Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Next to Arizona, whose dozen or more forts were new, the most troubled area in Halleck’s division lay in the plateau country drained by the Snake River and its tributaries. During the Civil War years the Northern Paiutes, commonly known as Snakes, had risen violently against prospectors pouring into the newly discovered gold regions of southwestern Idaho and southeastern Oregon. The campaigns of Oregon and Nevada Volunteers in 1864–66 had failed to bring these Indians under control, and the postwar Regulars inherited the task.37 This combat zone fell in both the Department of California and the Department of the Columbia, and both had forts directed at the Paiutes. In the former were Forts Klamath and Harney and Camps Warner, Watson, Logan, Alvord, and C. F. Smith, Oregon; Fort Boise and Camps Lyon and Three Forks Owyhee, Idaho. In the latter were Fort Bidwell, California, and Fort McDermit and Camps McGarry and Winfield Scott, Nevada.38

  For a time it seemed as though diplomacy might succeed in quieting the Paiutes. In October 1864 J. W. P. Huntington, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Oregon, negotiated a treaty with the Klamaths, Modocs, and Yahuskin Paiutes by which they yielded 11.5 million acres in central and southern Oregon and agreed to settle on the Klamath Lake Reservation, at the eastern base of the Cascade Range just north of the California boundary. Ten months later Pauline (or Paunina) and his fellow chiefs of the Walpapi Paiutes subscribed to the treaty. Although other Paiute bands occupied the lake-strewn plateaus of southeastern Oregon and the deserts and mountains of northern Nevada, the Yahuskins and Walpapis were the most powerful and warlike of the Paiute groups. But the Walpapi commitment to peace proved less than durable. Pauline and a few followers lived on the reservation during the winter of 1865–66, but in the spring they gave way to the blandishments of the warring bands. From the Cascades east to the Snake Valley and from the John Day River south to the Humboldt, the Paiutes preyed on stagecoaches, freight trains, and prospectors bound for the Idaho mines, and struck at gold camps, ranches, farms, and stage stations in the mountains drained by the upper John Day, Malheur, and Owyhee Rivers.39

  Throughout 1865 and 1866, as the Oregon Volunteers phased out, Regulars of the First Cavalry and Fourteenth Infantry tried to come to grips with the Paiutes. They did succeed in fighting several actions, but depredations continued to exact a terrible toll.40 An aroused citizenry excoriated the Army for want of energy and determination. And in fact a newly assigned district commander arriving at Fort Boise in December 1866 found cause for the criticism of his predecessor. “The feeling against him and many of his officers was very bitter,” he recalled. “They were accused of all manner of things. One thing was certain: they had not, nor were they, making headway against the hostile Indians. There was much dissipation amongst a good many officers, and there seemed to be a general apathy amongst them, and indifference to the proper discharge of duty.”41

  The new commander intended to change these conditions. He was George Crook, lieutenant colonel of the Twenty-third Infantry (newly created out of the Second Battalion of the Fourteenth), major general by brevet. The Paiute War would launch him on a rapid rise to top rank among the army’s Indian-fighting generals. In 1866 Crook was two years short of forty, of spare athletic build, with close-cropped hair, a blond beard that parted at the chin, and bright blue-gray eyes. In uniform he looked the soldier to the very core. But he rarely wore a uniform, and he never indulged the military dash and ostentation that kept so many of his fellow generals in the public eye. Quiet to the the point of introspection, modest, unselfish, considerate, conscientious, Crook yet on occasion could pronounce savage judgment on the character, motives, and actions of associates. He also tended to be stubborn and independent beyond the limits usually tolerated by the military system. Of his outdoorsmanship the whole army stood in awe. Possessed of legendary stamina and endurance combined with an ability to meet the wilderness on its own terms, he was a deep student of nature, an avid huntsman and fisherman, a crack shot, and an accomplished horseman—although for hard work he preferred a mule.

