Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  19. Nearly all of Meeker’s correspondence and reports are in Senate Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 31. Revealing insights appear in testimony taken by the House Committee on Indian Affairs in January 1880: House Misc. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 38; and by the Ute Commission of 1879: House Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 83.

  20. These events emerge from correspondence printed in extraordinary disorder in Senate Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 30. See also SW, Annual Report (1879), pp. 8–9.

  21. For the exchange of letters between Meeker and Thornburgh, see SW, Annual Report (1879), pp. 9–10. For the meeting between Jack and Thornburgh and other events of the march, see especially testimony of former agent Charles Adams, Captain Payne, Lt. Samuel A. Cherry, and Jack himself in House Misc. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 38.

  22. See Cherry’s testimony in House Misc. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 38, pp. 64–66. Jack’s words are quoted by Agent Charles Adams in testimony in ibid., p. 14. This conforms well with Jack’s own testimony, p. 196.

  23. The best sources for this action are in the testimony of Cherry, Payne, and Jack in ibid. The figure thirty-seven is commonly agreed by Indian sources as total Ute casualties, the other fourteen falling in action with agency employees and a civilian freight train en route to the agency. See especially Adams to Schurz, Oct. 24, 1879, in Senate Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 31, p. 13.

  24. Dodge’s detailed report, Oct. 27, 1879, is in Senate Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 31, pp. 105–8.

  25. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, p. 426. Lt. Col. Robert Williams was Crook’s adjutant general, Maj. M. I. Ludington his quartermaster. See also Wesley Merritt, “Three Indian Campaigns,” reprinted from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (April 1890) as Merritt and the Indian Wars, ed. Barry C. Johnson (London, 1972); and SW, Annual Report (1879), p. 12.

  26. Fort Lewis was established at this site in October 1878. Prucha, Guide to Military Posts, p. 85. For events with this command see Robert G. Athearn, ed., “Major Hough’s March into Southern Ute Country, 1879,” Colorado Magazine, 25 (1948), 97–109.

  27. Senate Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 30, pp. 89, 96.

  28. The commission’s report is in House Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 83.

  29. CIA, Annual Report (1880), pp. xxiv–xxv, 14–18, 193–98.

  30. Douglas, who “had connection with” Mrs. Meeker, was lodged in the Fort Leavenworth prison to await trial, but a year later was quietly released. None other of the twelve was taken into custody.

  31. House Misc. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 38, p. 13.

  32. To Schurz, Oct. 24, 1879, Senate Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., No. 30, p. 14.

  Mexican Border Conflicts, 1870–81

  THE INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY between the United States and Mexico raised no barriers to the passage of Indian raiders. For generations, war parties of Kiowas, Comanches, and occasionally Cheyennes and Arapahoes from the Great Plains regularly stabbed deep into Coahuila and Durango and returned with stock and other plunder, scalps, and captives. Mescalero Apaches from New Mexico and Chiricahua and Western Apaches from Arizona scourged Chihuahua and Sonora. Likewise, Americans from Texas to Arizona suffered constantly from raiders based south of the border. Kickapoos, Lipans, and Apaches, these Indians were refugees from the United States who had found new homes in the mountains of northern Mexico. The incursions of Indians from one nation into the other disturbed relations between the United States and Mexico for years and, in the 1870s and 1880s, presented the U.S. Army with one of its severest challenges.

  Other conditions aggravated the Indian problem along the border. Vast expanses of waterless desert and rough, barren mountains favored the Indians and speedily incapacitated conventional troops. Smugglers, rustlers, bandits, and assorted scoundrels of both countries infected the border with a pervasive spirit of lawlessness. Revolution in Mexico and Reconstruction in Texas added to the disorder. Finally, mutual suspicion and distrust, born of the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War and fed by loud talk in the United States of further territorial gain at Mexico’s expense, inhibited a cooperative approach to border problems.1

  A large share of the U.S. Army occupied the border region. In 1873, for example, more than 800 soldiers garrisoned five posts in the border zone of Arizona and New Mexico, while 2,500 held eight stations along Texas’ Rio Grande frontier.2 For fifteen years most of the latter were black, a circumstance that, exciting the prejudices of Texans and Mexicans alike, heightened tensions. Confusing the racial amalgam still more, a company of Seminole-Negroes helped police the Rio Grande. Originally from Florida, where the blend resulted from the union between Indians and runaway slaves, and more recently refugees from their later home in Indian Territory, the Seminole-Negroes proved highly effective auxiliaries. They owed much of their success to Lt. John L. Bullis, a tough, desert-wise officer detached from the Twenty-fourth Infantry to lead them.3 Despite their strength, U.S. units but rarely apprehended raiding parties from either side of the boundary. Fewer in numbers and often preoccupied with revolutionary concerns, Mexican troops achieved even less success.

