My accounts in this and subsequent chapters proceed from the following premises: Mescaleros ranged widely in New Mexico and Texas from bases in the Sierra Blanca, Guadalupe, and Sacramento Mountains of central and and southern New Mexico. Other Mescalero bands raided out of the Davis Mountains of West Texas, the Chisos Mountains of the Big Bend, and the Sierra del Carmen of Coahuila. In southwestern New Mexico, the Gila Apaches, loosely embracing the Mimbres, Copper Mine, Warm Spring, and Mogollon groups, a division of the Chiricahuas, ranged the continental divide from the Datil Mountains southward to Lake Guzman in Chihuahua. Adjoining them on the west, in eastern Arizona, were the Western Apaches, embracing the Coyotero (or White Mountain), Pinal, and Aravaipa Apaches on the middle Gila and upper Salt. In the Chiricahua Mountains to the south lived another band of Chiricahuas, and in the Sierra Madre of Mexico still another. All told, the Apaches probably numbered about 8,000. The Yavapai, numbering about 2,000, occupied the Tonto Basin and lower Salt and Verde Valleys and extended westward between the Gila and Bill Williams Rivers as far as the Colorado. These were Yuman rather than Apachean people, but were usually mistaken by the whites for Apaches. Accordingly, the three principal Yavapai divisions, Western, Southeastern, and Northeastern, are often erroneously called Apache-Mojave, Apache-Yuma, and Apache-Tonto. The Walapais, about 2,500 strong, ranged east of the Colorado northward from Bill Williams River. These were the hostile tribes. Peaceful tribes were the sedentary Yumas, Mojaves, and Chemehuevis of the Colorado River Valley; the Pimas, Papagoes, and Maricopas of the Santa Cruz Valley; and the Pueblos, Jicarilla Apaches, and Utes of the upper Rio Grande Valley.
13. House Ex. Docs., 39th Cong., 2d sess., No. 23, p. 15. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 40, 43, 440–41; (1868), pp. 732–33, 736–37.
14. See under appropriate headings in Prucha, Military Posts of the United States; Frazer, Forts of the West; and Ray Brandes, Frontier Military Posts of Arizona (Globe, Ariz., 1960). Early transitory posts were, in an arc around Prescott from east to north to west: Camps Reno (1868–70), Willow Grove (1867–69) and its successor Hualpai (1868–73), Date Creek (1867–73), El Dorado (1867), and Colorado (1868–71); in the upper Santa Cruz Valley south of Tucson: Camps Mason (1865–66) and Cameron (1866–67).
15. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 444–45; (1868), pp. 740–41; (1869), pp. 166–67.
16. Ibid. (1867), pp. 72–73, 82–84, 86–95; (1868), pp. 46–48; Carr, ‘“The Days of the Empire,’” pp. 4, 19–21.
17. For McDowell’s and Halleck’s views, see SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 82–83, 86–95; (1865), pp. 46–48.
18. Army and Navy Journal, 5 (June 6, 1868), 666. An excellent insight may be obtained from Bourke, On the Border with Crook.
19. Mason to Drum, April 29, 1866, RG 98, Dept, of the Pacific Letter Book 55, pp. 127–31, National Archives.
20. CIA, Annual Report (1869), p. 225.
21. Carr, p. 5.
22. For McDowell’s views see SW, Annual Report (1866), pp. 34–36; (1867), pp. 89, 95. For Carleton, see Utley, p. 234; for Mason, see the document cited in n. 19 above.
23. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 116–19. Carr, p. 18. E. R. Hagemann, ed., Fighting Rebels and Redskins: Experiences in Army Life of Colonel George B. Sanford, 1861–1892 (Norman, Okla., 1969), pp. 9–10.
24. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 130–31, 150–53.
25. Dan L. Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria (Norman, Okla., 1967), chap. 4.
26. Richard Y. Murray, The History of Fort Bowie (Unpublished Masters Thesis, Univ. of Arizona, 1951), pp. 119–23.
27. “Chronological List of Actions,” in Peters, comp., pp. 4–25.
