The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  Howard’s Well was only the most recent Kiowa and Comanche depredation. They had launched these raids into Texas for years but now raided from two reservations created by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation at Darlington, and the Kiowa and Comanche Reservation at Fort Sill. Although General Sheridan had expanded the Department of Texas to include the Indian Territory, it was off limits to the military. President Grant’s “Peace Policy” had placed pacifist Quaker agents in charge of these Indians. Government Indian policy ensured that Indians on their reservations were safe from the army. Pursuing troops had to halt at the Red River, the Kiowa-Comanche reservation boundary. Troops manned Fort Sill, but Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson believed in the Peace Policy and cooperated with the agent. The Fort Sill reservation had become a “City of Refuge.”16

  In his first annual report Augur complained of a daunting military situation. The settlements that were suffering most, he wrote, extended from the vicinity of Fort Richardson through Forts Griffin and Concho to Fort Stockton, then down the Pecos and Rio Grande as far as Fort McIntosh. The northern line, he pointed out, faced the Indian Territory, home of the reservation Indians, and the Staked Plains, home of the marauding bands that refused to go on the reservations. The other line was exposed to Indians located in Mexico who made their homes a base for operating against the Texas settlements and a market for plunder. The circumstances favored the Indians because troops had to act on the defensive and were constrained in their pursuit of marauding raiders by the reservation on the north and Mexico on the south.17

  From the moment of his inauguration, President Grant had been repeatedly implored by Texans and their newly admitted congressional delegation to do something about the raiders based in Mexico. Early in 1873 he quietly launched an unorthodox measure: move Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie, a Grant favorite, and his crack Fourth Cavalry from service in northern Texas to Fort Clark, near the Rio Grande in the south. Mackenzie would then cross the Rio Grande into Mexico and strike the raiders’ camps. Shortly after the transfer, in April 1873, William W. Belknap, the secretary of war, and Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, accompanied by Colonel Mackenzie, paused briefly at Augur’s San Antonio headquarters before continuing to Fort Clark. They briefed the general on what they expected him to do. How Augur responded to this clear violation of international law is unrecorded, but he did what he was told.

  Belknap and Sheridan closeted themselves at Fort Clark with Colonel Mackenzie, a volatile, irascible, hard-driving wartime hero. The only evidence of what took place comes from Mackenzie’s adjutant, Lieutenant Robert Carter. He was not present, but his colonel told him about it. In Carter’s words, Sheridan directed Mackenzie to “wage a campaign of annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction” against the offending Indians. That would involve crossing the border into Mexico, so Mackenzie asked for explicit orders. “Damn the orders!” erupted Sheridan, “Damn the authority! You go ahead on your own plan of action, and your authority and backing shall be General Grant and myself. With us behind you in whatever you do to clean up this situation, you can rest assured of the fullest support. You must assume the risk. We will assume the final responsibility, should any result.”18

  On April 20, 1873, Mackenzie addressed a private communication to Augur, setting forth what he needed to prepare for the expedition. He also identified the objective as Lipan, Mescalero, and “Hilleños” Apaches as well as band of Comanches. “It is important that these Indians be attacked as soon as possible for they are making a world of trouble, and there may never be as good an opportunity again.”

  I am perfectly willing to take the responsibility after what has been said and know where I can find a trail of stealing parties returning to their camps or feel that I do. My plan would be to send the companies on scouts in different ways and in such manner as not to excite remark and, then get them together quietly where I found such a party had crossed the river and try to arrange so as to reach their camp by daylight in the morning and try to pay them a little for burning those people at Howard’s Wells. . . .

  I shall expect officially that my action will be disavowed and probably that I shall be put in arrest, but it will quiet this border in a way that it has not been quiet in years.19

  Although Lipan and Mescalero Apaches had been guilty of raids, the most troublesome were Kickapoos. This must have become apparent to Mackenzie when spies sent across by Lieutenant Colonel William R. Shafter, commander of nearby Fort Duncan, reported on the location of Indian camps as he had promised. Moreover, Mackenzie’s strategy of seeking a fresh trail to follow made sense, because that would lawfully mitigate the violation of Mexican sovereignty.

