The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  The success of his rival Crook, especially at the hands of his rival Mackenzie, motivated Miles to step up his effort to get the Sioux to surrender to him instead of to Crook. It also prompted him to heap his scorn for Crook on Sherman. Reacting to a fancied slight in the newspapers, and without naming Crook, he ridiculed the general’s record from the beginning of the Sioux War to the latest operation. “These insinuations,” he wrote, “come with very poor grace from a man who was a failure during the war and has been ever since.”15 Such antagonism defined the relationship between the two—and their acolytes—until Crook’s death.

  To Miles’s chagrin, Crook won the contest for the largest number of Sioux and Cheyennes to give up. Responding to Miles’s emissaries, three hundred people, mostly Cheyennes, came into the Tongue River cantonment on April 22. Crook, however, had persuaded Spotted Tail to go among the various camps and offer the possibility of better terms. On May 6 Crazy Horse himself led the final group to surrender at Red Cloud Agency. The number who gathered in the south amounted to more than three thousand. That left Sitting Bull and Lame Deer, who refused to yield. Two weeks after the Battle of Wolf Mountain, Sitting Bull had arrived in Crazy Horse’s village with the requested ammunition. Sensing the growing sentiment for surrender, he turned his following to the north, ultimately to join other chiefs in the land of the “Great Mother” across the boundary. That left only Lame Deer, Miles’s next objective.

  Miles assembled a command consisting of four troops of the Second Cavalry from Fort Ellis, two companies of the Fifth Infantry and four of the Twenty-Second, 10 officers and 155 enlisted men. On May 1 they marched up the Tongue River, now free of snow. On May 5 they came on Lame Deer’s trail, heading west to the Rosebud. The next day scouts located the Indian camp. A night march placed the command in position for a dawn attack. At 4:30 A.M. the advance guard stormed into the village of fifty-one lodges, seized the herd of 450 ponies, and drove the Indians into the steep, pine-covered bluffs to the west. With the full command on line, the soldiers pursued the Sioux in a running fight for six miles back to the Rosebud. Miles reported fourteen dead left on the field, including Lame Deer and the head warrior, Iron Star.

  Miles’s official report noted only that, in response to a demand to surrender, several Indians advanced as if to comply but then renewed firing. “This ended all pacific measures,” he wrote, but he failed to tell the whole story. As described by a participant in a letter to the Army and Navy Journal, two Indians, Lame Deer and Iron Star, responding to the demand to surrender, warily approached Miles, with one hand extended and the other holding a carbine. Miles shook hands with Lame Deer, the adjutant with Iron Star. Miles motioned for them to lay down their arms. They did. Miles ordered a lieutenant to pick them up. As the officer bent to retrieve Iron Star’s weapon, he suddenly seized the carbine, stepped back, and fired at Miles. At that instant, Miles shifted to bring up his rifle, which was laid over his saddle. His horse jerked slightly, causing the bullet to miss Miles and kill a cavalry trooper to his rear. Thus ended “pacific measures,” as well as the lives of Lame Deer and Iron Star.16

  The Battle of Muddy Creek cost Miles four enlisted men killed and one officer and seven enlisted men wounded, testimony to the tenacity of the Sioux resistance. Lame Deer’s people had thirty killed, twenty wounded, and forty captured, testimony to the tenacity of Miles’s veteran soldiers. The village contained thirty tons of dried meat, rifles, and ammunition as well as two hundred saddles.

  Despite the casualties, Miles could rightly boast of an overwhelming victory against his adversaries at Muddy Creek, but Sitting Bull still worried him. Now in Canada with other bands of Sioux that had joined him, he might launch excursions across the border to hunt bison or commit depredations. Miles knew that Sitting Bull had met with the North-West Mounted Police but fretted that, whatever his agreement with the Canadian authorities, the chief could not control his young men. Miles wanted to take the field again to watch the border and if necessary cross it to punish errant Sioux.

  The problem was more complicated than that. The Sioux had made friends with the chief of the redcoats, Major James M. Walsh. He and his superiors assured Sitting Bull that he and his people could live in the Great Mother’s land so long as they obeyed her laws and did not venture back across the border. The issue, however, quickly became entangled in diplomacy between Canada (represented by London) and the United States. Canada wanted to shed responsibility for the Sioux altogether by persuading them to go home and surrender to the American authorities. The Sioux refused to leave a land of such freedom. For its part, the United States wanted the Canadians to take full responsibility for the Sioux or force them to surrender. Under such circumstances, it was risky to allow the volatile Nelson Miles near the border.

