The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

Companions of our exile, and our shields ’gainst every woe.

  May they see their husbands generals, with double pay also,

  And join us in our choruses of Benny Havens O!!4

  The Mesdames Johnston, Oakes, Palmer, and Johnson—the latter the wife of Lieutenant Richard W. Johnson—were all marching with the Second Cavalry now to Texas, living embodiments of Teresa Viele’s heroine. They were a quartet of rubber-tough companions, up in the morning at 4:00 and soldiering in their ambulance-wagons from 6:00 to 6:00, making twenty more miles toward Texas on a good day. At the end of those days they were women again and their four tents, staked among the hundreds in the encircling encampment, became magnets, reminders to the horse soldiers of a softer world left behind.5

  The Second Calvary was little more than half a year old. In early March 1855, the Congress had authorized four new regiments for the army, to answer the clamor on the frontier for a larger armed presence—two new cavalry regiments and two infantry. The Second Cavalry was one of these, and favored above all the others. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had taken a particular personal interest in its composition, handpicking its colonel and lieutenant colonel—Johnston and Robert E. Lee—and all of its officers. It had therefore come to be known in the army as “Jeff Davis’ Own.”6

  Through the spring and early summer the regiment’s young company commanders, among them newly promoted Captains Oakes, Palmer, and Stoneman of the class of 1846, fanned out into the country to recruit the best fighting men they could find. Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana were canvassed for the best cavalry horses money could buy. For an average price of $150 a head, grays were purchased for Company A; sorrels for Companies B and E; bays for Companies C, D, F, and I; browns for Companies G and H; and roans for Company K.7 Six of the regiment’s ten companies threw new brass-mounted Campbell saddles with wooden stirrups over the backs of these horses. The troopers carried state-of-the-art breech-loading carbines across their pommels and Colt’s navy revolvers on their hips. The latest in dragoon sabers hung from the belts of their officers. There was nothing too good for the Second Cavalry.8

  In late summer and early fall the regiment trained and drilled at Jefferson Barracks, and by October it was ready to march. They had been ordered to Texas because that state needed them most; it had an Indian problem bigger than any other region, a headache to match its size. Since the Mexican War, Indians had had their way in Texas, ransacking and raiding into the state from three directions—from Mexico to the south, New Mexico Territory to the west, and Indian Territory to the north. In 1850 the army had added five thousand more troops, scaling up from eight thousand to thirteen thousand men, in part to deal with the Indian trouble in Texas. But the higher numbers had hardly made a dent. And by 1855 the violent clash of the pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests in Kansas was pulling troops from Texas to an even more urgent crisis. Comanches, Kiowas, and Lupins were raiding at will across the state. Texas was said to be in a “defenceless condition.” If a cavalry was ever needed to gallop to the rescue of beleaguered settlers, pennants flying and bugles blaring, it was needed there. The Second Cavalry was marching to answer the trumpet call.9

  On October 27 the regiment left Jefferson Barracks. Its 750 men, 800 horses, twenty-nine wagons, one ambulance, and assorted private conveyances covered the trail for miles. The line of march from Jefferson Barracks to Fort Belknap was to take them from St. Louis southwest over the Ozarks, down the boundary line of Missouri to Maysville, Arkansas, then southwest through the Indian Territory into Texas.10 The Indian summer foretold a benign march. It was balmy and mild through all those early first days, and Eliza Johnston was cheered. It made up for the ague that had kept her for a day in St. Louis and forced the regiment to leave on Saturday without her. But she had caught up on Sunday, and on Monday she was soldiering.11

  “Especially pleasant,” she told her diary, “were scenes at night with hundreds of campfires blazing before as many tents, and soldiers seated on blankets, swapping stories, or tending kettles of boiling food.”12

  But winter was encroaching on the fall, and by December 4 when they crossed the North Fork of the Canadian River into the Indian Territory, wolves were howling around the tents, venturing as close as they dared to the blazing campfires.13 By Saturday, December 22, they were but fifty miles from Fort Belknap and the weather all day had been springlike. They should be at their destination easily by Christmas Day.

