Frontier Regulars Read online

  Copyright 1973 by Robert M. Utley

  All rights reserved

  First Bison Book printing: September 1984

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Utley, Robert Marshall, 1929-

  Frontier regulars.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York: Macmillan, cl973.

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  I. Indians of North America—Wars—1866—1895. 2. United States. Army—History. 3. West (U.S.)—History—1848—1950. 4. United States. Army—Military life—History—19th century. I. Title.

  [E83.866.U87 1984] 973.8 84–7484

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9551-3 (paper: alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9568-1 (electronic: e-pub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9569-8 (electronic: mobi)

  Reprinted by arrangement with Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Introduction

  ONE Return to the Frontier

  TWO The Postwar Army: Command, Staff, and Line

  THREE The Problem of Doctrine

  FOUR The Army, Congress, and the People

  FIVE Weapons, Uniforms, and Equipment

  SIX Army Life on the Border

  SEVEN Fort Phil Kearny, 1866

  EIGHT Hancock’s War, 1867

  NINE The Peace Commission of 1867

  TEN Operations on the Southern Plains, 1868–69

  ELEVEN Beyond the Plains, 1866–70

  TWELVE Grant’s Peace Policy, 1869–74

  THIRTEEN The Red River War, 1874–75

  FOURTEEN Sitting Bull, 1870–76

  FIFTEEN The Conquest of the Sioux, 1876–81

  SIXTEEN Nez Percé Bid for Freedom, 1877

  SEVENTEEN Bannock, Paiute, Sheepeater, and Ute, 1878–79

  EIGHTEEN Mexican Border Conflicts, 1870–81

  NINETEEN Geronimo, 1881–86

  TWENTY Ghost Dance, 1890–91

  Bibliography

  Index

  The Northern Plains, 1866–68

  Bozeman Trail Forts, 1866–68

  Hancock’s War, April–July 1867

  The Southern Plains War, 1868–69

  The Southern Plains and Texas, 1867–69

  The Snake War, 1866–68; The Modoc War, 1872–73; Area of Operations

  Crook’s Tonto Basin Campaign, 1872–73

  The Southern Plains, 1869–75

  The Red River War, 1874–7 5

  The Northern Plains, 1870–90

  The Sioux War of 1876; The Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25–26, 1876

  The Nez Percé and Bannock-Paiute Wars, 1877–78

  The Ute War, 1879

  Border Conflict, 1870–86

  ERRATA

  p. 25, 1. 28: Merrit should be Merritt

  p. 112, 1. 31: restored should be resorted

  p. 116, 1.6: eleven troops should be eight troops

  p. 118, 1. 29: May 2 should be May 3

  p. 120, 1. 17: August 22–23 should be August 21–22

  p. 132, 1. 23: Department of Dakota, not the Dakota

  p. 150, 1. 9: Kansas should be Kansans

  p. 155, 1. 33: three chiefs should be four

  p. 181, 1.2: has should be had

  p. 193, 1. 37: Freedman’s should be Freedmen’s

  p. 296, 1. 19: Same

  p. 194, 1. 32: Cohise’s should be Cochise’s

  p. 205, 1. 23: June 3 should be June 1

  p. 213, 1. 27: wtih should be with

  p. 230, 11. 20, 24: Henely should be Heneley

  p. 241, 1. 21: Nabraska should be Nebraska

  p. 246, 1. 24: Serman should be Sherman

  pp. 253–54: John S. Gray, Centennial Campaign, makes a persuasive case for fewer Indians than given here.

  p. 260, 1. 7: trumpeter orderly should be orderly trumpeter

  p. 268, 1. 19: Bonnett should be Bonnet

  p. 303, 1. 9: on should be of

  p. 315, 1. 10: Wallowa Valley

  p. 323, 1. 14: subsitute should be substitute

  p. 326, 1. 10: trial should be trail

  p. 327, 1. 11: Piautes should be Paiutes

  p. 335, 1. 21: Chief Douglas should be Chief Johnson

  p. 351, 1. 16: Zargosa should be Zaragosa

  p. 362, 1. 14: May 23 should be May 24

  p. 364, 1. 2: 1,000 should be 350

  p. 364, 11. 13–18: should read “trapped Victorio amid three peaks called Tres Castillos.” Dead Indians numbered 62. Who fired fatal bullet not known.

