The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

by Andrew R. Graybill

  115 Van Cleve, “A Brief Story,” 15–16 (emphasis in the original). The news was all the more distressing to Charlotte because she had lost her own Malcolm (Clarke’s nephew and namesake) to a murder several years earlier in California.

  116 Clarke, “Sketch of Malcolm Clarke,” 268.

  117 See Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).

  118 Clarke, “Sketch of Malcolm Clarke,” 268. Sherman does not mention this episode in his official report, though he notes that the party stopped twice at Wolf Creek (the location of the ranch, then owned by James Fergus), once for dinner on 24 Aug. and then, on the return from Fort Benton, for breakfast on 28 Aug. See Reports of Inspection Made in the Summer of 1877 by Generals P. H. Sheridan and W. T. Sherman of Country North of the Union Pacific Railroad (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office., 1878), 84, 86.

  Chapter 3: The Man Who Stands Alone with His Gun

  1 George Black, Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 239.

  2 Letter from Régis de Trobriand to O. D. Greene, 2 Jan. 1870, Montana Historical Society (cited hereafter as MTHS), Régis de Trobriand Papers (cited hereafter as RDT), SC 5, folder 1–2.

  3 The name of his second wife, whom Sully met while stationed at Fort Randall, was Sihasapawin (Blackfeet Woman). One of their children was Mary Sully, known also as Akicitawin (Soldier Woman), who, like her father, was an accomplished painter. I am grateful to Phil Deloria (great-grandson of Mary Sully) for this information.

  4 For Sully’s report on his meeting with the chiefs, see U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, House Executive Document 269, 41st Cong., 2nd session (1870), 36–37. James Welch offers a vivid (if fictional) imagining of this conference in his novel Fools Crow (New York: Penguin, 1986), 268–84. It is worth noting that because of their own name for the river, Piegans call the event the “Bear River Massacre.”

  5 Larry McMurtry spends only four pages on the episode in his catalog of such events, placing much greater emphasis on Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, among others. See Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West, 1846–1890 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 115–19. For a recent study of another horrific but obscure slaughter of Indians in the nineteenth-century West (though perpetrated not by whites but by a joint force of Mexicans and other native peoples), see Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin, 2008).

  6 New North-West, 20 Aug. 1869.

  7 See Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 60–62; and Langdon Sully, No Tears for the General: The Life of Alfred Sully, 1821–1879 (Palo Alto: American West Publishing, 1974), 216–18.

  8 U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, 7.

  9 Ibid., 50–51.

  10 For more on de Trobriand’s life and career, see Régis de Trobriand, Military Life in Dakota: The Journal of Philippe Régis de Trobriand, trans. Lucille M. Kane (1951; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982); and Marie Caroline Post, The Life and Mémoirs of Comte Régis de Trobriand, Major-General in the Army of the United States (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910).

  11 Letter from Régis de Trobriand to A. S. Simmons et al., 6 Oct. 1869, MTHS, RDT, SC 5, folder 1-2 (emphasis in the original).

  12 See Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970; New York: Owl Books, 2007), 170–72. Tosawi has been rendered in multiple ways, including Toch-a-way, Tosawa, and Toshaway.

  13 Though in later years Sheridan vehemently denied ever making much a statement, Captain Charles Nordstrom of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry claimed to have overheard the exchange. See Edward S. Ellis, The History of Our Country: From the Discovery of America to the Present Time, 8 vols. (1895; Cincinnati: Jones Brothers, 1900), 6:1483. In time this maxim was shortened to “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” also attributed to Sheridan.

  14 Quoted in Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 2.

  15 For more, see William G. Thomas III, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2011), 149–73.

  16 See Paul A. Hutton, “Sheridan’s Pyrrhic Victory: The Piegan Massacre, Army Politics, and the Transfer Debate,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 32, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 32–35.

  17 U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, 52.

  18 The literature on the battle is extensive. See Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 56–114; Jerome A. Greene, Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867–1869 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2004); and Thom Hatch, Black Kettle: The Cheyenne Chief Who Sought Peace but Found War (New York: Wiley, 2004).

