Terrible Swift Sword (47 page)

Despite everything, Sheridan had successfully overseen the registration of tens of thousands of black voters in Louisiana and Texas—indisputably his greatest achievement. He had punished the most odious instances of official corruption and misconduct. Even as his army was severely pared by postwar demobilizations from a peak of 52,000 men to just 7,000, he had attempted to protect loyal Unionists and blacks from the violence that permeated the Fifth Military District. He had made a maximum effort to carry out his mission, as he perceived it.

That said, Sheridan had displayed no aptitude for diplomacy. His forceful actions made him lasting enemies: even a decade later, he was accused in a $410,600 lawsuit of unlawfully seizing sugar and molasses from James Whalen's Killona Plantation; Whalen lost the litigation.
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JOHNSON INITIALLY CHOSE MAJOR General George Thomas of the Army of the Cumberland to succeed Sheridan in New Orleans. In a round-robin arrangement, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock of the Department of the Missouri was supposed to succeed Thomas, while Sheridan replaced Hancock. But because of Thomas's poor health, Sheridan and Hancock simply traded commands.

In instructing Sheridan to report to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Grant bluntly wrote, “You were right.” All along, Grant had assured Sheridan that his dismissal, which both had known for months was inevitable, would not affect Sheridan's military career. Grant invited Sheridan to come to Washington for a vacation after reporting for duty at Leavenworth. “I know such a welcome awaits you as will convince you that Republicans are not always ungrateful and that there is still loyalty in the country.”
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1868–1869

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 1, 1868, as the metallic light began to fade, a long column of mounted figures appeared on the snow-covered rolling hills south of Camp Supply, the army's new depot in Indian Territory. It was Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and his 7th Cavalry, in triumphal array. Two days earlier, red-bearded California Joe, the famously bibulous scout who had once drunkenly attacked US cavalrymen by mistake, had brought the first news of the crushing blow struck by Custer and his men against the Indians who had terrorized western Kansas throughout the late summer and fall.

During raids on the growing settlements in the Saline and Solomon river valleys in August and September, renegades had slaughtered seventy-nine settlers and snatched away young women and children. Fifty miles to the south, at daybreak
on November 27, the 7th Cavalry had struck back, smashing the sleeping Cheyenne winter encampment on the Washita River. The corpses of 103 warriors, women, and children were left strewn across the frozen ground.

Attacking the Indians in their winter camps was the novel strategy of Major General Phil Sheridan, who had conceded the futility of chasing warrior bands across the plains during the summertime. Now, Sheridan and his headquarters troops and contractors stood in ranks to welcome the victors.

The theatrical Custer turned it into a war pageant. The Osage scouts arrived first, their faces “fantastically painted,” and prominently displaying their shields and quivers of arrows. Fresh scalps dangled from their spears, and their own plaited scalps were bedecked with long trains of feathers and silver ornaments. Conspicuous even amid this sybaritic display was the Osage warrior Trotter, bearing the meticulously decorated scalp of the renowned Cheyenne chief Black Kettle. The Osages whooped and fired their rifles into the air.

Behind them on a black stallion rode Custer, stone-faced and nearly unrecognizable in a full beard, buckskins, and fur hat, leading fifty-three captive squaws and children mounted on ponies and swathed to the eyes in red trade blankets. The eight hundred 7th Cavalry troopers brought up the rear as their band played the 7th Cavalry's anthem, “Garry Owen.” Each officer lifted his saber as he passed Sheridan, who returned the salutes by raising his cap and smiling.

Of Custer, Sheridan had once said, “If there was any poetry or romance in war he could develop it.” No better proof of Sheridan's observation existed than Custer's dramatic entrance at Camp Supply.

That night, at the 7th Cavalry's encampment a half mile from Camp Supply, the Osages performed what Sheridan described as a “hideous scalp dance.” As the Osage drums pounded, the sister and niece of the late Black Kettle paid Sheridan a visit in his tent. Black Kettle's sister, Monahsetah, speaking for the captive women and children, politely asked Sheridan when he planned to murder them all. Nonplussed, Sheridan assured her that they would not be killed. The captives' spirits noticeably rose.
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SHERIDAN'S ELATION AT THE 7th Cavalry's triumph, however, was shot through with worry. Custer had informed him that Major Joel Elliot and sixteen men were missing. Custer hoped they would show up at Camp Supply or Fort Dodge.

Custer explained that he had been unable to conduct a thorough search for Elliot because he was being pressed by thousands of Indians who had come to Black Kettle's aid from nearby camps, and he had to protect his supply train. Sheridan thought Custer's explanation to be “a very unsatisfactory view of the matter.” Still, he was proud of what his men had accomplished. “The blow that Custer had struck
was a hard one, and fell on the guiltiest of all the bands—that of Black Kettle. It was this band that, without provocation, had massacred the settlers on the Saline and Solomon, and perpetrated cruelties too fiendish for recital.”
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Sheridan was eager to see the battlefield for himself—and to try to find out what had happened to the Elliot party. A few days later, Sheridan, Custer, the 7th Cavalry, the Osage scouts, and a long supply train rolled out of Camp Supply and turned south toward Black Kettle's ruined camp.

BOTH SHERIDAN AND HIS predecessor commanding the Department of the Missouri, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, had flailed impotently in their attempts to catch and punish the marauding Southern Plains Indian bands.