  p. 377, 1. 29: guage should be gauge

  p. 380, 1. 4: Benito should be Bonito

  p. 389, 1. 14: bed should be bend

  p. 407, 1. 28: At should be as

  Introduction

  IN A PREVIOUS volume of this series, I sketched the story of the handful of blue-clad frontiersmen who contended with the Indian tribes of the trans-Mississippi West in the years between the Mexican War and the Civil War.1 I also dealt with the Volunteers who replaced the Regulars during the Civil War years and who on almost every front stepped up the scale and effectiveness of warfare against the Indians. In the present volume my subject is the Regular Army that took up the task after Appomattox and carried the Indian Wars to their tragic and bloody conclusion at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890.

  The frontier Regulars saw themselves as the advance guard of civilization, sweeping aside the savage to make way for the stockman, the miner, the farmer, and the merchant. This stereotype is evident in the writings of officers such as Nelson A. Miles, George A. Custer, George A. Forsyth, John G. Bourke, George F. Price, T. F. Rodenbough, James Parker, and William H. and Robert G. Carter; of officers’ wives such as Mrs. Custer, Mrs. Biddle, Mrs. Summerhayes, and Mrs. Boyd; and of friendly newsmen such as John F. Finerty. It is to be glimpsed in the art of Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel. Above all, it is to be credited to Captain Charles King, who in dozens of novels reinforced the army’s view of itself. King summed it up years later in an address to Indian War veterans:

  It is all a memory now, but what a memory, to cherish! … A more thankless task, a more perilous service, a more exacting test of leadership, morale and discipline no army in Christendom has ever been called upon to undertake than that which for eighty years was the lot of the little fighting force of Regulars who cleared the way across the continent for the emigrant and settler.2

  Others saw the Regulars in a different light. Eastern humanitarians assailed them as butchers, rampaging around the West gleefully slaughtering peaceable Indians and taking special delight in shooting down women and children. Antislavery leaders such as Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison turned energies liberated by the Emancipation Proclamation to a crusade in behalf of the red men, and the army felt the sting of rhetoric sharpened in the long war against the slavocracy. “I only know the names of three savages upon the Plains,” declared Phillips in 1870, “—Colonel Baker, General Custer, and at the head of all, General Sheridan.” Baker’s assault on a Piegan village in 1870 inspired a verse that typified the humanitarian stereotype of the army:

  Women and babes shrieking awoke

  To perish ’mid the battle smoke,

  Murdered, or turned out there to die

  Beneath the stern, gray, wintry sky.3

  Until recent years, the heroic stereotype of the frontier army dominated the collective memory of Americans. It found its most vivid expression in the motion pictures of John Ford and the characterizations of John Wayne. Today, however, a nation increasingly troubled by its historic treatment of the Indians has substituted the ugly for the heroic stereotype. In great quantities of popul
ar literature, in television productions, and in motion pictures such as Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, the frontier Regulars are depicted as the nineteenth-century humanitarians saw them.

  Each of the stereotypes contains some small truths and some large untruths. Just as campaigning troopers sported both black hats and white hats—and any other hue that suited their fancy—so a fair appraisal of the Indian-fighting army must acknowledge a mix of wisdom and stupidity, humanity and barbarism, selfless dedication and mindless indifference, achievement and failure, triumph and tragedy; but above all, as in most human institutions, of contradictions and ambiguities. I hope that in the following pages the frontier Regulars emerge in a characterization that strikes a truthful balance between the two stereotypes.

  An expression of gratitude is due the following people for reading all or part of the manuscript or for other helpful kindnesses: Louis Morton of Dartmouth College, editor of the series in which this volume appears; Francis Paul Prucha of Marquette University; Harry H. Anderson of the Milwaukee County Historical Society; Robert Murray, Gordon Chappell, and Verne Ray; Andrew Wallace of Northern Arizona University; Donald J. Berthrong of Purdue University; James S. Hutchins of the Smithsonian Institution; Sidney B. Brinckerhoff of the Arizona Historical Society; and my colleagues in the National Park Service, Franklin G. Smith, Merrill J. Mattes, Roy E. Appleman, Erwin N. Thompson, John D. McDermott, Edwin C. Bearss, and Albert H. Schroeder. Special thanks go to Walter T. Vitous of Olympia, Washington, for the maps.

