The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  So the score of officers from the class of 1846 went west with an army of protection that was little more than a skeleton force. This slim reed of strength, less than ten thousand in number, would be undermanned, ill-equipped, and lost in the vastness of the land they must now protect. The dangers, privations, and hardships would be death-dealing. The geography and climate would be unforgiving. The distances would be unimaginable. The seaboard and the foreign frontiers that bounded this vastness stretched for ten thousand miles, an Indian frontier for another eight thousand.6 Most of the miles within these measureless borders were empty and uninhabited. In the twenty-five hundred miles from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to the Columbia River in Oregon, which the Mounted Rifles would cross in 1849, there were but two existing forts—Laramie and Kearny—and not a single house otherwise.7

  The soldiers sent to this wilderness would be garrisoned in seventy-nine lonely frontier forts, most of which did not exist when they arrived and had to be built. They were in effect going into exile, where they were to be far-flung, isolated, ignored, infrequently promoted, and thrown against one of the shrewdest, most elusive and frustrating enemies ever to sit a saddle.

  It was said of the Indian warrior that he was perhaps the best guerrilla partisan in history, “the finest light horseman that the world has ever seen, with tactics that have never been equalled by Bedouin, Cossack, Numidaian, or Tartar at his best.”8 He was an unfixed target, next to impossible to pin down, and taught from childhood to ride and fight and run. He was aggressive, warlike, courageous, strong, mentally alert, stealthy, and cunning. He knew the country and how to use it in a fight. He was highly motivated and highly skilled. In effect, he was the perfect soldier.9

  Most of the army’s battles with these hit-and-run fighters would be accidental, small skirmishes lasting no longer than it took the Indians to break contact. No Indians, if they could avoid it, would ever present a solid front for very long against the army’s superior fire power. Nor would all Indians fight equally well. None would fight at all except on horseback. And of these, the officers of the class of 1846 would soon learn to expect the hardest fight from the Utes and Shoshones on the high plains, the Comanches and Kiowas in Texas, and the Navajos and Apaches in the deserts.

  The only edge the horse soldiers seemed to have at first against this skillful, nebulous enemy were superior discipline and arms. Even the edge in arms, at first, was questionable. Artillery was essentially useless against this shadow adversary, although on large-scale sorties lightweight mountain howitzers were pulled along.

  This was a war the soldiers would fight for a long time with pistols and a hybrid sidekick called the musketoon. A blunderbuss of sorts (some called it a “brevet musket”), the musketoon was a musket sawed off to two-thirds of its original length. Its rammer was fastened to the barrel by a swivel to prevent its being lost or dropped while being loaded at a full gallop. It fired the same cartridge as the musket, but had neither its range nor accuracy; yet it kicked like a mule. It was nearly as useless as the artillery, but it was convenient to carry on horseback.10 One day it would give way to the rifled carbine, but many an Indian would survive its blast and many a trooper would be swept from his saddle by its wallop before that day came.

  So the pistol was left as the weapon of choice against the Indian. At first it was the single-shot, muzzle-loading horse pistol, the kind that misfired for Dominie Wilson in his close encounter with the Navajo chief. That soon gave way to the Colt’s cap-and-ball six-shooter that had become the rage in the Mexican War, and was the only sensible weapon for these close-in fights that lasted only moments or seconds.11

  There would be no fighting this war as armies, or as divisions or brigades or even as regiments. On rare occasions companies from several forts might combine to fight Indians on a major warpath. But any such combinations of five hundred to six hundred troops was as rare as buffalo were plentiful. The Indian wars were fought by single companies from isolated forts making long, galloping sweeps against hit-and-run Indian bands. Many companies would fight through an entire decade without ever taking the field with another company.12 Richard S. Ewell, one of the best of the Indian fighters, would one day say that he learned everything about commanding a company of fifty dragoons on the western plains and nothing about anything else.13

