The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  At Fort Jones Crook began what would be a lifelong obsession: hunting and fishing. In company with Brevet Second Lieutenant John Bell Hood, he took to the mountains seeking any animal or fowl or fish worth carrying back for supper. All of Crook’s spare time, then and later, was devoted to hunting and fishing.4

  Not all of Crook’s service in the Pacific Northwest amounted to a “grand farce.” In 1855 he rode as part of an escort to the expedition of Lieutenant R. S. Williamson exploring the Cascade Mountains, which afforded Crook ample opportunity to acquaint himself with the country and indulge his passion for hunting. He also renewed his friendship with his old friend Lieutenant Philip H. Sheridan, also assigned to the Fourth Infantry as a replacement for Lieutenant Hood.

  The Williamson expedition ended as the second Rogue River War broke out. Crook took the field in the spring of 1856, shortly after his promotion to first lieutenant on March 11. On this expedition he did much marching and hunting and on occasion collided with Indians. In fact, during one skirmish, he killed his first Indian with a pistol shot.

  Crook’s principal action in the Rogue River War took place in 1857. During the Pitt River expedition, Captain Judah, drunk most of the time, led his troops in one futile operation after another. At length he turned the command over to Crook and returned to Fort Jones. Crook proved a more aggressive commander, skirmishing with Indians in close combat on three occasions during the summer. In one engagement a shower of arrows rained down on his group, and one arrow struck him in the right hip. He grabbed the shaft and yanked it out, but the arrowhead remained embedded in his hip. A relief party headed by a drunken Captain Judah hurried toward the scene, but Judah fell by the wayside. After examining Crook, the post surgeon decided to let the wound heal, which it did, allowing Crook to continue his leadership throughout subsequent combat operations. The arrowhead remained in his hip for the rest of his life.5

  Captain Judah’s example probably reinforced Crook’s aversion to excessive use of intoxicants, the bane of the frontier army. Although he occasionally took a drink, he never overindulged and also never used tobacco.

  Crook’s final active service in the Pacific Northwest occurred during spring and summer of 1858, in the area of Washington Territory drained by the Columbia River. Crook commanded his company of the Fourth Infantry as part of an expedition under Major Robert Garnett. Much marching through scenic country took the troops almost to the Canadian border. Their mission was to seek the killers of some gold miners the previous April, who had taken refuge with friendly Indians west of the Columbia. The expedition succeeded, and Crook himself had five of the culprits executed by firing squad.6

  Such were the highlights of Crook’s introduction to Indian warfare. They exemplify the constant pursuit of and combat with a host of separate Indian tribal groups that fell to his lot. All of the tribes had been subdued by 1859. Crook had played a prominent part in these operations and acquired combat skills vital to his role in later Indian hostilities. He had also concluded that most Indian hostilities arose from mistreatment of the Indians by white people, which forced the army to make war on people with whom its officers and men often sympathized. From his experience in the Pacific Northwest, Crook shaped a personal philosophy on how to treat Indians: teach them the power of the government by thoroughly whipping them in combat, then deal with them in peace authoritatively but considerately. Also, never make promises that could not be kept and always keep truth in the forefront. As Crook would discover, such idealistic goals often foundered in the face of the contrary actions and attitudes of other officers and civilian government officials and unsympathetic public opinion.

  Crook passed his final three years in the Pacific Northwest at Fort Terwah, California, engaged in routine garrison duties. On May 14, 1861, he was promoted to captain in his regiment.

  In September 1860 Crook took his first leave of absence and returned to Ohio for a visit with family and friends. He took little interest in the great national issue then sweeping the country. Even the election of 1860, carrying Abraham Lincoln into the presidency and sparking a cascade of Southern states to rebel against the Union, seems to have aroused no more than passing interest in him. By Christmas 1860 Crook was back in California, settled at Fort Terwah. In spring 1861, with civil war gathering in the East, the two infantry regiments on the Pacific Coast were ordered to travel to the scene of the war.

  By September 1861 Captain Crook was in Washington, D.C., scouting opportunities for wartime service.

