Terrible Swift Sword (49 page)

NOVEMBER 27, 1868–WASHITA RIVER, INDIAN TERRITORY—As the sky became milky opaque in color, the cavalrymen could discern dozens of tall, white tepees in dense timber. It was the Cheyenne encampment of Black Kettle—the westernmost village of a chain of Indian encampments stretching for miles along the Washita River.

Custer had divided his regiment into four parts in order to encircle the village, without knowing how many warriors were in the camp or even which band they belonged to. Fortunately for him, Black Kettle's village contained just fifty Cheyenne lodges and three Sioux and Arapahoe tepees.

At daybreak, the troopers shed their overcoats and rations so as not to be encumbered when the shooting began. Then Custer gave the signal to his band to strike up “Garry Owen.” The men cheered when they heard the familiar tune, off-key though it was when played on frozen instruments. The troopers stormed the village.

The Indians awakened to what must have been their worst nightmare—especially for Black Kettle and the other Sand Creek survivors. Black Kettle fired his rifle to alert his people; then he and his wife, Ar-no-ho-wok, leaped on a pony. A storm of bullets cut them both down before they could cross the river.

Those who were able to fought back desperately with rifles and bows and arrows. A few broke through the ring of troopers; others leaped into the Washita River, using the bank for cover. Squaws and children who stayed in the lodges were not harmed, but those caught in the melee were shot down. Some took their own lives; a Cheyenne woman disemboweled her baby before plunging her knife into her own breast. The troopers had control of the village within ten minutes, but the fighting continued.
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Alerted by the shooting, large numbers of mounted warriors from the other villages massed on a nearby ridge while the troopers ransacked the village and collected prisoners. Satanta's Kiowa warriors and Little Raven's Arapahoes had daubed on war paint and galloped to the Cheyennes' aid. With loud whoops, hundreds of them attacked Custer's cavalrymen.

The troopers withstood the attack, then counterattacked, driving away the warriors. The cavalrymen burned the village and, in an act of calculated destruction, slaughtered the Cheyennes' pony herd—eight hundred horses—after letting the surviving squaws choose mounts for their ride into captivity.

As the 7th Cavalry prepared to pull out of the charred village, littered with the bodies of 103 Cheyennes, including Chiefs Black Kettle and Little Rock, the troopers discovered that the Kiowas and Arapahoes had stolen their overcoats and rations—and killed Custer's dog, Blucher, with an arrow when it tried to chase them.

Major Elliot and sixteen men were unaccounted for. A scout told Custer that he had seen Elliot and his men chasing some Indians who had slipped away from the camp. Custer's men rode two miles in the direction that Elliot was last seen, but they did not find him or his men. With hundreds of Indian warriors nearby, the search was discontinued.

Custer led his regiment several miles down the valley toward the other encampments, hoping to draw the warriors away from Black Kettle's smoking village so that the supply train could safely approach. The troopers then reversed direction, drew rations and warm clothing from the supply train, and started back to Camp Supply. Custer's losses totaled four dead, fifteen wounded, and seventeen missing but presumed dead.
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THE 7TH CAVALRY, THIS time accompanied by Sheridan and the 19th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, left Camp Supply on a clear, subzero morning in early December to view the Washita battleground and find out what had happened to Elliot and his men. The nearly 2,000 men and their supply wagons made steady progress despite the deep snows. When large buffalo herds stampeded the mules in the wagon train, Sheridan had to “throw out flankers” to shoot the leading bulls and turn away the herds. Packs of wolves devoured the fallen bison.

The 19th Kansas had already endured unexpected hardships just to reach Camp Supply, arriving too late to join Custer's expedition. Led by Colonel Samuel Crawford, who had resigned as Kansas governor to take the command, the 1,000 cavalrymen were itching to fight the Indians. They were amply supplied and armed with new Spencer carbines. After leaving Wichita on November 5, they had gotten lost and wandered the hills and valleys of southern Kansas for weeks, guided by their
clueless scout, Apache Bill. Wet, cold, and half starved, the worn-out troops had straggled into Camp Supply on November 28.