  Shafter’s spies apparently reported three villages about forty miles up the San Rodrigo River, near Remolino. The closest one belonged to Kickapoos. Fording the Rio Grande on May 17 with six troops of the Fourth Cavalry, about four hundred men, and twenty-five Seminole-Negro Scouts from Fort Duncan, the command raced up the Remolino River and struck the Kickapoo village, about fifty lodges. The horseman charged, shooting down Kickapoos coming out of their lodges, then burning the grass dwellings. Nineteen Kickapoos were killed and forty captured. Mackenzie found two other villages farther up the river, one Mescalero and one Lipan Apache. The occupants had fled, but the troops burned the villages. After two days on Mexican soil, Mackenzie’s command crossed back into Texas.

  Mackenzie’s official report differs in many respects from his private letter to Augur detailing his plans and strategy. Dated May 23, the official report makes no mention of following a fresh trail, indeed not even mention of crossing into Mexico. He treats all three villages as battlegrounds but gives few details other than casualties. Most of the long report dealt with the gallant action of his troops and the brave exploits of each of his officers.20

  As expected, Mackenzie’s violation of Mexican sovereignty angered Mexico, but the precarious Mexican regime of President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada protested only mildly. As expected (for the spies reported that most of the Kickapoo men had embarked on a hunting expedition), only women, children, and old men fell to Mackenzie’s carbines.

  Grateful Texans lauded Mackenzie as the hero of a great victory, which in fact was largely a killing of noncombatants, as Mackenzie knew it would be. But Remolino had the intended effect. Cross-border Indian raids subsided for three years.

  Not everyone hailed Remolino as a great victory. One who had not been let in on the secret was General William T. Sherman. “Mackenzie will of course be sustained,” Sherman wrote to Sheridan, “but for the sake of history, I would like to have him report clearly the facts that induced him to know that the Indians he attacked and captured were the identical Indians that engaged in raiding Texas. Had he followed a fresh trail there would be law to back him.” Less cerebral than the general-in-chief, Sheridan replied: “I am fully satisfied that Mackenzie struck the right Indians for there is none of them guiltless.”21

  At the same time, Augur’s northern frontier boiled toward an eruption. On the Kiowa and Comanche reservation surrounding Fort Sill and the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation farther north, inadequate rations, encroaching cattle ranchers, whiskey sellers, and horse thieves made reservation life miserable, while to the west white buffalo hunters decimated the herds that had so long supported tribal life. In spring 1874 the pace of Kiowa and Comanche raiding in Texas picked up, and Cheyennes raided north into Kansas. Sheridan demanded permission to unleash his regiments on the reservation Indians. In July 1874 the Interior Department finally agreed, on condition that the so-called friendlies be separated from the so-called hostiles. When the agents began compiling lists of the friendlies, the majority (certain to be classified as hostile) fled to the west. The Red River War of 1874–75 ensued.22

  The Red River War lapped over two military departments: John Pope’s Department of the Missouri and C. C. Augur’s Department of Texas. Sheridan’s strategy called for columns converging on the Texas Panhandle. Pope wo
uld launch two, one under Colonel Nelson A. Miles south from Fort Dodge, Kansas, and the other under Major William R. Price east from Fort Bascom, New Mexico. Augur would field three: one under Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie north from Fort Concho, one under Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell northwest from Fort Griffin, and a third under Lieutenant Colonel John W. Davidson west from Fort Sill.

  Largely without oversight from higher headquarters, the several columns made their own way in their own time into the area of hostilities. Both Miles and Mackenzie scored major victories. Mackenzie surprised a combined Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne camp in Palo Duro Canyon. The campaign stretched into the winter, when freezing storms drove the columns back to their bases, Mackenzie by Christmas. Miles stayed out, and by spring all the fugitives had been driven into their agencies.

