by Max Boot
Crook did not have much success against the Sioux in 1876 on the northern Great Plains. Leading large units was not his strength. He did better employing small, mobile columns against the Paiute of the Pacific Northwest in 1866–68 and against the Apache of the Southwest in 1872–73, 1882–84, and 1885–86. His most notable exploits occurred in 1883 when he routed the famous Apache chief Geronimo out of the forbidding Sierra Madre in northern Mexico by employing a force of 266 mules and 327 men, the largest contingent being friendly Apache. Geronimo was one of the most skilled, dogged, and merciless raiders that any Indian tribe had ever produced. He spent decades terrorizing settlers in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. But the presence of so many of his own people in the enemy camp demoralized even Geronimo and persuaded him to surrender, at least temporarily. He went off the reservation again, literally, in 1885, only to give up the next year after another relentless pursuit overseen by Crook. Yet, after getting drunk on mescal, Geronimo and a few others (20 men, 13 women) reneged on their promise to surrender. This embarrassing setback stained Crook’s reputation and caused him to be relieved of command at his own request.
The honor of capturing Geronimo for the last time fell to Crook’s hated rival, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles. He sent out a picked force of 55 soldiers, 30 mule packers, and 29 Apache scouts. They finally ran down Geronimo and his small band after one of the most arduous operations in the history of the U.S. Army—a 2,500-mile trek through the mountains of northern Mexico, whose government allowed such American forays into its territory much as Pakistan and Yemen in more recent times have given permission for some U.S. counterterrorist operations on their soil.
To prevent any more escapes, Geronimo and the rest of the Warm Springs and Chiricahua Apache, even those who had worked for Crook as scouts, were transported to captivity in Florida. Crook, who died in 1890, spent the last years of his life campaigning for justice for the Apache, who had been promised that they would be allowed to return to Arizona after a short stay in Florida. Geronimo never did live to see his native land again. As close as he ever got was Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he was moved in 1894 and died in 1909. In his last years he became, improbably enough, a celebrity who appeared at the 1904 world’s fair in St. Louis and other events staged by his erstwhile enemies, where he made good money ($2 each) from selling his autographed photograph.40
TODAY BOTH CROOK and Miles—two of the most illustrious generals of the late nineteenth-century army—have been long forgotten. Just about the only Indian fighter who is still widely remembered shared Crook’s aversion to alcohol, tobacco, and cussing but in most other ways was his opposite.41 The “genial, modest and unassuming” Crook disdained “the slightest pomp or parade.”42 A mule packer who served under him wrote, “In the field, except that everyone knew him, he might have been taken for a Montana miner. The only part of the uniform he wore was an old overcoat.”43 George Armstrong Custer, by contrast, with his flamboyant style and cadre of “embedded” reporters, made sure that everyone knew exactly who he was. He would become a legend by leading his command to annihilation.
As even casual students of history know, on the torrid afternoon of June 25, 1876, Custer rode with 597 officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment against a giant Indian encampment along the Little Bighorn River in southeastern Montana. There were many more Indians than expected—6,000 to 7,000 in all, of whom 1,000 to 2,000 were warriors—and they were led by superb leaders, including the greatest of them all: Crazy Horse. One army officer left a description of him that suggests the awe in which he was held even by his enemies: “In repose, his face and figure were as clear-cut and classical as a bronze statue of a Greek God. When he moved, he was as lithe and graceful as a panther, and on the war-path, he was as bold as a lion, and as cruel and bloodthirsty as a Bengal tiger.”
