Augur had the misfortune to serve under Banks, whose Civil War career proved less than distinguished. Bereft of military experience or knowledge, Banks was a Massachusetts politician who became one of President Lincoln’s first “political generals.” On May 16, 1861, with the war scarcely begun, Banks sewed on the two-starred shoulder straps of a major general. On August 9, 1862, Brigadier General Augur commanded the Second Division of Banks’s Second Corps. Banks opened the Battle of Cedar Mountain by hurling two divisions against Jackson, pushing him back. But the arrival of Hill enabled Jackson to counterattack and drive Banks in retreat. Augur received a severe wound, which kept him out of combat until it healed. Cedar Mountain earned Augur a brevet of colonel in the Regular Army and promotion to major general of Volunteers. It also helped ensure that he would once again have to serve under Banks.
Only five months after Cedar Mountain, in December 1862, Banks led a force of thirty thousand recruits by sea to Union-occupied New Orleans and supplanted another political general, Benjamin Butler, in command of the Department of the Gulf. Banks sent Augur to command the District of Baton Rouge until an army could be organized to capture the Confederate bastion of Port Hudson, on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Upstream, General Ulysses S. Grant tightened the noose on Vicksburg and wanted Banks to remove this last blockage of the Mississippi River. To Grant’s annoyance, Banks dithered in New Orleans, reluctant to undertake the mission.
Finally, however, on May 21, 1863, commanding the First Division of Banks’s Nineteenth Corps, Augur launched an attack against an outlying defensive position. He scored a victory that opened the way for Banks’s army of more than thirty thousand men to surround the fortress, which bristled with heavy artillery. Banks wanted to overpower the fort in one massive assault, then rush on to Vicksburg. His four division commanders opposed such a direct attack as too costly, but Banks insisted. The divisions were to attack when ready, not at a prearranged time. As a consequence, sporadic attacks throughout the day of May 27 resulted in bloody repulses. Banks now settled for a siege. It lasted until June 13, when Banks, fearing for his political as well as military fortunes, launched another assault. That too failed, with severe losses, so Banks continued the siege for another three weeks. Vicksburg fell to Grant on July 4. The Confederate commander at Port Hudson, seeing no purpose in continuing the battle, surrendered on July 9.
Augur had distinguished himself in the Port Hudson operation and was breveted brigadier general in the Regular Army for his conduct there. He was fortunate to be recalled to Washington to take command of the Department of Washington and Twentieth Corps, thus avoiding having to serve in Banks’s ill-fated Red River Expedition. Mustered out in September 1865, Nathaniel Banks returned to Massachusetts and was elected to Congress.
On March 13, 1865, Augur received a brevet of major general in the Regular Army for the catchall phrase that adorned so many high-ranking officers: gallant and meritorious services in the field during the Rebellion. He had earned the recognition. Before being mustered out on September 1, 1866, he served on a board examining officers for assignment and promotion in the Regular Army. On March 15, 1866, he received his own Regular Army assignment: colonel of the Twelfth Infantry. For Augur as a combat commander, the war had essentially ended in July 1863 with the surrender of Port Hudson.
DEPARTMENT OF THE PLATTE
The postwar years opened on a violent note in the West. On the northern plains, gold strikes in western Montana had led to the opening of the Bozeman Trail, which ran from the North Platte River northwest along the base of the Bighorn Mountains to the Yellowstone River and on to the Montana goldfields. The Sioux chiefs Red Cloud, Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, and others objected to migrant traffic across their Powder River hunting grounds. Objection turned to hostility when the army built three forts—Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith—to protect the trail. On December 21, 1866, Captain William J. Fetterman led a contingent of eighty infantry and cavalry out of Fort Phil Kearny to pursue a hovering band of Sioux and blundered into an ambush that wiped out Fetterman and all his men.
