by Drury, Bob
Six days later, at 10:30 on a dull gray morning in faraway Mankato, the raucous cheering of a vast crowd of civilians and soldiers drowned out the death songs of the thirty-eight Dakotas who climbed the scaffold. (President Lincoln, as noted above, had commuted one man’s sentence.) A moment later, according to one observer, the Indians’ “lifeless bodies were left dangling between heaven and earth.” It was the largest mass execution in American history.
Most died wearing war paint.
* * *
1. It should be noted that whites have always been much more inclined to affix the term “massacre” to Indian atrocities while preferring to call their own victories, such as the one at Blue Water Creek, “battles.”
2. Five American cities had a greater population than Minnesota, and three western hubs—New Orleans, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—each contained nearly as many people.
Part III
THE RESISTANCE
’Tis true they were a lawless brood,
But rough in form, nor mild in mood.
—Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos
15
STRONG HEARTS
Traveling at 250 feet per second and deadly accurate to 100 yards, it produced a sound that was described variously as a shrieking whistle or a mere whisper on the wind. In either case soldiers on the frontier certainly heard it coming, even if there was no time to react. So it was that in all likelihood Lieutenant Caspar Collins, a musket ball already lodged in his hip, recognized the hiss of the arrow an instant before its cast-iron tip pierced his forehead, drilled through his skull, and exploded his prefrontal cortex. The last thing he saw was his cavalry troop being overrun by Indians.
Hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne had poured from the ocher bluffs that overlooked the Army outpost known as Bridge Station, hard by the North Platte. They engulfed Collins’s command in a matter of moments. One trooper inexplicably dismounted in a dusty washout, determined to fight on foot. He was dead nearly before his boots hit the ground. Another’s horse was shot out from under him; wounded, he crawled on his hands and knees toward the 1,000-foot wooden span that led to the barricaded stockade on the far side of the river. Bluecoats on the battlements watched an Indian bury a tomahawk in his head. A third trooper fell with his mount, horse and rider both bristling with arrow shafts.
The last anyone saw of Lieutenant Collins, he was still in the saddle, blood streaming down his face, his hands squeezing the reins in a death grip as his horse reared and galloped into the center of the war party. Collins had been warned before leaving the fort that his was a suicide mission.
“I am not a coward,” he had replied. “I know what it means to go out . . . but I’ve never disobeyed an order. I’m a soldier’s son.”
His body was never recovered.
It was July 26, 1865, and Collins was one of twenty-nine cavalrymen from Ohio and Kansas killed in a daylong series of running fights in east-central Wyoming that came to be known as the Battle of Red Buttes. How many Indians fell Red Cloud could not immediately determine, as half of his force had ridden off to attack a train of Army freight wagons making for the fort. What he did know was that he had, at long last, set out to avenge a lifetime’s worth of lies, injustices, and broken promises. In the process, he had ordered the first shots fired in what would come to be known as Red Cloud’s War. He had no idea that three long columns of Bluecoats would soon be mounted and moving toward him with orders to kill him and every male Indian over the age of twelve.
• • •
The events at Red Buttes had followed from the Dakota Uprising of 1862. Yet years before Collins’s death at Bridge Station, Red Cloud had anticipated the war and its consequences, mentally sifting the possible outcomes like a placerman panning a mountain stream. While the Union and Confederate armies savaged each other in the east, the western side of the Mississippi had grown turbulent and vicious on both sides of the Oglalas’ tranquil Powder River territory. In Colorado the Ute had taken to raiding and burning the overland stage stations leading into Denver, and in the northern Rockies the Shoshones and Bannocks had declared open hostilities on the gold seekers drilling more and deeper holes into their mountains. Across the Kansas-Nebraska frontier marauding Cheyenne Dog Soldiers were killing emigrants and homesteaders by the score and—in the worst affront to white sensibility—frequently kidnapping women and children. The Comanche and Kiowa had virtually closed the Santa Fe Trail, and there were rumors of emissaries from those great southern confederacies traveling to the Oklahoma Territory to foment an Indian insurrection all across the Plains.
