Neither commanding general John M. Schofield nor the secretary of war, Redfield Proctor, agreed. Miles had confused the whole issue with the same sort of dissimulation that he had displayed in the Geronimo surrender. Both officials probably also wished that the politically explosive issue would go away. Early in February, “by direction of the President,” Miles had to restore Colonel Forsyth to command of the Seventh Cavalry.33
With 3,500 soldiers at his disposal, Miles could have launched the Indian war that he had predicted if he did not get his way in gaining military control of the reservations. Instead, in contrast to his generally maladroit conduct of the campaign, he put into effect a wise strategy for ending the affair peacefully. He used his troops to form a wide ring around the dispirited, factionalized refugees, then gradually tightened it while gently pushing them toward Pine Ridge Agency. At the same time, Miles sent conciliatory letters to the chiefs, encouraging them to surrender. Finally, on January 15, 1891, they did.
Miles alone deserves the honor of this outcome. Neither General Brooke nor General Ruger could likely have conceived and then executed the delicate maneuvers, military and diplomatic, that drew the Sioux into Pine Ridge. Neither possessed the understanding of the Indians that Miles’s extensive Indian campaigning equipped him with. The peaceful conclusion of the Ghost Dance conflict represented a tribute to Miles’s judgment. His command, nearly half the army’s infantry and cavalry, could have overwhelmed the Sioux, even if they had scattered into small parties. The cost would have been still more dead women and children and much bloodshed, but victory would have ensued. War would have gained Miles more publicity, but peace gained him the approval of his Washington superiors and the large Indian reform movement.
On January 22, 1891, Miles savored his triumph with a grand review of his army at Pine Ridge. Bundled in an overcoat buttoned at the neck, he sat astride a big black horse on the crest of a knoll. A sandstorm obscured the scene. But as regiment after regiment passed in review, trumpets flourishing and bands playing, Miles swept off his hat and took the salute. When the Seventh Cavalry approached, its ranks depleted by Wounded Knee and its colonel yet to be restored, with the yellow linings of the troopers’ capes flung over their shoulders, a band struck up Custer’s battle song, “Garryowen.” Miles hung his hat on the pommel of his saddle and let the wind whip his hair.
The grand review on January 22, 1891, provided General Miles with his final review as an Indian fighter. It was also the final review of the Indian-fighting army. The Ghost Dance was a spiritual uprising not an Indian war, but it brought about the last major military deployment of the Indian wars. Perhaps not coincidentally, in 1890 the Census Bureau found that a definable frontier of settlement no longer existed.
Freed from Indian concerns, Miles plunged into politics, making enemies in his efforts to reform the Indian service and to promote the presidential aspirations of his uncle, John Sherman. Miles’s handling of the Wounded Knee aftermath still rankled many and stoked controversy in the army. A cruel blow struck in July 1891, when the War Department reorganized military topography by abolishing divisions. Miles lost the Departments of Dakota, the Platte, and Texas. From Chicago he now commanded only the Department of the Missouri.
As always, throughout the early 1890s Miles spent much time, thought, and effort in cultivating influential friends and using them to promote his own ends. Two causes in particular commanded his attention. First was an attempt to get Congress to revive the grade of lieutenant general. He saw himself as the next general-in-chief when Schofield retired. The second cause was to join with Civil War veterans in seeking Medals of Honor for wartime exploits. They succeeded to such a degree that the scores awarded cheapened the value. Even so, in 1892 Miles received a Medal of Honor for gallantry at Chancellorsville. At the same time, he busied himself securing medals for his favorite subordinates. Captain Baldwin received his medal through Miles’s influence.
The Pullman Strike of 1894 in Chicago embroiled Miles in more controversy and earned him the enmity of General Schofield and President Cleveland. That same year, however, the retirement of General Howard opened the Department of the Atlantic. Miles moved to New York City to take command of this most prestigious of postings for general officers. In 1895 Congress restored the grade of lieutenant general. Schofield wore three stars until he retired in September 1895. A month later President Cleveland named Miles commanding general of the U.S. Army, but Schofield’s three stars did not come with the position.