  As early as October 1874 the warriors and their families had begun drifting into Fort Sill and returning to normal life—except that Sheridan contemplated punishment rather than normal life. In October he arrived at Fort Sill and conferred with both Augur and Pope. His solutions, however, came to nothing. By the spring of 1875, after all the Indians had returned to the agencies, those judged to be the worst offenders were sent east for imprisonment.

  In 1875, as the Red River War was ending in the conquest of the southern plains tribes, both General Sheridan and General Augur were diverted from Indian affairs. Reconstruction Louisiana had boiled with violence since the end of the Civil War, with factions of both parties and white supremacists contending with one another. President Grant sent Sheridan as his representative. After a complicated and controversial series of moves, Sheridan succeeded in having the Department of the Gulf added to the Division of the Missouri and placing General Augur in command on March 27, 1875.23

  A letter of March 12, 1875, signed by 138 residents of San Antonio and West Texas was testimony to the esteem in which Texans held General Augur, expressing regret that he was leaving for another station. The letter heaped fulsome praise on Augur’s “justice, force, and judgment” in commanding the Department of Texas and noted that he and his family would be missed from the city’s social scene. Moreover, they would warmly welcome him back to the Texas command.24

  Augur did not return to the western frontier for six years. His command of the Department of the Gulf lasted from July 1, 1878, when he took over the Department of the South, until December 26, 1880. On January 2, 1881, he found himself again in San Antonio in charge of the Department of Texas.

  Under Augur’s predecessor Brigadier General Edward O. C. Ord, the department had struggled through a tumultuous five years, involving Indians, Mexicans, and the army chain of command. Now, however, Augur faced a much quieter department. He rightly attributed this largely to the rapid expansion of the railroads across Texas. The Southern Pacific and the Texas and Pacific sliced through traditional Indian raiding trails. The Red River War had quelled the raiders from the Indian Territory. The Mexican Indians had been largely pacified by more U.S. crossings of the international boundary. By the end of 1881 Augur reported that only one serious incursion in the vicinity of Fort Clark had disturbed the calm, and the offenders had been caught and punished. Apaches created minor problems in far West Texas, but in most of Texas Indian hostilities had subsided.25 By late 1883 Augur could optimistically report: “There is no reason to believe that a hostile Indian has been within the limits of this department during the past year.”26

  Across the West, except in Arizona, the Indian Wars were winding down. As Augur surely understood, his own career was winding down too. He was sixty-two years of age and had spent forty years in the army. Nevertheless, he put in another two years commanding the Department of the Missouri, with headquarters at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. On July 10, 1885, he retired from the army, settling in Georgetown, D.C., near the nation’s capital. He died on January 16, 1898, at the age of seventy-seven and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

  Christopher C. Augur had an exemplary military career. He distinguished himself in the Civil War and even more so as a department commander in the West during the height of the Indian Wars. His low-key manner of command, combined with his preference for commanding from his headquarters rather than striving for a conspicuous presence leading troops in the field, kept him from achieving the public notoriety that crowned others such as George Crook and Nelson Miles. But as Augur presided quietly over the Departments of the Platte and of Texas, he achieved a significance ranking above most of his counterparts. Moreover, his success strengthened his already firm friendship with Lieutenant General Sheridan.

  Despite his low profile in history, Christopher C. Augur must be counted one of the most significant officers in the West after the Civil War.

  Brigadier General George Crook, commanding Department of the Columbia, 1868–1870; Department of Arizona, 1871–1875, 1882–1886; Department of the Platte, 1875–1882, 1886–1888.

  U.S. Army Military History Institute.

