The Colonel and Little Missie

by Larry McMurtry

  But the West was not the settled South. The Indians were skilled mobile fighting units; they didn’t have plantations or small farms that could be torched—though when an American commander did happen to hit a well-supplied village, as Crook did in Montana in 1875, the soldiers did burn everything, including foodstuffs that they themselves would later come to need.

  Sherman may have been the first to realize that the advance of the railroads would very shortly doom the Indians. Most of them, with the buffalo they depended on, would be caught between the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific. If one hunter, Buffalo Bill Cody, could kill three thousand buffalo in a short space of time, what chance did the buffalo have when whole trainloads of professional hunters could come right to the herds by rail? No chance, of course; the buffalo would vanish and the soon-to-be-starving Indians would have to do as they were told.

  Sherman’s theory was flawless—the only difficulty was political. The tracks of the two railroads were rapidly getting laid, but would-be settlers, thousands of them, were making tracks of their own at an even more rapid rate. Westering became a national compulsion; there was no stopping the tide of immigrants along the Platte, across the Santa Fe Trail, or any way that seemed convenient at the moment.

  Ahead of these immigrants lay many dangers, but no danger greater than the aroused fury of the Plains Indians. The U.S. Army, tired and depleted though it may have been in the first postwar decade, was very soon being asked to make a safe way for all the white folks seeking land.

  Sherman had no tolerance for Indians who wouldn’t behave. His policy was clearly exterminationist; it may be that he best expressed it in a letter he sent to General Phil Sheridan as the great battle for the plains was about to be joined:

  As brave men and as the soldiers of a government which has exhausted the peace efforts, we, in the performance of a most unpleasant duty, accept the war begun by our enemies, and hereby resolve to make its end final. If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians it is but the result of what they have been warned against again and again, and for which they seem fully prepared. I will do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided in me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry on their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretense that they may choose to allege . . . You may now go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority, and stand between you and any efforts that may be attempted in your rear to restrain your purpose or check your troops.

  Sherman may have been referring to the Peace Party, those Congressmen or politicians who felt there should be an effort to find a middle ground with the Indian tribes. For this movement, which was not wholly ineffective, Sherman had nothing but contempt. He is one of three individuals to whom the bluntest of all policy statements—that the only good Indian is a dead Indian—has been attributed. The first to say it was probably the Montana congressman James Cavanaugh; then Sheridan picked it up, and finally Sherman, who (according to Mencken) said it to an Indian who was panhandling at a railway station as Sherman was disembarking. “Me good Indian,” the old man said, to which Sherman replied, “So far as I know the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” It is doubtful that the old panhandler received a cent.

  The harshness of Sherman’s policy where Indians were concerned accounts for the fact that George Armstrong Custer, despite a court-martial or two and many callous infringements of military rules, kept being called back to command in the West. The fact that he abandoned Major Joel Elliott and eighteen men at the time of the Washita battle was not forgotten by either the officers or the rank and file, but Custer shrugged it off. He was by no means as able a commander as Sherman but his willingness to fight was evident to all. In a sense he lived to fight. He was harsh to and hated by his men, as well as by most of his fellow officers, but he was, nonetheless, the kind of man Sherman was looking for: one to whom fighting came first.

  When President Lincoln, sorely beset at the outset of the Civil War by dithering generals, began to receive reports of victory after victory secured by the nearly unknown Ulysses S. Grant, he said, in admiration: “He fights.”

  Exactly the same could be said for Custer, although Grant was reliable and Custer wildly erratic: he might simply ride off from his command to go have a romantic tryst with his wife—he did this in Kansas—but fighting was what he liked to do best, and he always returned to it once his critical superiors had been appeased. Sheridan moved mountains to get Custer out of his various scrapes; he wanted him back in the West. Yet Custer’s achievements in the West, once you boil them down, amount to very little.

  His one victory was the Battle of the Washita, and how wise a victory was that? He succeeded in killing Black Kettle, the most famous peace Indian of his time. A few warriors were killed but most of the dead were women and children. His reconnaissance, as usual, was feeble; it was only after he wrapped up Black Kettle’s village that Custer realized that the part of the plains where he was seemed to be swarming with Indians. He at once hustled back to a less exposed position, having achieved his one and only victory in the Plains Indian wars—and achieved it against the one Indian who didn’t want to fight.

  Black Kettle’s tough wife was also killed in this battle, though their two bodies were not immediately identified. During the terrible massacre at Sand Creek, Black Kettle’s wife had received no less than nine wounds, but Black Kettle somehow managed to carry her the forty miles to Fort Lyon, where the doctors saved her.

  It would be almost eight years before George Armstrong Custer led his gallant Seventh Cavalry against another Indian village. This was on a Montana plain in June of 1876, and when it was over, “Long Hair comes no more,” the Indian women sang.

  10

  THAT General Sherman was philosophically willing to totally exterminate the Plains Indians was clear enough from the letter quoted, and from numerous other statements. He would have been glad to mow them down and plow them under, but when he actually began to put armies in the field in 1866–1867, it soon became obvious that he didn’t have the muscle to accomplish any such genocidal program.

