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erhaps because of a tendency to view the record of a military establishment in terms of conflict, the U.S. Army’s operational experience in the quarter century following the Civil War has come to be known collectively as the Indian Wars, although those inhabitants
of America described by the catchall name of Indian did not have anything like a monolithic culture or society. Previous struggles with various Indian tribes, dating back to colonial times, had generally been limited as to scope and opponent (the Pequot war in New England that virtually exterminated that tribe being one of the more notable exceptions) and took place in a period when the Indian could withdraw or be pushed into vast reaches of uninhabited and as yet unwanted territory to the west. By 1865 this safety valve was fast disappearing; routes of travel and pockets of settlement had multiplied across the western two-thirds of the nation, and as the Civil War closed Americans in greater numbers and with greater energy than before resumed the quest for land, gold, commerce, and adventure that had been largely interrupted by the war. The showdown between the older Americans and the new, between two ways of life that were basically incompatible, was at hand. The besieged Indian, with an alien civilization pressing in and a main source of livelihood, the buffalo, threatened with extinction, was faced with a fundamental choice: surrender or fight. Many chose to fight, and over the course of twenty-five years the struggle ranged over the plains, mountains, and deserts of the American West, a small-scale war characterized by skirmishes, pursuits, massacres, raids, expeditions, battles, and campaigns of varying size and intensity. Given a central role in dealing with the Indian, the Army made a major contribution to conti- |
nental consolidation and in the process shaped itself as a culture and as an institution in many ways. After Appomattox the Army had to muster out over a million volunteers and reconstitute a regular establishment that had languished during the Civil War when bounties and short enlistments made service in the volunteers more profitable. There were operational commitments to sustain during and after the transition, some an outgrowth of the war just ended and others the product of internal and external situations that could not be ignored. Whereas the prewar Army of the 1850s was essentially a frontier Army, the postwar Army became something more. To defense of the frontier were added military occupation of the southern states, neutralization of the Mexican border during Napoleon’s colonial enterprise under Maximilian, elimination of a Fenian (Irish Brotherhood) threat to Canada in the Northeast, dispersion of white marauders in the border states, and a growing mission of coastal defense. But the mission of pacifying the frontier consumed much of the interest and attention of large numbers of Army officers and men in the years between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. One of the determining factors about life in the U.S. Army on the frontiers of America was the small size of the force engaged in operations in relative isolation from the country and from the rest of the Army. The Army was scattered throughout hundreds of small forts, posts, outposts, and stations throughout the American West, often with little more than a company of cavalry or infantry in each post. This isolation bred, on one hand, a strong sense of camaraderie, of bonding, within the Army in a way that only shared suffering can do. The officers and men often felt part of an extended family that had to look inward for strength as it relied on its own customs, rituals, and sense of honor separate from that distant civilian world or even from the very different military society "back East." This sense of unity, of "splendid isolation," kept the Army as an institution together during the harsh missions of western frontier duty but at the same time led far too often to professional and personal stagnation. Promotion was slow, and chances for glory were few given the dangers and hardships of small-unit actions against an elusive foe. |
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and isolated, professionally rewarding and stultifying. With low pay, poor quarters, an indifferent public, and a skilled foe that was at once feared, hated, and admired, the officers and men of the frontier Army seemed caught in a never-ending struggle with an elusive enemy and their environment. One historian summarized the Army post during this period on the frontier this way: "If one description could alone fit all frontier posts, it would be a monotonous routine relaxed only slightly by the color of periodic ceremony." This shared culture created many of the institutional myths and customs that continue to influence the Army’s image of itself to this day. The manpower strains of all the various missions after the Civil War plus manning all the frontier posts and stations badly strained the resources of a shrinking Regular Army. As the post–Civil War Army took shape, its strength began a decade of decline, dropping from an 1867 level of 57,000 to half that in 1876, then leveling off at an average of 26,000 for the remaining years up to the War with Spain. Effective