Meanwhile, Sitting Bull had soaked the Upper Missouri with tableland blood, for it was there that the most militant Minnesota Dakota renegades had allied with his feral Hunkpapas to terrorize traders and steamboat operators threshing the turbid waters of the frontier as well as the few dryland farmers and ranchers hardy enough to settle the country’s most windswept prairie. Any Indian considered too friendly toward the Americans was also fair game. The Hunkpapa chief Bears Ribs, who had urged moderation on Red Cloud and others at the large war council at Bear Butte in 1857, was slain by the Lakota after repeatedly ignoring Sitting Bull’s warnings to refuse the government’s handouts of rotten seed corn and sacks of moldy flour. Bears Ribs’s 250 ragged followers were left to wander through the desolate country alone; no other band was willing to take them in.
Even the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota Sioux in Mankato had failed to still white fears, and from 1863 onward news of the Minnesota “massacres” spread panic among settlements up and down the Missouri. President Lincoln and his War Department were inundated with alarmist telegrams from western politicians demanding troops to quell a Sioux rebellion that, ironically, was still limited to Sitting Bull’s distant corner of the Upper Missouri in present-day North Dakota. Nonetheless the government responded by constructing a series of new posts and fortified camps running from Omaha to Salt Lake City, including one above and four below Fort Laramie along the Oregon Trail. They not only were of little use—the hostiles were ghosts, everywhere and nowhere—but served to further inflame the western tribes. Through all of this, Red Cloud’s Powder River Country constituted perhaps the only peaceful oasis in the West. The great Oglala warrior chief recognized that this was temporary.
Some historians have viewed the indigenous tribes’ failure to take advantage of the American Civil War by acting collaboratively as the Indians’ most serious military error. That reasoning is based on a false premise. It is generally assumed that the great migration of the Regular Army at the onset of the War Between the States emptied the West of troops for the duration of the conflict. This was true at first. But Lincoln’s Treasury needed gold and silver from the mountain territories to pay for the war, and the president recognized that without military escorts many of the miners making for Montana, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho would never get there alive. The Union also required a fair amount of firepower to ensure that the ore made it out safely. Indian attacks were not the only potential peril; the Cherry Creek gold strikes along the front range of the Rockies in Colorado were precariously close to the Confederate state of Texas. Thus the Army presence west of the Missouri gradually increased until, by 1865, it actually exceeded prewar numbers.
It was a tentative buildup. Twice during the summer of 1862 combined Hunkpapa-Dakota war parties ambushed cavalry detachments that were escorting wagon trains of miners to the gold camps of Virginia City in western Montana, already a boomtown rivaling Denver. During the second attack they harassed a company of Iowa volunteers nearly all the way back to Sioux City. But 1862 was also the year Lincoln and the Free-Soilers took advantage of the absence of the southern plantation owners from Congress to pass the Homestead Act. This meant that beginning January 1, 1863, any U.S. citizen—or intended citizen, including freed slaves and female heads of households—could take title to 160 acres of government land west of the Mississippi, provided he or she improved the property, lived on it for five consecutive years, an
d had never taken up arms against the United States. The filing cost was $18. The trails west, already swollen with fortune seekers, men (like Mark Twain) looking to avoid military service, and the over 300,000 deserters from the Union and Confederate Armies, were now filled with families lugging harrows, seed drills, and new steel plows that sliced open the prairie much more easily than wood or cast iron. All this combined with a succession of fabulous strikes from the Comstock Lode to the Boise Basin Rush to at least double the West’s population.
These new voters, loyal Unionists, wanted roads and telegraph lines, stage and mail service, and above all protection against the Indians. Lincoln was a shrewd politician with an eye toward a second term. There was no question as to his response, and northern volunteers who had enlisted to fight Johnny Reb instead found themselves marching on what the newspapers called “red pagans.” In August 1864 the dilettante General Alfred Sully—a Philadelphia watercolorist and oil painter of some renown—led a column of 2,500 men into North Dakota and defeated Sitting Bull’s Sioux on the Upper Knife in a vicious three-day battle. In the end the Hunkpapas and Dakotas had no answer for Sully’s howitzers. The general personally ordered the bodies of three braves thought to have slain his aide-de-camp decapitated. Their severed heads were fixed on poles and left behind as a warning. It was a turning point, forcing the North Dakota hostiles to migrate southwest toward the Black Hills, inching the conflict closer to Red Cloud.
