The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  With Sherman’s blessing, Sheridan launched the Winter Campaign of 1868–69 against the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, seizing their supplies and livestock, killing those who resisted, and driving the rest back into the reservation. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the great mythmaker, marching under Sheridan’s orders, struck the biggest and most controversial blow in late November in a surprise attack on a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on the Washita River near modern-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Traveling through a foot of fresh snow, Custer and eight hundred men overran a winter village of fifty-one lodges, killing dozens of men, women, and children. Among the victims were Black Kettle, the Cheyenne chief who was a signatory at Medicine Lodge, and his wife. In an eerie premonition of Custer’s own demise at Little Big Horn eight years later, two officers and nineteen enlisted men were killed when they ran into a superior force of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa braves coming to Black Kettle’s aid. Custer burned the lodges and winter food supply, slaughtered hundreds of Indian ponies and mules, and brought back fifty prisoners.

  Sheridan justified the slaughter of Indian women and children by accusing Black Kettle of engaging in the same deeds. Custer’s men had found the bodies of two white captives, Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son, Willie, both of whom had been killed by Cheyenne warriors. The troopers, Sheridan, wrote in his report, “had struck a hard blow, and wiped out old Black Kettle and his murderers and rapers of helpless women.”

  He flung the most hideous of accusations, characterizing whites who sympathized with the Indians as accessories to murder and rape—“the aiders and abettors of savages who murdered, without mercy, men, women, and children; in all cases ravishing the women sometimes as often as forty and fifty times in succession, and while insensible from brutality and exhaustion forced sticks up their persons, and, in one instance, the fortieth or fiftieth savage drew his saber and used it on the person of the woman in the same manner. I do not know exactly how far these humanitarians should be excused on account of their ignorance …”

  Sheridan believed such women were no longer worth rescuing, having suffered the classic “Fate Worse than Death,” and it might be best if they perished by murder, suicide “or the providentially directed bullet of a would-be rescuer.”

  While it seemed like a deranged and twisted notion, Sheridan’s formula captured the nightmares and obsessions of many whites—their need for retribution, yet at the same time their deep-seated belief that women sexually abused in such a fashion were fit only for death. Nearly a century later, the director John Ford would take the same theme and build The Searchers around it.

  PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT had seen enough. In an effort to end the Plains Indian wars, he met with a delegation of Quakers shortly after his election to the presidency in 1868 and agreed to appoint their clergy as Indian agents. Grant, as usual, put it simply: “If you can make Quakers out of the Indians it will take the fight out of them,” he told the group. “Let us have peace.”

  Lawrie Tatum, a balding, bearded forty-seven-year-old teacher living on a farm in Iowa, was one of those pressed into government service in the name of Grant’s peace policy. Tatum was a prominent Iowan known for his involvement with helping runaway slaves before the Civil War. Despite having no experience in dealing with Indians, he was named Kiowa-Comanche agent in 1869.

  Tatum came to the agency in Anadarko with few illusions. Kiowas and Comanches “were still addicted to raiding in Texas, stealing horses and mules, and sometimes committing other depredations …,” he wrote. “They were probably the worst Indians east of the Rocky Mountains.” The warriors saw themselves at war with Texans, not with the Army. But a prominent Comanche chief told Tatum flatly that “if Washington don’t want my young men to raid in Texas, then Washington must move Texas clear away, where my young men can’t find it.”

  Tatum quickly figured out how the warriors were exploiting the reservation system. “They told me a number of times,” he wrote, “that the only way that they could get a large supply of annuity goods was to go out onto the warpath, kill some people, steal a good many horses, get the soldiers to chase them awhile, without permitting them to do much harm, and then the Government would give them a large amount of blankets, calico, muslin, etc. to get them to quit!”

  From the beginning, the warriors taunted and exploited Tatum’s goodwill and naïveté. Comanches stole his horses and his mules. A raiding party killed a man at the agency’s beef corral, and killed and scalped another man six miles away. Tatum was forced to move the beef cattle sixty miles east to Chickasaw territory so they would be out of Comanche reach. All the Friends employees fled the agency, including Tatum’s wife.

