Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

“Tip” Thornburgh, youthful major of the Fourth Infantry, enjoyed family connections that had advanced him rapidly to field grade—from first lieutenant to major and paymaster in one step. Although many resented his good fortune, he stood high in the favor of General Crook, who had helped him return to the line when staff routine palled. On September 21 Thornburgh led a troop of the Third Cavalry and a company of the Fourth Infantry out of Fort Steele. The next morning, in Rawlins, he picked up a troop and a half of the Fifth Cavalry, under Capt. J. Scott Payne, rushed by rail from Fort D. A. Russell, near Cheyenne, Wyoming. Altogether, the column counted 153 officers and enlisted men, 25 civilians, and 33 supply wagons.

  No act of Meeker’s so infuriated the Utes as his summons of soldiers. Word spread that they came at his request to put them in chains and move them to Indian Territory. Thornburgh took the measure of their anger on September 26, when the expedition reached the crossing of Bear River (now the Yampa), about sixty miles from White River Agency. Jack and about ten other prominent Utes visited him and, complaining bitterly of Meeker, asked over and over why the soldiers were coming to White River. Meeker, too, grew alarmed and quickly embraced an Indian proposal to ask Thornburgh to halt his command and, accompanied by no more than five soldiers, ride to the agency for talks with the chiefs. The danger of an armed collision ran high, as both Meeker and Thornburgh clearly recognized. Although Thornburgh agreed to Meeker’s proposal, further reflection prompted him to modify the plan so far as to advance the troops to a camp site within supporting distance of the agency. Understanding that the major had agreed to leave his men behind, the Utes predictably interpreted their further advance as evidence of bad faith.21

  Shortly before noon on September 29 the cavalry column splashed across Milk Creek, a stream that marked the northern border of the Ute Reservation some fifteen miles north of White River Agency. Thornburgh now had with him only the cavalry, about 120 troopers. The infantry and eight wagons had remained at the camp site of September 25 on Fortification Creek to establish a depot for forwarding supplies from Fort Steele. On a ridge beyond Milk Creek, Jack, with about 100 well-armed warriors, commanded the trail. As soon as Thornburgh saw them, he deployed his horsemen to the right and left but also sent his adjutant, Lt. Samuel A. Cherry, to try to open conversations. Jack later declared that the Indians wanted to talk, too, but “I was with General Crook the year before fighting the Sioux, and I knew in a minute that as soon as this officer deployed his men out in that way it meant a fight; so I told my men to deploy too.” Approaching the Ute lines, Cherry “took off my hat and waved it in a friendly way.” Then someone—Cherry said an Indian—fired a shot and the battle was on.22

  The Utes pressed aggressively on the front and flanks of the cavalry and threatened to get between them and the train, which had begun to corral in the valley on the other side of Milk Creek. As Thornburgh rode back toward the creek to look after the train, a Ute sharpshooter took aim and sent a bullet into his brain. Command devolved on Captain Payne, who drew the troopers back to the train. It had been awkwardly positioned, separated from the creek by 150 yards of open valley and exposed to fire from bluffs on two sides. Throughout the afternoon the Utes raked the corral with bullets. They also fired the prairie grass and sagebrush and very nearly burned the defenders from their positions. Backfires helped lessen the impact of the flames when they struck the corral. By nightfall, in addition to Major Thornburgh, ten men lay dead and another twenty-three (including Payne, another officer, and the surgeon) wounded. Three-fourths of the horses and mules had been hit. The Utes later conceded twenty-three warriors killed in the fighting on this day.23

  Having shed soldiers’ blood, the Utes had little to lose by turning their fury on the cause of their troubles. On the afternoon of September 29, as fighting raged on Milk Creek, warriors methodically slaughtered Meeker and nine of his employees at White River Agency. They spared Mrs. Meeker and daughter Josephine, carrying them and another woman and her two children into captivity.

  That night, Captain Payne started couriers northward with word of his situation, and in the predawn hours of October 1 news of Milk Creek sped over the telegraph wires from Rawlins. By the morning of October 2, Union Pacific trains had deposited the first elements of a relief force at Rawlins. Under Col. Wesley Merritt, four troops of the Fifth Cavalry and five companies of the Fourth Infantry hurried south on the road to Milk Creek. Also on October 2 Captain Dodge and his black troopers from Middle Park rode into Payne’s lines. Dodge had learned of Milk Creek from settlers and had made a twenty-three-hour forced march to the battlefield. He found Payne still pinned down by long-range fire and now with forty-two wounded. Within a short time all of Dodge’s horses had fallen victim to Indian marksmen.24 The Utes maintained the siege until Merritt’s arrival on the morning of October 5, then, after a brief skirmish, drew off to the south.

