The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  Crook had no sooner assumed command than Indians struck only twenty miles from Fort Boise. He seized the occasion to organize and lead a winter campaign. The stormy, freezing winter, combined with rough topography, made operations agonizingly difficult for officers and enlisted men alike. Crook intended to put into effect what would be standard operating procedure: get on the trail and don’t relinquish it until the enemy is found and defeated. Also, in addition to forty troopers of the First Cavalry under Captain David Perry, he took along ten Indian scouts; employing Indians against Indians would become another Crook hallmark.

  Crook’s command overtook the Paiute raiders in their home ranchería on the Owyhee River. Creeping into position on Christmas night 1866, he led his men in surprise dawn attack that overwhelmed the quarry, killed thirty men, and took nine women and children captive. Rather than return to Fort Boise, Crook continued the campaign, although he sent back for additional Indian scouts. In fact, as he boasted in his autobiography, he continued the campaign for two years without returning to Fort Boise.

  Backtracking up the Owyhee River to the Snake River, Crook paused to await resupply. He then worked west into Oregon up the Malheur River, where he took thirty prisoners at an Indian village on January 3, 1867, and attacked another on January 28, downing sixty defenders and taking another twenty-seven prisoners.11

  Archie McIntosh, a Scottish half-blood scout with vast experience in the wilds, was the last of Crook’s scouts during these operations and would remain in Crook’s entourage as he moved on to higher positions. That September McIntosh led Crook to a gathering of more than one hundred Achumawis, Modocs, and Paiutes on the south fork of the Pitt River in northeastern California. The tribesmen were ensconced in caves, fissures, and fortified ledges high on a 700-foot lava cliff. Although it was a virtually unassailable position, Crook resolved to storm it. In a two-day battle, on September 16 and 17, the troops scaled the heights while exchanging fire with the hidden warriors. By evening on the second day the Indians had made their way to safety through underground passages. The attack took the lives of at least twenty defenders, while others left enough blood on the rocks to indicate a higher casualty rate. Crook’s command lost an officer and two enlisted men killed and nine others wounded. Graphically, the affair became known as the Battle of Infernal Caverns.12

  In July 1868, when Crook again took the field with a large command, he had in person led a dozen scouts and participated in six fights. The Paiutes had been allowed no rest for a year and a half and forced to fight forty times. Aside from their exhaustion and inability to procure their usual food supplies, they had lost, according to army reports, 329 killed, 20 wounded, and 225 captured.13 After a month-long operation, culminating in negotiations with the principal chief, Weawea, Crook could report that the Indian war was over.14

  George Crook merited the accolade of his division commander, Major General Henry W. Halleck: “Too much praise cannot be given General Crook for his energy and skill with which he has conducted the war. He has endured many hardships, privations and dangers.”15

  Crook had made enough of a name for himself that he was selected to head the command of the Department of the Columbia when it fell vacant until a successor had been named. For two years he enjoyed a quiet routine life in Portland, Oregon, until Brigadier General Edward R. S. Canby arrived to take command in August 1870.

  While he engaged in temporary staff assignments, two division commanders urged him to take charge of the Department of Arizona, scourged for years by Apache hostilities. He steadfastly refused, in part because he was tired of Indian work and in part because his elevation would cause resentment among the many officers of higher grade. In May 1871, however, the adjutant general informed Crook that President Grant wanted him assigned to Arizona in his brevet rank of major general, a move that incurred the enmity of all the colonels of the line, as he had feared. On June 4, at headquarters in Wilmington, California, he formally relieved his predecessor, Colonel George Stoneman, and took command of the Department of Arizona.

  Crook’s record in the Indian wars of 1866–68 in Idaho, Oregon, and California rose in distinction above any other army officer’s accomplishments in the first years after the Civil War. It drew on his prewar success with these same Indians, the advantage of his wartime mastery of the art of command, and his determination to do his duty in whatever role his superiors assigned him. No other postwar officer, regardless of rank, could make such a claim. The only officer to warrant such distinction was George Crook. As he left the Department of the Columbia, Crook had taken his second step toward a reputation as the army’s foremost authority on Indians.

