Terrible Swift Sword (50 page)

Sheridan was convinced that the army's bête noir, the so-called Indian Ring—a nefarious, and largely imagined, cabal of politicians, federal bureaucrats, Indian agents, and businessmen—had manufactured the “hue and cry” to undermine the army's influence and shore up the Indian Bureau's authority. The Indian Ring had duped “some good and pious ecclesiastics,” he wrote, and they had unwittingly become “the aiders and abettors of savages who murdered, without mercy, men, women, and children.”

The Indians' serial rapes of female settlers always had especially outraged Sheridan, and the criticism of his campaign against Black Kettle's village inspired an unnecessarily explicit harangue on the subject in his annual report. The raiders, he said, raped the women “sometimes as often as forty and fifty times in succession, and while insensible from brutality and exhaustion forced sticks up their persons, and, in one instance, the fortieth or fiftieth savage drew his saber and used [it] on the person of the woman in the same manner.”
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After everything had been alleged and denied, Edmund Guerriere, who claimed to have gone raiding with the Cheyennes, attested to Lieutenant Colonel J. Schuyler Crosby that many of the renegades in fact had been members of Black Kettle's and Little Rock's bands.
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FORBIDDEN BY HAZEN TO attack other Indian villages along the Washita, Sheridan set out for Fort Cobb. Along the way, Sheridan, Custer, and their large cavalry
force passed what Custer described as “one continuous Indian village”—at least six hundred lodges extending twelve miles.

Sheridan wanted the Indians to turn over the raiders' ringleaders and stolen livestock. “I will compel them, if I can,” he wrote to Sherman. Above all, Sheridan and Custer, believing Monahsetah's falsehood, wished to apprehend Satanta and Lone Wolf and force them to answer for the Blinns' murders.
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The Kiowas' camp was not far from Fort Cobb. Custer rode out to parley with Satanta and Lone Wolf, but they refused to come in. Sheridan got a different reception when he went there with his nearly 2,000-man cavalry force. “I am now your chief and you must obey me,” Sheridan told them. “I am just as much your chief as you are the chiefs of your people.”

Upon hearing Sheridan's unyielding words and seeing the impressive firepower arrayed against them, the two chiefs quickly became cooperative. They and a large contingent of warriors set out with Sheridan and Custer for Fort Cobb. Satanta and Lone Wolf assured Sheridan that their villages would follow in a few days after they had packed up all of their possessions.
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But as the party approached Fort Cobb, more warriors made excuses to leave, and soon just a handful of Kiowas remained. When Satanta tried to escape, Sheridan knew that his cooperation had been a sham. Cavalry officers overtook the sexagenarian chief before he got away. Sheridan placed Satanta and Lone Wolf under arrest.

