Demonstrating how quickly he grasped the essence of his new command, in six months Pope conceived a strategy that he wanted to apply to Indian operations: concentrate his scattered troops at two large posts for the winter months, then return them to their regular stations in the spring to contend with Indian hostilities. In this manner two posts would replace seven in the winter, and the newly completed Kansas Pacific Railway would facilitate troop movements. Pope thought that his strategy would produce three advantages: a large reduction of expenses; better discipline and morale among the troops; and ability to use more of the available force for field service. Concentration would prove his second dominant issue.16
Pope and his wife Clara settled into comfortable quarters at the sprawling post of Fort Leavenworth. He was not a field general. He commanded from his desk at department headquarters, occasionally embarking on an inspection tour of his domain. He gave close attention to all the issues arising in the department and reported them verbosely, but without the flamboyant rhetoric of his earlier years. As before, controversy dogged him, but not as intensely as in the past.
In 1874, en route to a new assignment at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, Assistant Surgeon John Vance Lauderdale recorded his impression of General Pope: “Made a call upon Genl Pope and wife in their quarters near the Arsenal. Genl Pope and lady are both very sociable and pleased me very much. The Genl is a man quite well versed in the scientific literature of the day, and when it came my turn to talk with him, we were soon quite deep in Darwinism, evolution and all kindred subjects that came in that range of thought.”17
Pope’s second year commanding the Department of the Missouri was relatively peaceful, in part because the Indian Territory had been transferred to the Department of Texas, a move that Pope himself advocated. He did address a long simmering problem: New Mexican traders journeying to the Staked Plains of Texas to barter arms and ammunition with Kiowas and Comanches for stock and other property seized in Texas. To apprehend the traders, he posted three troops of cavalry on the Canadian River southeast of Fort Union, New Mexico. The summer’s mission succeeded in the seizure of many traders, their trains, and large cattle herds, which were turned over to civil authorities in New Mexico. Pope believed that they should be sent to Texas, where owners could more easily retrieve their stolen property. After the same operation the following year, he adopted this change.18
Pope still felt strongly about concentration of troops. He repeated verbatim the arguments that he had made a year earlier and added more. General Sheridan disagreed. He considered active operations in Pope’s command at an end. Therefore the only remaining mission was to give protection to travel routes and settlements. Garrisoned posts disbursed among the danger points were adequate for that purpose. Sheridan was to be proved badly mistaken in only three years.19
In his 1871 annual report Pope hinted at what was to become his third major issue, urged throughout his tenure. Criticizing the Army Regulations, then under revision, he complained of the “concentration of the minutest details of supply and expenditure in the supply bureaus in Washington.” This was only the most critical of the flaws in the system of all-powerful staff bureaus in Washington, depriving the army line of control over the many functions that should rest with line commanders.20
But concentration of forces remained an obsession for Pope. Never one to be cowed by superior authority, he continued to let Sheridan know how he felt:
If it were left to my judgment, I would concentrate here [at Fort Leavenworth] all the troops in the department east of New Mexico as winter quarters, and depend altogether on summer camps, thrown out from here in early spring, for all needed military protection of the Kansas frontier. As I have said many times, there is no danger from Indians in this region in the winter, and the summer camps, placed, if judicious, near where the present posts now are, would furnish, and furnish better, and with more efficiency, the military protection now imperfectly supplied by the small posts.21
Pope made these same contentions in testifying before the House Committee on Military Affairs in 1874.22 He succeeded in irritating General Sheridan, who did not take kindly to disagreement. “Pope is a little crazy on staff matters,” Sheridan wrote Sherman, referring to Pope’s complaint about staff problems, “his mind is in just such a condition that he wants to fight something all the time. I think myself you are the only person who has the best right to complain because Pope can if he wants completely control any & all staff officers in his Dept or any direction they may receive from the Heads of bureaus outside of proper channels.”23
This was disingenuous and unfair. It was technically true, but in practice the proper channels took so much time that the need had passed before the channels finished working. Moreover, while Pope undoubtedly persisted in fighting for his causes, he was both sincere and thoughtful. His proposals made enough sense that they warranted at least consideration and debate. As Pope and his fellow department commanders discovered, however, Sheridan’s temperament did not brook debate.
