Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Miles’ command consisted of seven troops of the Second Cavalry and seven mounted companies of the Fifth Infantry—in all 33 officers, 643 enlisted men, and 143 Crow and Cheyenne scouts. As the column moved up the south bank of Milk River on July 17, Lt. William Philo Clark and the Indian auxiliaries, scouting a southern tributary of the Milk, Beaver Creek, came unexpectedly upon a hunting party under Sitting Bull himself. In a running fight, the Sioux fell back to Milk River and crossed their women and children, then counterattacked. Outnumbered, the scouts were hard-pressed until Miles came up and dispersed the Sioux with two Hotchkiss rapid-fire cannon. The troops followed Sitting Bull’s trail to the boundary and halted. On July 23 Major Walsh visited the military camp and exchanged views with Miles. Their differing assessments of the actions and attitudes of the Sioux were barely concealed by official courtesy. Next Miles rounded up several hundred “Red River half-breeds,” from whom the Sioux obtained ammunition, and expelled them from U.S. territory. Then, in obedience to orders originating with a President anxious to avoid any offense to the Canadian government, he withdrew to the Missouri and in September broke up the expedition.42

  Terry heaped fulsome praise on Miles, and Sherman and Sheridan, doubtless relieved that no diplomatic trouble had been provoked, added their compliments. The Mounted Police,.however, believed that the U.S. Army’s attack on Sitting Bull had simply deferred the day when he would surrender. “So long as there remains a gopher to eat,” he vowed to Major Walsh, “I will not go back.” But the disappearance of the buffalo placed even the gopher in peril, and throughout 1879 and 1880 the Sioux camps dwindled as, one after another, the chiefs took their hungry people across the boundary to surrender. At last, on July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull and forty-five men, sixty-seven women, and seventy-three children rode into Fort Buford, the final vestige of the mighty alliance that had crushed Custer five years earlier. Sitting Bull handed his Winchester to his eight-year-old son and told him to present it to the post commander, Maj. David H. Brotherton. “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle,” the chief declared, “and this day have given it to you.”43

  In May and June 1881 a procession of chartered steamers transported almost 3,000 Sioux down the Missouri River to Fort Yates, the military post guarding Standing Rock Agency, for assignment to appropriate agencies. On July 29 the General Sherman cast off from Fort Buford with Sitting Bull and those who had surrendered with him. Although it paused at Fort Yates, the vessel continued downstream and debarked its passengers at Fort Randall. The government was not quite ready to set the old chief free among the reservation Sioux. For two years he would live under the rifles of the soldiers at Fort Randall.

  Nelson A. Miles was not present at the surrender of Sitting Bull to savor the triumph and garner the laurels. In December 1880 his long-prosecuted offensive on the political front had yielded him the star of a brigadier general,44 and he left the Yellowstone to assume command of the Department of the Columbia. Nevertheless, more than any other officer, Miles deserved the laurels for converting the disasters of the summer of 1876 into the succession of achievements that culminated at Fort Buford on July 19, 1881.

  In part his success stemmed from the establishment of a permanent post on the Yellowstone. Tongue River Cantonment and its successor, Fort Keogh, afforded Miles the invaluable asset of a fixed base in the heart of the Indian country. It domiciled his troops within comparatively easy striking range of the enemy. It greatly simplified the logistical problem that had so plagued Crook and Terry. And it helped undermine the morale and resilience of the Indians.

  A larger part of the explanation, however, lay in the abilities of Colonel Miles. He was an excellent regimental commander. John F. Finerty, the Chicago Times correspondent who observed him in 1876 and went with him to Milk River in 1879, described him as “a splendid field soldier, prompt, bold, and magnetic. He was always in high spirits, which is a good thing in a commanding officer.”45 He was also energetic, innovative, imaginative, flexible in strategy and tactics, and inflexible in pursuit of objectives. Together with less attractive traits rooted in vanity and ambition, Miles displayed all these qualities in Montana between 1876 and 1880.

  Neither weather nor fatigue turned Miles from his course, nor did the tendency to overestimate enemy capabilities that afflicted so many officers after the Custer battle. He went to Montana determined to keep after the Sioux until he crushed them or forced them to surrender. This is pretty much what he did. The army contained few top officers so little deterred by obstacles.

