Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Tall, handsome, robust, immaculately uniformed, Hancock “presented an appearance,” recalled General Grant, “that would attract the attention of an army as he passed.”14 Not alone for holding the Union center at Gettysburg against Pickett’s charge did newsmen label him “Hancock the Superb.” He fought superbly in almost every major battle of the Army of the Potomac. But his military career had given him little knowledge of Indians.

  The attitudes of the southern Plains tribes in 1866–67 Presented Hancock with the classic dilemma in which the army so often found itself. The principal leaders of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, and Comanches wanted to avoid trouble with the whites, even if it meant abandoning some of their historic haunts. The chiefs always had great difficulty restraining their warlike young men. Now the postwar spurt of travel and the advance of the railroad added deeply felt grievances to the natural raiding impulse, making the warriors even less amenable to tribal leadership. Edward W. Wynkoop, agent for the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, and Jesse H. Leavenworth, agent for the Kiowas and Comanches, labored to reinforce the chiefs in their pacific efforts. Both agents exaggerated only slightly in asserting that their tribes were at peace.

  But every tribe contained elements whose behavior weakened the assertion. By their menacing attitude the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers belied the protestations of the peace chiefs Black Kettle and Little Robe that the Cheyennes would leave the Smoky Hill Road alone. Their Arapaho allies under Little Raven displayed similar ambivalence.15 From newly reactivated Fort Arbuckle, in Indian Territory, came reports that showed the Comanches still raiding in Texas.16 The commanders at Forts Larned and Dodge, edgy after the Fetterman slaughter, passed on alarmist reports of tribal combinations forming for a general war in the spring. The Kiowas in this neighborhood were badly fragmented. Lone Wolf and Kicking Bird spoke for peace, but what the officers on the Arkansas heard more loudly were the blustery threats of Satanta to drive out the whites altogether if they did not stop running off his buffalo and burning his timber.17 Although Kiowa raiders continued to plague Texas settlements, with one or two exceptions the specific charges against them turned out to rest on groundless rumors.18 Complicating the situation still further, bands of Southern Brulé and Oglala Sioux of uncertain disposition had dropped down from the Platte and Republican to mingle with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes.

  If the insolent threats and scattering of minor depredations were allowed to pass unnoticed, they could well escalate into trouble of more serious proportions. As Sherman advised Hancock: “This cannot be tolerated for a moment. If not a state of war, it is the next thing to it, and will result in war unless checked.”19 But, as always, how to single out the few to be checked without alarming the many needing no check posed a thorny problem. In effect, Sherman and Hancock resolved on some insolent threats of their own. On March 11, 1867, Hancock advised Agents Wynkoop and Leavenworth that he intended to lead an army to the Plains to show the Indians that he could whip them if they tormented the travel routes. He planned to talk with the chiefs. If they wanted war, he would oblige them. If not, they must stay clear of the roads.20 “We go prepared for war,” the general proclaimed to his troops, “and will make it if a proper occasion presents…. No insolence will be tolerated.”21

  The command Hancock placed in camp at Fort Larned on April 7 was of suitably impressive dimensions—fourteen hundred soldiers in eleven troops of the Seventh Cavalry, seven companies of the Thirty-seventh Infantry, and a battery of the Fourth Artillery. The colonel of the Seventh was Bvt. Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith, a blunt, irascible old dragoon of almost thirty years’ service. Since Smith commanded the District of the Upper Arkansas, the regiment fell to his youthful and flamboyant lieutenant colonel, George Armstrong Custer. Slight of build, with long blond hair and a walrus mustache, Custer had rocketed to fame as a hard-hitting—some said reckless—cavalry leader in the Civil War. A major general with his own division at twenty-five, he now had to content himself with a regiment. Hancock’s expedition gave Custer his first experience with Indians. By the time of his last, on the Little Bighorn nine years later, he would be, depending on one’s point of view, either famous or infamous, idolized or abominated.22

  For the first of Hancock’s meetings, Agent Wynkoop promised to bring in a delegation of chiefs from a village of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and Oglala Sioux reposing on Pawnee Fork, thirty-five miles upstream from Fort Larned. A snow storm and a buffalo herd delayed the meeting five days, and then only two chiefs and a dozen warriors appeared. They were important chiefs—Tall Bull and White Horse—and despite his irritation at the poor showing, Hancock arrayed his officers in dress uniform and held a council. He lectured the Cheyennes sternly, gave them their choice of war or peace, and announced that on the morrow he would march up Pawnee Fork to the village and deliver his message to the rest of the chiefs.23