  That afternoon a messenger reached Merritt from the south. He had copies of a letter from Ouray to the White River chiefs commanding them to stop fighting, and he reported that Jack and his associates had consented to obey Ouray’s injunction. The messenger also gave his opinion, based on inferences drawn from Jack, that Meeker had been killed and the agency women made prisoners. On October 11, having arranged for Payne and his men to return to Rawlins, Merritt marched to White River Agency. He found the buildings burned and the bodies of Meeker and his employees lying where they had fallen.

  News of the Milk Creek disaster and the slayings at White River electrified the nation, and suspense over the fate of the captive women sustained public interest in the army’s response. Sheridan poured reinforcements into the Ute country. Union Pacific officials, Crook’s aide recalled, “turned over their track to General Williams and Colonel Ludington, the two staff officers charged with aiding the Merritt expedition.”25 By October 11, when he reached the agency, Merritt commanded more than 700 soldiers, and as many more, elements of the Third Cavalry and Fourth, Seventh, Ninth, and Fourteenth Infantry, were hurrying to join him. General Pope placed other forces south and east of the Ute Reservation. Col. Edward Hatch concentrated about 500 men of the Ninth Cavalry and Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-second Infantry at Fort Lewis, a new post at Pagosa Springs, on the upper San Juan River.26 Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie brought six troops of the Fourth Cavalry from Texas and took station at Fort Garland, in the San Luis Valley. Infantry units swelled his command to 1,500.

  Although Sherman and Sheridan favored prompt and severe punishment of the Utes, Interior Secretary Carl Schurz stepped in to blunt their response. He feared that a large-scale offensive would involve all the Utes in war and signal the death of the Meeker women. Through Ouray, Schurz believed, the release of the captives and a peaceful settlement of the conflict might be arranged. For this mission he selected former Ute agent Charles Adams, then a postal inspector in Colorado, and commissioned him a special agent of the Interior Department. With the fate of the captive women in the balance, Sherman could hardly turn down Schurz’s request on October 13 to call off the offensive while Adams pursued his assignment.

  The order caught Merritt already in motion southward toward Grand River in search of the White River Utes. Returning to the agency, he expressed his wonder at “being equipped for a campaign by one arm of the government and halted in its execution by another arm of the same government, on the verge of winter in a country where all campaigning very shortly will be beyond human execution.” Sheridan put it more strongly. He had fifteen to sixteen hundred men at White River Agency, dependent for supplies on a long and difficult road to railhead that would soon be closed by winter snow. “We went to the agency at the solicitation of the Indian Bureau, whose agent was murdered and our men killed and wounded, and now we are left in the heart of the mountains with our hands tied and the danger of being snowed in staring us in the face. I am not easily discouraged, but it looks as though we had been pretty badly sold out in this business.”27

  But the complaints of the generals subsided when Adams succeeded
in freeing the women. Accompanied by a delegation of Utes, including a chief specially commissioned by the ailing Ouray to speak for him, Adams sought out the camps of the White River Utes atop Grand Mesa. In a stormy conference on October 21 he persuaded their leaders to yield the women—although only after Ouray’s emissary threatened to mobilize the rest of the Utes in a war against the rebels and Adams promised to stop the advance of Merritt’s soldiers. Adams journeyed on north to Merritt’s camp and gave his news to the world in a dispatch telegraphed from Rawlins.

  The big commands assembled at White River and Forts Lewis and Garland served mainly as stage dressing for the remaining scenes of the Ute drama. Colonel Hatch sat with Adams and Ouray on a commission named by Secretary Schurz to examine witnesses and single out Indians deserving punishment. After a series of tedious and confusing meetings at Los Pinos Agency during November and December, the commission finally decided that the Utes had not intended to fight Thornburgh and that none should be judged culpable. At the same time two of the commissioners—Ouray dissenting—listed twelve Indians for further trial for the murder of the agency personnel and the “outrages” visited on the women during their captivity.28

