In only two years, 1870—72, the rails of the Northern Pacific advanced across the Minnesota and Dakota prairie to the Missouri River. Their arrival at the Missouri brought forth the town of Bismarck on the east bank and, on the west bank three miles downstream, a new military post. First called Fort McKeen when it was established in the spring of 1872, it was renamed Fort Abraham Lincoln the following November. Far in front of the railhead, surveyors worked toward the Rockies. To the Sioux, watching their progress west of the Missouri, they were alarming harbingers of the iron horse.
Whether the projected route of the Northern Pacific up the Yellowstone Valley violated Sioux territory as described by the Treaty of 1868 might have been debated at some length—although, strangely, it was not. The definition of the unceded territory-east of the Bighorn Mountains and north of the North Platte River—left obscure whether it extended north of the Bighorns as far as the Yellowstone. There could be no debate, however, over the attitude of the Sioux. They had occupied the buffalo plains as far north as the Missouri for a couple of generations and regarded them as indisputably Sioux domain. The prospect of a railroad anywhere in this land was thoroughly obnoxious and sure to arouse angry opposition. They rightly saw in it a force that would bring about the destruction of the buffalo and an influx of whites, and that would consequently leave them little choice but to go to the reservation and live on the dole.13
General Sherman viewed the Northern Pacific in the same light, and he placed the army at the service of the railroad.14 Formidable military escorts protected the surveyors in the summers of 1871, 1872, and 1873.15 Sitting Bull’s Sioux resisted, most vigorously the expedition of 1873. This expedition, commanded by Col. David S. Stanley, numbered almost 1,500 soldiers and 400 civilians, including ten troops of the Seventh Cavalry under Lt. Col. George A. Custer. A train of 275 wagons, supplemented by steamboats plying the Missouri and the Yellowstone, provided supplies.16
On August 4, 187, near the mouth of Tongue River, about 300 warriors tried to draw Custer and two of his troops, reconnoitering in advance of the main column, into an ambush. Custer foiled the attempt and fought off the assailants for three hours, then mounted his command and charged with a vigor that scattered the Indians. A week later, on August 11, Custer and eight troops of the Seventh collided with swarming Sioux on the north bank of the Yellowstone below the mouth of the Bighorn. Custer expertly countered the Indian thrusts and, the band blaring “Garryowen,” galloped in pursuit for ten miles.
Custer estimated that in the two actions his men had felled 40 warriors. He believed he had faced 800 to 1,000 warriors on August 11; Stanley’s estimate of 500 is probably more accurate. In the first engagement one soldier had been wounded, in the second one killed and three wounded, including Lt. Charles Braden, down with a badly shattered leg that later forced his retirement for disability.
The Stanley expedition passed three months, June 20 to September 23, in the field, penetrating as far west as the Bighorn and examining the Musselshell Valley too. This expedition was bigger by far than its predecessors, stayed out longer, and stirred the Indians to greater fury, as evidenced by their tenacity in the two battles with Custer. Although the Panic of 1873 threw the Northern Pacific into bankruptcy and granted the Sioux several years’ reprieve from the railroad, the surveys of 1871–73 added momentously to the accumulating Sioux grievances. And the white men had no sooner receded from the Yellowstone than they burst into the Black Hills.