As Sheridan's column marched on toward the Washita, a “blue norther'” swooped down upon them, lashing them with furious winds, freezing rain and snow, and achingly cold temperatures. Upon reaching the Canadian River, a detachment had to cut through the ice floes, their mounts emerging from the river bleeding and bruised. They built big drying fires on the opposite bank. The water refroze, trapping the wagons, and men had to wade in and chop them out with axes.
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That night, the winds blew down tents and extinguished the troopers' fires, reported De B. Randolph Keim of the
New York Herald
. Afraid to lie down for fear of freezing to death, the troopers tramped up and down in the camp all night as the equally miserable horses and mules “uttered melancholic moans.”
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IN HIS REPORT TO General Sherman, Sheridan wrote, “There never was a more complete surprise” than Custer's daybreak attack on Black Kettle's camp, which “strongly reminded one of scenes during the war.” Custer reported 103 Indians killed and the capture of fifty-three squaws and children, 875 ponies, 1,123 buffalo robes and skins, 535 pounds of gunpowder, 1,050 pounds of lead, 4,000 arrows, 700 pounds of tobacco, as well as rifles, pistols, bows, lariats, and large amounts of dried meat. Except for the captives, practically everything else was destroyed.
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In the Cheyenne lodges, Custer's men had found photos and daguerreotypes, clothing, and bedding taken from massacred settlers' homes; mail stolen from murdered couriers; and a large book, evidently a journal, in which nothing had been written. The Indians, however, had used the book to illustrate the recent fights of Black Kettle's band.
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ON DECEMBER I0, SHERIDAN, Custer, Keim, and several officers toured the battleground, escorted by a 7th Cavalry detachment. Yelping dogs stood watch over the frozen corpses of their Indian masters. As the group approached the charred village, they interrupted wolves and thousands of ravens and crows in their “carrion feast.” The birds rose from the ground in a noisy, black mass and passed over the soldiers.

The dead warriors had been wound into blankets; some had been laid in trees, others under bushes. In a ravine, the soldiers found thirty-eight bodies.

Sheridan's party rode to a hilltop that commanded a view of the site. About one hundred yards away they came upon the naked body of a white man, riddled with arrows and bullet holes, his head smashed. It was one of Major Elliot's men.

Two hundred yards further, they found the others, nude, frozen, and hacked to pieces. “The poor fellows were all lying within a circle not more than 15 or 20 paces in diameter,” wrote Sheridan, “and the little piles of empty cartridge shells near each body showed plainly that every man had made a brave fight.”

All the bodies were mutilated, but none was scalped. Later, an account citing Indian sources reported that Elliot and his men were pursuing a group of women and children when a band of Arapahoes cut them off from the village. More warriors arrived, and Elliot's men dismounted and waged their last fight.
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In an abandoned Arapahoe village nearby, troopers made another dismaying discovery—the bodies of a white woman and a young boy. A Kansas trooper identified them: Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son, Willie, captives of Arapahoe raiders who had attacked their wagon train near the Arkansas River on October 7.

The army was well aware of Mrs. Blinn's plight; two of her letters had found their way to Colonel William Hazen, the commander at Fort Cobb. “If you could only buy us of [
sic
] the Indians with ponies or anything,” she had written. Her son was weak, and she feared her captors were going to sell her into slavery in Mexico. Hazen had authorized an Indian trader to spend whatever was necessary to obtain her release.

Mrs. Blinn's ordeal had ended sometime after Custer's attack. She was shot at close range in the forehead and bludgeoned in the back of the head, after which “every particle of hair [was] removed.” Her child was found nearby with a bruise on his cheek and his white curly hair dabbled with blood, suggesting that his head had been dashed against a tree. Black Kettle's sister, Monahsetah, blamed their deaths on the Kiowa chief Satanta.
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SHERIDAN CONCLUDED THAT CUSTER had struck “the most villainous of the hostile bands”—which had slaughtered settlers along the Saline and Solomon Rivers months earlier, “and whose hands were still red from their bloody work on the recent raid.” He rejected others' portrayal of Black Kettle as a “peace chief.” Too old to ride with his warriors, Black Kettle had instead incited them with “devilish incantations” to raid the settlements, then afterward he had shielded them. It was “a merited punishment, only too long delayed,” Sheridan wrote.
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As commander of the southern Indian reservation district established after the Medicine Lodge Treaty, Hazen had labored throughout November to bring the tribes behind the shield of Fort Cobb, where they would be safe from attacks by the US cavalry. He was aware of what Sheridan was contemplating. “General Sheridan, still under the impression that these people are at war, may possibly attack them before I can collect them at this point,” Hazen wrote.