  As so often was the case, the showdown came over the question of white captives. In August 1869 a raiding party killed a Texas rancher named Koozier and abducted his wife and five children. The warriors returning to the agency demanded two mules and a carbine as ransom for the family. “I told them that I should give them nothing at that time, and they need not come again for their rations until the captives were brought to me,” wrote Tatum.

  It was a tense moment. The Indians kept their bows and arrows at their sides as they spoke with Tatum, and one of them ostentatiously took the cartridges out of his breech-loading gun and put them back again. Another one took to whetting a butcher knife in full view, “turning it over from side to side, making all the noise he could with it,” Tatum recalled.

  “After the council closed an Indian came over to me and ran his hand under my vest over my heart to see if he could ‘feel any scare,’ “ he recalled.

  In the end, Tatum got back the captives. The Indians wanted large supplies of coffee and sugar and their usual supply of flour and beef, plus ammunition. He gave them only the usual amount, “and $100 for each captive, as approved by the department.” Working this way, bargaining for live bodies one family at a time, Lawrie Tatum recovered a total of twenty-six captives during his four years as Indian agent.

  The Quahadis, Quanah’s band, did not play these games. For the most part they stayed away from the agency altogether. Their message, said Tatum, was that they “would never go to the agency and shake hands until the soldiers would go there and fight with them; if whipped, they would then go to the agency and shake hands.”

  SHERMAN WAS INFURIATED by Tatum’s reports. After President Grant appointed him overall commander of the army in 1869, Sherman and Army Inspector General Randolph Marcy went to Texas to see the situation for themselves. They left San Antonio on May 1871 on a 430-mile fact-finding mission to the army’s freshly established Fort Sill, escorted by seventeen black soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry. Along the way, they observed burned-out ranch houses and abandoned farms. Sherman marveled at how anyone could live in such a dangerous area without expecting to be killed.

  On May 18, Sherman’s party crossed Salt Creek Prairie under the watchful eyes of 150 Comanche and Kiowa braves led by Satanta, Satank, Big Tree, and a Kiowa medicine man named Mamanti, who was known as the Owl Prophet. The Indians had left the reservation at Fort Sill a few days earlier for their annual spring raiding season in Texas. The night before, Mamanti received a vision foretelling an encounter with two groups of whites the next day; the vision told him to let the first pass unharmed. Thus Sherman and his men rode free. An hour or so later, a small wagon train of a dozen teamsters hauling corn from the railway line to Fort Griffin passed the same spot. This time the warriors struck.

  When Sherman heard about the attack, he ordered Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie, the new commander of the Fourth Cavalry based at Fort Griffin, to rush to the scene. It was a miserable rainy day when Mackenzie and his men arrived. “The poor victims were stripped, scalped, and horribly mutilated; several were beheaded and their brains scooped out,” Captain Robert G. Carter, one of Mackenzie’s subordinates, recalled. “Their fingers, toes, and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths, and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen
or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled with arrows which made them resemble porcupines. Their bowels had been gashed with knives and carefully heaped upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals …”

  “One wretched man, Samuel Elliott … was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death …”

  Sherman pushed on to Fort Sill, arriving May 23. When the Kiowa leaders arrived four days later, Satanta freely described to Lawrie Tatum what had happened. He was summoned to a meeting with Sherman at the post commander’s house. Standing on the front porch, Sherman signaled his men, and the windows of the house and nearby stables were thrown open. Soldiers trained their guns on Satanta and his followers. The Kiowa chief quickly shifted into servile mode, and sought to walk back his claim: he had only watched the massacre from a distance, he insisted, not participated in it. But Sherman ordered him, Big Tree, and Satank placed in irons.

  Lone Wolf came riding up, eager for a showdown. He sat down on the porch with a Winchester cocked defiantly across his lap. For a moment, a replay of the Council House massacre of 1840 seemed imminent, and Sherman would have been caught in the crossfire. But Colonel Benjamin Grierson, Fort Sill’s commander, grabbed Lone Wolf’s carbine and warned the Indians they had no chance.

