The frontier began to heat up shortly after the Custers arrived. On December 21, 1866, a column of eighty soldiers from the 18th Infantry under the command of Captain William Fetterman were ambushed and wiped out in the northern Wyoming Territory by Oglala Sioux, led by Chief Red Cloud.15 The massacre inflamed a conflict that had been smoldering for years.
The northern Plains tribes had become incensed by the increasing number of whites traveling through Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho lands on the Bozeman Trail, heading for the Montana goldfields. The Civil War was partly to blame; in 1864 General Pleasonton, then in Missouri, had begun paroling Confederate prisoners on the condition they went north to the Dakota and Montana Territories. John Pope, commanding the Military Division of the Missouri at the end of the war, noted in June 1865 that these men were as problematic as the Indians themselves. Pope believed that “the continued rush of emigration to the mines, making highways through the entire Indian country, and attended with outrages upon the Indians which are never heard of except in acts of retaliation, makes it pretty certain that Indian hostilities will continue.”16
Meanwhile, the Indians had taken advantage of the power vacuum on the Plains during the Civil War. “Never before have the Indians been allowed for eighteen months to have their own way to murder, rob, and plunder indiscriminately and successfully, without check or hindrance,” Major General G. M. Dodge wrote in the summer of 1865. “They seem confident of success, fight well, and believe to-day that one Indian is equal to five white soldiers. It takes almost man to man to whip them, and will until the conceit is taken out of them by severe chastisement.”17
Captain Fetterman had assumed such “chastisement” would be easy: “Give me 80 men and I can ride through the whole Sioux nation.” The Sioux quickly took that conceit out of him. But the Fetterman massacre became a rallying cry for those who wanted to settle the Plains issue once and for all. “Should this reported massacre prove to be a fact, it may wake the Government up to the necessity of remodeling the whole Indian Bureau,” the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph editorialized. “It is certain that these roving savages cannot be allowed much longer to impede the development of this great branch of the nation’s industry.”18
General Sherman, now commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, ordered an expedition against the Indians in the spring of 1867, commanded by Winfield Scott Hancock. Hancock assembled a force of 1,400 men, including Custer and the 7th Cavalry, to take to the field with orders to find and punish any hostile Indian bands. Custer and his men moved 150 miles west to Fort Hays to make ready for the expedition. Libbie stayed behind at Fort Riley, though Custer was eager to have her join him. “Come as soon as you can,” he wrote in May. “I did not marry you for you to live in one house, me in another. One bed shall accommodate us both.”19
On April 12, Hancock met with Cheyenne chiefs at Fort Larned, fifty-five miles south of Fort Hays, near the junction of the Arkansas River and Pawnee Fork. With Hancock were 7th Cavalry commander Colonel Smith, Custer, Major Alfred Gibbs, and Lieutenant Colonel John W. Davidson of the 10th Cavalry. Tall Bear led a Cheyenne delegation of twelve chiefs. Colonel Ned Wynkoop, the Indian agent for the Cheyenne, was also present. Wynkoop was “an Indian agent par excellence,” by one report. “The Indians have every confidence in his integrity, and respect him for the ‘heap fight’ that he is known to be capable of making.”20
They gathered around a fire, the Indians passing a peace pipe, the whites smoking cigars. Hancock wanted to discuss the troubles on the Plains and warned the Indians that while he desired peace, he would fight any who went on the warpath. Tall Bear was focused on his people’s suffering. It had been a hard winter with little food. Hancock told them that the bison were “going away very fast, and that they would all disappear eventually.” Tall Bear, “wrapped gracefully in his buffalo robe, replied that they were becoming scarce, that they had never been so scarce as during the past winter, adding significantly, that the white men had made them scarce.”21 He blamed the railroads pushing through traditional Cheyenne lands and hunting grounds, and the white settlers who came in their wake.
The conference was inconclusive. Hancock requested to meet with more and higher ranking chiefs. Meanwhile, he wanted to move his force closer to the Indian village so they would understand the threat they faced. The next day he marched up the Pawnee Fork toward the village. Within six miles of the encampment, three hundred mounted Cheyenne warriors met him, drawn up in line of battle. Hancock halted, deployed some of his troops, then moved forward with Colonel Smith and Custer to parlay with the Dog Soldiers’ domineering war chief, Roman Nose.