  19 Quoted in Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 99.

  20 For Hardie’s report to Sheridan, see U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, 19–34.

  21 For Hardie’s communications with Sully, see ibid., 43–44.

  22 Ibid., 47 (emphasis in the original).

  23 See Theophilus F. Rodenbaugh, From Everglade to Canyon with the Second United States Cavalry (1875; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 7–13.

  24 Douglas C. McChristian, The U.S. Army in the West: Uniforms, Weapons, and Equipment (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 22–23. More on the history of Fort Shaw is in a letter from Richard Thoroughman to the author, 3 July 2007.

  25 Thomas Marquis, Custer, Cavalry & Crows: The Story of William White as Told to Thomas Marquis (Bellevue, Neb.: Old Army Press, 1975), 32.

  26 For more on Cobell, see William F. Wheeler, “Personal History of Joe Cobell,” MTHS, William F. Wheeler Papers, MC 65, box 1, folder 15.

  27 Black, Empire of Shadows, 251.

  28 New North-West, 21 Jan. 1870.

  29 For de Trobriand’s orders, see U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, 48.

  30 There are multiple accounts of the expedition, but this retelling relies primarily on the two best ones: Robert J. Ege, Strike Them Hard: Incident on the Marias, 23 January 1870 (Bellevue, Neb.: Old Army Press, 1970); and Dave Walter, Montana Campfire Tales: Fourteen Historical Narratives (Guilford, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 1997), 33–50. It is worth noting that, while Ege’s narrative is scrupulously researched, it is also—in the words of its author—“much kinder to Major Eugene M. Baker than most historians have written.” See Robert J. Ege to Merrill G. Burlingame, 3 April 1969, Montana State University Library, Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections, Merrill G. Burlingame Papers, collection 2245, box 36, file 6. See also Ben Bennett, Death, Too, for The-Heavy-Runner (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press, 1981); Wesley C. Wilson, “The U.S. Army and the Piegans: The Baker Massacre on the Marias, 1870,” North Dakota History 32, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 40–58; and J. P. Dunn, Massacres of the Mountains: A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1886), 509–42.

  31 For the best account of the engagement, see John H. Monnett, Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2008). See also Shannon D. Smith, Give Me Eighty Men: Women and the Myth of the Fetterman Fight (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2008).

  32 Great Falls Tribune, 27 Jan. 1935.

  33 Bear Head’s account (related in 1935) of the events of 23 Jan. 1870 appears in James Willard Schultz, Blackfeet and Buffalo: Memories of Life among the Indians (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 282–305. For a shorter but somewhat different version that he offered in 1915, see deposition of Bear Head, 18 Jan. 1915, MTHS, Heavy Runner Records (cited hereafter as HRR), MF 53.

  34 Billings Gazette, 3 April 1932. This account was offered by Spear Woman, a daughter of Heavy Runner who was seven at the time of the massacre. More than a decade after her death, Spear Woman’s own daughter, Mrs. George Croff, gave her mother’s story to the newspaper.

  35 Statement by Joe Connelly to Marguerite Marmont in 1931, Glenbow-Alberta Institute (cited hereafter as GAI), Stan Gibson Fonds (cited
hereafter as SGF).

  36 For more on the military armaments of this period, see McChristian, The U.S. Army in the West.

  37 See, e.g., deposition of Buffalo Trail Woman, 16 Jan. 1916, MTHS, HRR, MF 53.

  38 Schultz, Blackfeet and Buffalo, 301–2.

  39 Montana place-names in Blackfeet and English, Montana State University Library, Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections, James Willard Schultz Papers, collection 10, box 6, folder 7.

  40 For more on Doane, see Orrin H. Bonney and Lorraine Bonney, Battle Drums and Geysers: The Life and Journals of Lt. Gustavus Cheyney Doane, Soldier and Explorer of the Yellowstone and Snake River Regions (Chicago: Sage Books, 1970); and Marquis, Custer, Cavalry, and Crows. See also Black, Empire of Shadows.