The Indians had an advantage not only in warrior skill but also in weaponry. Many had Winchester repeating rifles (as well as bows and arrows), while the Seventh Cavalry was equipped with inferior single-shot .45 Colt revolvers and Springfield carbines. The overconfident Custer had refused to take along a battery of Gatling guns (an early machine gun), fearing they would only slow him down. He also split his command prior to the attack, as he had in the Battle of the Washita, confident that the results would be equally satisfactory. Apparently he had forgotten what a near-run thing the Washita had been. He had once declared, “There are not Indians enough in the country to whip the Seventh Cavalry.” That day he learned how wrong he was. “Long Hair” and 262 others—soldiers, scouts, civilians—wound up falling after a furious fight.44
This spectacular setback eclipsed, then and now, other Indian War catastrophes that were more costly, such as the defeat of the British general Edward Braddock at the Monongahela in 1755, where some six hundred soldiers died, or the defeat of the American general Arthur St. Clair in Ohio in 1791, which also led to the death of over six hundred soldiers.45 Most of these disasters were the result of the difficult dilemma that confronted commanders not only in the Indian Wars but in most other guerrilla wars: speed versus size. The bigger the column, the safer it was but also the less likely to catch elusive foes. Custer made the wrong choice, choosing speed over size, and paid the ultimate penalty. It was not, however, as unreasonable a choice as it appears in retrospect, given the success that Custer and countless other officers had enjoyed against more numerous Indian foes in battles such as the one at the Washita River eight years earlier.46
Moreover, for all its fame, in purely military terms the impact of Custer’s Last Stand was negligible: a reality that tends to be slighted in many works of history. All it did was hasten the end of independence for the Sioux and Cheyenne by persuading the “Great Father” in Washington to send more soldiers to their hunting grounds. Focusing on the Little Bighorn, as do a disproportionate number of all books written on the Indian Wars, can give a distorted impression. Such battles were rare. Indians, like all good guerrillas, typically avoided large-scale confrontations. The problem for the U.S. Army was similar to that faced by King Darius of Persia in his war against the Scythians: not defeating the raiders but catching them.
After the Little Bighorn, the star of the pursuit was “Bear Coat”—Colonel Nelson A. Miles, commander of the Fifth Infantry Regiment and George Crook’s great rival in the post–Civil War army. A mere store clerk in Boston in 1861, he had earned by the end of the Civil War a temporary promotion to major general and a Medal of Honor (not awarded until decades later) to go along with four different wounds. Following his service at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, his corps commander described him as “one of the bravest men in the Army; a soldier by nature.” After the war, this nakedly ambitious and exceedingly vain officer—just as talented as Crook but much more self-promoting—stayed in the army and married General William Tecumseh Sherman’s niece. Depicted by an admiring general as “a man of untiring and sleepless energy,” Miles led his five hundred infantrymen (“walk-a-heaps,” the Indians called them) in a relentless pursuit of Custer’s killers from October 1876 to January 1877.
Temperatures sometimes hit sixty degrees below zero Fahrenheit—so unbearably frigid that “the men had to stop in the midst of battles to light fires, to warm their fingers, which were no longer able to work the breech-locks.” Miles and his men were better prepared than their adversaries for such Arctic conditions. They were bundled up in fur-trimmed greatcoats, mittens, buffalo moccasins, and woolen face masks—making them look, Miles thought, “like a large body of Esquimaux.” With his “uncommon talent for fighting battles,” possessed (as one superior noted) of “perfect coolness and self-possession,” he skillfully deployed his artillery to beat off major attacks even when his command was completely surrounded. “He literally gave the savages no rest,” wrote a newspaper correspondent employing the ethnocentric vernacular of the day. The Sioux and Cheyenne who had annihilated the Seventh Cavalry were so disheartened by this “constant pounding” that they either surren
dered or fled to Canada.47
Miles would go on to become the commanding general of the U.S. Army in 1895. His foes Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull—two of the greatest Indian leaders in history—would in contrast meet a melancholy end, killed while resisting arrest on the reservation. Sitting Bull’s demise came in 1890, the year that the Indian Wars officially ended with a one-sided shootout at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota that claimed the lives of 25 soldiers and 153 Sioux men, women, and children. It was a fitting conclusion to almost three centuries of relentless slaughter and depravity—as well as considerable heroism and self-sacrifice on both sides.
WHEN THE INDIAN Wars are remembered today, it is with cinematic images of whooping Indians and charging cavalrymen. Those stereotypes are not wrong, but they are incomplete. As important to the final outcome was the boom of hunters’ guns destroying the buffalo, the buzz of telegraph wires summoning reinforcements, the steady clank of pioneer wagons across the prairie, and the toot-toot of trains traversing the transcontinental railroad completed in 1869. The occupation of their hunting grounds by white settlers doomed the Indians as surely as any battle. Often the application of force was actually counterproductive, encouraging the Indians to resist longer than if they had been better treated.