  CHAPTER THREE

  GEORGE CROOK

  To the postwar army and to the public at large, George Crook bore the reputation of being the foremost authority on Indians. He sustained that reputation during nearly a quarter of a century of service in three regions of the West. He was an officer not content to sit at a frontier post or a department headquarters, letting other officers bear the hardships of active field operations. He aggressively took the field himself, which kept his name before the public. Crook the Indian-fighter eclipsed Crook the Civil War general.1

  Yet, both professionally and personally, Crook the Indian-fighter had traits that he kept carefully concealed from the public, his superiors, and even himself. He took such pride in his exploits that he often exaggerated their importance in his official reports, glossed over or made excuses for what were plainly shortcomings, blamed others for his own failures, or took refuge in obstacles of topography or climate and even the bad faith of the enemy. He stubbornly clung to his own opinions despite arguments from authoritative sources. Without changing his opinions, even when conclusively demonstrated to be wrong, he dutifully carried out contrary orders from above.

  What may have been a natural disposition to reticence and introspection may also have been a deliberately cultivated persona. Acquaintances all noted his quiet, almost wordless demeanor. He rarely shared his opinions with anyone, even his adoring aides. To set himself apart from other ranking officers, he fashioned his beard in two long spikes, sometimes tied at the ends with ribbons. He shunned the uniform and in the field clothed himself in a canvas suit topped by a cork sun helmet, rode a mule and carried a shotgun, and in camp usually messed with his mule-packers rather than his fellow officers. In his office he wore civilian clothes and made sure his staff did too.

  Some of Crook’s eccentricities evolved before and during the Civil War. Others suddenly took root after the war, which leads to the suspicion that they were deliberately conceived as a way to enhance his public visibility.2

  SERVICE IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

  George Crook was a seasoned Indian-fighter even before the Civil War broke out. Born on a western Ohio farm on September 8, 1828, he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June 1848. Throughout his four-year tenure, he proved an undistinguished cadet, always in the bottom half of his class. For a time his roommate was fellow Ohioan Philip H. Sheridan, with whom he would have a longtime relationship, both friendly and hostile. Cadet Sheridan, however, assaulted another cadet and was suspended for a year. Crook graduated in 1852, a year before Sheridan, ranking thirty-eighth out of forty-three.

  As was customary, Crook was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant to serve until a vacancy opened the way to full second lieutenant. Posted to the Fourth Infantry, he traveled the Isthmus of Panama route to the Pacific Coast to join his company and begin his career as an Indian-fighter.

  It began inauspiciously. In October 1853, now a full second lieutenant, Crook and his company, together with another company, took station at newly constructed Fort Jones,
in mountainous northern California. They arrived at the conclusion of the first Rogue River War, a conflict pitting a group of tribes against the Indian-hating white settlers and miners flocking to Oregon and California. The whites brutalized the Indians, who in return stole livestock and menaced the settlements.

  The post commander at Fort Jones was Captain Henry M. Judah, an officer who quickly drew Crook’s enmity. Judah tended toward tyranny, indecisiveness, mood swings, and selfishness. His overriding flaw, however, was severe alcoholism. He made this disability plain to Crook. In January 1854 Judah led the two companies of the Fourth Infantry and a contingent of volunteers up the Klamath River to avenge the reported killing of a citizen. The command, mounted on mules, made its way through a swirling mountain blizzard and deep drifts of snow. The first day out, Judah got almost helplessly drunk and suffered through four days of delirium tremens. Trapping some Indians in a cave, he pondered how to kill or capture them without exposing his men to a murderous fire from above. Finally, he sent Crook to Fort Lane, across the boundary in Oregon, to obtain a mountain howitzer. Crook returned with the howitzer and also Captain Andrew J. Smith and a party of dragoons. Smith ranked Judah, still suffering from his bout with whiskey, and took command. Howitzer shells did no damage to the corralled Indians because the tubes could not be elevated sufficiently, but the noise and smoke disconcerted them. They offered to surrender to Captain Smith. Parleying with the their leader, Smith discovered that they were the innocent victims of the miners’ vindictiveness and called off the expedition. Crook and his fellow infantrymen returned to Fort Jones, concluding what he termed a “grand farce.”3