Sherman took these actions following an eye-opening inspection of the Texas frontier forts in May 1871. He had never believed that Indian depredations were as bad as Texans portrayed them, and indeed he saw no evidence of their claims throughout most of the trip. On May 18, he and his small escort crossed Salt Creek Prairie, about eight miles west of Fort Richardson, under the very eyes of a big Kiowa raiding party lurking in ambush. The Indians numbered about 100, including such noted war leaders as Satanta, Satank, Big Tree, Eagle Heart, and Big Bow. Only the medicine man Mamanti’s prediction of still richer prey saved Sherman and Insp. Gen. Randolph B. Marcy from death. That night a badly wounded teamster staggered into Fort Richardson, where Sherman and Mackenzie had spent the evening listening to the complaints of a delegation of citizens from nearby Jacksboro. He told of the massacre on Salt Creek Prairie of a train of ten wagons manned by twelve teamsters. Four had escaped, but the rest had been butchered, the wagons burned, and forty-one mules stolen. Now convinced of the validity of the Texan appeals, Sherman launched Mackenzie in pursuit of the raiders and himself grimly headed for Fort Sill.
At Fort Sill Sherman found Tatum wavering in his dedication to nonviolence. It gave way altogether on May 27, when the Kiowas came in for rations. Satanta boasted to Tatum of his part in the Salt Creek affair and demanded arms and ammunition for further raids. At once the agent sent a note to Colonel Grierson asking for the arrest of Satanta and others he had named. In a tense confrontation on the porch of the commanding officer’s quarters, Sherman and Grierson faced Satanta, Kicking Bird, Lone Wolf, and other Kiowa chiefs. When Satanta repeated his boast, Sherman ordered him, along with Satank and Big Tree, placed under arrest for trial in the Texas state courts. Satanta threw off his blanket and grasped his revolver. Others drew weapons. Sherman signaled. The shutters covering the front windows banged open to reveal a phalanx of black troopers with carbines leveled. The Indians subsided. Later in the conference, as tempers flared again, Stumbling Bear fitted an arrow to his bow and let fly at Sherman. Another Indian struck Stumbling Bear’s arm and ruined his aim. At the same time, Lone Wolf leveled his rifle at Sherman. Grierson jumped on the chief and they sprawled on the floor. This crisis also passed without bloodshed, and the three war leaders were lodged in a cell to await deportation.
Sherman left Fort Sill on May 30. Mackenzie’s column, worn out in a fruitless chase through rain and mud, rode in on June 4. Four days later they left for Fort Richardson, escorting the three chiefs, heavily chained and closely guarded. Singing his death song, old Satank managed to shuck off his manacles and attack his guard. He was shot and killed. In Jacksboro a cowboy jury duly pronounced the other two guilty of murder. In the belief that they would exert more restraint on their people alive than dead, Gov. Edmund J. Davis commuted their sentence from death to life imprisonment. Satanta and Big Tree entered the state penitentiary at Huntsville.50
Although widely heralded as a new dimension of the Peace Policy, the Jacksboro affair was actually an aberration brought about by an unusual combination of persons and circumstances. The Indians were not likely again to offer such indisputable proof of individual guilt as Satanta’s boastful confession, nor place themselves in so vulnerable a position as Grierson’s front porch. Jacksboro did not change the ground rules of army employment. It did not stop the raids in Texas. And it did not signal a new toughness in Indian management. To Superintendent Hoag, Tatum’s call for military help was unforgivable heresy. In his mind, “influences irresistibly evil” emanating from Fort Sill explained the failure of the Indians to embrace the new way of life offered them.51 The Hoag mentality continued to dominate policy in Indian Territory.
The swift retribution visited on the three chiefs scared some Kiowas and infuriated others. The tribe polarized into a peace faction headed by Kicking Bird and a war faction headed by Lone Wolf. Both from the reservation sanctuary and the Staked Plains, Kiowa and Comanche war parties robbed, burned, and butchered the length of the Texas frontier. Occasionally they even harassed Fort Sill.
