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

by Andrew R. Graybill

  In the camp all was quiet, as the Piegans—mostly women, children, and old men, given the recent departure of the hunters—slept, some of them fitfully, as their bodies tried to fight off the dreaded “white scabs” disease burning through the village. Whatever concerns they might have had during that bleak midwinter, a surprise attack by U.S. soldiers was probably not among them, considering their chief’s well-known status as a friend to the whites. But just before dawn, the barking of the Indians’ dogs suggested that something was amiss.

  At Heavy Runner’s lodge, located in the middle of the camp, a visitor rousted the headman with news that soldiers had been spotted nearby. Citing his good relationship with the napikwans, the chief attempted to calm his panicked followers, insisting that there was nothing to fear. With that, he took his “name paper” (Alfred Sully’s note of safe passage), opened his tent, and began walking purposefully toward the bluffs, waving the document high over his head.34

  Up on the ridge, Joe Kipp had broken the stillness demanded by Baker. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the scout had recognized to his horror that the markings on the central teepee were those of Heavy Runner, and not of Mountain Chief, as Kipp had anticipated. Realizing his mistake and the disaster about to ensue, Kipp shouted frantically to Baker that the unsuspecting encampment below was the wrong target; in fact, it was one of the villages the troops were expressly ordered to avoid. Baker, however, hissed at Kipp to fall silent and placed him under guard.

  At that moment Heavy Runner emerged from the camp below, brandishing his paper and, according to some accounts, a peace medal as well. Before he could reach the troops and establish his identity, the chief was hit by a single shot and fell to the snow, clutching Sully’s note to his chest. Years later a relative of Joe Cobell’s stated that Cobell himself had confessed to cutting down Heavy Runner, and for deeply personal reasons: the scout knew that if fighting broke out at the Big Bend, Mountain Chief’s band, into which Cobell had intermarried, would have sufficient time to strike their campsite and head for safety beyond the Medicine Line.35

  Following the initial blast, the other soldiers on the bluffs opened fire immediately. Most of the men were armed with Springfield rifles or Sharps carbines, both of which used a heavy, .50-70 caliber brass cartridge, an earsplitting charge strong enough to bring down buffalo and other heavy game.36 The soldiers aimed not only at the sides of the fragile skin tents but shot also at the bindings attached to the lodge poles, so that some of the teepees collapsed on the cooking fires within, suffocating or incinerating their smallpox-ravaged inhabitants. Though virtually no resistance came from the camp, firing continued unabated for almost an hour before Baker called a halt to the shooting and then loosed his cavalrymen upon the Piegans. The troopers swept down from the ridge and charged into the defenseless camp with pistols or sabers drawn, shooting and slashing indiscriminately as the Indians sought cover among the few lodges still standing. The foot soldiers were right behind them, however, cutting their way into the teepees and dispatching those hiding inside.37 Other troops, who had forded the river just before the shooting began, rounded up captives and corralled the Indians’ sizable horse herd. It was all over before midday.

  With the end of the skirmish, Bear Head, whom his captor had dragged all the way to the village, was finally released. The dazed boy picked his way among the smoldering ruins of the camp until he found his own tent, which like the others had been utterly destroyed. He stood before the carnage and felt sick. “In the center of the fallen lodge,” he remembered, “where the poles had fallen upon the fire, it had burned a little, then died out. I could not pull up the lodge-skin and look under it. I could not bear to see my mother, my almost-mothers, my almost-sisters lying there, shot or smothered to death.” In time he was joined by a handful of survivors, who wept at the soldiers’ terrible cruelty and mourned the violent deaths of those who had done no wrong.38 Thereafter the Blackfeet called the Big Bend Itomot´ahpi Pikun´i—Killed Off the Piegans.39

  IN THE AFTERMATH of the fight, Major Baker conferred with his officers and scouts. From Kipp and Cobell he received definitive word via Indian survivors that the annihilated camp was indeed that of Heavy Runner, the one headman Baker had been explicitly instructed to avoid. Mountain Chief, Baker learned, had moved his village a few miles down the Marias. Baker hurriedly adjusted his plans, ordering Lieutenant Gus Doane and F Company to remain at the Big Bend while the major himself led the rest of the troops downriver in search of the other encampment.