  On July 16, 1877, a steamer docked at the Tongue River cantonment and landed Generals Sherman and Terry. Amid a round of inspections and ceremonies, Sherman found time to address Secretary of War George W. McCrary, about documents that he had received from the secretary of state setting forth the Canadian view of the Sitting Bull problem. In his usual blunt fashion, the general set forth the military position:

  The English authorities should now elect to adopt these refugee Indians as their own, or force them back to our side of the line before they recuperate their ponies and collect new supplies of ammunition. If these Indians numbering about fifteen hundred of the very worst class, be permitted to recuperate and to use British Territory as a base of operations against us, the act will surely be equivalent to an act of hostilities, which I am sure the English authorities do not intend.

  Sherman added that “General Miles, commanding here, is very anxious to go to the border with a sufficient force to demand of the British agents that these Indians . . . be surrendered to him.”17

  Calmer minds prevailed, and a commission headed by General Terry journeyed to Fort Walsh, the police headquarters. On October 17, 1877, the commissioners met with Sitting Bull and other chiefs. Predictably, Sitting Bull flatly and rudely turned down General Terry’s plea for the Sioux to return to the United States. The diplomatic stalemate continued.

  Although still “very anxious” to march north to confront Sitting Bull once more, Miles remained at the cantonment overseeing construction of a permanent fort two miles to the west. It would be named Fort Keogh, after one of Custer’s captains. Miles was also responsible for a second fort, Fort Custer, at the mouth of the Little Bighorn River. As General Terry made his way to Canada in the autumn of 1877, another issue distracted Miles. His old mentor and longtime friend Oliver O. Howard was pursing Nez Perce Indians from Idaho across the mountains to the plains. His mission had been to confine the Nez Perces to reservations marked out in Idaho, but they gathered with their chiefs, including Chief Joseph, and bolted to the east, hoping to find sanctuary with their friends the Crows or even Sitting Bull in Canada. General Howard exhausted his command and himself chasing the Nez Perces but could not overtake the quarry. A courier from Howard reached Fort Keogh on September 17, bringing a plea for Miles to try to head off the Nez Perces before they could reach Canada.

  Miles reacted promptly, crossing the Yellowstone the next morning. As finally assembled, the expedition consisted of four companies of his own regiment mounted on Indian ponies seized at the Battle of Muddy Creek, three troops of the Seventh Cavalry, and three of the Second diverted from their mission of escorting General Terry to his Canadian rendezvous with Sitting Bull. Artillery, Indian scouts, and a long supply train of wagons and mules, guarded by another company of the Fifth Infantry, completed the column. The command numbered between 350 and 400 men.

  The column marched rapidly to the Missouri River, where Miles learned that the Nez Perces had already crossed and were moving toward Canada. He commandeered a passing steamer and ferried his troops across for another march to the northwest. On September 30 he caught the Nez Perces in camp at Bear Paw Mountains. The attack proved costly, with twenty-two enlisted men killed and thirty-eight wo
unded. Nez Perce marksmen singled out officers and sergeants and hit six officers, two mortally. Seven sergeants were killed and three sergeants and two corporals wounded. Miles called off the battle and settled in for a siege. It lasted for five days; on the fourth day General Howard arrived on the scene. He generously permitted Miles to remain in command and, when the Nez Perces surrendered the next day, to receive the surrender.18

  The Battle of Bear Paw Mountains added another star to Miles’s record as an Indian fighter. He had sustained unusually heavy casualties but had prevented the bulk of the Nez Perces from reaching Canada, where Sitting Bull was indeed waiting. Marring the victory, however, he trumpeted his success without granting Howard much credit. Howard reacted, and the two waged war on each other for nearly a year before General Sherman ordered them to stop. The friendship that began at Fair Oaks in 1862, when Howard lost his arm, ended at Bear Paw Mountain in 1877.