  Already, as the result of prewar experience in California and Oregon, Crook knew a great deal about Indians, and he would learn much more. He studied them as intensely as he studied the habits and psychology of birds and animals, so that, as an aide recalled, “he knew the Indian better than the Indian did.” In war he was ruthless, in peace paternalistically humane and solicitous. His insistance on honest treatment of the Indian, on never making a promise he could not honor, amounted almost to an obsession. He subscribed to and consistently practiced the Carleton-McDowell injunction to get on the trail and stay on it despite all obstacles until the quarry was cornered. He went still further by giving new emphasis to techniques that were to become his hallmark—extensive use of Indians to fight Indians, and reliance on pack mules for field transportation. The former armed him with the Indian skill in guerrilla warfare and the psychological impact on the enemy of finding kinsmen arrayed against them. The latter gave him a mobility denied by wagon trains.42

  One week after Crook’s arrival at Fort Boise, a war party struck near the mouth of the Boise River. “I took Captain Perry’s company of the First Cavalry,” he recalled, “and left with one change of underclothes, toothbrush, etc., and went to investigate matters, intending to be gone a week. But I got interested after the Indians and did not return there again for over two years.”43 Throughout 1867 and into 1868 Crook stormed about the Paiute country. He galvanized lethargic garrisons, led them against the enemy, and set an example that stirred other officers to action. He fired incompetent guides and scouts and hired skilled trailers such as Archie McIntosh, who later went with him to Arizona. He enlisted bands of Shoshonis from Idaho and employed them with notable effect against the Paiutes. No less than the burning summer heat did the cold, snow, ice, and sleet of winter inhibit his movement. “Our beards were one mass of ice,” he wrote of a late-winter scout. Pack mules, personally supervised, gave him wide-ranging freedom from supply bases.

  Between December 1866 and August 1868 Crook personally led about a dozen extended scouts from Camps Warner, Lyon, C. F. Smith, and Fort McDermit and personally commanded in six engagements. Other officers caught his aggressive spirit. Together Crook and his subordinates kept the Paiutes constantly on the run for a year and a half and forced them into combat on some forty occasions. In fourteen engagements the enemy found himself hit by Shoshoni scouts as well as Regulars, and in four of these the scouts fought alone under the leadership of Chief Guide Archie McIntosh or one of his subordinates. In all, the troops reported Indian casualties of 329 killed, 20 wounded, and 225 captured.44

  By mid-1868 the Paiutes had had enough of Crook’s style of war. Pauline had been killed early in the conflict, in January 1867. Old Weawea had emerged as the most influential hostile leader. In June 1868 he sent word to Crook that he wanted to make peace, and with about 800 followers he came to Fort Harney on July 1 for a conference. Crook, arrayed in his seldom-used dress uniform, treated the chief as he would treat peace-seeking Indians the rest of his career—curtly, even rudely, and with a great show of reluctance to quit fighting. He was sorry to hear that the Indians desired peace, he told Old Weawea. “I was in hopes that you would continue the war.” Every soldier killed could be replaced instantly. Every warrior killed could be replaced only as children grew up. “In this way it would not be very long before we would have you all killed off, and then the government would have no more trouble with you.” At length, however, he allowed himself to be persuaded to let the Paiutes have peace. Old Weawea’s people remained in the vicinity and drew rations from the army at Fort Harney. Ultimately, some settled on the Klamath Reservation and others on a reservation set aside in 1872 on the Malheur River. Many continued to live at large without any connection with an agency.45

  That many took note of the unconventional techniques by which Crook has so expeditiously ended a seemingly hopeless Indian war may be doubted. That many took note of the result and marked Crook as a comer is certain. General Halleck and his succ
essors, Gens. George H. Thomas and John M. Schofield, gave him high praise.46 Nor was the achievement lost on a War Department plagued with an abundance of generals with creditable Civil War records but embarrassing Indian-fighting records. When General Rousseau left the Department of the Columbia in April 1868, Halleck made Crook the temporary department commander, a post he held, even though by lineal rank a junior lieutenant colonel, for two years. And then he was to receive rewards that still more dramatically violated the hallowed seniority tradition.