The six-foot-tall chief rode up dressed in a U.S. Army officer’s uniform. “From his manner it was quite evident that he was indifferent whether he talked or fought,” wrote reporter Theodore R. Davis, who was present at the scene. A Spencer carbine hung from Roman Nose’s saddle, four revolvers were stuck in his belt, and he held a strung bow and a clutch of arrows in his left hand, “ready for instant use.”22 Hancock said he had come to talk and wanted to set up a camp where there was better wood and water. Roman Nose left some men with Hancock and rode off with the rest toward the village. After some delay Hancock resumed his march, over land that the Indians had burned, forcing him to make camp within a mile of the village. The Indian encampment was partially deserted; the chiefs explained that the women and children had grown frightened and left, and many of the young men were away on a hunting party.
Hancock grew suspicious; that night he ordered Custer and six hundred men to surround the village. They moved cautiously around the lodges in the darkness. “We all closed in on it, with carbines advanced,” Albert Barnitz wrote. A reconnaissance party presently returned to report that the village was abandoned. “The Indians had left,” Barnitz wrote, “just as noiselessly as wolves!”23 The only remaining occupants were numerous dogs, a lame old man, and a little half-breed girl not more than nine years old. She was “almost insensible, covered with blood,” Custer wrote. “When able to talk she said, ‘Those Indian men did me bad!’”24 Custer and his men went after the Cheyenne but only found the ashes of nearby Lookout Station and the half-consumed bodies of the station-men. Hancock ordered the Indian village burned in retaliation.
After this, the conflict was on. Custer took his command northeast to Fort Hays to ready for the coming campaign. An Iowa newspaper chided him for not being able to bring the fight to Roman Nose’s band: “Gen. Custer, the celebrated soldier whipper, is after the Indians, but as usual the savages were too fast for him and succeeded in getting out of his way.”25 But Custer knew the challenges facing the cavalry in irregular warfare against the Indians. He opposed the impending conflict and advised his superiors against it. “I regard the recent outrages as the work of small groups of irresponsible young men eager for war,” he wrote. He thought a general war on the Plains would further disrupt construction of the railroad and lead only to more innocent lives being lost. But “should a war be waged, none would be more determined than I to make it a war of extermination”—the same blunt language Custer used regarding the Confederates during the Civil War.26
However, chasing Indians across the Plains was nothing like engaging the Army of Northern Virginia. If anything, it was more akin to Custer’s operations against Mosby’s raiders. And the area he was patrolling was considerably vaster than Mosby’s Confederacy—the state of Kansas alone is about fifty times the size of Mosby’s area of operations. Custer had far fewer men, and the enemy moved with their whole communities, so the only scorched earth was when the Indians torched the plains to deny grass to Army horses.
The expected supplies for the regiment were slow in coming, and the wait at Fort Hays dragged on for weeks. Libbie, her friend Anna, and Eliza reached the fort in mid-May, which made the stay more tolerable for Custer, but the delay was hurting the unit. An outbreak of scurvy prompted Custer and his officers to buy anti-scorbutic foods for the men with their own funds, and they also mounted b
ison hunts and other measures “to secure for the men a beneficial change of rations.”27 But sometimes the hunting parties never came back. Albert Barnitz wrote his wife, Jennie, about a group that went out in search of buffalo and “forgot to return. Query, were they all gobbled by the Indians? We think not.” He said that desertions were “a nightly occurrence.”28
As in Texas, Custer had a difficult time coming to grips with the lack of discipline among the men. Barnitz wrote his wife that Custer “spares no effort to render himself generally obnoxious.”29 He called Custer “the most complete example of a petty tyrant that I have ever seen. You would be filled with utter amazement, if I were to give you a few instances of his cruelty to the men, and discourtesy to the officers.”30 In one case, six men went to the sutler’s post a half mile from camp in search of canned fruit during the scurvy epidemic. But they did not have a pass, so Custer had their scalps half-shaved and paraded them through the fort in a wagon to “the exceeding mortification, disgrace and disgust of all right-minded officers and men in camp.” Barnitz concluded that “no man but an incarnate fiend could take pleasure in such an abuse of authority.”31
The 7th mounted periodic patrols but did not find any Indians. Once Custer had a report of a large war party at Lookout Station and led a nighttime patrol of three hundred troopers to engage them. But all he found were the men rebuilding the station passing the time playing poker, with no sign of alarm and unaware of any Indians. As Custer left, one of the poker players remarked, “Fellers, did yer ever see ‘Wild Bill?’ That was the chap; purty boy, wasn’t he? Looked as ef he wanted a hand in, didn’t he though?”32 Custer did bear a superficial resemblance to James B. “Wild Bill” Hickok, who was scouting for Hancock at the time and won George’s admiration.