  Predictably, the approach of so many soldiers badly frightened the Indians, and the women and children stampeded to the hills. Camping half a mile from the village, Hancock directed the chiefs to round them up and bring them back. That night, alerted that the men might be getting ready to leave too, he had Custer throw a cordon of cavalry around the village. But the lodges were deserted; the Indians had already taken flight. “This looks like the commencement of war,” concluded Hancock.

  The Sioux and Cheyennes hurried north, Custer in close pursuit with eight troops of the Seventh Cavalry. The Indians, by scattering into small parties, left the cavalry with no trail large enough to follow. When Custer reached the Smoky Hill Road he found it a shambles—stage stations burned, stock run off, and citizens butchered. Putting in at Fort Hays before continuing the pursuit, Custer found himself suddenly immobilized. Forage thought to have been stockpiled had been delayed by high water.

  Back on Pawnee Fork, Hancock agonized for three days over whether to destroy the abandoned village. He thought the Indians guilty of “bad faith” in not acceding to his wishes and tried hard to convince himself that their flight was sufficient provocation. Wynkoop and Leavenworth argued insistently that the Indians were innocent of any offense and had run solely because they feared another Chivington massacre. To burn the village would compound the injury already done and make war certain. General Smith agreed. A courier from Custer decided the question, even though some doubt arose that the Pawnee Fork fugitives had indeed committed the Smoky Hill outrages. It made no difference anyway, Hancock concluded, “for I am satisfied that the Indian village was a nest of conspirators.” On April 19, over Wynkoop’s forceful protest, he put to the torch 111 Cheyenne lodges, 140 Sioux lodges, and immense quantities of camp equipage.

  At Forts Dodge and Larned, Hancock delivered his familiar war-or-peace ultimatum to Arapaho and Kiowa chiefs from camps south of the Arkansas. Satanta, the unpredictable Kiowa war leader, seemed so sincerely devoted to peace that Hancock presented him with a major general’s dress uniform. Reaching Fort Hays on May 2, he found Custer still paralyzed by want of forage. As soon as the grass grew greener, Hancock directed, Custer was to take the field. “War is to be waged against the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians between the Arkansas and the Platte.” With that, the department commander repaired to Fort Leavenworth.24

  During May and June the Sioux and Cheyennes waged their own war between the Arkansas and the Platte. They struck repeatedly at mail stations, stagecoaches, wagon trains, and railroad workers on the Platte, the Smoky Hill, and the Arkansas. The progress of rail construction slowed, and for a time stagecoaches on the Smoky Hill quit running altogether. Satanta repaid Hancock’s generosity by flaunting his new uniform while running off the stock herd at Fort Dodge. In remote western Kansas, Fort Wallace endured constant harassment, and its garrison skirmished several times with Cheyenne war parties.25

  With six troops of the Seventh Cavalry, about 300 men, Custer set forth on June 1 to search out the hostiles along a thousand-mile swath to the Platte, the Republican, and back to the Smoky Hill. Inconclusive clashes with Sioux warriors marked his progress.
He pushed the command to exhaustion, and troopers deserted by the score. The column dragged into Fort Wallace on July 13 with horses unfit for further campaigning.26

  For the rest of the summer Indian warriors ran wild on the Arkansas, Smoky Hill, and Platte. Agents Leavenworth and Wynkoop protested that their tribes had sought peaceful refuge south of the Arkansas, and each ascribed the continuing hostilities to the other’s Indians.27 In truth the peace elements of all the tribes had gone south of the Arkansas, but the war factions had stayed north of the river to enjoy a raiding season as exciting and profitable as that of 1864.