  But at about 8:00 that evening the weather took an unbelievable turn. None in that long military train had ever seen anything like it. None would ever forget it. The coldest blue norther Eliza Johnston had ever felt, one of the coldest Texas had ever seen, came out of nowhere, howling across the prairie highland. The shrieking wind blew out the fires in their tents. The thermometer plunged to four degrees below zero. It became impossible to keep warm.14

  “I do not believe that any of the hyperborean explorers felt the cold more intensely,” Colonel Johnston wrote his son. “Think of a northern blast, sixty miles an hour, unceasing, unrelenting (the Mercury below zero, ice six inches thick), coming suddenly down on the highest table-lands of Texas, 2,000 feet above the sea, upon a regiment only a few moments before luxuriously enjoying the balmy, bland south breeze.”15

  All the next day the wind screamed across the tableland. On Christmas Day, when they thought they would be at the end of a happy march, they were still thirty-five miserable miles from Fort Belknap. It was clear and beautiful, but so cold they couldn’t march at all. The next day Eliza Johnston celebrated her birthday, the coldest of her life. It was not until December 27, two months to the day after they left Jefferson Barracks, that the shivering regiment filed into its destination. The thermometer still held rigidly fixed below zero and they were colder than they had ever been or ever thought they could be.16

  When the cold weather waned, as it finally did after a succession of freezing northers one after another, the regiment began to scatter to outposts throughout Texas. All along the border Indian war parties were raiding and terrorizing white settlements. Into their midst on February 22 rode James Oakes, class of 1846, tempered in the fires of Mexico, where he had won two brevets for gallantry, and seasoned in past Indian combats. His company launched the regiment’s first countermeasures that day when he surprised and hammered a band of marauding Wacos. On the first day of May, at the end of a march of 450 miles, he also defeated a party of Comanches near the headwaters of the Concho.17

  The Indian wars were on in earnest in Texas, and Captain Oakes had fired the first shots. For the next five years the horse soldiers of the Second Cavalry would ride out in sorties south of the Red River under Oakes, Palmer, Stoneman, and other West Pointers, to pound the Indians wherever they could find them. They would patrol endlessly, pursue relentlessly, and bring as many of the marauders to battle as they could catch and corner. They would fight forty engagements, ride out on scores of patrols, scouting assignments, and escort missions.

  It would be a star-studded regiment. Out of it and the crucible of the Indian wars it would fight in Texas would come sixteen Civil War generals, eleven for the Confederacy and five—including Oakes, Palmer, and Stoneman—for the Union. The Second Cavalry would furnish the Confederacy with half of its eight four-star generals, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Edmund Kirby Smith, and John B. Hood. It was an elite fighting force, and Texas was a stern proving ground.18

  In the regiment’s first year in Texas, as the winter freeze thawed and spring wore on into summer, the terrorism abated. It would flare again; the quiet was only illusory and the Texas frontier was long, and “as open as the oceans.” But the Second Cavalry, with its stars-to-be and its companions in exile, had arrived and the Indians knew it and soon felt it. It was not a regiment many of them cared to stand and fight face-to-face. Such lethal head-to-head warfare against such military talent paid diminishing returns; they would continue to raid and evade, scalp and steal and run.19

  The problem Captain Samuel Davis Sturgis now
saw thundering down on him across the prairie in Kansas was not something he cared to face either. Better, he thought, to run. But it was too late for that.

  Sturgis had been making a name for himself on the frontier. The stout, curly-headed captain of cavalry had fighting in his genes. He was the nephew of Brevet Captain William Sturgis, who had died a hero’s death at Lundy’s Lane in the War of 1812. All of his letters of recommendation to the academy had mentioned the uncle, “as brave a man who ever drew a sword.” It had been thought the connection would give Sturgis an inside track; it was an asset more potent even than orphanhood.20

  Sturgis had married a companion for his exile, a yellow-haired Ohio girl named Jerusha, who had won him with her beautiful smile.21 But she was not with him now on this march across the prairie in the spring of 1857, and the sight before him was an unhappy one. Even for his seasoned eyes, which had seen nearly everything there was to see in the decade he had passed in Indian country, it was frightening.