  CIVIL WAR

  Crook swiftly perceived that the war would be fought almost entirely by the Volunteer Army being mobilized by the Lincoln administration and not by the Regular Army. At first the War Department tried to keep the Regular Army intact, and Crook employed Ohio political influence to gain permission to seek a Volunteer commission. The governor of Ohio granted him the colonelcy of the Thirty-Sixth Ohio Infantry, which launched Crook’s wartime career. As a recently mustered unit, posted to Summersville, in western Virginia, the Thirty-Sixth lacked any trace of discipline, organization, order, or even uniforms and arms. Taking command on September 12, 1861, Crook rose to the occasion and, by drill, discipline, and field training, transformed the unit into an effective regiment by the end of the year.

  As a West Pointer with almost a decade of professional service in the field, Colonel Crook easily outclassed his amateur officers, only recently drawn from civilian life and holding their commissions by election of the enlisted men (a custom that he abolished). On May 1, 1862, the Thirty-Sixth was combined with two other regiments to form a provisional brigade under Crook’s command. The brigade participated on the fringes of a campaign in the Shenandoah Valley to the east. On May 23, 1862, Crook achieved victory over a Confederate force in a battle at Lewisburg, during which a bullet struck him in the foot, inflicting a painful wound. For “gallant and meritorious service” at Lewisburg, Crook received a brevet of major in the Regular Army.7

  After Lewisburg, Crook’s brigade shifted to the Army of the Potomac. From a ridge-line, the brigade observed General John Pope’s crushing defeat at Second Manassas, then in September 1862 marched north to join General George B. McClellan’s effort to head off Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland.

  In the Antietam campaign Crook’s brigade fought valiantly in the Battle of South Mountain on September 14 and in the horrendous bloodletting of Antietam on September 17. In the first of these encounters Crook distinguished himself leading a bayonet charge; in the second he failed to reach a bridge over Antietam Creek that he had been ordered to seize. He spent the rest of his life trying to justify his failure to attack the bridge and cast the blame elsewhere. Even so, on October 1 Crook received word of his promotion on September 7 to brigadier general of Volunteers. Orders also directed him to rise from brigade level to division level and take command of the Kanawha Division, named for the river where it was deployed.

  Throughout 1863, commanding two other divisions in sequence, Crook participated in the Tennessee campaigns that centered on Chattanooga. In September he led one of his divisions in the Battle of Chickamauga, fighting tenaciously with the rest of the Union army to stave off defeat by the Confederate forces led by General Braxton Bragg. With the rest of the federal units, his division was driven back in disorder. After Chickamauga, he kept busy fighting Confederate outfits both in Tennessee and Alabama. None of the conflicts achieved much significance, but they revealed Crook as a competent division commander. In the spring of 1864 he returned to his West Virginia base and resumed command of the Kanawha Division.

  One of the brigades of the Kanawha Division was commanded by Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes, an Ohio politician who had secured a military posting. In contrast to most political generals, Hayes proved an able commander. He greatly admired Crook, and the two established a personal friendship that ripened over the years and involved Hayes’s full family. It proved useful to Crook when Hayes won the presidency in 1876.

  Since the beginning of the war, both side
s had struggled to dominate the Shenandoah Valley, which helped feed the Confederate Army and harbored strategic railway junctions.

  Because ineffective generals on both sides had failed to achieve decisive results, this “breadbasket of the Confederacy” remained contested. When Ulysses S. Grant came east in spring 1864 and donned three stars as general-in-chief, the valley took a place high on the Union priority list. Crook had campaigned in the valley enough to become thoroughly acquainted with it, so Grant summoned him to his headquarters to confer on future operations. For a year, as the Shenandoah took high rank as a Union theater of war, Crook’s service lay in the Shenandoah Valley. At times he distinguished himself, at times he turned in an undistinguished performance, but throughout he functioned as one of the second tier of generals. Reinforcing his new stature, on July 18, 1864, he was breveted major general of volunteers, which permitted him to don shoulder straps bearing two stars.