But Hazen was selective about whom he chose to protect. He rejected the bands that had butchered settlers along the Solomon and Saline Rivers; he had judged Black Kettle's band to be one of them. A week before he was killed, the chief had implored Hazen to protect his people. “I have always done my best to keep my young men quiet,” he told Hazen, but “some will not listen. . . . . I have not been able to keep them all at home.” Hazen told the Cheyennes and Arapahoes that he regretted being unable to give them sanctuary.
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Sheridan hoped to find other renegade Indians to attack along the Washita, but the camps near Black Kettle's were deserted; the Indians had fled, shooting dead hundreds of ponies to keep them out of the soldiers' hands. The wholesale slaughter pleased Sheridan. It was “a most cheerful indication that our campaign would be ultimately successful, and we all prayed for at least a couple of months more of cold weather and plenty of snow.”
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When Hazen learned that Sheridan and Custer were marching toward the other Indian camps, he sent a note stating that all the bands east of Black Kettle's village were friendly and under his protection. They “have not been on the war-path this season,” Hazen wrote.
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Of course, Hazen's message angered Sheridan, who had not forgotten about Hazen's expropriation of the eleven Rebel cannons claimed by Sheridan's division five years earlier on Missionary Ridge. This was another black mark against him in Sheridan's book. Hazen was no fonder of Sheridan.

His feelings toward Hazen notwithstanding, Sheridan could not very well flout Hazen's protection of the other Indian villages; Hazen reported directly to Sherman, except in military affairs, when he was answerable to Sheridan. Hazen clearly had the authority in this matter.

Custer wanted to attack Satanta's Kiowa camp anyway because of Monahsetah's accusation, but Sheridan forbade it. It was just as well that they did not, because Monahsetah had lied to protect the Arapahoes, who had killed the Blinns.

Sheridan fumed to Sherman that the binomial organizational structure was not working. As proof, he noted that government-issue flour, sugar, and coffee had been found in Black Kettle's camp—meaning his band had collected rations at the same time that it was raiding settlements. “Something should be done to stop this anomaly. I am ordered to fight these Indians, and General Hazen is permitted to feed them.”
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THE EAST RANG WITH denunciations of Custer's “massacre” of Black Kettle's band, drowning out the Westerners' gratitude for the punishment finally meted out to the Kansas raiders. George Manypenny, the commissioner of Indian affairs, suggested that Custer might have attacked the wrong village. The superintendent of
Indian affairs, Thomas Murphy, heralded the late Black Kettle as “one of the truest friends the whites have ever had among the Indians,” adding that “innocent parties have been made to suffer for the crimes of others.”

The
New York Times
and
St. Louis Democrat
quoted from a private letter by an unnamed 7th Cavalry trooper who said that Custer had delighted in the slaughter of the ponies; Custer later learned that the author was Captain Frederick Benteen, embittered by the death of his friend Major Elliot. Thereafter, Custer and Benteen were sworn enemies.

The Reverend Henry Whipple, Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, deplored the “shameless disregard for justice” and the taking of “the most foolhardy course we could have pursued.” Others claimed the army wished to exterminate the Plains Indians.
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The outcry must have puzzled Custer, Sheridan, and Sherman, who had planned and approved an operation that, excepting the deaths of women and children, resembled their punishing Civil War campaigns. Sherman heatedly denied that the army contemplated genocide. “We don't want to exterminate or even to fight them,” he said. “At best it is an inglorious war, and for our soldiers . . . . it is all danger and extreme labor, without a single compensating advantage.”