Terrible Swift Sword (55 page)

THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE OF Sheridan's 1874 campaign occurred on September 28 in a magnificent setting of eight-hundred-foot-high rock walls and treacherous rockfalls. On the eastern edge of northern Texas's desolate Llano Estacado plateau, the capstone escarpment shears off into the second-largest canyon in the United States—the Palo Duro, with its maze of auxiliary canyons.

Sheridan's orders had gone out July 25, and the plan was working. In August, the marching columns of Miles, Davidson, and Buell had begun driving the Kiowas, Comanches, and Southern Cheyennes westward. The warriors and their families had withdrawn deep inside Palo Duro's labyrinth of interconnected canyons.
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Near the canyon mouth, Miles and his 744 troopers had fought a five-hour running battle with about two hundred warriors on August 30. In late September, Mackenzie's scouts penetrated the canyons and located several hundred Indian lodges in a warren of canyons, protected by the towering canyon walls. They had also found a steep, sketchy trail of switchbacks and breathtaking cliffs that led from the capstone into the canyon.

Mackenzie force-marched his men all night to reach the rim above Palo Duro Canyon. At first light on September 28, the 4th Cavalry began the descent. Amazingly, they reached the canyon floor without mishap or discovery by the Indians.

Mackenzie led the attack, which instantly emptied the Indian villages. Part of his command rode straight to the Indians' pony herd and seized 1,500 horses. The warriors counterattacked to retrieve their animals, but failed. Throughout the day, they harassed the cavalrymen with sniper fire from the canyon walls, giving their elders, women, and children time to escape.

The Indians melted away into the side canyons, but without their pony herd, lodges, or personal property. The troopers burned the lodges and, after selecting the 350 best ponies from the herd, shot the rest on the canyon rim. “It was a heavy blow,” Lieutenant Carter wrote of the Indians' loss of their horses. “They were such valuable property that they were held in higher esteem than their squaws.”

Sherman was pleased with the campaign's progress. “They go in with the relish that used to make our hearts
glad
in 1864–65,” he told Sheridan.
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Sheridan had traveled to Fort Sill to better monitor the campaign. It was proceeding just as he had hoped: relentless cavalry attacks on the renegades' villages were forcing the bands to move repeatedly. Sheridan urged his commanders to keep up the pressure through the winter, until the Indians surrendered.

As they had during the Washita winter campaign of 1868–1869, Sheridan's troopers pursued the Indians to the ends of their endurance, fighting more than a dozen battles—each time destroying more Indian lodges, food, and supplies. The unyielding pressure, Sheridan wrote, gave the Indians “no opportunity or security to kill game or get food for their families, grazing for their stock, or safety for their lives, so their [
sic
] are now being captured or surrendering unconditionally and there is a fair prospect of a close of our labors before long.”
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The Southern Plains tribes were experiencing the “total war” that Sheridan, Sherman, and Grant had practiced with such awful efficiency in Virginia, Georgia, and
South Carolina a decade earlier. Their two brightest protégés from the Civil War, Mackenzie and Custer, had become the brutal science's new avatars on the Great Plains.

 

IN LATE FEBRUARY I875, bands of ragged, half-starved Kiowas, Southern Cheyennes, and Comanches began surrendering at the agencies. First, nearly three hundred Kiowas came in, followed in March by 820 Southern Cheyennes. The Comanches trickled in all that spring, with the last band of four hundred surrendering on June 2. The army had swept the country clean between Fort Sill and the Llano Estacado.
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Sheridan wanted to try the ringleaders for capital offenses before military tribunals and hang them. He also wished to send others to Eastern prisons if their cases were too weak to win convictions. The US attorney general approved Sheridan's exile plan but not the military commissions.

At Fort Sill in April 1875, as the Indian women wailed and wept, seventy-two warriors were shackled, placed in wagons, and sent on the first leg of their long trip to Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida.
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Sheridan's 1868–1869 and 1874–1875 campaigns had crushed the Southern Plains tribes and made the region safe for settlers.