After waiting in vain for two days for the rest of the Kiowas to appear at Fort Cobb, Sheridan learned that they were traveling in another direction, toward the Wichita Mountains southwest of the fort. “So I put on the screws at once by issuing an order to hang Satanta and Lone Wolf, if their people did not surrender at Fort Cobb within forty-eight hours,” Sheridan wrote. Lone Wolf immediately sent a courier to summon the Kiowas to Fort Cobb.
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For Satanta and Lone Wolf, the wait was agonizing. Nightfall of the first day arrived with no sign of the tribe. Throughout the following morning, the two chiefs anxiously watched the distant hills and grew discouraged. Satanta sat beside his tent, wrapped in a blanket, “swaying back and forth, chant[ing] the most doleful and monotonous death-song,” and scooped dirt into his mouth, wrote Colonel Horace Moore of the 19th Kansas.
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To Sheridan's disappointment, Satanta and Lone Wolf were spared the gibbet; their tribesmen began streaming into Fort Cobb during the afternoon of December 20. In his annual report, Sheridan wrote that he would always regret “not hang[ing] these Indians; they had deserved it many times; and I shall also regret that I did not punish the whole tribe when I first met them.”
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MAJOR ANDREW EVANS'S MISSING 3rd Cavalry, a month overdue in joining Sheridan from Fort Bascom, New Mexico, pounced on a Comanche and Kiowa village sixty miles west of Fort Cobb on Christmas Day. After clearing the village with cannon fire, Evans's troopers skirmished most of the day with the warriors, killing twenty-five of them, while other soldiers burned the village's sixty lodges. A week later, Evans's men were on their way back to New Mexico.
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The other truant column, Colonel Eugene Carr's 5th Cavalry from Fort Lyon, reached the northern Texas Panhandle on December 30 only to turn around and return to Colorado.
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ON THE FIRST DAY of 1869, Sheridan was satisfied with what he had accomplished so far, but the job was not yet completed. “The Indians, for the first time, begin to realize that winter will not compel us to make a truce with then,” he wrote to Sherman. He vowed to continue to campaign without letup until the Southern Plains warriors agreed to remain peacefully on their reservations.
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On New Year's Day, Sheridan met with twenty-one chiefs who came to Fort Cobb seeking peace. It mattered little to him, Sheridan told the chiefs, whether they went to their reservations or not; if they stayed out, “I will make war . . . . winter and summer as long as I live,” until they were wiped out. When Arapahoe chief Yellow Bear and Cheyenne chief Little Robe pledged their acquiescence, Sheridan replied, “If you come in here and do as I say, I will not be a bad chief to you.”
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As promised, Yellow Bear's Arapahoes surrendered, but the Cheyennes—among them Little Robe's band—did not. Custer volunteered to take forty men to their camps to parley. Fellow officers told him it would be suicidal. As one officer bid Custer good-bye, he slipped him a pocket Derringer, so that “at the last moment I might become my own executioner” if the Indians massacred his party. Custer returned without having found the Cheyennes.
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On March 1, Sheridan sent Custer, with the 7th Cavalry and 18th Kansas, to bring in the holdout Cheyennes, “or give them a sound thrashing.” This time, Custer located their village of 260 lodges.

The Indians, half starved and worn out from weeks on the run, held two captive white women, seventeen-year-old Sarah White and twenty-three-year-old Mrs. Anna Morgan. When the Cheyennes tried to slip away while the chiefs diverted Custer, he seized three chiefs as hostages. A tense standoff ensued. “I recall no more exciting experience with the Indians,” Custer wrote in
My Life on the Plains
, never imagining his last day on earth in 1876.

Custer gave the Cheyennes an ultimatum: release the two women by sundown the next day and surrender at Camp Supply, or he would kill the chiefs, and the
cavalry would attack the camp. Certain that Custer would do as he had threatened, the Cheyennes agreed to the terms.
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THE WINTER CAMPAIGN HAD smashed the power of the Southern Plains tribes. Sheridan had demonstrated that relentless campaigning alone, even without decisive battlefield victories, could break the Indians' fighting spirit. Sheridan had waged Grant's Overland Campaign in microcosm against a far weaker adversary, which he drove to the ends of its endurance by using winter as an ally.

Moreover, Sheridan had once more earned his men's deepest respect through the long days and nights of hard traveling, in blizzards and subzero cold. Private David Spotts of the 19th Kansas wrote in his diary that the men admired the major general for “camping in a tent when the weather was fair or foul, marching at our head in snow and rain, enduring all the hardships of wind and weather. He is not a young man, either, between 35 and 40 years old.”
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The final act of the campaign occurred on July 11, when Colonel Carr, with eight companies of his 5th Cavalry troopers from Fort Lyon and three companies of Pawnee scouts, surprised Tall Bull's Cheyenne Dog Soldiers in their village at Summit Springs in northeastern Colorado Territory. The troopers killed fifty-two Indians, including Tall Bull (reportedly shot by scout William Cody), looted and burned eighty-two lodges, captured four hundred ponies, and ended the Dog Soldiers' reign of terror in the Republican River area between the Kansas Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads.
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ON FEBRUARY 15, 1869, Sheridan received a note from President-elect Grant inviting him to Washington for his inauguration on March 4. Grant's message also included this line: “I will, of course, give you the Military Division now commanded by Sherman.” Sherman was succeeding Grant as general of the army.

