Red Cloud and Roman Nose spent the night repairing the damaged alliance, and the next morning the great war party paraded before Bridge Station just beyond cannon range, then swung back into the hills and vanished. Red Cloud recognized that despite his superior numbers, most of his fighters, his Oglalas and Brules in particular, were far too inexperienced, ill-disciplined, and uncomprehending of tactics to lay siege to the Army outpost. Even more disturbing was the way the tribes had nearly turned on each other. The best he could hope for was that as the war progressed his followers would learn. He was probably asking too much.
20
THE HUNT FOR RED CLOUD
It is not recorded if, on learning of Caspar Collins’s death, General Connor expressed any remorse over his verbal lashing of the young lieutenant. But it is known that when news reached Connor of the fight at Bridge Station—soon to be renamed Fort Caspar and eventually the site of Wyoming’s state capital—he chafed to ride against the hostiles. The conclusion of the Civil War had finally made this possible. Though not technically a peace treaty, the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865 marked the de facto end of hostilities, and thus of the Confederacy. It also meant that the battered Army of the Republic was able to replace the raw state militias patrolling the west with seasoned troops better capable of confronting the Indians of the Great Plains. South of the Arkansas, this meant eradicating the Kiowa and the Comanche, who were blocking movement along the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. North of the Platte, it meant killing Red Cloud and Sitting Bull.
General Ulysses S. Grant, the Army’s commander in chief, had long planned such a moment. The previous November, the day after the Sand Creek massacre, Grant summoned Major General John Pope to his Virginia headquarters to put such plans in motion. Despite his relative youth, the forty-three-year-old Pope was an old-school West Pointer and a topographical engineer-surveyor whose star had risen with several early successes on western fronts in the Civil War. It had dimmed just as rapidly when Lincoln placed him in command of the eastern forces; Pope was thoroughly outfoxed by Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope had been effectively exiled to St. Paul, Minnesota, until Grant recalled him to consolidate under one command a confusing array of bureaucratic Army “departments” and “districts” west of St. Louis. Grant named Pope the commanding general of a new Division of the Missouri, into which he enfolded three fractious geographic departments: Northwest, Missouri, and Kansas. This new division was also enlarged to include Utah and parts of the Dakotas. Pope’s mandate was to execute an offensive in the summer of 1865 that would, among its prime objectives, make safe the trail stamped out by John Bozeman.
The new route went by many names: the Bozeman Trail, the Montana Road, the Bozeman Cutoff. But whatever it was called, it was the road to gold in Montana. It broke north from the great Oregon Trail and shortened the journey to the new gold fields in the rugged mountains of western Montana by some 400 weary, plodding miles. Pope had appointed General Dodge as his chief subordinate, and together the two decided on a campaign plan to crush the High Plains tribes with a large-scale pincer movement. General Connor’s forces would march north out of Fort Laramie to face Red Cloud, while General Sully would lead a column northwest from Sioux City to finally finish off Sitting Bull, with whom his cavalry had been skirmishing for the better part of two years. The optimum time for such an assault was early spring, before the lush summer prairie grasses allowed the Indian ponies to regain their speed and stamina. But even with the cessation of fighting in the East, troop movements remained a cumbersome operation, and as a result through much of the spring of 1865 General Connor commanded less than 1,000 soldiers to protect the Platte corridor. This had reduced him to dispatching what were in essence rapid reaction teams up and down the “Glory Road.” Their rapidity, however, was somewhat in question. As Red Cloud had predicted, Connor’s soldiers spent the first half of 1865 chasing ghosts.
