The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

by Andrew R. Graybill

  TWO DAYS AFTER the butchery, Malcolm Clarke was buried in the afternoon of 19 August 1869, on a small rise near his ranch house, mourned by numerous friends and admirers. His final resting place was a quiet and peaceful spot, described eloquently by Helen: “Afar off could be seen the rugged crags of the Bear’s Tooth, at the base of which the great river runs, and under its shadow so much of joy, so much of sorrow had met and mingled together and wrought so strange a chapter in his life.”116 But the beauty of the grave site belied the great violence that had swirled all around it: the murder of its occupant, of course, but in a wider sense the decades of struggle between and among natives and newcomers for control of the land and its resources.

  The modest cemetery had a most unexpected visitor eight years later, after the property had passed out of the Clarkes’ hands. In the summer of 1877 General William T. Sherman, whose marauding exploits in Georgia during the Civil War had earned him a reputation far more savage than Malcolm Clarke’s, made a tour of the army forts of the West. He spent much of his trip in Montana, where the Nez Perce War—the final episode in the territory’s vicious struggle between Indians and whites—was entering its climactic stage.117 Traveling north from Helena on his visit, General Sherman stopped to rest at a quiet ranch in the Prickly Pear Valley. After a meal, he took a walk around the property, and in his wanderings he came across an unmarked grave, which he asked about when he returned to the house. Upon learning that in it lay the body of Malcolm Clarke, the general became pensive. He then explained to his host that the dead man had been a classmate of his at West Point, and that many times during the Civil War he had looked through newspapers and military reports, expecting to find mention of his old friend, probably for some gallant act. The trail had gone cold until Sherman’s chance discovery in the fastness of the Rocky Mountains.118

  Grave site of Malcolm Clarke, 2007. After a visit to his father’s grave in 1923, Clarke’s son Horace commissioned a fence to enclose it, a fitting tribute, as he put it, to “one of the greatest of Montana pioneers and a kind and good father.” Photograph by the author.

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  The Man Who Stands Alone with His Gun

  If Horace Clarke’s survival was a miracle—shot in the face at close range and then left for dead—the speed of his recovery was nearly as remarkable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Clarke ranch, the family retreated to the security of Helena, where Horace convalesced. But by the early autumn of 1869 he was back on the Little Prickly Pear, managing his father’s spread with his younger brother, Nathan, and living with all members of the household save for Helen, who had joined her aunt Charlotte in Minneapolis.1 Although Horace bore no lasting effects from the shooting, he wore a thick mustache for the rest of his life, perhaps to conceal the entry wound from his assailant’s bullet.

  Later that fall, rumors of an army campaign against the Piegans began circulating throughout western Montana, and in time they reached Horace’s ears. In the waning days of 1869 he traveled sixty miles to Fort Shaw to speak with Colonel Philippe Régis de Trobriand, an aristocratic French émigré and decorated Civil War veteran who oversaw military affairs in the District of Montana. Though he had no formal military experience of his own, Horace volunteered to join the expedition and offered Nathan’s services as well.2 They intended to avenge their father’s murder, even if it meant slaughtering their own blood relatives in the process.

  Officers’ quarters, Fort Shaw, 2007. It was here that Colonel Philippe Régis de Trobriand, the suave but demanding leader of U.S. military forces in Montana, resided during the planning and execution of Major Eugene M. Baker’s surprise attack on Heavy Runner’s camp. Photograph by the author.

  As it happened, de Trobriand’s bête noire, Lieutenant Colonel Alfred H. Sully, was working furiously to avoid just such an outcome. Thus on New Year’s Day 1870, at almost the same moment that Horace visited Fort Shaw, Sully left the post with twenty-five enlisted men, bound for the new Blackfeet agency on the Teton River some thirty-five miles to the northwest. As the superintendent of Indian affairs for Montana Territory, Sully intended to meet with various Blackfeet chiefs about the ongoing violence against whites that enraged young men of the tribe committed. This was no simple parley, however, for Sully carried a set of imposing demands as well, including the surrender of those Piegans indicted for the murder of Malcolm Clarke and the return of hundreds of horses and mules stolen from whites throughout the preceding summer and fall.

