Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past
Page 47
General William Tecumseh Sherman and General Philip H. Sheridan implemented an early version of the military strategy of “total war,” in which entire civilian populations are made to suffer the effects of armed onslaught, during the Civil War, notably during Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864 and Sherman’s destructive “March through Georgia” in 1865. Later, in combination with standard army procedures, the tactics of total war and surprise were used against Indians and approved by Sherman, as commanding general of the army, and by Sheridan, as commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, in 1876-77. Especially effective were surprise raids on Indian villages and encampments, during which the army would capture Indian horses and goods, forcing their victims to surrender or take refuge in other camps; often women and children were killed in these attacks, since the men had no time to mount a defense. Sheridan, who ordered Custer to attack Black Kettle’s Cheyenne camp along the Washita, was responsible for the statement, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” later to enter American folklore as: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” An equestrian statue of Sheridan stands in front of the New York State Capitol Building in Albany, New York, the city where Sheridan was born.1
Calamity Jane Cannary married James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok in 1870, gave birth to their daughter Jean Hickok in 1873, then gave Jean up for adoption. She reportedly accompanied Custer and his Seventh Cavalry on the Black Hills expedition of 1874, and divorced Hickok in 1876, shortly before his death in a gunfight. In 1893, she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, touring the eastern United States and England. During the last few years of her life, she often went on drunken benders, and was thrown out of at least one town, Billings, Montana, for shooting up a saloon. She died of pneumonia in 1903 near Deadwood, South Dakota, and was buried next to the grave of Wild Bill Hickok.
William McKay and Horatio Nelson Ross did in fact accompany Custer on the 1874 expedition in the Black Hills.
George Armstrong Custer, Thomas Custer, Isaiah Dorman, Charley Reynolds, Donald McIntosh, and Bloody Knife all died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Luther Hare, John Burkman, and Frederick Benteen survived that battle. Elizabeth Bacon Custer published three volumes of memoirs and devoted her long life and widowhood to preserving her husband’s memory until her death in 1933 in New York City.
Buffalo Calf Road Woman fought against the forces of General George Crook at the Battle of the Rosebud River, the battle that preceded Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn by eight days. At the battle by the Rosebud, Buffalo Calf Road Woman saved her brother’s life by riding into the midst of the fight to rescue him when his own horse was shot out from under him. That battle was known among the Cheyenne afterward as the Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.
Walking Blanket Woman fought against Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Little Bighorn to avenge the death of her brother. It is said that she wore the full war dress of a man and carried her dead brother’s shield.
Monahseetah (or the Young Grass That Shoots in the Spring, which I have rendered as Young Spring Grass) was a Cheyenne woman who survived Custer’s massacre of Black Kettle’s people camped along the Washita in 1868. She was reportedly at the Battle of the Little Bighorn with her aunt, who found Custer’s body and broke the dead man’s eardrums with her awl so that he, who had ignored the warnings of the Indians, “could hear better in the next world.” The legend persists among some Native Americans that Monahseetah had a son by Custer, named Yellow Bird, while she was living with and scouting for Custer in the late 1860s. If so, he would have been Custer’s only child and direct descendant.
Sitting Bull was nominated as paramount chief of all the Lakota Nation in 1866. Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, this chief and medicine man had a vision of white soldiers falling into camp, the vision that warned him of the Seventh Cavalry’s approach and foretold his people’s victory. That victory was the prelude to a series of defeats for the Lakota, and in 1877, Sitting Bull led his Hunkpapa Lakota to Canada, where they remained for four years before surrendering to the United States Army in 1881. He was imprisoned at Fort Randall for two years and then released into the custody of the Standing Rock agency in South Dakota. In 1885, he became a major attraction in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. In 1890, General Nelson A. Miles ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull, whom the army now considered a “fomenter of disturbances” for encouraging the Ghost Dance religion among the Lakota. When Indian police, backed by a squadron of cavalry, went to Sitting Bull’s cabin to arrest him, they were surrounded by a crowd of Ghost Dancers. Although Sitting Bull was prepared to leave peacefully, two of the Indian police shot him and killed him.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as Mark Twain, became one of America’s most popular, most enduring, and most authentic writers.
Frank Grouard was General George Crook’s chief of scouts during the Plains Indian campaigns of 1876-1877. The son of a Polynesian woman and a French missionary, he came to the United States, lived among the Lakota for several years, and was adopted by Sitting Bull.