  41 U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, 73. Baker did not report specific information on the ages and sexes of the victims until pressed to do so, more than two months after the incident on the Marias. One can only assume that the figures he provided came from Doane’s body count.

  42 Statement of Joe Kipp, 8 Feb. 1913, MTHS, HRR, MF 53. The Blackfeet recognize Kipp’s figure as the correct body count. See Great Falls Tribune, 23 Jan. 2007. Doane gave this assessment in 1889 as part of his unsuccessful application for the superintendency of Yellowstone National Park; it is uncertain whether he made this assertion with pride or regret. Quoted in Bonney and Bonney, Battle Drums and Geysers, 22.

  43 McKay was long mistakenly identified as “Walter.” See Stan Gibson to U.S. Army Center of Military History, 14 Feb. 1997, GAI, SGF; and Stan Gibson, notes on Walton McKay, GAI, SGF. It is worth noting that another soldier suffered a broken leg when pitched from his horse, becoming the only trooper wounded in the affair.

  44 For an account of this episode see Marquis, Custer, Cavalry & Crows, 33. Though Doane is not named, references to “the officer in charge” lead Black, among others, to the conclusion that it was Doane who ordered the executions. For his part, Bear Head believed there were four victims, and they were Bloods who had been in the Piegan camp. See deposition of Bear Head, 18 Jan. 1915, MTHS, HRR, MF 53.

  45 For their part, the Piegans insisted that the number of confiscated horses was closer to 5,000. See, e.g., statement of Joe Kipp, 8 Feb. 1913, MTHS, HRR, MF 53. John Ponsford, a member of the expedition, offered a figure of 3,000 horses seized, noting that all but 800 were claimed by their rightful white owners at Fort Shaw, with the balance sold to the highest bidders at an average price of eight dollars each. See John W. Ponsford, Baker Battle, 1870, MTHS, John W. Ponsford Reminiscence, SC 659.

  46 Billings Gazette, 3 April 1932.

  47 Telegram from Régis de Trobriand to O. D. Greene, 30 Jan. 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 5, folder 1-2.

  48 Letter from Régis de Trobriand to O. D. Greene, 18 Feb. 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 5, folder 1-2.

  49 U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, 17.

  50 Helena Daily Herald, 2 Feb. 1870.

  51 New North-West, 11 Feb. 1870.

  52 Owyhee Avalanche, 5 March 1870.

  53 See, e.g., the Daily Rocky Mountain Gazette, 30 Jan. 1870.

  54 Letter from Régis de Trobriand to Marie Caroline Post, 30 Jan. 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 1201.

  55 Letter from Régis de Trobriand to Marie Caroline Post, 9 March 1870, MTHS, RDT, SC 1201.

  56 Quoted in Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 192.

  57 For Pease’s report, see U.S. Congress, Expedition against Piegan Indians, House Executive Document 185, 41st Cong., 2nd sess. (1870), 7–8. For more on the exploitation of the forty-ninth parallel by Indians from both sides of the international boundary, see Andrew R. Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2007), 23–63.

  58 For Sully’s letter, see U.S. Congress, Expedition against Piegan Indians, 6. Sully explained later that he had intended to send a copy of Pease’s letter to the War Department at the same time, but that his clerk had forgotten to do so. See New York Times, 21 March 1870.

  59 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 25 Feb. 1870, 1576. Ironically, less than a year earlier Colyer had declared with great optimism that “in less than two years we shall have heard the last of ‘Indian outrages.’” See New York Times, 15 July 1869. Baker was a brevet colonel, hence Colyer’s appellation.

  60 New York Times, 24 Feb. 1870.

  61 Harper’s Weekly, 19 March 1870. Secretary of the Interior Jacob D. Cox sounded a similar note in a letter to President Grant dated 7 March 1870. Cox insisted that much of the conflict in the West stemmed from U.S. expansion into Indian territory, and he called particular attention to the circumstances in Montana, where, he explained, “the very capital of the Territory is located upon the land to which the Indian title has never been extinguished and which has never been formally opened by the government for settlement.” See U.S. Congress, Appropriations for Certain Indian Treaties, Senate Executive Document 57, 41st Cong., 2nd sess. (1870), 4.