The reports of these futile and frustrating excursions before and after the debacle at Bridge Station still festered within the Army high command when additional troops were finally assigned to the new Division of the Missouri in midsummer. General Connor’s gratitude was short-lived. The majority of the volunteers ordered into Indian Country from Civil War battlefields felt as if they had fulfilled their duty to the Union, and marched west with something less than zealous fervor in hopes that their discharge papers would outpace them. Many of those hopes were realized, and nearly half of the 4,500 reinforcements never crossed the Missouri. Connor may have wished the same for the rest. One regiment of 600 Kansas cavalry rode into Fort Laramie and promptly mutinied, refusing to ride any farther. Connor was forced to train his artillery on their camp to bring them under control. Still, he was confident that the 2,500 additional men he had received—including the Kansas mutineers—were more than enough to merge with Sully and defeat Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and whatever allies had been foolish enough to join them. In June 1865, he issued his infamous order to subordinate officers: find the hostile tribes and kill all the males over the age of twelve.
The strategy faltered from the start. Rivers and streams still swollen from heavy spring rains delayed Sully’s Missouri crossing for weeks, and when he finally managed to ferry his 1,200 troopers across the river they rode futilely up and down its banks and tributaries for nearly a month without finding Sitting Bull. Not finding Indians was becoming habitual for the Army across the frontier. Sully’s force of eighteen cavalry companies and four infantry companies was finally pulled back to Minnesota when the War Department overreacted to a raid by a small party of Dakota Sioux near Mankato. By the time Sully arrived to wipe out the “hive of hostile Sioux,” the Dakotas had slipped across the border into Canada. But he and his men were ordered to remain in the state in case the Indians returned. At faraway Fort Laramie, Connor was forced to readjust on the run. He decided that three prongs would replace the pincers.
To that end, in early July he ordered a column of nearly 1,400 Michigan volunteers under the command of Colonel Nelson Cole to ride north out of Omaha, skirt the east face of the Black Hills until they reached the Tongue, and wipe out a contingent of the fugitive Laramie Loafers reported to be congregating near Bear Butte. Cole was then to follow the river southwest until he met and united with the regiment of Kansas cavalry dispatched from Fort Laramie. This combined troop would then provide a flanking screen against Red Cloud’s multitribal forces, which Connor was confident he would locate near their favorite hunting grounds on the Upper Powder. Connor himself, meanwhile, would ride at the head of 1,000 men up John Bozeman’s trail, and all three American columns were to converge on Rosebud Creek, the heart of Red Cloud’s territory.
It was as fine a tactical advance as was ever drawn up in a West Point classroom. Needless to say, it failed utterly. The sulky Kansans’ movement proved so desultory as to be almost worthless, and once again the grain-fed Army mounts in Cole’s command withered and broke down on the desiccated South Dakota prairie. As von Clausewitz had noted, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Somewhere Colonel Moonlight must have felt vindicated.
Connor, freighting supplies for all three columns, remained oblivious of the difficulties his two flanking forces were experiencing when, several weeks into his own march, his Pawnee and Winnebago scouts discovered fresh tracks made by a large party of Indians moving northeast. He should have trusted his instincts; the main body of Sioux and Cheyenne were in fact still camped on the Upper Powder, hunting buffalo and celebrating the victory at Bridge Station. Instead he heeded his guides and turned his column. But the trail the Pawnee had cut belonged to a band of peaceful northern Arapaho led by a Head Man named Black Bear. Connor fell on them in north-central Wyoming near the Montana border. He raked Black Bear’s camp with his howitzers before charging, killing over sixty. The Arapaho, however, surprised him by putting up a spirited defense—their women fig
hting as hard as their men—before vanishing into a honeycomb of red rock canyons. A few warriors, attempting to divert the Americans, led them in the opposite direction up a shallow stream called Wolf Creek. Among the pursuing soldiers was a scout clad in buckskins whom several of the Indians recognized. They had once trapped and traded with him, and they considered him a friend. “Blanket” was his Arapaho nickname—“Blanket Jim Bridger.”
Although Connor captured a third of the large Arapaho remuda and set torches to the Arapaho camp—elk-skin lodges, buffalo robes, blankets, and an entire winter food supply of thirty tons of pemmican were devoured in the huge bonfire—it is difficult to call the “Battle of Tongue River” a victory. Black Bear’s son was killed in the artillery bombardment, and his death hardened the tribe’s enmity toward the whites. First Left Hand at Sand Creek; now Black Bear. The Army was increasing Red Cloud’s coalition for him.
