94. The charges centered on the sale of the lucrative Fort Sill tradership to a New York entrepreneur, who in turn permitted the regular trader to retain the monopoly in return for regular kickbacks which were shared with the Secretary or his wife. See Robert C. Prickett, “The Malfeasance of William Worth Belknap,” North Dakota History, 17 (1950), 5–52, 97–134. For the impeachment proceedings, see Cong. Rec., 44th Cong., 1st sess., vol. 4, pt. 7 (March 2–Aug. 1, 1876).
95. Sherman to Sheridan, April 1, 1876, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC.
96. To Sherman, Fort Shaw, Mont., March 15, 1877, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 125.
97. Lt. Col. W. P. Carlin to Rep. Levi Maish et al, Standing Rock Agency, Dak., Jan. 6, 1878, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 146.
98. “Instead of generals selecting their adjutant generals,” complained General Hancock in 1869, “the adjutant generals select their generals.” House Reports, 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 33, p. 188. In furtherance of his fiscal accountability, the Secretary of War retained the right to select and assign disbursing officers. Sherman to Sheridan, Oct. 20, 1878, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC.
99. With his usual exaggeration, General Pope protested that the staff controlled supplies and transportation, “but they are absolutely without any responsibility for results at all. Any disaster, dishonor, or suffering occasioned by the failure to furnish any article needed for the soldier is charged, and naturally charged, upon the military commander, though he has no more power over such matters than the coroner in Cincinnati.” Pope to Judge M. F. Force, Fort Leavenworth, Kan., March 13, 1876, quoted in Garfield, p. 445. Although Pope was not without his sources of power over the staff, his operations in the Red River War of 1874–75 had been badly compromised by supply problems on which he was not consulted.
100. Quoted in Army and Navy Journal, 75 (Nov. 3, 1877), 199. He was referring not only to regular but brevet generals, who were another source of resentment. At the close of the Civil War the staff had insured itself a generous bestowal of brevets for “faithful and meritorious service.” In 1869, in the Quartermaster Department alone, of the 88 officers 10 boasted brevets of major general and 22 of brigadier general. House Reports, 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 33, pp. 1–2. In 1876 the staff claimed 7 of the 13 brigadiers, 31 of the 75 colonels, 37 of the 80 lieutenant colonels, and 172 of the 242 majors; yet the staff conceded the line all but 100 of the 590 first lieutenants and all but 10 of the 445 second lieutenants. House Reports, 44th Cong., 1st sess., No. 354, p. 88.
101. To Rep. John Coburn, April 2, 1872, House Reports, 42d Cong., 3d sess., No. 74, p. 134. See also comments of Col. J. J. Reynolds in ibid., p. 209.
102. Sherman to Pope, April 24, 1876, Sherman Papers, vol. 90, pp. 417–19, LC. Officers were detailed to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Wig-wag refers to the Signal Corps.
103. See especially House Reports, 40th Cong., 3d sess., No. 33; House Reports, 42d Cong., 3d sess., No. 74; House Reports, 44th Cong., 1st sess., No. 354; and House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56.
104. Sherman to Sheridan, Dec. 30, 1878, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC. In a letter to Sheridan of Jan. 10, 1879 (ibid.), Sherman observed that “the young Staff officers have been busy as bees—running around of nights—saying that I and the Generals want to usurp the powers of the President, Secretary of War—Congress and of the Government itself.”
105. Schofield to Rep. Levi Maish et al, West Point, Jan. 3, 1878, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, pp. 25–26.
106. Schofield to Sherman, Dec. 24, 1878, Sherman Papers, vol. 49, LC.
107. Schofield had proposed a chief of staff under the commanding general in 1876. House Reports, 44th Cong., 1st sess., No. 354, p. 28. Schofield’s views are set forth in his autobiography, chaps. 22 and 26. See also Weigley, Towards an American Army, chap. 10. Huntington, pp. 163, 190, discusses the origins of the principle of civilian control.