William F. Cody was a Pony Express rider, hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad (where he killed so many buffalo to feed the railroad workers that he was immortalized as Buffalo Bill), was featured in a number of dime novels by writer Ed Judson (who wrote as Ned Buntline), and began a career in show business in 1872, appearing in “Scouts of the Plains.” After that, except for a brief return to the Plains in 1876 to scalp Chief Yellow Hand in revenge for Custer’s death, he became an impresario, produced his Wild West spectacles, toured the United States and Europe, became a millionaire, went bankrupt, and spent his last years touring with a circus. Buffalo Bill died in 1917 and is buried in Colorado, where a bronze equestrian statue of himself marks his grave.
John F. Finerty, born in Ireland and the son of an Irish editor, fled his homeland in 1864, but remained a lifelong advocate of Irish independence. He served in the Ninety-fourth New York Regiment during the Civil War, moving to Chicago after the war. He worked as a reporter and then as city editor of the Chicago Republican from 1868 to 1872. Until 1875, he worked for the Chicago Tribune. In 1876, the city editor of the Chicago Times, Clinton Snowden, assigned Finerty to cover the 1876 Sioux campaign for his paper. Finerty traveled with the troops of General George Crook during the war against the Lakota and later covered the Apache campaign in the Southwest. From 1879 to 1881, he was the Washington correspondent of the Chicago Times; from 1883 to 1885, he represented a Chicago district in Congress. When he died in 1908, several hundred army veterans and members of a number of Irish societies were part of his mile-long funeral procession. He was the author of War-Path and Bivouac, published in 1890.
Thomas Alva Edison had 1093 patents to his name. Among his many inventions were the vote recorder, the automatic telegraph, waxed paper, the mimeograph, the phonograph, the electric light, and the kinetoscope, a precursor of the motion picture projector.
Theodore Roosevelt, then vice president, became president of the United States in 1901, after the assassination of President McKinley. His love of the outdoors, which flowered during the time he spent in the Dakota Badlands in the 1880s, led him to espouse the cause of conservation and to set up a system of national parks.
Schuyler Colfax was elected vice president of the United States in 1868, in Ulysses S. Grant’s first term. After being implicated in the Crédit Mobilier stock scandal, he was dropped from the Republican ticket, retired from politics, and had a successful career as a lecturer.
James G. Blaine was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1869 to 1875 and was elected to the U.S. Senate from Maine in 1876. He ran for president as the Republican candidate in 1884, but lost to Grover Cleveland. He served as Secretary of State in 1881 during the administration of James Garfield, resigning that post after Garfield was assassinated and Chester A. Arthur, an ally of Senator Roscoe Conkling (a political enemy of Blaine’s) became president. In 1889, Blaine was again appointed Secretary of State by Pre
sident Benjamin Harrison, and died in 1893.
Edwin M. Stanton was appointed Secretary of War in 1862, resigned after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, but was persuaded by Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, to remain at his post. Stanton’s support of Radical Republicans in Congress, and of a harsh and punitive policy of Reconstruction in the defeated South, brought him into conflict with President Johnson. After Johnson demanded his resignation in 1867, Stanton refused to resign; Johnson then suspended him, appointing Ulysses S. Grant as Secretary of War ad interim. When the Senate declined to approve Stanton’s removal, citing the recently passed Tenure of Office Act (which prevented the president from removing a Cabinet officer and which was designed to limit Johnson’s powers), Stanton resumed his post as secretary but resigned after the attempt to impeach Johnson failed. In late 1869, friends persuaded President Grant to appoint Stanton to the Supreme Court, but Stanton died a few days after receiving the appointment. An unsubstantiated rumor at the time claimed that Stanton was a suicide. Another rumor, never proven, was that he was involved in the assassination of President Lincoln.
George B. McClellan was a West Point graduate who was appointed major-general in the U.S. Army in 1861, but after reverses in battle against the Confederate forces, he was relieved of command in 1862. He became active in the Democratic party and ran for president in 1864, but lost to Abraham Lincoln, the incumbent. He was elected governor of New Jersey in 1878 and held that office until 1881.
George Crook, called by General Sherman “the greatest Indian fighter in the history of the United States,” was a field commander in campaigns against the Paiute, Apache, Sioux, and Cheyenne. He became known for using mules instead of cumbersome wagons for hauling supplies and redesigned the mule pack to allow the animals to carry more weight. A master of guerrilla tactics against the Indian, he also had sympathy for his foe, and became one of the few white men trusted by the Sioux. In 1886, during his last campaign against the Apache, Crook persuaded Geronimo and his Chiricahuas to surrender by promising them that they would be released after imprisonment in the East for two years, and then allowed to return to their own lands. The War Department in Washington refused to honor this promise, Geronimo fled into Mexico, and Crook was severely reprimanded for negligence, for offering unauthorized terms to the Apache, and for his tolerant attitude toward Indians. Crook immediately resigned and was replaced by an old rival, Nelson A. Miles. Crook died in 1890. Geronimo surrendered later in 1886 for the last time, spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of war in Florida, Alabama, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and died of pneumonia in 1909.
