The Heart of Everything That is,The Untold Story of Red Cloud,
An American Legend
By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
Part III
THE
RESISTANCE
’Tis true they were a lawless
brood,
But rough in form, nor mild
in mood.
—Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos
15
STRONG
HEARTS
Traveling at 250 feet per
second and deadly accurate to
100 yards, it produced a
sound that was described
variously as a shrieking
whistle or a mere whisper on
the wind. In either case
soldiers on the frontier
certainly heard it coming,
even if there was no time to
react. So it was that in all
likelihood Lieutenant Caspar
Collins, a musket ball already
lodged in his hip, recognized
the hiss of the arrow an
instant before its cast-iron tip
pierced his forehead, drilled
through his skull, and
exploded his prefrontal
cortex. The last thing he saw
was his cavalry troop being
overrun by Indians.
Hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne had poured from the ocher bluffs that overlooked the Army outpost known as Bridge Station, hard by the North Platte. They engulfed Collins’s command in a matter of moments. One trooper inexplicably dismounted in a dusty washout, determined to fight on foot. He was dead nearly before his boots hit the ground. Another’s horse was shot out from under him; wounded, he crawled on his hands and knees toward the 1,000-foot wooden span that led to the barricaded stockade on the far side of the river. Bluecoats on the battlements watched an Indian bury a tomahawk in his head. A third trooper fell with his mount, horse and rider both bristling with arrow shafts.
The last anyone saw of Lieutenant Collins, he was still in the saddle, blood streaming down his face, his hands squeezing the reins in a death grip as his horse reared and galloped into the center of the war party. Collins had been warned before leaving the fort that his was a suicide mission.
“I am not a coward, ” he had replied. “I know what it means to go out . . . but I’ve never disobeyed an order. I’m a soldier’s son.”
His body was never recovered.
It was July 26, 1865, and Collins was one of twenty- nine cavalrymen from Ohio and Kansas killed in a daylong series of running fights in east-central Wyoming that came to be known as the Battle of Red Buttes. How many Indians fell Red Cloud could not immediately determine, as half of his force had ridden off to attack a train of Army freight wagons making for the fort. What he did know was that he had, at long last, set out to avenge a lifetime’s worth of lies, injustices, and broken promises. In the process, he had ordered the first shots fired in what would come to be known as Red Cloud’s War. He had no idea that three long columns of Bluecoats would soon be mounted and moving toward him with orders to kill him and every male Indian over the age of twelve.
Meanwhile, Sitting Bull had soaked the Upper Missouri with tableland blood, for it was there that the most militant Minnesota Dakota renegades had allied with his feral Hunkpapas to terrorize traders and steamboat operators threshing the turbid waters of the frontier as well as the few dryland farmers and ranchers hardy enough to settle the country’s most windswept prairie. Any Indian considered too friendly toward the Americans was also fair game. The Hunkpapa chief Bears Ribs, who had urged moderation on Red Cloud and others at the large war council at Bear Butte in 1857, was slain by the Lakota after repeatedly ignoring Sitting Bull’s warnings to refuse the government’s handouts of rotten seed corn and sacks of moldy flour. Bears Ribs’s 250 ragged followers were left to wander through the desolate country alone; no other band was willing to take them in.
Even the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota Sioux in Mankato had failed to still white fears, and from 1863 onward news of the Minnesota “massacres” spread panic among settlements up and down the Missouri. President Lincoln and his War Department were inundated with alarmist telegrams from western politicians demanding troops to quell a Sioux rebellion that, ironically, was still limited to Sitting Bull’s distant corner of the Upper Missouri in present-day North Dakota. Nonetheless the government responded by constructing a series of new posts and fortified camps running from Omaha to Salt Lake City, including one above and four below Fort Laramie along the Oregon Trail. They not only were of little use—the hostiles were ghosts, everywhere and nowhere—but served to further inflame the western tribes. Through all of this, Red Cloud’s Powder River Country constituted perhaps the only peaceful oasis in the West. The great Oglala warrior chief recognized that this was temporary.
Some historians have viewed the indigenous tribes’ failure to take advantage of the American Civil War by acting collaboratively as the Indians’ most serious military error. That reasoning is based on a false premise. It is generally assumed that the great migration of the Regular Army at the onset of the War Between the States emptied the West of troops for the duration of the conflict. This was true at first. But Lincoln’s Treasury needed gold and silver from the mountain territories to pay for the war, and the president recognized that without military escorts many of the miners making for Montana, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho would never get there alive. The Union also required a fair amount of firepower to ensure that the ore made it out safely. Indian attacks were not the only potential peril; the Cherry Creek gold strikes along the front range of the Rockies in Colorado were precariously close to the Confederate state of Texas. Thus the Army presence west of the Missouri gradually increased until, by 1865, it actually exceeded prewar numbers.
It was a tentative buildup. Twice during the summer of 1862 combined Hunkpapa Dakota war parties ambushed cavalry detachments that were escorting wagon trains of miners to the gold camps of Virginia City in western Montana, already a boomtown rivaling Denver. During the second attack they harassed a company of Iowa volunteers nearly all the way back to Sioux City. But 1862 was also the year Lincoln and the Free-Soilers took advantage of the absence of the southern plantation owners from Congress to pass the Homestead Act. This meant that beginning January 1, 1863, any U.S. citizen—or intended citizen, including freed slaves and female heads of households—could take title to 160 acres of government land west of the Mississippi, provided he or she improved the property, lived on it for five consecutive years, and had never taken up arms against the United States. The filing cost was $18. The trails west, already swollen with fortune seekers, men (like Mark Twain) looking to avoid military service, and the over 300,000 deserters from the Union and Confederate Armies, were now filled with families lugging harrows, seed drills, and new steel plows that sliced open the prairie much more easily than wood or cast iron. All this combined with a succession of fabulous strikes from the Comstock Lode to the Boise Basin Rush to at least double the West’s population.
These new voters, loyal Unionists, wanted roads and telegraph lines, stage and mail service, and above all protection against the Indians. Lincoln was a shrewd politician with an eye toward a second term. There was no question as to his response, and northern volunteers who had enlisted to fight Johnny Reb instead found themselves marching on what the newspapers called “red pagans.” In August 1864 the dilettante General Alfred Sully—a Philadelphia watercolorist and oil painter of some renown—led a column of 2,500 men into North Dakota and defeated Sitting Bull’s Sioux on the Upper Knife in a vicious three-day battle. In the end the Hunk papas and Dakotas had no answer for Sully’s howitzers. The general personally ordered the bodies of three braves thought to have slain his aide-de-camp decapitated. Their severed heads were fixed on poles and left behind as a warning. It was a turning point, forcing the North Dakota hostiles to migrate southwest toward the Black Hills, inching the conflict closer to Red Cloud.
And as news of Sitting Bull’s rebellion spread to the Powder River Country, small bands of wild Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Blackfoot Sioux, and even some Oglalas began making raids of their own. The few miners foolhardy enough to make for Montana via Nebraska and Wyoming were scalped and dismembered, mail stages were destroyed, and Army supply wagons were looted and burned. A favorite Indian practice on discovery of a chest or barrel of bacon, a staple of frontier mess tents, was to lash a captured teamster to a wagon wheel, pile the rashers about him, and set the meat afire. One relief party of troops that arrived in the aftermath of such a scene was barely able to tell the seared human from the hog. Meanwhile there was little the scattered and limited frontier troopers could do but cock an ear from behind log and adobe fortifications and listen as Indians bayed like prairie wolves from distant buttes and mesas.
Among these Indians was Crazy Horse. By the start of the white man’s Civil War the twenty-year-old Oglala’s reputation had grown with every coup counted and every scalp taken during the Crow Wars. His raiding companions now included not only Bad Faces, but also Miniconjou braves from his mother’s side of the family, and the legend of his one-man charges—which the Sioux called “dare rides”—was such that the number of horses shot out from under him became a standard joke among his fellow fighters. He was the incarnation of war, always personally in the forefront of raids and attacks, separated from his party by twenty to forty yards, a solitary whirlwind leading a line of warriors spread behind him like the wings of a hawk. “We know Crazy Horse better than you Sioux, ” a Crow fighter once told a Lakota. “Whenever we have a fight he is closer to us than he is to you.”
Yet Crazy Horse was far from being what the Indians called a reckless “Black Heart, ” a suicidal warrior riding into battle alone with only a war club in his hands and a death song on his lips. His followers knew well what to expect when he led them on raids, as he always planned what military strategists today would call an exit strategy. His fellow fighters were also struck by his unusual habit of jumping from his pony during critical moments of a skirmish in order to gain a more stable position from which to nock his arrows. When he was not battling Crows there was no finer tracker or hunter among the Lakota, and he invariably felled the most cows during the semiannual buffalo hunts. But he also tended to ride off by himself and return with fat elk, deer, antelope, and waterfowl. As his Dream Spirit Guide instructed, he always distributed the best meats from his kills among families, clans, and villages of lesser means.