108. Sherman to Sheridan, Dec. 20, 1869, and Sept. 26, 1872, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC.
109. To Terry, Dec. 5, 1880, Sherman Papers, vol. 91, pp. 541–44, LC.
110. General George Crook: His Autobiography, ed. Martin F. Schmitt (Norman, Okla., 1946), p. 134 n.
111. He dabbled in music, painting, architecture, and landscape architecture. A perceptive and candid obituary appeared in the Army and Navy Journal, 22 (May 9, 1885), 827.
The Problem of Doctrine
ARADOXICALLY, the postwar decades brought to the army, be sides stagnation, an awakening professionalism. The example of Prussia, dramatized by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, provided one stimulus, the restless, innovative Sherman another. Strengthening the infant Artillery School and the Engineering School of Application during the 1870s, founding the School of Application for Infantry and Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth in 1881, Sherman laid the foundations of a system of advanced military education. He created opportunities for officers to observe foreign armies and report on their practices. Under his patronage, Lt. Col. Emory Upton traveled around the world and set forth his findings in The Armies of Asia and Europe. Although not published until 1904, the contents of Upton’s enormously influential The Military Policy of the United States reached a wide audience in other forms almost immediately after his tragic suicide in 1884. From its founding in 1863, the Army and Navy Journal provided a forum for exchange of opinion. Professional journals began to appear in the 1880s, organs of newly created associations for promoting the study and discussion of military theory, such as the Military Service Institution of the United States and the U.S. Cavalry Association. By the 1890s, when the Indian Wars finally dragged to a close, professionalism flourished in the army.1
The gathering currents of military professionalism, centering on conventional wars of the future, left almost wholly untouched the unconventional wars of the present. Neither West Point nor the postgraduate schools addressed themselves more than incidentally to the special conditions and requirements of Indian warfare. Indian campaigns found their way into professional literature as interesting history rather than as case studies from which lessons of immediate relevance might be drawn. Sherman’s belief that the British experience in India might suggest techniques applicable to the American West partly motivated Upton’s world travels. But The Armies of Asia and Europe, reflecting the author’s enchantment with the Prussian war machine, contained no prescriptions for unconventional warfare. Military thought continued to focus on the next foreign war, as General Hancock made clear when he advised a congressional committee in 1876 that the Indian service of the Army was “entitled to no weight” in determining the proper strength, composition, and organization of the army.2 Yet for a full century, with brief interludes of foreign and civil war, Indian service was the primary mission of the army.
Three special conditions set this mission apart from more orthodox military assignments. First, it pitted the army against an enemy who usually could not be clearly identified and differentiated from kinsmen not disposed at the moment to be enemies. Indians could change with bewildering rapidity from friend to foe to neutral, and rarely could one be confidently distinguished from another.
Second, Indian service placed the army in opposition to a people that aroused conflicting emotions. Soldiers who had witnessed the plunder, rape, torture, and mutilation of Indian hostilities had no difficulty viewing the adversary as a savage beast. Yet between conflicts troops and Indians mingled with enough familiarity to reveal dimensions of Indian character that a white man could find fascinating and even admirable, and to disclose something of the injustice, deceit, fraud, and cruelty the Indian endured from government officials and frontier citizens. Ambivalence, therefore, marked military attitudes toward the Indians—fear, distrust, loathing, contempt, and condescension, on the one hand; curiosity, admiration, sympathy, and even friendship, on the other.
And third, the Indian mission gave the army
a foe unconventional both in the techniques and aims of warfare. Cunning, stealth, horsemanship, agility and endurance, skill with weapons, mobility, and exploitation of the natural habitat for military advantage marked his techniques. He fought on his own terms and, except when cornered or when his family was endangered, declined to fight at all unless he enjoyed overwhelming odds. Rituals and taboos decreed by religion ordered his conduct of war. A distinctive value system made plunder and combat honors as much the motivation and goal of war as defense of home and family.