The new commander of the Department of the Platte was Philip St. George Cooke. Based in Omaha, Cooke was a well-known veteran of the prewar army in the West and now brigadier general (and brevet major general). He had an undistinguished Civil War record, however, seemed older than his fifty-seven years, and provided little support to the commander on the Bozeman Trail, Colonel Henry B. Carrington. When the Fetterman disaster demanded a scapegoat, Cooke pounced on Carrington. General Grant added his own scapegoat, General Cooke. On January 9, 1867, Colonel and Brevet Major General C. C. Augur replaced Cooke as commander of the Department of the Platte. Augur commanded in his brevet rank of major general until elevated to brigadier general in 1869. He spent the balance of his career as a department commander.
With Grant still the head of the army, Sherman as lieutenant general commanded the Division of the Missouri from his St. Louis headquarters. Furious over the Fetterman disaster, Sherman telegraphed Grant: “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”4 He softened somewhat later but still instructed Augur to organize a force of two thousand infantry and cavalry, under Colonel John Gibbon, to invade the Powder River country and punish the Sioux. “No mercy should be shown these Indians, for they grant no quarter nor ask for it.” Sherman had to place Augur’s expedition on hold, however, because a commission appointed by the president was already at Augur’s headquarters in Omaha, en route up the Platte to talk with the Sioux.5
Chaired by Brevet Brigadier General Alfred Sully and including two former generals, the commission concluded that the Indians of the northern plains wanted peace and should have eighty thousand square miles of the Missouri and Yellowstone basins reserved for them alone. Also, the Bozeman Trail and its forts should be abandoned and military operations should be devoted mainly to guarding construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Rather than act on the Sully Commission’s conclusions, Congress on July 20, 1867, enacted a measure creating another peace commission. Chaired by the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Nathaniel G. Taylor, a sanctimonious Methodist cleric of rigid certitude, the commission contained a senator, a former general, a prominent humanitarian, and three army generals appointed by the president. President Andrew Johnson named retired General William S. Harney, General Alfred H. Terry, and General Sherman himself. Although retaining his vote on the commission, Sherman frequently absented himself for pressing business in Washington. He chose General Augur to sit in for him. Throughout the existence of the Peace Commission, Augur functioned as a full-time member and cast his vote as such.6
The Indian Peace Commission at Fort Laramie, 1868. Identifiable are Generals Harney (with bald head and white beard), Sherman (to Harney’s left), Augur (with mutton chops), and Terry (to Augur’s left).
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution (GN 03686).
Travel with the Peace Commission kept Augur away from his Omaha headquarters, but from a distance he continued to exercise command of the Department of the Platte. He directed the distribution of troops to all the stations and other vulnerable points on the Union Pacific Railroad and made certain that detachments were in position to counter raids from the north on any settlements. Pending negotiations with the Sioux, the Bozeman Trail forts also had to be maintained. The Peace Commission’s labors had not discouraged the aggressive young warriors of the Sioux and their Cheyenne allies either along the Bozeman Trail or on the Platte River road.7
The commission turned first to Red Cloud’s Sioux. Runners had been sent to invite the chiefs to meet with the emissaries at Fort Laramie in September 1867, but the commissioners had not even reached the fort when word came from Red Cloud that he had to prepare for the fall hunt and maybe would come down next year. Postponing the Fort Laramie meeting, the commission turned to the southern plains, where Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches had been waging war with the
army and against encroaching settlers. Meeting the tribal leaders in October at Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas, the peace-makers succeeded in making what they thought was peace. Although they were later proved wrong, the Peace Commission could present the Medicine Lodge Treaty to Congress as a sign of success. After a visit to Fort Laramie in hope of talking with Red Cloud proved futile (only a few friendly Crows camped at the fort), the commissioners met in St. Louis early in January 1868 to draft their report. All members signed the document, including the generals, who did so reluctantly.8
Notwithstanding the report, the Sioux had to be dealt with. As with Medicine Lodge, the commissioners again hoped to meet with Red Cloud and bore a treaty providing for reservations, strung along the Missouri River, where the Indians were to settle and receive government rations. As added enticement, they amended the draft to promise abandonment of the Bozeman Trail forts and designation of a vast block of country in the Powder River region as “unceded Indian territory,” closed to all whites. At Fort Laramie in April 1868 the friendly Brule Sioux chief Spotted Tail showed up to sign the treaty, as did some “stay-around-the-fort” people, but not Red Cloud. When the Bozeman Trail forts were abandoned, he would come down and talk.
