By the spring of 1875, Custer’s main preoccupation was finding ways to stem the gold rush he had helped start. In an interview in May 1875, he said the government was determined to “labor faithfully in protecting the Indians in their undoubted right, at present, to that portion of the Black Hills included in the treaty.”30 Custer thought it would be wise to vacate the Indians’ treaty rights however possible, for example by purchasing the Black Hills. He said that the time had come when “it must be decided whether the dog-in-the-manger mode of the Indians will be tolerated.”31
The New York Herald described Custer around this time as “tall, lithe, well-formed, with soft, light hair, a blonde moustache and a smooth face. A person unacquainted with him would little suspect that he is the terror of the bloodthirsty Sioux.” They said his “keen blue eyes look straight into the eyes of the listener, and his courteous and sincere manner puts one at ease on first entering the room. When animated, his eyes flash and his nerves seem touched with fire.”32
But for now the mission of the “terror of the bloodthirsty Sioux” was to keep miners out of the Black Hills. Some were removed by force; others were interdicted while heading into the area.33 Custer warned that just because some prospectors made it to the area did not mean others would survive the trip, especially once the Indians decided to take matters into their own hands. “It is the height of folly for parties to imagine that [miners] can march across the Plains after the Indians are on the warpath,” Custer cautioned. Whites trying to slip into the Black Hills would either be “killed outright” or, if they reached the area, would be “prevented from leaving their strongholds or places of concealment.”34
“We have at once the declarations that the miners must stay away but that they will secure plenty of gold if they will come,” a Pennsylvania paper wrote. “Bayonets and gold are respectively the repelling and inviting influences. Which will be the most potent remains to be seen.”35
Another Black Hills survey was planned to settle the gold question, hopefully debunking the more outlandish claims of riches and stemming the tide of miners. Custer assumed he would lead the expedition; in May 1875 he told the press that he was departing Fort Lincoln June 1, and if there were large numbers of miners in the hills, “it will probably take the whole summer to drive them out and keep out the intruders.”36 But Custer had become too controversial, and instead the mission was given to Lieutenant Colonel Richard I. Dodge of the 23rd Infantry.37
Columbia University mining geologist Walter P. Jenney and Henry Newton of the Interior Department conducted rigorous surveys at various locations in the Black Hills. They were escorted by four hundred soldiers and shadowed by miners hoping to make immediate use of their findings. “The yield of gold thus far has been quite small and the reports of richness of the gravel bars are greatly exaggerated,” Jenney said in an early report. “The prospects at present are not such as to warrant extended explorations in mining.”38
Yet such was the intensity of the gold mania that even this pessimistic report was read as confirming that gold could be found. “Prof. Jenney reports to Indian Commissioner Smith that the yield of gold is not sufficient to make it pay well,” one paper noted, “but the great body of miners, always waiting for an excitement, will not hesitate to go on and prospect for themselves, on the assurance that there is gold there at all.” The paper noted that “assurance was early and deliberately given by General Custer and never taken back. Resting on his word alone, it has been sufficient to attract several thousand miners to the outskirts of the Black Hills.”39 The Oakland Tribune wrote that “nothing can now prevent the invasion of the new El Dorado by thousands of men who have been held back by the uncertainty of the reported wealth of the Black Hills.”40
Since the government could not stop the invasion, it opened negotiations to purchase the land from the Sioux. The idea had been floated since the first reports of gold. Members of Congress, government experts, pundits, and advocates from all sides debated which lands should be sold, what price was fair, and how the money could be distributed to the Indians without falling into the hands of unscrupulous Indian agents, politicians, lawyers, thieves, and swindlers.