  Satanta could not quite comprehend why Sherman was so upset, a fact that enraged the general even more. “I answered him that it was a cowardly act for a hundred professed Warriors to attack a dozen Citizen Teamsters, and that all his hundred in time would be hung up like dogs as he would be,” Sherman wrote in a letter to his son. “He begged me to take him out now & shoot him, but I told him he should hang in Texas. This they dread terribly.”

  Sherman ordered Mackenzie to take Satank, Satanta, and Big Tree to Texas for trial. As the journey began, Satank told a Caddo escort named George Washington, “Tell my people that I am dead. I died the first day out from Fort Sill. My bones will be lying on the side of the road. I wish my people to gather them up and take them home.”

  About a mile from the post, Satank sang a death song. Then, with his back to his guards, he pulled the shackles from his hands, scraping off the skin, drew a butcher knife he had somehow managed to conceal in his clothes, and attacked a guard. The other guards opened fire. “It took him twenty minutes to die,” Carter recalled. Mackenzie left the body on the side of the road.

  MOODY, THIN-LIPPED, and hobbled by wounds that seemed both physical and emotional, Ranald Slidell Mackenzie came from a family of warriors. His father had been a naval commander, his uncle a Confederate commissioner. His mother was the granddaughter of Revolutionary War soldiers and his brother-in-law was no less than Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the man who opened Japan to the West. One of Mackenzie’s brothers attained the rank of lieutenant commander during the Civil War, and another was a navy rear admiral.

  Born in New York City in 1840, Mackenzie graduated first in his class at West Point in 1862 and went directly into combat. Before the Civil War ended he received seven brevets for gallantry and was wounded six times, three of them at the battle of Cedar Creek in northern Virginia in October 1864, where he was shot in the heel, then hit again and temporarily paralyzed after his horse was shot in the head and catapulted him to the hard ground. Two fingers on his right hand were shot off during the siege of Petersburg—which led the Indians to call him “Bad Hand.” He was present at the Appomattox surrender at the request of Grant, who called him “the most promising young officer in the army.”

  After the war Mackenzie was promoted to colonel and commanded one of the Buffalo Soldier regiments of black troops and fought Apaches. In February 1871 he took command of the Fourth Cavalry, based at Fort Concho and Fort Richardson in north Texas.

  Mackenzie burned with ambition, but he was small, rheumatic, and awkward on horseback. Captain Carter, who became a loyal admirer, called him “fretful, irritable, often times irascible.” Lieutenant James Parker, another loyal subordinate, recalled the deep, uncomfortable silences when Mackenzie invited Parker to join him for dinner. “We are full of meditation,” wrote Parker, “and we meditate and eat and meditate.” Still, these same aides recalled how Mackenzie generously paid off the $500 debt of a junior officer, telling him to pay it back when he could.

  In early October 1871, Mackenzie led the Fourth Cavalry into Blanco Canyon in the lower Panhandle, the heart of Quahadi territory, to punish the warriors who refused to submit to reservation rule. Few white men had ventured into this region ever since Coronado’s doomed expedition for gold in 1541. Every few miles the canyon widened into a broad valley hemmed in by impassable bluffs and pockmarked with ravines, sand hills, and narrow creeks that fed ponds and lagoons. There were herds of buffalo, flocks of wild ducks, and, according to Carter, “occasionally a majestic swan, whose trumpet notes sounded strange to our hunters.”

  After several uncomfortable nights, the hungry and exhausted troopers bivouacked in a narrow gap between the canyon walls. Mackenzie allowed them to build campfires, tipping their location. Around midnight a dozen shots rang out in quick succession. Mounted Indians rushed the camp, riding by at full speed, ringing bells, screaming war whoops, and trying to stampede the six hundred horses and mules. The terrified animals strained at their ropes to break loose—“rearing, jumping, plunging, running, and snorting,” wrote Carter, “with a strength that terror and brute frenzy alone can inspire. They trembled and groaned in their crazed fright …” Officers shouted commands, “Get to your horses!” The panicked horses pulled up the iron picket pins from the ground, sending them hurtling and whistling like bullets. The troopers tried to grab the ropes, “only to be dragged and thrown among the heels of the horses with hands lacerated and burnt by the ropes running rapidly through their fingers.” The men secured all that they could as the raiders fled in triumph.