28. The Bloody Tanks affair of 1864, when Arizonans enticed a band of Yavapais into camp with food and tobacco, then slaughtered them, was but one of several episodes of like character that drove the Yavapais to hostility. Utley, p. 256. Another occurred in 1868, when teamsters invited some Yavapais to La Paz to make peace, then fell on them and killed a dozen. The Walapais went to war in 1866 after a freighter murdered their principal chief on mere suspicion of complicity in the killing of a white man. A Prescott grand jury dismissed the case with a “unanimous vote of thanks” to the murderer. CIA, Annual Report (1869), pp. 216–18. Thrapp, pp. 39–40. B 9
The army was not blameless in this regard. The terror in which Cochise and the Chiricahuas held southern Arizona resulted from military treachery at Apache Pass in 1861, and the Gilas could hardly forget the murder of Mangas Coloradas while he was held prisoner by Carleton’s troops in 1863. Utley, pp. 161–63, 251–52. Also, in the spring of 1867 Col. John Irvin Gregg, commanding a district from Fort Whipple, solved the problem of whom to fight by declaring all Indians in his sector hostile and invalidating all safe-conduct passes issued by Indian agents. General McDowell cancelled the order and rebuked Gregg. “He certainly simplified the question as to what Indians were to be fought,” conceded McDowell, “but at the same time greatly extended the military operations necessary to be carried out to fight them.” McDowell noted that the order proved very popular with Arizonans and speculated that this was probably the motive that inspired it. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 105–6, 109–13, 121–22.
29. SW, Annual Report (1869), p. 124.
30. Apache hostilities are summarized in the annual reports of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory: CIA, Annual Report (1867), pp. 192–93; (1868), pp. 160–61; (1869), pp. 244–49.
31. “Chronological List of Actions,” in Peters, comp., pp. 4–25.
32. SW, Annual Report (1867), p. 69; (1868), p. 37. The regiments were the First and Eighth Cavalry, Second Artillery, and Ninth, Fourteenth, Twenty-third, and Thirty-second Infantry.
33. Comparison derived from troop distribution tables in SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 436–39, 444–51; (1868), pp. 732–47. Sherman received reinforcements in 1868 to help fight the Cheyennes and their allies.
34. See pertinent sections of Raphael P. Thian, comp., Notes Illustrating the Military Geography of the United States, 1813–1880 (Washington, D.C., 1881).
35. Abandoned between 1865 and 1868 were Forts Steilacoom, Wash.; Dalles, Yamhill, and Hoskins, Oreg.; Humboldt, Crook, Baker, Reading, and Camps Lincoln, Anderson, Jaqua, and Crook, Calif. Principal coastal fortifications were Fort Point, Point San José, Alcatraz Island, and Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and Forts Stevens and Cape Disappointment (later Canby) at the mouth of the Columbia. See appropriate headings in Prucha, Guide to Military Posts of the United States, and Frazer, Forts of the West.
36. Utley, p. 226. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 124–25.
37. Utley, pp. 225–27. “Snake” is a carelessly used term that has been applied to Shoshoni and Bannock as well as Northern Paiute. For identification of these bands and their leaders, see Omer S. Stewart, The Northern Paiute Bands, Anthropological Records, vol. 3, No. 2 (Berkeley, Calif., 1939).
38. See appropriate headings in Prucha and Frazer.
39. CIA, Annual Report (1866), pp. 5–6, 77–78, 89–91; (1867), pp. 71–73, 91–93, 95–103. The treaties are in Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2, 865–68, 876–78.
40. Military engagements and depredations on citizens, 1865–67, are listed by Superintendent Huntington in CIA, Annual Report (1867), pp. 95–103.
41. General George Crook: His Autobiography, p. 143.
42. The quotation is by Maj. Cyrus Roberts in Finerty, War-Path and Rivouac, p. 321. Finerty, a newspaper correspondent with Crook in the 1876 Sioux campaign, also gives good sketches of Crook, pp. 6, 55–56, 317. The lengthiest and most appreciative evaluation is by his long-time aide, Capt. John G. Bourke, in On the Border with Crook, passim; and “General Crook in the Indian Country,” Century Magazine, 41 (1891), 643–60. Some less attractive traits than described by Bourke emerge in Crook’s autobiography, cited in note 41, above. A balanced assessment is James T. King, “George Crook: Indian Fighter and Humanitarian,” Arizona and the West, 9 (1967), 333–48. There is yet no biography of Crook, a
lthough King is currently writing one. See, finally, the obituary in Army and Navy Journal, 27 (March 29, 1890), 582–83.
43. Crook, p. 144. Subsequent operations are recounted by Crook on pp. 144–59 and in SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 77–79, 124–25, 129–30, 140–41; (1868), pp. 68–72, 770–72. See also Oliver Knight, Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners (Norman, Okla., 1960), pp. 32–57, for the war as viewed by Joe Wasson, correspondent for the Owyhee Avalanche of Silver City, Idaho.