Barred from the reservation, Colonel Mackenzie turned to the Comanches of the Staked Plains. By keeping them occupied at home, he hoped to lessen their incursions against the settlements. Operations in the fall of 1871 featured a few skirmishes with warriors led by a rising young half-blood chieftain named Quanah Parker. In the summer of 1872 the Fourth returned to this area. Another command, under Lt. Col. William R. Shafter, also laced the vast table. Both expeditions were pioneering explorations in a little-known and hostile land. Mackenzie crossed the unmapped wilderness all the way to Fort Sumner, New Mexico. In the course of the march he exposed the pattern, magnitude, and participants of the Comanchero trade. For generations New Mexican traders, called Comancheros, had journeyed to the Staked Plains to trade whiskey, arms, and ammunition to the Kiowas and Comanches for the stock and other plunder of their raids on the Texas settlements. Henceforth the army would try to break up this commerce.52
A second expedition rewarded Mackenzie’s dogged search for the enemy. On September 29, 1872, he surprised and attacked Mow-way’s Kotsoteka Comanche village of 262 lodges on the North Fork of Red River, near McClellan Creek. The Indians were thoroughly routed and from thirty to sixty were killed, including some women and children. The troopers burned the village and seized 124 captives, mostly women and children, together with a huge pony herd. To the colonel’s mortification, a party of warriors skillfully stampeded the ponies and won them back. The prisoners were confined in a stockade at Fort Concho.53
In Satanta and Big Tree at Huntsville and the captives at Fort Concho, the government possessed powerful levers in the effort to curb the Kiowas and Comanches. Quaker sentiment, however, favored the release of the prisoners. Such trust and generosity, it was hoped, would induce the Indians to call off their war against Texas. In October 1872 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs promised a delegation of chiefs visiting Washington that if the Kiowas behaved themselves, and if the governor of Texas agreed, Satanta and Big Tree would be freed in six months. Not surprisingly, the Kiowas remained comparatively quiet during the winter. The Interior Department and humanitarian groups pressed Governor Davis to honor the promise. The assassination of General Canby in April 1873 so inflamed public opinion as to alter the timetable, but in October 1873 Satanta and Big Tree were at last set free. The Fort Concho prisoners had already been released, in June.
The liberation of Satanta and Big Tree infuriated Sherman, and his fears proved well founded. Throughout the winter of 1873–74 Kiowa and Comanche war parties ravaged Texas. They returned to the reservation sanctuary without fear of retribution such as Tatum had called down upon the Jacksboro raiders. His authority undermined by the parole of the Kiowa chiefs, Tatum had resigned in the spring of 1873. James M. Haworth, his successor, shared Superintendent Hoag’s rosy view of Indian management. At once the new agent removed the military guard from the agency. He seemed unlikely to emulate Tatum by asking the army to arrest Indians.
Influences propelling the southern Plains tribes toward a major uprising gathered force during the winter of 1873–74. For four years the Indians had endured mounting pressure and restraints of reservation life. They had also endured inadequate rations—sometimes no rations, when held back to compel the return of captives or stock taken in Texas—and varieties of food and other issue goods repugnant to their taste. They had watched with growing alarm the slaughter of the buffalo by white hide-hunters who left the carcasses to rot; 1,250,000 hides went east by rail in 1872–73.54 Although these influences created serious unrest, the principal stimulus to war remained cultural values that exalted war and showered acclaim on the successful warrior. Still another influence gained increasing importance—revenge. Warriors killed in Texas raids had to be revenged by their kinsmen in more Texas raids. The death of Lone Wolf’s son and nephew in a fight with a troop of the Fourth Cavalry near Fort Clark in December 1873 set the old war chief’s mind to plotting revenge and placed him beyond all reach of Agent Haworth
’s conciliation.55
All these forces operated on the Cheyennes, too. In addition, whiskey continued to demoralize their camps, and white horse thieves from Kansas preyed on their herds. Retaliatory measures led to occasional conflicts in Kansas. Cheyenne warriors in mounting numbers participated in the Texas raids of Kiowas and Comanches.56
In the spring and early summer of 1874, Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne warriors struck in all directions. On June 27 several hundred Comanches and Cheyennes attacked a rude village thrown up by hide-hunters on the North Canadian River at Adobe Walls, in the Texas Panhandle, scene of Kit Carson’s battle with Comanches in 1864. A Comanche medicine man named Isatai led the attack, but once more Quanah Parker figured prominently in the fighting. Twenty-eight hunters wtih high-powered rifles beat off the Indians and inflicted serious losses. Angry and humiliated, the warriors scattered, bent on revenge. On July 12, at Lost Valley, near the site of the Salt Creek Prairie massacre of 1871, Lone Wolf exacted revenge for the death of his son and nephew by ambushing a party of Texas Rangers. Warriors fell on ranches and travelers in Kansas and Texas and boldly attacked army mail parties.57
Depredations had reached a level of intensity that only a Hoag or a Haworth could ignore or rationalize. Sherman pressed for permission to send troops after Indians on the reservation. “Defensively it will require ten thousand Cavalry to give [frontier settlers] a partial protection,” he advised Secretary of War Belknap, “but offensively a thousand Cavalry can follow them and punish them as they surely merit.” Both Secretary of the Interior Delano and Commissioner of Indian Affairs E. P. Smith proved receptive. Their acquiescence obtained, Belknap gave Sherman the desired authority. On July 20, 1874, Sherman wired Sheridan to turn loose the troops.58
Sherman’s order gave official ratification to the existence of a state of war—the Red River War. The order also recorded the failure of the experiment of separating military and civil responsibility for the Indian at the reservation line. Nowhere were the fallacies of this simplistic approach more vividly demonstrated than in Indian Territory and Texas between 1869 and 1874. Quaker goodness had not kept the Indians on the reservation. The army had not been able to punish them off the reservation. Nor had the Jacksboro formula—arrest of individual Indians on the reservation for trial in civil courts off the reservation—provided a solution; after Jacksboro, Indians did not confess their depredations, and there was no other sure way to determine guilt. Opening the reservation to troops was the inevitable result. The wonder is that it was postponed so long after the “city of refuge” pattern became clear.