  The inability of the troops to prevent headline-making raids on stage stations and coaches and railroad workers aggravated another problem that plagued Sherman. The governors of Kansas, Colorado, Montana, and even Minnesota bombarded him and his superiors with appeals for authority to call out Volunteers to help the Regulars. Nothing so complicated an Indian war as undisciplined Volunteers riding about the countryside in search of Indians, and Sherman wanted no part of them. “I think I comprehend the motives of some of the Governors,” he advised Grant, “whom I would not entrust with a picket post of fifty men, much less with the discretionary power to call out troops at national cost.”28 Denial of such petitions exposed Sherman to scathing newspaper criticism and risked disasters that might be charged to his intransigence. But to all he gave the same answer: they could organize Volunteers if they wanted but must provide the financing themselves and hope that Congress would later pick up the bill. Under this condition, he knew, merchants would not advance credit and Volunteers would not volunteer.

  It was a delicate business, however, because of the chance that Volunteers might really be needed. The acting governor of Montana Territory, a volatile Irishman named Thomas Francis Meagher, played on this factor adroitly enough to bring Sherman to an ambiguous sanction of the muster of 800 Volunteers. John M. Bozeman, well-known pathfinder, had been murdered by Blackfeet Indians on his own Bozeman Trail, and settlers in the Gallatin Valley persuaded themselves that it portended a massive assault on their homes by Red Cloud’s Sioux. It did not, but Meagher’s rank-heavy battalion, commanded by a brigadier general, managed to run up a claim of more than a million dollars in June and July, half of which Congress finally paid.29

  A. C. Hunt and Samuel J. Crawford, governors of Colorado and Kansas, pressed their case with fervor. Sherman succeeded in fending off Hunt, but Crawford, with powerful aid from Senator Edmund G. Ross in Congress and the Sioux and Cheyennes on the Smoky Hill, at last won the general’s reluctant consent. In mid-July the Eighteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, a 353-man battalion, was mustered into federal service.30 It performed creditable work in helping the Regulars patrol the travel routes, and on August 22–23 two troops participated with a troop of the Tenth Cavalry in a major action on Beaver Creek with several hundred Sioux and Cheyennes.31

  Except for this initiative and Custer’s abortive expedition, Hancock’s forces spent the summer in strictly defensive duties. For Kansas, Colorado, and Indian Territory, Hancock counted the equivalent of two and one-half regiments of infantry (elements of Third, Sixth, Thirty-seventh, and Thirty-eighth) plus the Seventh and Tenth Cavalry, the last not yet fully organized. Little more than 4,000 officers and men held eighteen forts and camps and guarded more than 1,500 miles of major travel arteries. All the regiments struggled under a heavy burden of untrained recruits, and to make matters worse, all were continuously decimated that summer by desertion and cholera, both of epidemic proportions. Not surprisingly, they failed to secure every target the hostiles might elect to hit.32

  North of Hancock’s department Generals Terry and Augur, both concerned mainly with the Sioux, also remained on the defensive that summer. Plans for the expedition against Red Cloud’s Sioux fell quietly in the wastebasket. Even though the Sully Commission succeeded in holding friendly talks only with the friendly bands along the Missouri and the Platte, Sherman could not risk an offensive against the hostile Sioux as long as peace emissaries were anywhere near them. Besides, raids on the Union Pacific tied down troops that would have formed the expedition. And the bad publicity provoked by “Hancock’s War” made another offensive politically hard to justify. Sherman keenly felt the need to have the Powder River Sioux “taken down a good many notches,” but after three months of indecision he finally gave up the idea.33

  Generals Terry and Augur continued to devote themselves to strengthening the rudimentary defenses they had inherited. Terry, charged with protecting steamboat and overland traffic to Montana, bolstered and extended the defense system laid out by General Sully during the campaigns of 1864 and 1865. Forts Ransom and Totten joined the older Forts Abercrombie and Sisseton (Wadsworth) as way stations on the land routes by which travelers from Minnesota reached the Missouri River corridor to the mountains. Along the Missouri itself, the detachments occasionally at the trading posts of Forts Union and Berthold since 1864 were given permanent stations with the establishment nearby of Forts Buford and Stevenson. Added to Forts Randall, Sully, and Rice down river, the new posts brought the Missouri under military surveillance all the way to the mouth of the Yellowstone. Farther west, where misplaced Camp Cooke had proved of marginal value, Terry gave Montana two new forts—Shaw on Sun River and Ellis in the strategic pass by which the Powder River Sioux threatened the settlers in the Gallatin Valley.34