The truth hit all the generals in 1874, when Cheyennes raided north into Kansas and Kiowas and Comanches struck for the Staked Plains of Texas. The army was still barred from the reservations. The opening shot of the Red River War took place at the trading post of Adobe Walls, in the Texas Panhandle, on June 27, 1874. The proprietors were bison hide hunters who traded whiskey, arms, and ammunition both with other hunters and with Indians. The warriors’ attack on Adobe Walls, fueled by resentment over the slaughter of the herds, was easily repulsed. When the traders applied to General Pope for troops to take station at the trading post, however, he refused: they had proved they could defend themselves, the post was beyond Pope’s jurisdiction, and they had not sought protection for their lives but for their illegal business. The traders moved back to Dodge City.24
Sheridan objected vociferously to Pope’s action. He believed that all U.S. citizens deserved protection, especially these citizens, who were engaged in the valuable work of destroying the Indians’ larder. Once the bison vanished, the Indians would do as the government ordered. Sheridan fired off a letter to Sherman, censuring Pope for failing to aid the hide-hunters and for what he labeled a defensive state of mind. Someone leaked the letter to the press, greatly embarrassing Pope, who complained bitterly to Sherman. The affair further roiled the relationship between Pope and Sheridan.25
The Red River War began in earnest on July 21, 1874, when Pope received a telegram announcing that the secretary of the interior had opened the Indian reservations to the army. The Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches had taken refuge on the Staked Plains in the Texas Panhandle. Because the area of operations involved both Pope’s department and General Christopher C. Augur’s Department of Texas, the two generals seem to have evolved the strategy without much oversight from General Sheridan. Five columns converged on the Staked Plains: two from Pope’s department and three from Augur’s department. Colonel Nelson A. Miles led Pope’s main striking force south from Fort Dodge on the Arkansas River. Major William R. Price moved east from New Mexico. Augur launched a command west from Fort Sill, another northwest from Fort Griffin, and a third north from Fort Concho.
On August 30 Miles scored a success against warriors from all three tribes at Tule Canyon, at the northeastern base of the Staked Plain. But lack of supplies, combined with hot, dry weather, forced him to fall back. The principal victory fell to the Fort Concho column under Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie in a battle in Palo Duro Canyon on September 28. Miles kept to the field, however, after other commands had returned to their bases in the face of winter. By the spring of 1875 all the tribes had given up at their agencies.26
The Red River War dramatized Pope’s third main cause: the staff’s control of events in the field. Colonel Miles’s command suffered so much from the failures of supply contractors that on January 23, 1875, Pope wrote a long letter directly to the secretary of war, protesting against a crippling system:
I assume as a fact which cannot well be disputed,
that, being myself responsible for all consequences, and being the person who ought, of all others, to know the needs of the service in the Department and how to meet them, I am the best judge of the sort of contract to be made and the responsibility and ability of the men with whom it is made.
As a matter of fact, I have no control over it, and if the responsibility for whatever may happen from the failure of contractors be assumed by, and enforced against, the Quartermaster General, I am very willing to go on as has been done, but I beg here to protest against being made responsible for the consequences if arrangements which I am not allowed to make and for the failure of the disasters I am not permitted to provide against.27
Submerged in his usual drowning verbosity, Pope had identified a basic military maxim: a commander should control his own logistics. When he read the letter, General Sherman understood that too. But he could do little to change the power of the staff bureaus. “We cannot change human nature,” he wrote to Pope on April 24, 1876, “or make Congress or the President other than they are; they don’t care a cent for the Army, further than that it enables them occasionally to do some favor to a personal friend.”28
Pope wouldn’t give up. In 1876 Ohio judge Alfonso Taft replaced the impeached William Belknap as secretary of war. Taft was more open to needed reforms in the War Department than Belknap had been. Pope therefore urged his wartime comrade, Cincinnati judge Manning F. Force, to press reforms on Secretary Taft. Of the staff bureaus Pope wrote that, “although they absolutely control the supplies of the army to the smallest article, and regulate the manner of its transportation and delivery to the army, they are absolutely without any responsibility for the results at all. Any disaster, dishonor, or suffering occasioned by the failure to furnish an article needed for the soldiers is charged, and naturally charged, upon the military commander, though he has no more power over such matters than the coroner in Cincinnati.”29
Addressing the House Committee on Military Affairs two years later, Pope provided an illustrative example:
Even when there was an arsenal here, directly in sight of these headquarters, I could not, with all my authority as department commander, and with the responsibility for supplying the necessities of some thousands of men, procure an arm or a cartridge, nor even a tompion (wooden plug, worth possibly ten cents) to close the muzzle of a piece of artillery to protect the bore from the weather, without forwarding a requisition for it to division headquarters in Chicago, thence to be forwarded to the Adjutant General of the Army for the General-in-Chief; and as neither of these officials had any more authority than I to order its issue, the requisition went to the Secretary of War, from him to the Chief of Ordnance, thence back to me through the same channels.30
For all his emphasis on the flaws of the staff system, which would not be remedied until after the turn of the century, Pope never lessened his emphasis on concentration of troops in winter and disbursing them in summer. As late in his tenure as 1881, he was still urging concentration: “I have, however, dwelt on this subject so much in every annual report for a number of years past, that it is superfluous, if not unpleasantly persistent, to repeat the recommendations here.”31 General Sheridan doubtless considered it “unpleasantly persistent.”
