Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  The process of disarmament, however, stirred emotions on both sides. The Indians refused to produce the Winchester repeaters so much in evidence the day before, and the soldiers had to search for them in the lodges and beneath the blankets of both men and women. As tempers rose, a medicine man named Yellow Bird pranced about performing incantations and calling for resistance. In a scuffle between a soldier and an Indian, a rifle went off. Instantly the young men threw off their blankets, leveled their rifles, and sent a volley crashing into the nearest formation of soldiers.

  In a murderous, face-to-face melee, Indians and soldiers shot, stabbed, and clubbed one another. Women and children scattered in panic as bullets laced the tepees. The close-range action ended abruptly, and the combatants broke from the council square. On the hilltop the artillerymen jerked their lanyards. A storm of exploding shells leveled the village, sought out fleeing knots of Sioux, and filled a ravine where many took shelter with deadly flying shrapnel. Gradually the fighting subsided as the surviving Indians fled the battlefield. They left it a scene of frightful carnage: more than 150 Indians dead, including Big Foot and Yellow Bird, and another 50 wounded; 25 officers and soldiers killed and 39 wounded.17 Wagons bore the injured to improvised hospitals at Pine Ridge Agency. A snowstorm made white mounds of the bodies left scattered around the battlefield. On New Year’s Day of 1891 burial parties gathered the Indian dead and interred them in a mass grave on the hill from which the Hotchkiss guns had wrought their devastation.

  General Miles viewed Wounded Knee as an outrageous blunder. He relieved Forsyth of command and convened a court of inquiry to probe the killing of women and children and the deployment of the regiment in such fatal proximity to the Indians. The testimony showed conclusively that the troops, with several exceptions, had made every possible effort to avoid harming noncombatants. The testimony also supported Forsyth’s placement of his units for the task of disarming the Indians, although here the judgments were less persuasive, especially in light of Miles’ repeated injunctions to his subordinates never to let their units mix with Indians, friendly or not. Despite the conclusions of the court, Miles branded Forsyth guilty of incompetence, inexperience, and irresponsibility, and of disobeying orders. The Secretary of War and General Schofield disagreed, however, and ordered the colonel restored to his command.

  Although Miles judged too harshly, Forsyth’s dispositions do invite criticism. He deployed his units to disarm the Indians, not to fight a battle. But the possibility of a battle, no matter how remote, should have been considered and his troops kept at a greater distance from the Indians. At it was, he exposed some of his men to deadly close-range fire not only from the Indians but from one another as well. Moreover, the presence of so many soldiers in the very midst of the Indians doubtless contributed to their nervousness and helped provoke the conflict. But a more fundamental error, chargeable to Miles and Brooke, was the order to disarm the Indians. This stemmed from a misapprehension, by all the military chieftains save Sumner, of the true temper of Big Foot. Had he and his people simply been escorted to Pine Ridge, bloodshed would have been avoided and, it may well be, a helpful, or at least not a harmful, influence injected into the situation there.

  Because so many Indians perished, because at least sixty-two of the dead were women and children, Wounded Knee has come down in the national conscience as a massacre. But massacre implies deliberate and indiscriminate slaughter, such as Chivington perpetrated at Sand Creek in 1864. Wounded Knee was not deliberate; overcharged emotions touched off a bloodbath that neither side intended or foresaw. Nor was it indiscriminate; the troops tried to spare women and children, and did spare many, but they were mixed up with the men and often impossible to identify in the smoke and confusion. “Tragedy” is a label that more accurately suggests the causes and progress of this most regrettable of frontier encounters. Even so, the vivid memory of shattered corpses and maimed survivors makes the Indians’ preference for “massacre” wholly understandable.

  The consequences of Wounded Knee proved far more disastrous than any Big Foot could possibly have wrought by appearing at Pine Ridge in good health with rifle in hand. Brooke’s latest peace effort had succeeded. The dancers, under Short Bull and Kicking Bear, had abandoned the Stronghold on December 27 and were making their way slowly and apprehensively toward the agency. Wounded Knee halted the march. It also stampeded Two Strike’s Brules, who had surrendered on December 15, and some of the Oglalas under Little Wound, Big Road, and No Water. Dragging a protesting Red Cloud with them, these Indians fled the agency and joined with the people from the Stronghold in an immense camp laid out along White Clay Creek about fifteen miles north of Pine Ridge Agency.