  APACHES

  Arriving in Tucson, Crook went to work with characteristic vigor. He summoned the department’s principal officers to learn all he could about the country, the Apaches, and his troops. Then he formed a command of five troops of the Third Cavalry, supported by a pack train of sturdy mules, and set forth to explore his desert and mountain domain for himself. As always in his operations, Crook formed a contingent of scouts, partly Mexicans and partly local Indians; he regarded these as temporary until he could replace them with Apaches. Archie McIntosh, the invaluable veteran of Crook’s campaigns in the north country, led the scout detachment. McIntosh was ignorant of Arizona, but Crook trusted his instinct. Another capable professional who accompanied him from Idaho was Tom Moore, an expert mule-skinner. Crook made him chief packer for the department. McIntosh and Moore signaled Crook’s intent to rely heavily on Indian scouts and pack mules.

  Heading east from Tucson on July 11, the command camped for three days beginning July 14 at Fort Bowie, guardian of strategic Apache Pass through the Chiricahua Mountains and center of the domain of the indomitable Chiricahua Apache chieftain Cochise. From Fort Bowie the column turned north into the White Mountains and Camp Apache. Here Crook counseled with the White Mountain Apaches, who proved friendly and so responsive to Crook’s talk that seventy-five of them stepped forward to enlist in Crook’s scout unit. Paid the same as enlisted white troops, these became the nucleus of units that Crook would employ as combat troops in his projected offensive against the Apaches in the Tonto Basin. The Mexicans in the scout unit were discharged and sent home.

  Leaving Captain Guy V. Henry to organize a compact striking force of cavalry and scouts to penetrate the Tonto Basin, Crook took the rest of the command into the Mogollon Mountains and proceeded west along the narrow Mogollon Rim, blazing a 216-mile route through the wilderness that came to be known as the Crook Trail. It ended in the Verde River Valley at Camp Verde. From here Crook climbed to the town of Prescott and made Fort Whipple the headquarters of the Department of Arizona.16

  Crook learned at Camp Verde that his planned campaign in the Tonto Basin had been interrupted. President Grant had inaugurated his so-called Peace Policy, which aimed at conquering the western Indians by kindness. A peace commissioner, Vincent Colyer, had arrived in Arizona and cavalierly began to travel from agency to agency making peace with the various Apache tribes. Immensely frustrated by “Vincent the Good,” Crook had no choice but to suspend all military operations.

  By October 1871 Colyer had completed his mission, having created reservations for Chiricahuas, Tontos, and Yavapais. Those who wished to remain at peace would assemble on the reservations, while those who refused would be labeled hostile. Ultimately Colyer’s work failed, but in the meantime Crook planned his offensive. At the top of his list of objectives was achieving peace with the Chiricahuas, Cochise, and his people. This now proved impossible because another Washington emissary had concluded a peace agreement with the chief. Brigadier General Oliver O. Howard, the one-armed “Christian General,” had accomplished this feat, although Crook could find no document that set the terms to paper. In his autobiography Crook recounted his first meeting with Howard, who had recently resigned as head of the postwar Freedmen’s Bureau: “I was very much amused at the General’s opinion of himself. He told me that he thought the Creator had
placed him on earth to be the Moses to the Negro. Having accomplished that mission [at the Freedmen’s Bureau], he felt satisfied that his next mission was with the Indian.”17

  Delayed by Colyer and thwarted with the Chiricahuas by Howard, Crook late in 1872 proceeded with his Tonto Basin campaign. He formed nine compact striking columns, each consisting of a troop of cavalry, a contingent of Indian scouts, and a mule pack train. The scouts were led by Archie McIntosh and Al Sieber, a Civil War veteran who had come west and made himself an experienced match for McIntosh. The columns were to range independently seeking the quarry, their captains being the sole judge of their operations. The scouts would spread out as much as a day or two in advance. Crook himself would ride the periphery of the Tonto Basin, supporting and counseling his captains.