  The Confederate soldiers against whom Sherman had made his reputation as a fighting general mainly stood and fought, dying if necessary. But the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Pawnee, the Comanche, the Kiowa, the Arapaho, the Apache, and so forth much preferred to fight and run. When sent to retaliate for some raid or other, the U.S. Army could rarely catch the Indians they were after. They were not particularly well provisioned, and in any case, were temperamentally unsuited to long pursuits. The chases were frustrating, so much so that the soldiers usually fell back on punishing any Indians they happened to run into. Since their high command was on record as believing that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, why discriminate?

  In time, though, there would appear officers of the highest caliber, such as General George Crook, who did discriminate. General Crook, on his tours of duty in Arizona, spent a lot of time sorting out the Apache situation. There were nine branches of the Apache peoples; Crook’s distinction was that he took care not to punish the wrong tribes. He was fair, the Apaches realized it, and Crook came to be treated with respect. And the northern Indians, too, mostly respected Crook, particularly after they spent a whole day whipping up on him at the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876.

  As for the fire-breathing William Tecumseh Sherman, irony soon overtook his effort to secure the northern plains. It soon became apparent that he didn’t have the manpower, which forced him into tedious negotiations and slow diplomacy, tasks for which he was not well suited. Sherman probably sat through more peace powwows than any other general. His principal opponent in these debates, the Ogalala Red Cloud, was noted for his long-winded oratory. He might talk half the day—on the other hand, he might not bother to show up at all. If some buf
falo crossed his path while he was on the way to a powwow he might decide to hunt first and negotiate later.

  When he did arrive Red Cloud made it clear that if the whites wanted peace they needed to stop building forts in the Sioux lands. Three such forts—Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C. F. Smith—had foolishly been built right in the Sioux holy lands. There had been a gold strike in Montana—the three forts were supposed to protect immigrants along the Bozeman Trail. But the forts’ defenses were so weak that the army was forced to abandon them in 1868—although many warriors owing no allegiance to Red Cloud were involved in harassing the forts, the victory was attributed to Red Cloud and the episode became known as Red Cloud’s War.

  The victory, of course, was pyrrhic—the slackening on the part of the U.S. military was only temporary. Within a decade of the closing of those forts, Custer was dead, Spotted Tail was dead, Crazy Horse was dead, Sitting Bull was in Canada, Buffalo Bill had had his famous “duel” with Yellow Hair, and except for a few stubborn Apaches in the rocks of Arizona and New Mexico, the contest for the Western lands was over. A decade after Custer lost his last command, Geronimo and his eighteen warriors came in. The great contest was over, though paranoia about Indian intentions and capabilities was not quick to subside. Out of just such paranoia came the more or less meaningless flare-up in 1890, at Wounded Knee. Again for reasons of paranoia—administrative this time—the by then world-famous Buffalo Bill Cody was prevented from meeting his old star, Sitting Bull, soon to be killed by native policemen.

  Much later Cody made a movie about Wounded Knee, but few came to see it.

  11

  HELEN CODY WETMORE, Cody’s younger sister, titled her rose-colored biography of her brother The Last of the Great Scouts. Was Cody a great scout, and if so, what does that mean?

  Again, a little background might help. One of the most ineffectual military campaigns mounted in the post–Civil War West was that under the command of General Winfield Scott Hancock, which lumbered off into the central plains in 1867, spinning off, as it went, many smaller commands, some of which promptly got lost. Skeptics might argue that General Hancock himself was lost for much of this campaign. He was, however, the overall commander. Wherever he happened to find himself became true north, in a sense.

  Why this large, unwieldy force thought it could catch up with and punish small, highly mobile groups of Native American horsemen is one of those military mysteries that can never be explained. Sherman, realist in military matters, can hardly have placed much faith in this expedition. Sheridan, a major participant, was often vexed by the difficulty of engaging the enemy in numbers that might have made the whole thing cost effective. General Hancock and many of his semidetached commands mostly floundered around to no purpose, trying to sift through the ever-shifting mass of rumor in hopes of locating a grain or two of usable intelligence that might eventually lead them to an Indian.

  Here, for example, is an indication of the use Sheridan was able to make of Cody, upon receiving the unwelcome news that the Comanches and the Kiowa were on the warpath, information that needed to be conveyed to central command, or at least some command, as quickly as possible:

  This intelligence required that certain orders should be carried to Fort Dodge, ninety-five miles south of Hays. This too being a particularly dangerous route—several couriers having been killed on it—it was impossible to get one of the various “Petes,” “Jacks,” or “Jims” hanging around Hays City to take any communication. Cody learning of the strait I was in, manfully came to the rescue and proposed to make the trip to Dodge, though he had just finished his long and perilous ride from Larned. I gratefully accepted his offer, and after four or five hours rest he mounted a fresh horse and hastened on his journey, halting but once to rest on the way, and then only for an hour, the stop being made at Coon Creek, where he got another mount from a troop of cavalry. At Dodge he took six hours sleep and then continued on to his own post—Fort Larned—with more dispatches. After resting for twelve hours at Larned, he was again in the saddle with tidings for me at Fort Hays, General Hazen sending him this time, with word that the villagers had fled to the south of the Arkansas. Thus, in all, Cody rode about 350 miles in less than sixty hours, and such an exhibition of endurance and courage was more than enough to convince me that his services would be extremely valuable in the campaign, so I retained him at Fort Hays until the battalion of the Fifth Cavalry arrived and then made him chief of scouts of that regiment.