These special conditions of the Indian mission made the U.S. Army not so much a little army as a big police force. Scattered in tiny contingents through the frontier regions, it was charged with watching over the Indians and punishing those who declined to do the Great Father’s bidding. Long experience might have suggested that the realities of its chief employment be acknowledged in an organization and doctrine adapted to the police function. Instead, for a century the army tried to perform its unconventional mission with conventional organization and methods. The result was an Indian record that contained more failures than successes and a lack of preparedness for conventional war that became painfully evident in 1812, 1846, 1861, and 1898.
That military leaders failed to develop a formal doctrine of Indian relations—for in fact this service entailed much more than merely Indian fighting—is primarily an indictment of their prescience. They simply did not forsee that Indian resistance would engage the army for a hundred years. The current or at most the next war would be the last, and then they could get on with their main business. To devise a special system for so seemingly transitory a purpose did not occur to them. Therefore, the Indian troubles that occupied the army year after year called forth a body of essentially orthodox strategies only slightly modified by the special conditions of the police function.
The basic strategy, as the chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners explained it to Red Cloud in 1871, was for “the Great Father to put war-houses all through the Indian country.”3 As General Ord observed, “building posts in their country … demoralizes them more than anything else except money and whiskey.”4 Such garrisons made bluecoats visible to the Indians and placed them close enough to help prevent trouble and to react to it promptly when it broke. Both Sherman and Sheridan favored this approach, and they could point to Montana and Texas as examples of systematic pacification and settlement of frontier areas by advancing lines of forts.5
The flaws in this system arose mainly from the small size of the army. To be truly effective, the network of forts needed to be comprehensive enough to cover all potential trouble spots and strongly enough held to permit the prompt application of force sufficient to meet probable contingencies. An army of 25,000, with other responsibilities as well, could meet neither requirement. It could not man a hundred posts with effective garrisons, much less the larger number the effort implied.
An alternative approach held that troops should be concentrated at a few strategically located posts from which they could operate in strength wherever needed. General Pope and others who urged concentration were actually less concerned with Indian strategy than with the injury to regimental drill, discipline, and administration caused by dispersion. Almost everyone, even Sherman and Sheridan, conceded the benefits that would flow from concentration, but until the middle 1880s it was both practically and politically impossible. Settlers demanded protection in visible proximity, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not, and they never relinquished a nearby fort without a political struggle. Nor did they quietly acquiesce in the removal of a military market. (Testified one well-traveled observer: “There is a fort at Salt Lake City, which is there for the purpose, as I believe, of eating up Brigham Young’s provisions—his surplus food.”6) Also, since large permanent posts required specific congressional authorization, which was exceedingly difficult to obtain, the small temporary posts had to be maintained simply for the shelter they afforded the troops. Finally, the generals seem to have sensed, if they did not clearly perceive, that concentration could not work well until the Indians themselves had been concentrated on reservations and until railroad construction had progressed so far as to insure rapid movement in most directions.7
In 1880 Sherman judged the railroads sufficiently advanced to begin recasting the western military system, and the Secretary of War announced concentration as an official policy. Against congressional parsimony and the resistance of local constituents to abandonment of posts, however, the program proceeded slowly. Between 1880 and 1889 the number of western posts dropped from 111 to 82. In the next two years, with the prospect of Indian hostilities manifestly receding, the number fell to 62 in 1891.8
Torn between dispersion and concentration, the army pursued an Indian strategy that combined dispersion for defense with temporary concentration for offense. It was not a satisfactory strategy. The dispersed garrisons were too few and too weak to present an effective defense. The offensive expeditions, formed only by further weakening the defenses, took too long to assemble and proceeded under handicaps that too often negated their effectiveness for offense.