  On the American side of the border, the worst destruction centered in the Texas ranch country south and west of San Antonio. The perpetrators of these raids were Lipans, Mescalero Apaches, and Kickapoos. The Lipans, rarely mustering more than thirty warriors under the wily Washa Lobo, usually lived in a village within a dozen miles of Zaragosa. The Mescaleros, about 225 fighting men in four bands, roamed the mountains farther west, south of the Big Bend of the Rio Grande. The Kickapoos, numbering some 1,300, inhabited villages in Nacimiento Canyon of the Sabinas River, near Santa Rosa.4

  From their desert and mountain lairs, the raiders slipped across the Rio Grande in parties of five to twenty-five. Circling north of Forts Duncan and Clark, they awaited a full moon before sweeping through the abundant cattle and horse herds along the upper Nueces and its tributaries. Any luckless cowboy or traveler who got in the way was left butchered. By hard riding, the warriors could be safely back across the river with their stolen stock before the troops could intervene.

  Between 1865 and 1873 the Kickapoos were the principal culprits. With land grants and other inducements, the Mexican government had encouraged them to migrate from Kansas and help defend the frontier settlements against Kiowa and Comanche marauders. In 1862, and again in 1865, Texans had attacked emigrating bands. In retaliation, the Kickapoos had declared open war on Texas and year after year had prosecuted it with deadly effect. With the connivance of Mexican officialdom, the Indians disposed of thousands of stolen cattle, horses, and other loot to traders in Santa Rosa and other Mexican towns.

  Moved by the protests and appeals of the victims of these raids, in 1870 the State Department sought Mexico’s permission for U.S. troops to cross the boundary in pursuit of Indians. Constitutionally, only the Mexican Congress could grant this concession, and political disaster awaited the Mexican President who asked for it. Trying another approach, in 1871 the Indian Bureau, with Mexican aid that was more apparent than real, launched an effort to induce the Kickapoos to return to their American reservation. Before these negotiations could bear fruit, however, President Grant, in January 1873, announced a more aggressive policy.5

  To carry out this policy, the President directed the transfer of Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie and the Fourth Cavalry to the border. The energetic Mackenzie, who already stood high in Grant’s favor, had earned wide recognition for his recent operations against the Comanches (see p. 211). The regiment began to rendezvous at Fort Clark in March 1873. On April 11 Mackenzie appeared, accompanied by Secretary of War Belknap and General Sheridan. In San Antonio they had met with the department commander, General Augur. In further secret sessions at Fort Clark, Mackenzie received his instructions. No record seems to have been made, and the only source is Mackenzie’s adjutant, Lt. Robert G. Carter, who was not present but whom the colonel took into his confidence. Sheridan, according to Carte
r, directed Mackenzie to plan and execute a “campaign of annihilation, obliteration and complete destruction.” Pressed for more explicit orders, he is said to have pounded the table and declared vehemently: “Damn the orders! Damn the authority! You are to go ahead on your own plan of action, and your authority and backing shall be Gen. Grant and myself. With us behind you in whatever you do to clean up this situation, you can rest assured of the fullest support. You must assume the risk. We will assume the final responsibility should any result.”6

  There can be little question that Sheridan intended, as Mackenzie understood him to intend, a strike into Mexico to destroy the raiders in their homes. Dispatching three trusted scouts to reconnoiter the Kickapoo villages, Mackenzie imposed a harsh regimen of drill and target practice on his troops. Besides the spies in Mexico, only Mackenzie and Carter knew that the preparations looked to a campaign across the border. Carter recalled the colonel’s temperament, never very stable, as one of acute nervousness and irritability during this trying period.