COMMANDING GENERAL
Major General Miles’s U.S. Army was pathetically unready for the War with Spain, which Congress declared in April 1898. The army line, still 28,000 strong, had to expand to 220,000 regulars, volunteers, and National Guard. The War Department staff bureaus, products of the Indian wars, could not cope with the immense responsibilities of creating a fighting army. Russell Alger, the secretary of war, proved incompetent and, besides, could not get along with the abrasive Miles. Furthermore, President William McKinley had no confidence in the general-in-chief. Planning fell into disarray as Miles argued for an invasion of Puerto Rico and Alger and McKinley chose Cuba. General William R. Shafter, a hugely corpulent old Indian fighter, commanded in Cuba. Sent to Cuba by the president to observe Shafter’s operations, Miles overstepped his authority and feuded with the field commander.
McKinley had already decided on an invasion of Puerto Rico as well as Cuba, and Miles returned to Washington to take command of the Puerto Rican campaign. On July 25, 1898, Miles landed the first of his army in Puerto Rico. With the beach head secured, the troops advanced inland, skirmishing with Spanish units. Other elements of Miles’s invasion force, ultimately numbering 2,500 men, quickly routed the Spanish defenders. An armistice on August 12 brought the fighting to a close. Miles had conducted the operation efficiently, his only fault being an infuriating failure to keep Washington informed of events.
Distressed that Cuba had overshadowed Puerto Rico in the press, Miles made sure that the newspapers noticed him. In an interview with a reporter he blasted War Department incompetence and interference with his prerogatives. The interview caused an explosive reaction in the War Department and became a political issue between Democrats and Republicans. Secretary Alger eventually created an investigating commission to look into Miles’s charges. On December 21 Miles took the stand to testify before the commission. He repeated his criticisms, fought back against the secretary and the staff, and got revenge on the staff by accusing it of providing canned “embalmed beef” in the soldiers’ rations. As the beef controversy roiled the press, Miles continued to contribute to the furor. Even after the commission found the beef not contaminated, Miles added fuel to the fires by continuing to trumpet his opinion.
Even so, a bipartisan group worked for Miles’s promotion to lieutenant general. That unleashed further controversy, scandalous accusations, and insults between partisans. But on June 6, 1900, Nelson Miles received his third star. But it proved useless against the new secretary of war, Elihu Root. The secretary entered office committed to a sweeping reform of the military establishment, creating a general staff and a chief of staff and abolishing the post of commanding general. Miles fought that, of course, and at the same time publicly criticized the new secretary. Far worse, he gave a speech in which he claimed that Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, the new vice president and soon-to-be president, did not lead the charge up San Juan Hill.
RETIREMENT
In February 1902, after bitter controversy, the Root reforms became law. On August 8, 1902, Miles turned sixty-four, the mandated retirement age. Both Root and President Roosevelt issued an order announcing the retirement of Lieutenant General Miles and directing that he return to his home, with no celebration, no commendation, no retirement ceremony. The last commanding general of the U.S. Army faded into retirement. But not quietly. He continued to emit his customary bombast. He also revived his long-dormant quest for the presidency, but the Democratic convention of 1904 gave him only a few votes. Pro
bably to stoke that ambition, in 1896 he had published a massive volume entitled Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles. He followed that in 1911 with Serving the Republic: Memoirs of the Civil and Military Life of Nelson A. Miles, Lieutenant General, United States Army.
Miles never quietly faded away. Based in his Washington apartment, he remained an active public figure for the rest of his life. In World War I he made every effort, each wilder than the last, to organize a command for himself. On May 16, 1925, he took his grandchildren to the circus. As he stood while the band played the “Star-Spangled Banner,” a massive heart attack killed him. He was eighty-six. Only two Civil War major generals remained.
On May 19, 1925, the pageantry that had been denied Miles on his retirement ushered him across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery: color guard, black horses, caisson, 2,500 marchers from the army, navy, and marines, a fifteen-gun salute, and taps. He would have judged the procession appropriate for the last commanding general of the U.S. Army.