Crazy Horse had also discovered what the Indians called their personal “life path” when he was accepted into an Oglala soldier-society called the Strong Hearts. Inspired in part by tales of Sitting Bull’s defiance, the Strong Hearts were repelled when many of their own tribe relied on trade with the Americans for food and clothing; they themselves adopted an ideology of complete separatism from white ways. They refused to eat beefsteak, bacon, or sugar; to drink coffee or whiskey; or to wear any garment not made from traditional skins. They also warned off less-militant bands they discovered trekking to Indian agencies or forts to trade for these items, threatening to kill the offenders’ ponies if they continued.
Although Crazy Horse was generous to Lakota society’s least favored members, since his rejection by Black Buffalo Woman he had by all accounts become a taciturn adult whose heart was said to be not much larger than the talismanic pebble he wore behind his ear. But he was also a deeply spiritual young man, and among the spartan Strong Hearts he found a true home. “[He] was good for nothing but to be a warrior, ” observed the half-blood interpreter Billy Garnett, who through his Oglala mother befriended Crazy Horse in the 1860s. Now, with their mountain enemies defeated, the Strong Hearts turned their attention to the whites. Each spring during the Civil War years they rode south from their camps along the Yellowstone as soon as the grass was up, separating into groups of ten or fewer, spreading out among the trails leading west and concealing themselves among thick groves of willows and in shadowed hollows. There they awaited opportunities to rustle stock or kill emigrant stragglers. They did not yet have the strength to take on the U.S. Army, but they were confident that the time would soon arrive.
Life may have seemed cheap to the settlers and emigrants on the High Plains, with hundreds of thousands lying dead on eastern battlefields, so the Army justifiably considered the Indian raids pinpricks. The government’s strongest reaction was to ban the sale of guns and ammunition to any of the Powder River bands. Moreover, Crazy Horse and his Strong Hearts aside, through the first half of the 1860s Red Cloud and his people showed no inclination to disrupt the status quo. Relatively undisturbed in their new territory on the Upper Powder, free of the white man’s debilitating whiskey and diseases, the Oglalas and their Brule cousins reveled in the return to a more pure and natural lifestyle, the open spaces of the high prairie corresponding to some mystical place within the Sacred Hoop. They passed the seasons hunting in the majestic, game-laden territory and making occasional raids on the increasingly beleaguered Crows and Shoshones—by now pushed almost beyond the Bighorns—before settling into cozy winter camps where the larders were piled high with venison and buffalo meat.
Even when, in 1861, a regiment of infantry and five companies of cavalry were deployed from California to Fort Laramie to protect the overland mail route along the Oregon Trail, the Bad Faces maintained a tentative peace with the soldiers. In fact, during that same year the eighty-seven-year-old Old Smoke and his family bade farewell to the band and “retired” to the outskirts of the fort to settle among the Laramie Loafers. There is even some indication that before his peaceful death in 1864 the venerable Oglala Head Man was persuaded by the local Indian agent to farm a small plot of land. More likely, as the Sioux historian George Hyde speculates, Old Smoke “gave permission for the women to try their hand at it.” This Oglala-Brule idyll was of course destined to end violently. At the very moment that Red Cloud and his people were acclimatizing themselves to the ancient Sioux traditions, 1,400 miles away a former assistant bank teller from Delaware was taking his first steps toward their epic showdown.
Fetterman secured a commission as a first lieutenant less than two months after rebel artillery shells tore into Fort Sumter, and in June 1861 he reported for duty at Camp Thomas in Columbus, Ohio. The depot had been established as the regimental headquarters of the 18th Ohio Infantry under the command of another civilian who had volunteered for service, the Yale-educated abolitionist attorney Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington. Carrington was appointed to the position by his good friend Salmon P. Chase, a former governor of Ohio currently serving as Lincoln’s treasury secretary. Fetterman arrived in Columbus just five days after Carrington, and together the two officers spent the next five months organizing and training the companies of raw volunteers. It was soon apparent that the physically frail Carrington’s greatest assets were political and clerical. Fetterman, on the other hand, seemed a born field commander.
Theirs was the classic contrast: Cicero and Demosthenes, with the former moving men’s minds while the latter made them get up and march. Yet this did not spark a rivalry; Carrington and Fetterman seemed to sense that they complemented each other’s attributes, and their combined skills were necessary to turn the regiment into a trim, well disciplined unit. They also became personal friends, with the thirty-seven-year-old Carrington’s wife, Margaret, remarking in her journal on the younger officer’s “refinement, gentlemanly manners, and adaption to social life” at the camp.
When Fetterman was promoted to captain, given command of the 18th’s 100 man Company A, and ordered to the front in November 1861, Carrington remained at his desk in Ohio. In 1862, Fetterman led the company during its suicidal bayonet charge at Corinth, and soon thereafter he fought in the Battle of Stones River, a medieval slugfest that produced the highest percentage of casualties in the entire Civil War. It was noted in his record that he stood in the front lines alongside his enlisted men for the duration of this thirty-six-hour engagement. And though the regiment suffered over 50 percent casualties during the fight, Fetterman emerged without a wound.
Meanwhile, Carrington’s knack for recruiting kept him in charge of training depots in Ohio and, later, Indiana, while Fetterman, serving under General Sherman throughout the Georgia campaign of 1864, was promoted to battalion commander. The 18th performed admirably during engagements at Kennesaw Mountain, at Peach Tree Creek, and at Jonesboro— despite suffering more casualties than any other regiment in the Regular Army —and Fetterman’s official record began to include adjectives such as “courageous, ” “daring, ” and “relentless.” During the siege of Atlanta he was cited for “great gallantry and spirit, ” and a fellow officer reported being surrounded by Confederate troops and escaping with his life only when “Captain Fetterman’s command marched to my assistance with great promptness.” For his contributions to the Atlanta campaign, Fetterman, along with hundreds of Union officers, received another brevet appointment, to lieutenant colonel.
By the war’s end in 1865 Fetterman would decide to make the military his career, and it was with a supreme confidence that he prepared to set off for the frontier. But this was still more than a year away, and in the interim the Army was forced to overcome various blundering missteps, attributable to postwar politics, that continually impeded its Indian campaigns on the High Plains.
Historians generally attribute this state of affairs to (or blame it on) the exigencies of the Confederate rebellion. But while it was true that the most accomplished officers were needed in the East, the Army of the Republic had undergone a subtle reconfiguration well prior to Fort Sumter. The Founding Fathers, citing ancient Rome and contemporary Europe, were convinced that a ginned up “defence agst. foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home, ” as James Madison wrote. Madison added that standing armies “kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” The Founders instead envisioned, and implemented, a “multipurpose army designed for a wide variety of functions beyond combat.” Among the purposes were felling trees, building schools, delivering mail, offering medical care, and erecting hospitals and lighthouses. It was an army of surveyors and engineers—dredging canals, constructing bridges, and, by 1830, laying over 1,900 miles of road. The West Point curriculum of the early nineteenth century leaned heavily toward such skills, and the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers “became a major focus of American science . . . collecting flora, fauna, and geological specimens, and publishing their findings in prestigious journals.”
However, by the late 1840s, with Europe set ablaze by revolutions, with the victory over Mexico still burnishing reputations, and with Manifest Destiny enthralling the officer class, the curriculum at the Military Academy underwent an overhaul. Imperialism and colonialism now steered the governmental policies of America’s rivals, and at West Point pure science took a backseat to the study of night marches and artillery duels, of sieges and ambuscades. Nearly six decades earlier President Thomas Jefferson had warned, “Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible on our horizon, we should never be without them.” But young, eager officers like Lieutenants Fleming and Grattan lived, and sometimes died, for such specks of war. For all their wrongheaded racial attitudes, the earlier generation of engineer-soldiers had attempted to administer a modicum of justice to the West’s Native peoples. The officers now deployed to the frontier not only included those the War Department could spare from more important engagements against the South, but also men imbued with a sense of martial superiority, and anxious to substantiate it. They ranged from naive to obtuse to hateful, with personalities unencumbered with charisma and minds unclouded by thought.
One frontier general, for instance, was notorious for habitually confusing the names and locations of supposedly hostile tribes, and in one official dispatch he reported Indian raids west of Fort Laramie as having been carried out by the “Winnibigoshish Sioux, ” somehow conjuring a tribe from the name of a lake in north-central Minnesota. Another blithely admitted that he knew nothing about Indians and did not care to learn anything, and it was not unusual for his artillery batteries to conduct target practice on passing, peaceful Indian bands, or for his jumpy junior officers to order attacks on their own uniformed Pawnee scouts. 1 Nearly to a man these generals and their staffs showed no ability to control their raw troops, and rivalries between state volunteers threatened to escalate from fistfights into gunfights. The eastern recruits also had a farcical proclivity to go native—as would be dramatized 140 years later in the movie Dances with Wolves.