  Though skeptical about his prospects with the Indians, the lean, blue-eyed Sully was surely the right man for this delicate assignment. After all, he had extensive experience with native peoples, having served in numerous campaigns against them since the early 1840s, from Florida to California and many places in between. And that he was no racist was suggested by two of his marriages: the first to a Mexican girl he wed while stationed in California and, after her untimely death, the second to a Yankton woman he met in Dakota Territory in the 1860s.3 Sully was known as a fair and decent man, and he traveled to the Teton River that January day animated by the dim hope of averting additional conflict between the territory’s white and Indian residents.

  Whatever optimism Sully may have harbored quickly dissipated when he arrived at the agency late that afternoon. Although he had dispatched a mixed-blood scout to round up as many chiefs as possible, only four had bothered to make the trip: a Blood named Gray Eyes, and three Piegan headmen led by Heavy Runner, known to the military as a dedicated friend to the whites who favored peace. As for the other chiefs, the scout explained to Sully that he had found them too drunk to leave their camps.

  Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Sully, 1862. An accomplished artist as well as a decorated field commander, Sully sent reports from Montana in the aftermath of the Marias Massacre that earned him the enmity of Generals Phil Sheridan and William T. Sherman. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  In his conversations with the chiefs that night and the next morning, Sully expressed his disappointment that so few had shown up and then gave the Indians a stern speech, explaining that the U.S. government was weary of Blackfeet aggression and determined to make war on them if the natives did not cease their raiding and killing. Moreover, in an effort to convey the gravity of the situation, Sully insisted that if the army launched a military campaign against the Blackfeet, U.S. troops would pursue the Indians across the so-called Medicine Line into Canada, where native groups had long sought safe haven. Though a bluff, Sully’s threat had the desired effect, as the startled headmen promised to do all in their power to curb the depredations, return stolen livestock, and kill or capture Owl Child’s gang. Heavy Runner was so alarmed by Sully’s warning that he asked for a note of safe passage attesting to his cooperation with the whites. Sully gave the chiefs two weeks to meet his conditions.

  Unbeknownst to the Indians but suspected by Horace and Nathan Clarke and other Montana whites, the gears of the U.S. war machine were already turning, and just five days after Sully’s meeting with the chiefs, Major Eugene M. Baker and four companies of the Second U.S. Cavalry moved out from Fort Ellis (near Bozeman) to Fort Shaw, to be within striking distance of Blackfeet camps if ordered to attack. When Sully’s deadline passed without the Indians’ compliance, Baker led his men into the teeth of a particularly severe Montana winter, crossing broken, snow-covered terrain in plunging temperatures. On the fourth day the troops discovered a large Piegan encampment at the Big Bend of the Marias River, and deployed quietly in a skirmish line on the bluffs overhead. Among the dozens of concerned citizens who tagged along were the two Clarke brothers.4

  The carnage that ensued on that bitter morning has been lost not only to the public but to most historians as well, eclipsed by a handful of more infamous army slaughters of Plains Indian peoples. Whereas the atrocity at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864 has become a byword for white brutality, and Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890 is notable as the last major engagement of the Indian Wars, the Marias (or Baker) Massacre, as i
t came to be known, soon slipped into relative obscurity, despite the immediate, if momentary, storms of protest it aroused in the East and the reforms in Indian affairs that it engendered.5 The Piegans, however, never forgot, and neither did Horace Clarke, who lived forever in the shadows cast by the bloody events of 23 January 1870.

