapoos in a remorseless guerrilla war against Texas border communities. Mexican authorities, preoccupied by revolutionary turmoil, made no effort to restrain the Mescaleros, Lipans, and Kickapoos, and the merchants of Mexican frontier towns encouraged them by providing a market for the fruits of the raids.3

  Although federal troops returned to Texas in substantial numbers after the war, they were assigned at first wholly to interior stations and charged with policing a population lately in rebellion against the United States. Texas formed part of the Division of the Gulf, commanded by General Sheridan from headquarters in New Orleans. With passage of the Reconstruction Acts in March 1867, Texas fell, with Louisiana, into the Fifth Military District; a reorganization in 1868 contracted the district to Texas alone. The sole purpose of the military districts was to provide the organizational framework for military rule and “reconstruction” of the wayward South. This was the overriding concern of General Sheridan and his successor, General Hancock, as well as the series of lesser commanders who presided briefly over the Austin headquarters of the army in Texas. In both New Orleans and Austin the massive and complex exigencies of Reconstruction overwhelmed the appeals for help from the distant frontier settlements.

  These appeals overflowed the desk of the Reconstruction governors, who implored Sheridan to respond to the frontier emergency.4 But the general was preoccupied with fixing military rule on a resentful and sometimes violently resisting populace, with guaranteeing the safety of the freedmen, and with enforcing federal law. He believed that the governors and their petitioners deliberately exaggerated frontier conditions. “The mainspring of the whole movement is to get the United States troops from the interior of the State,” he informed General Grant. “It is strange that over a white man killed by Indians on an extensive frontier the greatest excitement will take place, but over the killing of many freedmen in the settlements nothing is done.”5

  Prodded by President Johnson and by the prospect of state troops officered by ex-Confederates gathering at the call of the legislature, Sheridan at last relented. By mid-1867 Regulars had reoccupied the prewar posts of Stockton and Davis on the El Paso road, and Chadbourne and Belknap on the northwestern frontier. They had also begun construction of a new post at Buffalo Springs, near Red River northeast of Fort Belknap. Fifteen hundred cavalrymen now patrolled the frontier; an equal number, mostly infantry, garrisoned interior stations; and 700 guarded the Mexican border.6

  The Quartermaster Department began to rehabilitate the frontier forts in the spring of 1867. A quarantine prompted by a yellow fever epidemic slowed progress through the summer. By autumn post commanders, complaining of inadequate water supplies, had begun to urge new sites. Finally, in October, a board of officers was appointed to examine the whole question. As a result, in February 1868 General Hancock issued orders for the abandonment of Forts Chadbourne, Belknap, and the unfinished post at Buffalo Springs. They would be replaced by the new installations of Forts Burnham on Red River, Richardson at Jacksboro, Griffin on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, and Concho at the forks of the Concho. From here the line would extend to the Rio Grande by way of the reactivated prewar forts of McKavett, Terrett, Clark, and Duncan. Forts McIntosh, Ringgold, and Brown carried the line down the Rio Grande border to the Gulf. Forts Stockton, Davis, and Quitman would continue to guard the El Paso Road. Telegraph lines would connect the stations with one another and with headquarters. Fort Burnham was never built
and the telegraph network remained some years in the future. The long delay in deciding the location of the forts and the money and labor wasted on Buffalo Springs, Belknap, and Chadbourne provoked severe criticism of the army. But by late 1868 a Texas frontier defense system had been fixed and manned that would endure without basic change for more than two decades.7

  During 1867 and 1868 Texas’ frontier defenders spent much of their time and energy building new posts and refurbishing old ones. But they also provided escort service for freight trains, stages, and cattle herds; patrolled the vast expanses of plain and desert that separated the forts; and searched out the trails of raiding parties that had struck and vanished. Such pursuits commonly turned out to be exhausting and profitless. Occasionally they ended in action—a brief exchange of gunfire, few casualties, and quick disengagement. Army records count 38 actions for 1867 through 1870, costing 16 troopers killed and 26 wounded. Estimates of Indian casualties, probably too generous, totaled 158 killed, 45 wounded, and 18 captured.8 The duty was hard, inglorious, and frustrating, and it produced no demonstrable effect on the scale of Indian raiding.

  Moreover, the seriousness of the situation remained unappreciated by top commanders. Sheridan relinquished the Fifth Military District in 1867 convinced that no more than a few depredations provoked by reckless frontiersmen lay behind the alarms that had forced him to reestablish the frontier forts,9 and his attitude decisively influenced the thinking of Grant and Sherman. Though less suspicious, Hancock was also preoccupied with Reconstruction problems. So, for that matter, were the commanders in Austin—first Bvt. Maj. Gen. Charles Griffin (colonel of the Thirty-fifth Infantry); then, after his death in the autumn of 1867, Bvt. Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds (colonel of the Twenty-sixth Infantry). In his annual report for 1867, for example, Reynolds dramatized the continuing priority of Reconstruction duty by pointing out that during the year 384 citizens had been murdered by fellow citizens and only 26 by Indians.10 This was small consolation to frontier settlers who knew that huge property losses and constant insecurity were part of the reckoning too. The emphasis began to shift in 1870, however, when the state at last qualified for readmission to the Union and the Fifth Military District gave way to the Department of Texas. Still, not until Sherman himself nearly lost his scalp on the Texas frontier did the realities begin to penetrate the thinking of top officials (see Chapter Twelve).