Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Mackenzie had spent most of September stockpiling provisions on the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos at the mouth of Blanco Canyon.10 Finally, on September 20, he led the column northward along the eastern edge of the Staked Plains. His eight cavalry troops numbered 21 officers and 450 enlisted men. Three companies of infantry guarded the supply base, while two escorted the expedition’s wagon train. Chilling storms soaked the troopers and mired the wagons. Only the grim determination of Mackenzie’s efficient quartermaster, Lt. Henry W. Lawton, kept the train in motion. Abundant signs testified to the proximity of Indians in large numbers.11

  During the night of September 26, about 250 Comanches rushed Mackenzie’s camp near Tule Canyon in an effort to stampede his horses. But Mackenzie had learned his lesson in 1872, when Mow-way’s men had recaptured the ponies lost in the Battle of McClellan Creek. The cavalry mounts had been staked, hobbled, cross side-lined, and ringed with pickets. Thwarted, the warriors sniped at the troops all night until, next morning, Mackenzie counterattacked and drove them off.

  Already, Mackenzie’s Tonkawa scouts had located an inviting target in the upper reaches of Palo Duro Canyon, the broad trough cut into the caprock by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of Red River. Mamanti’s Kiowas, Ohamatai’s Comanches, and Iron Shirt’s Cheyennes had taken refuge here. Their lodges, several hundred in number, extended down the canyon for three miles from the mouth of a feeder canyon, Blanca Cita. At daybreak on September 28 the Fourth Cavalry scrambled down the canyon wall by way of a narrow, precipitous trail. Before the first cavalrymen reached the bottom, the Indians began to flee. Each troop, upon completing the descent, charged through the villages in pursuit. Except for occasional skirmishing and long-range sniping, therefore, the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon was largely a rout. Only three warriors were known to have been slain, and Mackenzie’s single casualty was a wounded trumpeter. But the encounter was heartbreakingly costly to the Indians. Mackenzie burned all their lodges, food stores, and camp equipment and left the canyon with their entire pony herd, 1,424 head. The next day, at the head of Tule Canyon, he cut out the finest ponies for his own men and had the balance, more than 1,000, slaughtered.

  The Indian country now fairly swarmed with soldiers. During the first two weeks of October Mackenzie circled the head of Palo Duro Canyon before turning back to his supply base. Buell pushed up the Salt Fork of the Red from his supply base and found a warm trail. On October 11 he burned a deserted camp of 75 lodges. The next day he found another, of 475 lodges, and destroyed it, too. The trail turned northward toward the head of McClellan Creek to the Canadian. Discarded equipment and worn-out ponies recorded the closeness of the pursuit. But at the Canadian the quarry scattered, leaving Buell, with men and horses exhausted, to turn back in search of badly needed supplies.12 Miles, at last resupplied, had also been active. Elements of his command, now including Price’s New Mexico troops, scouted the valleys and plains south of the Canadian.

  Late in October Miles launched another operation. Scouting reports indicated that large numbers of Indians had sought safety in the western reaches of the Staked Plains. Miles hoped to get beyond them and flush them eastward, to be intercepted by Major Price. The movement was partly successful. On November 8 a detachment from Miles’ command under Lt. Frank D. Baldwin discovered Grey Beard’s camp of more than 100 Cheyenne lodges in the breaks of McClellan Creek. Baldwin placed his infantry company in a string of 23 empty supply wagons he was escorting, formed them in double column flanked by his mounted scouts and a cavalry troop, and stormed into the village. The surprised occupants fled as Baldwin’s unorthodox assault formation pursued them vigorously over twelve miles of prairie.13

  In Grey Beard’s abandoned village, which was destroyed, the troops found two young white girls, ages five and seven. They were Adelaide and Julia German, two of four sisters seized in western Kansas early in September when a war party waylaid the emigrant family of John German and butchered the father, mother, and eldest sister. The discovery of the two little girls raised hopes of liberating their older sisters, Catherine and Sophia, ages thirteen and eighteen.