But while politicians and newspaper editors debated the finer details of implementing the Black Hills purchase, they overlooked one important fact: the Sioux had little interest in making a deal. As soon as the 1874 expedition returned, a group of chiefs, including Running Antelope and Fire Heart of the Blackfoot Sioux, had an audience with Custer and “strongly protested against the violation of the treaty of 1868 by the white men going to the Black Hills.”41
In May 1875, a Sioux delegation led by Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, Lone Horn, and an Oglala leader named Sitting Bull (sometimes called “the good Sitting Bull” to differentiate him from the more famous Hunkpapa leader) came to Washington to discuss a variety of issues, including the invasion of lands guaranteed them by treaty, the desecration of their holy places in the Black Hills, insufficient rations and annuities, and corruption in the Indian agencies. They met with President Grant, acting Secretary of the Interior Cowen, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Smith, but received little in the way of assurances, especially regarding food. In fact, the government was subtly creating the food shortage as a means of leverage. This prompted Chief White Swan to observe sarcastically that “the worse an Indian behaves the more he gets.”42
Commissioner Smith was mainly interested in settling the Black Hills question. Congress had authorized $25,000 to buy out the tribal hunting rights guaranteed under the Fort Laramie Treaty and also proposed to allocate funds to move the Sioux to much better lands elsewhere. But the chiefs would not bargain. “Look at me!” Red Cloud told one of Grant’s emissaries. “I am no dog. I am a man. This is my ground, and I am sitting on it.”43 Spotted Tail told Smith that he wanted nothing to do with lands outside those he was born in, and “if it is such a good country, you ought to send the white men now in our country there, and let us alone.”
The May meetings went nowhere. Episcopal Bishop William H. Hare of the Missionary District of Niobrara, which included the Sioux reservation, prophetically warned that “we should not be surprised if, insisting now upon buying with money what the Indian does not wish to sell, we drive him to frenzy, our covetousness ends in massacre, and we pay for the Indians’ land less in money than in blood.”44 But the Grant administration and Congress were still eager to buy their way to a solution to the Black Hills problem.
In September 1875, a delegation was sent to Red Cloud Agency to reopen negotiations after reports that Spotted Tail might be willing to make a deal. Commissioners included General Terry, Senator William B. Allison of Iowa, and retired General Albert Gallatin Lawrence, among others. They were escorted by two companies of cavalry. Terry was very much in favor of fair play with the Indians and letting them stay unmolested in the Black Hills if they wanted. Custer said that “the Indians have no better friend than Gen. Terry. When I say friend, I mean a man that will see that they are justly dealt with.”45
The delegation arrived to find a massive gathering of perhaps twenty thousand Indians, mostly Sioux, but also some Cheyenne and Arapaho. Any deal would require three-quarters of the adult male Sioux voting in favor for it to take effect, according to the Fort Laramie Treaty, and the mood among the assembled Indians was bitter. The chiefs, under pressure from their own people, at first snubbed the government delegation. But as the whites prepared to leave after a few days, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and other chiefs consented to talk, and the session opened.
The Brulé and Oglala leaders were willing to listen, but others actively opposed any negotiations. By this time Spotted Tail and Red Cloud were considered “peace chiefs” and had lost their authority over the more warlike factions, who looked to Sitting Bull for leadership. This is particularly ironic in the case of Red Cloud, who had successfully prosecuted a war against the whites. As the two delegations began the talks, thousands of armed, mounted Indians formed a crescent around the meeting
tents. The two cavalry companies, led by Colonel Anson Mills and Captain James Egan, were deployed at the rear and flanks of the meeting area, and soon every cavalryman had a warrior with a loaded rifle behind him.
A few dozen warriors rode around whipping up excitement, while others were creeping closer in some nearby bushes. Then a Sioux warrior named Little Big Man, one of Crazy Horse’s lieutenants, rode into the circle with a rifle and threatened to shoot any Indian leader who agreed to sell the Black Hills.