  Though best known for his role in escorting the Washburn-Langford expedition through the Yellowstone region in the fall of 1870 (a 10,500-foot mountain in the park is named for him), Gustavus Cheyney Doane was also a magnificent field soldier.40 Born in Illinois in 1840, the tall, powerfully built cavalryman—easily recognizable by his long, waxed mustache—was held in high esteem by his comrades, who admired his courage and integrity. For those reasons, Baker tasked him with a grim assignment: burning all of the Piegans’ supplies and tallying the dead. That afternoon the lieutenant counted 173 Indians killed in action, later reported by Baker to have consisted of 120 able-bodied men and 53 women and children (numbers strenuously debated afterward).41 Though Joe Kipp claimed to have seen 217 bodies, Doane’s became the official figure; the lieutenant deemed the engagement the “greatest slaughter of Indians ever made by U.S. troops.”42 Baker’s men, by contrast, suffered only one fatality in the battle: Private Walton McKay, a twenty-four-year-old Canadian who was shot through the forehead when he peered into an Indian tent after the cavalry charge.43

  Meanwhile, Baker’s trip downriver took longer than expected. By the time he arrived that afternoon, the Indians had fled, leaving behind a hastily abandoned camp of seven lodges. As Baker expected, Mountain Chief, Owl Child, and some of the other wanted men had crossed to safety beyond the forty-ninth parallel, marked at that time simply by mounds of dirt or stone cairns but representing a haven from the vengeful Americans. There would be no satisfaction for either Horace Clarke or Bear Head, both of whom had lost their fathers at the hand of Ne-tus-che-o: the Indian renegade supposedly died several days later of smallpox, thus depriving the sons of the murdered men of an opportunity to exact their vengeance. Baker and his detachment camped at the site that evening and then burned the deserted lodges the following day.

  The killing at the Big Bend, however, had not ended completely when the soldiers’ guns fell silent. That evening eight warriors taken prisoner tried to escape, and after their recapture an enraged Lieutenant Doane ordered the Indians dispatched. When some enlisted men reached for their rifles, Doane barked, “No, don’t use your guns … Get axes and kill them one at a time.” Bear Head claimed to have overheard this conversation, and the ensuing horror. He recalled, “I hear[d] a sound as if some one was cutting up meat with an axe and a Grunt[.] I looked around and could see by the firelight one of the … Indians lying on the ground with his head split open.”44

  When Baker returned to the Big Bend on the morning of 24 January, Doane explained that the Indians had been killed in the act of escape (which apparently went unquestioned), and then he informed his commanding officer of a most unfortunate discovery: Heavy Runner’s camp was beset with smallpox, which though not much of a danger to the soldiers (who were vaccinated) was sure to complicate the fallout with Baker’s superiors as well as a skeptical public. In light of this news, Baker ordered the 140 captives freed at once, although he commandeered all of the Piegans’ three hundred horses, insisting that most of them had been stolen from whites in the first place.45 So that they might not starve, Baker left the Indians a few cases of bacon and hardtack. And then the soldiers departed, gone almost as quickly as they had appeared on the morning before.

  THE SITUATION FACING the survivors now became desperate. They had no shelter, no transportation, insufficient foodstuffs, and dozens of wounded. Many others were stricken with disease. Some of the Indians found shelter with friendly bands nearby, but others decided to make t
he arduous, seventy-five-mile trek to Fort Benton (even though many whites there loathed native people). The members of Heavy Runner’s family composed one such group. As Spear Woman, the dead man’s daughter—who was just a little girl in 1870—recalled many decades later, she and her mother and three siblings (one of them an infant) followed the soldiers’ tracks for a time, scavenging any of the column’s discarded food and supplies that they found along the way. After a few days they reached Fort Benton, but not before the baby perished.46

