Mochi's War

by Enss, Chris

  When the boys found the mounds of sand with tracks ending at them, they tore away some of the sand and recognized the body of Eddie M. Deming. The bodies of the men were found stripped of all their clothing and possessions. Three were untouched by wild animals and were not scalped, but the bodies were decomposing. Eddie had been scalped and his flesh eaten by wild animals; only the bones remained. As there were hundreds of Indians within a mile, they did not wait any longer, but started toward camp getting in (a distance of about ten miles) in about one and half hours. We stood guard all night, but were not attacked and rolled out for headquarters in Arkansas City the next morning about an hour before daylight.

  The murdered men are Eddie M. Deming, son of Mr. A. M. Deming, proprietor of the City hotel in this city; Daniel Short, of Lawrence, Kansas, Charles A. Davis of Cream Ridge, near Chillicothe, Missouri, and R. Pool, a young Englishman of Lawrence, but he has no relatives in America.

  There is still a party of thirteen men in danger and a provision train belonging to Captain E. A. Darling, surveyor and contractor. About thirty of us start out today to bring in the other party and train if possible and recover the dead bodies of our murdered comrades. If the parties who report that the Indians are disposed to be quiet on the frontier would take a trip out among them for a little while they would soon change their minds. I am certain that they are anything but peaceably inclined.

  One band of Indians has declared their intent to fight all summer long and will commence as soon as grass is high enough for feed.[20]

  The actions of Medicine Water and his band of Indians was a declaration of the Indians’ determination to continue fighting. Different tribal groups decided to join forces with the Cheyenne to rid the plains of white intruders. The next raid took place in the Texas Panhandle at an abandoned trading fort called Adobe Wall. Trappers and buffalo hunters had made the post their temporary headquarters, and the Indians in the territory resented it. Plans were made to attack Adobe Wall on the morning of June 27, 1874.[21]

  More than two hundred warriors raided the fort where thirty well-armed soldiers had taken refuge. The fighting was long and well sustained. Marksmen in front and behind the gates at Adobe Wall shot many Indians in the storming party. According to the August 8, 1874, edition of the Anglo American Times, “Seventeen Cheyenne and six Comanche were killed on the spot and a large number of both tribes mortally wounded.” The Indians eventually retreated. Not a single settler defending the post was shot or killed in the exchange.[22]

  The costly defeat prompted warriors from tribes riding with Medicine Water and Mochi to surrender to United States Indian agents and to agree to move onto reservations. Mochi rejected the idea. It was well known among the Cheyenne that Indians could die of starvation at a reservation if the government decided not to feed them. Mochi preferred to die in battle avenging her family lost at Sand Creek.[23]

  Although their numbers had been depleted, the Bowstring Society pressed on. The senseless slaughter of her parents and first husband and the permanent injury sustained by her daughter after being shot at Washita were always at the forefront of Mochi’s thoughts. She was out for blood and the full force of that drive would be visited on an immigrant family camping along the Smoky Hill River on Kansas land the Cheyenne considered to be rightfully theirs.[24]

  1. Indianapolis Daily Journal, June 29, 1869; Barbara Andre, “Custer at the Washita,” West Magazine, June 1968; Daily Rocky Mountain News, December 29, 1868.

  2. George Custer, “Report on the Battle of Washita,” November 28, 1868.

  3. Daily Rocky Mountain News, December 29, 1868.

  4. Blockton News, October 7, 1937; Patrick M. Mendoza, Song of Sorrow: Massacre at Sand Creek, 138–39; Jerome Greene, Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867–1869, 103–6; George E. Hyde, Life of George Bent Written from His Letters, 293, 296–97; Peter Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 5–6.

  5. Custer, “Report on the Battle of Washita.”

  6. Patrick M. Mendoza, Ann Strange-Owl-Raben, and Nico Strange-Owl, Four Great Rivers to Cross: Cheyenne History, Culture and Traditions, 75; Linda Wommack and John L. Sipes, Jr., “Mo-chi: First Female Cheyenne Warrior,” Wild West Magazine, April 2008; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 5–6.

