Terrible Swift Sword (48 page)

The Avengers went into action after warriors attacked a supply train near the Republican River. Forsyth's men followed the Indians to Arickaree Creek, a fork of the Republican River in northeastern Colorado Territory. Nearby were three large Indian villages of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, led by Sioux chief Pawnee Killer and Cheyenne warriors Tall Bull and Roman Nose.

At dawn on September 17, about seven hundred warriors attacked the Avengers and drove them to an island in Arickaree Creek. One of the first volleys of Indian gunfire killed Lieutenant Fred Beecher, a decorated Gettysburg veteran and a nephew of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The company surgeon also died. Forsyth was wounded twice.

The warriors, however, ran into deadly accurate gunfire when they tried—three times—to overrun the sharpshooters, who were armed with Spencer repeaters capable of sustained fire of twenty rounds per minute. For eight days, the Indians
ringed the besieged troopers, picking off their horses and denying them access to food and medicine.

Two scouts slipped through the cordon and alerted troopers at Fort Wallace, who ended the siege. The Avengers lost six killed and fifteen wounded on what became known as Beecher's Island, while killing about thirty-five Indians, including Roman Nose.
¹³

 

AT A MEETING IN Chicago in October 1868, the Indian peace commissioners, Republican presidential nominee General in Chief Ulysses Grant, and Lieutenant General Sherman, who oversaw the districts of Sheridan and other Western generals, reacted to the murderous Kansas raids by canceling the Indians' hunting and roaming privileges and resolving to force them, if necessary, onto their reservations. Commissioner Samuel Tappan objected that this was tantamount to a war of extermination. Sherman retorted that that was up to the Indians, and furthermore, a war against the Plains Indians was “not apt to add much to our fame or personal comfort.” Sherman also urged the transfer of the Indian Bureau from the Department of the Interior to the Department of War; let the army manage the Indians, he said.

In a letter to Sherman, Sheridan wholeheartedly supported putting the army in charge. Under the present system, “there are too many fingers in the pie, too many ends to be subserved, and too much money to be made; and it is the interest of the nation, and of humanity, to put an end to this inhuman farce. . . . . There should be one head [the army] in the government of Indians,” he wrote.

Sheridan also told Sherman that the Medicine Lodge Treaty, in failing to punish the renegades who raided the settlements, had enabled them to grow “rich in horses, stock, and other property.” “They should have been punished and made to give up the plunder captured,” he wrote. But because they were not, the raiders must now be “soundly whipped, and the ringleaders in the present trouble hung, their ponies killed, and [subjected to] such destruction of their property as will make them very poor.” He proposed to attack the Indians in their winter encampments, a strategy rarely used by the army and, therefore, likely to catch the Indians unawares.
¹⁴

“Go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority,” Sherman replied to Sheridan. “If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned [about] again and again.”
¹⁵

IN CHOOSING TO MOUNT a winter expedition, Sheridan knew that he faced daunting obstacles. Paralyzing blizzards and thirty-below-zero temperatures might
envelope the Great Plains at any time from late fall until mid-spring, transforming the best-laid military plan into a desperate struggle for survival. Horses and mules, whose forage had to be brought when the snow covered the grasses, were especially vulnerable to the uncertainties of resupply—and snow, cold, mud, and vast distances made it virtually impossible for supply trains to keep up. Because winter campaigns required extensive planning and preparation without a guarantee of success, few had been attempted. But those who had been bold enough to attempt them had sometimes been richly rewarded.

The prototype was Colonel Kit Carson's expedition against the Navajos during the winter of 1863–1864. In five sweeps through the Navajos' New Mexico mountain kingdom, Carson and his New Mexico and California volunteers had destroyed the Navajos' crops and orchards, seized their livestock, and kept them constantly on the run. In March 1864, 6,000 Navajos—half the tribe—had surrendered, and by the end of the year, 8,000 had given up and gone into exile.
¹⁶

Months later, on November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington and his Colorado militiamen wiped out a peaceful Cheyenne village that was under the protection of a government Indian agent and flying an American flag. In their unprovoked attack at Sand Creek in the eastern Colorado Territory, the soldiers slaughtered up to 150 men, women, and children, mutilating their bodies. A horrified government commission wrote that the soldiers' shocking actions “would put to shame the savage ingenuity of interior Africa.”
¹⁷

Before deciding to prosecute a winter campaign, Sheridan had not only consulted these historical antecedents but studied the meteorological records of western army posts to learn what kind of weather he should anticipate. He had also interviewed army officers, scouts, freighters, and settlers.

Most of them had advised against what Sheridan proposed. Famed mountain man and scout Jim Bridger, who was in his mid-sixties and living in St. Louis, had traveled to Fort Hays expressly to warn Sheridan not to proceed. “Blizzards don't respect man or beast,” Bridger reportedly said.

But others familiar with the Plains winters told Sheridan that what he proposed was not impossible—if the troopers were properly clothed, fed, and sheltered. Sheridan listened to what they said.

