by S. C. Gwynne
When the goods finally did arrive, they were of abysmal quality. And now the Indians confronted yet another aspect of the Indian office: its corruption. The clothing the Indians had been promised was shoddy and threadbare. The pants all came in one size: large enough to fit a two-hundred-pound man. Few Comanches weighed that much. The hats they received looked like those worn by the Pilgrims. Most of the Comanches ripped the clothes up and used them for other purposes. The food was bad, too. Instead of fresh meat—which had always been their diet—they got rancid bacon or salt pork. They were given a lot of cornmeal, which they detested and fed to their horses.
None of these failures could be blamed on the tangled government bureaucracy. They were the product of the endemic corruption and graft for which the Indian office had justly become infamous by the 1860s. The Indian peace commission of 1867 had been so scandalized by what they found out in the various agencies that they wrote:
The records are abundant to show that agents have pocketed the funds appropriated by the government and driven the Indian to starvation. It cannot be doubted that Indian wars have originated from this cause. . . . For a long time these officers have been selected from partisan ranks, not so much on account of honesty and qualification as for devotion to party interests and their willingness to apply the money of the Indian to promote the selfish schemes of local politicians.21
As time went by, the agents proved stupid as well as corrupt. Ironically, one commodity they were actually proficient at delivering to Comanches and Kiowas was weapons. The Indians had made an eloquent plea for better rifles; without them they could not hunt effectively, they argued, and thus would be more dependent on the government. While this argument had some merit, it was also quite as obviously true that Comanches were attacking Texas homesteads and Wichita farms. Amazingly, the Indian office persuaded the Department of the Interior, in violation of laws against arming Indians, to deliver several tons of arms and ammunition to plains tribes, including Comanches. And these weapons were not shoddy at all. In a day when the standard army issue weapon was still the single-shot rife, the Indian weapons included repeating Spencer and Henry rifles and carbines.22
Meanwhile, the heart of the Medicine Lodge treaty—the plan to turn Comanches and other horse tribes from nomadic hunter-gatherers into house-dwelling farmers—was also proving almost completely futile. A few Penatekas, long in captivity, tried to go along with the idea. But in general Comanche men simply refused to have anything to do with farming. When Leavenworth hired a white farmer in the spring of 1868 to demonstrate the planting of seeds, Comanches swooped down and plundered the fields before the crop was ripe. They ate green watermelons, which made them violently ill. The Indians only wanted beef, and eventually forced the agent to spend most of the budget on it, leaving little or nothing available to buy seed and farming tools.
The result of such efforts was to convince most Comanches that they were better off outside the reservation. On June 30, 1869, it was estimated that there were 916 Comanches on the reservation, but none of them were self-supporting farmers. All were living in tipis and subsisting on a combination of their own hunting, the undependable government food and annuities, and raids on Texas and on other tribal reserves. Many drifted off the government land to join the hostile bands in the Llano Estacado. There developed a pattern. In winter, more Comanches would arrive to camp on the reservation and to claim beeves and other food and annuity goods. In the spring they would drift back to the buffalo plains again or join raiding parties headed for the Texas frontier. It was a confusing, highly fluid situation. The one certainty was that, in spite of considerable government effort, Comanches remained Comanches. They had not yet been broken of their old habits.
Such a situation could not endure. The first casualty was the hated Office of Indian Affairs itself. In 1869, Congress did away with it, and in its place put the Indian Bureau, which soon arrived at what seemed like an ingenious compromise. The individual Indian agencies would be run by nominees from the religious community, thus minimizing the possibility of corruption. And if the Indians were converted to Christianity, so much the better. This became known as Grant’s “peace policy,” and the religious sect selected to oversee the Comanches was an extremely unlikely one: the gentle, peace-loving Quakers
Sixteen
THE ANTI-CUSTER
RANALD SLIDELL MACKENZIE came from one of those prodigiously overachieving eastern seaboard families that seemed connected, in profound and unaccountable ways, to everyone who was anyone in the corridors of power. His grandfather John Slidell was a Manhattan bank president and political power broker in New York City. His uncle John Jr. became the most powerful man in Louisiana politics, a U.S. senator, and the top adviser to President James Buchanan. Mackenzie’s aunt Jane married Commodore Matthew Perry, the man who opened Japan to the West. Aunt Julia married a rear admiral. Uncle Thomas became chief justice of Louisiana. His father, Alexander Mackenzie Slidell, who reversed his last and middle names at the request of a maternal uncle, was both a prominent naval commander and a well-known writer of histories and travel books who once had the distinction of being court-martialed for hanging the son of the secretary of war for mutiny. His mother came from splendid bloodlines, too: Her grandfather had been assistant secretary of the treasury under Alexander Hamilton.
Mackenzie thus grew up in elevated society, though his father’s death when he was eight put the family in more or less permanent financial difficulty. He was a frail, shy, smallish, unhealthy boy with the pale skin and transparent eyes of his Scottish forebears and a speech impediment that some described as a lisp and others as a slight stutter. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts, hoping to be a lawyer. But the family’s straitened finances would not allow him to finish. After two years he arranged for a transfer to West Point, which paid a salary in addition to providing free education. He matriculated there in 1858.