44. “Chronological List of Actions,” in Peters, pp. 4–9.
45. The council is described by Crook’s aide, A. H. Nickerson, in an appendix to Crook’s autobiography, pp. 307–9. See also SW, Annual Report (1868), p. 72.
46. SW, Annual Report (1867), p. 70; (1868), p. 44; Crook, p. 160.
47. Joseph P. Peters, “Uncle Sam’s Icebox Soldiers: The U.S. Army in Alaska, 1867–1877,” New York Westerners Brand Book, 9 (1962), 49–50. Lloyd Lewis, Sherman; Fighting Prophet, pp. 348–49, characterizes Davis as “a shaggy-bearded Hoosier who, as the son of Kentucky Indian-fighters, had run away from home at sixteen to fight Mexicans and to enjoy it so thoroughly that he refused a West Point nomination in order to remain on the frontier. Continuing in the army, he had earned a commission and had aimed the first gun that answered Charlestonians from Fort Sumter. He had fought in all the Cumberlanders’ battles, was reputedly the most talented swearer in the whole Federal force, believed in slavery, and was half admired, half feared, as the killer of the bullying General William Nelson at Louisville in September, 1862. Nelson had insulted him, and in the midst of a dispute studded with God-damn-you-sirs had been shot by Davis’s pistol.”
48. A wealth of authoritative detail about the Indians of Alaska and their condition at the time of U.S. acquisition is in a report by General Halleck’s aide, Bvt. Lt. Col. Robert N. Scott, Nov. 12, 1867, CIA, Annual Report (1868), pp. 308–17; and a report by U.S. Special Indian Commissioner Vincent Colyer, November 1869, ibid. (1869), pp. 533–616.
49. Peters, pp. 52–53. SW, Annual Report (1868), pp. 744–45.
50. Annual report for 1869, SW, Annual Report (1869), p. 136.
51. Quoted by Vincent Colyer, CIA, Annual Report (1869), p. 538. Colyer, a bitter critic of the army’s demoralizing influence on Indians throughout the West, found ample support for his thesis in Alaska, and his report dwells at length on the liquor problem.
52. Peters, p. 56. CIA, Annual Report (1869), pp. 586–87, 589.
53. Senate Ex. Docs., 41st Cong., 2d sess., No. 67.
54. Senate Ex. Docs., 41st Cong., 2d sess., No. 68. Vincent Colyer mobilized this testimony.
55. Peters, p. 57.
Grant’s Peace Policy, 1869–74
THE ELECTION OF GENERAL GRANT TO THE PRESIDENCY in November 1868 gave the army cause for optimism. So far as he had concerned himself with Indians at all amid the political turbulence of the years since the Civil War, Grant had supported Sherman and the other generals in their advocacy of a forceful Indian policy. He had also defended their actions against the strident attacks of the civilian authorities and their friends in the humanitarian community.
Civil-military friction had attained new intensity by the end of 1868. The army, disgusted over the failure of the peace commission of 1867, grew increasingly militant. The proliferating humanitarian groups, horrified by the bloodshed on the Plains in 1868, grew increasingly vocal in demanding reform. The civilians charged the army with usurping civilian authority, with debauching and demoralizing any Indians that came within range of military influences, with provoking unnecessary wars, with failing to discriminate between peaceful and hostile Indians, and with slaughtering women and children. Military officers, in turn, ascribed Indian troubles to the ignorance, incompetence, corruption, mismanagement, and rapid turnover of Indian Bureau personnel and accused humanitarians of pontificating on a subject with which they had no first-hand experience. Both charge and countercharge contained enough substance to suggest credibility and enough exaggeration and fabrication to fuel further controversy.
Army leaders continued to advocate a simple solution to the problem: transfer the Indian Bureau back to the War Department, its home before the creation of the Department of the Interior in 1849. Such a transfer, they argued, would end the uncertainty and contention over the respective roles, responsibilities, and jurisdictions of the civil and military arms of the government. It would promote efficiency by placing the Indians in the custody of capable, honest, educated officers committed to the well-being of their charges but also able, as Sherman emphasized, to apply force promptly, vigorously, and without the circumlocution ordained by the system of divided responsibility.1 It would promote economy by eliminating corrupt agents, abolishing a sprawling bureaucracy, and assigning procurement of Indian goods to the Quartermaster and Commissary Departments.