  On the morning of October 9, 1867, the steamer John L. Stevens entered the harbor of Sitka, Alaska. Aboard were a company of the Ninth Infantry and one of the Second Artillery, come to establish U.S. authority in the vast new possession purchased from Russia the previous March. Aboard, too, was the improbably named general to whom Halleck had entrusted the mission—Jefferson C. Davis. (He had been one of Sherman’s ablest wartime lieutenants, but was remembered chiefly as the hot-tempered, awesomely profane victor of a celebrated quarrel with a fellow general.) The troops were not allowed to go ashore until the official transfer party arrived, and that was another eight days. On October 18, in ceremonies in front of the Russian governor’s palace, a seasick General Rousseau accepted Alaska from a Russian naval captain. Cannon saluted, the U.S. flag replaced the Russian, and the army found itself on a new Indian frontier.47

  Alaska’s principal value derived from furs—seal, otter, marten, mink, fox, bear—and her Indians played a key role in the harvest. Commercial activity and settlement concentrated in the Alexander Archipelago, where Sitka alone harbored 900 of Alaska’s 2,000 white settlers. To the west, Kodiak Island and Cook Inlet also supported a handful of non-Indian residents. Military estimates placed the Indian population within reach of these centers at 60,0. They had a long history of dealing with the white man—with the Russians, resident in Alaska for more than a century; with “King Georges” of the Hudson’s Bay Company, across the border in British Columbia; and with the “Bostons,” U.S. traders who plied the inlets in search of profit. Thus the army’s chief role was not to subjugate the Indians but to supervise a long-established trade relationship that now intensified as more and more “Bostons” arrived to seek fortunes in the Indian trade.48

  During the ensuing year General Davis received three more companies of the Second Artillery, bringing his force to a total of 21 officers and 530 soldiers. Establishing his headquarters at Sitka, he sent detachments to found other posts at key centers of Indian-white contact—Fort Tongass, on Portland Channel facing Hudson’s Bay Company territory in British Columbia; Fort Wrangel, on an island at the mouth of the Stikine River; Fort Kodiak, on Kodiak Island, strategic for relations with the Aleuts of the adjacent Alaska peninsula; Fort Kenay, near the head of Cook Inlet; and St. Paul, in the Pribilof Islands of the Bering Sea.49

  Aside from building and maintaining their posts, the troops at these stations were charged mainly with preventing the manufacture and importation for Indian consumption of whiskey, on this frontier as on every other the prime tool of the fur trade. Despite a prohibition imposed by act of Congress, liquor of the vilest sort flowed freely into the territory. General Davis described it as “probably beyond chemical analysis; its effects upon the Indians are little better than strychnine.”50 The fitness of the army for this mission may be questioned. Far from suppressing the liquor traffic, soldiers appear to have been among the most energetic of its entrepreneurs. At every fort and at every nearby Indian village the evidence was dramatically and constantly apparent. “A greater mistake could not have been committed than stationing troops in their midst,” concluded the department’s medical director in 1869. “They mutually debauch each other, and sink into that degree of degradation in which it is utterly impossible to reach, either through moral or religious influences.”51

  Such friction as occasionally developed with the Alaskan Indians had its origin in the liquor problem. On New Year’s Day 1869 a chief treated to a bottle by General Davis himself fell into an altercation with a sentry, apparently also drunk. Although the trouble was smoothed over, not everyone got the word. Several killings on both sides led finally, by order of Davis, to the shelling of a Kake village by the U.S.S. Saginaw52. More serious yet was an incident on Christmas Day 1869. A drunken Stikine Indian bit off the finger of the wife of the quartermaster sergeant at Fort Wrangel. The post commander sent a detachment to arrest the culprit, but he resisted and was killed. Another Indian retaliated by pumping fourteen bullets into the post trader. When the Indians declined to surrender this man, the garrison opened fire on the village with a six-pounder howitzer. For two days Indians and soldiers exchanged fire, until the Indians gave in. A hastily organized military court found the prisoner guilty of murder, and he was promptly hanged.53

  The Fort Wrangel episode sparked congressional interest in Alaskan military affairs and developed testimony not only to the sorry condition of the troops there but also to the inefficiency of using soldiers in a nearly roadless land where virtually all travel was by water. Vessels manned by revenue officers or sailors would prove more effective, it was maintained.54 The War Department had little inclination to contest the idea. Alaska was a costly and thankless responsibility and, for those assigned there, a station even more detestable than Arizona. In 1870, therefore, the Department of Alaska was reduced to a district and all posts except Sitka were abandoned. For the next seven years two artillery companies uneventfully garrisoned this post and then were quietly withdrawn altogether.55

  NOTES

  1. For prewar developments in Texas see Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue, pp. 70–77, 125–140. For wartime developments see W. C. Holden, “Frontier Defense in Texas during the Civil War,” West Texas Historical Association Year Book, 4 (1928), 16–31; J. Evetts Haley, Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier (San Angelo, Tex., 1952), chap. 6; and Rupert N. Richardson, The Frontier of Northwest Texas, 1846 to 1876 (Glendale, Calif., 1963), chap. 16.

