Were the raids of the Cheyennes and their allies crimes or warfare? The loose governing structure of the high-plains nations muddled the question of responsibility. Little Rock said, “I think the only men who ought to suffer and be responsible for these outrages are the men…who ravished the women, and when I return to the Cheyenne camps and assemble the chiefs and headmen, I think these two men will be delivered up to you.” But Edmund Guerrier swore in an affidavit, “I was with the Cheyenne Indians at the time of the massacre.…As near as I can remember nearly all the different bands of Cheyennes had some of their young men in this war party, which committed the rapes and murders on the Solomon and Saline.”44
There was something collective, something communal, about the attacks, even if they were not initiated by the Cheyenne Council of Forty-Four. As they multiplied after the initial bloodshed, more and more men took part. Ironically, treating them as a crime would import an alien view of this conflict. The Southern Cheyennes had won their lands through costly wars against neighbors that featured such raids. Now they rebelled against an intrinsically unfair relationship with the United States, which was stripping them of those conquests.
Sheridan was not about to question that relationship. As far as he was concerned, he was at war. He would inflict collective punishment, as Sherman wrote, “to make them fear and respect us.”45
Sheridan summoned two officers he trusted to carry out an offensive. One was Maj. Eugene A. Carr, commander of the 5th Cavalry. An 1850 graduate of West Point, Carr served on the frontier from 1852 to 1860, and won the Medal of Honor in the Civil War. Carr would serve Sheridan well in the months ahead.
The other officer was Custer. He arrived at Fort Hays on October 4. Sheridan ate breakfast with him and briefed him on his plan for a winter campaign. On October 10 Custer rode into the camp of the 7th Cavalry, thirty miles from Fort Dodge. He had “his hair cut short, and a perfect managarie [sic] of Scotch fox hounds!” Barnitz wrote to his wife. “We will march on the long contemplated expedition toward the Wichitaw [sic] Mountains and sand hills, and will in all probability see a great many Indians before we return. Some of us may never return.”46
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CUSTER NAMED IT CAMP SANDY FORSYTH, after his friend Maj. George A. Forsyth. It provided a temporary home for eleven companies of the 7th Cavalry in south-central Kansas (the twelfth company was on detached duty at Fort Lyon). Colonel Smith had gone on leave, leaving Custer in command of the regiment. The arrival of recruits brought his force to twenty-nine officers and about 844 enlisted men.
Custer ordered mounted drills and target practice, and selected the forty best marksmen for an elite unit of sharpshooters under Lieutenant Cooke. He received a shipment of manuals from Washington, and ordered the officers to take classes on long-distance signaling. Fresh horses and mules arrived, as well as hundreds of wagons. Custer requested pistols, a sign that he expected close-range combat. He received 550 .44 caliber army revolvers. Blacksmiths shoed horses and the quartermaster distributed flannel underwear, greatcoats, and other winter clothes.47
“He was impatient to proceed,” recalled Benjamin Clark, a civilian scout, “and harassed the men and his subordinates by his arbitrary conduct. He was a hard master, but his dash and cavalier bearing held the admiration of his troopers.” Clark offered his memories thirty years later, but his evenhandedness gives weight to his observations. At the time he was twenty-six, a former Union cavalryman and veteran of the plains.48
The most controversial step Custer took was to “color the horses.” On November 3—the day the nation elected Ulysses S. Grant as its next president—he required the various companies to exchange horses so that each had a single color. Captain Benteen hated the horse exchange, though he hated everything Custer did. Barnitz had softened toward Custer since his return, but even he called it a “foolish, unwarranted, unjustifiable order.” The officers wanted to keep mounts they had trained and trusted. It has often been condemned as an example of Custer’s obsession with appearances.49