  7. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 5–6; Hyde, Life of George Bent, 22–24; Richard S. Grimes, “Cheyenne Dog Soldiers,” www.manataka.org; Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 57.

  8. Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 57; Bryce Walker, Through Indian Eyes: The Untold Story of Native American Peoples, 207; Belleville Daily Freeman, May 24, 1905.

  9. Wommack and Sipes, “Mo-chi: First Female Cheyenne Warrior”; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 5–6.

  10. John Speer, “Report to Fred Martin of Interview with Mrs. J. M. Chivington”; Reginald S. Craig, The Fighting Parson: Biography of Colonel John M. Chivington, 232–33.

  11. Craig, Fighting Parson, 232–33; Lori Cox-Paul, “John M. Chivington: The ‘Reverend Colonel’ ‘Marry-Your-Daughter’ ‘Sand Creek Massacre,’” Nebraska History 88, 132–34.

  12. Cox-Paul, “John M. Chivington: The ‘Reverend Colonel,’” 132–34; Craig, Fighting Parson, 232–34; Speer, “Report to Fred Martin.”

  13. Patricia Kinney Kaufman, My Mother’s People to Colorado They Came, 34–35; Cox-Paul, “John M. Chivington: The ‘Reverend Colonel,’” 134–35.

  14. Sullivan Democrat, November 1, 1866; Denver Republican, October 5, 1894.

  15. Kaufman, My Mother’s People, 34–35; Cox-Paul, “John M. Chivington: The ‘Reverend Colonel,’” 134–35.

  16. Columbus Daily Telegram, August 8, 1969; Hyde, Life of George Bent, 200–4.

  17. Hyde, Life of George Bent, 329–31; George Bird Grinnell, The Fighting Cheyennes, 316–18; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 6.

  18. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 6; Janesville Gazette, April 8, 1873.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 99–100; Hyde, Life of George Bent, 355–56.

  22. Anglo American Times, August 8, 1874.

  23. Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 75; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 6–7.

  24. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 6–7; Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 75; Mendoza, Song of Sorrow, 144–46.

  Chapter 7

  Savage and Cruel

  Ten years after the Sand Creek Massacre, animosity between the Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians, and white settlers was still raging. The band of renegade Indians crisscrossing territory from Colorado to Kansas struck out at anyone who threatened to deprive its members of their traditional way of life. The Bowstring Society, led by Medicine Water and his warrior wife Mochi, did not have the braves or weapons needed to lead successful raids on significant army posts or stage stops, so it concentrated its efforts on wagon and freight trains, land survey crews, and army scouting parties.[1]

  In July 1874, pioneers and explorers happened onto a gruesome scene near Buffalo Springs Station, a relay station in Oklahoma for the United States mail. Three freight wagons had been overturned and set on fire by Cheyenne Indians. The burned corpses lying on the ground next to the wreckage prompted travelers to reconsider heading west for fear of being killed. The short battle between the Cheyenne and a stubborn Irish freighter named Patrick Hennessy had been witnessed by a mail carrier and a station attendant as they hurried south along the Chisholm Trail. Patrick had chosen to ignore warnings about the warring Indians and pressed on with two other drivers, George Fant and Thomas Caloway.[2]

  According to historian and author T. G. McGee, within five minutes of the freight driver’s leaving the station multiple gunshots were heard by the mail carrier and the station attendant. The two men raced to the top of a bluff just in time to see the Indian raiders attacking the drivers. “George and Thomas were shot down a short distance from Pat,�
�� the mail carrier and station attendant told soldiers later. “Pat was killed and tied to the two wheels on one side of the wagon and then a torch was applied to the wagon. All three wagons were thought to be carrying grain. One who passed two days later stated that the grain was still smoldering in a heap over poor Pat’s charred remains, and his limbs were almost burned from his sturdy body as he lay spread there between the two charred wheels.”[3]