Although three columns of infantry and cavalry were snaking to and fro across the High Plains searching for him—albeit reluctantly in some cases—Red Cloud appeared to have no idea that he was the object of such lusty attention. He spent his days at leisure, and whiled away long nights attending formal medicine ceremonies, feasts, and scalp dances where he, Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses, and Roman Nose were accorded places of honor. In an attempt to consolidate a popular tribal front he sent Bad Face emissaries down the Powder to take part in Sitting Bull’s large Sun Dance on the Little Missouri. But the Hunkpapa chief failed to reciprocate, and this rather stunning insult was the beginning of a lifelong rift between Red Cloud and Sitting Bull.
Toward mid-August a Lakota hunting party spotted a civilian train of about twenty wagons escorted by two companies of infantry traveling west near the Badlands. Red Cloud and Dull Knife roused 500 warriors to ride out against the party. Some of the braves wore bloodied blue uniform tunics taken during the fight at Bridge Station, and at least one carried an Army bugle captured from Caspar Collins’s command. On reaching the Bluecoats they cut off and killed one of the train’s scouts, and at first sight of the Indians the wagons were rolled into an interlocking circle, destined to become a classic Hollywood trope. The Indians spread out on two flanking mesas, taking potshots, blowing their bugle, whooping, and taunting. The enclosed soldiers responded with howitzer fire that fell harmlessly, only gouging chunks from the surrounding hills.
Soon a white flag went up; the whites wanted to parley. Red Cloud and Dull Knife personally rode out to meet with the expedition’s two leaders. The civilian wagon master—an Iowa merchant who was surreptitiously surveying a trail into Montana—was joined by an Army captain commanding the infantry companies of “galvanized Yankees”—former Confederate prisoners of war who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the Union in exchange for their release. These southerners had not expected to be pressed into frontier service, and the Union officer was probably not certain whom he could trust less, the Lakota or his own troops.
Incredibly, after much palaver the two chiefs promised the train safe passage on the condition that it strike north of the Powder River buffalo grounds as well as cede a wagonload of sugar, coffee, flour, and tobacco as a toll. If this seems a curious decision for warriors who only weeks earlier had vowed to drive all whites from their territory, the explanation lay in the fact that the red man and white man did not adhere to the same concept of warfare, much less the same rules. The Sioux and Cheyenne viewed the Americans as merely a more numerous, better-armed version of the Crows, Shoshones, or Pawnee. To the Indians there was a time for battle, and a time to celebrate or mourn the results. Unlike invading soldiers, a trespassing emigrant train, even one escorted by cavalry, was more of a nuisance than a provocation.
This mind-set would eventually change, not least under Red Cloud’s leadership. But that was yet to come. To the Indians the skirmish at Bridge Station had been a flawed victory, but a victory nonetheless, and Sand Creek had been avenged. Now it was natural to fall back, plan for the autumn buffalo hunt, and settle into winter camps to await next year’s fighting season. There was even a notion that the lesson of Bridge Station might induce the whites to abandon the Powder River Country altogether.
As far-fetched as this seems in hindsight, war as an all-encompassing endeavor was as alien to the Indians as a naval blockade or a siege of Washington would have been. Although a few Lakota in closer contact with the whites were dimly aware of how much carnage the Americans had inflicted on each other at Chancellorsville, at Chickamauga, at Gettysburg, most had no grasp of the white man’s concept of battle as a year-round industry or as what is now called a zero-sum contest. That they had not learned from Chivington’s winter ride on Sand Creek demonstrated just how ingrained was Indian custom.
As it happened, though Connor may have possessed Chivington’s ardor, he had little of the Fighting Parson’s luck. After multiple delays his two flanking columns finally met, nearly by accident, northwest of the Black Hills on the Belle Fourche, almost 100 miles away from their planned juncture on the Tongue. Unknowingly, Cole proceeded to march his 2,000 men directly between Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa village on the Little Missouri and the Lakota-Cheyenne contingent camped on the Powder. Days of similar peregrinations followed. Cole sent out riders to find Connor’s column. They returned exhausted and bewildered. Connor dispatched his scouts to find Cole. They could not. The Americans were, in effect, lost in the wilderness; they were running low on supplies; and a grumbling Kansas contingent was ready to desert at any moment. This is how Sitting Bull and his braves found them.