Rumor had long endowed the Black Hills with great mineral wealth. Throughout the 1860s Dakota promoters had sought to verify the rumors, either through a government-sponsored geological survey or private gold-hunting expeditions. But this beautiful land of pine-clad mountains lay deep in Sioux country, and the army’s help was indispensable. Before 1868, the army, fully occupied with the Union Pacific Railroad and the Bozeman Trail, had no wish to encourage new frontiers that would require military protection. After 1868, the army was bound to oppose any such venture, for the Fort Laramie Treaty placed the Black Hills plainly within the Great Sioux Reservation. Not even the uncertainties of the unceded territory clouded Sioux title to this part of their domain. Even so, public sentiment for opening the Hills grew steadily stronger. Indian rights seemed of minor consequence to men idled by the depression that gripped the nation in the wake of the Panic of 1873.17
By 1873 military interests also favored a penetration of the Black Hills. Pondering how best to counter Sioux raids in Ord’s Department of the Platte, General Sheridan envisioned a large fort in the Black Hills, “so that by holding an interior point in the heart of the Indian country we could threaten the villages and stock of the Indians, if they made raids on our settlements.” In the autumn of 1873 Sheridan discussed the matter with the President and the Secretaries of War and Interior and won their encouragement. The result was the Custer expedition of 1874. Its chief purpose was to locate a suitable site for a military post. The presence of two “practical miners” testified to other purposes as well.18
Numbering more than 1,000 men in ten troops of the Seventh Cavalry and two companies of infantry, the Black Hills Expedition left Fort Abraham Lincoln on July 2, 1874. The march was a grand picnic amid game-rich forests and lush meadows cut by clear streams abounding in fish. The engineers mapped the country, and Custer named the principal peaks for such military luminaries as Harney, Terry, and himself. Near Bear Butte, on the northeastern border of the Hills, Custer found a good location for a fort. The miners discovered traces of gold in the streams—enough to arouse warm interest but not enough to interfere with baseball games, glee club sings, and champagne suppers.
As the column turned back toward Fort Lincoln, Scout Charley Reynolds carried official reports and newspaper dispatches southwest to Fort Laramie for telegraphic transmission to the East. In these and subsequent reports Custer wrote glowingly of the rich farming, grazing, and lumbering potential of the Black Hills. Although one report contained a much-quoted reference to “gold among the roots of the grass,” on the whole his assessment of mineral prospects was restrained. The expedition was back at Fort Lincoln by August 30. Already, based on the dispatches brought out by Reynolds, the press had whipped up a gold fever.
At once the President announced that the army would bar prospectors from Indian domain. But as the New York Tribune editorialized, “If there is gold in the Black Hills, no army on earth can keep the adventurous men of the west out of them.”19 The army tried, to the embarrassment and substantial loss of a number of parties intercepted en route or expelled after arrival. Throughout the spring and summer of 1875, troops from the Missouri River forts and from Camp Robinson and Fort Laramie performed this service. General Crook, newly assigned to command the Department of the Platte after his dazzling Arizona successes, even went into the Hills himself. Despite the efforts of the soldiers, whose sympathies lay clearly with the intruders, some 800 miners worked the streams of the Black Hills during the summer of 1875.20
Meanwhile, the government tried to solve the problem by purchasing the Black Hills from the Sioux. In an effort to verify Custer’s reports and fix a price, the geological survey long sought by Dakotans was sent out from Fort Laramie in the summer of 1875. Geologist Walter P. Jenny headed the expedition, and about 400 soldiers under Lt. Col. Richard I. Dodge went along as escort. The very presence of more soldiers in the Hills further incensed the Indians, and Jenny’s disclosure of rich mineral deposits compounded the problem by stimulating still greater immigration.21
The question of ceding the Black Hills was broached to Red Cloud and Spotted Tail during a visit to Washington in June 1875. Later, in September, a special commission headed by Sen. William B. Allison went to Red Cloud Agency to continue the discussions. In a series of wild councils, the emissaries encountered belligerence, intransigence, and what impressed them as an outrageously inflated conception of the worth of the Black Hills. Always a treasured part of the Plains Indians’ hunting grounds, this country had now become even more valuable
to them simply because it had become so valuable to the white man. “Our Great Father has a big safe, and so have we,” declared Spotted Bear. “This hill is our safe.” It seemed worth much more than the paltry $6 million the Great Father offered for it, or the $400,000 per year for which he was willing to lease it. More skilfull negotiators probably could have brought the agency chiefs to terms. But the young men from the hunting bands in the north, although a minority, adamantly opposed any deal and stood ready to back up this position by force if necessary. Mainly because of them, the negotiations ended in stalemate.22
This outcome presented the government with an acute embarrassment. In every legal and moral sense the Black Hills belonged to the Sioux, and no white man had a right to be there. Yet white men already held effective possession, and the government could not hope any longer to resist the public demand for an official opening of the coveted territory. The Allison commission had failed to throw a mantle of legal and moral rationalization over the seizure of the Black Hills. Another means had to be found.