  2. Richardson, Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement, pp. 308–12. Richardson, Frontier of Northwest Texas, chap. 17. CIA, Annual Report (1869), p. 393.

  3. The Kickapoo story is detailed in A. M. Gibson, The Kickapoos: Lords of the Middle Border (Norman, Okla., 1963), chaps. 15–16. Although dealing with a later period, the following sources provide background for this paragraph: House Reports, 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 701; House Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 1st sess., No. 13; House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64.

  4. For conditions in Texas, see James M. Day and Dorman Winfrey, eds., Texas Indian Papers, 1860–1916 (Austin, Tex., 1961), pp. 103–04, 113, 155, 232–33

  5. Senate Ex. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 19, pp. 7-9. SW, Annual Report (1866), p. 48. Rister, Border Command, chap. 2.

  6. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 378–80, 470–73. The 1867 returns showed 131 officers and 3,535 enlisted men present for duty in Texas. Serving at 37 posts, they consisted of three cavalry regiments (Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth) and parts of seven infantry regiments (First, Seventh, Twentieth, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-fifth, Thirty-ninth, and Forty-first). Eleven posts were Indian, twenty-two Reconstruction, and four border. All the Indian posts were garrisoned by cavalry: 45 officers and 1,453 enlisted men. Reconstruction posts, largely one-company stations in the towns, were held by 14 officers and 198 enlisted men of cavalry and 52 officers and 1,178 enlisted men of infantry. On the border were 20 officers and 706 enlisted men, mostly infantry.

  7. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 378–79; (1868), pp. 211–12, 855–71. Reestablishment of frontier defenses is treated in C. C. Rister, Fort Griffin on the Texas Frontier (Norman, Okla., 1956), chap. 4; Haley, chap. 7; and Ernest Wallace, Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier (Lubbock, Tex., 1965), chap. 2. By mid-1868, 177 officers and 4,380 enlisted men garrisoned 31 Texas posts—1,522 on the Indian frontier, 1,600 on the Mexican border, and 1,435 in the interior. In contrast to 1867, most Indian posts now had some infantry as well as cavalry. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 766–68.

  8. “Chronolo
gical List of Actions … with Indians from January l, 1866, to January, 1891,” in Peters, comp., Indian Battles and Skirmishes, pp. 4–25. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 711–16; (1869), pp. 143–45; (1870), pp. 41–42. See also Rister, Fort Griffin, chap. 4; Haley, chap. 9; W. H. Carter, The Life of Lieutenant General Chaffee (Chicago, 1917), chap. 9.

  9. SW, Annual Report (1867), p. 379.

  10. Ibid. (1869), p. 144.

  11. I have treated Civil War New Mexico at greater length in Frontiersmen in Blue, chap. 12. The Sherman quotation, Sept. 21, 1866, is in House Ex. Docs., 39th Cong., 2d sess., No. 23, p. 15.

  12. Apache organization and distribution tend to be complicated. I have relied heavily on mimeographed studies prepared for the Department of Justice for the Indian Land Claim cases, as follows: Albert H. Schroeder, A Study of the Apache Indians (5 vols., Santa Fe, N. Mex., 1960–63); Schroeder, A Study of Yavapai History (3 vols., Santa Fe, N. Mex., 1959); A. B. Bender, A Study of the Mescalero Apache Indians, 1846–1880 (St. Louis, 1960). See also Ralph H. Ogle, Federal Control of the Western Apaches, 1848–1886 (Albuquerque, N. Mex., 1940); C. L. Sonnichsen, The Mescalero Apaches (Norman, Okla., 1958); Frank C. Lockwood, The Apache Indians (New York, 1936); E. W. Gifford, The Southeastern Yavapai, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 29 (Berkeley, Calif., 1932); Gifford, The Northeastern and Western Yavapai, ibid., 34 (Berkeley, Calif., 1936); Morris E. Opler, “An Outline of Chiricahua Apache Social Organization,” in Fred Eggan, ed., Social Anthropology of North American Tribes (Chicago, 1955), pp. 173–242; and Grenville Goodwin, The Social Organization of the Western Apache (Tucson, Ariz., 1969).