  Itomot´ahpi Pikun´i

  Though white Montanans had endured numerous Piegan assaults throughout the late 1860s, the killing of Malcolm Clarke caused unprecedented levels of anxiety and outrage in the territory. To be sure, other prominent citizens had fallen victim to ambush by the Piegans, most notably John Bozeman, a pioneer who blazed an eponymous trail to Montana Territory before his murder in 1867. And yet, according to conventional wisdom, Clarke of all people should have been safe, given his marriage to a Piegan woman and the location of his ranch so close to the perceived security of the settlement at Helena.

  Newspapers throughout Montana mixed their reporting of Clarke’s death with impassioned pleas for military support. Just three days after the murder, a writer for the New North-West maintained, “The war cloud lowers. It is not conjecture or imagination. There is too much reality in flowing blood.” At the same time the editorialist held out little hope of imminent relief from the U.S. troops stationed in Montana. Indeed, the combined strength of the territory’s two posts—Forts Ellis and Shaw—was fewer than five hundred men. With these figures in mind, the writer lamented that “until some great massacre awakens the Government to a general retaliation under a good officer … we may expect continued and yearly recurrences of the horrors.”6

  Such alarmists found a sympathetic ear in Alfred Sully, who had arrived in Montana in May 1869 as a sort of exile. Despite valiant service in the Union army, Sully had seen his career stall in the late 1860s after he ran afoul of General Philip H. Sheridan. While serving under Sheridan on the southern Plains during the fall of 1868, Sully had clashed bitterly with Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, a Sheridan favorite. The following spring Sheridan retaliated by placing Sully on the unassigned list, a humiliation that left the forty-eight-year-old lieutenant colonel in professional limbo as a field officer without a command. In the end he was effectively banished to Montana, becoming one of many soldiers forced into civilian positions by the military drawdown after the Civil War.7

  Sully was receptive to the aggrieved Montana settlers because he was well versed in the hazards faced by white frontiersmen and their families. From his earlier postings throughout Indian country, Sully recognized the waylaid freighters, the pillaged ranchers, and especially the terrified pioneers who now implored him for assistance. Throughout the tense summer of 1869, he dutifully conveyed their apprehensions to federal officials in Washington, who in turn transmitted his communiqués to the headquarters of the U.S. Army’s Division of the Missouri (to which Montana belonged), commanded by none other than Sully’s former antagonist Phil Sheridan. While emphasizing in these messages the dangers faced by Montana whites, in advocating for military intervention Sully also adopted a classic bureaucratic pose, noting that the Indians’ livestock thefts “will make an expensive claim against the government.”8

  Not all observers shared Sully’s dire assessment, however. For instance, Alexander Culbertson, who had far greater firsthand knowledge of Montana than Sully had, argued that the recent depredations, including the murder of his friend and protégé Malcolm Clarke, were the work of “a portion of the young rabble, over whom the chiefs have no control.” Drawing on his four decades of experience with the Piegans, Culbertson blamed some of the trouble on the nonratification of recent treaties and suggested to Sully that provisioning the natives, who faced a growing subsistence crisis with the disappearance of the bison, could help calm tensions.9

  Colonel Philippe Régis de Trobriand, 1862. De Trobriand’s reputation among white Montanans soared after Baker’s slaughter on the Marias, which many residents of the territory hailed as a fitting “chastisement” for Piegan attacks on homesteads and wagon trains. Photograph in author’s collection.

  More important was the opinion of Colonel de Trobriand, who, unlike Sully, placed little faith in the breathless reports of the territory’s settlers, sharing Culbertson’s belief that only a few Indians were responsible for the unrest and that they had escaped across the border to Canada, anyway.10 Though he scorned the hysteria of Montana’s whites, he nevertheless tried to soothe their fears, as is evident in his patient reply to an October petition from Helena citizens demanding cavalry protection. With Gallic charm, de Trobriand wrote that while it was both his duty and his desire to defend all residents of Montana, “there is actually no Indian war in the territory.” He promised his correspondents that he would transmit their concerns to Washington, but tempered their expectations with an old French saying: “‘the prettiest girl can give but what she has.’ So with any military commander.”11 His would not, however, be the last word on the matter.