  The question of punishment was overshadowed by the larger question of opening the Ute Reservation. Coloradoans seized upon the uprising to demand expulsion of the Indians. During a visit to Washington early in 1880, Ouray and a delegation of chiefs acceded to an agreement drawn up by the Indian Bureau. In consideration of cash payments and the creation of a trust fund, the White River Utes were to move to Utah and settle on the Uintah Reservation, while the rest of the tribesmen were to take farming lands in severalty in the Gunnison and La Plata River valleys of southwestern Colorado. Also, Ute leaders were to use their influence to apprehend the twelve Indians charged with crime by the Hatch Commission. Approving the agreement on June 15, 1880, Congress added provisos that blocked the White River share of the money until the twelve Indians had been surrendered and also that tapped this money for annual payments to the Meeker women and other relatives of the men slain at the agency on September 29, 1879. A commission headed by that perennial commission chairman, George W. Manypenny, went to Colorado in the summer of 1880 and, in accordance with the Treaty of 1868, obtained the signatures on this agreement of three-fourths of the tribe’s adult males. On August 24, 1880, while assisting the commission in this task, Ouray finally succumbed to Bright’s Disease at the age of forty-seven.29

  Colonel Merritt returned to his station in November 1879, but a large portion of his command passed a comfortless winter in makeshift shelters at White River Agency. In July 1880 these troops were replaced by six companies of the Sixth Infantry, which occupied the site, under less trying conditions, through the winter of 1880–81. Colonel Mackenzie, after wintering at Fort Garland, pushed his force across the mountains to Los Pinos Agency in May 1880 and used them to keep peace between the Indians and whites anticipating the opening of Ute lands.

  By the summer of 1881 most of the White River Utes had moved to the Uintah Reservation, lured by annuity payments that tacitly acknowledged the impossibility of further prosecution of the twelve “criminals.”30 Also, another reservation had been established adjacent to the Uintah Reservation for the Uncompahgre and Tabaguache Utes of Los Pinos. They had been unable to find enough farming lands along the Gunnison and at length had agreed to move to Utah too. At the last moment they balked, but Colonel Mackenzie staged an impressive display of force, and they went.

  In September 1881 the infantry at the old White River Agency site moved downstream to the Green River and established Fort Thornburgh to guard the Indians now collected on the two Utah reservations. The post was moved northward to a new location in the spring of 1882 and abandoned in 1883. The Southern Utes—Moache, Capote, and Wiminuche—remained in southwestern Colorado, occupying a narrow strip of territory along the New Mexico border. In 1881 Fort Lewis was moved from Pagosa Springs seventy-five miles westward to La Plata River to watch over these Indians.

  The troubles at White River Agency grew out of Agent Meeker’s stubborn attempt at instant acculturation. “I don’t think that Mr. Meeker understood those Indians,” testified the perceptive Charles Adams. “He was a great agriculturist, and he thought he could succeed in forcing the Indians to work and to accept the situation as farmers, but he did not take into consideration that it is almost impossible to force Indians into that sort of labor all at once.”31 But Meeker’s policy did not ordain the violence of September 29, 1879. That occurred, probably without premeditation, because the Utes believed Thornburgh and Meeker guilty of bad faith. Considerable evidence fortifies Adams’ initial opinion that “if Major Thornburgh had gone to the agency with escort simply, the whole trouble would have been averted; that the party of young men under Jack went out to fight unknown to the older chiefs, and that the loss of so many young men excited the others so that the killing at the agency could not be averted.”32 Yet this conclusion does not necessarily convict Thornburgh of faulty decisions. He knew the Indians to be exceedingly agitated and threatening violence momentarily. Prudence demanded that he not place himself so far from the support of his command as to be wholly at their mercy. Crossing Milk Creek onto the reservation, however, he unwittingly set off the explosion of which he and Meeker became the most prominent casualties.

  The Ute War opened as a military show but quickly turned into a civilian show. The finale came as the product of diplomacy rather than force, with no military role beyond Colonel Hatch’s membership on the peace commission and the influence on Ute decisions of almost 4,000 soldiers massed menacingly in the background. After violence removed Meeker and Thornburgh, the central figures were Schurz, Adams, and Ouray. Schurz, despite some eccentricities one of the ablest administrators ever to head the Interior Department, took personal command of the diplomatic effort and steered it skillfully through, the tortuous politics of the situation. Adams carried out his assignment with sensitivity and political acumen. Ouray demonstrated that, despite declining powers, he still possessed an almost bicultural grasp of the Indian and white social, political, and economic orders and in a showdown could still impose his will on other Ute leaders. Together, Schurz, Adams, and Ouray produced a settlement that avoided further bloodshed.