The situation was tense; the commissioners and their escort could well have been massacred, with a fair number of Indians also killed. Sitting Bull the Good said aside to a friend, “There will be trouble here, and I will kill the first Indian that tries a shot. You stand by and watch me.”46 But Oglala leader Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses had planned for trouble. At a prearranged signal, one hundred of his men moved quickly between the hotheads and the commissioners, and three grabbed Little Big Man and led him away. This temporarily defused the crisis, and Spotted Tail suggested moving the negotiations to the relative safety of nearby Camp Robinson. At the reconvened meeting, Terry proffered the government’s offer for the Black Hills: a leasing arrangement at $400,000 per year, or purchase for $6 million. But again the Indians were not interested, and the commissioners returned home.47
The Black Hills issue continued to simmer into the fall. Anger over the invasion of their sacred lands, along with insufficient supplies and mismanagement on the agencies, drove increasing numbers of Indians to join Sitting Bull’s band living in the traditional manner in the unceded lands to the west of the Sioux reservation. With the Black Hills incursion out of control and winter approaching, the government began to discuss a military solution.
In late November, William E. Curtis of the Chicago Inter-Ocean, who had accompanied the Yellowstone expedition and was now Washington bureau chief for the paper, reported that planning was under way for a winter campaign against Sitting Bull. The purpose of the campaign was to “whip the hostiles into subjection for protection to whites, and the benefit of friendly Indians, and as winter is the only time to fight Indians successfully, preparations are being made accordingly.”48 The Bismarck Tribune, noting rumblings in favor of possible American intervention to support an anti-Spanish uprising that had broken out in Cuba, said that “the American people would prefer a war with Spain, but any kind of war will satisfy those panting for a fight, if it is nothing more than a winter campaign against poor old Sitting Bull, which seems to have fully been determined upon.”49
War was indeed determined upon; all it needed was a pretext. On December 3, 1875, Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler—who as senator from Michigan had invited Libbie on the boat trip to City Point, Virginia, in July 1864 to visit her Autie—ordered all Sioux to return to the reservation by the end of January, or be sent back by force. The sixty-day timeline was unrealistic given the poor state of communications with the renegade bands and the severity of the winter. Runners did not even set out from the agencies seeking Sitting Bull until the second week in January. Like the similar return order before Washita, Chandler’s demarche was really intended to establish a rationale for military operations.
Sitting Bull’s people were not going to return to the reservation, and the miners, then numbering around 1,200, were still seeking the elusive Black Hills gold.50 William Courtenay, who traded with the Indians along the Yellowstone and was sometimes robbed by them, wrote in an open letter, “Will the Government never undertake the chastisement of Sitting Bull and his band of murderers, refugees and outlaws?” He said that Rain-in-the-Face, Blade Moon, and Low Dog were “a few of the Indian outcasts and ruffians” who compose this “camp of cut throats, who for years have indulged with impunity in rapine and murder, and laughed at the Government.”51
“At the time we Oglalas had no thought that we would ever fight the whites,” Chief Low Dog said. “Then I heard some people talking that the chief of the white men wanted the Indians to live where he ordered and do as he said, and he would feed and clothe them.” The very idea of being dependent on the government offended Low Dog. “Why should I be kept as a humble man, when I am a brave warrior and on my own lands?” he said. “The game is mine, and the hills, and the valleys, and the white man has no right to say where I shall go, or what I shall do. If any white man tries to destroy what is mine, or take what is mine, or take my lands, I will take my gun, get on my horse, and go punish him.”