  In those ten years Sturgis, like Oakes, Palmer, and Stoneman, had become one of the army’s premier Indian fighters. In that decade the nephew of the hero of Lundy’s Lane had come into his own with the reputation as a straight-ahead sort of soldier who dealt swiftly and directly with whatever was in his front. This trait had made him a prisoner of war for eight days in Mexico before the battle of Buena Vista. It had likewise made him into a fearless and implacable Indian fighter.22

  His marathon pursuit of a band of Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico Territory in 1855 was already legendary in the army. Sturgis had been with the Department of New Mexico then, headquartered in Santa Fe, the town his commanding officer, Edwin Vose Sumner, called “that sink of vice and extravagance.”23

  The Mescaleros had raided the Eaton ranch near Galisteo, raped the women, shot two herders, and made off with seventy-five horses and mules. That night Sturgis took up the chase with eighteen dragoons and six civilians, including Eaton himself. For three bone-jamming days they rode, covering nearly sixty miles a day before stopping for a few hours’ rest. They overtook the marauders 175 miles from Santa Fe on January 16, 1855, standing before their stolen stock shouting peace overtures in Apache. One thing Sturgis hadn’t learned about Apaches over the years was their language.

  “Well men,” he said after trying to puzzle it out for a moment, “I do not understand a word they are saying, haul off and let them have it.”

  Pistols barked and musketoons roared. But the day was bitter cold, too cold for human hands on naked steel, and they could not reload. It mattered little to Sturgis how the job was accomplished as long as it got done.

  “Charge!” he shouted, and three Indians were soon dead, four wounded, and the livestock recovered.24

  That had been in the winter of 1855. It was now spring of 1857. Sturgis was a captain in the First Cavalry Regiment, another crack outfit, and the problem before him was entirely different.

  The column had seen its first buffalo at Cottonwood Creek, about fifty miles west of Council Grove. There had been only small scattered herds at first. But they had gradually multiplied, until they covered the prairie in every direction. The sight of a great buffalo herd was something no soldier who saw one ever forgot.

  Dabney Maury remembered marching through one herd for three days, thirty miles a day, without ever being out of its midst, the air around filled day and night with their ceaseless bellowing.25 One soldier found them “as numerous as the stars in the heavens.”26 Richard Ewell said there were times they were so thick on the land that “the bare prairie could not be seen. Hill after hill covered with buffaloe ad infinitum.”27

  Now, two miles away and closing, buffalo ad infinitum were thundering directly down on the little column from the First Cavalry Regiment.

  Its commander, Major John Sedgwick, stared at them in paralyzed disbelief. Sedgwick was an able officer, a quarter of a century in the service. He had graduated from West Point in 1837, nine years before Sturgis, the young officer from the class of 1846 who now sat on the horse beside him. Sedgwick had been an artillery officer for most of his twenty years in the army, not a horse soldier. Besides, he was from Cornwall Hollow, Connecticut, and what did they know of buffalo stampedes in Cornwall Hollow?28

  Sedgwick knew, staring at this one, that he could see no end to it in any direction. He knew it was surging toward them in “an irresistible torrent.” He knew that buffalo, set on a course, rarely turned from it unless forcefully persuaded otherwise; they just ran over anything in their way. What he did not know was what to do about it. His expertise was artillery, but he couldn’t cannonade them all.

  “Sturgis,” he said, turning to his second in command, “what’ll we do?”

  Sturgis had been staring at the onrushing torrent, too. Perhaps he had closed one eye as he watched it coming, as was his fashion when he was very much interested in something.29 He saw it a little differently from Sedgwick. To him it was another problem, not unlike many such problems he had dealt with in his decade on the frontier—a little more tricky perhaps, and maneuvering room was rapidly running out.

  “Time is too precious for explanations now, Major,” Sturgis said to Sedgwick; “better turn the command over to me for a little while—I’ll steer you through it.”

  “Take command, Captain,” Sedgwick said gratefully; “take command, and give your orders.”

