Killing Crazy Horse

by Bill O'Reilly

  “The loss of so many animals of value was a severe blow to the tribe,” Custer will write, “as nothing so completely impairs the war-making facilities for the Indians of the Plains as the deprivation or disabling of their ponies.”

  The village leader is a chief named Black Kettle. He is known as a man of peace and for many years has been eager to establish treaties with the whites to protect his people. It was Black Kettle’s Southern Cheyenne tribe who were attacked at Sand Creek on November 29,1864, even though he had personally flown a white flag of truce and the American Stars and Stripes over his tepee on that day so soldiers would not see him as a threat. Black Kettle survived the infamous slaughter, as did his wife—who suffered nine bullet wounds.

  Yet once again, Black Kettle’s people are now being attacked without cause, even though he signed a treaty with the U.S. government that promised his tribe “perpetual peace” after their sufferings at Sand Creek. Black Kettle is in his late sixties on the morning Custer and the Seventh Cavalry thunder into his camp, the American soldiers shouting fierce battle cries. Black Kettle panics and mounts a horse with his wife in retreat. Back in the village, the chief’s own warriors mock him as he tries to gallop away.

  But Black Kettle and his wife do not get far. They are shot in the back by American soldiers, their corpses falling into the Washita River.

  “We saw the bodies of Black Kettle and his wife, lying under the water,” the Cheyenne teenager named Moving Behind Woman will recount many years later. “It was getting late, and we had to go, so we left the bodies. As we rode along westward, we would come across the bodies of men, women and children strewn about. We would stop and look at the bodies and mention their names.”

  * * *

  With more than a hundred Indians dead, George Custer writes his full report shortly after the battle. Messengers travel through the night to deliver news of the great victory to General Sheridan’s headquarters. Custer’s success is a validation of Sheridan’s strategy of taking the battle to the enemy during the winter, when they least expect it.

  “The Major General Commanding announces to this Command the defeat, by the Seventh Regiment of Cavalry, of a large force of Cheyenne Indians under the celebrated Chief Black Kettle … on the morning of the 27th instant, on the Washita River, near the Antelope Hills, Indian Territory, resulting in a loss to the savages of one hundred and three warriors killed, including Black Kettle.”

  So reads Major General Phil Sheridan’s after-action report about the surprise attack on the Cheyenne at the Washita. The general does not mention that women and children were slaughtered.

  “The gallantry and bravery displayed, resulting in signal success, reflect the highest credit upon both the officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry.

  “Special congratulations are tendered to their distinguished commander, Brevet Major-General George A. Custer, for the efficient and gallant services rendered.”

  The history of Washita was initially written by the victors, as is so often the case. But the slaughter sets forth a series of events on the plains that would eventually shock America. Because a nonthreatening tribe had been annihilated, peace and negotiation will become much more difficult between the Indians and the U.S. government.

  Payback is coming.

  Chapter Seventeen

  MARCH 4, 1869

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  NOON

  The new president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, seeks peace.

  “The proper treatment of the original occupants of this land—the Indians,” he states during his inaugural address, is “one deserving of careful study. I will favor any course toward them which tends to their civilization and ultimate citizenship.”

  The short, bearded, paunchy Grant, whose clothing smells permanently of tobacco smoke from his habit of smoking as many as twenty cigars per day, stands on the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol Building. Supreme Court justice Salmon P. Chase has just delivered the oath of office, making the former Union general the eighteenth president of the United States. Now, as he delivers his fifteen-minute oration, Grant speaks openly about an issue that seems to have no solution: what to do about the Indians.

  America has three options: assimilation, isolation, or annihilation.

  In the words of Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy, the Indian warrior must now “take his place among other men and accept the march of civilization, as he must ultimately, or there is nothing except his destiny that awaits him, which is extinction.”

  In fiscal terms, it makes little sense for Grant to wage war against the Native American population. It costs the United States somewhere between $1 and $2 million per week to maintain a fighting force on a frontier stretching from the Apache lands along the Mexican border to the Lakota and Nez Percé tribes all the way north into Canada. Yet as the nation relies more frequently on overland transportation to reach cities and towns in the west, this fighting force is vital to protect railroads, stagecoaches, wagon trains of settlers, and even the solitary riders on horseback who carry the mail.1

  As Grant speaks on this cold Thursday afternoon, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads are just two months away from driving the final spike into a single length of track linking America’s east and west. Once that occurs, the transportation of passengers and freight will instantly become quicker and more affordable. This transcontinental railroad line is the most dramatic intrusion yet of white civilization into the Indian realm.2

  Many in America argue that assimilation is possible, yet an equal number believe the two races will never live in harmony. Both sides, however, believe in placing Indians on separate and supervised reservations. However, this is also a financial drain on the federal government. A typical treaty consigning tribes to a reservation includes the stipulation that Indians adopt an agrarian lifestyle. But until the tribes learn to be self-sustaining through planting crops and raising livestock, the American government must feed the Indians. For example, one key provision of the Treaty of Fort Laramie Treaty is that the government promises to give each member of the Lakota nation a regular ration of a pound of meat and pound of flour for four years. That is part of the $100 million dollars a year the Indian pacification is costing.