  Major Price, posted on the Washita to head off Indians retreating in front of Miles, fumbled a chance to strike Grey Beard. With three troops of the Eighth Cavalry and two of the Tenth borrowed from Colonel Davidson, back in the field once more after refitting at Fort Sill, Price encountered the Cheyennes on November 8 moving across his front in headlong flight from Lieutenant Baldwin. “For some reason not yet satisfactorily explained,” Miles later reported, Price failed to attack. “After halting and grazing animals for several hours, [he] moved in the opposite direction from the scene of the engagement.”14

  As Grey Beard traveled northwest, toward the Canadian, Davidson took up the chase. At the edge of the Staked Plains he halted while Capt. Charles D. Viele with 120 picked cavalrymen and Lt. Richard H. Pratt’s scouts continued the pursuit. In two days of hard riding they wore out their horses without overtaking the Cheyennes. Viele called off the pursuit and turned back.15 Meanwhile, on November 12, Miles dispatched the Eighth Cavalry squadron in the same direction. Capt. Charles A. Hartwell commanded instead of Price, relieved by Miles for failing to cut off Grey Beard on the eighth.16 On November 29 Hartwell attacked a party of forty to fifty Cheyenne warriors, perhaps part of Grey Beard’s band, at the head of Muster Creek, a tributary of the Canadian. The troops gave chase for twelve miles, but the Cheyennes escaped safely into Palo Duro Canyon.17

  Throughout November and December 1874, “northers” pounded the Staked Plains. Soldiers and Indians alike found almost no relief from the torture of rain, sleet, snow, and freezing cold. At times the storms coated the prairie with ice, at other times buried it under drifted snow, at still other times left it a vast expanse of mud. Horses died by the score at the picket lines. Frostbite produced long casualty lists. Columns moved slowly and painfully, when they could move at all. Men lived in constant discomfort.

  One after another of the army’s striking forces yielded to winter blasts and logistical failures. Davidson returned to Fort Sill on November 29, Buell to Fort Griffin early in December. Mackenzie, after prowling the southern reaches of the Staked Plains, broke .up his command shortly before Christmas. In December Miles sent the Eighth Cavalry squadron back to New Mexico. On January 2, 1875, with two companies of infantry and a troop of cavalry, he started a final swing around the headwaters of the branches of Red River. Swirling blizzards, bitter winds, and subzero temperatures plagued the march all the way to Fort Sill. But “the troops did not seem to suffer or complain,” Miles wrote to his wife, “and it was quite amusing to hear them sing ‘Marching Through Georgia’ way out on these plains.”18 They reached their Washita base on February 3. Leaving Maj. James Biddle with four troops of the Sixth Cavalry and four companies of the Fifth Infantry to man a cantonment Sheridan had ordered established on the Sweetwater, Miles repaired to Camp Supply and disbanded his expedition. The cantonment became a permanent post, Fort Elliott, a year later.

  Bad weather and military pressure had caused defections from the hostile camps as early as October. During November and December Kiowas and Cheyennes in small parties straggled in to give up at Sill and Darlington. Reports from the Staked Plains portrayed the hostiles as cold, destitute, afflicted with gnawing apprehension of attack by the bluecoats, and ripe for capitulation. Not until January and February, however, did significant numbers begin moving eastward. Late in February, through the good offices of Kicking Bird and Big Bow, Lone Wolf and almost 500 Kiowas were persuaded to surrender. Some of the Cheyennes, including Medicine Arrows and White Antelope, fled northward to join the Northern cyennes rauier man piacc uicmscivcs at uic army’s mercy. But most of the balance of the tribe surrendered to Colonel Neill near Darlington during late February and early March 1875. On March 6 alone, 820 Cheyennes laid down their arms. Among the chiefs were Grey Beard, Stone Calf, Bull Bear, Minimic, and Medicine Water. Stone Calf freed Catherine and Sophia German, alive though badly used. The Coman
ches proved more tardy, but emissaries from Fort Sill induced them to go to the agency too. On April 18 Mow-way, White Horse, and almost 200 Kotsotekas and Kwahadis surrendered to Mackenzie, now commanding Fort Sill, and on June 2 another 407 Kwahadis, including the elusive Quanah Parker, came in.