Nelson A. Miles fought in the Civil War and rose to the rank of major-general of volunteers. In 1866, he left the volunteers and became colonel of the Fortieth Infantry. His wife, Mary Hoyt Sherman, whom he married in 1868, was the niece of William T. Sherman and Senator John Sherman, a family connection Miles readily exploited. He began fighting Indians as a colonel of the Fifth Infantry, and his persistence in pursuing the enemy was in large part responsible for the final defeat of the Sioux. He disagreed, often publicly, with George Crook over the treatment of Indian prisoners; he also oversaw operations on the Sioux reservations before and after the massacre at Wounded Knee. In 1895, he became commander general of the U.S. Army, but his increasing altercations with President William McKinley made him lose favor, and he was a political liability by the time Theodore Roosevelt became president. He retired in 1903 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1925.
Alfred H. Terry, trained as a lawyer with a degree from Yale, fought in the Civil War and was commander of the Department of the Dakota from 1866 until his retirement in 1888. As a field commander, he fought during the Great Sioux War of 1876-1877. In 1877, he was sent to Sitting Bull, then in exile in Canada, with orders to promise the great Lakota chief a pardon if he and his people surrendered their horses and firearms and returned to the United States. Sitting Bull, having reason to distrust these promises, refused the offer and remained in Canada until 1881.
Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became a gifted and celebrated orator, abolitionist lecturer, and supporter of women’s rights. His intellect was so impressive that opponents of abolition often refused to believe that he was a former slave. He helped to raise a regiment of black soldiers, the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, to fight for the Union during the Civil War, served as U.S. marshal for the District of Columbia from 1877-1881, was recorder of deeds for the district from 1881-1886, and was minister to Haiti from 1889-1891. He was also the author of a classic autobiography, revised several times, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. He died in 1895.
James Wormley and his family, prominent members of Washington’s African-American community in the years after the Civil War, owned and managed the Wormley Hotel, which was established in 1871. The hotel was considered by many to be the best and most elegant of all Washington hotels in the 1880s, and many celebrated people and crowned heads of nations were among its guests.
Annie Oakley married Frank Butler, an Irish immigrant and trick shooter, in 1880; he soon retired from their act of “Butler and Oakley” to become his wife’s manager. The couple toured North America and Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Annie Oakley was adopted into the Lakota nation by Sitting Bull in 1885, presented to Queen Victoria of England in 1887, and shot a cigar out of the mouth of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Germany without injury to the prince. After giving demonstrations of rifle shooting for U.S. soldiers in 1918, she retired from public life in 1922 and died in 1926. Butler, whose management of his wife’s career helped to make her a legend, also died in 1926.
Kicking Bear was the Minneconjou Lakota who brought the news of Wovoka, the Paiute Messiah, to Sitting Bull. Wovoka’s Ghost Dance religion quickly spread among the despairing Sioux and led to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. There, while troops of the Seventh Cavalry were attempting to herd a group of unarmed Ghost Dancers back to the Standing Rock agency, a shot was fired, and the soldiers then opened fire upon the helpless Indians. It is estimated that some three hundred Lakota men, women, and children died at Wounded Knee. Twenty-five Blue Coats also died, most of them killed by army bullets or shrapnel.
Several people deserve acknowledgment for their aid and moral support during the writing of this novel. First and foremost are my editor John Douglas, whose support and patience approached the superhuman, and George Zebrowski, for his strong encouragement. Others who helped me more than they perhaps realize include Jack Dann, my literary agent Richard Curtis, Richard Miller, Rebecca Springer, Nancy Hanger, Shirley S. Darmer, Kenneth I. Darmer, Connie Sargent Jensen, and the staffs of the Albany Public Library and the New York State Library and Archives. I am grateful to all of them.
—Pamela Sargent
Endnotes
1. It is worth noting here that between 1862 and 1867, wars with the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Navaho cost the United States government an estimated one hundred million dollars for several hundred Indian casualties, including women and children. According to the records of the Military Division of the Missouri, the total cost of the war against the Sioux and Cheyenne from 1876 to 1877 was $2,312,531.24. In 1990 dollars, this amount would equal approximately $27,663,242, or about $185,000 for each Indian killed. ♠
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Pamela Sargent
ISBN 978-1-4804-9751-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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