THE ARMY’S DREARY WAR
In the 1880s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show would stage battle scenes in which a united Sioux met a united white cavalry in glorious combat. But at almost every level, these so-called “reenactments” were artful contrivances designed to obscure the real history they represented. The Plains Indian wars were confusing, messy, and terrifying for everyone caught up in them. Throughout the many skirmishes and massacres which constituted their primary drama, the army fought and feuded in the ranks, and any sense of national purpose was almost consistently absent. Witness to the army’s dismal season, Cody discovered his usefulness not only as an Indian fighter, but as a symbol of Indian fighting, as a protagonist on whom white officers and other middle-class Americans could hang their own desires and longings.
Grasping the essence of Cody’s appeal to the army requires first the debunking of one prominent myth about the history of the American military. Today, it is widely believed that until the Vietnam War, Americans respected, admired, and supported their military. Then critics of the war (mostly on the left) demeaned the armed forces. Only in recent years has the army recovered its now jealously guarded status as one branch of a wildly popular armed service. According to many commentators, today’s veneration of the American soldier marks the rightful return of an old tradition.
Beholden to this view, modern Americans are often surprised to learn that in the years that Cody began scouting for the military, Americans were so divided on the issue of fighting Indians, and so dubious of their army’s valor, that the campaigns were anything but glorious. Part of the reason lay in public suspicions of the new federal army. From the earliest days of the United States, citizens preferred short-term, all-volunteer, local militias to a permanent military. To many people, a paid, professional military was a threat to the republic, an overly aristocratic institution at odds with democracy, a drain on public finances, and a haven for criminals, layabouts, and others incapable of making a living in commerce.
The wide popularity of the Civil War’s Union army was a rare exception to this rule, a shift in perception occasioned by the volunteering of middle-class men who answered the call to save the Union, and temporarily drove darker aspersions about the army into the wilderness. But as Union veterans went back to civilian life after 1865, Americans by and large returned to their traditional anti-army sentiments.36 After Appomattox, funding for the army vanished. Almost a million soldiers mustered out by the spring of 1866, shrinking the army to 54,000 troops. Soldiers confronted the two great challenges of occupying the defeated South and winning the Indian wars despite worsening shortages of men and matériel. By 1874, Congress was budgeting for only 27,000 soldiers and officers. Recruitment was so poor that the true number of soldiers rarely exceeded 19,000, and these were but poorly provisioned. 37
The army’s post–Civil War missions failed to rouse public esteem. The southern occupation was inglorious, thankless, and contentious, riven with questions about the constitutionality of martial law and the rights of black freedmen and their former owners.
The Indian wars were as controversial as the southern occupation, but for different reasons. Americans were united in the proposition that Indian cultures should disappear, but they fought bitterly over how to effect that end. Frontier settlers tended to be vehemently in favor of massive military force to remove Indians altogether. But these citizens were in the minority. The more numerous easterners were more skeptical of the need for military action. Uncertain of the arability of western lands, they often believed that Indians would gradually diminish before the superior civilization and not require military conquest at all. Echoing these doubts were religious reformers, also based largely in the East, who were newly energized by their successful campaign to rid America of slavery. After the Civil War, they turned their attentions to reforming Indian policy. Seeking to settle and Christianize America’s nomadic, pagan Indians, they viewed the army with deep suspicion. Indians needed to know Christian charity and hear the gospel so they could fly to Christ. The last thing the cause of civilization needed was violent ranks of drunken, blaspheming, lecherous soldiers in Indian Country.