21
BURN THE BODIES; EAT THE HORSES
Sitting Bull was angry. A month earlier, about when Red Cloud fell on Bridge Station, Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas had tried to pick a fight with the garrison stationed at Fort Rice in North Dakota. The timing was serendipitous. The Indians had not planned the simultaneous raids; it was merely the season. But Sitting Bull had even less success than Red Cloud. Geography was his downfall.
A year earlier, in the wake of his victory on the Upper Knife, General Sully had ordered his engineers to construct the fort on a steep plateau overlooking the west bank of the Missouri. The plain surrounding the outpost was sketched with low, sage-encrusted bluffs broken only by dark ravines running to the horizon. As Sully had planned, the soldiers on the parapets could see for miles in every direction, and when Sitting Bull’s decoys appeared before their gates the lookouts had no trouble making out the main body of 400 to 500 Hunkpapas and Dakotas trying to conceal themselves behind the distant buttes. The post commander formed a defensive skirmish line along the riverbank that furled around the stockade’s cottonwood walls, but refused to allow his men to go any farther. The Sioux made one frantic charge, loosing a storm of arrows and musket balls, but fell back under an American artillery bombardment. At this post, unlike Bridge Station, there was no wagon train in need of rescue. The soldiers held their position, and their howitzers kept the Sioux well out of arrow and musket range. Sitting Bull led a sullen retreat.
When a month later his outriders spied the billowing dust clouds of Colonel Cole’s force meandering not far from where the Powder empties into the Yellowstone, Sitting Bull and his frustrated Hunkpapas jumped them like angry badgers.
Cole’s force outnumbered the attackers by four to one, but his men and their horses were all debilitated after marching for weeks through the low, flat heat of a baking drought that left their skin cracked and their lips, tongues, and eyeballs coated with a thin pall of fine yellow loess soil. At the first sign of Indians, Cole ordered his troop to assume a defensive position, corralling up near a grove of leafy scrub oak. Through four days and nights the Sioux probed, running off a few horses and wagon mules, with Sitting Bull personally capturing one officer’s majestic black stallion. But the Indians could neither penetrate the makeshift battlements nor lure out its defenders.
It was weather that finally forced Cole’s hand. On the first day of September the temperature dropped seventy degrees and a freak blizzard swept do
wn from the north, killing over 200 of the Americans’ weakened horses. After burning his extraneous wagons, harnesses, and saddles, Cole had no choice but to march his men up the Powder. Sitting Bull had sent out messengers to Red Cloud’s camp, and his Hunkpapas and Dakotas were now reinforced by small parties of Oglalas as well as some Miniconjous and Sans Arcs. These Sioux kept up a steady harassment of the slow-moving Americans, albeit to little end. The farther southeast the troop drove, the more concerned Sitting Bull became over straying too far from his defenseless village back on the Little Missouri. His scouts informed him that General Sully had pulled back across the Missouri, but one never knew. The Hunkpapas harassed the column for two more days, and then fell off to ride home. It was now Red Cloud’s turn.
On September 5, the Bad Face chief finally reacted to Colonel Cole’s intrusion by assembling 2,000 braves to meet the beleaguered American force. He chose as his battleground a bend in the Powder marked by tall, sheer sandstone bluffs broken by winding ravines. It was an ideal site for an ambush. No one knows why Red Cloud did not ride with the war party that day; some historians contend that after days of fasting and vision quests the Cheyenne chief Roman Nose begged for the honor of leading the combined Sioux-Cheyenne contingent. Red Cloud apparently did grant Roman Nose that honor, and in his own stead sent Crazy Horse and Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses.
The Heart of Everything That Is Page 23