1. One unintended consequence of the Civil War was less federal protection for the harried, dwindling Pawnee. Ironically, the tribe began to see its future as lying with the whites, and many of its warriors—as much for revenge on the Sioux and Cheyenne as out of necessity—jumped at the chance to join the Army’s new Pawnee scout corps.
Perhaps inevitably, when the doomed Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s company of Ohio cavalry reached Fort Laramie, its members were so influenced by the Indian fighting tales of their Colorado and California counterparts that many began to imagine themselves frontiersmen. The transformation was hastened by the arrival of Jim Bridger, lured from his Missouri farm to become the Frontier Army’s chief scout at $10 a day, more than most officers were paid. Some thought that the sixty-year-old Bridger was finally showing his age. When he was young his standard meal might include an entire side of buffalo rib. Now he was content with a jackrabbit and an eighteen inch trout roasted on spits over a campfire and a quart of coffee to wash them down. Nonetheless officers and enlisted men alike were in awe of the mountain man’s eccentric skills. He could find fresh water on the driest of alkaline flats, build and stoke a fire in a hellish winter whiteout, and safely guide a wagon team across a quicksand-laden river. He also showed the newcomers an old Indian trick: ridding their clothing of ever-present fleas and lice by spreading the garments over anthills.
On one occasion Bridger led a troop to the site of an attack on an emigrant wagon near the South Pass through the Rockies. A father and son had been killed and butchered, their bodies left splayed across the buffalo grass near a copse of box elders. Inexplicably, the attackers had not taken the younger man’s Navy Colt. Bridger dismounted and examined the mutilated corpses, which were pierced by arrows that he identified by their fletchings as Cheyenne and Arapaho. He pried the revolver, its chamber empty, from the son’s hand, and walked slowly in ever-expanding circles. Soon, with a flourish, he snapped off a branch of sagebrush. There was a speck of blood on it. Bridger beamed. “The boy hit one of the scamps, anyway, ” he said. The dime novelist Ned Buntline could not have written a better scene.
It did not take long for somewhat of a cult to grow around “Major” Bridger and a few other former mountain men who passed through Fort Laramie. One of Lieutenant Collins’s letters to his mother describes Bridger and the others in their “big white hats with beaver around it; a loose white coat of buck or antelope skins, trimmed fantastically with beaver fur; buffalo breeches, with strings hanging from ornaments along the sides; a Mexican saddle, moccasins, and spurs with rowels two inches long, which jingle as they ride. They have bridles with ten dollars’ worth of silver ornaments on; Indian ponies, a heavy rifle, a Navy revolver, a hatchet and a Bowie knife.” It was no wonder that many of the young enlisted men in Collins’s company soon discarded their blue woolens in favor of buckskins and Spanish spurs, and purchased hardy Indian ponies out of their own base pay of $14 a month.
But something other than eastern troopers playing dress-up would constitute one of the first troubling omens for the Lakota way of life. In 1863 a single wagon train veered north off the Oregon Trail and rolled up the center of the Powder River Country. Lakota and Cheyenne scouts posted on the pine-studded foothills of the Bighorns halted the line of prairie schooners and signed a demand to speak to its leader. A tall, lanky twenty-eight year-old and his Mexican interpreter rode out to meet them. The interpreter introduced the wagon master as “Captain” John Bozeman. Bozeman doffed his hat, revealing a thick blond mane, and told the Indians that he did not intend to settle their land but merely to pass through it en route to the new diggings beyond the mountains in western Montana. The Lakota emphatically refused. “You are going into our country where we hunt, ” an old chief said. “You people have taken the rest. Along the great road to the south, white men have driven away all the buffalo and antelope. We won’t let you do that here. If you go into our hunting country our people will wipe you out.”
Bozeman returned to the train and urged the emigrants to call the Indians’ bluff, but the travelers were wary. They argued for ten days over whether or not to proceed. In the end they voted to turn back and instead follow the uncontested, if longer and more difficult, route to Montana that snaked west of the mountains. As the Indians watched the train disappear over the southern horizon, they could not have known that Bozeman, a failed gold miner from Georgia, had just taken the first step in his plan to “mine the miners” as an expedition guide along the shortened route to the gold camps. Four months earlier he and a crusty frontiersman named John Jacobs had journeyed south and east from Virginia City along this route, nearly killing themselves in the process. Bozeman was a persistent man, and not easily dissuaded by the threat of losing his handsome blond hair. The insouciance of the Lakota in dealing with him that July day would return to haunt them. From the faint wheel ruts dug by that first train would grow a beaten path known as the Bozeman Trail.
When whites killed the buffalo, the animals were skinned where they fell, everything but their hides and tongues left to rot on the prairie. The hunters considered the meat worthless, but to the tribes this was not only a criminal physical waste, but a blasphemous affront to the animals’ spirits, to Mother Earth, to the Sacred Hoop of life itself. When white buffalo hunters made camp, for instance, it was a common practice to slaughter a mule some distance away to attract wolves and then spread strychnine over the carcass. The hunters never bothered to bury the poison before they moved on, which resulted in the agonizing deaths of already decimated Indian pony herds later grazing in the area. The hunters, unaware of their insult, wondered what they had done to provoke retaliation.
Meanwhile, for several years the southern branches of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota had found themselves virtually fenced in by the Oregon Trail to the north and the Santa Fe Trail to the south. This territory was further constrained by a new branch of the overland stage that connected the East to the booming gold camps around Denver—the line’s relay stations at intervals of every twenty to twenty-five miles establishing a thin ribbon of American civilization across land promised to the Indians. By the conclusion of the Civil War the tribes were forced to share even this tiny swath of territory with small regiments of buffalo hunters and with stagecoach stock competing for pasturage. Among these put-upon Oglala bands were the Bear people and the followers of Little Thunder and Spotted Tail.
By this time Spotted Tail was a changed man. He had always been an astute observer, but the sheer number of whites he had encountered during his two year “imprisonment” as a scout at Fort Leavenworth had transformed him from fire-eater to pacifist. Fort Leavenworth was a steamboat hub on the Lower Missouri, and during those months he watched thousands of well armed Bluecoats pass through. These were, he came to understand, just the tip of the American Army’s spear. At tribal councils and in private conversations during the seven years since his return, he had urged accommodation with the Americans, citing what his Minnesota cousin Little Crow had characterized as an enemy “as numerous as the leaves in the forest.”
Spotted Tail’s was not a lone voice. His words were echoed by Little Thunder, gun-shy since his own encounter with Harney at the Battle of Blue Water Creek. Little Thunder foresaw nothing but calamity for his people should they take up arms against the United States. And both Lakota Head Men noted that the Ute and the Shoshones had recently signed peace pacts with the Americans. Spotted Tail and Little Thunder conveniently omitted the fact that few homesteaders or ranchers cared to settle in the Ute or Shoshone mountain realms. But in any case their arguments for moderation were mostly ignored by younger braves who viewed the older men’s attitude as capitulation, if not treason. Some Dog Soldiers also had reason to suspect that Spotted Tail and other former Lakota prisoners had taken part in reprisals against Cheyenne raiders while serving as Army scouts. The most serious of these involved the execution of half a dozen Southern Cheyennes on Grand Island in southeastern Nebraska after they had thrown down their weapons in surrender.
Alone and adrift, Spotted Tail, Little Thunder, and a few other southern Lakota and Cheyenne Head Men finally acquiesced in a one sided “treaty” forced on them by the Army. It confined their bands to an even smaller reserve between the North Platte and South Platte, and did little to stem the escalating bloodshed that by 1864 had become more brazen. Indian raids on the stage line and the lumbering emigrant and supply wagon trains traversing the corridor to the Colorado gold camps had become a regular occurrence. Over three days in early August a string of ranches along the South Platte were attacked and thirty-eight settlers were killed, nine wounded, and five captured. At the same time, farther west, the Cheyenne fell on two emigrant trains, killing another thirteen and kidnapping a girl and a boy. The raids continued throughout the fall, and one freight outfit was ambushed and burned only a few miles from Denver, the territorial capital, which now contained over 100,000 miners and attendant entrepreneurs— more people than all the Plains tribes combined. The result was a virtual closing of the Leavenworth-Denver road; all mail bound for California was rerouted across the Isthmus of Panama.
The last straw was the rout of a detachment of cavalry dispatched from Camp Sanborn, northeast of Denver. Dog Soldiers ambushed the troop and, perhaps as a retort to General Sully, beheaded the young lieutenant leading them. Rumors circulated that his head was later used in ball games at the Cheyenne camp; and hearing these rumors, the general in charge of the territory ordered a Colorado volunteer brevet colonel, the fire-breathing Methodist minister John Milton Chivington, to run the hostiles to ground.