  NOTES

  1. Population statistics are from CIA, Annual Report (1877), p. 292. For a history of the Bannocks, see Brigham D. Madsen, The Bannock of Idaho (Caldwell, Ida., 1958). Although seriously flawed, the standard history of the Bannock War is George F. Brimlow, The Bannock Indian War of 1878 (Caldwell, Ida., 1938).

  2. CIA, Annual Report (1878), pp. 290–92. Stewart, The Northern Paiute Bands, deals with the organization and distribution of these Indians.

  3. Army and Navy Journal, 15 (Aug. 10, 1878), 5. See also Crook’s annual report in SW, Annual Report (1878), p. 90. The Bannocks drew rations, according to Crook, sufficient for four out of seven days.

  4. Madsen, pp. 202–7. Brimlow, chaps. 4–5. CIA, Annual Report (1878), pp. xii–xx, 49–50, 118–19. SW, Annual Report (1878), p. 90.

  5. For these operations, in addition to sources already cited, see Howard’s annual report and a compendium of official correspondence annexed to General McDowell’s annual report in SW, Annual Report (1878), pp. 127–92, 208–36. See also Don Russell, One Hundred and Three Fights and Scrimmages: The Story of General Reuben F. Bernard (Washington, D.C., 1936), chap. 8; Howard, My Life and Experiences among Our Hostile Indians, chaps. 27–31; R. Ross Arnold, The Indian Wars of Idaho (Caldwell, Ida., 1932),. chaps. 10–12; George F. Brimlow, ed., “Two Cavalrymen’s Diaries of the Bannock War, 1878 [Lt. William C. Brown and Pvt. Frederick W. Mayer],” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 68 (1967), 221–58, 293–316; and Chandler B. Watson, “Recollections of the Bannock War,” ibid., 317–29. Stanley R. Davison, ed., “The Bannock-Paiute War of 1878: Letters of Major Edwin C. Mason,” Journal of the West, 11 (1972), 128–42. The reports of the Malheur and Umatilla agents are also illuminating: CIA, Ann
ual Report (1878), pp. 119–20, 122–23.

  6. Howard’s report in SW, Annual Report (1878), pp. 170, 222. See also Russell, pp. 129–30.

  7. Miles’ report in SW, Annual Report (1878), pp. 224–26.

  8. Laufe, ed., An Army Doctor’s Wife on the Frontier, p. 346. See Brimlow, pp. 150–54, for other details of this episode.

  9. For these operations, see SW, Annual Report (1878), p. 67; Brimlow, chap. 16 and pp. 224–25; and Miles, Personal Recollections, chap. 13.

  10. SW, Annual Report (1878), p. 235.

  11. See W. C. Brown, The Sheepeater Campaign (Caldwell, Ida., 1926); Howard, chap. 32; Arnold, chap. 13; Russell, chap. 9; C. B. Hardin, “The Sheepeater Campaign,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 47 (1910), 25–40; SW. Annual Report (1879), PP. 155–60 For speculation on Sheepeater antecedents, see Ake Hultkrantz, “The Source Literature on the Tukudika’ Indians in Wyoming: Facts and Fancies,” in Earl H. Swanson, Jr., ed., Languages and Cultures of Western North America: Essays in Honor of Sven S. Liljeblad (Caldwell, Ida., 1970). pp. 246–64.

  l2. SW, Annual Report (1879), p. 157.

  13. Ibid., p. 159. Catley’s report is on p. 158.

  14. Ibid., p. 157.

  15. Ibid., p. 163.

  16. Standard histories are Robert Emmitt, The Last War Trail: The Utes and the Settlement of Colorado (Norman, Okla., 1955); and Wilson Rockwell, The Utes, A Forgotten People (Denver, Colo., 1956).

  17. CIA, Annual Report (1878), pp. 282–83, 294–95. For the 1868 treaty see Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, 2, 990–93.

  18. This background is set forth in the standard history of the Ute outbreak of 1879: Marshall Sprague, Massacre: The Tragedy at White River (Boston and Toronto, 1957). See also the account in J. P. Dunn, Massacres of the Mountains: A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West, 1815–1875 (New York, 1886), chap. 20. Correspondence concerning Ute affairs, 1873–79, is in Senate Ex. Docs., 46th Cong., 2d sess., Nos. 29 and 30.