The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  Terry’s victory was a triumph, and accolades showered the victor of Fort Fisher. Grant ordered a one hundred–gun salute fired along the Petersburg line and promptly recommended Terry for appointment as brigadier general in the Regular Army. President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton sent their congratulations, and a formal resolution conveyed the thanks of Congress to the general. The nation’s press praised Terry lavishly.

  With the fall of Fort Fisher, the Confederacy’s last remaining outlet to the sea was closed. Eager to occupy Wilmington and provide reinforcements for General Sherman, then advancing from the west, General Grant brought Major General John M. Schofield and his corps from the west to work with Terry and Admiral Porter in breaking down the remaining Confederate defenses on the Cape Fear River. Schofield arrived in mid-February 1865 and took command even as Confederate general Braxton Bragg was placed in charge of defending Wilmington. With Terry’s Provisional Corps and Schofield’s corps, aided by Porter’s gunships, the Union force fought three engagements as it advanced up the Cape Fear River. In less than a week Bragg began evacuating Wilmington. On February 22 Terry and Schofield’s subordinate General Jacob D. Cox entered the city.

  After marching his corps northwest to Goldsboro and linking up with General Sherman’s army, Terry took station briefly in Raleigh, North Carolina. In May, after war’s end, he went to New Haven on leave but resolved to stay in the army. In June he was assigned to Reconstruction duty in Virginia, with headquarters in Richmond. After a year in this assignment, he was mustered out of the Volunteers on September 1, 1866, as a full major general. Secretary Stanton gave him his choice of a new assignment in his Regular Army grade of brigadier general. He chose St. Paul, Minnesota, headquarters of the newly created Department of Dakota.

  DEPARTMENT OF DAKOTA

  Terry’s new command, subordinate to the Military Division of the Missouri, encompassed Minnesota and most of Dakota and Montana. Headquarters varied between Fort Snelling and St. Paul, Minnesota. A seasoned general at thirty-nine, Terry arrived in St. Paul at the end of October 1866 ignorant of the northern Great Plains and their Indian inhabitants. From his predecessor, General John Pope, he inherited ongoing warfare with the Teton Sioux and the responsibility of protecting gold-seekers using the Missouri River to access the goldfields of western Montana and Idaho. The other route, the Bozeman Trail from Fort Laramie to the goldfields, had been assigned to the adjoining Department of the Platte.

  Terry quickly organized his department into districts and traveled widely in Dakota, inspecting existing forts and authorizing two new ones, Totten and Stevenson. In June 1867, as instructed by General Sherman, Terry traveled by horse and steamer to Helena, Montana, where he found the settlers frightened by Sioux aggressions. The acting governor had called out volunteers and urged that they be placed in federal service. Terry refused, but the militia rampaged across the country anyway. The Gallatin Valley, where citizen anxiety was justified, posed a special problem. He authorized the erection at Bozeman of Fort Ellis. By the end of the year Terry could report that his department was organized into four districts containing fourteen posts garrisoned by four infantry regiments. He also conferred with General Sherman on measures to make peace with or fight the Indians, mainly the Teton Sioux. Within two years Terry had mastered the intricacies of his new command, in which he would pass most of his remaining career.5

  As Terry acquainted himself with the Department of Dakota, forces gathered to shape the course of U.S. Indian policy. In December 1866 the Fetterman disaster at Fort Phil Kearny, on the Bozeman Trail from Fort Laramie to the Montana mines, sparked vigorous controversy over how to respond both to the Teton Sioux perpetrators and to the larger question of how to deal with all the plains tribes. The Indian Bureau and its friends in the Senate urged a peaceful approach that depended on treaties and reservations to lead the tribes into “civilization.” The army and its congressional friends favored military conquest as the first objective before pursuing more moderate measures. The army also lobbied for transfer of the Indian Bureau from the Interior Department to the War Department.

