Lacking mobility, heavy offensive columns brought the enemy to battle only when he could be surprised, usually in his village encumbered with his family. The surprise attack on a village produced casualties and panic and ended with the destruction of food, shelter, stock, and other possessions. The psychological effect on the Indian survivors as well as on allied groups often led to surrender.
To achieve surprise required not only a careless enemy but also excellent intelligence and reconnaissance services. White frontiersmen and friendly Indians, wise in wilderness and Indian lore, were hired or enlisted to provide these services. “California Joe” Milner, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, “Lonesome Charlie” Reynolds, “Yellowstone” Kelly, Frank Grouard, Al Sieber, and Crow, Arikara, Osage, Shoshoni, and Apache scouts proved indispensable in locating the objective and easing a command into striking position. In employing auxiliaries so well adapted to both enemy and terrain, the army made a modest departure from conventional methods, but then failed to carry it to a logical conclusion.
Two other strategies improved prospects for a successful surprise attack. First was the winter campaign. Indians tended to neglect ordinary precautions in the winter. With game and grass scarce, they were also less mobile. Regular army forces ran great risks in winter operations, but the returns could be correspondingly rewarding. The second strategy involved converging columns. Several forces moving on an area of operations from different directions were more likely than one to fall on an Indian camp. Converging columns could also harry an enemy into submission simply by keeping him constantly on the move and fearful of a surprise attack. Converging columns worked well in the Red River War of 1874–75, but failed spectacularly in the Sioux War of 1876.
The surprise attack on the village was total war. In such encounters women and children were nearly always present. They mingled with the fighting men, often participated in the fighting, and in the confusion and excitement of battle were difficult to identify as noncombatants. In engagement after engagement women and children fell victim to army bullets or were cast upon a hostile country, often in winter, without food or shelter.
Total war raised disturbing moral questions, not only for the eastern humanitarians who shrilly protested military butchery, but for the army as well. Some officers openly acknowledged the intent of the surprise attack to be indiscriminate killing. “The confessed aim is to exterminate everyone,” concluded Colonel de Trobriand, “for this is the only advantage of making the expedition; if extermination were not achieved, just another burden would be added—prisoners.”17 Other officers went to great lengths to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. General Crook, for example, constantly emphasized this policy.18 Even Wounded Knee, which took the lives of at least sixty-two women and children, discloses extraordinary efforts to avoid harming them.19
A generalization that acknowledges the varying attitudes of commanders toward this issue is difficult. However, conceding instances of purposeful slaughter, conceding instances of deliberate or careless killing of noncombatants by individual soldiers, and conceding instances in which commanders failed to take proper precautions, it seems clear that most officers tried hard to spare women and children. The officer corps subscribed to a Sir Walter Scott code of chivalry that exalted womanhood. Although perhaps not embracing Indian womanhood, it nevertheless held in contempt the mistreatment of women. In the majority of actions, the army shot noncombatants incidentally and accidentally, not purposefully.
But what of the morality of a strategy aimed at finding and destroying Indian villages where women and children would unquestionably be present and suffer death or injury? This is a question not to be asked of the Indian Wars alone but of all conflicts in which war has been waged on whole populations. Whether, as General Sherman contended, such warfare is in the end more humane because it is more speedily and definitively ended may be argued. The significant point is that Sherman’s strategy for the conquest of the Indians was as moral, or immoral, as his march across Georgia in the Civil War or as more recent military actions involving civilian populations. The ethical questions implicit in the style of war against the Indians are appropriate not solely to a characterization of the frontier army but rather to a discussion of the whole sweep of American military history and tradition.
Humanitarians, appalled by the killing of women and children, scored the army for practicing extermination. Some pronouncements of Sherman, Sheridan, and others sound like exterminationism. But closer examination reveals most such assertions to have been addressed not to the Indian race as a whole but only to those portions of it that defied the government’s will. Extermination—a later generation would call it genocide—is the systematic obliteration of a whole people. Many officers believed that extinction was the Indian’s ordained fate, but few advocated or attempted to bring it about by war. Rather it was an impulse to civilize the Indian that dominated military attitudes as it dominated public sentiment and government policy—and that belies the charge that the United States pursued a policy of genocide. Nor was genocide the result; in less than a century following the end of warfare, the Indian population doubled.