The breakdown of negotiations for the Black Hills capped seven years of mounting frustration with the Sioux hunting bands. They raided all around the periphery of the unceded territory. They terrorized friendly tribes. They contested the advance of the Northern Pacific Railroad. They disrupted the management of the reservation Indians while obtaining recruits, supplies, and munitions at the agencies for these hostile activities. And now they interfered with the sale of the Black Hills. The right to roam outside the boundaries of the Great Sioux Reservation—on the upper Republican and in the unceded territory—made all this possible. In June 1875 Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were persuaded, for a monetary consideration, to relinquish the Republican River hunting rights. Three months later the failure of the Allison commission focused the attention of top government officials on the more crucial question of the unceded territory.
Almost from the ratification of the Treaty of 1868, military leaders had seen in the repeated aggressions of the hunting bands justification for extinguishing their right to range the unceded territory. “Inasmuch as the Sioux have not lived at peace,” declared General Serman in 1873, “I think Congress has a perfect right to abrogate the whole of that treaty, or any part of it; … I would like to see the Sioux forced to live near the Missouri River, north of Nebraska, for that was the ultimate design and purpose of the Peace Commission of 1867–68.“23 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Walker (1872—73) would tolerate any provocation to buy time for railroads and settlement to solve the problem, but his successor, Edward P. Smith, came to share Sherman’s view. In a show of militance almost without precedent in the Indian Bureau, he urged in 1873 that a military command be stationed at every Sioux agency, that the Sioux be kept on the Great Sioux Reservation, and that the hunting bands be compelled, by military force if necessary, to quit the unceded territory and settle on the reservation.24 The Black Hills crisis of 1875 won these views a wider acceptance than they had ever before attained.
On November 3, 1875, a meeting was held at the White House that included President Grant, Secretary of War Belknap, Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Smith, and Generals Sheridan and Crook. Although the evidence is thin, almost certainly these discussions produced decisions, first, to withdraw troops from Black Hills duty, thereby allowing the mineral region to fill with prospectors; and second, to initiate immediate measures to force the hunting bands out of the unceded territory and onto the reservation, thereby ending their raiding activities and diminishing their power to obstruct a Black Hills settlement.25
As General Sherman understood the first decision, settlement would now be officially sanctioned all along the western boundary of the Great Sioux Reservation—i.e., in the unceded territory, which was now to be denied to the hunting bands—“and if some go over the Boundary into the Black Hills, I understand that the President and Interior Dept will wink at it for the present.”26 By the winter of 1875–76, the President and the Interior Department were winking at about 15,000 miners in the Black Hills.27
As for the second decision: On November 9, six days after the White House meeting, the Indian Bureau came up with some solid documentation for a forceful move against the Indians. Inspector E. C. Watkins, completing a tour of the Sioux country, penned a scathing indictment of “certain wild and hostile bands” under Sitting Bull and other chiefs who roamed the unceded territory. Describing their repeated offenses against settlers and other Indian tribes, he concluded: “The true policy, in my judgment, is to send troops against them in the winter, the sooner the better, and whip them into subjection.” Both Commissioner Smith and Secretary Chandler instantly embraced this recommendation and commended it to the War Department. On December 6, in response to a directive from Secretary Chandler, Smith instructed the Sioux agents to send out runners to notify all Indians in the unceded territory to move onto the reservation by January 31, 1876. Otherwise, they would be certified as hostile and the army would come after them. Having thus made the Indian Bureau publicly responsible for a military offensive, Commissioner E. P. Smith resigned, and another Smith, J. Q., replaced him.
Runners carried the government’s ultimatum to the winter camps on the Yellowstone and its tributaries. Even had the Indians been given ample time, and even had the season been congenial to travel, it is doubtful if many would have made an effort to comply. Not unexpectedly, January 31, 1876, came and went without measurable response. On February 1, therefore, Secretary Chandler notified Secretary Belknap that “Said Indians are hereby turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper under the circumstances”; and the army, “as requested by the Interior Department,” promptly began organizing the winter campaign Inspector Watkins had called for in November.