As early as 1862, when he took command in the Northwest, Pope had embraced the cause of the Indian even when fighting him. His lengthy critique of Indian policy in 1864 provided a base for subsequent years of advocating humane treatment of the Indians. Throughout his career he harbored sympathy for the Indians more pronounced than that of most of his colleagues. His strident opposition to the treaty system was rewarded in 1871 by congressional abolition of treaties. He believed that Indians confined to reservations should receive the full rations and annuities promised by treaties. He wavered on the issue of assimilation into white culture but advocated transforming Indians into farmers and cattle ranchers. He joined with others in an issue that surfaced repeatedly in the Congress: return Indian Affairs to the War Department, where they once were lodged. Opposed by Indian rights groups in the East, these measures repeatedly failed. In short, General Pope earned the sobriquet “humanitarian general,” a distinction few other generals merited.32
The Red River War of 1874–75 marked the height of Pope’s career as an Indian fighter. He had to contend with Ute hostilities in Colorado in 1879–80, but they dimmed in comparison to the Red River hostilities. Instead, beginning in 1878, he became increasingly preoccupied with the case of General Fitz John Porter. Ever since his court-martial in 1862–63, Porter had devoted himself to reversing the findings of the court. With reams of evidence and the support of generals and politicians, Porter succeeded in interesting President Rutherford B. Hayes. Much to Pope’s anger and chagrin, Hayes appointed a commission headed by General John M. Schofield to examine the evidence. The Schofield Commission found for Porter, further outraging Pope. He endured continuing strain for five years, however, as his political friends fought the finding and put off the ultimate resolution. In 1882 President Chester Arthur commuted Porter’s sentence and restored him to the Regular Army rank of colonel. Then-president Grover Cleveland issued a full pardon in 1884. Pope now bore the full burden of the disaster of Second Manassas.
The blow suffered by the outcome of the Porter case combined with deteriorating health took its toll on Pope, but in 1882 the retirement of General Irvin McDowell opened a vacancy for a major general. As the army’s senior brigadier, Pope lobbied vigorously for the appointment. On October 25, 1882, he donned the two stars of a major general.
With the retirement of General Sherman in 1884 and the elevation of General Sheridan to Sherman’s place, the Military Division of the Missouri fell vacant. Pope wanted Chicago, but he ended up filling McDowell’s vacancy, commanding the Division of the Pacific. Pope and Clara settled in San Francisco in November 1883.
Except for the concluding years of the Apache wars in Arizona, Pope’s division was quiet and his duties routine. In Arizona the department commander was first George Crook, then Pope’s subordinate from the Red River War, Nelson A. Miles, now a brigadier commanding the department. In his usual arrogant way, Miles directed the final operations against Geronimo without much regard for the chain of command. Pope protested that Miles corresponded directly with General Sheridan in Washington, but to little avail. Sheridan had as little regard for Pope as Miles did.33
Even before the surrender of Geronimo, Pope reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four. On March 16, 1886, he retired from the army. John and Clara Pope settled in St. Louis, both dogged by declining health. Clara died in June 1888, John on September 23, 1892. They are buried in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.
Aside from John Pope’s acerbic temperament, his Civil War career reached its high with the victory at Island No. 10 and plunged to its low with the disaster at Second Manassas. Almost alone, he won Island No. 10. Almost alone, he lost Second Manassas. The exile to Minnesota opened a new and more productive career on the Indian frontier. It also eased his truculent personality. His years of Indian service, 1862–86, quieted his belligerency and steadied his command style. He remained as wedded as ever to his own ideas, however, and expressed them as verbosely as ever. He never used one word when ten would do.
As a department commander, Pope was not a field general. He commanded from his desk at Fort Leavenworth. He conceived the plans but left his subordinates to carry them out without too much interference. He supported them to the extent that he could or thought they deserved. Throughout, in war or peace, he continued to pursue his three basic causes: the iniquity of U.S. Indian policy and its deleterious effect on the Indians; the dispersion of his troops when they should be concentrated at one or two posts in the winter and deployed in the field in summer; and the pernicious consequences of a staff system that deprived line commanders of needed resources. He fought these battles long after he should have understood that he alone could not win them. History judges his causes meritorious and ultimately achieved: Ind
ian policy was reformed, concentration occurred with the close of Indian hostilities, and the staff system underwent radical reform.
John Pope was not only a competent, even superior, department commander but also a noted humanitarian general.
Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry, commanding Department of Dakota, 1866–1869, 1873–1886.
U.S. Army Military History Institute.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ALFRED H. TERRY
General Alfred H. Terry came into the army as a volunteer without a military education. His way was won without political influence up to an important separate command—the expedition against Fort Fisher in January 1865. His success there was most brilliant and won him the rank of brigadier-general in the regular army and of major-general of volunteers. He is a man who makes friends of those under him by his consideration of their wants and their dues. As a commander, he won their confidence by his coolness in action and by his clearness of perception in taking in the situation under which he was placed at any given time.1
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