The Army had chosen well. Colonel Chivington despised Indians. Despite a bout with smallpox in his youth, the forty-four-year-old Chivington was physically robust: he stood six feet, five inches and carried his 260 pounds with the grace of an antelope. His broad, round face was shadowed by a scraggly black beard and punctuated by a set of tiny brooding eyes disconcertingly disproportionate to his looming bulk. In his official portrait his barrel chest seems about to burst from a blue tunic sporting two rows of brass buttons shined to a glint; he resembles a meaner Ulysses S. Grant. Chivington was born in Ohio, the son of a veteran Army officer, and he had settled in Colorado following a stint on the Ohio-Illinois preachers’ circuit. He had also spent time at tribal missionary posts in Kansas and Nebraska, where his low opinion of the Native inhabitants hardened. He exemplified a new breed of westerner who took a simple view of the Indian problem: in any dispute, the red man was wrong. Lost in the mists of time were the gentle persuasions of “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.
Chivington’s booming, baritone sermons landed on his listeners like cannon fire, and although he had founded Denver’s first Sunday School, the angles of his racist zeal were too sharp for even his tough frontier flock, who (as the church phrased it) “located” him into early retirement soon after he arrived. “Mr. Chivington was not as steady in his demeanor as becomes a man called of God to the work of the ministry, ” the religious historian James Haynes tactfully put it. But he was perfect for the job of murdering infidel Indians, and he went about it with brio. Following the incident at Camp Sanborn the settlers, emigrants, and miners along the South Platte were encouraged not to bury murdered whites and instead were asked to transport whatever remained of the mutilated corpses “stretched in the stiffness of death” to Denver. There they were put on public display, usually on the muddy wooden boardwalks that fronted saloons. One exhibition included the scalped wife and children of a slain ranch manager, Nathan Hungate. Predictably, alcohol fueled the spectators’ passions. The Rocky Mountain News called for “a few months of active extermination against the red devils, ” and the Denver Commonwealth for the perpetrators of “such unnatural, brutal butchery to be hunted to the farthest bounds of these broad plains and burned at the stake alive.” In response, the territorial governor ordered all able-bodied men to meet for military drills every morning. The governor also issued a proclamation instructing all citizens, “either individually, or in such parties as they may organize, to kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found, all such hostile Indians.” Colonel Chivington eagerly answered the call to vigilantism.
The Civil War had forced Congress to reorganize the western Army into three distinct services, and regulars found themselves on equal footing with state or territorial volunteers as well as local militiamen. Many of these latter “one hundred days men” who took up the governor’s challenge— including cardsharps, gunfighters, drunks, and pimps—were of the opinion that any and every Indian was fit for a shroud. Since no one at the War Department, which was vexed by more immediate problems, exerted a moderating influence on these avenging crusaders, militia commanders like Chivington operated with extraordinary freedom. The “Fighting Parson” instructed his Colorado volunteers that total war was the order of the day, every day, and his detachments galloped along the South Platte and Republican annihilating whatever small bands of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota they could catch. The unlucky Indians passing through these free-fire zones were usually the peaceable, the old, and the infirm. The more agile hostiles, mounted on fast ponies, were much too savvy to face Chivington’s guns head-on.
White reprisals lessened during the summer of 1862 when Colonel Chivington’s Colorado volunteers were ordered south to head off a Confederate army advancing up from Texas through New Mexico. (There, these volunteers would strike a decisive blow at the Battle of Glorieta by capturing and torching a rebel supply train after which Chivington ordered the execution, by bayonet, of 500 to 600 enemy horses and mules.) The Indians took advantage of the Colorado volunteers’ absence to form their largest war parties to date and to soak the Leavenworth-Denver turnpike with blood. By the autumn of 1864 the split between the tribal militants and the pacifist faction had widened to a chasm. When, at the belated urging of Washington, Colorado’s territorial governor offered sanctuary to any Indians “should they repair at once to the nearest military post, ” two Cheyenne bands struck out for Fort Lyon on the territory’s southeastern plain. One was led by the chief Black Kettle, the other by White Antelope, and they were joined by a few followers of the Arapaho Head Man Left Hand. When they reached the fort in mid-autumn they were ordered to surrender their weapons in exchange for daily food rations. By this time Colonel Chivington had returned to Denver.
Fort Lyon’s new commander, Major Edward Wynkoop, was a friend of Chivington’s, and far less disposed than his predecessor toward differentiating between antagonistic and friendly tribes. He looked for any excuse to declare Black Kettle and White Antelope hostiles, and when he found none he simply refused their people food; returned their old muskets, bows, arrows, and knives; and ordered them off the premises. They were, he said, free to hunt in a limited territory bordering a stream called Sand Creek that fed into the Smoky Hill River about thirty-five miles northwest of the fort. The Cheyenne sensed a trap, but they were reassured that as long as Black Kettle flew the white flag of truce above his lodge next to an old American flag the Head Man had once received as a gift, no harm would come to them.
Two days after the Indians departed, on November 28, Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon with two field cannons and 700 men of the 3rd Colorado Volunteer Cavalry. He took every precaution to keep his presence secret, throwing a ring of guards around the post to prevent anyone from leaving. That night he and the volunteers, swollen by an additional 125 Regular Army troops, rode for Sand Creek. At just past daybreak the next morning they climbed a ridge overlooking the Indian camp. Most of the warriors were absent, hunting to the east. Of the 500 to 600 Indians remaining, more than half were sleeping women and children. Chivington ordered the Indian pony herd driven off. Then his howitzers erupted and the whites charged.
Black Kettle frantically raised the two flags over his tepee as his people fell around him—including White Antelope, whose death song was silenced by a bullet to the throat. It was a slaughter. The immediate survivors staggered to the nearby frozen creek bed, where women and children huddled beneath the high banks, and the few braves who were present gouged the earth with knives and tomahawks in an attempt to dig shooting pits. They were soon surrounded, and for more than two hours Chivington’s volunteers picked them off like targets in a carnival game. Afterward the colonel and his officers stood by as the usual atrocities ensued. Infants and children were butchered like veal calves—“Nits breed lice” was a saying of Chivington’s—and the soldiers devoted extra attention to slicing off penises, scrotum sacks, and pudenda, which when stretched and cured would be fashioned into tobacco pouches and purses. “Barbarity of the most revolting character, ” an investigative committee of the U.S. House of Representatives termed it. “Such, it is to be hoped, has never before disgraced the acts of men claiming to be civilized.”
The soldiers departed at dusk—Chivington had lost ten men, with another thirtyeight wounded—and as night fell the Indian survivors crawled out from beneath the dead. All told, close to 200 were murdered along Sand Creek that day, three-quarters of them women and children. Those who escaped, Black Kettle among them, spent the next several days tramping across the frozen earth toward the warriors’ hunting camp on the Smoky Hill. When they reached the site, one of his band’s first acts was to banish Black Kettle and his family, who eventually moved to the country south of the Arkansas. Then the survivors plotted their revenge.
next
The Great Escape
1175
Hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne had poured from the ocher bluffs that overlooked the Army outpost known as Bridge Station, hard by the North Platte. They engulfed Collins’s command in a matter of moments. One trooper inexplicably dismounted in a dusty washout, determined to fight on foot. He was dead nearly before his boots hit the ground. Another’s horse was shot out from under him; wounded, he crawled on his hands and knees toward the 1,000-foot wooden span that led to the barricaded stockade on the far side of the river. Bluecoats on the battlements watched an Indian bury a tomahawk in his head. A third trooper fell with his mount, horse and rider both bristling with arrow shafts.
The last anyone saw of Lieutenant Collins, he was still in the saddle, blood streaming down his face, his hands squeezing the reins in a death grip as his horse reared and galloped into the center of the war party. Collins had been warned before leaving the fort that his was a suicide mission.
“I am not a coward, ” he had replied. “I know what it means to go out . . . but I’ve never disobeyed an order. I’m a soldier’s son.”
His body was never recovered.
It was July 26, 1865, and Collins was one of twenty- nine cavalrymen from Ohio and Kansas killed in a daylong series of running fights in east-central Wyoming that came to be known as the Battle of Red Buttes. How many Indians fell Red Cloud could not immediately determine, as half of his force had ridden off to attack a train of Army freight wagons making for the fort. What he did know was that he had, at long last, set out to avenge a lifetime’s worth of lies, injustices, and broken promises. In the process, he had ordered the first shots fired in what would come to be known as Red Cloud’s War. He had no idea that three long columns of Bluecoats would soon be mounted and moving toward him with orders to kill him and every male Indian over the age of twelve.