Between these competing segments of the electorate, the army occupied a middle ground, less a conquering force than “a frontier constabulary charged with mediating among various foes,” in the words of historian Sherry Smith.38 Their role was to prevent not only massacres of whites by Indians, but massacres of Indians by whites. It was a volunteer militia of Colorado civilians that slaughtered over one hundred women, children, and elderly Cheyenne in the Sand Creek massacre of 1864. The village had been guaranteed federal protection, and the atrocity understandably enraged Cheyenne survivors. It also infuriated federal authorities, by renewing U.S.-Cheyenne hostilities, confounding federal diplomacy, and interrupting the westward flow of settlement and commerce. Throughout the 1860s, the ongoing struggle over Indian policy at the national level meant the army continually sought to justify more expenditures and larger troop deployments, often to congressional committees which were at best ambivalent. Not surprisingly, military people in the latter 1860s and throughout the 1870s felt unsupported, underpaid, and even betrayed by their country.39
In his continuing bid for respectability, Cody socialized almost exclusively with officers, most of whom were northern middle-class men like himself.40 But in doing so, he trod warily over political fault lines which crisscrossed the military and aggravated their difficulties during the Indian wars. Officers extolled higher notions of duty and honor, often professing devotion to an aristocratic code of conduct resembling—and sometimes derived from—Sir Walter Scott’s best-selling lore of the Round Table.41 But the men who wore the epaulets, stars, and shoulder braids were often bitterly factionalized. Many officers sought transfers to the West in 1866, believing they would have more chance to prove themselves in combat on the Plains. Accelerated promotion through brevet ranks was the chief method of rewarding combat valor and the most coveted honor in the Civil War. But even in those relatively rare moments when the army and their Indian opponents closed on the battlefield, officers were rarely promoted. The War Department did not award brevet ranks in the Indian wars.42 Moreover, as congressional budgeteers reduced the number of troops, the number of officers’ commissions fell into a corresponding decline. Thus, on the Plains, the army had too many young officers with ever fewer chances of promotion. Advancement in rank came mostly when superiors retired or died. Consequently, officers politicked furiously to have rivals disciplined, demoted, transferred, or court-martialed, and the resultant political frictions troubled the entire theater of the West.43
Commanders’ frustrations were compounded by the theater of combat, for the West offered few opportunities for reversing public scorn. The weird landscape of the Plains was in thrall to weather that veered between parching heat and cold so fierce it froze a man’s mouth shut.44 Reports of Indian attacks were practically continuous, but meeting Sioux or Cheyenne in decisive combat was rare. Indian war parties, even entire villages, usually outran and outsmarted army patrols, separating into small groups and dispersing into the vastness of the Plains which they knew so well. All too often, soldiers had the same experience Lt. Col. George Custer did in 1867, thundering across the Plains in pursuit of an entire Cheyenne village, only to be “discouraged by seeing the broad, well-beaten trail suddenly separate into hundreds of indistinct routes, leading fan-shape in as many different directions.” 45 The U.S. Army was better armed, better mounted, and usually larger than the Indian forces. Eventually, these advantages would tell in the army’s favor. But in the short term, none of them seemed to make much difference, as Indians repeatedly fought and then fled, leaving army leaders to explain to the newspapers, and to the public, why they had failed to catch Indians yet again.46
For officers it was depressing and humiliating. For soldiers, it was worse. The frontier army was plagued by scurvy, rank-and-file boredom, and high rates of desertion, all exacerbated, especially i
n 1866 and 1867, by the absence of any great victories. General Winfield Scott Hancock ventured out to treat with—and hopefully intimidate—the Cheyenne Dog Men in 1867. He found no warriors willing to meet him in battle, burned the wrong village, provoked more Cheyenne raids, and terrified Cheyenne diplomats who might have helped establish peace. “Hancock’s War” was roundly criticized in the national press.47
Not surprisingly, soldier morale was low and desertions high. On average, the army lost fully one-fourth of its troops to desertion in the 1870s, and over a longer period, between 1867 and 1891, one-third of the army deserted.48 There were abundant reasons for discontent: drafty barracks, illfitting uniforms and boots, and a dismal diet of pork, hardtack, and coffee, which barely sustained a soldier’s health. Troopers could go six months without seeing their wages, which dropped from $16 a month in the Civil War to $13 a month in 1871. They did not rise for the next twenty-seven years.49