  In the Department of the Platte, as the Union Pacific left the emigrant roads at the forks of the Platte and advanced directly westward up Lodgepole Creek, General Augur established new posts to provide protection to survey and labor crews. To Forts Kearny, McPherson, and Sedgwick he added Forts Sidney, D. A. Russell, Sanders, and Fred Steele. On the road up the North Platte, while keeping venerable Fort Laramie, he abandoned Forts Mitchell and Casper. At the same time, he established Fort Fetterman at the point where the Bozeman Trail veered northward from the Platte to Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith.35

  Terry and Augur had the Sioux country ringed with forts—Terry seven along the line of the Missouri from Randall to Ellis, backed by four between Minnesota and the Missouri River; Augur seven along the line of the Platte and the Bozeman Trail and a string of another six along the Union Pacific between the North and South Platte. To hold these lines, as well as posts in Minnesota and Utah, Terry commanded four regiments of infantry (Tenth, Thirteenth, Twenty-second, Thirty-first) and Augur five (Fourth, Eighteenth, Twenty-seventh, Thirtieth, and Thirty-sixth). In addition, Augur had the Second Cavalry and a highly effective battalion of Pawnee Indian Scouts.36

  The Sioux and their Northern Cheyenne allies were surrounded—by some 5,000 officers and enlisted men, chiefly infantry, strung in tiny clusters around a perimeter 2,500 miles in extent. Because of weakness in numbers, lack of mobility, and the restraints imposed by successive waves of peace commissioners, they had no choice but to remain on the defensive. No such inhibitions held back the Indians. The very presence of soldiers aroused their fury. So did the swelling parade of steamboats on the Missouri, the voracious demands of their boilers on the lightly timbered river bottoms, the rapid progress of the railroad up the Platte, and above all the continuing shrinkage of the buffalo herds caused by all this activity along the rim of the Indian homeland. On the Missouri, the Platte, and the Powder, the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes demonstrated that peace depended on more than the soothing words of peace commissioners.

  In Dakota, camps of hostile Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, and Yanktonai Sioux ranged from the lower Yellowstone and Little Missouri to the Heart and Cannonball. Increasingly they gave allegiance to a chief destined to become the most powerful and implacably hostile of all the Sioux leaders—Sitting Bull. War parties from these camps held the upper Missouri in a state of chronic insecurity. They fired on steamboats, sniped at express riders, and knocked off camps of woodchoppers who supplied the boats with fuel. They continued to war on their hereditary enemies, the Arikaras, Mandans, and Gros Ventres, who resided in helpless dependence on the g
overnment at the Fort Berthold agency. Fort Stevenson endured occasional harassment. Fort Buford, from the day of its founding in 1866, was a special target of Sioux aggression. Warriors repeatedly ran off its cattle and mules, collided with herd guards, and fell on parties of soldiers that strayed beyond the limits of safety.37

  Along the line of the Union Pacific, raiding parties from south of the Platte followed end-of-track across western Nebraska while, farther west, others from the Powder River camps fell on surveyors marking the line across Wyoming. Although General Augur kept two infantry regiments and half a cavalry regiment employed in guard and escort duty, they proved insufficient to insure workers and surveyors against Indian attack.38

  The Bozeman Trail remained Augur’s most worrisome problem. The Fetterman disaster had awakened the army to the weakness of Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith. By July 1867 more than 900 officers and soldiers of the Eighteenth and Twenty-seventh Infantry and Second Cavalry held the three forts, and another 500 men were building Fort Fetterman as the southern anchor of the road. Even so, the defenders defended little more than their own stations. Throughout 1867 the Powder River chiefs closed the road to all but heavily armed military trains. Almost no civilian parties reached Montana by this route during the year. The Indians also subjected Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith to the same kind of harassing pressures that had so plagued Carrington the previous year. And once more they laid plans to wipe out the hated forts altogether.39

  In July 1867, after the annual sun dance, the Powder River bands came together in a great enclave on the Little Bighorn River. They were mainly Oglala Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, but embraced also some Miniconjou and Sans Arc Sioux and Northern Arapahoes. The leaders resolved to destroy Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith but could not agree on which one to strike first. Settling the dispute in typically democratic fashion, some 500 to 800 warriors, mostly Cheyennes, headed for Fort C. F. Smith, while another 1,000, accompanied by Red Cloud himself, set forth for Fort Phil Kearny.40