  Baker and his men arrived at Fort Shaw on Sunday, 29 January. There the troops were met by the exuberant Colonel de Trobriand, who three days earlier had received unofficial word of the incident on the Marias. De Trobriand joyously telegrammed to his superiors, “The result of the expedition shows how well it has been conducted by [Baker], and I am Confident that peace and safety is secured for a long time to the Territory.”47 In fact, the colonel was so pleased that a few weeks later he wrote again to his commanders to praise Baker for his “activity, energy, and judgment” while recommending him for a brevet.48

  For his part, Baker simply wanted to return to Fort Ellis, given the space constraints at Fort Shaw that had inconvenienced his men on the outbound leg of their campaign. Thus on 31 January he led his troops southeast to Fort Ellis, where they arrived on 6 February, precisely one month after their expedition began. All told, the soldiers had traveled more than six hundred miles, and—as Baker explained in his initial report—“in the coldest weather that has been known in Montana for years.”49 Yet even as his troops recuperated from their travails, a storm of a different sort was gathering and would soon break upon the major. In time this tempest would come to engulf not only Phil Sheridan but also William Sherman himself.

  Officers of the Second U.S. Calvary at Fort Ellis, 1871. This photo depicts Baker (ninth from left, leaning with his left hand on the fence post) and some of his officers, the year after the Marias Massacre. Lieutenant Gustavus Cheney Doane is fourth from left. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  The Spoils of Victory

  News of the incident on the Marias reverberated throughout Montana and the larger Rocky Mountain West, trumpeted with a jingoistic fervor and greeted with elation by area whites. On 2 February the Helena Daily Herald ran a story that began, “The deed is done: the murder of Malcolmb Clark has been avenged; the guilty Indians have been punished, and a terrible warning has been given to others of our red-skinned brethren, who may be inclined to live by murdering and plundering the white man.”50 Meanwhile, the New North-West published a resolution submitted by citizens of the Deer Lodge Valley stating, “That we do most heartily and sincerely indorse the manner of treaty then and there made [on the Marias] with those and all others of our red brethren who inhabit the soil of Montana.”51 Neither broadsheet, however, matched the vitriol of Idaho Territory’s Owyhee Avalanche, which defended Baker by invoking alleged Indian atrocities and suggested hyperbolically that henceforth the army should “[k]ill and roast [the Indians] as they do the pale face. Kill the squaws so the accursed race may cease to propagate. Kill the pappooses.”52

  Expressions of gratitude poured in for Sherman, Sheridan, and Baker from all corners of Montana.53 There were even scattered encomia for Colonel de Trobriand, who just a few months earlier had elicited jeers from the territory’s white residents for his refusal to dispatch the cavalry against the Piegans. The Frenchman explained in a smug missive to his daughter in late January, “The settlers haven’t raised a statue to me,” though he expressed confidence that they would fondly remember him after he departed for his next posting in Utah.54 Sure enough, on a visit to Helena a few weeks later, de Trobriand was flattered when during dinner at a local restaurant the maître d’hôtel threw open the windows facing the street so that grateful residents of the city might serenade him (even as they mauled the pronunciation of his last name).55

  Sherman, however, was far less sanguine. He warned Sheridan in late January to “look out for the cries of those who think the Indians are so harmless, and obtain all possible evidence concerning the murders charged on them.”56 In the end, the general of the army was right to worry about a backlash, although he probably never imagined that it would originate from within his own ranks.

  On 6 February, Lieutenant William B. Pease, the Indian agent for the Blackfeet, wrote Alfred Sully to describe a recent visit he had made (on Sully’s orders) to an Indian camp containing some survivors of the massacre. Those Piegans who had witnessed Baker’s attack gave Pease a very different account of the native casualties suffered at the Big Bend. They explained that smallpox was rife in the camp and that only 33 men were among the dead. The rest of the 140 victims were women and children, all of the latter under the age of twelve “and many of them in their mothers’ arms.” Pease added that in the aftermath of the slaughter most of the Piegans had fled across the forty-ninth parallel into Canada, and that those Blackfeet remaining in Montana were terribly frightened “and not disposed to retaliate upon the whites for the death of their friends.”57

