Terrible Swift Sword (54 page)

Yet, even in 1871, extermination seemed impossible; upwards of 10 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains. Since the early nineteenth century, when the Plains Indians' equestrian, bison-hunting culture had reached its apotheosis, the Indians had killed thousands every year, efficiently converting every kill into food, clothing, and shelter—at a rate of roughly six buffalo annually for every man, woman, and child. Conversely, soldiers, trophy hunters, and others killed thousands of buffalo out of casual blood lust—even from atop trains crossing the prairies, with passengers shooting buffalo along the right-of-way. All of these losses, even after attrition from disease, age, and predators were factored in, scarcely put a dent in the enormous herds.

 

BY THE TIME THE warriors attacked Adobe Walls in 1874, however, buffalo hunting had become highly lucrative—because German tanners had invented a novel process that turned buffalo hides into high-grade leather. Tanneries on the East Coast adopted the new process in 1871 and began buying hides for $3.50 apiece by the wagonload.

Teams of buffalo hunters and skinners armed with “Big Fifties” flooded the Great Plains. “It was like a gold rush,” wrote Frank Mayer, who invested his $2,000 life savings in a hunting outfit and profited handsomely. From 1872 to 1874, millions of hides were shipped from Fort Dodge, Kansas—most of them killed north of the Arkansas River. “The vast plain, which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert,” Major Richard Dodge, the commander at Fort Dodge, wrote in the fall of 1873. That year, hunters edged south into Indian Territory, where they were forbidden to hunt.

The army, although sworn to protect the reservation Indians from intruders, winked at the hunters' blatant poaching. An army officer once articulated the army's
view to Mayer with startling clarity: “If we kill the buffalo we conquer the Indian. It seems a more humane thing to kill the buffalo than the Indian, so the buffalo must go.”

Wright Moar wanted assurances that there would be no army interference before he moved his large-scale hunting operation into Indian Territory. He bluntly asked Major Dodge what he would do if Moar and others hunted inside the Indians' preserve. Dodge replied obliquely but unmistakably, “Boys, if I were hunting buffalo I would go where the buffalo are.”
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SHERIDAN, SHERMAN, AND GRANT lobbied hard against every attempt to slow or stop the slaughter, although no government policy officially condoned it, and many army officers in fact objected to it. In 1874, at the urging of Sheridan and Sherman, Grant pocket vetoed a bill passed by Congress that would have made it illegal for a non-Indian to kill female buffalos or males in larger numbers than were needed for food.
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Sheridan discouraged the Texas legislature from passing a bill that would have saved the buffalo from extinction in Texas. In an address to a joint session in Austin, Sheridan said that instead of stopping the hunters from killing buffalo, Texas should give each of them a bronze medal, with a dead buffalo on one side and a “discouraged Indian” on the other. Buffalo hunters, Sheridan told Texas legislators,

The army practiced what Sheridan preached to Texas leaders. At nearly every Southern Plains military post, buffalo hunters were provided with free ammunition—”all you could use, all you wanted, more than you needed,” according to Frank Mayer—as well as a place from which to ship their hides.
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SHERIDAN WAS FREE TO prosecute the 1874 campaign against the Southern Plains Indians as he saw fit. “Act with vindictive earnestness, and to make every Kiowa & Comanche knuckle down,” Sherman instructed him. Sheridan responded, “I propose, if let alone, to settle the Indian matter in the Southwest forever.”
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His plan was for five columns—2,700 army infantry, cavalry, and artillery—to converge on the Texas Panhandle and relentlessly pursue the 1,200 Indians who had gone raiding. Colonel Nelson Miles would drive south from Fort Dodge, while Lieutenant Colonel John Davidson led troops westward from Fort Sill in Indian Territory, and Lieutenant Colonel George Buell moved west from Fort Griffin, Texas. Major William Price would push eastward from Fort Union in the New Mexico Territory, while Colonel Ranald Mackenzie marched north from Fort Concho, Texas.

Once the plan was made, Sheridan hastened to push the columns into the field without delay, even before they were battle ready. Speed was essential, he believed, to stop the troublemaking bands from coercing peaceful Indians to join them and “to prevent the accumulation of winter supplies from the buffalo herds.”

Mackenzie's column was the plan's keystone. Sheridan had transferred Mackenzie and his crack 4th Cavalry from the Rio Grande area to participate in the operation. As Mackenzie marched north from Fort Concho, the other four columns would push the Indians into his path.
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Sheridan, Sherman, and Grant prized Mackenzie above all of their frontier field officers. He was a younger model of them: active, smart, coldly efficient, and utterly ruthless. He might have inherited the ruthlessness. His father, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, while commanding the brig
Somers
in 1842, hanged three mutineers from the yardarm—one of them the son of War Secretary John Spencer. While a court of inquiry exonerated the elder Mackenzie, his naval career did not survive.

High-strung, intense, spartan in his habits, and, later in his life, increasingly unstable, Ranald Mackenzie graduated from West Point in 1862 and quickly earned a reputation as a fearless combat officer at Second Manassas, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and under Sheridan at Winchester and Cedar Creek. At Cedar Creek, although wounded twice while his regiment withstood Jubal Early's onslaught, Mackenzie refused to leave the field, even when Sheridan urged him to obtain medical treatment. This was Sheridan's kind of officer.