Though frequently criticized, the standard offensive method was never seriously threatened. Heavy columns of infantry and cavalry, locked to slow-moving supply trains, continued to crawl about the vast western distances in search of an enemy who could scatter and vanish almost instantly. Such expeditions ran up an impressive record of failure, but they also scored enough successes to discourage serious analysis of their validity or of possible alternatives. Most experienced officers knew their foe as a master of guerrilla warfare. Some even spoke of using his own techniques against him. But few ever went beyond this recognition to elaborate a doctrine combining the advantages of the two kinds of warfare.
One who came close was the erudite Frenchman, Col. Philippe Regis de Trobriand. He believed that the enemy’s advantages could be largely offset, first, “by forming auxiliary squadrons composed of frontiersmen who know the Indians and who are able to fight them their own way”; and, second, “by enrolling in volunteer companies the Indians themselves who are allies of the United States and who are at war with the hostile tribes, the line officers being taken exclusively from among the men of the plains who are familiar with the habits, ideas, and languages of the tribes.”20
Use of experienced frontiersmen against the Indians was hardly original with de Trobriand. Western governors and congressional representatives regularly advocated the muster of state or territorial Volunteers into federal service for Indian duty. Army leaders usually opposed these efforts because Volunteers lacked discipline, resisted federal authority, and were given to excessive plundering of both the enemy and the federal treasury. De Trobriand’s scheme would have considerably lessened these disadvantages by incorporating special units of frontiersmen directly into the Regular Army. The one notable test of such a plan, Maj. George A. Forsyth’s scout company in Kansas in 1868 (see pp. 147–48), yielded encouraging results. After the Battle of Beecher’s Island, however, it was disbanded, and if a comparable unit was ever proposed, it failed to surmount barriers of convention and economy.
Nor was the use of Indians against Indians an original idea. Throughout the Indian Wars, the army employed Indian scouts. The army act of 1866 authorized 1,000 scouts, although after Congress imposed a ceiling of 25,000 on enlisted strength the number was administratively limited to 300 except on special occasions. Commanders testified emphatically to their worth.21 In de Trobriand’s view, however, they were valuable not solely as scouts, guides, and trailers but as fighters as well. Organized in military units under white officers, they would function roughly as regular troops in all situations except combat, when they would throw aside the white man’s trappings and fight as Indians. Even as de Trobriand wrote, Frank and Luther North were validating this thesis on the central plains. From 1866 to 1870 their famous battalion of Pawnee scouts showed conclusively that Indians could be organized into military uni
ts and employed with good effect against other Indians.22
Another who viewed Indian warfare with rare insight was George Crook. Like de Trobriand, he saw the advantages of friendly tribesmen as auxiliaries in campaigns against hostiles. He used Shoshonis against Paiutes in Oregon in 1866–68, Pimas and Maricopas against Apaches in Arizona in 1872–73, and Shoshonis and Crows against Sioux in Wyoming and Montana in 1876. In these operations Crook did not organize his allies as formally as suggested by de Trobriand or practiced by the North brothers, or as he himself did in Arizona in later years. Usually they fought under their own leaders and followed their own inclinations as often as the instructions of the officers or white scouts assigned to accompany them.