  Mackenzie’s spies reported to him on the night of May 16, 1873. They had found three villages on the upper San Rodrigo River about forty miles west of Piedras Negras. Numbering fifty to sixty lodges each, one was Kickapoo, one Lipan, and one Mescalero. Moreover, most of the Kickapoo fighting men had left their homes that morning. Mackenzie issued marching orders at once. Rendezvousing the next day between Fort Clark and the Rio Grande, the cavalrymen crossed the river at nightfall. The expedition consisted of six troops of the Fourth Cavalry, about 400 strong, and a heavily laden mule train. Also, Lieutenant Bullis and twenty-five Seminole-Negro scouts from Fort Duncan rode with the command.

  Next morning, May 18, Mackenzie reached his objective. Wave after wave of troopers swept through he Kickapoo village near Remolino with carbines blazing. The last wave dismounted to fire the grass lodges. With the warriors absent, the women, children, and old men fought desperately but ineffectively. Nineteen died in the defense and forty were taken captive. One soldier was killed, two wounded. Destroying the other two villages, whose occupants had fled, the troops and their prisoners hurried back to the river. Not until safely on the U.S. side of the border on the nineteenth, exhausted by almost sixty hours of sleepless activity, did they dare pause for rest.7

  Mackenzie’s Kickapoo expedition was a bold and daring maneuver. A collision with Mexicans would almost certainly have brought on a rupture in relations between Mexico and the United States. Only swift movement prevented such a collision, and this proved possible only because the Battle of Remolino burdened Mackenzie with so few wounded men to impede his withdrawal from Mexican soil. Although public opinion in Mexico reacted with predictable outrage, the precarious new regime of President Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada rode out the storm and confined its action to a belated and surprisingly mild protest.

  The vagueness of Mackenzie’s authority made his invasion of Mexico all the more daring. He seems to have acted entirely on Sheridan’s implication, orally conveyed, that President Grant favored this course. How accurately Sheridan understood and represented the President’s desires is speculative. General Sherman, if he shared in the secret at all, disapproved. “McKenzie [sic] will of course be sustained,” he wrote Sheridan on June 3, “but for the sake of history, I would like to have to him report clearly the facts that induced him to know that the Indians he attacked and captured were the identical Indians that engaged in raiding Texas. Had he followed a fresh trail there would be law to back him.” The new Mexican President seemed friendly to the United States and deserved support, but he “will find it hard to preserve his popularity if he submits to positive insult from us, the ‘Grin-goes.’” Sheridan’s reply, innocent of any understanding of diplomatic requirements, was that of course Mackenzie had struck guilty Indians, for “there is none of them guiltless.”8 One wonders how firmly the United States would have backed Mackenzie had his adventure provoked a major diplomatic confrontation.

  Pitting half a cavalry regiment against a handful of women, old men, and children, the Battle of Remolino can hardly be classed a great feat of arms. It is even less creditable because Mackenzie knew the fighting men had departed and hastened to strike before they returned. Indeed, Remolino is one of the rare instances in which the Regular Army stands convicted of warring purposely, rather than incidentally or accidentally, on women and children; and the boastful writings of Beaumont, Carter, and other veterans conceal the true character of the opposition. Nevertheless, Remolino produced results. For the first time, the Kickapoos began to negotiate seriously with U.S. commissioners for a return to the United States. Three months after Remolino, 317 began the trek to Indian Territory, and two years later another 115 made the journey. Also, fearful of further punishment, those who remained in Mexico dramatically scaled down their Texas raids.9

  For three years after Mackenzie’s blow fell on the Kickapoos, Texas enjoyed a respite from incursions of Indians based in Mexico. Grateful Texans heaped praise on the Fourth Cavalry and its hard-hitting young colonel. Coahuila, too, at last gained relief from Kiowa and Comanche depredators. Their conquest in the Red River War of 1874–75 (see Chapter Thirteen) broke the deadly pattern of raids from which Mexicans had suffered for a century and a half. By 1876, however, the lesson of Remolino had dimmed, and once more violence came to the Rio Grande border. Kickapoos participated occasionally, but now the principal offenders were Lipans and Mescalero Apaches.