To the army, the order of July 20, 1874, marked a welcome, if belated, hardening of the Peace Policy. It eliminated the problem of how to catch raiders without following them home. But it resurrected an old, more familiar problem: how to distinguish between peaceful and hostile Indians. Separating the one class from the other was the army’s first order of business in the Red River War.
NOTES
1. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 5–6.
2 CIA, Annual Report (1868), pp. iii–iv. The case for the opposition was stated in great detail by Commissioner of Indian Affairs N. G. Taylor in ibid., pp. 7–15. The transfer question is treated in Donald J. D’Elia, “The Argument over Civilian or Military Indian Control, 1865–1880,” Historian, 24 (1961–62), 207–85; Priest, Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren, chap. 2; and Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian, pp. 42–43 and passim.
3. For the Peace Policy, see Priest, chaps. 1–5; Mardock, chap. 4; and Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, chap. 3. A well-reasoned revisionist article is Henry G. Waltmann, “Circumstantial Reformer: President Grant & the Indian Problem,” Arizona and the West, 13 (1971), 323–42.
4. Both the Board of Indian Commissioners and the abolition of the treaty system were the result of growing resentment in the House of Representatives over the Senate’s paramount role in Indian policy. The House did not participate in the conclusion of treaties by the Executive or their ratification by the Senate but had to appropriate the funds to carry them out. The House held up the Indian appropriation bill in 1869, and the Board of Indian Commissioners was the compromise that broke it loose. The House refused all compromise in 1871, and the Senate acceded to an act that abolished the treaty system—without, however, invalidating existing treaty obligations.
5. Mardock, pp. 53–54.
6. CIA, Annual Report (1869), pp. 5–6. Fritz, p. 81.
7. Official documents are printed in Senate Ex. Docs., 41st Cong., 2d sess., No. 49; House Ex. Docs., 41st Cong., 2d sess., No. 185; ibid., No. 197; SW, Annual Report (1870), pp. 29–30; and CIA, Annual Report (1870), pp. 190–191. An analysis sympathetic to Baker is Robert J. Ege, Tell Baker to Strike Them Hard: Incident on the Marias (Bellevue, Neb., 1970). See also Athearn, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West, pp. 279–82; and Mardock, pp. 67–70.
8. 16 Stat. 319 (July 15, 1870).
9. Mardock, chap. 5. Fritz, pp. 73–76. Priest, chaps. 2–3. Waltmann, pp. 334–35. Athearn, p. 281.
10. Thian, Notes Illustrating the Military Geography of the United States, p. 52.
11. Ogle, Federal Control of the Western Apaches, 1848–1886, pp. 76–79.
12. CIA, Annual Report (1870), pp. 8, 137–40; (1871), pp. 69–76, 88. James R. Hastings, “’The Tragedy at Camp Grant in 1871,” Arizona and the West, I (1959), 146–60. Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria, chap. 7.
13. Ogle, pp. 81, 89. Crook, Autobiography, p. 160. CIA, Annual Report (1871), pp. 77—78. Most of the perpetrators of the massacre were brought to trial but easily acquitted. Colyer’s mission was authorized by a clause in the Indian appropriation act that provided $70,000 for collecting the the Apaches on reservations, feeding them, and promoting civilization. 16 Stat. 546 (March 3, 1871).
14. Colyer’s report, CIA, Annual Report (1871), pp. 41–95. Crook, pp. 162–68. Thrapp, pp. 95–106. Ogle, pp. 87–102. Army and Navy Journal, 9 (Aug. 5, 1871), 816.