Custer’s expedition finally set off on June 1, heading for Fort McPherson, 250 miles north, with 350 men and 20 wagons. He was to scout the area between Fort Hays and the Platte River, then move west toward Fort Sedgwick, south to Fort Wallace, and east back to Fort Hays. It was believed that there were large numbers of Cheyenne and Sioux in the area, and Custer’s orders were to “hunt out and chastise” them.
The first week of the scout, they saw few signs of Indians, but there was some drama. One night the troopers found they had camped amid a large colony of rattlesnakes, which they used to augment their rations after some quick work with their sabers. Days later Colonel Wickliffe Cooper, a well-regarded officer but an alcoholic, shot himself in the head in a drunken fit and died. And when they reached the Platte after six days in the field, thirty-five men deserted in twenty-four hours—10 percent of Custer’s total force.
Late in the afternoon on June 7, thirteen more men “deliberately shouldered their arms and started off for the Platte,” Custer wrote, “in the presence of the entire command, in open day.”33 This bold action threatened the cohesion of the entire unit, and Custer determined that “severe and summary measures must be taken.” He ordered Major Joel Elliot, Lieutenants Tom Custer, William W. Cooke, and Henry Jackson, and a few enlisted men to “pursue the deserters who were still visible . . . and then bring the dead bodies of as many as could be taken back to camp.”
The pursuers set out. Seven of the thirteen deserters had opened up a two-mile lead and got away. Three of the remaining six were shot and wounded, and the other three surrendered. All six were placed under arrest and hauled back to camp in a wagon. Custer at first said the wounded would not be treated, but half an hour later quietly instructed the surgeon to tend to them. One of the men, Charles Johnson, who was shot in the head and abdomen, subsequently died of his wounds. “The effect was all that could be desired,” Custer wrote. “There was not another desertion as long as I remained with the command.”34
The column resupplied at Fort McPherson, then moved up the Platte valley, passing abandoned ranches and numerous rough graves, “all that told of the fate of the poor mortals who had ventured to make a home on the Plains,” as Davis put it.35 Twelve miles up the valley, they made camp near Jack Morrow’s ranch. A Sioux war leader named Pawnee Killer arrived unexpectedly with a half dozen braves, saying they “loved their white brothers” and wanted food and protection from the Cheyenne. Pawnee Killer promised Custer he would encamp quietly near Fort McPherson if permitted, and when he left, Custer gave him a supply of coffee, sugar, and hard tack.
General Sherman, who arrived the next day, was skeptical that Pawnee Killer could be trusted. He ordered Custer south to the headwaters of the Republican River to search for Indian bands, then encamp and await further instructions. Sherman had a high opinion of George; earlier that year he wrote his brother that Custer was “young, very brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer. He came to duty immediately on being appointed, and is ready and willing now to fight the Indians.” Sherman said he was “bound to befriend him.”36 Sherman encouraged Custer to be ruthless with the Indians, but as the column moved up the river there were none to be found—except when they wanted to be.