  To resolve the issues Congress created a commission on July 20, 1867, to go among the tribes of both the northern and southern plains and attempt to conclude peace treaties establishing reservations. The commission consisted of both humanitarian peace advocates and three generals—Sherman, Terry, and retired general William S. Harney—appointed by President Andrew Johnson. With Sherman absent in Washington most of the time, Brigadier General Christopher C. Augur sat in for him. Augur commanded the Department of the Platte, adjoining Terry’s department on the south.6

  The Peace Commission gave Terry a broad view of the Indian tribes, their homeland, and the politics of Indian policy. The first stop was Fort Laramie, where Red Cloud of the Teton Sioux declined to leave his hunting grounds. Kansas was the next stop, where the commissioners succeeded in negotiating the Medicine Lodge Treaty with the southern plains tribes. Meeting in St. Louis in January 1868, the members signed a report boasting of the Medicine Lodge Treaty but leaving unresolved the Teton Sioux. Another visit to Fort Laramie still failed to lure Red Cloud into the fort. Eventually, after the commission left, he came in and made his mark on the Treaty of 1868, which would have significant consequences in future years, with which General Terry would have to deal.

  The final meeting occurred in Chicago on October 7, 1868. War had broken out on the southern plains, and the generals easily outvoted the peace proponents. Sitting in on the meeting was General Grant, who clearly stood to be the next president of the United States. Terry and Augur readily voted with the generals. The Peace Commission did not solve the dilemma of war versus peace, but it marked a significant event in the history of Indian affairs.

  For General Terry, the Peace Commission had been a major learning experience, which had equipped him to approach the affairs of the Department of Dakota with a wide perspective but had kept him away from his department headquarters. Back in St. Paul, however, he was afforded only seven months before he was transferred on May 17, 1869, to command the Department of the South in Atlanta, still in the throes of Reconstruction chaos. His legal knowledge and his success in similar duty in Virginia probably played a part. Terry was replaced in St. Paul by Major General Winfield S. Hancock, who took up President Grant’s Peace Policy of coaxing the tribes onto reservations while protecting the travel routes from those who refused to submit. Not until January 2, 1873, could Terry free himself from the demanding assignment in Atlanta and return to command the Department of Dakota.

  The department that Terry left in 1868 roiled with Sioux troubles. The Treaty of 1868 had created a Great Sioux Reservation covering all of what is now the state of South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills. To gain Red Cloud’s assent, the treaty had also promised to abandon the Bozeman Trail forts and authorized an “unceded Indian territory” west of the reservation. This territory, the rugged country drained by the Tongue and Powder Rivers, was for Indian use only; all whites were barred. Here Lakotas and Cheyennes who scorned reservation life could follow the bison as long as they existed. “Winter roamers” under Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other Teton chiefs followed the old life. Reservation Indians drew rations at their agencies on the reservation, but many rode west to the unceded territory to join their kin for a summer spent reliving the old life. Further agitating affairs, many winter roamers slipped into the agencies in the winter to share in the rations issued the agency Indians. Nor did bold young men always respect boundaries, and settlements and ranches along the Platte River suffered from Indian raids.

  Motivated by the principles of President Grant’s Peace Policy, General Terry believed the Indians in his department should be led into the paths of self-supporting “civilization.” This was also the task of the civilian Indian agents. Two factors inhibited Terry from pursuing his thinking: many of the agents were corrupt and incompetent; and his superior in division headquarters in Chicago, Lieutenant General
Philip Sheridan, held warlike views at odds with his own. Another complication was the Northern Pacific Railway. Halted at the Missouri River by the Panic of 1873, it nevertheless enjoyed the vigorous support of both Sheridan and Sherman, who had replaced Grant when he became president. The railway also promised to antagonize the Sioux when it resumed construction westward. Still another irritant was the Black Hills, part of the Great Sioux Reservation but coveted by whites because of rumors of gold in its streams. Sheridan took great interest in the Hills despite their being guaranteed to the Sioux by treaty. Confronted by Sheridan, a domineering, volatile superior, Terry settled in at St. Paul largely as a desk general, overseeing the wishes of Sheridan in the Department of Dakota.