15. Howard’s report, June 1872, in CIA, Annual Report (1872), pp. 148–75. O. O. Howard, My Life and Experiences among Our Hostile Indians (Hartford, Conn., 1907), chaps. 7–10.
16. I have treated the Bascom Affair in Frontiersmen in Blue, pp. 162–63.
17. Howard’s report, Nov. 7, 1872, CIA, Annual Report (1872), pp. 175–78. Howard, chaps. 12–14. See CIA, Annual Report (1872), p. 306, for Cochise’s sojourn on the reservation. He left when Colyer moved the reservation to Tularosa.
18. Crook, pp. 168–73. SW, Annual Report (1872), pp. 78–79. See also Cofyer’s and Howard’s reports cited in notes 14 and 15, above.
19. Reports of Colyer and Howard cited above.
20. See Colyer’s and Howard’s reports cited above for examples of citizen attacks on them. CIA, Annual Report (1871), pp. 78–81, details explicit threats of citizens of Silver City, N.M., to obliterate the Apaches of the Canada Alamosa Reservation.
21. CIA, Annual Report (1872), pp. 5–6, 58, 94.
22. These factors are discussed by Crook in “The Apache Problem,” 257–69; and Autobiography, p. 175; and by his aide, Lt. John G. Bourke, in On the Border with Crook, pp. 109–12, 138–39, 142, 149–57, 181–82. See also Thrapp, Conquest of Apacheria, chap. 8; and Gunther E. Rothenberg, “General George Crook and the Apaches, 1872–73,” Westerners Brand Book (Chicago), 13 (Sept. 1956), 49–56. Also, late in 1871 Crook received fresh troops to work with as the Fifth Cavalry and Twenty-third Infantry replaced the Third Cavalry and the Twenty-first Infantry. Early in 1870 Sheridan had advised Sherman that it would be well to get the Third Cavalry out of the Southwest. “It was there before the war, and is I hear to some extent mixed up with the natives.” Sheridan to Sherman, Jan. 3, 1870, Sherman Papers, vol. 27, LC.
23. My account of the 1872–73 campaign is drawn mainly from Bourke, chaps. 10 and 11; Bourke’s journal in Bloom, “Bourke on the Southwest,” New Mexico Historical Review, 9 (1934), 380–435; Thrapp, Conquest of Apacheria, chaps. 10 and 11; Thrapp, Al Sieber, Chief of S
couts (Norman, Okla., 1964), chaps. 7 and 8; Crook, pp. 175–86; Ogle, pp. 112–17; Rothenberg; and Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, chap. 15. See also Sidney B. Brinckerhoff, “Camp Date Creek, Arizona Territory, Infantry Outpost in the Yavapai Wars, 1867–73,” The Smoke Signal (Tucson Corral of Westerners), No. 10 (Fall 1964), pp. 16–17.
24. Bourke, pp. 213–14.
25. CIA, Annual Report (1873), p. 342.
26. Canby’s attitude emerges in letters of Feb. 5, 7, 17, 21, and April 13 and 17, 1872, House Ex. Docs., 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 122, pp. 5–6, 9, 14–15, 17, 19–21.
27. Ibid., pp. 26–28, 223–25, 237–38. The standard history of the Modoc War is Keith A. Murray, The Modocs and Their War (Norman, Okla., 1959). See also Erwin N. Thompson, The Modoc War: Its History and Topography (Sacramento, Calif., 1971); Verne F. Ray, Primitive Pragmatists: The Modoc Indians of Northern California (Seattle, Wash., 1963); and Ray H. Glassley, Pacific Northwest Indian Wars (Portland, Oreg., 1953). Important reminiscent accounts are Richard H. Dillon, ed., William Henry Boyle’s Personal Observations on the Conduct of the Modoc War (Los Angeles, n.d.); Alfred B. Meacham, Wigwam and War-Path (Boston, 1875); Jeff C. Riddle, The Indian History of the Modoc War and the Causes that Led to It (n.p. 1914); and military accounts in Cyrus T. Brady, Northwestern Fights and Fighters (New York, 1913), Part 2. Official correspondence is in House Ex. Docs., 42d Cong., 3d sess., No. 201; Senate Ex. Docs., 42d Cong., 3d sess., No. 29; House Ex. Docs., 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 122; ibid., No. 185; House Ex Docs., 43d Cong., 2d sess., No. 131; Senate Ex. Docs., 44th Cong., Sp. Sess., No. 1.
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