strength always lay somewhere below authorized strength, seriously impaired by high rates of sickness and desertion, for example. Because the Army’s military responsibilities were of continental proportions, involving sweeping distances, limited resources, and far-flung operations, an administrative structure was required for command and control. The Army was, therefore, organized on a territorial basis, with geographical segments variously designated as divisions, departments, and districts. There were frequent modifications of organization, rearrangements of boundaries, and transfers of troops and posts to meet changing conditions. (See Map 35.) Development of a basic defense system in the trans-Mississippi West had followed the course of empire. Territorial acquisition and exploration succeeded by emigration and settlement brought the settlers increasingly into collision with the Indians and progressively raised the need for military posts along the transcontinental trails and in settled areas. The annexation of Texas in 1845, the settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute in 1846, and the successful conclusion of the Mexican War with the cession to the United States in 1848 of vast areas of land all had drawn the outlines of the major task facing the Army in the West in the middle of the nineteenth century. During the period between the Mexican and Civil Wars, the Army had established a reasonably comprehensive system of forts to protect the arteries of travel and areas of settlement across the frontier. At the same time the Army had launched operations against Indian tribes that represented actual or potential threats to movement and settlement. Militarily successful in some cases, these operations nevertheless hardened Indian opposition, prompted wider provocations on both sides, and led to the delineation of an Indian barrier to westward expansion extending down the Great Plains from the Canadian to the Mexican border. Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, for example, responded to the Sioux massacre of Lt. John L. Grattan’s detachment with a punishing attack on elements of that tribe on the Blue Water in Nebraska in 1855. Farther south, Col. Edwin V. Sumner hit the Cheyennes on the Solomon Fork in Kansas in 1857 and Bvt. Maj. Earl Van Dorn fought the Comanches in two successful battles, at Rush Spring in future Oklahoma and Crooked Creek in Kansas in 1858 and 1859, respectively. |
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The Army on the Great Plains found itself in direct contact with a highly mobile and warlike culture that was not easily subdued. In the Southwest, between the wars, Army units pursued Apaches and Utes in New Mexico Territory, clashing with the Apaches at Cieneguilla and Rio Caliente in 1854 and the Utes at Poncha Pass in 1855. There were various expeditions against branches of the elusive Apaches that involved hard campaigning but few conclusive engagements such as the one at Rio Gila in 1857. It was in this region in 1861 that Lt. George N. Bascom moved against Chief Cochise, precipitating events that opened a quarter century of hostilities with the Chiricahua Apaches. In the Northwest, where numerous small tribes existed, there were occasional hostilities between the late 1840s and the middle 1860s. Their general character was similar to operations elsewhere: settler intrusion, Indian reaction, and U.S. Army or local militia counteraction with superior force. The more important events involved the Rogue River Indians in Oregon between 1851 and 1856 and the Yakima, Walla Walla, Cayuse, and other tribes on both sides of the Cascade Mountains in Washington in the latter half of the 1850s. The Army, often at odds with civil authority and public opinion in the area, found it necessary on occasion to protect Indians from settlers as well as the other way around. The Regular Army’s frontier mission was interrupted by the onset of the Civil War, and the task of dealing with the Indians was transferred to the volunteers. Although the Indians demonstrated an awareness of what was going on and took some satisfaction from the fact that their enemies were fighting each other, there is little evidence that they took advantage of the transition period between removal of the regulars and deployment of the volunteers. The so-called Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862 that produced active campaigning in the Upper Missouri River region in 1863 and 1864 was spontaneous, and other clashes around the West were the result not of the withdrawal of the Regular Army from the West but of the play of more fundamental and established forces. The volunteer units were in many instances commanded by men of a very different stamp than were Regular Army units. In one instance, a Colorado volunteer cavalry unit, commanded by a volunteer colonel named John M. Chivington, attacked and massacred several hundred peaceful Cheyenne Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864 in one the worst atrocities of the western wars. There were dangers in relying on volunteer units in this essential peacekeeping role. In any case, by 1865 overall Army strength in the frontier departments was about double what it had been in 1861. The volunteers kept pace with a continuing and gradually enlarging westward movement by further developing the system of forts their predecessors had begun. The regional defense systems established in the West in the 1850s and 1860s provided a framework for the deployment of the Army as it returned from the Civil War to its frontier responsibilities. In the late summer of 1866 the general command and administrative structure for frontier defense comprised the Division of the Missouri, containing the Departments of Arkansas, Missouri, Dakota, and the Platte; the Division of the Pacific, consisting of the Departments of California and the Columbia; and the independent Department of the Gulf, whose area included Texas. However, by 1870 the Division of the Pacific included |