  All the commands behaved outstandingly, keeping the Apaches on the run, unable to feed themselves. In twenty conflicts during winter 1872–73 the troops and their Indian scouts killed nearly two hundred Yavapais and Tontos. Highlights of the campaign were the battles of Skull Cave on December 28, 1872, and Turret Peak on March 27, 1873. At Skull Cave Captain William H. Brown trapped one hundred Yavapais in a cave high on the cliffs of Salt River Canyon. As in Crook’s fight at Infernal Caverns in California, fire against the roof of the cave swept the occupants, killing seventy-five. In the second engagement, the denouement of the offensive, Captain George M. Randall launched a surprise attack on a sleeping ranchería atop Turret Peak. Twenty-three died in the assault.

  After Turret Peak, Tontos and Yavapais flocked into their reservations and surrendered. The offensive gained Crook high praise in all quarters. He deserved it, because it was the most brilliant operation of his career. In October 1873, at Fort Whipple, the telegraph brought word of Crook’s promotion from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. Over the protest of General Sherman and amid the outcry of all the colonels of the line, President Grant insisted on rewarding Crook.18

  NORTHERN PLAINS TRIBES

  On April 27, 1875, two days after reaching Omaha, Nebraska, General Crook assumed command of the Department of the Platte. He had been summoned to his new position by Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan, his superior as commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. From his offices in Chicago, Sheridan presided over the Department of Dakota, Department of the Missouri, and Department of Texas—in short all the country east of the continental divide. Crook’s primary focus while he commanded the Department of the Platte would be the northern plains and their Sioux and Cheyenne occupants.

  The center of Crook’s immediate interest was the Black Hills. They sprawled along the western edge of the Great Sioux Reservation, which encompassed all the land west of the Missouri River within what would become the state of South Dakota. The reservation had been set aside by the Treaty of 1868 to provide a home for the five tribes of Teton Sioux. Some of them settled there and drew government rations. Others continued to roam the Powder River country west of the reservation. Called the “Northern Roamers,” these tribes owed fealty to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. They pursued the old nomadic life, subsisting on the bison herds. The Black Hills held special value for all the Sioux as a cool, well-watered oasis amid the hot, dry plains below, a source of lodgepole pines for tipi poles, and, some said, an area of spiritual significance.

  The issue that confronted Crook in 1875 originated with a military expedition in the summer of 1874 that discovered gold in the Black Hills. It was commanded by the flamboyant lieutenant colonel of the Seventh Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer, based at Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri River in General Alfred H. Terry’s Department of Dakota. Now the hills swarmed with gold-seekers, violating the Treaty of 1868. The army’s mission was to enforce the terms of the treaty by expelling the non-Indian invaders.

  A force of infantry and cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Richard I. Dodge had entered the hills in May 1875, escorting a civilian expedition charged with confirming the presence of gold. Dodge confirmed modest payloads but did not disturb the miners at their diggings. Sheridan ordered Crook to travel to the hills and oust the miners. In July Crook rendezvoused with Dodge and set about talking with the diggers. He openly sympathized with them and condemned the Sioux, pointing out that they had repeatedly violated the treaty by carrying off stock belonging to settlers along the Platte River. Crook and Colonel Dodge persuaded the miners to record their claims so that they could return and exploit them once the government had acquired the hills from the Sioux.19

  The miners’ return, of course, depended on the government obtaining the Black Hills. A commission chaired by Senator William B. Allison swiftly discovered that the Sioux had no intention of selling. Barring miners from the hills, however, was not politically acceptable. In Washington top officials contrived a deceitful scheme that would force the Indians into hostility and lead to the Great Sioux War of 1876. Crook, still essentially a field general, would play a key role in the hostilities.20

  General Sheridan had planned a three-pronged offensive against the Sioux in the Powder River country—the same strategy employed in Kansas and Texas in General John Pope’s Red River campaign of 1874–75. Crook would lead the southern prong advancing north from Fort Fetterman, Wyoming. The other two prongs would originate in General Terry’s Department of Dakota. From the east Terry would thrust west from Fort Abraham Lincoln to the Yellowstone River, while from the west Colonel John Gibbon would move down the Yellowstone from Fort Ellis. Inexperienced in Indian warfare, Terry intended to unleash his cavalry commander, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer.