Against all of his family’s expectations, he performed brilliantly, graduating first in his class of twenty-eight cadets. He was considered by many in his class to be “the all-around ablest man in it.”1 He never grew much—as an adult he was a slim five feet nine inches tall (the limit for a cavalryman)—but he lost some of his shyness, made friends more easily, played pranks, and ran with a lively crowd. His talent in mathematics secured him a position as assistant professor while he was still a student. In the tiny, cloistered world of the military academy, he undoubtedly knew the immodest and trouble-prone young man, one class ahead of him, named George Custer, though there are no records of their relationship. The two officers could not have been more different. Custer was exuberant, vainglorious, and outrageous. Mackenzie was dark and complex, deeply private and inwardly turned, and never built for public adulation. Custer was a horrendous student, and the word able was not the first that came to mind when people described him. More like “libidinous and alcoholic.”2 When he graduated in 1861, he ranked thirty-fourth out of thirty-four students in his class, having accumulated a class-high of 726 demerits. In spite of these gaping differences, the two men were, oddly, twins of fate. Born less than a year apart, their careers mirrored each other’s virtually every step of the way, from their money-strangled ambitions to study law to their West Point days to their heroism and precociousness in the Civil War, where they fought in the same campaigns, and ultimately to their Indian fights in the West. The parallel lines crossed only a few times, the last occurring after the disaster at Little Bighorn, when Mackenzie was sent north to, in effect, clean up Custer’s mess.
Mackenzie’s graduation in 1862 landed him in the middle of the Civil War, and over the next three years he climbed the ranks with breathtaking speed. He served in the engineer corps at the battles of Manassas (second), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, receiving brevet promotions that quickly boosted him to the rank of major. (A brevet rank was temporary, often given on the battlefield to increase the officer corps in times of emergency. The idea was to keep the army from becomi
ng, in peacetime, top-heavy with officers.) Still, he was bored by engineering work and longed for command. He finally got it at the battle of Cold Harbor in June 1864, when he was brevetted to lieutenant colonel and given charge of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Artillery. He was twenty-three years old. He soon proved himself to be both dazzlingly competent and almost recklessly brave. At the Battle of Winchester, where Custer also fought, he “seemed to court destruction all day long,” wrote one of his soldiers. “With his hat held aloft on the point of his saber, he galloped over the forty-acre field through a perfect hailstorm of rebel lead and iron with as much impunity as though he had been a ghost.”3 At one point a Confederate artillery shell cut the horse he was riding in half. Wounded in the thigh, he bound the gash and kept on fighting.
With just a few months left in the war, he was given his first major command: the cavalry division of the Army of the James. By Appomattox he held the brevet ranks of brigadier general of the regular army and major general of the volunteers, making him the highest-ranking officer in West Point’s class of 1862. He was only twenty-four years old. He had been brevetted seven times in less than three years, a pace of promotion almost unheard of in the army and which beat Custer’s five brevets, though Custer ended with the same rank.4 Mackenzie was, moreover, one of Grant’s favorites. “I regarded Mackenzie as the most promising young officer in the army,” Grant later wrote in his memoirs. “Graduating at West Point, as he did, during the second year of the war, he had won his way up to command of a corps before its close. This he did upon his own merit and without influence.”5
Something else happened to Mackenzie during the war. Like so many other young men, he hardened. He lost his easy affability, his prankishness, and much of his good humor. This was undoubtedly caused in part by the bloodshed and suffering he witnessed from 1862 to 1865. But it was more directly related to a series of gruesome, debilitating wounds he received and from which he would never fully recover. He was wounded on six different occasions. At Manassas, he was shot with a .50-plus-caliber bullet through both shoulders, a terrible internal wound that should have killed him. He lay where he fell for twenty-four hours before being rescued. He was hit in the leg with an artillery shell (at Winchester), and later wounded in the chest by shrapnel. Another artillery shell took off the first two fingers of his right hand. The pain never left him, and it changed him.
His first command felt the brunt of this change. When he inherited it, the Second Connecticut had been a beaten, neglected, and demoralized unit. After Cold Harbor, Mackenzie drilled them mercilessly and punished them liberally. The men hated him. He was so hard on them that some even plotted to shoot him in the next battle.6 “By the time we reached the Shenandoah Valley,” wrote one of his lieutenants, “he had so far developed as to be a greater terror to both officers and men than Early’s grape and canister.”7 At Winchester the regiment fought gallantly; its losses were higher than any other regiment in the fight; the men also witnessed Mackenzie’s astounding bravery. After that the talk of mutiny stopped. His men did not like him. Many feared him. But like all men in subsequent Mackenzie commands, they always believed they had a better chance with him in battle than with other commanders. He was not what West Pointers would describe as a martinet. He was neither vain nor arrogant nor capricious. He was just brutally demanding: the boss from hell.