At dawn on June 24, the troopers were “busy grooming and feeding our stock, at peace with all the world,” one of Custer’s men recalled, when “suddenly came bang, bang, bang! and most unearthly yells.” They saw “hundreds of Indians, all mounted on fleet ponies, and coming for us with a vengeance.” The Indians wounded a sentry and attempted to drive off the cavalrymen’s horses, “until the guard opened on them such a galling fire that they were obliged to retire.” Custer was impressed with the skill the Indians displayed in mounting their attack. “We had often heard of the high perfection of some of the Indian tribes in military evolutions and discipline, but here we saw evidences which went far to convince us that the red man was not far behind his more civilized brother in the art of war.”37
A truce was called, and Custer rode out with a half dozen men to talk to the leader of the war party. It was Pawnee Killer. He recognized Custer and asked him why he had left the Platte. Custer asked where Pawnee Killer’s village was and why he was not near Fort McPherson as promised. Neither got a satisfactory answer. Pawnee Killer said his heart was good and asked for more sugar and coffee, and also some ammunition, none of which was forthcoming.
After the uncomfortable parlay, Custer rode back to his camp and ordered his men to make ready for a fight. They chased Pawnee Killer and his braves, but the Indians outran the cavalrymen, and Custer returned to camp. “This was the way they returned the favor” of the supplies, Custer’s trooper wrote. “Pawnee-killer said it was a mistake, and Gen. Custer let him off scot free. The peace the old fellow wanted was a piece of our hair, I presume.”38
Later that day a small group of Indians returned and watched the camp from a nearby bluff. Captain Louis McLane Hamilton, grandson of Alexander Hamilton, and, like his grandfather, handsome and ambitious, took a party of twenty men and rode after the Indians, chasing them eight miles from camp. But this was the same ruse that had fooled Fetterman; Hamilton rode into an ambush of three hundred Sioux. His group fought doggedly for an hour and somehow managed to get back to camp suffering no losses other than one horse.
Meanwhile, things were heating up elsewhere. One of Custer’s supply trains, escorted by a detachment led by Lieutenants Samuel M. Robbins and William W. Cooke, fought a three-hour, fifteen-mile running battle with around eight hundred Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, suffering two wounded. And a detachment under Captain Barnitz got into a brutal, hand-to-hand scrape with a large group of Indians near Fort Wallace, losing some killed with many wounded.39
In the garbled way that news was sometimes passed along from the remote frontier, the New York Tribune, which was skeptical of the Plains campaign, reported that “there are no signs of a speedy end to the Indian war. Five thousand Sioux forbid white men to enter their country, the Utes threaten new disturbances, and it is reported that Gen. Custer has been overpowered and killed.”40 A British newspaper echoed this report, saying, “A large force of Indians had surrounded a small body of cavalry under General Custer, and killed the wh
ole party.”41 The St. Cloud Journal responded to the false report: “If Gen. Custer had killed a pack of Indians the Tribune would have raised a fearful howl. This Indian worship is one of the most disgusting features of Eastern sentimentalism.”42 Sherman, long an enemy of the press, said that “journalists should endeavor to ascertain the truth before shocking the public with such terrible announcements.”43
Awaiting further orders from Sherman, Custer moved his command along the Republican, then overland to the Platte, then to Riverside Station, forty miles west of Fort Sedgwick. There he learned by telegraph that orders had been sent out with Lieutenant Lyman Kidder and a party of ten, guided by a friendly Sioux named Red Beard. Custer was ordered to continue to Fort Wallace as originally planned; en route on July 12 near Beaver Creek, he found the mutilated remains of Kidder and his party. Red Beard had been scalped but the trophy left behind, a sign that it had been a Sioux ambush, probably Pawnee Killer’s band.
The next day Custer arrived at Fort Wallace. He had expected to find Libbie there to greet him. But there was no word from her, and he learned that a flash flood on the Smoky Hill River at Fort Hays where she was last staying had taken nine lives. (In fact Libbie had a harrowing experience and narrowly escaped being swept away, not that he knew.) This was too much for him. After learning that the civilians from Fort Hays had been evacuated further downstream to Fort Harker, Custer assembled a group of seventy-five officers and men led by Captain Hamilton, and on July 15 they set out.
Custer drove his men mercilessly, 150 miles in fifty-five hours. The weather was hot and the way dangerous. “The Indians swarm along the route,” one report noted, “and are bolder and more determined than ever before.”44 Near Downer’s Station some of Custer’s men who had lingered to the rear a few miles were attacked by a band of Cheyenne, and two were killed. Custer refused to take the time to send back a party to retrieve the bodies of the dead.
The Real Custer Page 25
