by Max Boot
The Cherokee, an agrarian, peaceful, and remarkably Americanized tribe with their own written language, tried to resist relocation by legal action—to no avail. More militant tribes, ranging from the Sauk and Fox of Illinois to the Seminole of Florida, resisted with force. They were equally unsuccessful, although they inflicted considerable costs on the American government. The Second Seminole War was particularly costly: lasting seven years (1835–42), it led to the death of nearly 1,500 soldiers, or almost 15 percent of the entire force in Florida, and the expenditure of $30 million—more than the annual federal budget at the time. Hostilities did not end until virtually the entire Seminole nation, originally comprising some four thousand people, had been captured or killed.24
Like the Seminole, all the other eastern Indians eventually were clubbed into submission and shipped west. This was one of the darkest chapters in the long, shameful history of European and American mistreatment of indigenous peoples. But it was not the end of the Indian Wars. In the trans-Mississippi West would be written the climactic chapters of the struggle between Americans and Indians.
22.
THE WINNING OF THE WEST
Braves vs. Bluecoats, 1848–1890
IT WAS THE “buffalo trail” that gave the Cheyenne away. On the morning of November 26, 1868, near the Texas border, the Osage Indian scouts found a path in the snow that ran parallel to the stream. Buffalo always went straight for the water and then scattered to graze. So this trail had been made by people.
For the past three days, through falling snow and thick fog, the Seventh U.S. Cavalry Regiment had been on the trail of hostile Indians who had raided settlements in Kansas, killing men, raping women, torching homesteads. Now, deep in “Indian Territory,” today’s Oklahoma, they had their first solid lead. As the troopers rode on, wrote a captain, they found traces of “a plain fresh trail which had obviously been made in the afternoon of the day previous by a war party of from one to two hundred Indians.”
The troopers loaded their Springfield carbines and tested them to make sure they were not frozen. In the evening they rested for an hour, fed their horses and themselves, brewed some coffee, and then mounted up to continue the pursuit. At 1:30 a.m. on Friday, November 27, the Osage scouts reported smelling smoke and hearing faint tinkling sounds in the distance. “Heap Injuns down there,” the Osage chief Little Beaver reported. The regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, crawled to the top of a summit with some of his officers to decide on a course of action. He did not know how many Indians were in the village nestled below him in a bend of the Washita River. Nor did he care. For a daring cavalier like Custer—a man with a cast of mind similar to Robert Rogers’s and Banastre Tarleton’s—there was but one acceptable course of action. He would attack at dawn.
Still only twenty-nine years old, Custer was already a famous war hero, known for his vanity (he sported uniforms of his own design, long golden hair, and an imposing walrus mustache), his reckless courage, and his driving ambition, all of which attracted ardent admiration and perfervid loathing in equal measure. At West Point he had been nearly expelled on more than one occasion and had finished dead last in the class of 1861. Yet so conspicuous was his gallantry as a Union cavalryman that just two years later he vaulted straight from the rank of lieutenant to that of brevet brigadier general at age twenty-three. He ended the Civil War as a brevet major general and a division commander who was celebrated for leading his men from the front and simultaneously criticized for getting so many of them killed or wounded.
Peacetime brought a demotion for the “Boy General,” as he was known in the press, and deployment to the western frontier. But Custer never lost his knack for courting controversy. In 1867 he was convicted by a court-martial for deserting his command in order to meet his beloved wife, Libbie, at a distant fort. When a fresh campaign against the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other tribes beckoned the following year, Major General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Department of the Missouri, cut short Custer’s sentence—a year’s suspension without pay—and recalled him to duty in the expectation that this swashbuckling officer could wage unremitting war as successfully against Indians as he had against Confederates. Sheridan’s confidence would be amply repaid at what became known as the Battle of the Washita, if not on later occasions.
Custer split his seven hundred officers and men into four columns and told them “to get as close as possible to the village without giving any alarm.” No talking, no smoking, no cooking. He even ordered the dogs that had accompanied them to be strangled with ropes or “dispatch[ed] with knives” to prevent them from spoiling the surprise attack. “The silence was oppressive,” wrote a captain. “Even the horses by their rapid gait showed that they, too, nervously partook of the quiet excitement.” The troopers spent “the night in moody meditations,” recalled a lieutenant, “broken occasionally by spasmodic shivers and involuntary shakes.”
As the warming rays of the sun flickered over the horizon, the soldiers could see the “clustered tepees, situated among wide-branching cottonwood trees.” “The hour was so still,” recalled a scout, “that a man could almost hear his watch tick.” Suddenly a shot rang out. The band struck up “Garry Owen,” Custer’s favorite martial tune, although the musicians managed to get out only a few bars before their instruments froze. With a thunderous roar the cavalrymen galloped toward the five hundred Indians assembled before them. As they crashed through the frozen snow, “the Indian village rang with unearthly war-whoops, the quick discharge of firearms, the clamorous barking of dogs, the cries of infants and the wailing of women.”