  Ignoring the conventional wisdom that cavalry was necessary for offensive operations, Miles employed his infantry aggressively. His campaign of October 1876 to January 1877 seemed to justify his declaration to a congressional committee a year later that “a body of infantry troops can walk down any band of Indians in the country in four months.”46 The achievements of the “walk-a-heaps” against Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Chief Joseph’s Nez Percés, contrasting dramatically with the performance of the cavalry at the Little Bighorn, touched off an extended discussion in Congress and the army over whether infantry was not, after all, superior to cavalry for Indian warfare. Although in fact most of Miles’ successes were won with conventional cavalry and mounted infantry, he demonstrated new uses for the infantry on the frontier and in the process gave this arm renewed pride and a sense of accomplishment.

  Like Crook, Miles appreciated the benefits of Indian allies, and he made extensive use of them. The Cheyennes and Sioux who surrendered to him in April 1877 remained at Fort Keogh until 1881, nominally as prisoners of war but actually as auxiliaries to the troops. Together with Crow allies, they participated significantly in all of Miles’ operations as scouts and, in battle, as combatants. They were responsible for his remarkable record of finding enemy camps. In almost every engagement they figured tactically in important, sometimes decisive ways. Also, functioning as spies, they kept Miles informed of sentiment and plans in the hostile camps. Miles paid high tribute to this spy system, but regrettably he left almost no explanation of how it operated. Crook, too, owed a large debt to his Indians; as has been noted, they led Mackenzie to Dull Knife’s village in November 1876 and then took prominent part in the action. Crook also maintained an efficient network of spies who fomented discord among the hostiles and reported on their temper and intentions.

  Spotted Tail is usually assigned generous credit for the midwinter peace mission that eventuated in the surrender of most of the hostiles in the spring of 1877. The achievement was substantial, and it is not diminished by recognition of the army’s vital role in keeping them so stirred up during a long, hard winter that they were receptive to Spotted Tail’s inducements. Crook and Mackenzie participated in this process: the action of November 26, 1876, impoverished the Cheyennes and disheartened the Sioux. But Crook’s subsequent operations did not threaten the hostiles. It was Miles, campaigning relentlessly in winter storms, who so wore down his adversaries that they either surrendered with Crazy Horse or sought safety with Sitting Bull in Canada. And it was Miles, too—although here the effect is less clear—whose aggressive presence on the international boundary served notice on the Sioux refugees in Canada that they could return to the United States only if they submitted unconditionally and went to a reservation.

  As Sioux hostility faltered, and even after it ended, the army continued to expand the northern Plains defense system. Forts Keogh and Custer had been constructed in 1877. Responding to the threat posed by Sitting Bull, Congress appropriated money for Fort Assinniboine, which was established on Milk River in May 1879 by Col. Thomas H. Ruger and the Eighteenth Infantry. Fort Maginnis followed in August 1880, blocking the Judith Basin route by which war parties from Canada slipped down to the Yellowstone. To the south, at the eastern base of the Bighorn Mountains, Fort McKinney was established in 1877 and named in honor of a lieutenant killed on the nearby Dull Knife battlefield. Sheridan himself picked the site for Fort Meade, establishe
d in August 1878 near Bear Butte on the northeastern edge of the Black Hills. Fort Robinson continued to watch over the Oglalas at Pine Ridge, while Fort Niobrara was built in 1880 on the Niobrara River to the east to watch over the Brulés at Rosebud Agency.47

  As usual, the military presence invited settlement. The Northern Pacific Railroad, reenergized in 1879 and completed in 1883, was an even more persuasive attraction. Cattlemen, sheepmen, and dirt farmers spread up the valleys of Montana and Wyoming. “Prosperous farms and cattle ranches exist where ten years ago no man could venture,” wrote General Sherman in his annual report for 1880. “This is largely due to the soldier, but in equal, if not greater measure, to the adventurous pioneers themselves, and to that new and greatest of civilizers, the railroad.”48 The surrender of Sitting Bull signified the passing of the northern Plains from the Indian to the soldier, the pioneer, and the railroad.

  NOTES

  1. The story is vividly told in Hanson, The Conquest of the Missouri, chap. 38. This is a biography of Marsh.

  2. 19 Stat. 95–96 (July 22, 1876).

  3. 19 Stat. 204 (Aug. 15, 1876). See also Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 7, 376; and Cong. Rec., 44th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 5674–75, 5694–96 (Aug. 15, 1876).