  Union fortunes in the Shenandoah Valley revived on August 8, 1864, when Major General Philip H. Sheridan arrived to assume command of the Army of the Shenandoah. His long-range objective was to drive the Confederate army of Lieutenant General Jubal Early from the valley and then to lay waste to the area so that it would cease to supply Southern armies with provender. To accomplish his mission, Sheridan had three infantry corps, of which Crook’s Eighth was one, and three brigades of cavalry from the Army of the Potomac. The Army of the Shenandoah numbered about thirty thousand men. In Crook, Sheridan found a congenial old friend from West Point and the Pacific Northwest. The two got along personally, and Sheridan frequently sought Crook’s professional advice.

  After a month of marching and countermarching, on September 19 Sheridan committed the Army of the Shenandoah to a major battle with General Early outside Winchester. All three corps took part as well as some of the cavalry. In a decisive move, Crook saw an opportunity to turn the enemy’s left flank. He wheeled his corps in such a fashion that he was able to launch a charge against the Confederate line. The line collapsed, and the Confederates fled south.

  The Battle of Opequon Creek represented Sheridan’s first triumph in the Shenandoah Valley, and he received warm accolades from Washington. Crook’s role had been critical. What should have been cause for jubilation, however, turned to a rancorous memory that haunted him to the end of his days. In his report Sheridan failed to give Crook proper credit and made the move on the Southern left flank seem like part of his own plan. Crook never forgave his superior.8

  Next General Early posted his army in a long defensive line on Fisher’s Hill. Sheridan scouted the position and, so he wrote, determined that the Confederate right and center were too strong to assault but that the left might be turned, as had occurred at Opequon Creek. Crook examined the position on his own and conceived a scheme for marching his corps stealthily through the forests of North Mountain, which abutted the Confederate left, and surprising the defenders’ left flank. Sheridan and his two other corps commanders doubted that such a move could be carried out without being discovered. Crook brought in Hayes, now brigadier general, to back the proposal with his lawyer’s eloquence. Sheridan and the other generals reluctantly consented. Crook successfully led his corps through the mountain forests and on September 22 fell on the Confederate left in a surprise attack. Early’s line doubled up and collapsed. The enemy fled south, with Crook and his men in pursuit.

  Again Sheridan received warm praise in Washington while failing to give Crook or any of his other subordinates much credit. In his account he implied that Crook’s success was part of his own plan. Even so, a month later Crook was appointed major general of volunteers. The following spring, on March 13, 1865, he was breveted major general in the regular army for his role in the Battle of Fisher’s Hill.

  Assuming that Early had decided to withdraw from the valley, Sheridan in mid-October accepted the invitation of Grant and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to travel to Washington and confer on future operations. In his absence, the Army of the Shenandoah lay in a north-south axis on the eastern bank of Cedar Creek. Crook’s corps held the left flank, extending to the south. At dawn on October 19 Early’s army emerged from the morning fog and fell on Crook’s corps. Taken by surprise, the troops fled north, spreading the panic into the other corps. In one of the Civil War’s most dramatic moments, usually exaggerated, Sheridan galloped into the fray on his black horse Reinzi. The troops rallied, turned, and regained their original positions. Later in the afternoon Sheridan thrust his army into Early’s defenses at Fisher’s Hill and won a stunning victory.

  The collapse of the Eighth Corps at Cedar Creek opened Crook to the charge of negligence, and in fact several of his decisions merited the charge. Fortunately for him, all the other generals could also be accused of exposing their troops to Early’s surprise, so Crook escaped condemnation. Nevertheless, as the years went by, he increasingly resented the glory showered on Sheridan for the battles of Opequon, Fisher’s Hill, and Cedar Creek. A year before his death, Crook returned to the battlefields. Exposing his darker side in his diary, he concluded that Sheridan’s actions in allowing the public to believe what he knew to be fiction were “contemptible.” “The adulation heaped on him by a grateful nation for his supposed genius turned his head, which, added to his natural disposition, caused him to bloat his little carcass with debauchery and dissipation, which carried him off prematurely.”9

  Crook’s next major episode caused him acute embarrassment. After the valley campaign, he resumed command of the Department of West Virginia, with headquarters in Cumberland, Maryland. He bunked in the Revere Hotel, near another hotel that housed Major General Benjamin Kelley, whose division guarded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Cumberland lay in the midst of a population of largely Southern sympathizers and teemed with Confederate guerrilla bands. Never known to be especially interested in women, Crook fell for the daughter of the hotel’s owner, Mary Dailey. It seems not to have daunted Crook that her family embraced the secessionist cause and her brother rode with one of the partisan bands (which he probably did not know). At 3:00 A.M. on February 20, 1865, however, Crook was awakened in his bedroom by a squad of Confederate rangers. They took him and General Kelley captive and hurried out of town, having tricked and overpowered the guards.