  By spring 1878 the threat posed by Sitting Bull that Miles and his superior had predicted began to materialize. Sitting Bull’s original following of 800 lodges (including 45 lodges of Nez Perces that succeeded in reaching Canada) had been strengthened by 240 more lodges of Crazy Horse’s people, who had fled the Red Cloud Agency after the chief’s death in September 1877. That amounted to some 5,000 people, including about 1,500 warriors. Furthermore, the herds of bison, struck down by hide-hunters, had begun to decline precipitously. The tribes native to Canada that depended on the herds took offense at sharing them with the Sioux. As hunger stalked all the camps, parties inevitably crept across the boundary to bring meat home and also to commit depredations.

  Eager to chastise the Sioux, Miles began to assemble a command at Fort Keogh as early as January 1878 to march to the boundary country. General Sherman read about these preparations in the newspapers and immediately made his views known to Sheridan and Terry. The government had no wish to provoke a war with “renegades” who wandered back and forth across the border, he declared. If any large body of Sioux came south toward the Yellowstone, Miles should attack them. If Terry was certain that a large confederation of tribes had moved south of the boundary intending to attack settlements or to interrupt traffic on the Missouri River, he should send three converging columns against them, from Forts Buford, Benton, and Keogh. Doubtless with the impulsive Miles in mind, Sherman wrote: “I am not willing that we should drift into a difficult and expensive war, which may be avoided by leaving time to work out a solution.”19

  Miles prepared to march, however, when reports from the north reached Fort Keogh in early February, indicating the presence of 410 lodges south of the boundary. He reported that he intended to aim for the country between the Milk River and the boundary, but a telegram from St. Paul on February 24 stopped him. When ordered to recall the column to Fort Keogh, Miles warned of dire consequences, which prompted Sherman’s response of March 11: “I appreciate highly Genl Miles’s zeal, but do not think we should be drawn into a costly war at this time.”20

  Stymied from operating along the border, Miles turned to other activities: social life at Fort Keogh, touring the scene of his friend Custer’s death, serving on an equipment board in Washington, and imploring General Sherman for advancement, as always. He became so obnoxious that Sherman wrathfully turned on him. Finally, in 1879, Sitting Bull’s people grew so bold south of the border (even as far south as the Yellowstone) that Miles got his chance.

  In July 1879, with the apprehensive backing of Terry, Sheridan, and Sherman, Miles led a command north of the Missouri River to the Milk. It consisted of seven companies of the Fifth Infantry and seven troops of the Second Cavalry, 33 officers and 643 enlisted men, backed by 143 Indian scouts. On July 17, in a bend of the Milk River between Frenchman’s Creek and Beaver Creek, the advance guard, a company of infantry and a troop of cavalry with 50 Indian scouts, encountered 400 Sioux. In a vigorous skirmish ranging over twelve miles, the warriors astutely withdrew, then suddenly turned and surrounded the small command. Miles hurried the main force forward and drove the Indians north in retreat. He followed as far as the Canadian boundary and bivouacked. Major James Walsh of the North-West Mounted Police came down from Fort Walsh for a consultation.21

  On July 23, the day before Miles conferred with Major Walsh, President Hayes summoned Secretary McCrary and General Sherman to the Executive Mansion. He was concerned that an Indian war would erupt north of the Missouri River. He instructed McCrary and Sherman to prevent such an affair if at all possible. Miles was to confine his operations to country south of Milk River. The secretary of war reinforced the order in a telegram directly to General Sheridan, cautioning that it would be “exceedingly unfortunate if hostilities resulted from any over zeal on the part of Miles.” Offended, Miles returned to Fort Keogh and disbanded the expedition.22

  The Sitting Bull campaign of 1879 marked the end of Miles’s years as a combat commander. It also marked the approaching end of Sitting Bull’s freedom. Driven by hunger and pressed by the mounted police, Sitting Bull finally surrendered at Fort Buford in 1881, depriving Miles of credit for the surrender. For Miles, the challenge was to use all his influence and connections to secure one of the brigadier vacancies expected in 1880. Chief Signal Officer Albert J. Myer died in August, opening a vacancy that Miles vigorously sought. He failed. Major General Irvin McDowell and Brigadier General Edward O. C. Ord were approaching the age of sixty-two and would be eligible to retire. Neither wanted to, but President Hayes, under pressure to appoint a new brigadier before his term expired, forcibly retired Ord. The president gave Ord’s star to Miles, to rank from December 15, 1880. Sherman considered Ord’s compulsory retirement an outrage, especially because widespread sentiment held that Miles’s political connections had prevailed.