♦ ♦ ♦
The events at Red Buttes had
followed from the Dakota
Uprising of 1862. Yet years
before Collins’s death at
Bridge Station, Red Cloud
had anticipated the war and
its consequences, mentally
sifting the possible outcomes
like a placerman panning a
mountain stream. While the
Union and Confederate
armies savaged each other in
the east, the western side of
the Mississippi had grown
turbulent and vicious on both
sides of the Oglalas’ tranquil
Powder River territory. In
Colorado the Ute had taken to
raiding and burning the
overland stage stations
leading into Denver, and in
the northern Rockies the
Shoshones and Bannocks had
declared open hostilities on
the gold seekers drilling more
and deeper holes into their
mountains. Across the
Kansas-Nebraska frontier
marauding Cheyenne Dog
Soldiers were killing
emigrants and homesteaders
by the score and—in the
worst affront to white
sensibility—frequently
kidnapping women and
children. The Comanche and
Kiowa had virtually closed
the Santa Fe Trail, and there
were rumors of emissaries
from those great southern
confederacies traveling to the
Oklahoma Territory to
foment an Indian insurrection
all across the Plains.Meanwhile, Sitting Bull had soaked the Upper Missouri with tableland blood, for it was there that the most militant Minnesota Dakota renegades had allied with his feral Hunkpapas to terrorize traders and steamboat operators threshing the turbid waters of the frontier as well as the few dryland farmers and ranchers hardy enough to settle the country’s most windswept prairie. Any Indian considered too friendly toward the Americans was also fair game. The Hunkpapa chief Bears Ribs, who had urged moderation on Red Cloud and others at the large war council at Bear Butte in 1857, was slain by the Lakota after repeatedly ignoring Sitting Bull’s warnings to refuse the government’s handouts of rotten seed corn and sacks of moldy flour. Bears Ribs’s 250 ragged followers were left to wander through the desolate country alone; no other band was willing to take them in.
Even the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota Sioux in Mankato had failed to still white fears, and from 1863 onward news of the Minnesota “massacres” spread panic among settlements up and down the Missouri. President Lincoln and his War Department were inundated with alarmist telegrams from western politicians demanding troops to quell a Sioux rebellion that, ironically, was still limited to Sitting Bull’s distant corner of the Upper Missouri in present-day North Dakota. Nonetheless the government responded by constructing a series of new posts and fortified camps running from Omaha to Salt Lake City, including one above and four below Fort Laramie along the Oregon Trail. They not only were of little use—the hostiles were ghosts, everywhere and nowhere—but served to further inflame the western tribes. Through all of this, Red Cloud’s Powder River Country constituted perhaps the only peaceful oasis in the West. The great Oglala warrior chief recognized that this was temporary.
Some historians have viewed the indigenous tribes’ failure to take advantage of the American Civil War by acting collaboratively as the Indians’ most serious military error. That reasoning is based on a false premise. It is generally assumed that the great migration of the Regular Army at the onset of the War Between the States emptied the West of troops for the duration of the conflict. This was true at first. But Lincoln’s Treasury needed gold and silver from the mountain territories to pay for the war, and the president recognized that without military escorts many of the miners making for Montana, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho would never get there alive. The Union also required a fair amount of firepower to ensure that the ore made it out safely. Indian attacks were not the only potential peril; the Cherry Creek gold strikes along the front range of the Rockies in Colorado were precariously close to the Confederate state of Texas. Thus the Army presence west of the Missouri gradually increased until, by 1865, it actually exceeded prewar numbers.
It was a tentative buildup. Twice during the summer of 1862 combined Hunkpapa Dakota war parties ambushed cavalry detachments that were escorting wagon trains of miners to the gold camps of Virginia City in western Montana, already a boomtown rivaling Denver. During the second attack they harassed a company of Iowa volunteers nearly all the way back to Sioux City. But 1862 was also the year Lincoln and the Free-Soilers took advantage of the absence of the southern plantation owners from Congress to pass the Homestead Act. This meant that beginning January 1, 1863, any U.S. citizen—or intended citizen, including freed slaves and female heads of households—could take title to 160 acres of government land west of the Mississippi, provided he or she improved the property, lived on it for five consecutive years, and had never taken up arms against the United States. The filing cost was $18. The trails west, already swollen with fortune seekers, men (like Mark Twain) looking to avoid military service, and the over 300,000 deserters from the Union and Confederate Armies, were now filled with families lugging harrows, seed drills, and new steel plows that sliced open the prairie much more easily than wood or cast iron. All this combined with a succession of fabulous strikes from the Comstock Lode to the Boise Basin Rush to at least double the West’s population.
These new voters, loyal Unionists, wanted roads and telegraph lines, stage and mail service, and above all protection against the Indians. Lincoln was a shrewd politician with an eye toward a second term. There was no question as to his response, and northern volunteers who had enlisted to fight Johnny Reb instead found themselves marching on what the newspapers called “red pagans.” In August 1864 the dilettante General Alfred Sully—a Philadelphia watercolorist and oil painter of some renown—led a column of 2,500 men into North Dakota and defeated Sitting Bull’s Sioux on the Upper Knife in a vicious three-day battle. In the end the Hunk papas and Dakotas had no answer for Sully’s howitzers. The general personally ordered the bodies of three braves thought to have slain his aide-de-camp decapitated. Their severed heads were fixed on poles and left behind as a warning. It was a turning point, forcing the North Dakota hostiles to migrate southwest toward the Black Hills, inching the conflict closer to Red Cloud.
And as news of Sitting Bull’s rebellion spread to the Powder River Country, small bands of wild Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Blackfoot Sioux, and even some Oglalas began making raids of their own. The few miners foolhardy enough to make for Montana via Nebraska and Wyoming were scalped and dismembered, mail stages were destroyed, and Army supply wagons were looted and burned. A favorite Indian practice on discovery of a chest or barrel of bacon, a staple of frontier mess tents, was to lash a captured teamster to a wagon wheel, pile the rashers about him, and set the meat afire. One relief party of troops that arrived in the aftermath of such a scene was barely able to tell the seared human from the hog. Meanwhile there was little the scattered and limited frontier troopers could do but cock an ear from behind log and adobe fortifications and listen as Indians bayed like prairie wolves from distant buttes and mesas.
Among these Indians was Crazy Horse. By the start of the white man’s Civil War the twenty-year-old Oglala’s reputation had grown with every coup counted and every scalp taken during the Crow Wars. His raiding companions now included not only Bad Faces, but also Miniconjou braves from his mother’s side of the family, and the legend of his one-man charges—which the Sioux called “dare rides”—was such that the number of horses shot out from under him became a standard joke among his fellow fighters. He was the incarnation of war, always personally in the forefront of raids and attacks, separated from his party by twenty to forty yards, a solitary whirlwind leading a line of warriors spread behind him like the wings of a hawk. “We know Crazy Horse better than you Sioux, ” a Crow fighter once told a Lakota. “Whenever we have a fight he is closer to us than he is to you.”
Yet Crazy Horse was far from being what the Indians called a reckless “Black Heart, ” a suicidal warrior riding into battle alone with only a war club in his hands and a death song on his lips. His followers knew well what to expect when he led them on raids, as he always planned what military strategists today would call an exit strategy. His fellow fighters were also struck by his unusual habit of jumping from his pony during critical moments of a skirmish in order to gain a more stable position from which to nock his arrows. When he was not battling Crows there was no finer tracker or hunter among the Lakota, and he invariably felled the most cows during the semiannual buffalo hunts. But he also tended to ride off by himself and return with fat elk, deer, antelope, and waterfowl. As his Dream Spirit Guide instructed, he always distributed the best meats from his kills among families, clans, and villages of lesser means.
Crazy Horse had also discovered what the Indians called their personal “life path” when he was accepted into an Oglala soldier-society called the Strong Hearts. Inspired in part by tales of Sitting Bull’s defiance, the Strong Hearts were repelled when many of their own tribe relied on trade with the Americans for food and clothing; they themselves adopted an ideology of complete separatism from white ways. They refused to eat beefsteak, bacon, or sugar; to drink coffee or whiskey; or to wear any garment not made from traditional skins. They also warned off less-militant bands they discovered trekking to Indian agencies or forts to trade for these items, threatening to kill the offenders’ ponies if they continued.
Although Crazy Horse was generous to Lakota society’s least favored members, since his rejection by Black Buffalo Woman he had by all accounts become a taciturn adult whose heart was said to be not much larger than the talismanic pebble he wore behind his ear. But he was also a deeply spiritual young man, and among the spartan Strong Hearts he found a true home. “[He] was good for nothing but to be a warrior, ” observed the half-blood interpreter Billy Garnett, who through his Oglala mother befriended Crazy Horse in the 1860s. Now, with their mountain enemies defeated, the Strong Hearts turned their attention to the whites. Each spring during the Civil War years they rode south from their camps along the Yellowstone as soon as the grass was up, separating into groups of ten or fewer, spreading out among the trails leading west and concealing themselves among thick groves of willows and in shadowed hollows. There they awaited opportunities to rustle stock or kill emigrant stragglers. They did not yet have the strength to take on the U.S. Army, but they were confident that the time would soon arrive.