And as news of Sitting Bull’s rebellion spread to the Powder River Country, small bands of wild Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Blackfoot Sioux, and even some Oglalas began making raids of their own. The few miners foolhardy enough to make for Montana via Nebraska and Wyoming were scalped and dismembered, mail stages were destroyed, and Army supply wagons were looted and burned. A favorite Indian practice on discovery of a chest or barrel of bacon, a staple of frontier mess tents, was to lash a captured teamster to a wagon wheel, pile the rashers about him, and set the meat afire. One relief party of troops that arrived in the aftermath of such a scene was barely able to tell the seared human from the hog. Meanwhile there was little the scattered and limited frontier troopers could do but cock an ear from behind log and adobe fortifications and listen as Indians bayed like prairie wolves from distant buttes and mesas.
Among these Indians was Crazy Horse. By the start of the white man’s Civil War the twenty-year-old Oglala’s reputation had grown with every coup counted and every scalp taken during the Crow Wars. His raiding companions now included not only Bad Faces, but also Miniconjou braves from his mother’s side of the family, and the legend of his one-man charges—which the Sioux called “dare rides”—was such that the number of horses shot out from under him became a standard joke among his fellow fighters. He was the incarnation of war, always personally in the forefront of raids and attacks, separated from his party by twenty to forty yards, a solitary whirlwind leading a line of warriors spread behind him like the wings of a hawk. “We know Crazy Horse better than you Sioux,” a Crow fighter once told a Lakota. “Whenever we have a fight he is closer to us than he is to you.”
Yet Crazy Horse was far from being what the Indians called a reckless “Black Heart,” a suicidal warrior riding into battle alone with only a war club in his hands and a death song on his lips. His followers knew well what to expect when he led them on raids, as he always planned what military strategists today would call an exit strategy. His fellow fighters were also struck by his unusual habit of jumping from his pony during critical moments of a skirmish in order to gain a more stable position from which to nock his arrows. When he was not battling Crows there was no finer tracker or hunter among the Lakota, and he invariably felled the most cows during the semiannual buffalo hunts. But he also tended to ride off by himself and return with fat elk, deer, antelope, and waterfowl. As his Dream Spirit Guide instructed, he always distributed the best meats from his kills among families, clans, and villages of lesser means.
Crazy Horse had also discovered what the Indians called their personal “life path” when he was accepted into an Oglala soldier-society called the Strong Hearts. Inspired in part by tales of Sitting Bull’s defiance, the Strong Hearts were repelled when many of their own tribe relied on trade with the Americans for food and clothing; they themselves adopted an ideology of complete separatism from white ways. They refused to eat beefsteak, bacon, or sugar; to drink coffee or whiskey; or to wear any garment not made from traditional skins. They also warned off less-militant bands they discovered trekking to Indian agencies or forts to trade for these items, threatening to kill the offenders’ ponies if they continued.
Although Crazy Horse was generous to Lakota society’s least favored members, since his rejection by Black Buffalo Woman he had by all accounts become a taciturn adult whose heart was said to be not much larger than the talismanic pebble he wore behind his ear. But he was also a deeply spiritual young man, and among the spartan Strong Hearts he found a true home. “[He] was good for nothing but to be a warrior,” observed the half-blood interpreter Billy Garnett, who through his Oglala mother befriended Crazy Horse in the 1860s. Now, with their mountain enemies defeated, the Strong Hearts turned their attention to the whites. Each spring during the Civil War years they rode south from their camps along the Yellowstone as soon as the grass was up, separating into groups of ten or fewer, spreading out among the trails leading west and concealing themselves among thick groves of willows and in shadowed hollows. There they awaited opportunities to rustle stock or kill emigrant stragglers. They did not yet have the strength to take on the U.S. Army, but they were confident that the time would soon arrive.
