Wild Bill

by Tom Clavin

  Cody had been only eighteen when he first met Louisa Frederici. During the winter of 1864–65, he was with a Union army detachment stationed in St. Louis. There he encountered and became smitten with the beautiful young woman. After the war was over and he was discharged, Cody returned to St. Louis, and he later recalled, “I was not slow in declaring my sentiments to her.” They became engaged, and satisfied enough with that, Cody was off to Nebraska to drive stagecoaches between Fort Kearny and Plum Creek. But Louisa proved too distracting, and in March 1866, Cody was back in St. Louis, where the wedding ceremony was held. The young couple then boarded a Missouri River steamboat for Kansas and Leavenworth. There, Cody’s sister Eliza and her husband held a proper wedding reception, and soon after, he became the proprietor of a hotel he named the Golden Rule House.

  The reason why Hickok found Cody in Junction City was the latter was by then fleeing the hotel business. Not surprisingly for a man who had packed a lot of adventure into a thus-far short life, the Golden Rule House “proved too tame employment” and Cody “sighed for the freedom of the plains.” He had left Louisa behind—and come December, also a daughter, Arta—to find other work and was more than willing to ride again with Wild Bill. The two men traveled to Fort Ellsworth, where Hickok had been hired on as a scout. Cody came aboard in the same capacity, and together and separately, the two friends guided army units and sometimes wagon trains that had been provided with army protection.

  Cody had acquired his nickname the year before. A pursuit of several business ventures had panned out as poorly as the hotel venture, so he took to buffalo hunting for the Kansas Pacific Railway. The company had twelve hundred employees working on laying track and related chores, and they had to be fed. There were plenty of buffalo around—estimates at the time were that millions of the beasts roamed the Kansas plains—but a hunter had to be a good shot to kill efficiently and be ready to encounter Indians angered by trespassers on their traditional hunting grounds. Cody had plenty of experience evading and outwitting hostiles, but it was his prowess with a rifle in killing the animals plus the sheer number of kills that had witnesses referring to Cody as “Buffalo Bill.” The name stuck, and for the rest of his life, he would use it to promote whatever enterprise he was involved in, and especially himself.

  If Cody is to be believed: “During my engagement as hunter for the company—a period of less than eighteen months—I killed 4,280 buffalo; and I had many exciting adventures with the Indians, as well as hair-breadth escapes.”

  In Junction City, Cody craved more of that rambunctious life. Hickok was happy to oblige. He had been given a new assignment by Marshal Whiting, this one to round up a gang of army deserters and thieves. Perhaps Buffalo Bill would like to join him?

  He did, and the two friends set off. They were next seen in Topeka, with a familiar result to their lawman labors. As the March 28, 1868, issue of The Topeka Leader reported, “W.F. Cody, government detective, and Wm. Haycock, Deputy U.S. Marshal, brought eleven prisoners and lodged them in our calaboose on Monday last—a band of robbers having their headquarters on the Solomon, charged with stealing government property and desertion.”1

  That summer, with Cody having presumably returned to his family, Hickok signed on to scout for the Tenth Cavalry Regiment. Perhaps a little speculation is permitted here. Hickok may have been one of the few scouts who would take on such a task … or at least willingly. The regiment was made up of black troopers, who became known as “Buffalo Soldiers.” Given Hickok’s family history, being a guide for them did not pose a problem.

  The Tenth U.S. Cavalry had been formed at Fort Leavenworth in 1866, composed of black enlisted men and white officers (there was no such thing as a black officer). By the end of July 1867, eight companies of enlisted men had been recruited from the Departments of the Missouri, Arkansas, and the Platte. They were under the overall command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson. The Pittsburgh native had been a music teacher before the Civil War, then had distinguished himself in battle, especially in what became known as Grierson’s Raid, from LaGrange, Tennessee, to Baton Rouge, a pivotal part of General Grant’s Vicksburg campaign in 1863. The following year, Grierson’s cavalry force defeated that of General Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Battle of Tupelo. After the war, becoming head of the Tenth Cavalry could not have been the most coveted command, but Grierson championed the abilities of black soldiers—often putting him at odds with superiors—and he retained this position as commander of the Tenth for twenty-four years.