  ROBERT M. UTLEY

  Washington, D.C.

  December 1972

  NOTES

  1. Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848–1865 (New York, 1967).

  2. Quoted in Robert G. Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie (1935; reprint, 1961), pp. 46–47.

  3. Both quotations are in Robert Winston Mardock, The Reformers and the American Indian (Columbia, Mo., 1971), p. 69.

  Return to the Frontier

  MAJ. GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN passed the winter of 1865–66 in St. Louis, headquarters of his first postwar command. Seven years earlier the fortunes of the blunt eccentric had reached new depths in a shabby law office in Leavenworth, Kansas. Only four years earlier his sanity had been widely questioned. Now, at forty-six, he was the hero of Atlanta and the already legendary March to the Sea, the nation’s second soldier, surpassed in popular esteem only by Ulysses S. Grant, and the ruler of a military domain sweeping west from the Mississippi River to the crest of the Rocky Mountains and north from Texas to the British possessions.

  The physical and emotional toll of four years of war showed plainly in Sherman’s face. Gray flecked his unruly red hair and beard. Seams furrowed his high forehead and cheekbones and pulled at eyes whose faintly wild cast betrayed his nervous temperament. An awesome command presence born of wartime triumphs prompted almost instant deference, even from those of the highest station. Even so, his stature did not insure universal admiration. Quick of mind, fiercely independent of thought, uninhibited and articulate in expressions of opinion, disdainful of political and social imperatives, he effortlessly offended anyone who annoyed or inconvenienced him. With his family he enjoyed a warm if occasionally strained relationship. With his wartime comrades he repaid veneration with affection. With the Regulars of his new plains command he showed his pride in their achievements, his solicitude for their comfort, and his sympathy for their distress over the frustrations of Indian duty. In return, they accorded him loyalty and respect.1

  Sherman approached his postwar duties with a zeal born of a love of the West and a vision of its destiny. He had served as a lieutenant in California after the Mexican War and later tried his hand at banking in San Francisco and the law in Kansas. Failure in these enterprises had not weakened his conviction that Americans must meet the West’s challenge, populate its vast reaches, develop its rich potential, and make it a viable part of the Republic.2

  The Union’s ordeal resolved by four years of bloodletting, the West once more exerted its magnetism on the American imagination. In none did the lure of the frontier kindle more enthusiasm than the restless Sherman. A St. Louis office could not contain him during a summer in which a hundred thousand countrymen, energized, emboldened, and freed from narrow concerns by the war, were expected to push up the Arkansas, the Smoky Hill, the Platte, and the Missouri in search of new opportunities in the West. Early in the season he made a swing along the eastern margin of the Great Plains. Late in the summer, accompanied by his brother John, U.S. Senator from Ohio, he journeyed up the Platte as far as Fort Laramie, visited Denver, and crossed the Rockies to Fort Garland, then returned down the Smoky Hill. Everywhere his observations reinforced his conviction that the army would have a large role to play in the postwar West.3

  What Sherman saw were multitudes of emigrants pouring westward on the Oregon-California Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the Smoky Hill Trail. Their wagons mingled with freight trains laden with merchandise and with stagecoaches hurrying passengers and mail to the growing cities of the Rockies, the Southwest, the Great Basin, and the Pacific Slope. Many eagerly sought wealth in the new mineral districts opened during the war years in Montana, Idaho, and Arizona, or in the older ones of California, Nevada, and Colorado. Others sought the free land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862. Still others were attracted by the commercial or political opportunities of a growing country. The surge of migration would add a million citizens to the census rolls of the western states and territories between 1860 and 1870 and another two and one-half million by 1880.4

  Equally portentous to one who had known the prewar West were the twin bands of iron fingering westward from the Missouri River in Kansas and Nebraska. When Sherman began his late-summer trip in August, the Union Pacific’s Eastern Division (later the Kansas Pacific) had reached Manhattan, Kansas, 115 miles from the Missouri, and would be at Fort Riley in another month. Farther north, the general and his brother rode the main line of the Union Pacific from Omaha almost to Fort Kearny, 194 miles, before taking to ambulances for the journey up the Platte to Fort Laramie.5 Almost two thousand miles of plains, mountains, and deserts separated the Missouri from the Pacific. But Sherman’s recent comrade-in-arms, Grenville Dodge, the Union Pacific’s chief engineer, gave every evidence of narrowing the gap in record time, while at the California end of the route Central Pacific labor gangs tore at the summit of the Sierra Nevada.