  When the settlers living and working at Buffalo Springs Station viewed the site where the men had been killed, they were horrified. According to the mail carrier’s account of the incident in the Chronicles of Oklahoma, no one was willing to go near Patrick Hennessy to bury his remains. “He was lying on the east side of the Chisolm Trail. . . . The position of the burning body gave evidence that the man, still alive, had been tied to the two wheels by the chain traces of his own wagon.”[4]

  Cheyenne Indian agent John Miles noted in his report to the government that Patrick Hennessy had struggled greatly to break loose from the ties that bound him. “His ankles and feet were all that could be used to recognize the fallen freight driver,” Miles wrote. “Much of the sugar, coffee, oats and corn were hauled away by the Indians. All of the men were horribly mutilated and scalped.” All were eventually buried where they died.[5]

  Ida Dyer, the wife of one of the Indian agents in the territory, recalled in her reminisces printed in 1896 the terrifying thoughts travelers had as they journeyed by the graves. “We felt the wickedness of the Indians’ power in his own country,” Ida wrote, “and shivered and shuddered as we passed on.”[6]

  The reign of terror that gripped the Indian Territory continued long after Patrick Hennessy and his fellow freighters met their demise. In late August 1874, an unsuspecting survey crew lost their lives in southwestern Kansas near a well-known frontier landmark called Lone Tree.[7]

  Captain Oliver Francis Short led the party of twenty-two government engineers out of Lawrence, Kansas, on July 29, 1874. They were to cover 920 miles marking the boundaries of the land occupied and belonging to the Plains Indians. Among those traveling and working with Captain Short was his fourteen-year-old son Daniel Truman Short, Captain Cutler and his sixteen-year-old son Harry Cutler, James Shaw and his eighteen-year-old son J. Allen Shaw, Clem Duncan, William Richard Duncan, Frank Blacklidge, twenty-two-year-old Harry C. Jones, and eighteen-year-old John H. Keuchler. On August 15, 1874, Captain Short and his team made camp east of Lone Tree, and the following day he wrote his wife to let her know that all was well. He shared with her that water had been located for the crew and the oxen and that there was an abundance of stones available to use as cornerstone markers.[8]

  Captain Short and the other engineers discussed what to do if irate Indians saw them and threatened to attack. It was agreed that they would set fire to the buffalo grass around them. The decision was later rescinded in favor of preserving the grass for their oxen. On Sunday, August 23, Captain Short led the crew in a brief Bible study and in singing hymns. The rest of the day was spent doing such tasks as laundry, checking survey equipment, and tending to the livestock. The following morning buffalo hunters stopped by the camp and shared coffee and biscuits with the men. Captain Short sent the letters to his wife with the hunters who were headed to Dodge City, and the survey crew prepared themselves for a long day of work.[9]

  Captain Short sent eleven men from the expedition north to survey. Short took five men with him and traveled south. He left his son Harry behind to tend to the camp duties. The entire team was scheduled to meet back at the camp on Monday, August 31. Less than two days after the survey crews took to the field, disaster set in. The men working north of the camp had no idea Captain Short and his team had met with trouble until his wagon was found abandoned near a creek far from where the captain and his group were supposed to be.[10]

  The eleven-member team was suspicious, and they immediately armed themselves. They approached the wagon cautiously, guns ready to fire at anything that moved. It wasn’t until they reached the empty vehicle that they saw the bodies of Captain Short and his entire team lying face down in the dirt, dead. The Cheyenne had killed the luckless surveyors and laid their victims in a row. The oxen used to pull the wagons had been killed as well, and the hind quarters of the animals had been cut off. According to the May 1932 edition of the Kansas Historical Quarterly, Captain Short, his son, and Harry Jones had been scalped, and the others had their heads crushed. A compass was hammered into the head of one of the men and the pockets of all the men had been turned inside out.[11]

  Upon further investigation by the eleven men who found their slain cohorts, the first point of attack was located. Captain Short and his team were eight miles from the camp they had established a few days prior. The Indians had surrounded the survey group and Captain Short and his men had run toward the wagon for cover. There were twenty-eight bullets found in the water barrel attached to the side of the wagon. The ground around the scene was littered with cartridge shells and survey equipment. The September 6, 1874, edition of the Atchinson Globe reported that on Thursday, August 27, 1874, a party of hunters arrived at the geographical survey crew’s camp and informed the group that “they had been chased by a body of twenty-five Indians the day or two previous to the attack on Short’s party but succeeded in getting away from them.”[12]