  4. CIA, Annual Report (1877), p. 14.

  5. Cody’s contest with Yellow Hand, a close-range exchange of gunfire in which Cody proved a better shot than his adversary, was greatly embellished by press-agentry and dime-novel sensationalism. It has been one of the frontier’s enduring legends, dramatized in Cody’s Wild West shows and, more recently, in several motion pictures. For Merritt’s movements, see King, Campaigning with Crook, chap. 3; and “The Story of a March,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 3 (1890), 121–29; James T. King, War Eagle, chap. 7; Price, Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, chap. 16; and Russell, The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill, chap. 17. For Crook’s delay here, see James T. King, “General Crook at Camp Cloud Peak: ‘I am at a Loss What to Do,’” Journal of the West, 11 (1972), 114–27.

  6. From Fort Leavenworth, June 15, 1876, Sherman Papers, vol. 44, LC.

  7. King, War Eagle, p. 172. For this phase of the campaign, see Finerty, War-Path and Bivouac, chaps. 17–18; King, Campaigning with Crook, chaps. 6–7; Gibbon, pp. 50–64; Bourke, On the Border with Crook, chap. 20; arid SW, Annual Report (1876), pp. 466–71, 475–76, 504–9.

  8. Official reports are in SW, Annual Report (1876), pp. 506–13. Good accounts are in Mills, My Story, pp. 170–74; King, Campaigning with Crook, chap. 9; Finerty, chap. 20; and Bourke, pp. 369–76. The village contained many trophies of the Little Bighorn, including a Seventh Cavalry guidon and Capt. Myles W. Keogh’s gauntlets.

  9. Maj. Alfred L. Hough, arriving on the Yellowstone in October, found a consensus among veterans of the campaign that the annihilation of Custer’s command had so demoralized the troops and their leaders—“in fact they were afraid of the Indians”—that “everything went wild, there appeared to be no settled plans.” Robert G. Athearn, ed., “A Winter Campaign against the Sioux,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 35 (1948–49), 279.

  10. Feb. 10, 1877, Sherman Papers, vol. 45, LC. For a critical assessment of Crook’s management of the campaign, see James T. King, “Needed: A Re-evaluation of General George Crook,” Nebraska History, 45 (1964), 223–35.

  Seeking to learn what had gone wrong, Major Hough, quoted in the preceding note, found that “At General Sheridan’s Head Quarters nothing was said, and if I attempted to turn the conversation on the subject, it was avoided. At Genl. Terry’s Head Quarters the whole tone of the talk was apologetic; giving reasons for this and for that, everybody seemed to feel that they had done something for which they had to find an excuse. At Bismarck I met censure and criticism. At Buford it was ridicule of the most censorious nature.” Hough traveled from St. Paul to Bismarck in a special railroad car with Sheridan and Terry. “I was impressed with the opinion that both of them felt that the campaign against the Sioux … was a failure for which they would be held responsible by the people. Especially was this the case with General Terry who was nervous, excited, and depressed in spirits; he had changed much since I had last seen him in 1869.” Athearn, ed., pp. 274, 279.

  11. Olson, Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem, pp. 230–235. Nebraska History, 15 (1934), 277–95. SW, Annual Report (1876), pp. 469–70; (1877), pp. 533–34, 537–40.

  12. 19 Stat. 191–92 (Aug. 15, 1876). Kappler, Indian Affairs, 1, 168–72. Olson, pp. 224–30.

  13. Principal sources for Miles’ operations from autumn 1876 to spring 1877 are official reports in SW, Annual Report (1876), pp. 469–71, 482–87; (1877), pp. 487–500, 523–29, 540–47. Miles, Personal Recollections and Observations, chaps 17–19. Johnson, Unregimented General, chap. 10. Luther S. Kelly, “Yellowstone Kelly”: Memoirs of Luther S. Kelly, ed. M. M. Quaife (New Haven, Conn., 1926), chaps. 9–10. Kelly was Miles’ chief scout. Important to an understanding of these events are two excellent articles by Harry H. Anderson: “Nelson A. Miles and the Sioux War of 1876–77,” Westerners Brand Book (Chicago), 16 (1959), 25–27, 32; and “Indian Peace-Talkers and the Conclusion of the Sioux War of 1876,” Nebraska History, 44 (1963), 233–54.