That should not detract, however, from an appreciation of the skills or the ruthlessness exhibited by George Armstrong Custer, George Crook, Nelson Miles, and other notable Indian fighters. Although the U.S. Army always considered Indian fighting an activity of secondary importance and never developed much doctrine designed specifically for this mission, soldiers stumbled through sheer experimentation upon effective techniques to defeat what one of them called “the best fighters the sun ever shone on.”48 The methods they employed—in particular the use of native scouts, attacks on the enemy’s food supplies, and the rounding up of the insurgent population—would play a major part in most successful counterinsurgency campaigns well into the twentieth century. Their Indian adversaries, in turn, showed how to utilize their mobility effectively to evade and hinder more numerous pursuers—and how to fight with great resolution in a doomed cause.
Equal determination would be shown by very different tribesmen fighting a very different sort of empire not in the Wild West but in the even more wild East.
23.
THE WINNING OF THE EAST
The Holy War against Russia in
Chechnya and Dagestan, 1829–1859
INSURGENTS DO NOT often set up fortified redoubts; their strengths lie in mobility and invisibility, not in military engineering. But, though relatively rare, rebel strongholds can be devilishly hard to attack if well, meaning inconveniently, situated. One of the first and most famous of all was at Masada, where Herod the Great had built palaces atop a steep mountain in the lion-colored Judean desert, 1,400 feet above the Dead Sea. Here the Jewish Zealot sect, fewer than a thousand in number, held out for three years after the fall of Jerusalem and finally committed mass suicide rather than be captured alive by a Roman army, 15,000 strong, in AD 73. A thousand years later, the medieval Muslim sect known as the Assassins operated out of a nearly impregnable fortress known as Alamut in the Elburz Mountains of northern Persia. Not nearly as well known today, but just as formidable to its besiegers, was the nineteenth-century citadel of Gimri, an aoul, or fortified village, built of stone and sun-baked mud, high in the mountains of Dagestan.
“The bare rock face towered up from the valley in unbroken slabs of limestone,” wrote one traveler. “There were no trees, no foothold anywhere.” Only two tracks led to its entrance, neither one wide enough to let more than one man pass at a time. “A whole regiment could be held at bay by a handful of sharp-shooters.” Reaching Gimri was especially difficult when snow was on the ground, as it was in the fall of 1832 when a Russian army approached the site. Yet the Russians were not dissuaded. Their commander, General Alexander Veliaminov, declared, “Could a dog pass? Then that’s enough. Where a dog can go, so can a Russian soldier.” And he ordered his men upward through a thick mist.
By October 17, 1832, some ten thousand Russian soldiers had surrounded Gimri and were ready to launch an assault. Inside, they knew, was Ghazi Muhammad, the man who three years earlier had proclaimed a gazavat (sacred struggle) against them. He became known as the first imam of Dagestan, and his followers were called the murid (“he who seeks” in Arabic). Although they were influenced primarily by the Sufist tradition, their “fanatical puritan movement,” wrote two historians, “was in many ways comparable to the contemporary Wahabi movement in Arabia.” Ghazi Muhammad managed to make life uncomfortable for the Russians by striking into the neighboring province of Chechnya. In August 1832 he ambushed five hundred Cossacks in a forest, killing more than a hundred of them.
The Russian forces sent out to round up the murids found it a frustrating experience—just as frustrating as it was for American soldiers sent to track down Indian war parties or French soldiers sent to find Haitian or Spanish revolutionaries. General Fedor Fedorovich Tornau left a vivid account of campaigning against this “ferocious, tireless enemy.” Each day, he wrote, was pretty much like another—“only at rare intervals” did face-to-face clashes with guerrillas vary “the deadly monotony of the proceedings.” More often, Russian troops marched from one campsite to another pursued by an invisible foe. “Fighting went on from beginning to end of each march: there was the chatter of musketry, the hum of bullets; men fell; but no enemy was seen.” Soldiers who became separated from the main body, such as sharpshooters who operated in pairs, would suffer a gruesome fate reminiscent of French troops in Haiti: “the Chechens would rise as it were out of the ground, rush at the isolated couples and cut them to pieces before their comrades could come to the rescue.” Even in fortified bivouacs there was little security from “the bullets with which the Chechens favored us nearly every night, creeping up to the camp in spite of all precautions.”