Opponents of the army rejected this reasoning. They, too, abhorred conflict of authority, but that could easily be remedied by subordinating military commanders to Indian agents. Transfer would not bring greater efficiency or economy either, enemies of the proposal contended. Above all, they ridiculed the notion of entrusting the moral, intellectual, and material improvement of the Indians to men trained for war and distinguished for neither moral nor intellectual superiority. As the Secretary of the Interior declared in 1868, “Our experience during the period when the Indians were under military care and guardianship affords no ground for hope that any benefit to them or the treasury would be secured.”2
A transfer measure had carried in the House of Representatives early in 1867, in the aftermath of the Fetterman disaster, but was drowned in the Senate by the movement that led to the creation of the peace commission. The commission at first advocated a separate, cabinet-level Department of Indian Affairs, but in October 1868, following the Cheyenne uprising on the southern Plains, came out in favor of transfer. Grant had participated in this meeting and applauded the proposal (see pp. 138–39). In response, as soon as Congress convened in December 1868, the House again passed a transfer bill.
As Grant took office in March 1869, therefore, the generals thought they had gained a powerful new ally in the battle with the civilians. But President Grant was not General Grant, and to the surprise of army officers his administration proved receptive to the reform impulses emanating from humanitarian circles. Although scarcely the author of the collection of measures that came to be labeled “Grant’s Peace Policy,” the President fostered the official climate in which they took shape and gained official adoption.3
The Peace Policy emphasized peace—“conquest by kindness”—and clearly contemplated continued civilian supremacy in the conduct of Indian affairs. Among its more prominent features were the nomination of agents and superintendents by church groups, a Board of Indian Commissioners composed of philanthropists serving without pay to oversee the disbursement of Indian appropriations, and an end to the treaty system by which Indian tribes were viewed as “domestic dependent nations” with which the United States must negotiate.4 All Indians were to be concentrated on reservations and there educated, Christianized, and helped toward agricultural self-support.
Despite this pacific emphasis, the Peace Policy, as originally conceived, contained much that military men could approve. Only the Central and Southern Superintendencies, embracing certain of the Plains tribes, were manned by church-nominated officials—all Quakers. Virtually all the remaining superintendents and agents were army officers detailed to the Indian Bureau. Moreover, while reservation management focused on pursuits of peace, the army had sole responsibility for all Indians off the reservation. Here seemed to be an objective basis for separating hostile from peaceful Indians and civil from military responsibilities. Thus, while not the exclusively military approach officers had hoped for, the Peace Policy offered the prospect of a combined approach in which the military role was influential and fairly clearly defined.5 And, as a further encouragement, the transfer iss
ue by no means expired with the birth of the Peace Policy. Although the bill passed by the House in December 1868 failed in the Senate, another gained momentum in the next Congress.
In the glow of civil-military harmony fostered by Grant’s unfolding Indian policy, army and Indian Bureau officials reached a “perfect understanding,” as Commissioner Eli Parker termed it, of their respective roles. Indian agents and military commanders received the resulting instructions in the summer of 1869. The Indian Bureau had “exclusive control and jurisdiction” of all Indians on their reservation, the army of all Indians off their reservation. The army would not interfere with any Indians on their reservation unless invited by the agent or his superiors. The army would treat all Indians off their reservation as hostile.6
As both military and civil personnel in the field quickly perceived, the new policy declaration left some basic questions unanswered. How, for example, did it apply to Indians such as the Apaches of Arizona for whom no reservation system had been developed? When civil authority asked the army to intervene on a reservation, who was in charge, the agent or the military commander? How could the Indian be prevented from using a reservation as a sanctuary from which to raid neighboring settlements? And if the army was summoned, how did it distinguish guilty from innocent?
Before a rational attack on these questions could be devised, the application if not the theory of the Peace Policy underwent a fundamental modification. On January 23, 1870, Maj. Eugene M. Baker and two squadrons of the Second Cavalry attacked and all but obliterated a Piegan village on Montana’s Marias River. Humanitarians branded the affair a deliberate and unprovoked massacre of peaceful Indians, women and children as well as men. Sherman and Sheridan defended Baker, pointing out that these Piegans were demonstrably guilty of depredations and that the casualty figures belied the charge of massacre. Of 173 killed, 120 were men and 53 were women and children, while 140 women and children were taken captive and later released. The army’s protestations, however, were overwhelmed by columns of sensationalism that filled eastern newspapers, and Baker stood convicted by public opinion of unspeakable barbarism.7
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