  But not all that money is being spent on Native Americans. Political appointees who care little about the tribes run the U.S. government’s Indian Bureau, first founded in 1824. “No branch of the federal government is so spotted with fraud, so tainted with corruption,” a congressman will state on the floor of the House. Reservation Indians often go hungry and without shelter or blankets, due to embezzlement, theft, and misappropriation of funds. Grant plans to completely overhaul this system, removing political appointees and replacing them with representatives from protestant religious groups. It is felt that their inherent honesty and determination to civilize the Indians through introducing the white religion will be transformative.

  For the nomadic tribes of the plains, whose warriors believe farming is women’s work and who worship their own spirit world, such an agrarian adaptation is difficult—if not impossible. Thus, even after tribes sign a treaty and begin life on the reservation, they often wander off to hunt in their traditional fashion, leading to incidents like General Custer’s attack on Black Kettle’s band.

  An exception to this practice is the tribal lands bequeathed to the Sioux in the Dakota and Wyoming territories. This grant was ratified by the Senate in mid-February and signed by former president Andrew Johnson as one of his last acts in office.

  The Sioux reservation is so vast, and the game so plentiful, that there is no need for warriors to consider a future tilling the earth. In theory, there is also no need for them to worry about conflict with whites, because the Treaty of Fort Laramie promises the Sioux “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of their vast new reservation, “completely off limits to whites.”

  President Grant campaigned on the platform of “Let us have peace” and has no intention of breaking any treat
y with the Indians. Quite the contrary—his stated ambition is to offer citizenship to the tribes. That would be the most revolutionary act ever by an American president regarding Native Americans.

  The new president well knows that last week, on February 26, 1869, just two days after Andrew Johnson signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie, Congress voted to approve a new amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While coincidental, the timing could not be better for Grant. The new Fifteenth Amendment promises the vote to all American males, regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

  Ostensibly, that would include Indians. But the issue becomes complicated.

  Ulysses Grant is now forty-six years old. He is an introverted man whose quiet bearing is mistaken by some as a lack of intellect. He is bad with money, making many financial mistakes, and often trusts the wrong people. The president has “a puzzled pathos, as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not understand the terms,” the poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell will write of his meeting with Grant.

  But that quiet façade can be misleading. The president is an idealist, willing to take a stand on those things in which he deeply believes. During the Civil War, he switched party alliances from the Democrats, whose pro–slave owner policies remained close to the beliefs of Andrew Jackson, to the new Republican Party, led by anti-slavery president Abraham Lincoln.

  Ironically, Grant was once a slave owner himself, making him the last president of the United States to possess a human being as personal property. In 1859, U. S. Grant set free his lone slave, at a time when he sorely needed the money selling the man could have garnered. Grant’s newfound belief in equality was reinforced during the Civil War, as he watched black troops fight and die with professionalism and courage.

  The change of heart would prove vital to Grant’s election as president. His Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour, campaigned on a pro-white platform—blaming blacks for the nation’s ongoing postwar division. “This is white man’s country; let white men rule,” read one Democratic campaign button. The Democrats further went on to claim that the Republicans fostered “military despotism and black supremacy” in the South. Indeed, the words “black supremacy” were written into the Democrats’ official platform statement of 1868. Pro-Democrat newspapers predicted that a Republican victory would allow black men to openly rape white women. This absurdity actually stoked fears on the western frontier that if Republicans were elected, captured white females would be raped by Indian warriors.

  Ulysses S. Grant with the U.S. Capitol in the background

  Grant and the Republicans, while taking great care to not be openly solicitous of blacks for fear of losing the white electorate entirely, had been in favor of black suffrage and equality throughout the Reconstruction process. It is Grant’s plan to continue this “Radical Reconstruction” during his presidency.

  In the end, Ulysses S. Grant received a minority of the white votes on Election Day, 1868. Of the 5.7 million voters who went to the polls, Grant won by just 306,000 votes. The deciding factor was the 500,000 black ballots cast in his favor.

  President Grant’s views on race stand in marked contrast to those of his predecessor, Andrew Johnson. As governor of Tennessee, Johnson publicly stated that every American should own a slave and sided with the interests of white southerners throughout Reconstruction. Grant slowly distanced himself from the coarse Johnson after the Civil War, even while serving as General of the Army. The divide grew so deep that by 1869 the two men no longer speak. Grant would not even allow Johnson to make the traditional ride of incumbent and president-elect to the inauguration in his personal carriage this morning. Now, even as Grant speaks about not just Native American rights but also rebuilding the nation, Andrew Johnson remains at the White House he inherited upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.3

  Grant is about to finish his address as he stares out at the crowd, which includes eight full divisions of the U.S. Army, standing in formation as they prepare to march in review past the presidential box.

  “In conclusion, I ask patient forbearance one toward another throughout the land, and a determined effort on the part of every citizen to do his share toward cementing a happy union.”