Life may have seemed cheap to the settlers and emigrants on the High Plains, with hundreds of thousands lying dead on eastern battlefields, so the Army justifiably considered the Indian raids pinpricks. The government’s strongest reaction was to ban the sale of guns and ammunition to any of the Powder River bands. Moreover, Crazy Horse and his Strong Hearts aside, through the first half of the 1860s Red Cloud and his people showed no inclination to disrupt the status quo. Relatively undisturbed in their new territory on the Upper Powder, free of the white man’s debilitating whiskey and diseases, the Oglalas and their Brule cousins reveled in the return to a more pure and natural lifestyle, the open spaces of the high prairie corresponding to some mystical place within the Sacred Hoop. They passed the seasons hunting in the majestic, game-laden territory and making occasional raids on the increasingly beleaguered Crows and Shoshones—by now pushed almost beyond the Bighorns—before settling into cozy winter camps where the larders were piled high with venison and buffalo meat.
Even when, in 1861, a regiment of infantry and five companies of cavalry were deployed from California to Fort Laramie to protect the overland mail route along the Oregon Trail, the Bad Faces maintained a tentative peace with the soldiers. In fact, during that same year the eighty-seven-year-old Old Smoke and his family bade farewell to the band and “retired” to the outskirts of the fort to settle among the Laramie Loafers. There is even some indication that before his peaceful death in 1864 the venerable Oglala Head Man was persuaded by the local Indian agent to farm a small plot of land. More likely, as the Sioux historian George Hyde speculates, Old Smoke “gave permission for the women to try their hand at it.” This Oglala-Brule idyll was of course destined to end violently. At the very moment that Red Cloud and his people were acclimatizing themselves to the ancient Sioux traditions, 1,400 miles away a former assistant bank teller from Delaware was taking his first steps toward their epic showdown.
16
AN ARMY
IN
SHAMBLES
William Judd Fetterman had
long harbored a desire for
military service. Born in 1835
into a Cheshire, Connecticut,
military family, Fetterman’s
mother died from
complications during
childbirth. He was orphaned
at nine years old on the death
of his father, Lieutenant
George Fetterman. He went
to live with his uncle William
Bethel Judd, another Regular
Army officer who served
with distinction during the
Mexican War. Bethel, like
George Fetterman, had
graduated from West Point,
and the young Fetterman
hoped to follow in their
footsteps. But when he
applied in 1853 he was
rejected by the Military
Academy’s admissions board,
for unknown reasons.
Thereafter the eighteen-year-
old grudgingly took up a
career in banking, working in
Rochester, New York, before
moving to Delaware. In 1861
a second opportunity for
military service arose with
the expansion of the Army of
the Republic at the outbreak
of the Civil War. Fetterman,
now twenty-six, jumped at
the chance.Fetterman secured a commission as a first lieutenant less than two months after rebel artillery shells tore into Fort Sumter, and in June 1861 he reported for duty at Camp Thomas in Columbus, Ohio. The depot had been established as the regimental headquarters of the 18th Ohio Infantry under the command of another civilian who had volunteered for service, the Yale-educated abolitionist attorney Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington. Carrington was appointed to the position by his good friend Salmon P. Chase, a former governor of Ohio currently serving as Lincoln’s treasury secretary. Fetterman arrived in Columbus just five days after Carrington, and together the two officers spent the next five months organizing and training the companies of raw volunteers. It was soon apparent that the physically frail Carrington’s greatest assets were political and clerical. Fetterman, on the other hand, seemed a born field commander.
Theirs was the classic contrast: Cicero and Demosthenes, with the former moving men’s minds while the latter made them get up and march. Yet this did not spark a rivalry; Carrington and Fetterman seemed to sense that they complemented each other’s attributes, and their combined skills were necessary to turn the regiment into a trim, well disciplined unit. They also became personal friends, with the thirty-seven-year-old Carrington’s wife, Margaret, remarking in her journal on the younger officer’s “refinement, gentlemanly manners, and adaption to social life” at the camp.
When Fetterman was promoted to captain, given command of the 18th’s 100 man Company A, and ordered to the front in November 1861, Carrington remained at his desk in Ohio. In 1862, Fetterman led the company during its suicidal bayonet charge at Corinth, and soon thereafter he fought in the Battle of Stones River, a medieval slugfest that produced the highest percentage of casualties in the entire Civil War. It was noted in his record that he stood in the front lines alongside his enlisted men for the duration of this thirty-six-hour engagement. And though the regiment suffered over 50 percent casualties during the fight, Fetterman emerged without a wound.
Meanwhile, Carrington’s knack for recruiting kept him in charge of training depots in Ohio and, later, Indiana, while Fetterman, serving under General Sherman throughout the Georgia campaign of 1864, was promoted to battalion commander. The 18th performed admirably during engagements at Kennesaw Mountain, at Peach Tree Creek, and at Jonesboro— despite suffering more casualties than any other regiment in the Regular Army —and Fetterman’s official record began to include adjectives such as “courageous, ” “daring, ” and “relentless.” During the siege of Atlanta he was cited for “great gallantry and spirit, ” and a fellow officer reported being surrounded by Confederate troops and escaping with his life only when “Captain Fetterman’s command marched to my assistance with great promptness.” For his contributions to the Atlanta campaign, Fetterman, along with hundreds of Union officers, received another brevet appointment, to lieutenant colonel.
By the war’s end in 1865 Fetterman would decide to make the military his career, and it was with a supreme confidence that he prepared to set off for the frontier. But this was still more than a year away, and in the interim the Army was forced to overcome various blundering missteps, attributable to postwar politics, that continually impeded its Indian campaigns on the High Plains.
🐎 🐎 🐎
While the war continued and
Lieutenant Colonel Fetterman
was making a name for
himself in the field, Lincoln
and his War Department
finally began to turn serious
attention to the West. After
General Sully’s victory over
Sitting Bull, the president
dispatched additional
columns of state volunteers
from across the Midwest to
man key crossings along the
Missouri, Platte, and
Arkansas Rivers. The
Minnesota Uprising may have
been the root of the Indian
wars that would engulf the
High Plains for most of the
next decade, but those wars
were also impelled by a series
of almost unbelievably
dunderheaded appointments
of general officers on the
other side of the Mississippi.
Perhaps not until Vietnam
100 years hence would
political and military leaders
so totally misread a situation
on the ground. Zachary
Taylor’s earlier vision of an
American soldier
implementing “the ax, pick,
saw, and trowel” to tame the
West became a blurred
memory as cannons, muskets,
and swords were hauled from
eastern battlefields, crated,
and shipped west by the ton. Historians generally attribute this state of affairs to (or blame it on) the exigencies of the Confederate rebellion. But while it was true that the most accomplished officers were needed in the East, the Army of the Republic had undergone a subtle reconfiguration well prior to Fort Sumter. The Founding Fathers, citing ancient Rome and contemporary Europe, were convinced that a ginned up “defence agst. foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home, ” as James Madison wrote. Madison added that standing armies “kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” The Founders instead envisioned, and implemented, a “multipurpose army designed for a wide variety of functions beyond combat.” Among the purposes were felling trees, building schools, delivering mail, offering medical care, and erecting hospitals and lighthouses. It was an army of surveyors and engineers—dredging canals, constructing bridges, and, by 1830, laying over 1,900 miles of road. The West Point curriculum of the early nineteenth century leaned heavily toward such skills, and the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers “became a major focus of American science . . . collecting flora, fauna, and geological specimens, and publishing their findings in prestigious journals.”
However, by the late 1840s, with Europe set ablaze by revolutions, with the victory over Mexico still burnishing reputations, and with Manifest Destiny enthralling the officer class, the curriculum at the Military Academy underwent an overhaul. Imperialism and colonialism now steered the governmental policies of America’s rivals, and at West Point pure science took a backseat to the study of night marches and artillery duels, of sieges and ambuscades. Nearly six decades earlier President Thomas Jefferson had warned, “Were armies to be raised whenever a speck of war is visible on our horizon, we should never be without them.” But young, eager officers like Lieutenants Fleming and Grattan lived, and sometimes died, for such specks of war. For all their wrongheaded racial attitudes, the earlier generation of engineer-soldiers had attempted to administer a modicum of justice to the West’s Native peoples. The officers now deployed to the frontier not only included those the War Department could spare from more important engagements against the South, but also men imbued with a sense of martial superiority, and anxious to substantiate it. They ranged from naive to obtuse to hateful, with personalities unencumbered with charisma and minds unclouded by thought.