In the future, the public would remember the grumbling, desertion-prone soldiers not only as enthusiastic subordinates of a united, heroic officer class, but as standard-bearers of a white vanguard. Thus, in 1887, when Cody debuted his reenactment of “Custer’s Last Rally” in New York, the presentation of an immaculately uniformed, all-white army in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show reinforced dominant theories about race and civilization. Americans generally saw their westward expansion as the onward march of Anglo-Saxons along the arc they had followed from Britain to the New World centuries before, and which set their Aryan forebears wandering west from the Asian highlands long before that. Civilization was the product of the white race; white people moving to the West would establish it in defiance of their barbarian opponents. Just as the westering Saxons displaced the primitive Celts, so the Anglo-Saxons would defeat the Sioux and Cheyenne.50
Perhaps nothing has done more to obscure the complex history of the Plains Indian wars than these simplistic and enduring fantasies of grand racial conflicts. For on the ground, in the real Indian wars, class divisions between officers and troopers often undermined morale and esprit de corps while the ethnic and racial composition of troops confounded notions of clear-cut race war. Prominent fighters in the Plains campaigns included six all-black regiments (with white officers), the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, organized into four infantry regiments and the famed Ninth and Tenth Cavalry. 51
But other troops, too, complicated ideals of a white man’s army. Most soldiers were poor men, and many were immigrants. For the first decade after the Civil War, foreign-born recruits, mostly Irish and German immigrants, comprised 50 percent of the ranks. Almost a third of Custer’s Seventh was Irish in 1876, and they were joined by Germans, Italians, and others. In the words of one scholar, the Plains army “was a foreign legion,” patched together from Americans, Irish, Germans, French, British, Scandinavians, Italians, and Russians. Legend has it that the Eighth Infantry band in 1880s Montana was imported wholesale from Italy.52 The Seventh Cavalry band spoke German and, according to Custer, regimental conversation was a “parody of Babel,” where “almost every language has its representatives.”53
Today we might see these disparities as quaint cultural variations. But in the 1860s, they aggravated class frictions between soldiers and their commanders, and they had pronounced implications for the ability of the army to fulfill white racial destiny: at the time, to be “white” meant more than having a pink skin. In the 1860s, “white” men were of Anglo-Saxon descent. They were Protestant, English-speaking, and usually native-born. Most of all, white men possessed an inherited facility for self-governance, which flowed from the capacity to restrain appetites for violence and sensual pleasures.54
Germans, widely known as “Dutch” (from “Deutsch,” their term for themselves) were mostly Catholics, and speakers of an alien language. They were tenuously white, at best.
The Irish were even more problematic. In popular reckoning, they were characteristically violent (a trait they displayed in the many strikes that paralyzed American cities), hostile to the rudiments of civilized behavior, and unable to restrain their appetites for liquor or sex. Many critics saw them as threats to the American republic, on a par with newly freed blacks, or savage Indians. Recalling New York’s draft riots, one journalist described the noise of the Irish mob as “a howling as of thousands of wild Indians let loose at once.”55
In this sense, a war that pitted “savage” Irish troopers against “savage” Indians was singularly ironic. Indians were of mysterious origin themselves (there were none in the Bible, after all). Some theorized that the most ardent opponents of the frontier army, the Oglala Sioux, were in fact Irish—as in “O’Gallalla.”56
Laughable as it may seem, it made a certain kind of cultural sense to white Americans, who had long derided the Irish as savages. Comparisons of Irish to blacks were just as common, and they cut both ways across the racial divide, with Irish pegged as “white negroes” and blacks as “smoked Irish.”57
By the 1860s, writers had been warning for decades that the prodigious immigration of “the most degenerate races of olden day Europe,” including the “Irish, cross-bred German and French, and Italians of even more doubtful stock,” would result in political chaos, and the racial decay of American Anglo-Saxondom.58 In the 1880s and ’90s, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West “reenactments” of Plains battles depicted an all-white army pitted against a dark Indian menace. But in 1867, when Cody began scouting for the army, its ranks replicated the immigrant hodgepodge which seemed to threaten the Anglo-Saxon republic with racial dissolution. The result was an army riven with racial and class tensions. Irish ascended to racial respectability, to whiteness, by helping to resist and marginalize other nonwhites.59 So, just as Americans ridiculed Irish immigrants as “savages,” Irish soldiers conflated their hostilities to Indians and blacks. George Custer overheard two of his Irish troopers preparing to fire on a furious Sioux charge in 1873:
“Say Teddy, I guess the ball’s opened.”