The principal handicap was lack of mobility. In fact, the offensive expedition represented a wager of strength against mobility. Such a column could not begin to match the Indian’s mobility, and reasonably alert tribesmen could almost always evade one. But if the quarry could be brought to bay, the army’s superiority in numbers, firepower, organization, and discipline prevailed. One officer likened a typical expedition to a dog fastened by a chain—“within the length of chain irresistible, beyond it powerless. The chain was its wagon train and supplies.”9
A column operating almost anywhere in the West devoted enormous effort to logistics. Supply depots had to be spotted at strategic points and guarded. Wagon trains or river steamers, usually owned by civilian firms under military contract, stockpiled supplies at the depots. Other trains shuttled between depot and field forces and accompanied the field forces. Each infantry company required at least one six-mule wagon, each cavalry troop three.10 Forage for mules and horses had to be hauled because “American” stock, unlike Indian ponies, could not subsist solely on grass, which often was not to be had anyway. Oxen did not require grain but were even slower than mules. Thus encumbered, a large command faced formidable odds indeed in trying to run down Indians who lived off the land, traveled lightly and swiftly, and when pressed scattered to reunite later at an appointed rendezvous. The Terry-Crook campaign of August 1876 against the Sioux furnishes an example of how decisive logistics could be; it ended with the troops expending virtually all their energy and resources simply keeping themselves supplied (see Chapter Fifteen).
Gen. George Crook met the challenge of mobility by making his forces dependent upon mule rather than wagon transportation. Other commanders at times experimented with mule trains, with indifferent to intolerable results depending on how badly they managed the enterprise. But Crook refined the science of organizing, equipping, and operating mule trains into perhaps the highest state of perfection in the history of the U.S. Army. He lavished unceasing study and care on the selection of both mules and attendants—civilians preferred—and on the proper design, mounting, and packing of pack saddles. Efficiently managed, therefore, his trains gave him mobility, as is eloquently attested in the recollections of one of Geronimo’s warriors: “Troops generally carry their ammunition and supplies in wagons, therefore they follow the flat country. It was only when Gen. George Crook chased the Indians with a column supplied by mule pack trains that the Apaches had a hard time staying out of reach.”11
Another aspect of mobility was the endurance of cavalry horses. Even when not deprived of regular grain allowances, horses quickly deteriorated under extended exertion, and rare was the campaign that afforded either grain or nutritious grasses in sufficient abundance. Transportation limited the former, drouth, winter, or prairie fire the latter. In 1882 the Assistant Quartermaster General of the army stated as a military principle that “Unless cav
alry operate in a country well supplied with forage a large amount of wagon carriage must be furnished for forage, and in such cases cavalry is of little value except to guard its own train, and to do that in the presence of an enterprising enemy it will need the addition of infantry.”12
Experience in the West, most notably against the Sioux and Nez Percés in 1876–77, tended to confirm this principle. Indeed, the poor performance of the cavalry in these campaigns led to an extended debate over the comparative efficiency of infantry and cavalry in Indian warfare. Infantry officers, incensed over the shrinkage the foot regiments suffered in order to permit the expansion of the mounted regiments in 1876 (see pp. 16–17), proclaimed the superiority of their arm. As the Sixth Infantry’s Col. William B. Hazen stated the case: “After the fourth day’s march of a mixed command, the horse does not march faster than the foot soldier, and after the seventh day, the foot soldier begins to outmarch the horse, and from that time on the foot soldier has to end his march earlier and earlier each day, to enable the cavalry to reach the camp the same day at all.”13 Critics also asserted that cavalry as it had developed in America was essentially mounted infantry. Cavalrymen rode to the battlefield and then dismounted to fight. They made indifferent infantry because they were armed with lighter weapons and were distracted by their horses. The trooper, even cavalry officers conceded, fought on foot because he had not been trained to fight on horseback.14
No substantive changes of organization or method resulted from the debate. In fact, while articulating some truths not wholly appreciated in earlier years, infantrymen somewhat overstated their case. Despite its deficiencies of staying power and mounted performance, cavalry remained the arm most likely to close with Indians in combat. Under favorable circumstances foot troops might get into a village of Indians, conceded Col. John Gibbon, as his own Seventh Infantry had at the Big Hole; “but, as a general rule, and especially when they are on the alert, cavalry is the only arm of the service with which that can be done.”15 General Sherman remained convinced that “cavalry is the most efficient arm of the service for the present existing condition of things in the Indian country.”16 The controversy damaged the cavalrymen’s ego but not their preeminence in Indian warfare.
Frontier Regulars Page 7