  * * *

  But the “happy union” will not be easily achieved. Four years after the Civil War, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia, and Texas still resist efforts to return to the United States and are occupied by federal troops and a military governor. Eventually, those states will capitulate to Washington’s demands and rejoin the Union in 1870.

  Other than uniting the nation, the Indian conflict is perhaps the greatest obstacle facing the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. White farmers continue to flood onto the prairie lands of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Crow, encouraged by the prospect of cheap acres promised by the Homestead Act of 1862. “Barbed wire” is emerging as a means of dividing western lands and keeping cattle from straying. And “cow boys,” a new breed of individual whose primary role is guiding large herds of longhorn cattle from their grazing lands in Texas to railheads in Kansas, routinely travel through Comanche territory at great risk.4

  But in the end, it will not be the farmers or the cow boys who will put President Grant’s Indian policy to its greatest test.

  No, it will be the discovery of a sparkling mineral in the land of the Sioux: gold.

  Chapter Eighteen

  MARCH 20, 1869

  PRESCOTT, ARIZONA

  MORNING

  President Grant wants to meet the fierce Apache chief, Cochise, face-to-face.

  And it may happen.

  Readers of this morning’s Weekly Arizona Miner are startled to see that the elusive Chiricahua leader has recently met with the U.S. Army to discuss a peaceful settlement of the Apache wars, now entering their eighth year. The fact that Cochise has actually been seen in person is just as shocking. His name has become synonymous with terror and stealth, for he continues to raid with impunity, seldom seen by his victims and confounding all attempts by the U.S. Army to locate him. There are now fourteen military outposts in Arizona, occupied by a collective force of more than two thousand soldiers. But none have been able to find Cochise—and none have been able to stop his aggression. It is estimated the Apaches have killed almost a thousand people since the early 1860s.

  Unlike all the other Native American opponents the United States has faced, Cochise has never surrendered, preferring to withdraw from the field of battle when the tide turns against his band rather than laying down his arms. So it is that miners, stagecoach passengers, ranchers, and anyone else foolish enough to inhabit the Apache lands live in fear of a fatal attack by Cochise’s warriors.

  “Cacheis [Cochise] is about six feet three inches high, strongly muscled, with mild prominent features, hooked nose, and looks to be a man who means what he says,” reports the Miner. “Age is just beginning to tell on him.”

  In his fashion, Cochise dictates the terms of the meeting. Ever since the 1861 “tent cutting” act of duplicity in Apache Pass, and the subsequent hanging deaths of his relatives, the chief has despised American soldiers. But the ongoing war with the United States has killed many of his warriors, leaving Cochise with a tribe consisting largely of women and children. The chief is almost sixty now, and growing weary of fighting. His face is harshly lined from years of sun and wind, and his black hair is streaked with silver. His beloved refuge at Apache Pass is now home to a large American fort, thus off-limits to Cochise and his tribe. His father-in-law and fellow chief, the towering Mangas Coloradas, was murdered by soldiers seven years ago after he entered Fort McLane in southwestern New Mexico under a flag of truce.

  On February 5, a force of sixty-one American soldiers marched into Dragoon Pass, Cochise’s new stronghold in southern Arizona. But as the Miner is reporting, instead of allowing himself to be hunted, Cochise sent a messenger stating he would meet with the Americans on the morning of February 6.

  “His camp was six miles off, up in the mountains,�
� the Miner reports. “He came down the next day with some of his men and met the [Captain] and escort. All hands were soon talking and smoking. The following is the conversation that ensued.”1

  COCHISE: What are you doing out here, Captain?

  CAPTAIN FRANK W. PERRY: Come to see you and prospect the country generally.

  COCHISE: You mean you came to kill me or any of my tribe; that is what all your visits mean to me. I tried the Americans once and they broke the treaty first, the officers I mean, this was at the Pass.… I lost nearly 100 of my people in the last year, principally from sickness. The Americans killed a good many. I have not 100 Indians now. Ten years ago I had 1,000. The Americans are everywhere, and we must live in bad places to shun them.… My Indians will do no harm until I come in, which I may do inside two months.

  PERRY: I heard you were wounded often.…

  COCHISE: I was wounded twice. First near Santa Cruz, in the leg 12 years ago. I had a bad leg for some time afterwards. Next near Fronteras, two years ago, in the neck.

  * * *

  The conversation continues, but in the end Cochise refuses to accompany Captain Perry the one hundred miles north to his headquarters at Fort Goodwin. However, he requests and receives gifts of blankets, bread, and tobacco from the soldiers. The chief and his followers then depart the meeting site, disappearing back into the Dragoon Mountains to their secret campsite. No attempt is made to stop them.

  “Why he and the others were let off … beats my understanding,” writes the Miner’s reporter, a man whose byline reads only “Occasional.”

  The reporter concludes: “I expect the mail to be jumped soon.”

  “Occasional” is correct, as Apache attacks on the U.S. mail service are stepped up.