Crook gave this approach a significant variation. Rather than seek allies in one tribe to fight another, he turned to the very tribe against which his operations were directed. The efficacy of this method lay not only in matching the enemy’s special skills but also in the psychological impact on the enemy of finding his own people arrayed against him. “To polish a diamond there is nothing like its own dust,” Crook explained to a reporter in 1886:
It is the same with these fellows. Nothing breaks them up like turning their own people against them. They don’t fear the white soldiers, whom they easily surpass in the peculiar style of warfare which they force upon us, but put upon their trail an enemy of their own blood, an enemy as tireless, as foxy, and as stealthy and familiar with the country as they themselves, and it breaks them all up. It is not merely a question of catching them better with Indians, but of a broader and more enduring aim—their disintegration.23
Applied successfully by both Crook and Col. Nelson A. Miles in the closing stages of the Sioux War of 1876 (see Chapter Fifteen), the practice received its most intensive test under Crook’s supervision in the Apache conflicts of the 1880s (see Chapter Nineteen).
Exclusive or even major use of Indians as combat forces entailed grave risks. They were kinsmen, racial if not tribal, of the people being hunted, and one could never be fully certain of their reliability. Good leadership offset much of the gamble. Crook chose his scout officers with great care. Young men of ambition, dedication, sensitivity, and above all rapport with their men offered the best prospects. These officers, remarked one perceptive observer, were less “Indian-fighters” than “Indian-thinkers.”24 Whether scouts or fighting auxiliaries, Indians compiled an almost uniform record of faithfulness—the mutiny at Cibicu was a rare exception (see p. 372)—but this record failed to allay widespread suspicions. General Sheridan’s distrust of Apache scouts led to the greatest disappointment of Crook’s career (see p. 386).
Finally, Crook recognized that successful Indian strategy involved far more than simply fighting Indians. He framed four precepts to guide him in dealing with them: first, to make no promises that could not be kept; second, to tell the truth always; third, to provide remunerated labor; and fourth, “to be patient, to be just, and to fear not.”25 Unfortunately, few officers of either the army or the Indian Bureau possessed the intellectual and human qualities to follow such a code. And even Crook, sharing authority with civilian officials and reporting to superiors who could overrule him, found adherence discouragingly difficult and sometimes impossible.
The nation’s leaders failed to heed the lessons of Crook’s experience. With a conventional military force they tried to control, by conventional military methods, a people that did not behave like conventional enemies and, indeed, quite often were not enemies at all. Usually, the situation did not call for warfare, merely for policing. That is, offending individuals or groups needed to be separated from the innocent and punished. But this the conventional force could rarely do. As a result, punishment often fell, when it fell at all, on guilty and innocent alike. Instead of a conventional army, a force was needed endowed with the capability of differentiating between guilty and innocent and, employing the Indian’s own fighting style, of effectively contending with the guilty.
The Indian scout companies evolved in the 1870s and 1880s by Crook and others suggested what might be achieved by Indian auxiliaries given a scale and continuity sufficient to permit the full effect to be demonstrated. A brief experiment in the early 1890s of creating an Indian company in every regiment stationed in the West represented misdirected effort; it aimed less at exploiting the Indian’s peculiar abilities than transforming him into a conventional soldier, and anyway the Indian Wars had ended by the time the program got fully under way.26 Nor did the reservation police forces organized by the Indian Bureau beginning in 1878 meet the need, although they did remarkably well considering their limitations. They were small, badly equipped, underpaid, without overall direction or coordination, and buffeted by the partisan and patronage politics that afflicted the Indian Bureau.27
Some thought the Northwest Mounted Police developed by the British to bring law and order to the Canadian West offered an ideal model. But as Sheridan and others pointed out, the 300 red-coated constables succeeded mainly because the sparsity of settlement prevented serious competition between whites and Indians for the lands and resources of the Northwest Territories.28
Ironically, the only serious proposal for an Indian auxiliary force of meaningful composition and magnitude came from none other than a Commissioner of Indian Affairs. In this annual report for 1878 Commissioner Ezra A. Hayt proposed the formation of a corps of 3,000 Indians, “enlisted from the young men of the most warlike tribes, and placed under the command of Army officers of experience.” Held in large bodies, fully controlled by the War Department, this auxiliary force would stand ready to rush to the scene of actual or threatened hostilities.29
In size, composition, leadership, and control, Hayt’s reasoning seems sound. In employment, however, he might have given further thought to dispersing the force sufficiently to allow it to perform a police as well as a military function. A force of 3,000 would have yielded 15 four-company battalions of 200 Indians each. Recruited from and distributed among the potentially most troublesome tribes, properly trained and officered, such battalions might have prevented or contained many an outbreak and, brigaded with other Indian battalions and bolstered by regular units, could have rapidly quelled uprisings that could not be averted.