  Not good sense, but government policy, required that the army fight the Indians mainly with infantry. It was too expensive to mount and maintain cavalry-only regiments throughout the remote Indian country. “Walk-a-heaps,” the Indians called these foot soldiers, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. “As well might we send boys into a cornfield to catch marauding crows with hopes of success as to start foot-soldiers in pursuit of Indians,” complained the Daily Missouri Republican. “The government had as well place its soldiery on crutches and to command them to capture the wild antelope, as to send them, on foot, in the war path of the well-mounted warriors of the plains,” said the Brownsville (Texas) American Flag. “Infantry in the Indian country … are about the same use as so many stumps would be,” said John W. Whitfield, an Indian agent on the upper Platte.14 But that is the way it had to be.

  The longer they fought the Indian, however, the more like him these soldiers became and the more like him they fought. The best of the Indian fighters learned to think like this enemy, and dress for the occasion.

  Captain Edmund Kirby Smith described himself, “mounted on my mule … [;] courduroy pants; a hickory or blue flannel shirt, cut down in front, studded with pockets and worn outside; a slouched hat and long beard, cavalry boots worn over the pants, knife and revolver belted to the side and a double barrel gun across the pommel, complete the costume as truly serviceable as it is unmilitary.”15

  So there they were, exiles in their own land, fighting an untidy, exhausting war against a skilled and phantom enemy, “living the best years of their lives in remote frontier posts with rare glimpses of the refinements of civilization, having little reward in sight but a sense of duty done, growing gray in junior grades under the slow promotions of peace conditions, kept poor by the necessities of frequent changes of stations.”16

  For them, as one of their wives said, it was “days of weary marching, nights of sleepless watching.” Whether in the sierras of the North, the prairies of the West, or the savannahs of the South, “their lives are always the same. Like a chain of sentinels, their insufficient garrisons are stretched from the south-east to the extreme north-west; the reveille waking loud echoes on the rock-bound shores of Oregon, while the tattoo softly murmurs through the orange groves of Florida.” The reward? Lives “too often yielded in some ignoble border skirmish, sacrificed ingloriously to their country, leaving a nameless grave on some distant, unfrequented spot.”17

  Death was no stranger to James Stuart, but the nameless grave was anathema to him. He had seen too much of death, been near it too many times. He had faced it in battle after battle in Mexico and survived.

  He had faced it as a boy in Beaufort, South Carolina, when he was only twelve years old. He had been sick then and believed dying.

  “Mamma,” he asked his mother, “the doctor has told you that I cannot live, has he not?”

  “Yes—he has,” his sobbing mother said.

  “I thought so,” said the dying boy, “but Mamma, don’t cry for me. I am not afraid to die. And there is something I wish to beg you to do for me: Stop crying, and listen to me.”

  “Well, go on, my son,” his mother said, trying to be brave, for “Jamie” was her first-born. “What is it?”

  “When I am dead I wish you to carry me to Beaufort and bury me in the Beaufort church-yard by the side of grandmother, where the birds will sing over me. Promise me that you will do it.”

  The mother had promised through her tears.

  But Jamie didn’t die. He recovered and lived to be a handsome, dashing, sensitive young man who could quote the poetry of Robert Burns by heart. He had gone on to West Point and there became George McClellan’s roomma
te and dearest friend.18

  In Mexico there was no danger Jimmy Stuart wouldn’t face, no storming party he wouldn’t volunteer for, and no brevet he didn’t win—two for gallantry under fire. He was “a soldier of winning though of modest and reserved address,” his brother wrote of him, “of great beauty of person and of romantic and interesting character.”19 He was “handsome, and gentle as a woman,” his classmate Dabney Maury said, yet “no soldier of our army surpassed him in courage and daring.”20

  After Mexico, Brevet Captain Stuart went with the Mounted Rifle Regiment to fulfill the mission it had been organized for—to police the Oregon Trail. He was with it when they rode the length of the trail from Fort Leavenworth to the Columbia River in 1849. Now it was the middle of June 1851, and he was camped in the Rogue River valley with a small detachment of Rifles driving army horses to California. The regiment was going to Texas and the horses were being transferred to its replacement regiment, the First Dragoons. Captain Philip Kearny was in command of this horse-driving detachment and his two officers were Stuart and John G. Walker.