  “Orderly bugler,” said Sturgis to a soldier beside him. “Give my compliments to company commanders and say that Captain Sturgis is in command.

  “Hurry on back to the train as fast as you can go,” he then told him, “and give my compliments to the quartermaster and tell him to corral his wagons quickly, in as small a space as possible, teams heading south, with the beef cattle inside the corral.”

  The stampeding buffalo were now a hundred yards closer than they had been, and closing. In seconds Sturgis had the column turned about and in full galloping retreat toward the supply train in the rear. As they pulled abreast of it, the train was already forming in corral, with the beef herd on the inside as ordered.

  “Dismount, to fight on foot!” Sturgis bellowed as he reined in.

  Three troopers of every four, all now afoot, feverishly gripped their rifles. The fourth grasped the reins of their four horses and stood by. Quickly they formed ranks, and to their horror, Sturgis turned them about and ordered them to march “double quick” a hundred yards back toward the oncharging herd. The flanks of the column were now thrown back in a V-shaped line with the tip pointing like an arrow at the oncoming buffalo and the open end enclosing the horses, the beef herd, and the train. The earth trembled and shook.

  My God, thought trooper R. M. Peck, staring at the brown wall bearing down on them, what will be left when that avalanche of horns and hoofs sweeps over us all? Sturgis had told them what they must do; they must try to split the herd by firing into it. Peck did not see how it could possibly work. Where could the beasts find room to divide?

  “Commence firing!” Sturgis roared.

  A sheet of fire slammed into the thundering herd from the Sharps rifles. To Peck’s astonishment and relief the buffalo began doing the impossible—splitting, crowding savagely to the right and left of the tip of the V, trampling one another in their passion to escape the withering fire.

  Down either flank of the V the heaving brown torrent surged without any discernible slackening of speed. The soldiers, their hearts in their throats, furiously pumped bullets into the herd as fast as they could load and fire. Boxes of cartridges were dragged from the ammunition wagons, and those not squeezing triggers reloaded guns. There must be no letup in the hail of fire raining on the herd.

  It seemed to Peck that in spite of all this, they were about to be overwhelmed and trampled to death at any moment, “by that living tornado.” The dust was blinding, and the wedge was slowly being bent back, foot by foot, until the soldiers were now tightly packed together about their horses and wagons in the ever-narrowing V. There was nowhere left to go. The slim line that separ
ated them from being crushed to death seemed about to snap.

  For half an hour the river of buffalo poured past without stint. Then just as suddenly as it had come, it began to thin and recede.

  “Cease firing,” Sturgis said at last.

  The troopers lowered their rifles and tried to still their trembling fingers and quiet their screaming nerves. All about them lay dead and dying buffalo. Other beasts, wounded and straggling but still on their feet, staggered on in the aftertow of the disappearing herd.

  Sturgis watched them go. It had been just another day’s work on the frontier for the nephew of the hero of Lundy’s Lane. Today it had been buffalo, tomorrow it might be Indians—probably would be—for that is what they were there for.

  Turning to Sedgwick and undoubtedly giving him his compliments, he relinquished command of the column.30

  The

  Bloody

  Saddle

  Captain Oliver Hazard Perry Taylor turned in his saddle as the column rode out of Fort Walla Walla, and waved one more time in wordless farewell to his wife Kate and their little son and daughter.

  These absences were hard on them all, but especially on Kate and the children. There was always the possibility he might not return. Like any other frontier wife, Kate lived in dread of that. There was also the possibility he might return and find them dead—that had also happened. On the frontier, death, disease, and violence were shadow companions—always waiting.

  Since the class graduated from West Point in 1846, since he and Dominie Wilson had stormed the church together at the Taos Pueblo, Taylor had been in the West, a continent removed from his native Rhode Island. Now in the spring of 1858, after twelve years on the frontier, he was a battle-seasoned veteran of the Indian wars. His toughness showed in his bearing, in his lithe, saddle-hardened frame, his sharp angular face, his piercing eyes, and his fierce black moustache peaking like a low tent over his strong mouth.1