Commisioner Hayt’s proposal seems not to have sparked any interest in the War Department, and he himself soon lost his post in one of the scandals that periodically rocked the Indian Bureau. The Regular Army continued to grapple cumbersomely with a mission for which it was badly organized and trained. How different might have been the history of the westward movement had a paramilitary force such as Hayt advocated been created and employed as a prominent adjunct to the army line.
NOTES
1. Weigley, History of the United States Army, pp. 272–81. Stephen E. Ambrose, Upton and the Army (Baton Rouge, La., 1964). Bigelow, William Conant Church and the Army and Navy Journal.
2. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 5.
3. CIA, Annual Report (1871), p. 24
4. March 5, 1867, in Senate Ex. Docs., 40th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13, p. 83.
5. SW, Annual Report (1879), pp. 4–6.
6. Felix Brunot, chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Jan. 15, 1874, in House Reports, 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 354, p. 157.
7. Considerable debate and discussion focused on this issue. See especially Sherman to Sheridan, Jan. 16, 1873, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC; SW, Annual Report (1871), pp. 24, 40–47; (1872), p. 69; (1875), p. 77; (1876), p. 452; (1877), pp. 58–59, 63; (1880), pp. 53, 209–10; House Reports, 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 384, pp. 159–62, 177–78, 189, 218–19, 223; House Reports, 44th Cong., 1st sess., No. 354, pp. 60, 61; House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, pp. 84, 123, 133, 270; House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64, p. 69.
8. Figures are from tables in SW, Annual Report (1880), pp. 10–33; (1889), pp. 96–114; (1891), pp. 104–22. See also ibid.. (1880), pp. iv, 4–5; (1881), pp. 35—36: (1882), pp. 5,
10–20, 69, 80, 96, 101; (1883), pp. 9, 105; (1884), pp. 48, 84, 103; Army and Navy Journal, 20 (Sept. 30, 1882), 195.
9. G. W. Baird, “General Miles’s Indian Campaigns,” Century Magazine, 42 (July 1891), 351.
10. S. B. Holabird, “Army Wagon Transportation,” Ordnance Notes—No. 189 (Ordnance Department, Washington, D.C., April 15, 1882), pp. 1–3.
11. Jason Betzinez, with Wilbur S. Nye, I Fought with Geronimo (Harrisburg, Pa., 1959), p. 37. For Crook and his mule trains, see John G. Bourke, “Mackenzie’s Last Fight with the Cheyennes: A Winter Campaign in Wyoming and Montana,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 11 (1890), (reprint ed., Bellevue, Neb., 1970), pp. 14–16; Bourke, On the Border with Crook (New York, 1891), pp. 138–39, 150–56; A. A. Cabannis, “Troop and Company Pack-Trains,” Journal of the U.S. Cavalry Association, 3 (1890), 248–52; W. E. Shipp, “Captain Crawford’s Last Expedition,” ibid., 5 (1892), 348–49; and Emmett M. Essin, III, “Mules, Packs, and Packtrains,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 74 (1970), 52–63.
12. Holabird, p. 3.
13. To House Military Committee, April 11, 1878, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 454. See also pp. 44 (Marcy), 123 (Hazen again), 138 (Sully), and 237 (Miles).
14. Army and Navy Journal, 75 (May 4, 1878), 630–31; (May 11, 1878), 647. Hutchins, “Mounted Riflemen: The Real Role of Cavalry in the Indian Wars.” W. E. Shipp, “Mounted Infantry,” Journal of the U.S. Cavalry Association, 5 (1892), 76–80. Schofield in SW, Annual Report (1888), p. 104.
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