Nelson A. Miles’s claim to fame rested on far more than being the last army commanding general. It rested mainly on his service as colonel of the Fifth Infantry at a time when conventional wisdom held that only cavalry could prevail against Indians. He and his foot soldiers distinguished themselves primarily in the Great Sioux War of 1876–77 and secondarily in the Red River War of 1874–75. No other field officer, even Mackenzie, came close to matching his record. As a general officer commanding departments and a division, however, Miles’s performance proved mediocre or worse. His many character flaws stained his stature in the frontier army. Still, he emerges as the most successful of the army’s Indian fighters.
CHAPTER SIX
EDWARD O. C. ORD
Edward Ord was an individualist, his character and personality not entirely in harmony with military structure. An impulsive, restless nonconformist, he often ran afoul of the structure and as often sought to manipulate it. Within the structure, his quick mind and proficiency in mathematics won widespread admiration. Energetic, aggressive, imaginative, inventive, courageous to a fault, and possessed of uncommon endurance, he made a good soldier, though sometimes lacking judgment and inattentive to personal appearance.
Edward Otho Cresap Ord was born on October 18, 1818, in Cumberland, Maryland, his ancestry shrouded in mystery and said to involve English royalty. With political support from Maryland and nearby Washington, D.C., he entered the military academy at West Point in 1835 and graduated in 1839. As a second lieutenant in the Third Artillery, he immediately joined his regiment in Florida, where the Seminole Indian War was in progress. The hostilities lasted until 1842, and Lieutenant Ord distinguished himself scouting into the forbidding Everglades, skirmishing with Seminoles, and fighting in one vicious combat. In July 1841 he was promoted to first lieutenant.1
PACIFIC SERVICE
Recruiting service, the Coast Survey, and other routine duties kept Lieutenant Ord out of the Mexican War. After enduring the long voyage around Cape Horn to the Pacific, he arrived in Monterey, California, on January 27, 1847, three weeks after California had fallen to the Americans. A shipmate was the other lieutenant of his company, William T. Sherman. Four months after arrival, the company’s captain departed for the East, leaving Ord to take over the unit, with Lieutenant Sherman as his second in command. Based in Monterey, Ord and Sherman’s artillery company and a company of dragoons formed the only regular army force in California. The two officers rode the countryside, sightseeing and getting acquainted with the people.
Brigadier General Edward O. C. Ord, commanding Department of California, 1868–1871; Department of the Platte, 1871–1875; Department of Texas, 1875–1880.
Brady Collection, U.S. Signal Corps (photo 111-B-4550), National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
The discovery of gold in 1848 ignited a mad rush to the mines and swept dozens of deserters out of the little military command. Prices skyrocketed, overwhelming the low pay of the officers and soldiers, so both Ord and Sherman obtained leaves in an attempt to improve their finances. For Ord, a brief visit to the mines proved a failure, but he soon discovered that his experience in the Coast Survey equipped him to win contracts for surveying. Aside from Sacramento, site of pioneer John Sutter’s fort, Ord’s most significant contract led to the first survey of the burgeoning community of Los Angeles.
On January 1, 1850, Ord traveled to the East on a brief leave of absence. Back in California by autumn, he found himself promoted to captain of another company of the Third Artillery. It was stationed in Boston, so back east he went. After five years in the Coast Survey, he took his artillery company back to California. For the next three years he learned to be an Indian fighter.
Both the state of Oregon and the Territory of Washington were home to a variety of tribes, tormented by the Indian-hating white settlers. When they Indians resisted, the soldiers had to fight people with whom they sympathized. By 1855 the department commander, General John E. Wool, confronted two Indian wars, one in Oregon and another in Washington. In Oregon the Rogue River Indians, exasperated by the tyranny of white settlers, had fought one war and now brought on another. In Washington, gold discovered near Fort Colville, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post just south of the international boundary, brought a rush of prospectors across the homeland of the Yakima Indians. Chief Kamiakin rallied his and neighboring tribes to resist such encroachment.