  The raiders stirred up commanders even less respectful of diplomatic amenities than Mackenzie. Brig. Gen. Edward O. C. Ord commanded the Department of Texas. Of somewhat disorderly and imprecise mind, he was a vigorous old campaigner with a reputation for physical prowess. “I’ll bet today he can ride that frontier with any corporal,” General Sherman told a congressional committee. Sherman added that as a young subaltern Ord “would swim rivers with ice floating in them when he might have bridged them, and he would go over the tops of mountains when he might have gone around.”10 Sherman thus unwittingly revealed why Ord, temperamentally, was not the most appropriate commander for a troubled international frontier. The officer charged with the upriver border defenses seemed an unlikely choice for any field assignment. But despite a mountainous frame that would have immobilized most men, Lt. Col. William R. Shafter, Twenty-fourth Infantry, had led his black soldiers in punishing campaigns all over Texas for almost a decade. Coarse, profane, a harsh disciplinarian, “Pecos Bill” had proved himself an effective leader.11

  Ord and Shafter shared the belief that the best way of dealing with the new wave of marauding was to root out the marauders in their homes, as Mackenzie had done, even though it violated the territory of a friendly neighbor. After a particularly bloody raid in the spring of 1876, Ord instructed Shafter to go after the offenders in their Mexican villages. In June Shafter began to probe the mountains and deserts of Coahuila for the Indians. On July 30 a detachment from his command—Lieutenant Bullis with twenty Seminole-Negro scouts and twenty black cavalrymen—smashed a Lipan village of twenty-three lodges near Zaragosa. For the rest of 1876 and into 1877, Ord and Shafter played fast and loose with the doctrine of “hot pursuit” by which they justified their incursions. Although a rough correlation could be demonstrated between Indian raids in Texas and the U.S. response in Coahuila, Shafter’s columns rarely crossed the border in hot pursuit or even on an enemy trail. But time and again Bullis’ scouts and the Tenth Cavalrymen at Forts Duncan and Clark, always under orders from Shafter, thrust into Mexico.12

  The 1876 crossings aroused little response from the Mexican government. For one thing, except for the march that ended in the fight near Zaragosa on July 30, Shafter’s columns kept west of the settlements, in almost uninhabited deserts and mountains imperfectly known even to the Mexicans. For another, Mexican officials gave tacit consent to the operations—or at least so Shafter claimed. Finally, the revolution launched in 1876 by Porfirio Díaz wholly occupied President Lerdo’s state governments in a struggle for self-preservation. By early 1877 Diaz had
triumphed, in part by exploiting Mexican hostility toward the United States. The kind of “consent” underlying Shafter’s Mexican adventures, if indeed it ever existed, could no longer be expected.

  An international incident occurred almost at once. The new governor of Coahuila proclaimed aid to U.S. forces operating on Mexican soil a treasonable offense, and officials at Piedras Negras imprisoned two Mexicans who had guided Shafter to Zargosa the previous July. When word reached General Ord that they would be shot as traitors, he ordered Shafter to liberate them. At dawn on April 3, 1877, citizens of Piedras Negras awoke to find three troops of the Tenth Cavalry ringing the town, two companies of the Twenty-fourth Infantry drawn up on the plaza, and a determined Shafter demanding release of the prisoners. But Mexican authorities had been wakeful enough to spirit them into the interior before Shafter could spring his trap, and he withdrew as gracefully as possible. Mexico loudly protested this indignity to her sovereignty.13

  A sort of war of nerves developed between the new Mexican President and the new U.S. President, Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes used Diaz’ need for U.S. recognition as a lever to force Mexico to remedy the border situation, and Diaz used the U.S. demand for such a remedy, particularly for a treaty permitting border crossings in hot pursuit, as a lever to pry loose recognition. Although the two governments remained in “unofficial” diplomatic communication in Washington and Mexico City, neither president showed any disposition to give in first.14

  On June 1, Hayes opened still further the gulf between the two countries. Colonel Shafter had reported on May 10 that the Indians were now taking refuge in Mexican towns, and in an endorsement General Ord had asked “how far in such cases I can authorize the troops to go.” The answer came out of a meeting of the President with his Cabinet. Ord was free, Secretary of War McCrary advised General Sherman on June 1, “when in pursuit of a band of the marauders, and when his troops are either in sight of them or upon a fresh trail, to follow them across the Rio Grande, and to overtake and punish them.”