Frontier Regulars
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Spotted Tail’s mission lasted almost two months. The new terms, coupled with the chief’s great prestige, dissolved most of the opposition. Upon his return on April 5, he could report that virtually all the hostiles had agreed to surrender. Throughout the spring weeks of 1877, they came in large groups and small to surrender to the army and settle at the agencies. Altogether, more than 3,000 turned themselves in at Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Cheyenne River Agencies. Only 300, almost all Cheyennes, surrendered at Tongue River Cantonment—in Miles’ mind another cause for resentment of Crook, since large numbers of Indians, having negotiated with Miles, were on their way to surrender to him when they learned of Spotted Tail’s approach with possibly more generous terms. On May 6 the Oglalas came in to Red Cloud Agency led by Crazy Horse himself. He threw three Winchester rifles on the ground. With Sitting Bull in Canada, the great Sioux War seemed to be at an end.25
But not quite. Fifty-one lodges, mostly Miniconjous under Lame Deer, had separated from Crazy Horse on the Powder. Vowing never to surrender, these Sioux headed for the Rosebud to hunt buffalo. Miles learned of this movement from the Indians who surrendered to him on April 22. Five days later the Second Cavalry squadron from Fort Ellis, Capt. Edward Ball commanding, reported to him for duty. On May 1, with Ball’s cavalry and six infantry companies (two of the Fifth and four of the Twenty-second), Miles started up the Tongue to look for Lame Deer. Some of the recent hostiles, most notably the Miniconjou Hump and the Cheyennes White Bull and Brave Wolf, went along as scouts.26
Sixty-three miles up the Tongue, Miles cut loose from his wagons. Leaving three infantry companies to guard the train and the other three to follow, he moved swiftly westward with the cavalry. The scouts found Lame Deer’s camp on an eastern tributary of the Rosebud, Muddy Creek. At dawn on May 7 Miles led the four cavalry troops in a charge on the village. The surprised Sioux fled up the slopes beyond the tepees. One troop, assisted by the Indian scouts, seized the pony herd, 450 head.
Cut off from retreat, a small party of Sioux, including Lame Deer and the head warrior, Iron Star, were induced by Hump to surrender to Miles. Agitated and fearful, both laid their rifles on the ground. Lame Deer grasped Miles’ hand and Iron Star the hand of Adj. George W. Baird. At this crucial moment a scout rode up and covered the Indians with his rifle. Instantly, both seized their rifles from the ground, and Lame Deer fired point-blank at Miles. Miles dodged and the bullet struck and killed a cavalryman behind him. The two Indians raced up a nearby hillside as Miles’ party opened fire. Lame Deer was cut down. Iron Star tried to carry him but had to give up the attempt. Topping a hill, Iron Star ran head-on into the full troop of cavalry. The troop commander, Capt. James W. Wheelan, dropped the war leader with his pistol.
Fourteen Sioux had been left dead on the Muddy Creek battlefield. Miles lost four enlisted men killed and one officer and six enlisted men wounded. The cavalry pursued the fleeing Indians down the creek to the Rosebud, then returned to burn the village. More than half the captured ponies were slaughtered. The balance were taken back to Tongue River Cantonment and used to convert four companies of Miles’ regiment into mounted infantry.
The fugitives from the Battle of Muddy Creek, some 225 people under Lame Deer’s son, Fast Bull, kept Miles occupied most of the summer of 1877. Even though the mass surrenders of the spring made unnecessary the elaborate buildup envisioned by Sheridan, Miles received substantial reinforcements. Besides the Second Cavalry squadron, eleven troops of the Seventh Cavalry under Colonel Sturgis, four companies of the First Infantry and two of the Eleventh saw service under Miles. In various combinations, chiefly under Majs. Henry M. Lazelle and James Brisbin, Miles’ troops scoured the Tongue, the Powder, and the Little Missouri in pursuit of Fast Bull. There were occasional skirmishes, but it was the constant harassment that finally broke the will to resist. In small groups, beginning in late July and ending in September, Fast Bull’s people made their way to Camp Sheridan, near Spotted Tail Agency, and surrendered.27
Miles used part of his command to construct the two permanent posts for which Congress had appropriated funds the previous August, in the aftermath of the Custer disaster. He built one adjacent to the Tongue River Cantonment. The other occupied bluffs overlooking the confluence of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn Rivers, fifteen miles north of the Custer Battlefield. In November the former was named Fort Keogh, in honor of a captain slain at the Little Bighorn, and the latter Fort Custer.
