Terrible Swift Sword (4 page)

The Indians killed six miners bound for the Colville goldfields and murdered the Indian agent sent to investigate the deaths. Under a flag of truce, militiamen seized Walla Walla chief Pio Pio Mox Mox, shot him when he tried to escape, scalped him, and cut off his ears. The Walla Wallas, Yakimas, Cayuses, and Umatillas—as well as members of other Washington tribes—donned blue paint and went on the warpath.
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The commander of the US Army's Northwest Department, Major General John Wool, whose service dated to the War of 1812 and who had led an expedition during the recent Mexican War, blamed the Washington and Oregon territorial governors for starting a war “to promote their own ambitious schemes.” Now, he disgustedly observed, they wanted the army to win the war for them.
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THE WIRY, COMPACT SHERIDAN had been on duty in the Pacific Northwest for just seven months. Upon being reassigned to the 4th US Infantry in California,
Sheridan had traveled to New York, where he temporarily commanded a detachment of three hundred recruits at the army fort on Bedloe's Island before sailing to San Francisco, crossing the Isthmus of Panama in suffocating July heat.

At Fort Reading, California, he was ordered to catch up with an army expedition that had left four days earlier to survey a railroad route between the Sacramento Valley and the Columbia River in the Oregon Territory. He relieved Lieutenant John Bell Hood, a Class of 1853 classmate and future adversary, and assumed command of the expedition leader's mounted escort. The expedition's quartermaster was Lieutenant George Crook, a friend and former West Point roommate.
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When the expedition reached the Columbia River, Sheridan was assigned to Major Gabriel Rains's expedition against the Yakima Indians; they had killed their Indian agent and repulsed a punitive expedition under Major Granville Haller.

Rains's column, consisting of a small detachment of regulars and Oregon mounted volunteers, did no better. After trailing six hundred Yakima to a ridge, where the Indians taunted the soldiers and made lewd gestures, Sheridan proposed that he lead his dragoons into a canyon behind them while Rains charged the hill with his infantry, trapping the Indians between them—a strategy Sheridan would employ over the years with success.

But the hypercautious Rains rejected the plan, and the Indians continued to mock the soldiers before disappearing into the mountains. After the troopers foundered in the deep snow in futile pursuit, the expedition ended without achieving any of its objectives. Sheridan fumed over Rains's “incompetency.”
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Sheridan was optimistic as 1856 began, although the Nez Perces, Spokanes, Cascades, Walla Wallas, and Umatillas had now joined the Yakimas on the warpath. Rains was gone, replaced by Colonel George Wright of the 9th Infantry, an able thirty-year veteran. Better still, the twenty-five-year-old Sheridan was leading his first independent command, small though it was, on a rescue mission.
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CLOAKED BY THE COLD, early-morning fog on March 27, the
Belle
deposited Sheridan and his damp dragoons on a narrow neck of land about five miles downriver from the Middle Cascades blockhouse. The runoff-swollen Columbia River had made a peninsula of the shelf of vegetation-clotted dry land, hemmed on one side by a flooded slough and on the other by the river.

Yakima and Cascade Indians were also on the neck of land, Sheridan and his men quickly discovered. The Indians commenced taunting and shooting at the soldiers. With six men, Sheridan advanced under cover of the thick underbrush to determine the Indians' position and strength.

There was another gust of gunfire, and a bullet nicked Sheridan's nose and struck a soldier crouched beside him in the neck, severing his carotid artery and spinal cord and spraying blood everywhere. It was Sheridan's first close brush with death under fire. Buoyed by the kill, the Indians rushed the scouting party, but other soldiers brought up the naval gun and opened fire with solid shot. The Indians withdrew.

All day long, the dragoons and Indians traded gunfire, with neither side able to advance. At nightfall, Sheridan sent the
Belle
back to Vancouver with his written report on the situation.

After a day's desultory combat—Sheridan's first—the blockhouse still lay five miles distant. But rather than wait for a relief force, Sheridan devised a new plan of attack.