In 1867, Hancock had arranged a parley with the Cheyenne “Dog Soldiers”—warriors who eschewed the reservation for the free life of the plains—on the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas River, but the Indians fled when they saw Hancock's troops. Hancock had sent Custer and the 7th Cavalry after them. The Indians scattered and continued robbing homes, killing and raping settlers, and kidnapping their children.

And then Hancock had suspended Custer for one year because he had force-marched his men from Fort Wallace to Fort Harker in July 1867—ostensibly to obtain supplies but actually so that he could visit his wife, Libbie.
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Having failed to subdue the Cheyenne and their allies, the government tried diplomacy; Congress organized an Indian Peace Commission. In October 1867, the commissioners negotiated a treaty with the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Lipans, Comanches, and Kiowas at Medicine Lodge Creek in southern Kansas. Each tribe was assigned a reservation in the Indian Territory. The government pledged to pay an annuity and to provide food, clothing, teachers, schools, and doctors.

The Comanches and Kiowas were permitted to continue hunting buffalo in their traditional hunting grounds south of the Arkansas River. The Arapahoes and Cheyennes could hunt the buffalo between the Arkansas and Platte Rivers, so long as they did not interfere with the white settlers or the construction of the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific Railroads. Most of the Indians who signed the treaty did not know what they were signing, and it was not explained to them.

Congress, immersed in impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson, delayed ratifying the treaty for two years. Consequently, the promised goods and annuities were not sent to the reservations.
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By spring 1868, with the Indians facing starvation, the manifest failure of the treaty had become evident. Lieutenant General William Sherman, commander of
the Division of the Missouri, wrote to his wife, “The poor Indians are starving. We kill them if they attempt to hunt and if they keep within the Reservations they starve.” Many did not report to their reservations but went hunting instead. Others chose to go on the warpath.
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AFTER REPORTING TO FORT Leavenworth in August 1867 as the new commander of the Department of the Missouri, Sheridan had taken a long leave of absence. He visited his parents in Somerset, Ohio, then traveled to New York and thence to Washington.

There, Sheridan spent his days working with Generals Sherman and Christopher Augur on an army code of regulations and articles of war. At night, he socialized, enjoying it so much that he lingered in the capital through the early months of 1868. Sherman joked to his wife that he was urging Sheridan to return to work, but “he rather enjoys the parties.” At the end of February, Sheridan finally left Washington for Fort Leavenworth.
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Early in the summer, Sheridan moved his headquarters to Fort Hays to be closer to the frontier. During an inspection tour of Fort Dodge, he met with a group of young Arapahoe and Cheyenne warriors, who told him their women and children were starving. Pitying them, Sheridan gave them a generous supply of rations.
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But in August, Comanches and Kiowas began raiding the Texas settlements, and about two hundred Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and Sioux and Arapahoe warrior bands rampaged through Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. “A general outbreak was upon us,” Sheridan wrote. The marauders rejected reservation life, resented the approaching Kansas Pacific Railroad, and scoffed at the counsel of their “peace chiefs.”

From the Solomon and Saline river valleys to eastern Colorado, each attack wrought a heartrending tragedy. Daniel Wesaser's father was killed and his sister kidnapped, along with her child and Wesaser's six- and eight-year-old daughters. In a letter to Sheridan's headquarters, he wrote, “Their poor heart-broken mother is grieving herself to death for them. It is a hard trial; it looks like it is more than we can bear.” The six-year-old was found frozen to death, and Wesaser's nephew was murdered; the others were never seen again.
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Acting Governor Frank Hall of the Colorado Territory reported that the Indians controlled the eastern territory up to twelve miles from Denver. “They are more bold, fierce, and desperate in their attacks than ever before,” he wrote.
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In September, Sheridan sent Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Sully, the commander at Fort Dodge, with five hundred 7th Cavalry troopers and a company of the 3rd Infantry south into Indian Territory. A month earlier, Sully had enraged Sheridan by distributing arms to the Indians so that they could hunt buffalo. Now, Sully's
ponderous column disappointed Sheridan, becoming a target for hit-and-run Indian attacks. It returned to Fort Dodge without accomplishing anything.

Another expedition by Colonel Eugene Carr's 5th Cavalry in northwestern Kansas was more energetic, but ultimately unsuccessful too. Despite waging a series of running fights, Carr's men were unable to force the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers to a decisive battle.
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The fleet warriors were as elusive as summer dust devils—there one minute, gone the next. They lived off the land, while the soldiers were tethered to supply trains—each infantry company requiring a six-mule wagon, and each cavalry troop, three wagons—to haul food, ammunition, and forage for the horses and mules. Unlike the Indian ponies, the army's livestock could not subsist solely on prairie grasses.

Moreover, scattered across Sheridan's Department of the Missouri were just 2,600 troops, 1,200 of them mounted, while the tribes in his jurisdiction could conceivably put 6,000 warriors in the field.

 

SHERIDAN RELUCTANTLY REINED IN his gut urge to strike back hard against the depredations. Instead, he concentrated his troops in the western Kansas forts, from which they might better protect—as much as it was possible—the settlers, the Santa Fe and Smoky Hill Trails, and the Kansas Pacific Railroad. Winter could not come soon enough this bloody year.
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There was a noteworthy exception to Sheridan's defensive program. Colonel George Forsyth, Sheridan's aide-de-camp, who had long lobbied Sheridan for a field command, was given a special “ranger” detachment. Its forty-seven men were all proven frontiersmen and sharpshooters. The unit was dubbed “Solomon's Avengers,” in recognition of the settlers murdered along the Solomon River.