  On the day after Wounded Knee, December 30, warriors from this camp fired some sheds near the Drexel Mission church four miles north of the agency. Brooke sent the Seventh Cavalry to investigate. Forsyth failed to secure the ridges on both sides of the valley and allowed himself to be drawn into a trap, with one squadron pinned down by enemy fire and the other prevented by Indians on the ridges from going to its support. Major Henry’s squadron of the Ninth Cavalry joined the fray. They had just completed an all-night march of fifty miles from White River, but they urged their exhausted mounts to the rescue, drove the Sioux from their dominating positions, and extricated the Seventh from its embarrassing predicament. Drexel Mission reflected no credit on Forsyth and cost him one man killed, an officer mortally wounded, and five enlisted men wounded.

  Now based at Pine Ridge, General Miles undertook the task of neutralizing the “hostile” village. It contained about 4,000 people, some 800 to 1,000 fighting men. But Miles had it ringed, at cautious distances, with 3,500 soldiers. Another 2,000 stood by at still greater distances. During the early days of January 1891, he slowly contracted the ring while making peace overtures through Indian emissaries. Confused, frightened, alternately defiant and submissive, quarreling among themselves, pressed gently by troops who drew in a little closer each day, the chiefs moved slowly and hesitantly toward the agency. Gradually the great village dissolved, and the people streamed into the agency. The final surrender took place on January 15 when Kicking Bear yielded his rifle to General Miles.

  In scarcely more than two weeks Miles had ended the Ghost Dance uprising without the further violence that, in the aftermath of Wounded Knee, appeared certain. He succeeded because he understood Indian psychology. He foresaw that, given the divided leadership in the Sioux village, a careful mix of diplomacy and the threat of force could bring about the desired result without more bloodshed. With great patience and skill, he had pursued this course to a successful conclusion.

  Six days after the surrender Miles’ army staged a final grand review. A stiff gale shrouded Pine Ridge Agency in clouds of dust as regiment after regiment paraded before the general and his staff. In compact ranks the First Infantry marched behind its colonel, “Pecos Bill” Shafter. Eugene Carr’s saber flashed from his spurs to his fur cap as the Sixth Cavalry trotted by. “Henry’s Brunettes,” black faces grim behind carbines at the salute, followed their gaunt major, buried deep in a buffalo overcoat. Massed trumpets shrilled as the troopers of the Seventh Cavalry approached. The storm whipped the bright yellow linings of their capes, and Shafter’s regimental band swung into “Garryowen,” the rollicking air that had spurred Custer’s charge at the Washita twenty-two years earlier. Miles gave way to a rising excitement, waved his hat vigorously, then hung it on the pommel of his saddle while the wind tore at his graying hair. On the hillsides, however, hundreds of blanket-swathed Sioux watched impassively. As the artillery clattered off the parade field, emptying the valley of all save the blasting dust, they witnessed the curtain fall on the four-century drama of the Indian wars.18

  The Ghost Dance was the Indian’s last hope. Accommodation had failed. Retreat had failed. War had failed. And now Wounded Knee made it plain that religion had failed. No choice remained but to submit to the dictates of the government. Whether coincidentally or no
t, in this very year of 1890 the statisticians of the Census Bureau discovered that they could no longer trace a distinct frontier of settlement on the map of the United States. Only three years later a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner appeared before the convention of the American Historical Association in Chicago to present a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

  In the movement that Turner traced and that he perceived as a central determinant of American history, the frontier Regulars of 1866—90 had figured prominently. Their part is recorded in more than 1,000 combat actions, involving 2,000 military casualties and almost 6,000 Indian casualties.19 But other statistics are revealing too. In the year of Wounded Knee four transcontinental railroads spanned the West, where in 1866 there had been none. In 1890, 8.5 million settlers occupied the Indian’s former hunting grounds, where in 1866 there had been less than 2 million. The buffalo herds that blackened the Great Plains with perhaps 13 million animals in 1866 had vanished by 1880 before the rifles of professional hide hunters.20 These figures tell more about the means by which the Indian was subjugated than do battle statistics.