  Even before the Northern Pacific Railway declared bankruptcy in 1873, Sheridan had ensured that the railroad’s surveying expeditions worked with military escorts. Surveys as far as Montana’s Yellowstone River in 1871 and 1872 encountered Sioux resistance, indicating that the railroad would be hotly contested. Anticipating the survey of 1873, therefore, Sheridan brought Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry from the South to provide the escort. Although commanded by Colonel David S. Stanley, Custer and his cavalry engaged and routed Sitting Bull’s Lakotas on two occasions. At the conclusion of the expedition, the Seventh Cavalry settled into the new post of Fort Abraham Lincoln, on the west bank of the Missouri River, three miles south of Bismarck. These measures seem to have been undertaken with little or no consultation with General Terry after his arrival in 1873.

  In 1874, after three years of consideration, Sheridan determined to explore the Black Hills and fix a site for a military post to prevent the Sioux from raiding along the Platte. He consulted the president, the secretaries of war and the interior, and General Sherman. After gaining their assent, Sheridan visited Fort Lincoln in June, talked with Custer, and returned to Chicago, where he issued orders to Terry to organize the expedition. Terry endorsed Sheridan’s orders with a detailed analysis of the legality of penetrating the Black Hills, all of which supported Sheridan’s orders. Again, however, Terry had been ignored in forming the plans, as indicated in his annual report the following year: “The Black Hills expedition was organized pursuant to orders of General Sheridan issued while he was at Fort Lincoln in June 1874.”7

  Custer’s Black Hills expedition, revealing a largely unknown land of timbered mountains and lush valleys, gained widespread publicity. What caught the public eye, however, was the discovery of gold, which obscured the purpose of the expedition. Custer did fix a site for a military post, but it would not be built until 1878. More immediately, the Sioux regarded the intrusion into their domain as a violation of the Treaty of 1868 (but it wasn’t) and the inevitable flood of gold-seekers as a more serious violation (it was).

  Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, Seventh Cavalry.

  Little Bighorn National Battlefield Monument.

  No sooner had Custer returned to Fort Lincoln than General Sheridan directed Terry to use his troops to intercept gold-seekers, destroy their wagons and outfits, and arrest the leaders. As the New York Tribune pointed out, however, “If there is gold in the Black Hills, no army on earth can keep the adventurous men of the west out of them, and the Government should lose no time in extinguishing the Indian title to the auriferous lands.” Recognizing this reality, the government did indeed move to extinguish Indian title. The secretary of the interior appointed a commission headed by Senator William B. Allison to persuade the Sioux either to grant mining rights or to sell the Hills outright. General Terry was a member of the commission and played an active role, possessing more knowledge of the Indians than most of the other members. The negotiations with Red Cloud and other Sioux chiefs took place at the Red Cloud Agency in September 1875. A month’s deliberations, often raucous, failed to overcome Lakota resistance.8

  The failure of the Allison Commission focused official attention on the winter roamers who occupied the unceded territory. They had disrupted the proceedings of the Allison Commission, raided both in Montana and along the Platte River road, and stirred up the agency Indians. On November 3, 1875, President Grant met with the secretary of war, the secretary of the interior, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Generals Sheridan and George Crook. A saber-rattling report by an Indian bureau inspector, almost certainly engineered for the purpose, provided a pretext for ordering all Indians in the unceded territory to report to their agencies by February 1, 1876, or be considered hostiles subject to military action.

  The Indians did not report. For one thing, moving their villages in a northern plains winter was a daunting undertaking. For another, they probably did not understand the message delivered by runners to be an ultimatum, if they even knew what an ultimatum was. General Sheridan began organizing a three-pronged winter offensive into the Powder and Yellowstone River country. Brigadier General George Crook would move north from Fort Fetterman. Two columns under Terry’s command would form a pincer on the Yellowstone River: Colonel John Gibbon east from Fort Ellis, and Colonel Custer west from Fort Lincoln. Severe winter weather confounded Crook’s thrust and prevented Terry’s columns from marching until spring advanced, nudging the winter campaign into a summer campaign.