In fact, “coloring the horses” sent a clear message to the 7th Cavalry. Custer later wrote that it was an old cavalry tradition, “bordering on the ornamental perhaps, although in itself useful.” It was a command-and-control device—needless for isolated patrols or garrison duty, but valuable in massed combat. A nineteenth-century field commander relied on sight to identify his own troops as well as the enemy. Cavalrymen charged, scattered, and swirled across the landscape. Uniform horse colors helped a commander make sense out of the chaos and give direction to his units. Custer’s order told the 7th Cavalry that they were going into battle.50
Of course, Custer indulged himself. He ordered one of his men, a tailor in civilian life, to make him a buckskin suit with fringes, which he wore instead of his uniform. He hunted daily. “I brought my shotgun and twenty-five pounds of shot with me and expect to have my table loaded with game every day,” he wrote to Kirkland Barker, president of Detroit’s Audubon Society. Custer’s two greyhounds and three staghounds, Maida, Blucher, and Flirt, were “my inseparable companions.”51
“We are going where white men have never been,” Custer exaggerated to Nettie Humphrey Greene on November 8. He described the arrival of his twelve Osage guides. Led by men named Little Beaver and Hard Rope, they impressed Custer, who enjoyed the exoticism of their painted faces and native clothes. He watched them mount “green untrained horses,” throw a stick on the ground, and fire at it as they galloped past at full speed. “Every shot struck the target.” He also complained that he had written two prior letters to Nettie without a reply. He did not know that this friend who had helped him court Libbie and married his best man had herself died.52
“We are going on what is likely to prove a pretty hard campaign, both on men and horses,” Custer wrote to J. Schuyler Crosby, Sheridan’s assistant adjutant general. “I do not ask to shorten the campaign. On the contrary I am in favor of pounding away as long as we can stand it or as long as we can find Indians.” It was, he knew, his only chance to prove himself after his humiliation. But he remained the same man. As he closed his letter, he added, “Be virtuous and you’ll never be happy.”53
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CUSTER DID NOT LIKE Alfred Sully. Though Sully held the same service rank, he had graduated from West Point two decades earlier and now commanded the Department of the Upper Arkansas. With a weak chin hidden behind a scraggly gray goatee, he dabbled in painting, which he had learned from his father, Thomas, a well-known artist. Sully was a veteran of the Mexican War, had fought on the Peninsula, then led an incursion into the Dakota Territory in response to the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862. Well regarded within the army, Sully married a Sioux wife. “Now, unaccountably, he turned into a cautious, slow-moving general who set the pace in an ambulance rather than on horseback,” writes Robert Utley.54
The command marched south from Camp Sandy Forsyth on November 12, along with five companies of infantry and an extensive wagon train. Six days later, they encountered a trail. Custer ordered his Osage scouts to examine it. They concluded that it was recently made by a large war party headed north. Custer wanted to follow it backward to strike the unprotected villages. To his consternation, Sully refused.
Soon afterward they camped between Wolf Creek and Beaver River in the Indian Territory. Following Sheridan’s instructions, Sully ordered the men to construct a permanent post that came to be known as Camp Supply. They erected palisade walls around a rectangular enclosure, with log blockhouses on two opposing corners. Here they were outside of the District of the Upper Arkansas. Custer demanded command by virtue of his brevet rank of major general (Sully held a brigadier brevet). Again Sully refused.