  No one perceived the true military role more clearly than Sherman himself, who could have been pardoned had he claimed full credit for his beloved Regulars. Reflecting upon the tranquility that lay on the frontier at the time of his retirement in 1883, he concluded: “The Army has been a large factor in producing this result, but it is not the only one. Immigration and the occupation by industrious farmers and miners of lands vacated by the aborigines have been largely instrumental to that end, but the railroad which used to follow in the rear now goes forward with the picket-line in the great battle of civilization with barbarism, and has become the greater cause.”21

  Turner himself, taking an imaginary station at historic South Pass, failed even to see the soldiers among that procession of conquerors that passed before his mind’s eye. The army deserved his mention, but only as one of many groups that pushed the frontier westward and doomed the Indian. Other frontiersmen—trappers, traders, miners, stockmen, farmers, railroad builders, merchants—share largely in the process. They, rather than the soldiers, deprived the Indian of the land and the sustenance that left him no alternative but to submit. The army’s particular contribution was to precipitate a final collapse that had been ordained by other forces. In this perspective the frontier army finds its true significance.

  Thus the frontier army was not, as many of its leaders saw it, the heroic vanguard of civilization, crushing the savages and opening the West to settlers. Still less was it the barbaric band of butchers, eternally waging unjust war against unoffending Indians, that is depicted in the humanitarian literature of the nineteenth century and the atonement literature of the twentieth. Rather, the frontier army was a conventional military force trying to control, by conventional military methods, a people that did not behave like a conventional enemy and, indeed, quite often was not an enemy at all. This is the most difficult of all military assignments, whether in Africa, Asia, or the American West. The bluecoats carried it out as well as could be expected in the absence of a later generation’s perspective and hindsight. In the process they wrote a dramatic and stirring chapter of American history, one that need not be diminished by today’s recognition of the montrous wrong it inflicted on the Indian.

  NOTES

  1. SW, Annual Report (1878), p. 194.

  2. Testimony before House military committee, Jan. 31, 1874, House Reports, 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 384, p. 276.

  3. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, chap. 7. Priest, Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren, chap. 2. Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian, pp. 159–67. D’Elia, “The Argument over Civilian or Military Indian Control.” For subsequent indications of controversy, see John Gibbon, “Transfer of Indian Bureau to War Department,” American Catholic Quarterly Review, 19 (1894), 244–59; and L. D. Green, “The Army and the Indian,” Harper’s Weekly, 38 (May 19, 1894), 471.

  4. See especially Richard N. Ellis, “The Humanitarian Generals,” Western Historical Quarterly, 3 (1972), 169–78; and Ellis, “The Humanitarian Soldiers,” Journal of Arizona History, 10 (1969), 55–62.

  5. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, p. 436.

  6. SW, Annual Report (1884), p. 103.

  7. The three major generalcies in the 1880s were occupied as follows: (1) McDowell, 1872–82 (ret.); Pope, 1882 (ret.); Terry, 1886–88 (ret.); Crook, 1888–90 (died). (2) Schofield, 1869–95 (prom.). (3) Hancock, 1866–86 (died); Howard, 1886–94 (ret.). The six brigadier generalcies were occupied as follows: (1) Pope, 1866–82 (prom.); Mackenzie, 1882–84 (disability ret.); Stanley, 1884–92 (ret.). (2) Augur, 1869–85 (ret.); Gibbon, 1885–96 (died). (3) Howard, 1866–86 (prom.); Ruger, 1886–96 (prom.). (4) Terry, 1866–86 (prom.); Potter, 1886 (ret.); Willcox, 1886–87 (ret.); Merritt, 1887–95 (prom.). (5) Ord, 1866–80 (ret.); Miles, 1880–90 (prom.); Grierson, 1890 (ret.). (6) Crook, 1873–88 prom.); Brooke, 1888–97 (prom.). For the forcible retirement of Ord and the elevation of Miles, see p. 356.