  The weather was fine and the line of march was taking them through one of the most beautiful river valleys in the Oregon Territory. There were Indians around; this was Rogue River Indian country. But they were known to be friendly. The hardest part of the journey was behind them, and Stuart was afire with anticipation. When they reached California he was going home to Beaufort on leave. The girl he left behind was waiting there; the soft murmur of the dove was calling these West Pointers now.

  But on this night in June Stuart’s mind was not full of love, but of trouble. There was no reality he couldn’t bravely face. But what do you do about dreams? He shook Walker awake and told him he had a premonition that he was going to die. Nonsense, Walker protested. Maybe, Stuart said, but Walker must see to it that his last wishes were carried out. It is just a nightmare, Walker said, forget it.

  In the morning the news was unexpected and ominous. The Rogue River Indians were unaccountably on the warpath. The Rifle column proceeded cautiously through the morning and later in the day came upon their trail. So it had come to this. Kearny made plans to follow the Indian war party the next morning, and Stuart passed another fitful night full of fatal premonitions. Over breakfast he told Walker of a dream: an Indian warrior had appeared at the door of their tent, drawn his bow on Walker, then changed his aim at the last moment and killed Stuart instead.

  The column caught up to the Indian war party later that morning and there was a fierce fight. The Indians were beaten when Stuart rode up behind one brave so intent on what was passing in front that he didn’t see him coming. Stuart could have killed him instantly with a shot through the head or back, but that wasn’t his way. Chivalry for a defeated enemy was his code, even when the enemy were savages. Instead he would capture him. Uncocking his pistol, he took hold of the barrel and lightly tapped the Indian on the shoulder with the butt end. The startled brave leaped back and drove an arrow deep into Stuart’s side, before being killed by the captain’s troopers.

  “Oh, to think that I should have passed through six battles in Mexico, to die at last by the hand of an Indian!” Stuart cried as Walker knelt beside him.

  He lingered on, clinging to life until the next afternoon beside the road where he fell. Then he died, and Walker buried him under a live oak tree and carved his initials in the bark. He was but twenty-six years old.21

  South Carolina mourned for him, as a family would for its son. The state’s General Assembly ordered a sword inscribed to his courage, sheathed it in a scabbard of gold, and presented it to his grieving parents. “Among the sons of South Carolina who by their distinguished valor and military skill in the Mexican War, acquired renown for themselves, and adorned her annals,” the proclamation read, “she cherishes with particular pride and affection the memory of Brevet Capt. Stuart.”22

  When word of Stuart’s death reached George McClellan, he opened the journal he had kept in Mexico and wrote on a blank page at the end: “On the 18th of June, 1851, at five in the afternoon died Jimmie Stuart, my best and oldest friend.”23

  But Stuart did not die to be buried in a nameless grave under trees in a valley so far from home. Some of his classmates—McClellan, Maury, A. P. Hill—and other officers who loved him, sent Walker back for his remains.

  In Charleston, Walker asked Stuart’s mother for permission to bear the body on to West Point, there to bury it with military honors under a monument to his memory. But the mother remembered a promise she had made at another unhappy time so many years before, and she said no.

  She buried him instead in the Beaufort churchyard beside his grandmother, where the birds in the big trees would sing over his grave. It was what he had wanted.24

  Stuart’s classmate Dominie Wilson survived his dance of death with the Navajo chief. But an even more deadly enemy had hold of him now. It was a foe that was present even in the room at Brown’s Hotel when he and Tom Jackson had drunkenly danced the barefoot back-step and roared their rollicking tributes to Benny Havens. It had been stalking him ever since.