  AS THE WINTER of 1868–69 settled in over the southern Plains, small parties of area Indian tribes straggled into Fort Cobb in the western part of Indian Territory (now present-day Oklahoma). They were starving, and many traveled on foot because U.S. troops under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Custer had incinerated their food supplies and killed their horses. Having eaten the last of their dogs, the natives came to the army outpost seeking relief from General Sheridan, the very officer who had masterminded the devastating campaign against them. Leading one such group was Tosawi, a noted Comanche headman who had treated for peace with federal officials the year before at Medicine Lodge Creek. When he was presented to the general at Fort Cobb, the chief introduced himself by saying in broken English, “Tosawi, good Indian.”12 Sheridan supposedly replied with a glib and chilling rejoinder that he made famous and that haunted him ever after: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”13

  This was the man who in the spring of 1869 became lieutenant general of the U.S. Army and assumed control of implementing military policy in the Division of the Missouri, a sweeping expanse of more than a million square miles of western territory that included the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Sheridan’s ascent was meteoric—just eight years earlier he had been a lowly first lieutenant; now he answered only to William T. Sherman, the commanding general of the army. A powerful mix of ambition, bravery, luck, and political savvy had propelled him upward, despite his almost comical appearance. “Little Phil” stood at just five feet five inches tall, which was merely the most immediate of his physical shortcomings. Abraham Lincoln famously cataloged the others in describing the general as “a brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can skratch them without stooping.”14 Sheridan’s fitness as a commander was beyond question, however, displayed especially in the fall of 1864 as he led his troops in laying waste to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, foreshadowing the destruction in Georgia wrought later that year by Sherman during his fabled March to the Sea.15

  Critics of Sheridan’s prosecution of the Indian Wars denounced him as a garden-variety racist, but this was an oversimplification. To be sure, he harbored the reflexive prejudice toward native peoples characteristic of his time and place, but he did not seek the Indians’ extermination. Rather, like many of the eastern reformers who loathed him, Sheridan hoped to see Indians Christianized and settled on reservations, where they could learn the skills and habits of white Americans. But he diverged from the humanitarians on the question of how to reach this goal: while the former emphasized schooling and moral suasion, Sheridan insisted that natives who raided and plundered had to feel the hard hand of war, and not merely the velvet glove.16 It was precisely this strategy that he employed in subjugating the Indians of the southern Plains in 1868 and bringing admired men like Tosawi to their knees.

  Given Sheridan’s temperament and inclination, the conflicting reports from Montana that arrived at his Chicago headquarters in the waning months of 1869 placed him in an awkward pos
ition. On the one hand, the Piegan depredations roiling the territory seemed to call for just the kind of punishment Sheridan advocated, and yet from prior experience he deeply distrusted Alfred Sully, the source of this information. On the other hand, Régis de Trobriand—whom Sherman knew and commended to Sheridan for his reliability—downplayed the violence in his district and urged restraint in pursuing the Indian offenders, advice that ran contrary to Sheridan’s naturally aggressive instincts.

  In the end, Sheridan’s decision was made for him in October, as Secretary of the Interior Jacob D. Cox—on Sully’s behalf—urged the War Department to send troops against the Piegans. Responding later that month to the directives from Washington, Sheridan outlined his strategy: “I think it would be the best plan to let me find out exactly where these Indians are going to spend the winter, and about the time of a good heavy snow I will send out a party and try and strike them.”17 Sherman endorsed the scheme two weeks later, no doubt because such tactics had worked to so-called perfection in Indian Territory the year before, giving Sheridan the signature victory of his campaign on the southern Plains. On 27 November 1868 Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the yellow-haired boy wonder, led the Seventh U.S. Cavalry in a surprise attack against the winter camp on the Washita River of Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief who had survived the Sand Creek Massacre four years earlier. Though Custer’s recklessness contributed to the deaths of a score of U.S. troops, the Indians suffered more than a hundred casualties, including Black Kettle and one of his wives, who were shot in the back while trying to escape.18