  62 U.S. Congress, Piegan Indians, 9–10. Colyer did not allow Sheridan’s insult to go unanswered, insisting to the general, “Because I pull aside the curtain and let the American people see what you call ‘a great victory over the Indians,’ it does not follow that we do not want the men who perpetrated the horrid crimes you portray with so much zest, justly punished. Strike, if you must strike, the guilty, not the innocent.” New York Times, 10 March 1870 (emphasis in the original).

  63 The best source for information on the transfer debate (as well as the larger struggle for control of Indian affairs) is Henry G. Waltmann, “The Interior Department, War Department, and Indian Policy, 1865–1887” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1962). See also Donald J. D’Elia, “The Argument over Civilian or Military Indian Control, 1865–1880,” Historian 24, no. 2 (Feb. 1962): 207–25; and Marvin Garfield, “The Indian Question in Congress and in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 2, no. 1 (Feb. 1933): 29–44.

  64 For more on Sand Creek, see Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (1961; Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1977); and Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013).

  65 The literature on Grant’s peace policy is extensive. Among the most helpful sources are Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860–1890 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); Loring Benson Priest, Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865–1887 (1942; Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969); and Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984). For a revisionist perspective, see Henry G. Waltmann, “Circumstantial Reformer: President Grant & the Indian Problem,” Arizona and the West 13, no. 4 (Winter 1971): 323–42.

  66 Hutton, “Sheridan’s Pyrrhic Victory,” 33–34.

  67 Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1868, 40th Cong., 3rd sess., 467–74. It is worth noting that, as a member of the Peace Commission, Sherman signed his name to Taylor’s report (along with three other generals). It is doubtful, however, that he endorsed this portion of the document.

  68 Army and Navy Journal, 26 Feb. 1870.

  69 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., 25 Feb. 1870, 1577. Because Voorhees was a Democrat, his indictment of Grant was surely informed more by the congressman’s partisan sensibilities than by a commitment to racial justice; in fact, the historian Kenneth M. Stampp attributed to Voorhees an “intense race prejudice,” which no doubt shaped his role as one of the chief Copperheads (northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and whom Abraham Lincoln lamented as “the fire in the rear”). See his Indiana Politics during the Civil War (1949; Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978), 211. For more on Voorhees’s life and career, see Henry D. Jordan, “Daniel Wolsey Voorhees,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 6, no. 4 (March 1920): 532–55.

  70 New York Times, 11 March 1870. For his part, Sherman was convinced that Logan seized upon any opportunity to t
hwart him, given that Sherman had passed over Logan when selecting the commander of the Army of Tennessee after the death of General J. B. McPherson in July 1864. See Robert G. Athearn, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 254. For more on Logan, who is remembered for conceiving of the idea of Memorial Day, see James Pickett Jones, John A. Logan: Stalwart Republican from Illinois (Tallahassee: Univ. Presses of Florida, 1982).

  71 Army and Navy Journal, 26 March 1870.

  72 Congressional Globe, 44th Cong., 1st sess., 20 April 1876, 2673.

  73 Linda K. Kerber, “The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian,” Journal of American History 62, no. 2 (Sept. 1975): 271–95.

  74 Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (1998; New York: Norton, 2008), 138. For the importance of opposition to Indian removal in the strengthening of the antislavery movement, see Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 15–40. See also Allison L. Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). On the intellectual connections between African colonization and Indian removal, see Nicholas Guyatt, “‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009): 986–1011.

  75 Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1971), 8.

  76 For more on Child, see Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994).

  77 For a sampling of these and other pieces, see Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986). See also Laura L. Mielke, “Sentiment and Space in Lydia Maria Child’s Native American Writings, 1824–1870,” Legacy 21, no. 2 (2004): 172–92.