For his gallantry at Cedar Creek, Mackenzie was breveted a brigadier general at just twenty-four and given command of the Army of the James's cavalry. He fought beside Sheridan at Five Forks and Appomattox Court House. By then, Mackenzie had been wounded four times; outside Petersburg, a shell fragment tore off two fingers. Grant later wrote, “I regarded Mackenzie as the most promising officer in the army.”
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On the frontier, Mackenzie was another Custer, with the same daring and dash, but without the theatrics or the surpassing ego. Significantly, he was one of the few Civil War leaders who successfully adapted his tactics to the exigencies of Indian fighting. His men called him “Three-Finger Jack,” while the Indians knew him as
“Bad Hand.” He achieved maximum results with minimum casualties, yet remained unloved by his men because he was severe and irascible.

Undoubtedly his irritability stemmed from the fact that he was in pain much of the time. He suffered from recurring fevers and from rheumatism in his right shoulder, left forearm, legs, and right knee—reminders of his Civil War wounds. Recently, Mackenzie had taken an Indian arrow in the thigh.

Superiors and subordinates alike recognized Mackenzie's gifts as a combat leader. He was one of the few officers, wrote one of his lieutenants, Robert Carter, “who was always ready and willing to assume the gravest responsibilities, and he would never hesitate to take the initiative while awaiting definite orders.”
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Because Mackenzie never hesitated, Sherman had sent him to track down and punish the Indians who slaughtered seven mule drivers in 1871. During another expedition in 1872, Mackenzie's troopers had attacked a Comanche village, killing twenty-five Indians.
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IN I873, SHERIDAN AND War Secretary William Belknap had turned to Mackenzie when 1,000 Kickapoo Indians living in Mexico mounted raids on the Texas ranch country along the Nueces River. The raiders moved so swiftly that they were back across the Rio Grande in Mexico before US troops or local militia could respond. Sheridan transferred Mackenzie's 4th Cavalry to Fort Clark, replacing Colonel Wesley Merritt's 9th Cavalry, which had been largely ineffective.

Traveling to Fort Clark to meet with Mackenzie in April, Sheridan instructed him, strictly unofficially, to march into Mexico and destroy the Kickapoo village. Immediately after the meeting, Mackenzie told Lieutenant Robert Carter what Sheridan had said to him: “I want you to be bold, enterprising, and at all times
full of energy
, when you begin, let it be a campaign of
annihilation, obliteration
and
complete destruction
, as you have always in your dealings done to all the Indians you have dealt with. . . . . I think you understand what I want done, and the way you should employ your force.”

When Mackenzie asked Sheridan whose orders would give him the authority to violate Mexico's border, Sheridan exploded, pounding his fist on the table. “Damn the
orders
!” he shouted. “Damn the
authority
! You are to go ahead on your plan of action, and your authority and backing shall be General Grant and myself. With us behind you in whatever you do to clean up this situation, you can rest assured of the fullest support. You must assume the risk. We will assume the final responsibility should any result.”
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Harassed by Texans during the Civil War, the Kickapoos had relocated to the Mexican province of Coahuila at the Mexican government's behest, to protect the citizens there from Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache marauders. The Kickapoos did their part, thereby gaining a sanctuary whenever they raided Texas—as well as buyers for the cattle, horses, and goods they stole during those raids.

In May 1873, Mackenzie's scouts located the Kickapoo village, and as darkness fell on May 17, Mackenzie, four hundred 4th Cavalry troopers, and two dozen black Seminole scouts crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico. Forty miles away lay the Kickapoo village outside Remolino.

The troopers rode all night. Dawn on May 18 found them outside Remolino. They attacked immediately and achieved complete surprise, killing at least nineteen women, children and old men—no warriors were present. They then rode off with forty prisoners, after burning the village and two others nearby. By late May 18, the weary cavalrymen were back in Texas—after having marched 160 miles without sleep in a day and a half.

Mackenzie's officers had assumed that he had written orders for the raid. When they learned that he did not, they were outraged. Had they known this, they told him, they would have refused to cross the river. Mackenzie, sounding like his father on the
Somers
, snapped back, “Any officer or man who had refused to follow me across the river I would have shot!”
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Sheridan jubilantly informed Sherman of the raid's success, but the commanding general, who had known nothing of it, frostily replied that he disapproved. The Texas legislature, however, extended its “grateful thanks” to Mackenzie and his men for “inflicting well merited punishment upon these scourges of our frontier.” In his annual report, Sheridan defended the raid. “If the Mexican authorities cannot or will not protect our citizens from the attacks of Indians and freebooters from their side of the river, then it is the duty of the Lieutenant General to see that they are so protected.”

Months later, the Kickapoos left Mexico, resettling in the Indian Territory; the Rio Grande was quiet for the next several years. Sheridan had broken the rules, and Mackenzie's bold gambit had succeeded brilliantly.
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