Early the next morning, after firing the cannon into the solid wall of green in which the Indians lay hidden, Sheridan and half of his forty dragoons boarded a large Hudson's Bay bateau brought up on the
Belle
and crossed to the Columbia's south shore.

In the middle of the river, just below the blockhouse, lay Bradford's Island, two miles long and a mile wide. Sheridan planned to row the bateau upriver along the island's south side, concealed from the Indians on the north shore, and then to cross the river to the blockhouse.

But the south channel was choked with rapids, and Sheridan saw that the bateau would have to be dragged by rope through the rocks and rapids to the smooth water opposite the blockhouse. Sheridan and ten men landed on the island and began hauling the boat upriver by a rope attached to its bow.

It was slow, laborious work—until the soldiers happened upon a camp of Indian squaws. Commanding their silence, so as not to alert the warriors on the river's north shore, Sheridan and his men forced the squaws to help them pull the boat. “They worked well under compulsion, and manifested no disposition to strike for higher wages,” Sheridan sardonically observed.
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Sheridan and his dragoons landed just below the blockhouse and, anticlimactically, rescued the settlers without further resistance from the Indians. A couple hours later, an army detachment under Lieutenant Colonel Edward Steptoe arrived from Vancouver.

The Cascades on the north shore had fled to the island, while the Yakimas had bolted for the mountains. Sheridan, Steptoe, and their men crossed to the island, formed a skirmish line, and rounded up the Cascades—men, women, and children.

The headmen denied playing any role in the settlers' massacre or in the battle on the north shore. But when Sheridan lined up all the Indians with their muskets
in hand and checked them for powder residue, he found that all had been fired recently.

Sheridan arrested thirteen of the “principal miscreants.” Colonel Wright convened a drumhead court, which convicted Chief Chimoneth and eight braves of participating in the massacre. They were hanged.
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WHILE SHERIDAN AND HIS dragoons were camped near the blockhouse, a frontier guide, Joseph Meek, asked Sheridan whether an Indian named Spencer or his family had passed through the area. They were traveling to Fort Vancouver, where Spencer, an influential, peaceable Chinook chief, was an interpreter and mediator for Colonel Wright.

Meek said that Spencer, believing it safe for his family to travel alone, had gone ahead, but the family had not yet reached Fort Vancouver. Meek glumly remarked that they were probably all dead.

Sheridan and his dragoons began a search and soon found the bodies of the mother and six children. All had been strangled. The bodies were arranged in a semicircle, with short lengths of rope knotted around their necks—except for the baby, around whose neck was looped a red silk handkerchief, probably taken from the mother.

The killers, Sheridan surmised, were probably whites avenging the deaths of their relatives during the recent settler massacres. He never forgot what he saw that day.
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IN HIS GENERAL ORDERS No. 14, General in Chief Winfield Scott recounted the successful Cascades campaign and “the gallant conduct of the troops, under, in most cases, circumstances of great hardship and privation.” He added, “Second Lieutenant Philip H. Sheridan, Fourth Infantry, is specially mentioned for his gallantry.” In his first combat, Sheridan had displayed initiative, bravery, and a knack for improvisation.
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In 1857, the army and the militia got the upper hand in the Yakima War, and the tribes were compelled to cede enormous tracts of land west of the Cascade Mountains. The massacres and revenge killings had blighted the countryside. A traveler to the Washington coast in 1857 observed deserted, ruined homes and desolate fields.
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GENERAL WOOL SENT SHERIDAN and his dragoons to Fort Yamhill to prod the 1,500 Indians on the Grande Ronde reservation in Oregon's Coastal Range to adopt an agrarian life. For the next four years, the reservation was Sheridan's home base.

The Oregon Indian tribes had submitted tamely to the whites, except for the Rogue River bands, which refused to abandon their hunting-and-gathering ways. Sheridan and his men tried to persuade them at least to give up their self-destructive traditions, such as honoring the dead by destroying the deceased's possessions and killing their horses on their graves. Another tradition permitted a family to kill a medicine doctor if a relative died under his care.