On July 16, 1877, as the buildings of Fort Keogh rose from the valley at the mouth of Tongue River, the steamer Rosebud deposited Generals Sherman and Terry and their staffs on the Yellowstone shore. A round of inspections and evening socializing reached a climax two days later in a formal retreat ceremony. The General of the Army pinned medals to the tunics of thirty soldiers in recognition of combat heroism. To the accompaniment of the regimental band, the Fifth Infantry, two battalions afoot and one mounted on the Indian ponies seized at Muddy Creek, paraded for the dignitaries.28
The band, the flags, and the medals symbolized the dawn of a new day in the Yellowstone Valley. Scarcely a year earlier a white man entered this country at his peril. Now Forts Keogh and Custer planted the army in the very heart of the Sioux domain. Although Sitting Bull remained unbroken, General Sherman, visiting the site of Fort Custer, could truthfully declare: “The Sioux Indians can never again regain this country.”
Throughout the summer of 1877, tension gripped the Indians of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies. The hope raised by Crook and Miles of agencies in their own country turned to disappointment and bitterness. The Northern Cheyennes left for distant places almost immediately after surrendering. As the Commissioner of Indian Affairs explained with a certain lack of candor, they “were suddenly seized by a desire to remove to Indian Territory,” and on May 28, escorted by a troop of the Fourth Cavalry, 937 of them began a seventy-day trek to the agency of their southern kinsmen.29 The Brulés and Oglalas unhappily contemplated a move, too—back to the Missouri River. The Indian appropriation act of August 15, 1876, had decreed that rations for the Sioux be issued at locations on the Missouri River. In signing the Black Hills treaty, the chiefs had consented.
But the source of greatest apprehension, to Indians as well as whites, was Crazy Horse. “This incorrigible wild man,” as the agent described him, was “silent, sullen, lordly and dictatorial.” He was also unpredictable, and the agency Indians feared he would set off an explosion that would hurt them all. Crazy Horse apparently believed that Crook had promised him an agency in the Powder River country, and the talk of going to the Missouri unsettled him. Also, the enlistment of Sioux scouts in August to help fight the Nez Percés angered the chief. He was sure they were to be used against Sitting Bull. The leading chiefs of the agency feared that Crazy Horse was preparing to bolt the reservation and go back to the Powder River country, and they drew back from him.30
The issue of the scouts threatened to precipitate a confrontation. The post commander at Camp Robinson, Lt. Col. Luther P. Bradley, summoned reinforcements from Fort Laramie. General Crook, en route for the corner of his department threatened by the Nez Percé War, detoured by way of Camp Robinson and, on September 2, ordered Bradley to arrest Crazy Horse. After a series of misadventures, the chief was finally taken into custody on September 5. Both Indians and soldiers were in the group that attempted to disarm him two days later. He fought back, and in the scuffle he received a mortal stab wound, whether from his own or another Indian’s knife or an infantryman’s bayonet has been debated ever since. When he died during the night, a Miniconjou chief voiced the sentiment of many saddened but greatly relieved Indians: “It is good, he has looked for death, and it has come.”31
Late in September a delegation of chiefs headed by Red Cloud and Spotted Tail went to Washington to lay their grievances before the new Great Father. True to his promise, General Crook was there, too. urging that the Sioux not be forced to settle on the Missouri. President Hayes promised that if the Indians spen
t the winter on the Missouri, where their provisions had already been stockpiled, they could select new agency sites farther west in the spring. Even so, while the movement was in progress in late October, Crazy Horse’s band and other “northern” Sioux, some 2,000 in number, broke free and headed back to the Powder. Ultimately, they joined Sitting Bull in Canada. The rest, after many tribulations, finally forced a reluctant government to make good the President’s promise. In 1878 Spotted Tail and the Brulés settled on the south fork of White River, and Spotted Tail Agency became Rosebud Agency. Red Cloud and the Oglalas chose a location still farther west, on White Clay Creek, and Red Cloud Agency became Pine Ridge Agency.32