One frontier general, for instance, was notorious for habitually confusing the names and locations of supposedly hostile tribes, and in one official dispatch he reported Indian raids west of Fort Laramie as having been carried out by the “Winnibigoshish Sioux, ” somehow conjuring a tribe from the name of a lake in north-central Minnesota. Another blithely admitted that he knew nothing about Indians and did not care to learn anything, and it was not unusual for his artillery batteries to conduct target practice on passing, peaceful Indian bands, or for his jumpy junior officers to order attacks on their own uniformed Pawnee scouts. 1 Nearly to a man these generals and their staffs showed no ability to control their raw troops, and rivalries between state volunteers threatened to escalate from fistfights into gunfights. The eastern recruits also had a farcical proclivity to go native—as would be dramatized 140 years later in the movie Dances with Wolves.
1. One unintended consequence of the Civil War was less federal protection for the harried, dwindling Pawnee. Ironically, the tribe began to see its future as lying with the whites, and many of its warriors—as much for revenge on the Sioux and Cheyenne as out of necessity—jumped at the chance to join the Army’s new Pawnee scout corps.
Perhaps inevitably, when the doomed Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s company of Ohio cavalry reached Fort Laramie, its members were so influenced by the Indian fighting tales of their Colorado and California counterparts that many began to imagine themselves frontiersmen. The transformation was hastened by the arrival of Jim Bridger, lured from his Missouri farm to become the Frontier Army’s chief scout at $10 a day, more than most officers were paid. Some thought that the sixty-year-old Bridger was finally showing his age. When he was young his standard meal might include an entire side of buffalo rib. Now he was content with a jackrabbit and an eighteen inch trout roasted on spits over a campfire and a quart of coffee to wash them down. Nonetheless officers and enlisted men alike were in awe of the mountain man’s eccentric skills. He could find fresh water on the driest of alkaline flats, build and stoke a fire in a hellish winter whiteout, and safely guide a wagon team across a quicksand-laden river. He also showed the newcomers an old Indian trick: ridding their clothing of ever-present fleas and lice by spreading the garments over anthills.
On one occasion Bridger led a troop to the site of an attack on an emigrant wagon near the South Pass through the Rockies. A father and son had been killed and butchered, their bodies left splayed across the buffalo grass near a copse of box elders. Inexplicably, the attackers had not taken the younger man’s Navy Colt. Bridger dismounted and examined the mutilated corpses, which were pierced by arrows that he identified by their fletchings as Cheyenne and Arapaho. He pried the revolver, its chamber empty, from the son’s hand, and walked slowly in ever-expanding circles. Soon, with a flourish, he snapped off a branch of sagebrush. There was a speck of blood on it. Bridger beamed. “The boy hit one of the scamps, anyway, ” he said. The dime novelist Ned Buntline could not have written a better scene.
It did not take long for somewhat of a cult to grow around “Major” Bridger and a few other former mountain men who passed through Fort Laramie. One of Lieutenant Collins’s letters to his mother describes Bridger and the others in their “big white hats with beaver around it; a loose white coat of buck or antelope skins, trimmed fantastically with beaver fur; buffalo breeches, with strings hanging from ornaments along the sides; a Mexican saddle, moccasins, and spurs with rowels two inches long, which jingle as they ride. They have bridles with ten dollars’ worth of silver ornaments on; Indian ponies, a heavy rifle, a Navy revolver, a hatchet and a Bowie knife.” It was no wonder that many of the young enlisted men in Collins’s company soon discarded their blue woolens in favor of buckskins and Spanish spurs, and purchased hardy Indian ponies out of their own base pay of $14 a month.
But something other than eastern troopers playing dress-up would constitute one of the first troubling omens for the Lakota way of life. In 1863 a single wagon train veered north off the Oregon Trail and rolled up the center of the Powder River Country. Lakota and Cheyenne scouts posted on the pine-studded foothills of the Bighorns halted the line of prairie schooners and signed a demand to speak to its leader. A tall, lanky twenty-eight year-old and his Mexican interpreter rode out to meet them. The interpreter introduced the wagon master as “Captain” John Bozeman. Bozeman doffed his hat, revealing a thick blond mane, and told the Indians that he did not intend to settle their land but merely to pass through it en route to the new diggings beyond the mountains in western Montana. The Lakota emphatically refused. “You are going into our country where we hunt, ” an old chief said. “You people have taken the rest. Along the great road to the south, white men have driven away all the buffalo and antelope. We won’t let you do that here. If you go into our hunting country our people will wipe you out.”
Bozeman returned to the train and urged the emigrants to call the Indians’ bluff, but the travelers were wary. They argued for ten days over whether or not to proceed. In the end they voted to turn back and instead follow the uncontested, if longer and more difficult, route to Montana that snaked west of the mountains. As the Indians watched the train disappear over the southern horizon, they could not have known that Bozeman, a failed gold miner from Georgia, had just taken the first step in his plan to “mine the miners” as an expedition guide along the shortened route to the gold camps. Four months earlier he and a crusty frontiersman named John Jacobs had journeyed south and east from Virginia City along this route, nearly killing themselves in the process. Bozeman was a persistent man, and not easily dissuaded by the threat of losing his handsome blond hair. The insouciance of the Lakota in dealing with him that July day would return to haunt them. From the faint wheel ruts dug by that first train would grow a beaten path known as the Bozeman Trail.
17
BLOOD ON
THE ICE
Red Cloud’s Oglalas may
have been oblivious of the
knife edge on which they
walked, but south of the
Oregon Trail the Indian
situation was worsening. By
the mid-1860s the traditional
buffalo ranges along the
Republican River were
already dwindling, not least
because of the first white
hunting parties converging on
the droves from new
settlements in Missouri,
Kansas, and eastern
Nebraska. A solitary hunter
equipped with an accurate
large-bore Sharps rifle could fell up to 100 buffalo in a
single stand, and this
technology marked the
beginning of a Plains-wide
slaughter that within four
decades would reduce an
estimated 30 million animals
to less than 1,000. It was the
greatest mass destruction of
warm-blooded animals in
human history, far worse than
what the world’s whaling
fleets had already
accomplished, and as Sitting
Bull was to lament years
later,
“A cold wind blew
across the prairie when the
last buffalo fell. A death wind
for my people.”When whites killed the buffalo, the animals were skinned where they fell, everything but their hides and tongues left to rot on the prairie. The hunters considered the meat worthless, but to the tribes this was not only a criminal physical waste, but a blasphemous affront to the animals’ spirits, to Mother Earth, to the Sacred Hoop of life itself. When white buffalo hunters made camp, for instance, it was a common practice to slaughter a mule some distance away to attract wolves and then spread strychnine over the carcass. The hunters never bothered to bury the poison before they moved on, which resulted in the agonizing deaths of already decimated Indian pony herds later grazing in the area. The hunters, unaware of their insult, wondered what they had done to provoke retaliation.
Meanwhile, for several years the southern branches of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota had found themselves virtually fenced in by the Oregon Trail to the north and the Santa Fe Trail to the south. This territory was further constrained by a new branch of the overland stage that connected the East to the booming gold camps around Denver—the line’s relay stations at intervals of every twenty to twenty-five miles establishing a thin ribbon of American civilization across land promised to the Indians. By the conclusion of the Civil War the tribes were forced to share even this tiny swath of territory with small regiments of buffalo hunters and with stagecoach stock competing for pasturage. Among these put-upon Oglala bands were the Bear people and the followers of Little Thunder and Spotted Tail.
By this time Spotted Tail was a changed man. He had always been an astute observer, but the sheer number of whites he had encountered during his two year “imprisonment” as a scout at Fort Leavenworth had transformed him from fire-eater to pacifist. Fort Leavenworth was a steamboat hub on the Lower Missouri, and during those months he watched thousands of well armed Bluecoats pass through. These were, he came to understand, just the tip of the American Army’s spear. At tribal councils and in private conversations during the seven years since his return, he had urged accommodation with the Americans, citing what his Minnesota cousin Little Crow had characterized as an enemy “as numerous as the leaves in the forest.”
Spotted Tail’s was not a lone voice. His words were echoed by Little Thunder, gun-shy since his own encounter with Harney at the Battle of Blue Water Creek. Little Thunder foresaw nothing but calamity for his people should they take up arms against the United States. And both Lakota Head Men noted that the Ute and the Shoshones had recently signed peace pacts with the Americans. Spotted Tail and Little Thunder conveniently omitted the fact that few homesteaders or ranchers cared to settle in the Ute or Shoshone mountain realms. But in any case their arguments for moderation were mostly ignored by younger braves who viewed the older men’s attitude as capitulation, if not treason. Some Dog Soldiers also had reason to suspect that Spotted Tail and other former Lakota prisoners had taken part in reprisals against Cheyenne raiders while serving as Army scouts. The most serious of these involved the execution of half a dozen Southern Cheyennes on Grand Island in southeastern Nebraska after they had thrown down their weapons in surrender.