The teepees belonged to a band of Cheyenne led by Chief Black Kettle, a tragic figure who counseled peace but could not control the depredations of his young braves. These Cheyenne had already suffered grievously from the white man. Four years earlier, while camped under a white flag along Sand Creek in Colorado, Black Kettle’s band was attacked without provocation by seven hundred volunteers under the sanguinary Colonel John M. Chivington. One white witness later recalled that “all manner of depredations were inflicted”—Indians “were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.” The death toll amounted to two hundred people, two-thirds of them women and children.25
Black Kettle survived the Sand Creek Massacre. He would not survive the Washita attack. He was shot off his horse as he was trying to flee. Two of his wives and a daughter were also killed. Many others fell “almost before sleep had left their eyelids.” But other Indians overcame their initial surprise and, as Custer wrote, “seized their rifles, bows and arrows, and sprang behind the nearest trees, while some leaped into the stream, nearly waist deep, and using the bank as a rifle-pit, began a vigorous and determined defense.” One of his officers noted, “The Indian boys and squaws fought as fiercely as did the bucks”—small wonder, given their previous experience of the white man’s brutal way of war.
It took hours to extinguish the last resistance and by then a disconcerting sight was visible on the nearby ridgelines: Indians on ponies, hundreds of them, “gorgeous in war bonnets and paints,” some “armed with guns and some with bows and arrows and gaudy shields.” A cavalry officer noted how “surprising” it was too see “all the hills . . . alive with mounted warriors.” Little did the impetuous Custer, who was undertaking his first Indian campaign, realize when he began the attack that thousands of Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa were camped a few miles downstream. Already they had killed Major Joel Elliott and seventeen troopers who had become separated from the main body of troops while riding in pursuit of fleeing Cheyenne. A war correspondent who visited the battlefield the next month found their naked corpses frozen solid and covered with numerous bullet and arrow holes. Some were missing their heads; others had their throats cut. “There was not a single body,” he reported, “that did n
ot exhibit evidences of fearful mutilation.” The entire regiment only narrowly avoided a similar fate.
Rather than risk a battle against “greatly superior numbers,” Custer did the prudent thing—for once. He decided to retreat after destroying the Cheyennes’ shelters and steeds. Huge bonfires were kindled to burn the seventy-five buffalo-hide tepees and all of their contents. The 650 ponies were harder to eradicate. Initially the men tried to rope the animals and slit their throats, but the poor ponies became so frantic that this plan was abandoned. The troopers spent two exhausting hours firing volley after volley into the moaning and snorting and bleeding animals. As the sun fell behind the snow-covered peaks, the cavalrymen feinted an attack toward nearby Indian villages. This drew off the Indian warriors and allowed the cavalry to march back to its camp as the band played “Ain’t I Glad to Get out of the Wilderness.”
The results of this “nice little fight,” as one officer termed it, would be shrouded in controversy—along with everything else in Custer’s life. Some officers accused Custer of leaving Major Elliott and his men to their fate by not making an attempt to rescue them. The Indians, for their part, accused Custer of grossly exaggerating the casualties he had inflicted among their fighting men. He claimed to have killed 103 warriors. The Cheyenne said they had lost fewer than 20 men and a similar number of women and children. There was no doubt that some “squaws” and their “papooses” were shot down in the chaos of battle. Custer had intervened to save the rest, but he was still accused by some of committing a massacre. There were also allegations that he had taken one of the 53 female captives as his mistress. Everything that Custer did prompted denunciation and defense, both in his lifetime and afterward. Of one aspect of the raid, however, there was little doubt. By destroying their village, their food supply, and their ponies, Custer had dealt a severe blow to the Indians. The campaign was not yet over, but it was through the use of such tactics that the Cheyenne and the other proud, warlike tribes would be brought to their knees.26
THE WARS SURVEYED in the preceding chapter—conflicts fought largely in the forests of the East Coast and on foot against settled tribes of farmers—do not fit the common conception of Indian Wars. The popular stereotype of bluecoats and braves on horseback was forged in the trans-Mississippi West between 1848 and 1890 in clashes such as the Battle of the Washita. Those wars would lead, by a conservative estimate, to the deaths of 1,109 U.S. soldiers, 461 U.S. civilians, and over 5,500 Indians.27
The greatest clashes occurred on the Great Plains against the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Sioux. Like the nomads of Inner Asia, these superb horsemen ranged across seas of grass in the post–Civil War era following buffalo herds and warring with neighboring tribes. They lived in portable, buffalo-hide teepees and disdained agriculture. Theirs was a warrior society par excellence where sustenance came from the slaughtering of buffalo, deer, and other animals and the plundering of the possessions, especially the horses, of enemy tribes. Bravery was inculcated from birth; boys joined their first war party as young as eleven. “Better to die on the battlefield than to live to be old”: this was the philosophy of the Sioux and other Plains tribes. From their perspective, wrote Royal Hassrick, the foremost student of the Sioux, “courting death” was “as important a part of warfare as victory.” The highest honors, in the form of feathers worn in a war bonnet, were reserved for warriors who “counted coup”—that is, struck an enemy in battle, whether that blow caused any injury or not—because this was an inherently dangerous undertaking. Stoicism was another cardinal virtue. ”Men on war missions or hunting expeditions,” wrote Hassrick, “were noted for their ability to suffer wounds unflinchingly, to experience long periods of hunger and exposure.” Plains Indians neither gave nor expected quarter in battle: for a man, the wages of defeat were death, often accompanied by mutilation. Women and children, by contrast, were spared; typically they were adopted into the tribe that had defeated their menfolk.28
On a man-to-man basis there is little doubt that the individual Indian was a better warrior—tougher, bolder, braver—than the average U.S. Army soldier. But by the midnineteenth century there were only 270,000 Indians in the West, and many of them had already made their peace with the white man. The “hostile” tribes had fewer than 100,000 people—this in a region that would be the destination for 8 million Americans in the four decades following the California gold strike of 1848. Even the mightiest of tribes, the Sioux, numbered fewer than 30,000 in 1866, which meant that they could probably field no more than 7,000 warriors.29 Just as in the East, therefore, the tribes could not make good their losses, while the whites could count on seemingly endless reinforcements.