  8. SW, Annual Report (1883), p. 45.

  9. I have written of this process in The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, chaps. 2–3. It emerges clearly in the annual reports of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs throughout the 1880s. For other glimpses, see McLaughlin, My Friend the Indian; Hyde, A Sioux Chronicle; Julia B. McGillycuddy, McGillycuddy, Agent (Palo Alto, Calif., 1941); and Clark Wissler, Indian Cavalcade, or Life on the Old-Time Indian Reservations (New York, 1938).

  10. Indian Rights Association, Ninth Annual Report (1891), p. 29.

  11. The most authoritative account of the content and spread of the religion, as well as its antecedents, is Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. For a biography of the prophet, see Paul Bailey, Wovoka, the Indian Messiah (Los Angeles, Calif., 1957).

  12. My account of the Ghost Dance among the Sioux is taken essentially from my earlier work on this subject, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation.

  13. Awkwardly, the Sioux reservations lay in the Department of the Dakota, Brig. Gen. Thomas H. Ruger commanding, but were more accessible to Brooke’s Department of the Platte. Miles therefore chose to carry out his mission under Brooke’s leadership. Until he assumed personal command in the field, Miles directed affairs from his Chicago office.

  14. Red Cloud, old and with failing eyesight, remained at Pine Ridge Agency pursuing a course of studied neutrality. The Brules’ great leader, Spotted Tail, had been assassinated in an intratribal feud in 1881. His people had drifted without strong leadership ever since.

  15. Principal sources for this episode are McLaughlin, chaps. 11—12; E. G. Fechet, “The True Story of the Death of Sitting Bull,” Proceedings and Collections of the Nebraska State Historical Society, 2d ser., 2 (1898), 179—89; Stanley Vestal, ed., New Sources of Indian History, 1850—1891 (Norman, Okla., 1934), passim; SW, Annual Report (1891), pp. 194–99.

  16. Miles had his inspector general assemble evidence to bring Sumner before a court of inquiry, but the findings did not support such proceedings. Although Sumner had orders to arrest Big Foot, their language permitted discretion. Not until December 24, only hours after Big Foot’s flight, did Sumner receive a direct order to make the arrest at once.

  17. Indian casualties cannot be exactly counted. The burial detail found 146 dead on the battlefield—84 men and boys, 44 women, and 18 children. The Pine Ridge hospital received 51 wounded, of whom at least 7 died. To this may be added a probable 20 to 30 not discovered on the field who either died or recovered from wounds. Military casualties were 1 officer, 6 NCOs, and 18 privates killed; 4 officers, 11 NCOs, 22 privates, and 2 civilians wounded.

  18. The scene is graphically described in Charles G. Seymour, “The Sioux Rebellion, The Final Review,” Harper’s Weekly, 35 (Feb. 7, 1891), 106.

  19. These figures are for 1866–90 as computed from the AG “Chronological List” printed in Peters, comp., Indian Battles and Skirmishes. Casualties break d
own into 69 officers killed and 68 wounded and 879 enlisted men killed and 990 wounded. Indian casualties, extracted from military records and therefore somewhat suspect, total 4,371 killed, 1,279 wounded, and 10,318 captured.

  20. The army is frequently charged with pursuing an official policy of exterminating the buffalo. There was never any such policy. None, indeed, was necessary, for the hide hunters needed no encouragement to carry on their profitable and wholly legal business. However, both civil and military officials concerned with the Indian problem applauded the slaughter, for they correctly perceived it a crucial factor that would force the Indian onto the reservation. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano stated this view in 1874: “The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game … as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them on reservations, and compelling them to begin to adopt the habits of civilization,” House Reports, 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 384, p. 99. General Sheridan often expressed similar opinions, and in 1874 suggested that the Texas legislature strike medals of gratitude for award to the buffalo hunters. “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years,” he declared. “They are destroying the Indian’s commissary.” Mari Sandoz, The Buffalo Hunters (New York, 1954), p. 173.