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the Departments of the Columbia, California, and Arizona and the Department
of the Missouri covered the Departments of the Dakota, the Platte, and the Missouri; the Department of Texas was included in the Division of the South. While the Civil War was still in progress, gold was discovered in Montana and fortune seekers flocked to the area. Lines of communica |
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tions to the fields around Virginia City lay along circuitous routes, and pressure mounted for more direct access. The Army explored the possibilities
and adopted a route, pioneered by John Bozeman, extending from Fort Laramie on the North Platte River and Oregon Trail, northwestward
along the eastern base and around the northern shoulder of the Big Horn Mountains. Unfortunately, the trail cut through hunting grounds that a treaty in 1865 had reserved for the Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos.
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GALVANIZED YANKEES During the last year of the Civil War, Plains Indian warfare reached a crescendo as more and more |
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to frontier Indian service in exchange for their freedom. Farther northwest, The Army during the Indian Wars was habitually unable to balance resources with requirements, both because of limited manpower and because of the continental size of the theater of operations. As Lt. Gen. William T. Sherman, commanding the Division of the Missouri, aptly expressed the challenge: |
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Were I or the department commanders to send guards to every point where they are clamored for, we would need alone on the plains a hundred thousand men, mostly of cavalry. Each spot of every road, and each little settlement along five thousand miles of frontier, wants its regiment of cavalry or infantry to protect it against the combined power of all the Indians, because of the bare possibility of their being attacked by the combined force of all the Indians. It was the good fortune of both the Army and the citizen in the West that the Indians rarely acted in concert within or between tribes, although had they done so the Army might have been able to regularly employ large units instead of dispersing troops in small detachments all over the frontier and might also have had better luck in forcing its elusive opponents to stand and fight. But troops and units were at a premium, so much so in 1868 that Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan decided to try an unusual expedient to carry out his responsibilities in the Department of the Missouri. Sheridan directed Maj. George A. Forsyth to "employ fifty first-class hardy frontiersmen, to be used as scouts against the hostile Indians, to be commanded by yourself." Recruited at Forts Harker and Hays in Kansas, the command took the field in late August in a region frequented by Comanches, Kiowas, Southern Cheyennes, and Arapahos, augmented by some Sioux roaming south of the Platte. The tribes were restive: The Kansas Pacific Railroad was advancing through their country, frightening the buffalo—their source of food, clothing, and shelter—and attracting white settlement. The Cheyennes were still smoldering over the massacre of 200 of Black Kettle’s peaceful band, including women and children, by Col. John M. Chivington and his Colorado volunteers on Sand Creek in 1864 and had demonstrated their mistrust of the whites when Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock penetrated their area with a large expedition in 1867. Forsyth and the Indians collided on the Arickaree Fork of the Republican River at dawn on November 17, 1868, when a combined war party of 600 Cheyennes, Sioux, and Arapahoes attacked him in a defensive position on a small island in the riverbed. The Indians pressed the fight for three days, wounding Forsyth and fifteen of his scouts and killing his second in command, Lt. Frederick H. Beecher, his surgeon, and four other soldiers. Among Indian casualties in this Battle of Beecher Island was the influential Cheyenne leader Roman Nose. The first rescue force on the scene was Capt. Louis H. Carpenter’s company of black troopers of the 10th Cavalry. By the late 1860s the government’s policy of removing Indians from desirable areas, graphically represented by the earlier transfer of the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southeast to Oklahoma (the Cherokees called it the Trail of Tears), had run its course and was succeeded by one of concentrating them on reservations. The practice of locating tribes in other than native or salubrious surroundings and of joining uncongenial bands led to more than one Indian war. Some bands found it convenient to accept reservation status and government rations during the winter months, returning to the warpath and hunting trail in the milder seasons. Many bands of many tribes refused to accept the treaties offered by a peace commission and resisted the government’s at |