  In the summer of 1852 Wilson was in Las Lunas, New Mexico Territory, serving under Richard Ewell. An excellent officer when sober, Ewell said of him, “but unfortunately is a confirmed sot and sets such an example to my men that my trouble is doubled when he is present.”25

  By early the next year Wilson was in Albuquerque and slipping away. On February 21, 1853, he died at twenty-eight, killed by hard liquor, and only two years older than Stuart had been.

  “Poor Dominie,” Dabney Maury mourned, “his long pent craving was never slaked … until his enfeebled frame was laid to rest in a soldier’s grave away off in the shadow of the Rockies.”26

  Another mourner, Oliver H. P. Taylor, the classmate who had stormed the church at Taos by his side in the Mexican War and had become his closest friend, remembered something nobler. “I have never known any one,” Taylor said, “so apparently unconscious of danger under all circumstances.”27

  That was the Dominie Wilson the Navajo chief would also have remembered.

  India-Rubber Women

  and

  Buffalo Men

  Well, here I am soldiering,” Eliza Johnston told her diary on October 29, 1855.1 Indian summer had come to Missouri, interceding with the coming winter, and Eliza was marching to Texas with the Second Cavalry. The weather was perfect for soldiering.

  It was a common thing in the Indian wars for wives to march with their soldier-husbands to some frontier outpost to be their companions in exile. The colonel of this crack new regiment, Albert Sidney Johnston, was Eliza’s husband. But the young subalterns of the class of 1846 had been falling in love and taking wives, too. Two of those young wives were marching with Eliza and the Second Cavalry to Texas. One of them had married James Oakes, thirty-fourth in the class; the other had wed Innis Newton Palmer, thirty-eighth. Their husbands were both captains and company commanders now, among the most promising young officers in the service.

  Teresa Griffin Viele had also married an officer who for a while had been a member of the class. She would also one day be soldiering to Texas, to engage the Comanches, and would blame it all on West Point. “That mammoth trap,” she called the academy, that source of their predicament, “where the coleur de rose of army-life serves as a bait for the unsophisticated, where reality wears the gloss of romance, and military glory appears in its brightest holiday dress, accompanied by all the poetry of war. Most delusive spot, where even the atmosphere seems heavily freighted with martial music and martial association.”2

  She had fallen for it; she had taken the bait. They all had. Captivated by the gloss of romance and lulled by the poetry of war, Teresa had met, fallen in love with, and married West Point and Egbert Louis Viele. Her husband, a New Yorker, had entered the academy with the class of 1846, but had been “found” and held back a year instead of dismissed, to graduate thirtieth of thirty-eight in the class of 1847.

  “No recruit,�
� Teresa Viele would say after her marriage to the army, “ever entered the service with more enthusiasm than I did, or felt more eager to prove himself a soldier.”

  In her fantasy’s eye she beheld a beau-ideal heroine of the frontier, “a kind of tough, weather proof, India-rubber woman, ‘six feet high—grand, epic, homicidal,’ who could travel over hundreds of miles of prairie on horseback, or follow the train for months on top of a baggage-waggon.”

  Familiar fraternization with the most savage Indian tribes in the West would be de rigueur for this amazon-Teresa. Human sympathy, food, or rest would be “mere frivolous weaknesses, necessities of our fallen nature.” These she would banish from her high-strung mind. A mighty energy of character would sustain her through the direst emergencies; nothing would unstring her dauntless nerves. The allurements of dress, petty artifices, tears—any of the little feminine failings—would have no place in her frontier psyche. Teresa’s India-rubber woman would scorn them all, and the regiment, of course, would adore her. Her children, if she had any, would be “embryo soldiers arrayed in military baby clothes, cradled in a disabled drum, tucked in with a piece of ‘star-spangled banner,’ and teething on a drumstick.” Marching away to war, this archetypal warrior-wife would be “the witness of many a thrilling and gory scene, with the din of battle in her ear, and stern endurance on her brow.”3

  And when the boys sang that stanza of the Benny Havens anthem they had written for her and those like her, her lusty soprano would soar proudly above their deep baritones:

  To the ladies of the Army, our cups shall ever flow,