Captain Ord took part in both wars.
In October 1855 Ord’s company, based at Benecia Barracks near San Francisco, marched north to Fort Dalles, on the Columbia River, to form part of Major Gabriel J. Rains’s expedition into the Yakima country. The command consisted of nearly four hundred Regulars and five hundred Oregon Volunteers (operating independently of Rains). Ord took charge of three howitzers, but Rains proved so inept that the expedition returned to Fort Dalles after a month of blundering around the Yakima country, having accomplished nothing beyond marching 175 miles. Back in Benecia by late November, a disgusted Ord preferred charges of incompetence against Rains and expressed his outrage in letters to New York newspapers. These headstrong measures achieved no more than expressing his frustration and revealed a rashness that would cause him trouble in the future.2
The second Rogue River War had already broken out in Oregon, and Ord’s artillery company was assigned to an expedition led by Major Robert C. Buchanan. (Throughout the hostilities in Oregon and Washington, artillery usually served as infantry.) Before setting out from California to the scene of hostilities early in January 1856, Ord informed the New York media of his opinion: the white settlers caused the war. Reaching Buchanan at the mouth of the Cheteco River in Oregon, Ord marched with the column to the mouth of Rogue River. On March 26 Buchanan assigned him to command an offensive expedition a short distance up the Rogue River against the Macanootenay village of Rogue River Indians. His command consisted of his own artillery company and a company of 112 infantrymen. The village proved to be recently abandoned, and the troops burned the thirteen lodges. At this point, about sixty warriors in canoes paddled across the river to attack the troops. Ord handled his command expertly, dispatching his two companies to different parts of the field to meet converging bands of Indians. After a vigorous contest, the warriors fell back to their canoes with ten killed and a few wounded. Ord’s own loss amounted to one soldier wounded.
Assigned next to escort a supply train, Ord marched his company to the mouth of the Cheteco River, where he overtook a large party of Indians on April 28 and, although outnumbered, immediately attacked. Again he put the enemy to flight with enemy losses of half a dozen warriors killed, a few captured, and their stores seized. Ord lost one soldier killed and another wounded.
These actions demonstrated Ord’s ability to command units in combat, and San Francisco newspapers praised him. He was among the officers commended by army headquarters for outstanding conduct in the Rogue River War.3
A Yakima War in 1858 again summoned O
rd and his company from California to Washington. This Yakima War, which involved an alliance of several tribes, overshadowed the earlier one. Indian anger at white settlers and gold-seekers had smoldered since the first encounters and now became a full-scale uprising. The local commander was Colonel George Wright, with the newly formed Ninth Infantry, equipped with new long-range infantry rifles. A small command from Wright’s regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Steptoe ventured into the Yakima country to intimidate the Indians and reassure the Colville miners. On May 16 a thousand warriors from different tribes confronted Steptoe’s 170 soldiers. The standoff culminated in the troops defending a hilltop for two days and nights. Ignominiously, under cover of night, Steptoe abandoned the position, his howitzers, and his six dead and slipped away.
Retaliating for the Steptoe disaster, Colonel Wright organized a major campaign. Ord’s company joined Wright’s command as part of a battalion of the Third Artillery under Captain Erasmus D. Keyes. With a command of six hundred infantry, dragoons, and artillery, Wright marched out of his supply base near Fort Walla Walla on August 27, headed north through rugged country. On August 30 his troops descended from a plain to a land of scattered lakes. On September 1 they encountered a force of about five hundred warriors drawn up on a hill to fight. With Ord’s company in advance, the troops quickly drove the enemy off the hill, below which lay four lakes. Holding Ord’s men as personal escort, Wright remained on the hill to watch his troops fight the Indians. The new long-range rifles proved decisive: they could be fired accurately at six hundred yards, while the Indian muskets had a range of three hundred yards. Suffering sixty casualties, the Indians fled the field. The Battle of Four Lakes gave Wright victory without a single casualty on his side.
The Commanders Page 15