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tempt to confine them to specific geographical limits; it fell to the Army to force compliance. In his area, General Sheridan now planned to hit the Indians in their permanent winter camps. While a winter campaign presented serious logistical problems, it offered opportunities for decisive results. If the Indians’ shelter, food, and livestock could be destroyed or captured, not only the warriors but their women and children were at the mercy of the Army and the elements, and there was little left but surrender. These tactics, amounting to the total destruction of the Indian culture, raised certain moral questions for many officers and men that were never satisfactorily resolved. Sheridan devised a plan whereby 3 columns would converge on the Indian wintering grounds just east of the Texas Panhandle: 1 from Fort Lyon in Colorado, 1 from Fort Bascom in New Mexico, and 1 from Camp Supply in the Indian Territory later to be called Oklahoma. The 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George A. Custer fought the major engagement of the campaign. Custer found the Indians on the Washita River and struck Black Kettle’s Cheyenne village with eleven companies and from four directions at dawn on November 29, 1868, as the regimental band played "Gerry Owen," still the 7th Cavalry’s regimental song. A fierce fight developed, which the Indians continued from surrounding terrain. By midmorning Custer learned that this was only one of many villages of Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches extending for miles along the Washita. Facing such odds, Custer hastened to destroy the village and its supplies and, notably, about 875 ponies and horses; used an offensive maneuver to deceive the enemy; and under cover of darkness withdrew from the field, taking 53 women and children as prisoners. The 7th Cavalry lost 21 officers and men killed and 13 wounded in the Battle of the Washita; the Indians lost perhaps 50 killed and as many wounded. This battle was yet another instance of hitting the Indians in the winter months when the destruction of their villages and stored food killed or weakened more than did the initial military attack. The Kiowas and Comanches did not lightly relinquish their hunting grounds and forsake their way of life. Some lived restlessly on a reservation in Indian Territory around Fort Sill; others held out. Sherman, now Commanding General of the U.S. Army; Sheridan, commanding the Division of the Missouri; and their field commanders would have to undertake several more major campaigns before these tribes were forced to accept reservation life. In 1871 reservation Kiowas raided into Texas, killing some teamsters of a government wagon train. General Sherman, visiting at Fort Sill, had the responsible leaders (Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree) arrested in a dramatic confrontation on the post between armed Indians and soldiers in which only Sherman’s coolness prevented an explosion. Satank was later killed while attempting escape, and Satanta and Big Tree were tried and imprisoned for two years. Again in custody in 1876, Satanta took his own life. There were other incidents on the Southern Plains before the Indians there were subjugated. An Army campaign in 1874–1875, known as the Red River War, involved about 3,000 troops and was launched in five columns, one under the command of Col. Nelson A. Miles and another under Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie, from bases in Texas, New Mexico, and Indian Territory against the Texas Panhandle refuge of the |
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CUSTER George A. Custer (1839−1876) graduated from West Point in 1861. A charismatic leader who won re- |
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Plains tribes. On September 24 Colonel Mackenzie and the 4th Cavalry found the winter camps of the Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos in the deep Palo Duro Canyon on the Staked Plains. Mackenzie’s surprise attack separated the Indians from their horses and belongings, which were destroyed. The campaign continued all winter and into the following spring, with many Indians finally surrendering in desperation and being placed on the reservation. Not all the Indian Wars were fought with Plains tribes. The Army engaged in wars with several Pacific slope tribes in the 1870s, and the operations were widely scattered over the mountainous northwestern quarter of the trans-Mississippi West. |
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and mandating the removal of the Nez Perce to the Lapwai Reservation across the Snake River in Idaho. Some elements of the tribe complied; but Chief Joseph and his people did not, and the Army was ordered to move them. A series of irresponsible actions by both sides led to hostilities.