  The surrender of Woman’s Heart, Satanta, and other Kiowas at Darlington Agency on October 7, 1874, raised the question of what to do with offenders as they came into their agencies. As General Sherman pointed out, “To turn them loose to renew the same old game in the spring seems folly.” About Satanta there was little disagreement—except, predictably, from Superintendent Hoag and Agent Haworth. He was speedily returned to the Texas penitentiary, where on March 11, 1878, he took his own life by throwing himself from an upper window. For all Indians who could be charged with specific acts of murder or theft within the past two years, General Sheridan favored trial by a military commission such as had disposed of Captain Jack and his Modoc cohorts. Other “ringleaders” Sheridan would confine at a distant military post such as Fort Snelling. For his part, Sherman would colonize a small handful of the worst leaders among a distant tribe such as the Chippewa of Lake Superior, where they could labor for their subsistence. The rest he would place under military control on their own reservations. “If the Secy of the Interior will give you half the usual appropriation you can safely undertake to maintain these tribes at peace,” he telegraphed Secretary of War Belknap. “The other half,” he observed, alluding to the imperatives of Indian Bureau patronage, “would maintain the agencies comfortably in some Christian land, say Ohio.”19

  Anticipating the formation of a military commission, throughout the winter both Neill and Davidson seized from each party that surrendered those warriors deemed guilty of murder, theft, or other offenses. At Fort Sill, Lt. Richard H. Pratt, commander of Davidson’s Indian scouts, was charged with compiling a list of offenders and gathering evidence against them. Both Pratt and Neill relied heavily on informers among the Indians themselves. Also, the German sisters pointed out Cheyenne warriors guilty of depredations and of abusing them during their captivity. Those caught in the nets cast by Neill and Pratt were placed in irons and held in the guardhouses at Darlington and Fort Sill until their disposition could be decided.20

  On April 6 a blacksmith at Darlington was placing leg irons on a Cheyenne named Black Horse when the taunts of some women prompted him to try to escape. Guards swiftly shot him down, but their bullets strayed into the main Cheyenne camps. After a brief exchange of fire, i oo to 150 men and a few women and children fled to a sand hill on the south side of the North Canadian River, where arms and ammunition had been secreted. Neill quickly surrounded them with three troops of cavalry. He raked the hilltop positions with deadly Gatling gunfire that killed six of the fugitives; but he could not get the cavalry to face the Cheyenne rifles in an attack. Even so, nineteen soldiers were wounded. That night, the Cheyennes slipped away and headed west.21

  Many of these Indians subsequently drifted back to Darlington under the influence of an amnesty promised by General Pope. A party of about sixty, however, tried to reach the Northern Cheyennes. Lt. Austin Henely’s troop of the Sixth Cavalry, out of Fort Wallace, found their trail and caught up with them on Sappa Creek, in northwestern Kansas, on April 23. About thirty escaped as the cavalry charged, but the rest were trapped in the depression of a dry stream bed. One by one Henely’s men picked them off—nineteen men and eight women and children. Two soldiers were killed in the attack.22

  Sappa Creek was the last of more than two dozen combat actions of the Red River hostilities. It took the lives of nearly as many Indians as all the others combined. Had success been measured in enemy casualties, the Red River offensive would be counted a dismal failure. But, as measured by the mass surrenders of early 1875, it was a resounding triumph. The hostiles had sustained damaging losses of food, shelter, stock, and other possessions. They had been kept constantly on the move, constantly in fear of surprise attack. They had suffered grievously from cold and hunger. Ultimately they had come to view the detested reservation as preferable to the terrible insecurity and discomfort of fugitive life in a frozen country swarming with soldiers. As in 1868–69, experience had validated Sheridan’s total-war strategy.

  Sheridan had conceived the overall strategy and spent most of October 1874 in Indian Territory helping to put it into effect. Augur, while maintaining his headquarters at Fort Sill from August until almost Christmas, left the conduct of operations largely to Mackenzie, Davidson, and Buell. Pope gave closer supervision to his subordinates. This infuriated Miles, who believed that he should enjoy greater independence, especially when Pope went east late in September. “It required a peculiar kind of genius,” he wrote to his wife, “to conduct an Indian campaign from West Point or Boston.” All five columns ought to be under a single field commander, Miles thought, and he left little doubt which officer he judged best qualified for the assignment.23 He was doubtless right, but in the end unity of command could have brought no more decisive results.