His scouts, including a young man named William Cody, showed him on maps where the Indian winter camps were located—on the Washita River northwest of Fort Cobb in Indian Territory. Sheridan decided to take his chances with the elements in order “to strike the Indians a hard blow and force them onto the reservations.”
¹⁸

Sheridan laid out what would become his signature offensive strategy in the West: forces converging on an objective from different directions to deliver a knockout wallop. This one would be three-pronged, involving more than 3,000 men:
Colonel A. W. Evans marching east from Fort Bascom, New Mexico, with six troops of the 3rd Cavalry and two infantry companies; Brigadier General Eugene Carr leading seven troops of the 5th Cavalry southeast from Fort Lyon, Colorado Territory; and the principal strike force marching south from Fort Dodge, Kansas, with eleven troops of the 7th Cavalry, five infantry companies, and twelve companies of the Kansas 19th Volunteer Cavalry.
¹⁹

Sheridan did not want Sully either to lead the operation or to command the 7th Cavalry. While Sully was one of the best-known Indian fighters in the West, his actions the previous summer had angered and disappointed Sheridan.

 

SHERIDAN HAD JUST ONE man in mind to lead the operation—the beau ideal of the light cavalry who had helped save the Union army during George Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, who had won a general's star at twenty-three, and who had burnished his glittering reputation in the Shenandoah Valley and at Five Forks, Sailor's Creek, and Appomattox Court House. Lieutenant Colonel George Custer was the kind of officer that Sheridan most liked: he was extraordinarily energetic, quick to act, aggressive, and willing to carry out any mission, even killing Indian civilians and destroying their homes.

But Custer was at home in Monroe, Michigan, serving out his one-year suspension for dereliction of duty. With Sherman's help, Sheridan got the last two months of Custer's sentence commuted. On September 24, Custer received a telegram from Sheridan. “Generals Sherman, Sully, and myself, and nearly all the officers of your regiment, have asked for you,” Sheridan wrote. “Can you come?” Six days later—before Sheridan's request was officially approved—Custer reported to Sheridan at Fort Hays.
²⁰

Sheridan explained his plan, and Custer enthusiastically endorsed it. Custer would ride south toward the Washita River, “the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies; to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.” It was not so different from the warfare in the Shenandoah Valley, where the Union cavalry's object was to destroy enemy forces, crops, and livestock.
²¹

Custer liked the fact that the campaign would “dispel the old-fogy idea” that winter operations were impossible and, better still, force the Indians “to engage in a combat in which we should do for him what he had hither done for us; compel him to fight upon ground and under circumstances of our own selection.”
²²
He began preparing the 7th Cavalry for the expedition. While their horses were being reshod, the eight hundred troopers readied their clothing and gear and improved their marksmanship with twice-daily target practice.
²³

Custer's return was not welcomed by the 7th Cavalry, which disliked his strict discipline. Unlike the Wolverines, who had proudly served under him during the war, the 7th Cavalry troopers thought his command style unsuited to the frontier. They found his obsession with proper appearance especially irritating. But Custer had always been mindful of the impression he made, and he demanded as much of his regiment.

He infuriated his men when he seized their horses and reassigned them new mounts according to color—bays to four companies; sorrels to three companies; and chestnuts, browns, blacks, grays, and “brindles” to one company each. Captain Frederick Benteen, a company commander, described Custer's action as “not only ridiculous, but criminal, unjust, and arbitrary in the extreme.”
²⁴

 

SHERIDAN SENT SULLY WITH a supply train to build a forward depot one hundred miles south of Fort Dodge for the winter campaign. Camp Supply soon stood at the confluence of Wolf and Beaver Creeks in the northwestern Indian Territory.

Sheridan rode there in November and experienced the ferocity of a Great Plains blizzard firsthand. Rain and snow drenched the troops, and powerful winds carried away their tents. Wet, cold, and shivering, Sheridan spent a miserable night huddled under a wagon, and “the gloomy predictions of old man Bridger and others rose up before me with greatly increased force.” But he and his troops pushed on and arrived at Camp Supply on November 21 to find Custer and the 7th Cavalry waiting for them.
²⁵

But neither Evans nor Carr nor the 19th Kansas Cavalry had yet arrived. Scouts ranging the countryside could find no sign of them. While concerned about their absence, Sheridan decided to proceed anyway. He would prove to the Indians “that he would have no security, winter or summer, except in obeying the laws of peace and humanity.” Custer, too, had no misgivings about marching into Indian Territory with just his eight hundred 7th Cavalry troopers, rather than the originally planned 3,000-man strike force.
²⁶

 

IT SNOWED ALL NIGHT November 21, and at reveille at 4 a.m. the next morning, snow was still falling, and two feet lay on the ground. Custer's bugler blew “Boots and Saddles,” and the 7th Cavalry and its Osage and Kaw scouts mounted up. Visiting Sheridan's tent before leaving, Custer was asked by Sheridan what he thought of the snowstorm. “Nothing could be more to our purpose,” Custer replied. “We could move and the Indian villages could not.” As snow fell in “blinding clouds,” the cavalry rode out of Camp Supply with Custer guiding by his compass and the 7th Cavalry band playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

On November 26, Major Joel Elliot struck a trail, less than a day old, of 100 to 150 warriors traveling southeast. Custer cut loose from his supply train, and the troopers followed the trail, carrying only what they needed.

All day and that night they pursued the warriors, who evidently were returning to their village from a raid on the Kansas settlements. About midnight, the soldiers reached the Washita River valley, where the raiders' trail ended at a cluster of lodges barely visible through riverside fog. Custer and his officers were certain they had located some of the Indians who had terrorized the Kansas settlements.

Through the rest of the night, the troopers quietly surrounded the village. To guard against discovery, officers forbade their men to build fires or even to stamp their feet to keep warm. Clutching their horses' reins, the troopers spent a “cold and comfortless night” in the subzero cold and snow, as the fog swirled about them.