Settlers’ militias sometimes pursued a genocidal policy against the Indians, as the Sand Creek Massacre showed. The U.S. Army did not. Although the bluecoats were capable of considerable brutality, their goal was not to exterminate the Indians but to move them onto reservations—a strategy known as “concentration” that would be employed by many other counterinsurgents, including, as we shall see, the British in the Boer War. “For whites,” write two leading historians of the West, “concentration offered a happy coincidence of self-interest and noble philanthropy.”30 The self-interest was that Indians could be removed from lands coveted by whites, thereby preventing what the secretary of the interior described in 1873 as “frequent outrages, wrongs, and disturbances of the public peace.” The philanthropic part of the enterprise (“the great work of humanity and benevolence”) was that Indians were supposed to be taught “the arts of agriculture, and such pursuits as are incident to civilization.” In practice, however, Indians were often denied the lands promised to them and taken advantage of by unscrupulous Indian agents. Seldom were these restless hunters happy to settle down as inoffensive farmers. Thus confining Indians on reservations required the constant application of force with, as the secretary of the interior said, “all needed severity.”31
That was a job for a ragtag American army, which by 1874 numbered just twenty-seven thousand officers and men—smaller than the New York Police Department today.32 They were a hard-drinking, hard-bitten group of volunteers characterized, unkindly if not inaccurately, by one newspaper as “bummers, loafers, and foreign paupers.”33 Their assignment was to man a series of forts along the trails taken by pioneers heading west. Contrary to the popular impression fostered by nineteenth-century “dime novels” and twentieth-century movies, forts were rarely besieged by Indians; most did not even have stockades or other defenses. Rather they provided a base from which soldiers could fan out in pursuit of hostile warriors, much as the French army was then doing in North Africa and the British army on the Northwest Frontier. In common with the British and French, the American army’s most effective tactics were to target, as Custer did in 1868, Indian food stores, pony herds, and teepees, especially in wintertime when tribes were less mobile. Given the Indians’ subsistence-level economy, it did not take much to put them on the brink of starvation, giving them no choice but to enter a reservation. In essence tactics had not changed all that much since the seventeenth-century battles between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan.
THE MOST INNOVATIVE and admirable of the post–Civil War Indian fighters was Major General George Crook, a “straight as a lance,” broad-shouldered West Pointer who had fought at Antietam and Chickamauga. He was an avid hunter and a crack shot who stood out in the dissolute postwar army for not drinking alcohol to excess, not smoking, not using profanity, and not gambling. His diary was filled with disapproval, in small, neat handwriting, of all these “vices.” His beverage of choice was milk; his preferred hobby cribbage and other card games played only for “pastime,” never for money.34
“A brilliant strategist,”35 he made an in-depth study of Indian ways and realized that, as an aide put it, “unless savage should be pitted against savage, the white man would be outwitted, exhausted, circumvented, possibly ambuscaded and destroyed.”36 He therefore made extensive use of Indians as sco
uts and auxiliaries (“the wildest that I could get”) led by officers with “the best physique” and “great patience.”
Crook also realized that it would be hard to catch elusive braves with the ponderous wagon trains favored by the army. So he ditched them in favor of more mobile mules, becoming the leading expert on the military uses of these humble pack animals. Mule packing was such a specialized skill that he thought it could only be undertaken by civilian experts who were “paid liberally”—an early form of military contractor. Crook’s motto was “the trail must be stuck to and never lost.”37
While dogged in pursuit of Indians, Crook also tried to be fair in his dealings with them. He instructed subordinates to “deliver justice to all—Indians as well as white men,” “to make no promises not in their power to carry out,” and not “to become the instruments of oppression.”38 In his diary he recorded his personal creed: “The persons who enjoy the most happiness in this world are those who have the greatest amount of charity for their fellow man.”39 More than most of his contemporaries, he understood that a successful Indian policy had to offer carrots as well as sticks. Unfortunately he had trouble convincing his superiors. They favored a harsher approach.