  Because of the abusive behavior of the commander of Fort Leavenworth, Colonel Grierson wangled a transfer of his regiment to Fort Riley in August 1867. Soon after, the Tenth saw its first significant action at the Battle of the Saline River, about twenty-five miles northwest of Fort Hays. After a railroad work party was wiped out, patrols from the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment accompanied by a Tenth Cavalry unit were sent out to locate the Cheyenne war party. Captain George Armes and his Company F of the Tenth Cavalry were following an active trail along the Saline River when suddenly they found themselves surrounded by about four hundred Cheyenne warriors.

  Briskly, Armes formed a defensive “hollow square” with the cavalry mounts in the middle. Seeking better defensive ground, Armes walked his command while maintaining the defensive square. After eight hours of combat, two thousand rounds of defensive fire, and fifteen miles of movement by Company F, the frustrated Cheyenne finally gave up and rode away. The black soldiers, without reinforcements, concluded 113 miles of movement during the thirty-hour patrol, riding the final 10 miles back to Fort Hays, with only one trooper killed in action. Among the surviving wounded was Captain Armes, who had been struck in the hip by a bullet.

  Hickok spent much of the summer and fall of 1868 as a scout and dispatch rider for the Tenth Regiment.2 In between such chores, he continued to tackle missions as a deputy U.S. marshal. One assignment brought him into contact with a twelve-year-old who would go on to have a long career as a western lawman.

  On the trail of a horse thief that summer, Hickok rode into Atchison, Kansas. He encountered a group of boys and girls, one of whom was William Tilghman, who was immediately impressed by the mounted stranger. Hickok was atop “a sturdy government mule” and “rode with the easy grace of a Plainsman,” Tilghman wrote years later. “Tall, he was over six feet, splendidly built, and his face as handsome as his form, with strong clear-cut features and keen dark blue eyes, long drooping mustache and hair curling upon his shoulders.” Speaking in “a slow assured manner,” Hickok queried the youngsters about the suspect. Tilghman would contend that this one meeting with Wild Bill inclined him toward a career in law enforcement, which would include serving with Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and other lawmen in Dodge City and later in Oklahoma. Tilghman was still wearing a badge at seventy years of age in 1924, when he was gunned down.

  With General Sherman’s okay, General Ulysses S. Grant (soon to become President Grant) had appointed General Philip Sheridan to head the Department of the Missouri. The saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” was mistakenly attributed to him, but there was no mistaking Sheridan’s aggressive attitude toward making the frontier safe from hostiles.

  True, Sheridan was, like Hancock, another in a series of Civil War heroes sent west to succeed where previous commanders had failed. But at least Sheridan had served on the frontier as a young officer and had some experience with Plains Indians, once describing them as “the best light cavalry in the world.” And Sheridan was accustomed to winning, having campaigned successfully against J. E. B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee, and Sheridan’s successful Shenandoah Valley campaign in 1864 had greatly weakened the rebel resistance.

  Sheridan was also smart enough to recognize that the western tribes were not dumb savages waiting to be wiped out or herded onto reservations. Unlike previous commanders, he was not about to underestimate his adversary. He had about fourteen hundred men under his command, and he expected the number of warriors the tribes could put on t
he warpath was three times that. Plus, the natives knew the landscape better than anyone. For some tribes, this area had been their home for generations. To have any chance, Sheridan had to have the best scouts federal funds could buy.

  That is where Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody, as well as several other plainsmen, came in. Being outnumbered, Sheridan’s various detachments could not afford to be surprised. Scouts would have to take the risks necessary to track the movements of Cheyenne, Sioux, Comanche, and whatever other tribes were resisting the soaring number of westbound travelers and relentless fort-building.

  In July 1868, the Cheyenne and Comanche began attacking settlements in Kansas. Farmers, ranchers, and emigrants on the trails were killed, many of them scalped and mutilated in unspeakable ways. Sheridan ordered troops into the field to track down the war parties, especially Cheyenne raiders led by Roman Nose. Still bitter over the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado four years earlier, the Cheyenne were spoiling for a fight.