Red Cloud’s attitude frustrated all the advocates of peace as well as those who inclined to war, particularly General Sherman. From history’s perspective—and probably from Augur’s perspective—Red Cloud and the other Sioux chiefs were justified in clinging to their homeland as long as possible. It supported their way of life and insulated them from the way of life that the white people proposed. Moreover, the Sioux clearly saw that they held the advantage. The government was powerless to make them conform, so they didn’t.
Resignedly, the peace emissaries left a copy of the treaty with the post commander at Fort Laramie and returned to St. Louis. Finally, in November 1868, Red Cloud and the other chiefs came to the fort and made their marks on the treaty.
The Peace Commission hoped to resolve the long-festering government policy of presenting the Indians with both peace pipe and rifle. It didn’t. In 1868 war broke out on the southern plains. When the commission met in Chicago for the last time on October 7, 1868, the generals outvoted the proponents of the peace pipe on every resolution offered. Sitting in on the meeting was Ulysses S. Grant, the general who soon would be president of the United States. His presence did not harm the generals’ cause. For the time being at least, the rifle would prevail over the peace pipe.
C. C. Augur had sided and voted with the other generals on all the issues. His vote rested not alone on loyalty to them. He had mastered the problems confronting the peace commission, as indicated by an untitled six-page essay that he had composed on official stationery, probably late in 1867. The Sioux, he wrote, were fighting for the Powder River country and would never give it up as long as an Indian lives. “They say if they do give it up it will involve their destruction as a people, and they might as well die fighting. This is undoubtedly the tone and feeling of the northern Sioux. Their successes in this country during the past year have emboldened them to hope for success, and with this present feeling I doubt that the really influential chiefs can be gotten in for negotiation.”9
As for what to do in these circumstances, Augur wrote: “The only course I see is to meet with the chiefs and influential men, and learn what will satisfy them, and then determine whether the government can afford to yield to their terms. If not they will have to be whipped into subjection, an alternative involving much time, much money, and a good many more men than is now generally supposed necessary.” Augur was right, although the whipping would not be attempted until 1876.10
Elevated to brigadier general in 1869, Augur turned from his peace commission duties to command the Department of the Platte from his Omaha headquarters.
In 1869 the Republican River country of northern Kansas attracted Indians from both north and south. A winter campaign in the south had flushed Cheyennes north into this area, where they joined with Oglala Sioux native to the country and other Sioux riding from the north for the mild climate and ample bison herds. It was a combustible mix, and General Augur organized the Republican River Expedition, consisting of seven troops of the Fifth Cavalry and three companies of Pawnee Indian scouts, with Major Eugene A. Carr commanding. A tough but contentious veteran of the prewar army and a brigadier general during the Civil War, Carr considered himself underrated and deserving of higher rank, as he was. On July 11, 1869, Carr won a signal victory by surprising a Sioux and Cheyenne camp of eighty-four lodges under Tall Bull at Summit Springs, Colorado. The troopers killed fifty-two Indians and took fifteen women and children prisoners. A reorganized command, substituting three troops of the Second Cavalry for three of the Fifth, took the field in September under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Duncan and on July 26 struck a village of fifty-six lodges on the Arikara Fork of the Republican, drove the occupants in flight, destroyed the village, and rode in futile pursuit for two hundred miles. These operations broke the hold of the Sioux and Cheyennes on the Republican River country.11
Spring 1870 confronted Augur with still more Indian problems, compounded by some white problems. In the Sweetwater country near South Pass, miners established a settlement that attracted Indian raids. Farther east, in the Wind River Valley, Shoshones and Arapahos occupied a reservation that Sweetwater miners charged provided a refuge for Arapaho raiders against their stock. On April 2 raiders struck the Sweetwater mines and killed six men. When miners followed the trail and ascertained that it led to the reservation, a party then set out. En route to the reservation they overtook an Arapaho group that was headed to the agency to procure supplies, attacked and killed all of the eleven men, and then let the women and children continue on. The Arapahos protested their innocence of the raid, which may well have been carried out by Shoshones.