After the war was over, Mackenzie remained in the army, reverting to his actual rank of captain (as did Custer), and building harbor defenses in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1867 he was promoted to colonel and took command of the Forty-first Infantry, a black regiment that soon moved to Texas. He was stationed at various different forts there, and saw his first limited Indian engagements in 1869 and 1870. They were really nothing more than skirmishes. He spent a good deal of his time sitting on courts-martial in San Antonio. In 1871 he got his big break. He was given command of the Fourth Cavalry on the frontier, an event that was a direct consequence of President Grant’s increasing impatience with the “peace policy.” It was no accident that the man he considered his most aggressive and effective officer was being placed squarely in the path of Comanche war parties.
The record of federal officers on the frontier in those days showed just how lethal the West still was, even for mounted bluecoats. In 1864, Carson had nearly perished against Comanches and Kiowas at Adobe Walls. Van Dorn and Chivington had had their massacres, but the experience of the ebullient and egocentric Captain William Fetterman in 1866 more closely approximated the real risks of western command. Oozing self-confidence and itching to kill savages, Fetterman led eighty men out from Fort Phil Kearney in Wyoming on December 21, under orders to rescue a wagon train of woodcutters that was under attack by Red Cloud’s Oglala Sioux. He was warned twice that he should do nothing more than escort the woodcutters back to the fort.
Instead of following those orders, Fetterman plunged ahead looking for Indians to shoot. He spotted a small and vulnerable-looking group of Sioux warriors and pursued them. He soon discovered that they had been put there as bait. He thus rode directly into ambush. Exactly how many Indians took part in the attack is not known. Enough to kill eighty troopers in less than twenty minutes. In his report to his superiors, post-commandant Henry Carrington listed some of the items he found on the battlefield the next day: eyes torn out and laid on rocks, noses and ears cut off, teeth chopped out, brains taken out and placed on rocks, hands and feet cut off, private parts severed. The Oglalas seemed especially annoyed at two men who carried brand-new sixteen-shot Henry repeating rifles. Presumably they had done a good deal of damage. Their faces had been reduced to bloody pulp, and one of the men had been pierced by more than a hundred arrows.8
Two years later another army unit was destroyed at the Battle of the Washita, which was in all other ways a massacre of Indians. In November 1868, Colonel George Custer, commanding the Seventh Cavalry for the first time, attacked a Cheyenne village on the Washita River in what is now western Oklahoma. His strategy was the same one that got him killed eight years later. He divided his force, then advanced over unknown terrain against an enemy of unknown strength, and executed a “double envelopment,” a maneuver that required overwhelming superiority in numbers. This time he got lucky, at least at first. At dawn, his troopers tore into a small village of fifty-one lodges under Chief Black Kettle, surprising them and sending them fleeing from their tipis. Black Kettle had made the mistake of not believing his scouts, a mistake Custer also made and would soon pay for. Custer’s men rampaged through the snowy camp, killing indiscriminately.9 Women and children who had taken cover under buffalo robes were dragged out of the tipis by Osage scouts and shot. Though Custer reported that he had killed a hundred three warriors, he had actually killed only eleven. The rest were women, children, and old men. The soldiers then looted and burned the village.
Meanwhile a squad of men under Major Joel Elliot, last seen in hot pursuit of Indians, was now missing. It was later learned that they had fallen for the same immemorial trick that had fooled Fetterman. They had ridden after a bunch of Cheyenne boys. At some distance from the village, the boys evaporated and in their place appeared several hundred mounted, armed Indians. The white soldiers then dived for cover in the high grass, thus violating a fundamental principal of defensive combat: They abandoned a clear field of fire.10 They were mostly shot where they lay. Their bodies were later found on the south bank of the river, frozen and horribly mutilated. It was believed that the Indians who killed them were Arapahos.
What were Arapahos doing near the Cheyenne camp? The answer revealed exactly how lucky Custer had been. Just below Black Kettle’s camp, stretching for fifteen miles along the river, was the entire winter encampment of the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Comanches and Kiowas were camped with them. This disconcerting fact was uncovered when a platoon that had gone downriver to round up horses suddenly found itself encircled by warriors from the lower camps. Beyond the Indians the white men could see hundreds of tipis in the river
valley. Laying down a covering fire, they retreated, barely making it back to camp, where they breathlessly told Custer the news. He was alarmed. His men were tired; he was running out of ammunition; the command was alone in subzero weather in a hostile wilderness; and his main supply train had been left lightly guarded many miles away. Realizing now that he could not take the eight hundred captured Indian horses with him, he ordered them all shot. The men used pistols to do it and the scene was gruesome. After being shot the horses broke away and ran in all directions, bleeding onto the snow. Then he retreated. He was so worried about an Indian attack that he marched all night.11
One of the Comanches in those lower camps was twenty-year-old Quanah. “When we heard of the fight,” he recalled later, “all of our men hurried to the scene but General Custer retreated when he saw so many of us coming. We did not get close enough to fight him. After several skirmishes without results, we returned to our camp and moved out onto the plains.”12 He never explained how he had come to be there, though the Washita was fully within the Comanche heartland.
Custer had only narrowly avoided Fetterman’s fate. He had come perilously close to confronting what would have been perhaps the largest group of hostile Indians ever assembled in one place. Later, he would actually face the largest group of hostile Indians ever assembled in one place, and he would not be so lucky.