  Sherman clearly perceived the profound military implications of the railroads. Furthermore, he needed no gift of prophecy to foresee the enormous influence they would exert on the settlement and economic and political development of the West. Finally, no less clearly did he understand the meaning for the Indian, and thus for the army, of the scenes that unfolded before him in August and September 1866.

  Twenty-five years of intermittent warfare had obliterated or crushed many of the tribes that stood athwart the westward movement. The unconquered tribes were nomadic or seminomadic. They needed a great deal of country, and the resources it contained, to sustain their way of life. Already, perhaps ten times as many whites as Indians peopled the West, and hundreds of thousands more were coming. Where they passed and where they settled, the Indians found no welcome. Buffalo and other game and food supplies diminished. The timber that served as firewood and the grass that furnished forage grew scarce along the white man’s roads and vanished altogether around the white man’s settlements. The territory in which the Indian could roam undisturbed contracted.

  Sherman saw it happening to the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes in 1866. Formerly they had ranged the Great Plains from the Arkansas to the upper Missouri. Then the California and Oregon migrations of the 1840s and 1850s sliced across their domain and they were shouldered northward from the Platte. Next came pressures from Minnesota and Dakota that crowded them westward from the Missouri. Finally, the gold strikes in Colorado, Idaho, and Montana raised barriers to the west.

  “The poor Indian finds himself hemmed in,” declared S
herman.6 In the Congress Senator Lot Morrill of Maine stated the same conclusion: “As population has approached the Indian we have removed him beyond population. But population now encounters him on both sides of the continent, and there is no place on the continent to which he can be removed beyond the progress of population.”7

  The story was the same everywhere—on the southern Plains, where the Texas frontier and the road up the Arkansas limited the range of Kiowas, Comanches, and Southern Cheyennes; in the Southwest, where Apaches eked out a bare subsistence from a desert land filling with gold-seekers; and in Montana, Idaho, and eastern Oregon, where miners overran the mountain-and-plateau homeland of Flatheads, Blackfeet, Nez Percés, Bannocks, and Paiutes. In Idaho and Arizona hostilities already proclaimed the Indian’s determination to resist the invasion. On the Great Plains, scene of massive campaigns in the closing years of the Civil War, Sherman could find no Indian threat that did not vanish as he neared its reported source; yet he discerned “a general apprehension of danger.” “There is a universal feeling of mistrust on both sides,” he added, “and this will sooner or later result in a general outbreak.”8

  Sherman had witnessed the opening of the final act of the frontier drama. Back in St. Louis by late October, he looked to the future certain in the knowledge that for some time to come the destinies of the army and the Indian were to be interlocked in the American West.

  By no means all the Indians inhabiting the American West in 1866 were prospective opponents of the frontier army. The government counted some 270,000 people in 125 distinct groups plus an assortment of “other Indians,” “other bands,” and “etceteras.”9 Some of these, such as the Pueblos of the Southwest and the Crows of Montana, had chosen to accommodate peacefully to the American presence. Others, such as the Navajos of Arizona and New Mexico and coastal groups of the Pacific Northwest, had fought the whites in earlier times and had lost. Still others, terrorized by more powerful tribes and decimated by the white man’s diseases and vices, had never gathered the strength to fight. In 1866 only a handful of tribes retained the power and will to contest the westward movement. On the Great Plains they were the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche. In the Rocky Mountains they were the Nez Percé, Ute, and Bannock. In the Northwest they were the Paiute and Modoc. And in the Southwest they were the Apache. Totaling less than one hundred thousand people, these “hostile” Indians engaged the United States in the final struggle for the American West.