Augur ordered two troops of the Second Cavalry to converge on the mines. One, under Captain David S. Gordon, arrived in time to fend off another Indian attack on May 4. In the fight Lieutenant C. B. Stambaugh and a sergeant were killed, together with one Indian warrior. Augur established two posts in this country, Camp Stambaugh at the Sweetwater mines and Camp Brown on the Wind River reservation.12
While contending with these troubles, Augur also faced troubles from influential white people. A group of prominent Wyoming entrepreneurs formed an association, the Big Horn Mountain Mining and Exploring Expedition, designed to prospect the western slopes of the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains. Said to have recruited two thousand men, the expedition prepared to set forth in May 1870, although the scheme had already come under fire for threatening to invade the unceded Indian territory guaranteed by the 1868 treaty. President Grant became involved. Ultimately orders reached General Augur to prevent the expedition from leaving Cheyenne, using force if necessary. Association leaders seemed to have compromised when they signed a document pledging to avoid the Wind River reservation and confine their operations to the west side of the Bighorn Mountains, but they promptly violated the agreement, entered the Wind River reservation, and pointed north. Augur sent a troop of cavalry to stop them. When they were overtaken, however, the officer discovered that the expedition was already dissolving and simply escorted its former members back to Cheyenne.13
In his annual report for 1871—his last at the head of the Department of the Platte—General Augur proudly boasted that not a single white man had been killed in his department in 1871. “This exceptional condition of Indian affairs on the frontier is a subject of unusual satisfaction. Under its happy effects the frontier settlements have been strengthened and extended; new portions of the country have been explored, new mines discovered and worked, and an unprecedented increase of immigration has followed.”14
On December 11, 1871, General Augur relinquished command of the Department of the Platte to Brigadier General Edward O. C. Ord.
DEPARTMENT OF TEXAS
Less than two months later, General Augur assumed command of the Department of Texas,
with headquarters at San Antonio. He had left the Department of the Platte secure and peaceful but now confronted a Texas struggling with Indian hostilities. From the north Kiowas and Comanches swept through Texas and into Mexico, raiding, plundering, and taking captives. From the south Kickapoos and Lipan and Mescalero Apaches living in Mexico crossed the Rio Grande to raid Texas cattle ranches.
Three months after settling in San Antonio, Augur discovered the nature of the hostilities that he would contend with in Texas in the form of a horrific massacre on April 20, 1872, at Howard’s Well, a watering place on the San Antonio–El Paso Road west of the Pecos River. Between 125 and 150 Kiowa and Comanche warriors riding south from the Indian Territory fell on a Mexican wagon train hauling military supplies from San Antonio to Fort Stockton. They killed eleven men and wounded three, then plundered and burned the wagons. Lieutenant Colonel Wesley Merritt and two troops of the Ninth Cavalry, changing stations, came on the scene, followed the trail, and clashed with the warriors. One officer and one Indian were killed, and Merritt took the wounded into Fort Stockton. A paragraph in his report alerted Augur to the enemy he faced in Texas:
Words fail to convey an idea of the sickening atrocities committed by the demons who overpowered the train men. Several of them were taken alive, tied to wagons, and burned. An old woman was carried some distance from the place of the attack and then shot and scalped. Her grand-child had its ears cut off, was scalped and had its brains dashed out; while her daughter, the mother of the child, who witnessed it all, as also the death of her husband at the train, was carried off by the fiends. More than one poor wretch crawled from the burning wagons after the ropes which bound them were burned off, only to burn to blackened unrecognizable masses with their charred hands and faces raised in positions of entreaty.15
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