  “The hissing and spitting of the bullets sounded viciously,” Carter would recall, “and the yells of the retreating Indians from the distance came back on the midnight air with a peculiar, taunting ring.” Carter thought to himself, “We found them at last!” And then he realized a more accurate and frightening truth: “They had found us!”

  The Indians had taken some seventy of the army’s horses and mules, including Mackenzie’s own fine gray pacer.

  At dawn Carter led a patrol to search for the lost horses. A shot rang out in the valley, and through the yellow morning haze Carter and his men spotted several Comanches attempting to make off with a dozen more animals. The troopers gave chase, vaulting an arroyo and pursuing the Indians onto a flat open prairie ascending toward a ridge. Suddenly, as the sun rose high enough to illuminate the plain, Carter made out the forms of dozens of mounted Indians galloping over the ridge straight at him and his twelve men. He had fallen into an ambush.

  “It was like an electric shock,” he would recall. “All seemed to realize the deadly peril of their situation and to take it in at a glance. For a moment the blood seemed fairly congealed for we realized what the ruse of the Indians had been …”

  Carter had to choose. He and his men could try to coax their tired mounts back to the ravine, where they could take cover. But Carter knew their horses were too spent to make it. The alternative was to stand and fight where they were and retreat slowly, firing at every step. Carter ordered the men to dismount.

  The Comanches moved to encircle the small band of soldiers. The warriors, Carter wrote, “were naked to the waist; were arrayed in all their war paint and trinkets, with head dress or war bonnets of fur or feathers … Their ponies, especially the white, cream, dun and clay banks, were striped and otherwise artistically painted and decorated with gaudy stripes of flannel and calico. Bells were jingling, feathers waving, and with jubilant, discordant yells … and uttering taunting shouts, they pressed on to what they surely considered to be their legitimate prey.”

  Somewhere behind the warriors, high up one of the canyon walls, Carter could hear Comanche w
omen ululating in a high-pitched tremolo, urging on their men.

  Carter and his men kept firing as they pulled back, then leapt on their horses and broke for the ravine. One of the men, Sergeant Seander Gregg, was riding an exhausted gray horse that stumbled. An Indian, taller and darker than most, came racing out of the pack on a coal-black horse. He was dressed in a full-length war bonnet and bear claw necklace. “His face was smeared with black war paint, which gave his features a satanic look,” Carter wrote. “A large, cruel mouth added to his ferocious appearance.”

  Quahadi Comanche camp, 1869–74. The Quahadis were the last of the major Comanche groups to surrender to white military rule and take up reservation life.

  Forty yards away, Gregg’s comrades tried to lay down covering fire. But the warrior pulled his horse behind the hapless sergeant, using him as a shield against the bullets. Carter shouted to Gregg to use his carbine or his six-shooter, but Gregg was too stunned and weakened to force a cartridge into the chamber. The Indian drew his own pistol and shot Gregg point-blank in the head.

  Many years later Carter, in his detailed but melodramatic account of the skirmish, would claim that the warrior was Quanah. The claim might be categorized as just another post-incident Quanah myth, except for the fact that Quanah himself later affirmed publicly that he had killed Gregg.

  He wheeled his horse around and galloped away with his warriors. At first Carter wondered why, but then he saw Tonkawa scouts riding to his rescue, bearing down toward his position; right behind them were Mackenzie’s troopers.

  The Comanches, supplied with fresh mounts by their women atop the canyon walls, shouted down taunts and insults. But they did not attack. By the time Mackenzie’s troops made it to the top, the Quahadis had melted away.