  Once the Indians were out of sight the hunters backtracked and examined the Indians’ camp. Some of Captain Short’s papers were found, along with parts of his surveyor’s chain. Mochi confessed after her arrest that the camp belonged to Medicine Water. The captain and the other slain men were buried near the lone cottonwood tree on the plains where they died. Their bodies were later removed and laid to rest at their family cemeteries. Captain Short’s wife organized the effort to bring the surveyors home. Mrs. Short went on to file a claim against the State of Kansas for her loss and was later awarded $5,000.[13]

  Stories of how white settlers continued to suffer the wrath of Medicine Water’s band traveled from outpost to outpost. Panic set in among pioneers, and many refused to venture any farther than Independence, Missouri, until the government could assure their safety. Colonel Nelson Miles was ordered by commanders of the United States Army to lead an aggressive campaign against the Cheyenne and capture the Bowstring Society chief, his wife, and the 276 other Indians fighting with them.[14]

  Not everyone agreed with the government’s approach. Military officers such as Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, politicians such as Ulysses S. Grant, and members of the clergy believed the actions of the Indians were justified to an extent. They did not advocate the wholesale torture and murder of white men, women, and children, but argued that the Indians’ actions had been prompted by the United States government’s treatment of them. “The name of Cheyenne is representative to many persons of all that is savage and cruel. There is nothing which soothes conscience like the abuse of those whom we have wronged,” wrote Bishop Henry Whipple in the February 22, 1879, edition of the Greencastle, Indiana, newspaper the Greencastle Star. “The Cheyenne were among the friendliest of the Indians of the plains. They were a brave, noble type of red men.”[15]

  After gold was discovered in California, the United States made a treaty for the right of way across the Indian country in which the Cheyenne joined. “For this right the government agreed to pay $50,000 annually,” Bishop Whipple further explained about the plight of the Indian in the Greencastle Star article:

  No white man was to settle on the Indians’ land. This treaty was faithfully observed by the Indians. Emigrants crossed the plains in safety, singly, in companies, in ox-trains, and on foot. Once the cry of gold was heard throughout the land the Indians were forgotten. It is then many Cheyenne became unfriendly. Cities were laid out and lots sold upon Indian lands.

  The press of immigration drove the buffalo and the Indians south. The Indians’ annuity payment ceased. The Indians were sad and depressed, but they kept the peace. Black Kettle, their chief, was our friend. He knew the power of the whi
tes and dreaded war.

  One day a body of troops was seen crossing the prairie. Black Kettle took a United States flag in his hands and his two brothers’ white flags in his hands and hoisted them as a sign of friendship. White Antelope, one of these brothers, had just returned from an errand of mercy. He had gone at Black Kettle’s request one hundred miles to warn the mail coach that the Kiowa were on the war path. The goodwill messengers were fired upon by the troops, and the brothers were both killed. Black Kettle went to his tepee where there were three white men in United States uniforms and said to them, “I believe you are spies; it shall never be said that a man ate Black Kettle’s bread and came to harm in his tent. Go to your people before the fight begins.”

  Black Kettle gathered his little band and fought so bravely that he saved a part of his people. Between two hundred and three hundred men, women, and children were butchered. Babes were scalped in their mothers’ arms, women with children were ripped and their unborn children taken from their mothers’ wombs and the scalps of babies taken as trophies of victory. Scenes took place that day which were so horrible that the language cannot conceive of such barbarity. Thus ends the first chapter of our dealing with the Cheyenne. Black Kettle, who loved his people with blind devotion, who knew the power of the whites and dreaded the certain doom of Indian war, still pleaded for peace. For this he was near being deposed of his chieftanship by the Indians. The Sand Creek Massacre changed the course of the future between the Indians and white man.