  Sheridan’s scheme collapsed under the weight of a northern plains winter. Terry could not get underway until the spring thaw, and Gibbon had to delay until Terry could reach the Yellowstone. The opening phase of the campaign of 1876 therefore fell to George Crook.

  The expedition filed out of Fort Fetterman on March 1, 1876. It consisted of nearly a thousand infantry and cavalry supplied by a mule pack train. On March 7–10 a fierce snowstorm driven by high winds sank the temperature below zero and pummeled the straggling command to frigid exhaustion. In his report Crook stressed, unconvincingly, that he accompanied the expedition merely as an observer, not as the commander. He wrote that he wanted to test the notion that troops could not campaign in a northern plains winter. Actual command would rest with the colonel of the Third Cavalry, Joseph J. Reynolds. Thus, when scouts sighted two Indians working east through the snow, Reynolds commanded the force sent to follow (three cavalry squadrons of two troops each). On March 16 they discovered a village strung along the banks of the Powder River. At dawn on March 17 they attacked.

  The Battle of Powder River opened with a surprise assault from two directions by two of the squadrons, while the third aimed for the pony herd. Only one of the two assault squadrons managed to penetrate the village. The third squadron rounded up six hundred animals and herded them to safety. Driven from their lodges by the troopers who charged into their village, warriors assembled in the hills overlooking the valley, then roared into the village in a successful counterattack. The surprised cavalrymen were busy destroying the tipis and the winter store of food when hit and swept out of the village—so hastily that they left two dead soldiers behind. Far worse, in the absence of security that night, the Indians dashed in and recovered their pony herd. As Crook correctly concluded, two squadron commanders and Reynolds himself failed to exercise adequate leadership. To continue the campaign, according to Crook, the expedition needed the provisions that had been burned and abandoned in the village and the ponies and horses with which he had intended to remount the command. Therefore he led the column back to Fort Fetterman. On the day of arrival, he preferred charges against Colonel Reynolds.21

  Crook accurately assessed the causes of the failure of the Battle of Powder River. He erred only in believing that Reynolds had struck the village of Crazy Horse and in attributing the abandonment of the campaign to Reynolds’s failure to secure the Indian provisions and pony herd. In truth, the winter hard
ships that he hoped to show could be overcome had proved the expedition’s undoing. As Colonel Reynolds complained to General Sherman, “these winter campaigns in these latitudes should be prohibited. [Illegible] is no name for them—the month of March has told on me more than any five years of my life.”22

  The central objective of Sheridan’s three-pronged campaign was to surprise the Indians in their winter encampments, before the spring grasses freed them to roam and opened the way for reservation Indians to ride out to join them for a summer’s frolic. Winter shattered that concept, but the three-pronged movement resumed anyway. Again Crook would march from the south as Terry and Gibbon marched from east and west farther north.

  On May 29, 1876, Crook once more led his column out of Fort Fetterman. It consisted of fifteen troops of cavalry and two companies of infantry to guard the supply wagons and pack mules, in all slightly more than a thousand officers and enlisted men. Far to the north, close to the Montana border, he established a base camp on Goose Creek, an affluent of Tongue River. There 176 Crow and 86 Shoshone warriors joined him on June 14. Hereditary enemies of the Sioux, the Crows and Shoshones came to fight as auxiliaries rather than to scout for the army.

  The Crows believed that the Sioux were camped on Tongue River to the north, in Montana. On June 16, therefore, Crook cut loose from his supply base and took up the march again, carrying only four days’ rations. After crossing from the Tongue to the Rosebud River, early in the morning of June 17 the troops lolled on the banks of the Rosebud, brewing coffee and in some cases, including Crook, playing whist. Suddenly the Indian allies came pouring over the ridge line, followed by hundreds of whooping Sioux warriors. Taken by surprise, the soldiers scrambled to organize for battle while the Crow and Shoshone warriors turned and held the Sioux at bay for twenty minutes, while the cavalry formed a battle line.