Months later Senator William B. Allison, the Iowa Republican who had been at the failed September 1875 conference at Red Cloud Agency, pleaded with the Senate to reach an agreement with the Sioux in regard to the Black Hills. He cautioned that “unless some action be taken soon by Congress to treat with these Indians . . . a general Indian war would take place.”52 But by then the war was already upon them. “Gen. Custer intended to make a conquest of the new country and it is likely that he has succeeded,” one editorialist wrote at the start of the gold rush. “Swarms of gold hunters are now collecting in the frontier towns, waiting for the spring break up, when they will invade the Black Hills. It is painful to contemplate the change which will be wrought in the peaceful country of the Sioux.”53
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
GRANT’S REVENGE
On February 1, 1876, Secretary of the Interior Chandler informed Secretary of War Belknap that since Sitting Bull’s followers had not come to the reservation, they were to be considered hostiles and “turned over to the War Department for such action on the part of the Army as you may deem proper under the circumstances.”1 He washed his hands of whatever might happen next. “This wasn’t a fight instituted by the Army for glory going purposes, or anything of that kind,” Captain Frederick Benteen wrote, “but rather, ’twas a little gentle disciplining which the Department of the Interior . . . had promised would be given the Indians if they, the nomads of the tribe, declined to come in to agencies in the Spring.”2
Sheridan envisioned three columns converging on the Indians somewhere east of the Bighorn Mountains. He intended to overcome the Indians’ advantage in mobility by gradually reducing the area in which they could evade his forces and presenting them with increasingly poor options. If all went as planned, the Indians would either be forced into a battle they could not win, or surrender and return to the reservations under armed escort.
However, Sheridan’s plan had several drawbacks. The columns would operate on exterior lines, separated by vast distances, making it difficult to communicate and coordinate movements. They would not know how many Indians they faced, or where they were. If one column made contact with the enemy, it would have to herd the Indians toward the other forces, not knowing exactly where those forces were, and hoping the Indians did not move in another, unexpected direction. Worst of all, the plan assumed the Indians would not do what any conventional military force would do in this situation: engage each column separately and defeat them in detail.
If the Indians did not know the war was coming, it was not for lack of press coverage. The Bismarck Tribune’s November 20 headline, “Winter Campaign against Sitting Bull,” announced the coming conflict even before Chandler set his deadline. Operational details followed: a December report said that the Army “will carry on concerted movements from two sides, and if they once get an opportunity will make it very interesting for the warriors.”3 In February the New York Times ran a front-page story outlining most of the campaign plan, with Custer and Brigadier General George Crook moving from the east and south respectively, to “join their forces and attack Sitting Bull in the Powder River country, which is west of the Black Hills, and about one hundred and fifty miles east of the Big Horn Mountains.” The article estimated Sitting Bull’s force at six hundred to one thousand warriors.4 Later reports bumped this number up to 1,500.5 A Wisconsin paper predicted that soon they would hear “that Sitting Bull’s convictions have undergone a radical change, and, if he survives the heroic treatment to which he will be subjected that he has concluded to abandon
war, go into the agricultural business and raise corn and potatoes for a living.”6
The first attempt was made in early spring. A column of eight hundred men set out in March under George Crook, Sheridan’s roommate at West Point, who had been a Corps commander under him in the Civil War. Crook had fought successfully against the Apaches and was well regarded on the frontier. The Indians referred to him as Gray Fox.
Crook’s force, ten companies of cavalry and two of infantry under Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds, were accompanied by a host of scouts, civilian drivers, and 85 wagons pulled by 892 mules. They moved slowly over icy trails and through snow storms, enduring bitter cold. Eventually they located an Indian village near the Powder River, which they thought was Crazy Horse’s. In fact it was a Cheyenne band under Old Bear and Two Moons moving away from the more warlike groups because they did not want their people involved in whatever conflict was coming. They fought an inconclusive battle on March 17. Reynolds’s men burned the village before leaving, and some of the teepees, packed with ammunition, exploded. The expedition achieved little, and Crook court-martialed Reynolds for leaving wounded men on the field.
Colonel John Gibbon—known to the Indians as “White Whiskers”—meanwhile left Fort Ellis in Montana in early April with six companies of the 7th Infantry and four troops of the 2nd Cavalry under Major J. S. Brisbin. They were to patrol the north bank of the Yellowstone River and intercept the Indians, whom Crook was supposed to be driving north. But the expected fleeing bands never materialized, and according to Lieutenant John F. McBlain, Gibbon’s column “had used up all the rations it had taken with it, had drained all the Montana posts, and had contracted for meats and hard bread, long before there was any apparent movement in the south.”7
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