On November 21, word came that Sheridan was approaching. Custer galloped out to meet his patron. The stout little general immediately ordered Sully back to Kansas and put Custer in charge of the strike force.55
Jubilant, Custer invited his subordinate officers to go after nightfall to serenade Sheridan. “He receive
d us in his good, genial way, shaking hands with all,” Barnitz wrote of the general. “He received us in the open air, around a big camp fire. Like Grant, Sheridan is a man of few words, but he always looks very animated.” Barnitz thought he was disappointed that Sully had not allowed them to follow the war-party trail. “It has commenced to snow since I returned from General Sheridan’s camp,” Barnitz added, “and if it continues I suppose it will greatly facilitate the tracking up of our ‘Indian Friends.’ ”56
Sheridan planned for the 7th Cavalry to serve as the most important of three columns that would converge on the tribes believed to be wintering on the Washita River in the Indian Territory. This was outside the reservation established by the Medicine Lodge Treaty, but they were entitled to hunt anywhere south of the Arkansas. The ongoing hostilities, not the Indians’ location, gave Sheridan his justification for an offensive. He ordered Major Carr to lead a column out of Fort Lyon on a southeasterly course, and Maj. Andrew J. Evans to move east with another force from Fort Bascom, New Mexico Territory. The 7th Cavalry would march south under Custer. Sheridan said he intended “to strike the Indians a hard blow and force them on to the reservations set apart for them, and if this could not be accomplished to show to the Indian that the winter season would not give him rest.” He wished to ensure that “these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare.” They must surrender unconditionally or face “utter annihilation.”57
Sheridan wanted to deny hostile Indians any shelter near Fort Cobb in the Indian Territory. Wynkoop resigned as agent for the Cheyennes, refusing to be a party to another massacre. General Sherman sent a special agent, William B. Hazen, the man who had arrested Custer at West Point in 1861. He welcomed the Comanches and Kiowas, but told the Cheyennes and Arapahoes that they must make peace with Sheridan.58
Some historians have argued that Sheridan based his strategy in 1868 on his use of “total war” in the Shenandoah Valley. There, Utley writes, Sheridan and Custer “had deliberately set out to spread such poverty and despair as to destroy both the ability and will to fight. Now they planned the same treatment for the Indians.” Certainly past experience influenced Sheridan, but its impact should not be exaggerated. The “total war” in Virginia was not so total after all. The federal army took care to spare civilian lives—far more than in the Indian wars. Military necessity dictated the army’s focus on American Indian populations. The high-plains nations could never be defeated purely through combat against their fighting men. The entire people had to be controlled. And it was obvious that the best time for an offensive was winter, when their ponies were weak from poor grazing. The army had frequently conducted winter attacks against villages full of noncombatants. The true novelty of Sheridan’s campaign was the scale of his operation, with its logistics, multiple columns, and new bases.59
At Camp Supply, Sheridan had expected to find the 19th Kansas Cavalry, a volunteer regiment organized after the raids on the Saline and Solomon rivers. Led by former governor Samuel J. Crawford, it was supposed to support the 7th Cavalry, but no one knew where it had gone. With the trail of the hostile war party growing colder by the hour, Sheridan decided not to wait. On November 22, he called Custer into his tent and ordered him to move out at dawn.60
“The stars were still shining when Custer arose, swearing and charging around,” recalled Ben Clark. Custer ordered reveille at four o’clock, two hours before daylight. His brother Tom drew out his breakfast as Custer berated and damned the teamsters, surgeons, civilian scouts, Osage scouts, and eleven companies of cavalrymen until they aligned into marching formation before six o’clock. Tom’s delay “brought on an explosion of wrath from Custer, who charged into the tent, kicked over the mess table, and sent dishes and victuals flying in all directions,” Clark said.61
Clark served as Custer’s chief of scouts. The thin twenty-six-year-old “has long light hair, falling below his shoulders,” one observer noted. Quiet and unpretentious, “he is a man of excellent judgment and superior intelligence,” steeped in the lore of the plains. Yet he was not Custer’s first choice. He initially picked Moses Milner, a heavy-bearded, corncob-pipe-smoking, hard-drinking Westerner known to all as California Joe. A decade older than Custer and far more colorful than Clark, he went west during the Mexican War and spent twenty years wandering from Montana to New Mexico. Custer enjoyed his stories, as he rode along on an undersized mule. But he was a drunk, so Custer replaced him with Clark, who led a detachment of several civilian scouts, including Jack Corbin and Raphael Romero.