The Northern Cheyennes were less successful than the Sioux in asserting the right to live in their own country. Only after one of history’s great tragedies dramatized the depth of their conviction did the remnants of this tribe win an agency in the north. The Northern Cheyennes arrived at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency in Indian Territory in August 1877. Unacclimated and greviously homesick, they died by the dozen during the winter of 1877–78. Finally, on September 7, 1878, Dull Knife and Little Wolf led 300 people in a desperate break for their northern homeland. Cavalry from Fort Reno and Camp Supply took up the chase and engaged them in a few inconclusive skirmishes. Troops also converged from posts in the Departments of the Platte and Dakota. Frightened Kansas citizens mobilized for self-defense. Violating a strict prohibition laid down by acute;the chiefs, a few of the warriors killed some settlers. North of the Platte, in Nebraska, a dispute between Dull Knife and Little Wolf divided the fugitives. Part went with Dull Knife to surrender to the soldiers at Camp Robinson. The rest, under Little Wolf, continued northward in hopes of reaching the Yellowstone Valley.33
Dull Knife and his followers surrendered to a cavalry patrol near Camp Robinson on October 23, 1878. Domiciled in a barracks building at the post, for two months they resisted all appeals to return peacefully to Indian Territory. They had given up expecting to be allowed to live with the Sioux at Pine Ridge, and they would die before going south again. They meant it, as the post commander, Capt. Henry W. Wessells, Jr.,34 discovered when he received orders to make them go. Early in January, after attempting unsuccessfully to persuade the women and children to leave the barracks, he cut off all food, water, and fuel. Nearly a week of hunger, thirst, and cold drove the prisoners to an almost suicidal break for freedom. On the bitterly cold night of January 9, 1879, with the ground covered by snow, they burst from the barracks windows, shot the guards with firearms the women had secreted at the time of surrender, and fled the post. The startled garrison turned out swiftly and gave chase, shooting down the escaping people as they were overtaken. Almost half—men, women, and children—fell before the army rifles, but the bloodbath earned such sympathy that the government relented. The survivors, including Dull Knife, settled at Pine Ridge.35
After parting with Dull Knife in October 1878, Little Wolf and his people eluded the army all winter. On March 27, 1879, on the Little Missouri River in the extreme southeastern tip of Montana, they surrendered to Lt. William Philo Clark and two troops of the Second Cavalry, out of Fort Keogh. Largely responsible for this result were the Two Moons Cheyennes, who had been serving Colonel Miles with great distinction ever since surrendering to him in April 1877. Little Wolf and his followers joined these Cheyennes at Fort Keogh, and the men signed on as scouts. In 1880, upon Miles’ application, the Dull Knife people at Pine Ridge were also permitted to move to Fort Keogh. Gradually, as the need for the military services of the Indians diminished, they drifted up the Tongue and Rosebud Valleys to make their homes. In 1884 an Executive Order set aside the Tongue River Reservation for their permanent occupancy. Almost within sight of the Muddy Creek Battlefield of 1877, the Lame Deer Agency was established. At last the Northern Cheyennes, like the Sioux, had an agency in their homeland.36
For five years after the campaign of 1876, the specter of Sitting Bull loomed over the northern Plains. While he remained free, the Sioux War could not be regarded as conclusively ended. The first of the Hunkpapas had crossed the boundary into Canada in December 1876. Sitting Bull arrived in the spring of 1877. Including the Crazy Horse people who broke away from the southern agencies in October 1877, the refugee Sioux came to number more than 4,000 Indians in some 600 lodges. Hunkpapa, Oglala, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, and Blackfoot Sioux tribes were all represented. Besides Sitting Bull, prominent chiefs included Gall, Black Moon, No Neck, Iron Dog, Big Road, Low Dog, and Spotted Eagle. Also, in October 1877 about 100 Nez Percé warriors and 50 women under White Bird joined the Sioux. They had slipped away from their people rather than surrender with Chief Joseph to Colonel Miles after the Battle of Bear Paw Mountain (see Chapter Seventeen). Following the buffalo, the refugee Indians scattered over the plains in the vicinity of Wood Mountain and the Cypress Hills.37
The North-West Mounted Police, scarcely four years old, maintained a post, Fort Walsh, on the southern edge of the Cypress Hills. The superintendent, Maj. J. M. Walsh, greeted the refugee bands and let them know exactly what was expected of them. They could stay in the country of the Great Mother only so long as they scrupulously obeyed her laws. Major Walsh and his scarlet-coated policemen treated the Sioux firmly, fairly, and above all consistently, and in return they were accorded not only obedience but respect bordering on reverence.