“Yis, and by the way thim rid nagurs is comin’ it’s openin’ wid a grand march.”60
For immigrant troopers anxious to grasp some fragments of elusive whiteness, fighting Indians was only half the battle. They scrambled constantly to put distance between themselves and other “nonwhites” who wore the same uniform. After one particularly grueling 1869 campaign, the all-black Tenth Cavalry nearly went to war against the heavily immigrant Fifth Cavalry. “Men on both sides appeared to be desperate, and it required all my time and careful watching to prevent a terrible conflict,” reported the white commander of the Tenth.61
Racial dissension in the army was so pronounced that to a limited degree even Indians exploited it. White commanders of the black Tenth Cavalry reported racial taunts “in plain English” by some of the hundreds of Cheyenne warriors who surrounded them on the Solomon River in August 1867. “Come here, come here, you sons of guns; we don’t want to fight the niggers, we want to fight you white sons of guns.”62
Army race tensions were evident throughout Cody’s own autobiography, in which he poked fun at black soldiers, mocking their aspirations to “sweep de red debels from off de face ob de earth.” In another anecdote, he recalled the night that a camp sentinel “who was an Irishman” bumped his head on a tree limb and insisted that Indians had hit him over the head. “As shure ez me name’s Pat Maloney, one of thim rid divils hit me on the head wid a club, so he did.”63
Frictions between native-born English-speakers and immigrant Germans strained the Cody household. In 1904, Cody recalled an instance from early in his marriage when Louisa took umbrage that he, “not thinking any that her mother was German,” began “humming a little song that the soldiers used to sing there about the Dutch.” As he told Louisa’s lawyers many years later, his thoughtlessness “made Mrs. Cody angry and she give me a good deal of trouble about it.”64
Whiteness within the frontier army was thus limited, contested, and often the provenance of a minority, and there was little hope for change in the short term. P
opular theory, or wishful thinking, had it that the environmental influences of settling the land and sharing in America’s abundance of nutrition could “whiten” immigrants, and for this reason many of the ethnic and racial conflicts that roiled the East were supposedly muted on the frontier. 65 But army recruits were often very new to American shores. They were soldiers, not settlers. In fact, settlers despised them. Army rations constituted anything but good food, a fact made abundantly clear by the numbers of troopers who stole into town to buy meals, or filch them. And soldiers, like urban immigrants, were renowned for slovenliness, belligerence, and savage predilection for drink.66
Seen in the internally contentious, multiracial context of the frontier army, beleaguered by public hostility and congressional indifference, Cody’s popularity with officers begins to make a certain sense. An energetic, courageous, buckskin-clad white scout who could steer troops across the Plains and back again, fighting hostile Indians, would be welcome indeed for the white middle-class commanders of the U.S. Army. But one final feature of Plains warfare upped the currency of Cody’s white Indian imposture even more. White scouts, or at least competent ones, were almost impossible to find. Indeed, scouts were perhaps the most troublesome of all civilians for the American army.
While the army pursued Indians in combat, and fantasized about white Indian scouts who could lead them to glory, most of their best scouts were actually Indians. Army scouting parties were predominantly made up of Shoshones, Crows, Arikaras, Pawnees, Osages, Kaws, Cherokees, Delawares, and an assortment of other Indians who opted for the army in the war between expansionist nomads and expansionist Americans. In a reflection of their prominence, no fewer than sixteen Indian scouts won the Congressional Medal of Honor between 1869 and 1890.67
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