  14. Miner’s and Otis’ reports, Oct. 12 and 27, in SW, Annual Report (1876), pp. 485–87, 485–87, 515–18. John S. Gray, “Sitting Bull Strikes the Glendive Supply Trains,” Westerners Brand Book (Chicago), 28 (1971), 25–27, 31–32.

  15. In addition to sources cited in note 13 above, see Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Feb. 10, 1877), 431.

  16. Hazen’s reports, Nov. 2 (2) and 9, 1876, in SW, Annual Report (1876), pp. 471, 481–82. Hazen had been kept at Fort Buford since 1872 and, despite seniority, systematically denied a part in any of the operations of 1872–77 in the Department of Dakota. During the trial of Secretary of War Belknap in 1876, it was alleged that this exile “in the Arctic regions” resulted from Hazen’s testimony before the House Comimttee on Military Affairs in 1872 accusing Belknap of profiting from the sale of the Fort Sill post tradership. Prickett, “The Malfeasance of William Worth Belknap,” p. 109. Hazen himself, however, attributed his eclipse to the animosity of General Sheridan. Sheridan and Hazen, it will be recalled (p. 153), clashed at Fort Cobb in 1868 when Hazen prevented Sheridan from treating the Kiowas as hostile. Hazen to Sherman, May 5, 1877, Sherman Papers, vol. 46, LC. Hazen finally won appointment as Chief Signal Officer in 1800. His seven-year tenure was stormy. “No one in the service,” the Army and Navy Journal marveled in an obituary, “had a more unfortunate faculty for involving himself in controversies.” 24 (Jan. 22, 1887), 520. Major Hough, quoted in notes 9 and 10 above, wrote to his wife from Fort Buford in October 1876: “I have a difficult place to fill, midway between two ambitious men, Hazen and Miles, who are making plans to effect their own advancement.” Athearn, ed., pp. 277–78. Hough was relieving Otis at the Glendive supply depot.

  17. The most detailed account of Crook’s expedition and the Dull Knife fight is Bourke, “Mackenzie’s Last Fight with the Cheyennes.” See also Lessing H. Nohl, Jr., “Mackenzie against Dull Knife: Breaking the Northern Cheyennes in 1876,” in K. Ross Toole et. al., eds., Probing the American West: Papers from the Santa Fe Conference (Santa Fe, N.M., 1962), pp. 86–92. The Indian side of the story is in Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, chap. 27; and Powell, Sweet Medicine, 1, chaps. 11–12.

  18. There appears to be no sound basis for the story that Crazy Horse refused the Cheyennes his hospitality. Its origins were in factional quarrels that developed in the village later and that prompted the Cheyennes, after their surrender, to criticise Crazy Horse. Anderson, “Indian Peace-Talkers,” p. 246, n. 24.

  19. Bourke vividly remembered Christmas Day 1876: “Beards, moustaches, eye-lashes and eye-brows were frozen masses of ice. The keen air was filled with minute crystals, each cutting the tender skin like a razor, while feet and hands ached as if beaten with clubs. Horses and mules shivered while they stood in
column, their flanks white with crystals of perspiration congealed on their bodies, and their nostrils bristling with icicles.” “Mackenzie’s Last Fight,” p. 218.

  20. In addition to sources cited in note 13 above, see Don Rickey, Jr., “The Battle of Wolf Mountain,” Montana, the Magazine of Western History, 13 (Spring, 1963), 44–54.

  21. Miles to Sherman, Nov. 18, 1876; Jan. 20, Feb. 1 and 2, March 14 and 29, April 8 and 30, 1877, Sherman Papers, vols. 45 and 46, LC. See also Miles’ letters to his wife during this period in Johnson, pp. 150–70.

  At the same time, Miles launched a campaign to win promotion to the next vacancy of brigadier general that fell open. He sought testimonials from all over the army and enlisted political influence wherever he could find it. Urging Sherman to advance his cause, he confided that the post he really wanted was Secretary of War.

  In a letter to his wife, Miles names those in the rear he blames for not properly supporting him: General Terry and his quartermaster, Maj. Benjamin Card, at St. Paul, Colonel Hazen at Ford Buford, and Colonel Otis at the Glendive depot.

  22. Sheridan to Sherman (confidential), Feb. 10, 1877, Sherman Papers, vol. 45, LC.