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GENERAL CROOK (1828–1890) Graduating thirty-eighth in a class of forty-three at West Point, George Crook would be the lowest rank- |
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concluded the peace talks with one of the most memorable speeches in western history. "Hear me, my Chiefs," one army observer remembered Joseph saying, "I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." The Apaches were among the Army’s toughest opponents in the Indian Wars. The zone of operations embraced the territories of Arizona
and New Mexico, western Texas, and Mexico’s northern provinces. Despite the fact that hostile Apaches were relatively few in number and the theater was essentially secondary, they tied down sizable forces over a long period of time. |
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brought results, and he left Arizona in relative quiet when he went to the Department of the Platte in 1875. |
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1879: "As it is now you have a divided responsibility. It is like having two captains on the same ship." All the elements of the clash of cultures and civilizations were present
in the events leading to the final subjugation of the Indians. The mounted tribes of the Great Plains were astride the main corridors of westward expansion, and this was the area of decision. The treaty of 1868 had set aside the Great Sioux Reservation in South Dakota; and the Army had abandoned the Bozeman Trail, leaving the Powder River
region as Indian country. The Sioux, the Northern Cheyenne, and their allies were thus north of the main transcontinental artery along the Platte. Although the arrangement worked for several years, it was doomed by the seemingly irresistible march of settlers. The Sioux rejected
white overtures for a right-of-way for the Northern Pacific Railroad; when surveyors went ahead anyway they ran into Indian resistance, which led to the dispatch in 1873 of a large military expedition under Col. David S. Stanley up the Yellowstone Valley. The next year General Sheridan sent Custer and the 7th Cavalry on a reconnaissance through the Black Hills, within the Sioux Reservation. When geologists with the expedition found gold, the word spread rapidly and prospectors filtered into the area despite the Army’s best efforts to keep them out. Another treaty was broken, and band by band angry reservation Indians slipped away to join nontreaty recalcitrants in the unceded Powder River region of Wyoming and Montana. |
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(left center)(second from right, seated) Powder and surprised a Cheyenne-Sioux camp but failed to press an initial advantage and withdrew without punishing the Indians. Terry’s column never left its fort. The abortive campaign was not renewed until the spring, when Sheridan pressed his subordinates into renewing their attacks, this time with three columns under Crook, Gibbon, and Terry directed against the Powder River area. |
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his superiors, that Crook was also in the Rosebud valley and had been engaged and blocked by a large force of Indians not far upstream on this very same day.
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INDIAN SCOUTS When engaged in Indian campaigns, the U.S. Army often employed scouts as guides, trackers, and |
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The main phase of the Battle of the Little Bighorn lasted about two hours. Reno, charging down the river with three companies and some Arickara scouts, ran into hordes of Indians, not retreating, but advancing,
perhaps mindful of their creditable performance against Crook the week before and certainly motivated by a desire to protect their women and children and cover a withdrawal of the villages. Far outnumbered, suffering heavy casualties, and in danger of being overrun, Reno withdrew
to the bluffs across the river and dug in. |
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PINE RIDGE The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota was the site of the last military conflict between the U.S. |
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ing across the land. The buffalo were gone, and the Indians were confined
1. How did the Army have to change its organization and tactics to fight the Indian Wars as opposed to how it fought the Civil War? |
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5. How would you have settled the "Indian question" during the 1860s and 1870s? What means would have been available to you as an Army officer to change what happened to the Indians, and how would you use those means? R R Hutton, Paul A. Phil Sheridan and His Army. Norman: University of Other Readings Athearn, Robert G. Forts of the Upper Missouri. Englewood Cliffs, |
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Last updated 25 August 2005 |