One day, a band of Rogue River Indians murdered a medicine woman on Fort Yamhill's parade ground after her patient died. Sheridan met with the Indians—by now, he was fluent in Chinook, the coastal tribes' lingua franca—and demanded that they give up the sixteen men who had each fired a bullet into the woman's body. The tribe refused. During the unsuccessful parley, someone stole Sheridan's pistol.

That night, Sheridan and fifty troopers raided the Indians' camp and captured the chief. Sheridan threatened to kill him unless his tribesmen handed over the sixteen men. They surrendered the killers, and Sheridan placed all of them in chains. There were no further clashes between the Rogue River Indians and Sheridan's men.
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Sheridan now had time to enjoy coastal Oregon's beauty. He described watching squaws and their children gathering crabs at night on the beach at Yaquina Bay. With a torch in one hand and a sharp stick in the other, they impaled the crabs and deposited them in baskets that they carried on their backs. “The reflection by the water of the light from the many torches,” wrote Sheridan, “with the movement of the Indians while at work, formed a weird and diverting picture of which we were never tired.”
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And then there was Sidnayoh—her white friends called her Frances—the daughter of a Willamette Valley Indian chief and Sheridan's lover in Oregon. Sidnayoh never forgot Sheridan and even traveled to Washington, DC, after the Civil War to see him. However, Sheridan evidently made it clear that their romance was over; when she returned to Oregon, Sidnayoh married a Canadian trapper. In early 1869, Sheridan declined President-elect Ulysses Grant's appointment to the army's Pacific Northwest District command, citing “many reasons, some of which are personal.”
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WHEN THE CIVIL WAR began in April 1861, Sheridan and his fellow officers watched the developments 3,000 miles away with sharp interest. Several Southern officers left the 4th Infantry to join the Confederate army, part of an exodus of Southerners throughout the US Army.

A wave of promotions swept the ranks, much to the relief of the remaining Union officers. Sheridan, who had spent eight years as a second lieutenant, became a first lieutenant and then, three months later, a captain. While his regiment was
ordered east, Sheridan remained at Fort Yamhill, awaiting the arrival of his replacement, Captain James Archer of the 9th US Infantry.

But when Archer arrived, Sheridan refused to relinquish command to him, believing that his sympathies lay with the Confederacy and that he might commit “some rebellious act.” Indeed, Archer resigned his commission and left Fort Yamhill in July to join the Rebels. Sheridan remained in charge until September, when another captain—who convinced Sheridan of his fealty to the Union—relieved him.

Eager to get in on the fighting, Sheridan headed east.
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HIS PATRIOTISM, SHERIDAN WROTE, “was untainted by politics, nor had it been disturbed by any discussion of the questions out of which the war grew.” To friends and neighbors whom he visited in Somerset on the way to his new duty station in St. Louis, he said, “This country is too great and good to be destroyed.”
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In November 1861, he reported to the 13th US Infantry, commanded by Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose courtship more than a decade earlier Sheridan had covertly watched.

But no sooner had Sheridan reached Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, than the Department of the Missouri's new commanding general, Major General Henry Halleck, assigned him to audit the department's disordered ledgers. Millions of dollars were unaccounted for at the end of the chaotic hundred-day command of Halleck's predecessor, Major General John C. Fremont.

Fremont had built up his command and raised an ironclad fleet on the Mississippi River, but he had also run up shocking costs and quarreled with—and even jailed—his patron, Frank Blair, the brother of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. Fremont's “emancipation proclamation” for the states that he administered—Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Arkansas, and western Kentucky—was too much for President Abraham Lincoln, who demanded that Fremont withdraw it. When Fremont refused and the Blairs then leveled serious charges against him, Lincoln fired Fremont on October 7, 1861.
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Fremont's chief quartermaster, Brigadier General Justus McKinstry, was in jail when Sheridan reached Jefferson Barracks. McKinstry and his agents had overcharged the government for building materials, horses, clothing, and other goods, pocketing huge sums of money without Fremont's knowledge.

Sheridan joined an army committee trying to find out where the money had gone. It was just one of three committees sifting through the Fremont department books, the others being a congressional subcommittee and President Lincoln's three-man Commission on the Debts of the Western Division.