Roughly twenty-five, Romero was said to be a Mexican who had been taken by Indians as a boy—or else of mixed Mexican and Arapaho ancestry. He certainly knew the languages and ways of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes. “His hair never made the acquaintance of a comb, and his hair is almost equally unacquainted with water,” Custer wrote to Libbie. The men mocked him as “Romeo,” which amused Custer. “We have a great deal of sport with him. I threaten to put kerosene oil on his hair and set it on fire.” He added, “Yet he is a very good and deserving person, in his way.”62
At the last moment, Custer rode over to Sheridan’s tent. “His first greeting was to ask what I thought about the snow,” Custer later wrote. “To which I replied that nothing could be more to our purpose. We could move and the Indian villages could not. If the snow only remained on the ground one week, I promised to bring the General satisfactory evidences that my command had met the Indians.” Custer led the column out of camp—on schedule—as the band played, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”63
Snow fell, heavier, denser. The horses trudged through a white mire that reached twelve inches. “A very disagreeable day,” wrote Barnitz, who rode with “buffalo overshoes and lodge-skin leggings” to protect his legs as they poked out from under his greatcoat. The great horizontal of the plains disappeared behind a vertical, opaque wall. “It became unsafe for a person to wander from the column a distance equal to twice the width of Broadway,” Custer wrote, making a cosmopolitan reference to New York’s most famous street. He pulled out a compass and guided the regiment himself. Twelve hours after departure, they camped in the snow. The troops caught rabbits to roast over their campfires, and the Osages beat drums until long after dark.64
The next day the storm relented. Custer did not. When some teamsters took too long to harness their mules in the morning, he made them walk as punishment. The column moved out through the snow, hooves and wagon wheels cracking through the ice when crossing streams. The Osages directed the regiment toward the South Canadian River, into sight of an impressive set of buttes called the Antelope Hills.65
On November 26, on the bank of the South Canadian River, Custer decided to search for the trail of the war party detected near Camp Supply. He sent three companies to march eastward along the river, under Maj. Joel Elliott. At twenty-eight, Elliott was a year younger than Custer, and had commanded the regiment during his suspension. Born to Quaker parents in Indiana, the Burnside-whiskered Elliott saw heavy combat during the Civil War, rising from an enlisted man to the rank of captain in the 7th Indiana Cavalry. In 1865 he had served as Custer’s judge advocate in Texas. Impressed, Custer had added his support to a lobbying effort by Elliott’s political friends to secure him his post as major in the 7th Cavalry.66
Elliott took his three companies along the north bank as Custer crossed the river with the rest of the regiment. Custer marched south into the Antelope Hills, which he ascended to survey the country below. He was about to order the column to move out when a rider appeared in the distance. Putting his field glass to his eyes, he saw Jack Corbin, a scout who had gone with Elliott. He brought word that Elliott had discovered a fresh trail twelve miles away, made by the Indian war party as it returned south, 150 strong. It crossed the river and angled to the southeast.
Custer sent Corbin back on a fresh horse with orders for Elliott to follow the trail. Custer would head southeast, aiming to intercept
him near nightfall. He had the bugler blow a signal to call the officers together. For greater speed, he said, they would leave their tents and extra blankets with the wagons, which would follow behind with an eighty-man escort. Each trooper would carry rations and forage in his saddlebags, along with 100 rounds of carbine ammunition. Four ambulances would follow more closely, along with two wagons carrying extra ammunition and forage.
Just as Custer was setting out, Captain Hamilton came up. He had been assigned command of the main wagon train. He begged to be allowed to join the strike force. Custer allowed him to switch places with Lt. Edward Mathey, who suffered from snowblindness. The command rode out. They remained in the saddle until 9 p.m., when they found Elliott’s camp some thirty miles from where they started.67
Custer allowed only an hour for rest and dinner. They were now in the enemy’s country. There were no more bugle calls and no smoking. Anything that clanged or jangled was tied tight. The band did not play, the men did not sing, nor did they talk.
Hard Rope and Little Beaver led the pursuit on foot, examining the ground to keep on the war party’s trail. The temperature dropped again, and the snow developed a hard crust. The sound of several hundred horses crunching through the surface seemed thunderous. Custer followed, several hundred yards back, and the reunited regiment remained another half mile behind as it marched through freezing darkness.68
Hard Rope and Little Beaver stopped. Custer quietly sent an order to halt the column and went forward. “What is the matter?” he asked.
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