The stage had been deftly set for a military solution to the long-festering Sioux problem. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the sequence of events beginning with the Watkins report of November 9 and ending with Interior’s action of February 1 certifying as hostile all Indians off the reservation proceeded according to a scenario carefully worked out at the White House on November 3. Thus began “Sitting Bull’s War.”28
General Sheridan saw success dependent on a quick move against the Indians while they lay vulnerable in their winter camps and before they received the usual spring reinforcements from the agencies. “Unless they are caught before early spring,” he warned, “they cannot be caught at all.”29 Not until February 8, however, was Sheridan able to signal the advance to his subordinate generals, Terry in St. Paul and Crook in Omaha. Already Terry had learned that Sitting Bull was not on the Little Missouri, as reported, but about 200 miles farther west. This meant that the swift cavalry thrust Terry had hoped Custer might make from Fort Lincoln would have to be given up and an expedition involving considerably more preparation organized. Heavy snows slowed the concentration of the Seventh Cavalry at Fort Lincoln and stopped the flow of supplies over the Northern Pacific from St. Paul. Gradually, Terry’s winter campaign came more and more to look like a spring or even a summer campaign.30
Meanwhile, General Crook was also discovering how powerful an antagonist a northern Plains winter could be. With his customary drive, he managed to have an expedition assembled at Fort Fetterman, Wyoming, by the end of February 1876. Consisting of five troops of the Second Cavalry, five troops of the Third, and two companies of the Fourth Infantry, it numbered almost 900 officers, enlisted men, and civilians. Crook had brought his pack trains from Arizona, and five trains of eighty mules each, supplemented by about eighty wagons, hauled forage and other provisions. Crook assigned command of the expedition to the affable and elderly colonel of the Third Cavalry, Joseph J. Reynolds, whose name had recently been tainted by contractor scandals in Texas. Crook went along himself, ostensibly as an observer but, except for one short, crucial period, actually in command. “Shrouded from head to foot in huge wrappings of wool and fur,” according to
Crook’s aide, the men of the Bighorn expedition swung out of Fort Fetterman under clear skies on March 1 and headed up the old Bozeman Trail.31
The worst adversary turned out to be the weather. For four days, March 7–10, a “norther” pummeled the command, piling up snow and dropping the temperature below zero. The wagons had been left under infantry guard on Crazy Woman’s Fork, and the troops suffered through tentless nights. Grimly they pushed on to the Tongue River and, following Indian signs, down that stream. Driving wind and bitter cold came in the wake of the storm. On three nights the mercury congealed in the thermometer. Ice and snow made marching treacherous and exhausting.
Crook turned east, toward the Powder. On March 16 the scouts spied a pair of Indians headed east. Possibly to afford Reynolds a chance to polish his tarnished reputation,32 Crook gave him the mission of following them. Three of the two-troop squadrons into which the cavalry had been divided, about 300 men, moved out with Reynolds in the early evening. The remaining two squadrons and the pack trains stayed with Crook.
During the night the scouts discovered the Indian village, numbering about 100 lodges, in a cottonwood grove beside Powder River. At the time, the troops believed that it belonged to Crazy Horse. Subsequent evidence strongly indicates that it consisted mostly of Old Bear’s Cheyennes and some visiting Oglala Sioux under He Dog, about 200 warriors and their families.33 Reynolds’ plan to strike the village from two directions miscarried because the scouts had not described its location or the topographical character of its approaches with sufficient exactitude. Nevertheless, one squadron managed to get into the village, drive its occupants into the bluffs bordering the valley, and begin the destruction of the lodges and their contents. Another squadron seized the pony herd, some 600 to 800 head. Then the warriors counterattacked. The leadership of Reynolds and two of the squadron commanders proved unequal to the occasion, and the troops withdrew with more haste than dignity, leaving the bodies of two soldiers to the enemy. Compounding the humiliation, that night the Indians recaptured most of their pony herd.
Frontier Regulars Page 32