  The second week of September found Hickok with the Tenth Cavalry at Fort Lyon in Colorado for what he thought would be a break from outriding Indians while carrying dispatches to and from General Sheridan. But reports were coming in about Cheyenne war parties nearby, and Hickok was sent out to see if this was true, and if so, where they were before the hostiles simply showed up outside the fort.

  That Sunday afternoon, he arrived at Kiowa Creek and found on one bank a burned-out wagon and several bodies. He kept riding to find a town and round up a burial party. That turned out to be Gomerville, fifty miles southeast of Denver. There, Hickok learned that the burned wagon had been part of a wagon train that had been attacked by Cheyenne, and some residents of Gomerville were preparing to go after the warriors before they could do more harm. Given his experience, they asked Hickok to lead the way.

  He and the thirty-four men of the improvised militia unit searched for days between the Republican River and Kiowa Creek without turning up a single Cheyenne. But one afternoon when they were returning to Gomerville, a large war party found them. Hickok’s group was dangerously exposed. Atop a sunbaked mesa, they dug in as best they could, using tin plates and spurs. They had barely begun making headway when the Indians attacked. Hickok and the other better shooters picked off as many as they could while the rest kept digging. Finally, a sufficient series of trenches and holes was dug to offer some protection. In the interim, though, many of the militia’s exposed horses had been killed. The Cheyenne wanted to make sure no one escaped.

  As it turned out, the warriors were the ones who had to do the escaping. They had not cornered a bunch of shopkeepers or an inexperienced army patrol but hardy frontiersmen who could shoot fast and well. Warriors were repulsed by a barrage of bullets, and even after they retreated, they were shot off their horses while figuring out what to do next. Frustrated, they continued to move away to what they hoped was a far enough range. If they planned next to wait until the white men were weak from hunger and thirst, they could not have known how effective this strategy would be. After eight days on the trail, Hickok and the Gomerville residents were already worn out and were low on food and water.

  That night, Hickok rode down the slope of the mesa and aimed his horse in the direction of Gomerville. Startled Indians fired rifles, but quickly Wild Bill was beyond them and galloping too fast for anyone to chase. His experience with the rough country coupled with the desperate situation of the men left behind spurred him on to make the night ride without a mishap. When Hickok arrived, he roused the residents of the town. Twelve armed men rode with him when he left.

  Shortly before dawn, the rescue party arrived. They crept quietly up behind the Indians, then let out loud yells and began shooting. The men under siege began shooting, too. The frightened Indians, believing that they had suddenly been surrounded by army cavalry, grabbed their mounts and took off. After one more trip to Gomerville with the men making a triumphant return, Hickok continued on his way to Fort Lyon.

  This siege and its outcome were harbingers of a similar but bigger one that happened almost simultaneously. By 1868, Roman Nose was a veteran fighter. “Perhaps no other chief attacked more emigrants going west on the Oregon Trail between 1860 and 1868,” writes the American Indian historian Charles A. Eastman. He was a Cheyenne whose command of warriors included Oglala Sioux, who had fought in Red Cloud’s War the previous two years, as well as Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.

  In this instance, Roman Nose allowed Sheridan’s troops to chase him until he reached the Arickaree Fork of the Republican River in Colorado. There, in mid-September, the Sioux and Cheyenne turned to fight, and abruptly, the pursued had the pursuers at a disadvantage. Roman Nose commanded several hundred warriors as opposed to only fifty or so led by Major George Forsyth. However, what was unique about this “army” force was that it was made up of experienced scouts, not regular troopers. Sheridan had ordered Forsyth to lead a smaller, more mobile, more experienced, and presumably tougher contingent than typical troopers. The thought was these white men could beat the Indians at their own game.

  This was innovative thinking by the top general on the Plains. However, Roman Nose was not inclined to be outwitted or outfought. At dawn on September 17, he attacked Forsyth’s camp. Almost immediately, the scouts were surrounded. But they did not panic, even after recognizing that no escape route was open. Having managed to turn back warriors trying to stampede their horses, the scouts took to their mounts and hurried to a sandbar in the middle of the Arickaree (later to be known as Beecher Island). This provided some cover as the Indians attacked. There were at least two hundred of them, with later (and probably less accurate) estimates being as high as six hundred warriors.