  Four days later Sully transmitted Pease’s report to Ely Parker, a Seneca Indian who had served as Ulysses S. Grant’s military secretary during the Civil War and in that capacity drafted the terms of surrender signed by Robert E. Lee at Appomattox; as president, Grant had appointed Parker commissioner of Indian affairs in 1869. Realizing the incendiary nature of the agent’s allegations, Sully insisted in his cover letter that by forwarding the dispatch he was not taking sides in the matter; rather, he was simply giving the Indians a fair hearing, which he believed was his duty “as their only representative.”58 This distinction, however, had disappeared by the time Lieutenant Pease’s account became public later that month. During debate over an army appropriations bill in the U.S. House of Representatives on 25 February, a letter from Vincent Colyer, secretary of the Board of Indian Commissioners, was read aloud to the chamber. In his missive Colyer cited the dispatch of Lieutenant Pease in referring to the “sickening details of Colonel Baker’s attack,” adding that these “facts” were “indorsed by General Sully, United States Army.”59 A heated discussion of the subject quickly ensued, as congressmen rose both in defense and in condemnation of Colyer’s accusations.

  Such indignation was not confined to the halls of government. The New York Times, which had received an advance copy of Colyer’s letter, published a scathing editorial on 24 February. Noting that it had supported a series of recent strikes against native peoples, including Custer’s raid on Black Kettle’s encampment in November 1868, the Times insisted that on this occasion there could be no defense of such “butchery” and called for an official investigation.60 Likewise, the editors at Harper’s Weekly suggested to their 100,000 readers that the Marias massacre was just the latest episode in “our Indian policy of extermination,” an ugly pattern that stretched back more than two centuries to the colonial period. The piece ended with a flourish, wondering whether instead of killing Indians “the army should not rather be directed against our own people, whose endless cheating and lawlessness rouse their victims to revenge.”61

  Colyer’s letter had a chilling effect within the military establishment, which was anxious to avoid the sort of public chastisement it had absorbed in the wake of the Washita debacle. On 26 February, Sherman’s office sent a telegram fraught with concern to General Sheridan, requesting Baker’s official report of the incident, which had not yet been received in Washington. Sheridan replied that he would furnish the information as soon as it was available, but then gave over the greater part of his letter to a scorching denunciation of Colyer, whom the general condemned as a tool of the so-called Indian ring, a nebulous web of supposedly corrupt individuals who profited from government contracts made through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Sheridan went on to recount the base horrors he had seen in the West perpetrated by native peoples—rapes, thefts, and murders. He added, “It would appear that Mr. Vincent Colyer wants this work to go on.”62 Little Phil’s rage was understanda
ble: the hero of the Shenandoah knew he was facing one of the greatest political crises of his career.

  THOUGH INCENSED BY the affront to his reputation, Sheridan was also vexed by the timing of the controversy, which could not have broken at a more inopportune moment. As it happened, in January 1870 the House of Representatives began debate on legislation that had as one of its key provisions the transfer of the Indian Bureau from the Department of the Interior back to the Department of War, where it had originally resided from the founding of the United States until 1849. The military had sought to regain control of Indian affairs ever since and seemed poised to score a decisive victory that spring. The uproar over Baker’s campaign, however, went right to the heart of the explosive post–Civil War dispute over federal Indian policy and threatened to derail the transfer initiative.63

  At issue in the larger conversation about the “Indian problem” was the best method for avoiding native-white conflict, especially on the Great Plains. With the resumption of American westward expansion after 1865, most evident in the frenzied pace of railroad construction, the trans-Mississippi region had convulsed with spasms of horrific violence. None was more controversial than the Sand Creek Massacre of November 1864, in the midst of the Civil War no less, when militiamen under the command of Colonel John Chivington murdered more than 150 pacific Cheyennes and Arapahos in eastern Colorado and later displayed their scalps and severed genitalia in a Denver theater.64 The slaughter and other army-Indian clashes throughout the late 1860s caused escalating public outrage, so that when President Ulysses S. Grant took office in March 1869 he vowed to make sweeping changes in the management of Indian affairs. Grant’s “peace policy,” as it came to be known, emphasized “conquest through kindness” and featured the use of religious groups to Christianize Indians as part of the “civilizing” proces.65