  Don Russell, a careful map reader, corrected General Sheridan’s arithmetic, concluding that Cody only rode 290 miles on this particular circuit, not 350, but it still works out to an average of 116 miles a day, no mean pace, and a pace maintained through country where he might have encountered hostile Indians at any time.

  General Eugene Carr was also impressed with Cody’s daring, and with his ability to cover country. He called Cody the “best white trailer” he had ever worked with. General Carr took over the Fifth Cavalry during this campaign and used Cody often.

  Of course Cody, as courier, was merely doing the job he had been doing since the age of eleven. He had by this time had plenty of training, and was thoroughly familiar with the country he was crossing. He seems to have had an excellent inner compass and was apparently never lost, a characteristic he shared with the great Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, a plainsman also noted for his ability to chew up ground. And yet General Sheridan was surely right to applaud Cody, for he was taking very substantial risks. At least five times in the autobiography he finds himself in a race for his life, races that, as I have said, he only narrowly won. Some Kiowa under the important chief Satanta were once after him nip and tuck, one Kiowa coming so close that Cody was forced to shoot the horse out from under him.

  One of the “authentic” aspects of Cody’s life as a scout was his often repeated decision to aim for the horse rather than the rider—the horse obviously made a considerably bigger target. Indeed, students who don’t think Cody actually killed Yellow Hair agree that he did shoot his horse out from under him, making him much more killable.

  Cody, as a performer, often loped around one arena or another, shooting glass balls with a smoothbore rifle whose cartridges were filled with birdshot, an easy enough thing for a seasoned marksman to do. As a hunter Cody killed many buffalo from horseback, but in most cases he was within a few feet of his victim—he merely had to point and pull the trigger. When questioned about his Indian fighting he was frank and modest about the problems of shooting from horseback while traveling fast. When racing horsemen shot at one another, he admitted, the normal result was that nobody hit anything.

  Don Russell and others have pointed out that during the wasteful 1867–1868 plains campaign scouts were hired to find Indians, not fight them—the army’s one purpose was to fight them. Sometimes Cody could locate Indians but he readily acknowledged that Native American scouts were far better trackers than he ever became. It was the Pawnee scouts working with Major Frank North who found Tall Bull’s camp, in the Battle of Summit Springs.

  In general, all across the West and Southwest, Native American scouts were usually called in when there was serious tracking to do—in some cases they did serious fighting, too. General Crook’s Crow and Shoshoni scouts fought heroically at the Battle of the Rosebud. These scouts, witnesses thought, kept that battle a narrow defeat for Crook, rather than an absolute rout. In the Southwest particularly the Apache scouts were invaluable. Without them Geronimo might still be out.

  Strategically the 1867–1868 campaign amounted to very little. General Hancock finally turned his immense command around and lumbered home. Custer’s attack on the Washita was the one major battle of the campaign, and it was ill-directed.

  I will look a little later at the Battle of Summit Springs, which was not really a major engagement. It’s of interest here because it was the first occasion when Cody claimed a kill he probably hadn’t made—the same was to occur, under equally debatable circumstances, in the conf
lict with Yellow Hair.

  Sheridan and Carr were, however, right to praise Cody for his willingness to take big risks in order to move (dubious) intelligence from one fort to another. He deserved their praise and earned his $100 bonus. Being a scout and courier happened to be the only military work Cody could perform creditably. As a courier, however dangerous the country, he was once again on his own, enjoying the real if dangerous freedom of the plainsman. He was not afraid to stake his life on his horsemanship, either.

  In national terms he may not really have been a great scout. He could not claim to have traveled the great reach of territory that Kit Carson, Jedediah Smith (dead before Cody was born), or the Delaware scout Black Beaver all mastered. But he was a better horseman than any of the above—it is entirely fitting that in the poster art created for his shows he is nearly always on horseback. It was on horseback that he looked most like himself—as I have said elsewhere, it is hard to overestimate how far a man can go in America if he looks good on a horse.

  He seems never to have lost his skill with horses. Near the end of his life a show horse reared and fell over backwards with him. This is a much dreaded occurrence that has killed many cowboys and not a few rodeo hands. (Such a death occurs in the second volume of my Lonesome Dove tetralogy.) But Cody eluded the falling horse, at the cost of a slight injury to his leg. He was still quick enough and horse-savvy enough to mostly get out of the way.

  It might be argued, against Helen Cody Wetmore, that her brother William was not quite the last of the great scouts—in that running one would have to at least mention Lonesome Charley Reynolds, the scout Custer sent ninety miles through very hostile country to announce that the general had discovered gold in the Black Hills—a place neither general nor scout was supposed to be. Though his horse died and his tongue swelled so from thirst that he couldn’t close his mouth, Lonesome Charley made it through to Fort Laramie.