  After a 150-mile ride on horseback through bitter winter weather, the two generals and their escort faced General Jubal Early. Delighted with the prize, Early forwarded them to Richmond for confinement in Libby Prison. General Lee, however, promptly contacted Union headquarters and arranged an exchange. By mid-March the two embarrassed Union generals were back home. Secretary Stanton had proposed making an example of them by mustering them out of the service and letting them remain in Libby Prison, but General Grant wanted them back and prevailed.

  Crook expected to be returned to command his Eighth Corps in Maryland, but General Grant assigned him to command the remaining cavalry division in the Army of the Potomac, the others having been withdrawn and placed under Sheridan. Crook rightly viewed this as a lesser command than he had held for two years and suspected that it was form of rebuke for allowing himself to be captured, which it may have been. His new assignment, however, ensured that he would participate in the campaign that led to Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.

  On April 1 the Battle of Five Forks opened the campaign, as Grant sought to force Lee’s army from its defenses south of Petersburg. Crook’s division played a significant role in the preliminaries to the battle when it bore the brunt of a Confederate assault on March 31, held its ground until ammunition ran short, and then fell back. The day’s fighting cost one-third of the division’s strength. In the main battle the next day Crook’s battered division acted on the defensive. On April 2 and 3 they trailed the rest of the army, guarding wagon trains. Thereafter, however, they joined with other infantry and cavalry units to contend with the retreating Confederates. On April 6, at the Battle of Saylor’s Creek, Crook’s division played a con
spicuous part in crushing major elements of the Confederate army. For the three days remaining until the climax at Appomattox, Crook’s cavalry fought as bravely as the rest of the Union force. At least once Crook found himself fighting in the center of the battlefield. Surrounded and facing capture, he fought his way to safety.

  Unlike other top commanders, however, when Lee surrendered to Grant, Crook remained with his own command and was not present at Appomattox Courthouse.

  In the Appomattox campaign Crook had acted, led, and fought with bravery and distinction. He could be proud of his role in the final scenes of the conflict with Lee’s army. In the larger sense, Crook had performed well, sometimes brilliantly, in the entire war. He emerged as one of the second tier of Union generals to merit distinction. Only his embarrassing capture by Confederate partisans stained his record.

  On August 22, 1865, awaiting assignment in Baltimore, Crook and Mary Dailey were married. He hardly mentioned the nuptials in his memoir and rarely wrote of her in later years. Even so, the little available evidence indicates that it was a stable marriage, marred only by Crook’s long absences in the field.

  In his autobiography Crook sourly lamented: “I regret to say that I learned too late that it was not what a person did, but it was what he got the credit of doing that gave him a reputation and at the close of the war gave him position.”10 As if to validate his conviction, as the postwar Regular Army took shape in 1866, the War Department offered him the post of major of the Third Infantry, a plunge of five grades from major general. He complained bitterly that officers of less rank were receiving higher appointments and called for reconsideration. As a result, he was appointed lieutenant colonel of the Twenty-Third Infantry. Importantly, however, he retained his brevet of major general in the Regular Army.

  THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST—AGAIN

  Unlike other Civil War generals, Lieutenant Colonel Crook insisted on being addressed by his regular rank. He reached his new posting, Fort Boise, Idaho, headquarters of the Military District of Boise, in December 1866. As commander of the district, Crook reported to Major General Frederick Steele, who headed the Department of the Columbia, a unit of the Division of the Pacific. Crook brought to his first postwar assignment ample experience as an Indian fighter in this very area. The enemies were Paiutes, Shoshones, Bannocks, Pitt Rivers, and others who had made life tough for immigrants and miners in northern California, Oregon, and Washington as well as Idaho.