The influx of so many Sioux created grave dangers. The diminishing buffalo herds in Canada were insufficient to feed even the resident Blackfoot, Cree, Assinniboine, and other Indians, much less the newcomers. With the prospect of famine came the prospect of inter-tribal strife and of forays across the boundary in search of buffalo—forays certain to involve American lives and property. Both the Canadian and U.S. governments devoutly desired the Sioux back in the United States on a reservation.
In an attempt to bring about such a result, a commission headed by General Terry arrived at Fort Walsh in October 1877. Lt. Col. James F. Macleod, Commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police, came down from his headquarters to greet the American general and to help Major Walsh impress on the Sioux leaders the gravity of the question they must decide. The Canadian officers believed that Terry, so well known to the Sioux as their recent enemy, was an unwise choice for the mission of persuading them to give up their guns and ponies and go to a reservation. Indeed, Walsh barely succeeded in getting Sitting Bull and his fellow chiefs to meet the U.S. commissioners at all. On October 17, however, the conference took place in the officers’ mess at Fort Walsh. As the police had feared, the chiefs truculently rejected Terry’s overtures and dramatized their feelings by effusively embracing the redcoats while declining even to shake hands with the Americans. “You come here to tell us lies,” Sitting Bull spat at Terry, “but we don’t want to hear them…. Don’t say two more words. Go home where you came from.” Under the circumstances, the commissioners heeded Sitting Bull’s injunction and went home.38
Terry’s failure aroused the scorn of Colonel Miles, who stepped up his campaign to have all of Montana and Dakota placed under his command. Given such a department, he wrote General Sherman early in 1878, and authority “to over-power and govern all these Indian tribes in this region,” he would order the Third Infantry “from the Helena race track” to the mouth of the Musselshell, concentrate infantry from the Missouri River posts at Fort Peck Agency, mobilize the Crows, Arikaras, and Mandans, and in six weeks clear the country of hostile Indians. As Sherman well knew, the hostile Indians were in Canada. To allow the ambitious Miles anywhere near the border with a strong force seemed like a prescription for an international incident. “I cannot make you a Brigadier General,” he wrote Miles on February 9, 1878, “nor can I advise a new department for your special command,” and “most undoubtedly” a violation of British territory would land him in serious trouble. On the same day, Sherman issued orders barring military operations north of the Missouri River unless navigation were threatened or settlers molested.39
Miles would not relent. He gat
hered political support in Montana, and he pressed his own case while in Washington serving on an equipment board in the winter of 1878–79. “I have told him plainly,” an exasperated Sherman exploded to Sheridan, “that I know no way to satisfy his ambitions but to surrender to him absolute power over the whole Army, with President & Congress thrown in…. He wants to remain on the Equipment Board, and at the same time to command all of Terry’s troops, to advance north of the British line, drive back Sitting Bull & Co., and if necessary follow them across the Border as Mackenzie did on the Mexican Border.” Indeed, confirming Sherman’s fears, Miles had solicited his private blessing of a foray into Canada to smash the Sioux such as Mackenzie had led into Mexico against the Kickapoos in 1873 (see Chapter Eighteen). “Because as you explained Generals Sheridan and Mackenzie once consented to act unlawfully in defiance of my authority in a certain political contingency,” Sherman informed Miles, “is no reason why I should imitate so bad an examole.”40
Sherman had no desire to let Miles get near the border, but in the spring and summer of 1879 the Sioux themselves afforded him the opportunity. Famine threatened them in Canada. In fact, about 200 lodges gave up the struggle and returned to their reservations in the United States. Small parties of those not yet ready for such a drastic solution dropped into Montana to hunt buffalo. The Assinniboine agent at Fort Peck, which had been moved down the Missouri to the mouth of Poplar River in 1877, complained of their encroachment on the game resources of his reservation. Miles, therefore, won authority to organize an expedition to drive the Sioux back across the border. Noting that “Genl Miles is too apt to mistake the dictates of his personal ambition for wisdom,” Sherman cautioned Sheridan to insure that he did not precipitate a boundary incident. Sheridan, who regarded the Sioux threat as much exaggerated (“gotten up by traders and Montana interests, helped along by Miles’ scouts”), replied that he would “gradually circumscribe his opportunities north of the Missouri River.”41