  The long-sought star on his shoulder straps did not remove Miles from Indian service, but it ended his career as a field commander directing troops on a battlefield. His exploits in the Red River War of 1874–75 and the Great Sioux War of 1876–79 established his reputation as an Indian fighter. The only officer who might have matched Miles was Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie, whose reputation dimmed when he had to be confined to an insane asylum shortly after making brigadier. Despite many personal flaws, Nelson A. Miles ranks as the most successful Indian fighter of the post–Civil War West.

  DEPARTMENT OF THE COLUMBIA

  December 1880 also marked the time when the president summoned General Oliver O. Howard to Washington to place him in command of the Department of West Point, which proved unfeasible and was abandoned after only three years. Howard’s transfer opened a department command for the new brigadier. Before Miles could even travel to the Department of the Columbia, however, he became entangled in the scandal that had brought Howard to West Point—the Johnson Whittaker case. Whittaker was a black cadet who accused white cadets of tying him to his bunk, beating him, and cutting him. No one believed him, but the case made nationwide news. Under Howard’s auspices a court-martial was convened to try Johnson for lying to gain public sympathy. General Miles served as president of the court, which duly found Whittaker guilty, although President Chester Arthur voided the court’s sentence. Even so, Whittaker was expelled for failing to pass a course.

  Even before undertaking the court-martial assignment, Miles found himself appointed by President Hayes as a member of the Ponca Commission. This group, chaired by Miles’s rival General Crook, was charged with determining whether Ponca Indians who had been confined to Indian Territory but subsequently returned to their Nebraska homes should be allowed to stay. The commission ruled that they should.

  On August 2, 1881, General Miles reached Vancouver Barracks, Washington Territory, and took command of the Department of the Columbia. No Indian hostilities disturbed the department; Generals Crook and Howard had taken care of that. Miles traveled extensively, visiting installations and garrisons in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington. He took special interest in Alaska, which fell under his command. After cruising the Inside Passage, he authorized exploring expeditions of
the interior: one led by Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka in 1883, two in 1884, and one in 1885. He also joined with Senator John Sherman to speculate in Washington, D.C., real estate.

  Vancouver Barracks, however, seemed too remote from the rest of the country for Miles’s temperament. Mary Miles was unhappy too. While continuing to promote the virtues of the Pacific Northwest, and even hint at absorbing British Columbia into the United States, Miles quietly worked for another assignment. General Sherman retired in 1884, which deprived Miles of the source that he prized most highly for special favors, although he never grasped Sherman’s abhorrence of nepotism. When General Augur retired in 1885, Miles worked to supersede him as commander of the Department of the Missouri, headquartered at Fort Leavenworth. General Sheridan, Sherman’s successor as general-in-chief of the army, advanced his cause. and President Grover Cleveland made the appointment. Miles took command on July 28, 1885.

  DEPARTMENT OF ARIZONA

  From his comfortable billet at Fort Leavenworth, Miles kept an eye cocked on events transpiring in Arizona. His rival George Crook was trying to bring Geronimo and his Apaches to heel. Crook had commanded the Department of Arizona since 1882, actively campaigning against the Chiricahua Apaches, remote in sanctuaries high in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. Crook believed that only an Apache could catch an Apache, as he had demonstrated in the Tonto Basin campaign of 1872–73. Two years after assuming command in Arizona, however, General Sherman’s retirement elevated Philip Sheridan to the top position. Sheridan regarded Apache scouts as unreliable if not traitorous. He preferred regular troops. But Crook was universally acknowledged as the reigning expert on Apaches, so Sheridan did not interfere.

  In March 1886 Crook’s vigorous campaigning in Mexico finally succeeded, only to be dashed by the sudden drunken flight of Geronimo and his immediate following. Other Apaches had surrendered, however, and Sheridan demanded that Crook cancel the surrender and begin negotiations again. Crook knew that would send all the Apaches back on the warpath. When Sheridan refused to yield, he asked to be relieved.