Sheridan's promotion was a testament to Grant's confidence in his former Cavalry Corps commander's surpassing ability. Once more, Sheridan had proved that he was equal to practically any challenge—vanquishing the cream of the Confederate army, waging a cold war on the Mexican border, governing unreconstructed Rebels, or suppressing renegade Indians.

As commander of the Division of the Missouri, Sheridan would be responsible for the Departments of the Missouri, Dakota, and Platte—compassing hundreds of thousands of square miles between Canada and Texas and from Chicago to the Rocky Mountains. He was charged with protecting the settlements and railroads and keeping the peace, all with a pitifully small force of 10,000 troops.
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Delayed by the winter campaign in starting for Washington until early March, Sheridan and his party were riding north toward Fort Hays and the railroad that
would take them to Washington when they intercepted a courier headed for Fort Dodge. As Sheridan suspected, the rider had a telegram for him.

Red-faced and with a catch in his voice, Sheridan read it aloud: he had been promoted to lieutenant general, making him the army's second-ranking officer. He produced a small bottle of whiskey; it was passed round to his staff officers, and a celebratory toast was offered: “To the health of the lieutenant general and the close of the campaign!”
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1870–1871

THE SOUTHERN PLAINS WINTER CAMPAIGN of 1868 to 1869 was Lieutenant General Phil Sheridan's last field command. As the second-ranking army officer, he now no longer personally led men into battle; others would do the leading, while Sheridan, although still vigorous and just thirty-eight years old, would plan and direct.

One of Sheridan's first actions as William Sherman's successor was to move the Military Division of the Missouri headquarters from St. Louis to Chicago. Troops and supplies now moved on railroads rather than rivers, and Chicago was the West's rail center.

Cosmopolitan and bustling, with 300,000 residents, Chicago became Sheridan's first permanent residence since his boyhood days in Somerset, Ohio. Division headquarters was a building at Washington and La Salle Streets, opposite the courthouse.
He stayed at the Palmer House, a popular stopping place for army officers, before purchasing a home on South Michigan Avenue. He lived there with his younger brother Michael, who was his staff adjutant general and, of Sheridan's siblings, closest to him in spirit. Mary and Robert Lawrence kept house and cooked for the brothers. Mrs. Lawrence had served Sheridan since the Shenandoah Valley campaign.
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Sheridan quickly became a popular dinner guest in Chicago society because of his sociability, modesty, and fame and because he was an eligible bachelor. He enrolled at the Bournique School of Dance where, in classes arranged by Mrs. George Pullman, wife of the sleeping car inventor, he learned to waltz and polka and to perform a popular quadrille called “The Prairie Queen.” His classmates included George Pullman, department store magnate Marshall Field, and Robert Todd Lincoln.
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Despite his renown, Sheridan remained unassuming. Once, when he was trout fishing in Wisconsin, an elderly farmer asked him to point out the famous General Sheridan. When Sheridan replied that he was in fact that general, the farmer refused to believe him. “How could a little man with such a low voice as yourn [
sic
] command a big army?”

The Earl of Dunraven described Sheridan as reserved on first acquaintance, though he quickly warmed to new company. He was “a delightful man,” Dunraven wrote, “with the one peculiarity of using the most astounding swear words quite calmly and dispassionately in ordinary conversation.”
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He spent freely. He purchased two farms and adjacent timberland in Polk County, Oregon, near the Grande Ronde Indian Reservation that he once superintended. Sheridan's papers detail a profusion of minor purchases that added up: an $11 goblet; a $24 ice pitcher; $14 worth of books from a New York bookseller; and, on the same day, $87 for books from a Chicago dealer.

“He could not save,” his brother Michael wrote. “But possibly this was due as much to liberality as to lack of method, for if he had money on hand he gave it and spent it freely.” Every former soldier with a hard-luck story found Sheridan to be a soft touch.
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SOON AFTER MOVING INTO the White House, President Ulysses Grant shocked his former army colleagues and alienated Western supporters by adopting a new Plains Indians program, the so-called Peace Policy. No longer would the tribes be treated as sovereign nations; no new treaties would be signed. Instead, the Indians would become wards of the government and, eventually, productive citizens—through civilizing and Christianizing.