  Terry’s strategy was sound: turn Custer loose. Sheridan had done that on the southern plains in 1868, and Custer delivered. Terry would remain in his St. Paul headquarters while Custer and Gibbon struck the Sioux. Politics intervened, however. A staunch Democrat, Custer had quietly provided material to eastern newspapers that accused Grant administration officials of corruption. With the impeachment of Secretary of War William W. Belknap, congressional investigations advanced. Custer was summoned as a witness and further angered President Grant by implicating his brother, Orvil. When Custer hastened back from Washington to lead his command west, he failed to gain permission and was halted in Chicago. Grant ordered that another officer lead the expedition. Sheridan ordered Terry to take the field himself. Responding to appeals from Terry and Sheridan, Grant relented insofar as to allow Custer to go, under Terry, in command of his own regiment.9

  Thanks to his reckless subordinate and an angry president, General Terry embarked on his only postwar field command. He approved of the objective: round the Indians up and force them to settle on their reservation and become civilized.

  With Gibbon already on the Yellowstone with his infantry and Major James Brisbin’s cavalry, Terry assumed command of the Dakota Column, which comprised Custer’s entire Seventh Cavalry and assorted infantry units. It departed Fort Lincoln on May 17, 1876. The long, plodding march to the Yellowstone, with frequent rain, snow, and cold dogging the troops, was aimed at finding the Indians. It also tested Terry’s relations with Custer. Twice in his field diary Terry hinted at irritation with his subordinate, but it is improbable that he ever treated him sternly.10 Custer ranged widely, following his own inclinations rather than Terry’s; in fact, he had boasted to a fellow officer that once in the field he intended to cut loose from Terry. But the general issued enough orders to establish his status as expedition commander. If he disliked or distrusted Custer, he kept his opinion to himself. Notably, when he later joined with Colonel Gibbon, he maintained the same benign attitude, even though during the Civil War he had often recorded his dislike of Gibbon.

  On June 8 the Dakota Column reached the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Powder River. Here Terry met Captain Grant Marsh’s river steamer Far West bearing supplies and established a supply base. Boarding the Far West, he steamed up the river until spotting Gibbon’s Montana Column on the north bank. Meeting with the colonel, Terry ordered him to march back to the mouth of the Rosebud and await further orders. On June 10 Terry ordered a sweeping scout south of the river by Major Marcus A. Reno aimed at trying to locate the Indian village. Reno’s scout bore fruit: a large Indian trail led up the Rosebud and, as Terry’s scouts noted, almost certainly turned west to the Little Bighorn. On June 21, at the mouth of the Rosebud, Terry convened a conference aboard the Fa
r West to outline his strategy to Gibbon, Custer, and Major James Brisbin of Gibbon’s command. Although the officers discussed the strategy at length, it was conceived by Terry himself.11

  Colonel John Gibbon, Seventh Infantry.

  Author’s collection.

  Terry’s orders, committed to paper by his adjutant general, were handed to Custer the next morning. They explicitly outlined Terry’s thinking: Custer would lead the Seventh Cavalry up the Rosebud, follow the Indian trail when it was found, then continue up the Rosebud when the trail turned west to the Little Bighorn as assumed until reaching the headwaters of the Tongue River. From there Custer would turn down the Little Bighorn, enabling him to strike the village from the south and driving it against Gibbon’s infantry, which would be advancing up the valley from the north. The two forces would be approaching each other on the afternoon of June 26. But the orders also provided the basis for endless argument: Terry placed too much confidence in Custer’s “zeal, energy, and ability” to burden him with precise orders that might hamper him when nearly in contact with the enemy. However, Custer should follow them unless he saw “sufficient reason” for departing from them, which, of course, Custer did find. Whether the reason was sufficient or not fuels a controversy enduring to this day.12

  On the morning of June 22, at the mouth of the Rosebud, Terry, Gibbon, and Brisbin watched the departure of the Seventh Cavalry as it began the march up the Rosebud. They then boarded the Far West and returned to the north bank of the Yellowstone. Gibbon and Brisbin joined their troops for the march up the river, while Terry remained on board. On June 24 the steamer ferried the troops to the south bank. Terry’s plan called for the column to turn up the Bighorn to the mouth of the Little Bighorn and follow that river upstream until encountering the village or Custer. At the mouth of the Bighorn Terry took to his horse with his staff and joined the advance on the right bank of the Bighorn, while the Far West maneuvered up that river to the mouth of the Little Bighorn.