  The successful conclusion of the campaign is all the more remarkable because from its beginning all the commands were beset by supply problems of the most extraordinary severity. They originated almost entirely in transportation deficiencies. Contractors responsible for moving supplies to Fort Griffin for Mackenzie, to Fort Sill for Davidson and Buell, and to Camp Supply for Miles failed repeatedly to meet their obligations. In addition, government transportation organic to the separate commands was inadequate to forward provisions from these forts to the field depots and to sustain columns away from their depots as long as desirable. As a result, all the commands suffered unexpected delays. More serious, forage shortages, combined with the scarcity of grass following the summer’s drouth, hastened the breakdown of cavalry mounts.24

  The main fault lay in the contract system itself. Supplies were carried by private train owners subcontracted by a prime contractor. He owned no wagons or mules himself, but he commanded the financial resources to assume the contract. Neither he nor the train owners came under military control, and they moved pretty much at their own pace. Pope favored government trains; but if that could not be allowed, the responsible commander, not a quartermaster officer beholden to Washington, should arrange contracts and regulate contractors. “It is the work we must have done,” he declared, “and unless that is done, no amount of bonds or securities avail anything.”25

  Compounding these difficulties, the field commanders lacked enough government-owned teams and wagons to meet the transportation requirements that were not contracted. Miles, Davidson, and Buell were all forced back to their depots prematurely when supplies ran out—Miles early in September 1874 when in hot pursuit of Indians routed in the action of August 30. As Davidson remarked, “Expeditions with our limited transportation find themselves with only enough supplies to carry them back when they reach the present country of the Indians.”26 Miles protested vigorously that his sixty wagons could haul only enough rations and forage to supply his command for twenty-one days, and this was not enough. Pope, however, regarded this as simply one more of Miles’ insatiable demands. “For anything like efficient service or rapid movement,” Pope informed Sheridan, “Miles has all the transportation he can use advantageously, and to buy more mules and fit up wagons would be a long tedious and unnecessary labor and expense.”27 The complaint came not only from Miles, however, and Pope would have been well advised to go to the labor and expense, for in January 1875 winter immobilized the contract trains altogether. To supply the garrison of the Sweetwater cantonment for the rest of the winter, Pope virtually stripped his department of government trains and placed them on the road from Fort Dodge through Camp Supply to the cantonment. Even then, only Sheridan’s prompt dispatch of fifty wagons and teams from the Department of Dakota saved Pope the necessity of withdrawing the command.28

  Despite the cumbersome command arrangement and despite logistical deficiencies of the most chronic and exasperating character, Sheri
dan’s “saturation strategy” paid off. It did so because Mackenzie, Davidson, Buell, and above all Miles persisted in the face of adversities that would have afforded many another commander plausibile justification for returning to home stations for the winter. The victory, moreover, proved permanent. The tribes of the southern Plains—Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Plains Apache—settled unhappily on their reservations and never again challenged the government with armed force.

  The finality of the conquest may be attributed only in part to the vigor of military operations. The removal of leading men of the war factions was also significant, for it silenced the voices most likely to urge violcncc as a solution to reservation frustrations. The Attorney General ruled against Sheridan’s proposed military commission, but on March 13, 1875, the President decided that the “ringleaders” and “such as have been guilty of crime” were to be imprisoned, without their families, in the East. A dubious justice attended the selection of the “ringleaders.” The most noted chiefs were singled out and the balance capriciously chosen from among little-known warriors. On April 28, 1875, amid the wailing and weeping of Indian women, a train of eight wagons moved out of Fort Sill under charge of Lieutenant Pratt. Aboard, shackled to one another and to the wagons, were seventy-four Indians: thirty-three Cheyennes, including Grey Beard, Minimic, and Medicine Water; twenty-seven Kiowas, including Lone Wolf, Woman’s Heart, and White Horse; eleven Comanches, of whom only Black Horse boasted any prominence; two Arapahoes; and one hapless Caddo. During the long journey by wagon and railroad, Grey Beard, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, was shot and killed while trying to escape in Georgia.29