  The initial assaults by the yelling and whooping combination of Sioux and Cheyenne riders were intended simply to overwhelm the outnumbered scouts. But their ranks were shredded by the sharpshooters and their Spencer rifles. The next tactic was for small groups of Indians to make sudden dashes at the sandbar to kill just one or two scouts at a time and win the battle by attrition. The scouts shot the horses first, then their riders after they got up and were figuring out which way to go. Between these attacks, the scouts dragged the dead horses back to the sandbar to use as breastworks, and thus they were better protected as the day went on. This allowed them to scan the shore and aim at individual Indians before they could form an attack. The accuracy was disconcerting to the Indians, even more so when a bullet found Roman Nose, who was killed.

  The scouts survived the night. Before dawn, two of them, Jack Stilwell and Pierre Trudeau, slipped away from the river. Their destination was Fort Wallace, seventy miles away. They crawled through the tall September grass the first three of those miles, then began walking. They traveled only at night, hiding from Indians during the day. After four days, the exhausted duo found Fort Wallace. Meanwhile, the scouts at the Arickaree Fork continued to fend off attacks, with both sides paying the price. Seven scouts were killed and at least fifteen wounded, including Major Forsyth, who was shot twice and was not expected to live. Eventually, none of those under siege expected to live because in addition to the relentless Indian attacks, the men had nothing to sustain them but muddy river water and rotting horseflesh. And they assumed Stilwell and Trudeau had by now been killed, their horribly mutilated bodies left in the tall grass.

  At dawn on September 25, Troops H and I of Hickok’s unit, the Tenth Cavalry, swooped down on the entrenched Indians and routed them. The scouts, very much weakened by the ordeal, may at first have thought that Lieutenant Colonel Louis Carpenter and his Buffalo Soldiers were a mirage. The rescuers found at least fifty dead horses and Forsyth still alive and in command. Two days later, after the more severely wounded were able to travel, the combined units set off for Fort Wallace. Because of his ability to find the remote location of the besieged scouts, his actions during the battle that defeated the Indians encircling the sandbar, and his care of the wounded, Carpenter was awarded the Medal of Honor.

  Since the French and Indi
an War over a century earlier, winter in the United States had been a time for armies to dig in and plan their spring campaigns. That had remained true on the Plains, with the tribes repairing to remote camps that afforded some protection from the elements and army units holing up in forts. General Sheridan thought that such idleness was a waste of time. With a good supply of experienced plainsmen like Hickok and Cody, the winter encampments of the Indians could be located, and the cavalry could attack when the inhabitants least expected it and were most vulnerable. As fall waned, Sheridan ordered three columns, led by Colonels George Armstrong Custer and A. W. Evans and General Eugene Carr, out into the field. They were to converge at the headwaters of the Red River, where it was believed there was a large concentration of Cheyenne.

  Though Hickok was reunited with Custer from time to time during the campaign, especially as he outrode war parties carrying dispatches between the army column commanders and Sheridan, he was not present for the most notorious event of the fall actions against the Indians. What happened at the Washita River, where Custer’s troopers destroyed an Indian village, was a terrible reminder of the despicable actions of Colonel John Chivington’s troops almost four years to the day earlier at Sand Creek.

  As Hickok and most scouts and military men on the Plains knew, Custer had gotten into hot water with his superiors the year before, and it was something of a miracle that he and the Seventh Cavalry were part of Sheridan’s early-winter campaign at all. In a bizarre series of events, during a campaign in 1867, Custer had overmarched his men and summarily hanged several of them for desertion; then he himself deserted, detouring to meet his wife, Libbie, at Fort Harker. He had been tried in a military court and found guilty. The punishment was a one-year suspension from command. However, Sheridan, needing leaders of courage and initiative, petitioned Grant to allow Custer to return to the field two months early. Always inclined to fight anyway, the former boy general (still only twenty-eight) recognized that a victory in battle would best restore his reputation. Unfortunately for a Cheyenne leader named Black Kettle and his band, they were on the road leading to Custer’s redemption.