Alone and adrift, Spotted Tail, Little Thunder, and a few other southern Lakota and Cheyenne Head Men finally acquiesced in a one sided “treaty” forced on them by the Army. It confined their bands to an even smaller reserve between the North Platte and South Platte, and did little to stem the escalating bloodshed that by 1864 had become more brazen. Indian raids on the stage line and the lumbering emigrant and supply wagon trains traversing the corridor to the Colorado gold camps had become a regular occurrence. Over three days in early August a string of ranches along the South Platte were attacked and thirty-eight settlers were killed, nine wounded, and five captured. At the same time, farther west, the Cheyenne fell on two emigrant trains, killing another thirteen and kidnapping a girl and a boy. The raids continued throughout the fall, and one freight outfit was ambushed and burned only a few miles from Denver, the territorial capital, which now contained over 100,000 miners and attendant entrepreneurs— more people than all the Plains tribes combined. The result was a virtual closing of the Leavenworth-Denver road; all mail bound for California was rerouted across the Isthmus of Panama.
The last straw was the rout of a detachment of cavalry dispatched from Camp Sanborn, northeast of Denver. Dog Soldiers ambushed the troop and, perhaps as a retort to General Sully, beheaded the young lieutenant leading them. Rumors circulated that his head was later used in ball games at the Cheyenne camp; and hearing these rumors, the general in charge of the territory ordered a Colorado volunteer brevet colonel, the fire-breathing Methodist minister John Milton Chivington, to run the hostiles to ground.
The Army had chosen well. Colonel Chivington despised Indians. Despite a bout with smallpox in his youth, the forty-four-year-old Chivington was physically robust: he stood six feet, five inches and carried his 260 pounds with the grace of an antelope. His broad, round face was shadowed by a scraggly black beard and punctuated by a set of tiny brooding eyes disconcertingly disproportionate to his looming bulk. In his official portrait his barrel chest seems about to burst from a blue tunic sporting two rows of brass buttons shined to a glint; he resembles a meaner Ulysses S. Grant. Chivington was born in Ohio, the son of a veteran Army officer, and he had settled in Colorado following a stint on the Ohio-Illinois preachers’ circuit. He had also spent time at tribal missionary posts in Kansas and Nebraska, where his low opinion of the Native inhabitants hardened. He exemplified a new breed of westerner who took a simple view of the Indian problem: in any dispute, the red man was wrong. Lost in the mists of time were the gentle persuasions of “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.
Chivington’s booming, baritone sermons landed on his listeners like cannon fire, and although he had founded Denver’s first Sunday School, the angles of his racist zeal were too sharp for even his tough frontier flock, who (as the church phrased it) “located” him into early retirement soon after he arrived. “Mr. Chivington was not as steady in his demeanor as becomes a man called of God to the work of the ministry, ” the religious historian James Haynes tactfully put it. But he was perfect for the job of murdering infidel Indians, and he went about it with brio. Following the incident at Camp Sanborn the settlers, emigrants, and miners along the South Platte were encouraged not to bury murdered whites and instead were asked to transport whatever remained of the mutilated corpses “stretched in the stiffness of death” to Denver. There they were put on public display, usually on the muddy wooden boardwalks that fronted saloons. One exhibition included the scalped wife and children of a slain ranch manager, Nathan Hungate. Predictably, alcohol fueled the spectators’ passions. The Rocky Mountain News called for “a few months of active extermination against the red devils, ” and the Denver Commonwealth for the perpetrators of “such unnatural, brutal butchery to be hunted to the farthest bounds of these broad plains and burned at the stake alive.” In response, the territorial governor ordered all able-bodied men to meet for military drills every morning. The governor also issued a proclamation instructing all citizens, “either individually, or in such parties as they may organize, to kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found, all such hostile Indians.” Colonel Chivington eagerly answered the call to vigilantism.
The Civil War had forced Congress to reorganize the western Army into three distinct services, and regulars found themselves on equal footing with state or territorial volunteers as well as local militiamen. Many of these latter “one hundred days men” who took up the governor’s challenge— including cardsharps, gunfighters, drunks, and pimps—were of the opinion that any and every Indian was fit for a shroud. Since no one at the War Department, which was vexed by more immediate problems, exerted a moderating influence on these avenging crusaders, militia commanders like Chivington operated with extraordinary freedom. The “Fighting Parson” instructed his Colorado volunteers that total war was the order of the day, every day, and his detachments galloped along the South Platte and Republican annihilating whatever small bands of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota they could catch. The unlucky Indians passing through these free-fire zones were usually the peaceable, the old, and the infirm. The more agile hostiles, mounted on fast ponies, were much too savvy to face Chivington’s guns head-on.
White reprisals lessened during the summer of 1862 when Colonel Chivington’s Colorado volunteers were ordered south to head off a Confederate army advancing up from Texas through New Mexico. (There, these volunteers would strike a decisive blow at the Battle of Glorieta by capturing and torching a rebel supply train after which Chivington ordered the execution, by bayonet, of 500 to 600 enemy horses and mules.) The Indians took advantage of the Colorado volunteers’ absence to form their largest war parties to date and to soak the Leavenworth-Denver turnpike with blood. By the autumn of 1864 the split between the tribal militants and the pacifist faction had widened to a chasm. When, at the belated urging of Washington, Colorado’s territorial governor offered sanctuary to any Indians “should they repair at once to the nearest military post, ” two Cheyenne bands struck out for Fort Lyon on the territory’s southeastern plain. One was led by the chief Black Kettle, the other by White Antelope, and they were joined by a few followers of the Arapaho Head Man Left Hand. When they reached the fort in mid-autumn they were ordered to surrender their weapons in exchange for daily food rations. By this time Colonel Chivington had returned to Denver.
Fort Lyon’s new commander, Major Edward Wynkoop, was a friend of Chivington’s, and far less disposed than his predecessor toward differentiating between antagonistic and friendly tribes. He looked for any excuse to declare Black Kettle and White Antelope hostiles, and when he found none he simply refused their people food; returned their old muskets, bows, arrows, and knives; and ordered them off the premises. They were, he said, free to hunt in a limited territory bordering a stream called Sand Creek that fed into the Smoky Hill River about thirty-five miles northwest of the fort. The Cheyenne sensed a trap, but they were reassured that as long as Black Kettle flew the white flag of truce above his lodge next to an old American flag the Head Man had once received as a gift, no harm would come to them.
Two days after the Indians departed, on November 28, Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon with two field cannons and 700 men of the 3rd Colorado Volunteer Cavalry. He took every precaution to keep his presence secret, throwing a ring of guards around the post to prevent anyone from leaving. That night he and the volunteers, swollen by an additional 125 Regular Army troops, rode for Sand Creek. At just past daybreak the next morning they climbed a ridge overlooking the Indian camp. Most of the warriors were absent, hunting to the east. Of the 500 to 600 Indians remaining, more than half were sleeping women and children. Chivington ordered the Indian pony herd driven off. Then his howitzers erupted and the whites charged.
Black Kettle frantically raised the two flags over his tepee as his people fell around him—including White Antelope, whose death song was silenced by a bullet to the throat. It was a slaughter. The immediate survivors staggered to the nearby frozen creek bed, where women and children huddled beneath the high banks, and the few braves who were present gouged the earth with knives and tomahawks in an attempt to dig shooting pits. They were soon surrounded, and for more than two hours Chivington’s volunteers picked them off like targets in a carnival game. Afterward the colonel and his officers stood by as the usual atrocities ensued. Infants and children were butchered like veal calves—“Nits breed lice” was a saying of Chivington’s—and the soldiers devoted extra attention to slicing off penises, scrotum sacks, and pudenda, which when stretched and cured would be fashioned into tobacco pouches and purses. “Barbarity of the most revolting character, ” an investigative committee of the U.S. House of Representatives termed it. “Such, it is to be hoped, has never before disgraced the acts of men claiming to be civilized.”
The soldiers departed at dusk—Chivington had lost ten men, with another thirtyeight wounded—and as night fell the Indian survivors crawled out from beneath the dead. All told, close to 200 were murdered along Sand Creek that day, three-quarters of them women and children. Those who escaped, Black Kettle among them, spent the next several days tramping across the frozen earth toward the warriors’ hunting camp on the Smoky Hill. When they reached the site, one of his band’s first acts was to banish Black Kettle and his family, who eventually moved to the country south of the Arkansas. Then the survivors plotted their revenge.
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The Great Escape
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