 

WITH THE SOUTHERN PLAINS quiet, Sheridan could now concentrate on pacifying the turbulent Northern Plains. The Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, neglected and hungry on their reservations, were seething over encroachments on their tribal lands by settlers, gold prospectors in the Black Hills, and the Northern Pacific Railroad. Under the 1868 Fort Laramie treaties, the two tribes had received all of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri River, including the Black Hills. The treaties also permitted the Indians to hunt buffalo north of the North Platte River so long as the herds lasted.

Red Cloud was the most prominent signatory, and he never reneged; two other Sioux chiefs, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, had not signed. Soon after the treaties were made, rumors began to circulate that the Black Hills abounded in mineral wealth—a portent of future trouble.

In early 1874, Sheridan began organizing an expedition into the Black Hills to find out if the rumors, now rampant, were true, as well as to assay the region's soil, timber, grass, and water resources and to locate a site for a military fort. On July 2, while Sheridan was completing his plans for the Red River campaign, Custer and the 7th Cavalry, which had been escorting Northern Pacific Railroad work crews in Montana, left Fort Abraham Lincoln in Bismarck, Dakota Territory, to explore the Black Hills.
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CUSTER'S EXPEDITION FOUND SURPRISINGLY plentiful timber, soil, grass, and water in the Black Hills, but most importantly, survey crews panned small amounts of gold in creeks near Harney Peak. The press reports caused prospectors to pour into the Black Hills. The gold rush was on.

With soldiers now needed to keep the miners out, Sheridan proposed the construction of two Black Hills forts, but Congress appropriated no money to build them. Consequently, supplies for the ceaseless army patrols, mainly conducted by Custer's 7th Cavalry, had to be hauled in from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Despite the army's efforts, by the summer of 1875 hundreds of white miners were panning the Black Hills's creeks and digging in the hillsides.

Even before Custer's expedition, there had been trouble at the Sioux agencies operated by the Indian Bureau. In February 1874, troops were summoned from Fort Laramie when Sioux from the Red Cloud Agency killed Lieutenant Levi Robinson as he led a wood-gathering detail. The prospectors' invasion of the Black Hills infuriated the Sioux war factions. Rumors of war began crowding out the rumors of gold.
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Powerless to keep out the prospectors, in September 1875 government commissioners offered to buy the Black Hills from Sioux leaders for $6 million or to lease the area for a $400,000 annuity. The Sioux rejected the offers. Chief Spotted Bear reportedly told the commissioners, “Our Great Father has a big safe. This hill is our safe.”

After the parley's failure, War Secretary Belknap summoned Sheridan and George Crook to a White House meeting to discuss further action against the Sioux.
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AS THE SITUATION DARKENED on the Northern Plains, Sheridan was pulled away from his duties by two developments. Grant sent him to Louisiana in late 1874 to prevent Democrats from filling five disputed seats in the state house of representatives and taking control of the state assembly. The second interruption in his duties was more pleasant: Sheridan got married on June 3, 1875.

Unsurprisingly, the bride of the Civil War hero and second-ranking army officer was an army brat—Irene Rucker, the youngest daughter of Colonel Daniel Rucker, assistant army quartermaster general. Born at Fort Union, New Mexico, Miss Rucker, a devout Catholic educated in convents, was scarcely half the forty-four-year-old Sheridan's age. When she was a teenager, she and her family had stayed at Sheridan's home after the Great Chicago Fire damaged their house. But the courtship had not begun until a few years later, after a military wedding in which Miss Rucker was a bridesmaid.

They were married by the Right Reverend Thomas Foley, bishop of Chicago, in a private military ceremony at the Rucker home. The invited guests included President and Mrs. Grant, Sherman, War Secretary Belknap, and Generals John Pope, George
Crook, Christopher Augur, and Alfred Terry. The
New York Times
described the wedding as “quiet and unostentatious,” with Sheridan wearing his full dress uniform and gold spurs. Among the numerous and expensive wedding gifts were a carriage and pair of horses, diamond earrings, and, from President and Mrs. Grant, a “seed pearl pin and earrings.”
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IN LATE I874, MISS Rucker, with several other ladies and Sheridan's staff, had accompanied the lieutenant general to New Orleans, ostensibly a stopover during a longer trip to Havana, Cuba. But suspicious New Orleans residents were certain that Sheridan had come to impose the will of the Republican Grant administration. They retained vivid memories of Sheridan's heavy-handed administration of the Fifth Military District.