Life may have seemed cheap to the settlers and emigrants on the High Plains, with hundreds of thousands lying dead on eastern battlefields, so the Army justifiably considered the Indian raids pinpricks. The government’s strongest reaction was to ban the sale of guns and ammunition to any of the Powder River bands. Moreover, Crazy Horse and his Strong Hearts aside, through the first half of the 1860s Red Cloud and his people showed no inclination to disrupt the status quo. Relatively undisturbed in their new territory on the Upper Powder, free of the white man’s debilitating whiskey and diseases, the Oglalas and their Brule cousins reveled in the return to a more pure and natural lifestyle, the open spaces of the high prairie corresponding to some mystical place within the Sacred Hoop. They passed the seasons hunting in the majestic, game-laden territory and making occasional raids on the increasingly beleaguered Crows and Shoshones—by now pushed almost beyond the Bighorns—before settling into cozy winter camps where the larders were piled high with venison and buffalo meat.
Even when, in 1861, a regiment of infantry and five companies of cavalry were deployed from California to Fort Laramie to protect the overland mail route along the Oregon Trail, the Bad Faces maintained a tentative peace with the soldiers. In fact, during that same year the eighty-seven-year-old Old Smoke and his family bade farewell to the band and “retired” to the outskirts of the fort to settle among the Laramie Loafers. There is even some indication that before his peaceful death in 1864 the venerable Oglala Head Man was persuaded by the local Indian agent to farm a small plot of land. More likely, as the Sioux historian George Hyde speculates, Old Smoke “gave permission for the women to try their hand at it.” This Oglala-Brule idyll was of course destined to end violently. At the very moment that Red Cloud and his people were reacclimatizing themselves to the ancient Sioux traditions, 1,400 miles away a former assistant bank teller from Delaware was taking his first steps toward their epic showdown.
16
AN ARMY IN SHAMBLES
William Judd Fetterman had long harbored a desire for military service. Born in 1835 into a Cheshire, Connecticut, military family, Fetterman’s mother died from complications during childbirth. He was orphaned at nine years old on the death of his father, Lieutenant George Fetterman. He went to live with his uncle William Bethel Judd, another Regular Army officer who served with distinction during the Mexican War. Bethel, lik
e George Fetterman, had graduated from West Point, and the young Fetterman hoped to follow in their footsteps. But when he applied in 1853 he was rejected by the Military Academy’s admissions board, for unknown reasons. Thereafter the eighteen-year-old grudgingly took up a career in banking, working in Rochester, New York, before moving to Delaware. In 1861 a second opportunity for military service arose with the expansion of the Army of the Republic at the outbreak of the Civil War. Fetterman, now twenty-six, jumped at the chance.
Fetterman secured a commission as a first lieutenant less than two months after rebel artillery shells tore into Fort Sumter, and in June 1861 he reported for duty at Camp Thomas in Columbus, Ohio. The depot had been established as the regimental headquarters of the 18th Ohio Infantry under the command of another civilian who had volunteered for service, the Yale-educated abolitionist attorney Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington. Carrington was appointed to the position by his good friend Salmon P. Chase, a former governor of Ohio currently serving as Lincoln’s treasury secretary. Fetterman arrived in Columbus just five days after Carrington, and together the two officers spent the next five months organizing and training the companies of raw volunteers. It was soon apparent that the physically frail Carrington’s greatest assets were political and clerical. Fetterman, on the other hand, seemed a born field commander.
Theirs was the classic contrast: Cicero and Demosthenes, with the former moving men’s minds while the latter made them get up and march. Yet this did not spark a rivalry; Carrington and Fetterman seemed to sense that they complemented each other’s attributes, and their combined skills were necessary to turn the regiment into a trim, well-disciplined unit. They also became personal friends, with the thirty-seven-year-old Carrington’s wife, Margaret, remarking in her journal on the younger officer’s “refinement, gentlemanly manners, and adaption to social life” at the camp.