Russian troops reacted much as American troops did against the Indians: “Small columns were sent out on all sides to ravage the enemy’s fields and dwellings. The aouls blaze, the crops are mown down, the musketry rattles, the guns thunder; again the wounded are brought in and the dead.”
On those rare occasions when the murids were cornered, they fought with a magnificent disregard for their own lives. In 1832 the Russians stormed the aoul of Germentchug, the largest and richest in Chechnya, with over six hundred houses. After the initial assault, only three houses remained in the murids’ hands. Under heavy fire, Russian volunteers set fire to the houses and threw grenades down their chimneys. “There was nothing left for the enemy but to surrender or burn,” General Tornau wrote. But when an emissary asked for their capitulation, “a half-naked Chechen, black with smoke,” emerged to declare, “We want no quarter; the only grace we ask of the Russians is to let our families know that we died as we lived, refusing submission to any foreign yoke.” Suddenly the door of a burning house was flung open and a Chechen charged out sword in hand. He was immediately shot down. Five minutes later the same thing happened. By the time the fires had been extinguished, seventy-two murids had died. Not one had been taken alive.
Given such fanatical resistance, which was hardly typical of nineteenth-century imperial campaigns, the Russians were understandably pleased to have cornered Ghazi Muhammad in 1832. Eliminate him, they figured, and his movement would collapse. As usual, the murids fought to the death, but the Russians smashed through their fortifications. As they were about to complete the conquest of Gimri, however, a group of soldiers noticed a man in the doorway of a house just outside the aoul. He was “very tall and powerfully built” and was on an elevated stoop. He pulled out his sword, hitched up his robe, and charged through the door. An officer described what happened next:
Then, suddenly, with the spring of a wild beast, he leapt clean over the heads of the very line of soldiers about to fire on him, and landing behind them, whirling his sword in his left hand he cut down three of them, but was bayoneted by the fourth
, the steel plunging deep into his chest. His face still extraordinary in its immobility, he seized the bayonet, pulled it out of his own flesh, cut down the man and, with another superhuman leap, cleared the wall and vanished into the darkness.
The Russian soldiers were “left absolutely dumbfounded” by this spectacle, but they thought no more of it. What, after all, was the escape of one man when the rest of the murids had been killed, Ghazi Muhammad among them? Surely now, they must have thought, these ignorant mountaineers would reconcile themselves to the enlightened rule of the tsars. Little did the Russians suspect that the man who escaped—his name was Shamil—would wage unremitting warfare on them for the next quarter century and become one of the legendary guerrilla commanders of the century.49
JUST LIKE THE English settlers of North America, the Russians started off on the periphery of a continent—in their case, Asia—and over the course of centuries advanced toward the Pacific Ocean as well as points north and south. Both nationalities, whose advance eventually collided in Alaska, justified their conquests with sweeping doctrines: the Americans claimed to be pursuing “manifest destiny,” the Russians to be championing Orthodox Christianity.
From our perspective, the most telling similarity was in the adversaries they encountered. Both bumped up against some relatively advanced states: the United States would fight Britain, Mexico, and Spain; the Russians clashed with Poland, Sweden, Persia, Turkey, and China. But most of the opposition in both America and Asia came from nonstate peoples. The “Wild Field,” as the Russians called their steppe frontier, was even more unsettled and dangerous than the Wild West, because Asian nomads were more numerous than the American Indians. Russian attempts to regulate relations with Mongol and Turkic tribes proved as unsatisfactory as the interactions of their American counterparts with the Seminole and Sioux. In both cases the tribes were so decentralized that no headman could bind all of his warriors or enforce control over recognized international boundaries. That led both Washington and St. Petersburg to fight countless small wars against skilled if primitive guerrillas.