Indeed, Sheridan bore secret orders from the president to reverse what Grant and other Republicans viewed as a Democratic power grab. So closely held were the details of this trip that neither Sherman nor the commander of the Division of the South knew anything about it. Sheridan was instructed to communicate by cipher with Belknap alone.

The 1874 elections had given the Democrats an apparent legislative majority, but the GOP-dominated election board ruled that each party had won fifty-three seats, with five in dispute, to be decided when the legislature convened in January. On January 4, Democrats in the state house of representatives, in a smoothly choreographed series of actions, seized control of the legislature and filled the five disputed seats with party members.

Grant had authorized Sheridan to use army troops to rectify the situation if necessary. And so, when Louisiana's Republican governor, William Kellogg, requested federal assistance, Sheridan acted. Army infantrymen marched into the legislative chamber with fixed bayonets and ejected the five Democrats. All the Democrats stormed out to convene a rump legislative session, while Republicans reorganized the House.
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To further secure his authority, Sheridan unilaterally incorporated the Department of the Gulf into his Division of the Missouri. He sought to replace the Gulf Department's commander, the former XIX Corps commander William Emory—an “old man, entirely unfitted for this place”—with protégé Mackenzie, but he ultimately withdrew Mackenzie's name because of “great dissatisfaction in Army circles.”

Sheridan also sought Belknap's permission to round up the leaders of the anti-Republican White League—Confederate veterans who, just three months earlier, had battled city police in the streets. He wanted to try them in military courts. With Louisiana certain to be a pivotal state in the 1876 presidential election, Sheridan
and Grant feared that the White League would prevent blacks from voting, thereby swinging the state to Democrats. But Sheridan did not get his military tribunal, despite warning Belknap of “the existence in this state of a spirit of defiance” that was a threat to loyal citizens.

The Civil War was a decade past, and Sheridan's resort to authoritarian Reconstruction-era tactics in Louisiana was extremely unpopular. Some Southern newspapers called for a revival of the war. State legislatures passed condemnatory resolutions, and Sheridan was denounced on the floor of Congress.

Grant and Belknap staunchly defended Sheridan—Grant in a message to Congress. After an ugly partisan fight, Congress appointed an investigatory panel.

In New Orleans, hostile crowds shadowed Sheridan wherever he went, and he received death threats. Congressman George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, in New Orleans with the investigatory committee, attested to the citizens' naked hostility toward Sheridan. Whenever Sheridan entered the dining room at the St. Charles Hotel for breakfast, Hoar wrote, “there were loud hisses and groans from nearly the whole assembled company.” The guests would underline particularly venomous passages in the New Orleans papers and have a waiter carry them to Sheridan. “The General would glance at it with an unruffled face, and bow and smile toward the sender.”

The congressional committee defended Sheridan's use of troops at the Louisiana legislature and brokered a compromise that calmed the volatile situation, at least until the 1876 elections: the Democrats got control of the House, while Republicans dominated the Senate.
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ON NOVEMBER 3, I875, a secret policy meeting was held at the White House that proved enormously consequential for the Northern Plains tribes. While no transcript exists, historian Robert Utley writes in
Frontier Regulars
that those attending included President Grant, Sheridan, Crook, War Secretary Belknap, Interior Secretary Zachariah Chandler, and Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward Smith. Notably absent was General Sherman, who, fed up with Belknap constantly usurping his authority, had moved his headquarters to St. Louis in October 1874, virtually ceding control of army matters to Belknap.
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The meeting participants understood that there was no stopping the settlers, entrepreneurs, railroads, towns, and “civilization” from overrunning the once exclusive domain of the Plains Indians. There was no discussion of this; Manifest Destiny was so tightly interwoven into American orthodoxy as to be beyond moral or legal challenge.