Terrible Swift Sword (56 page)

And, indeed, the people were coming, like it or not: in 1870, an estimated 2.3 million whites lived in the West; by 1880, there would be 4.9 million. The only matter to decide was the technical problem of how to quickly and efficiently dispose
of the Indians so that the whites could safely occupy vast areas that by treaty belonged to the Northern Plains tribes.

The secret meeting yielded two momentous decisions, neither occasioning public announcement. First, the army would withdraw troops guarding the Black Hills and not interfere with prospectors entering the Sioux's sacred grounds. Sheridan notified General Alfred Terry, his Department of the Platte commander, of this decision on November 9. President Grant, he said, had decided that his order forbidding miners to enter the Black Hills country “should not be rescinded, [yet] no rigid resistance by the military should be made to the miners going in. . . . . Cause the troops in your command to assume such attitudes as will meet the terms of the President in this respect.”

Secondly, Grant and his advisers decided to compel the northern tribes to quit their hunting grounds stretching west to the Big Horn Mountains and to force them to live permanently on their reservations. In December, runners carried instructions to the roaming bands to report to their reservations by January 31, 1876. After that date, the army would force those staying out to comply or kill them if they still refused. As expected, the hostile bands led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Gall, and others rejected the government ultimatum, setting the stage for the Great Sioux War of 1876.
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All of this was agreeable to Sheridan. The army was no longer burdened with the impossible assignment of keeping white prospectors out of the Black Hills. And the ultimatum promised to settle the problem of the fractious Northern Plains tribes. Since 1868, the Sioux had drawn rations at the agencies while raiding at will. The eastern Wyoming Territory had become virtually uninhabitable for white settlers and dangerous, too, for Crows, Shoshones, and Pawnees.

The president and his counselors also authorized Sheridan to mount a Northern Plains winter campaign immediately following the expiration of the January 31 deadline. While the leaders' faith in him must have gratified Sheridan, he also surely lamented Congress's refusal to grant his requests in 1874 and 1875 for two new forts. Sheridan had chosen the sites at the mouth of the Tongue River and on the Big Horn River after a personal reconnaissance. With those forts, the army might have swiftly seized control of the Powder River country. Without them, the soldiers had to march long distances before even beginning to campaign, eliminating the possibility of surprise.
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IN MAKING HIS NEW battle plan, Sheridan drew from the successful 1868–1869 and 1874–1875 campaigns. Army columns would converge from three directions on the Powder River country to destroy the wild bands' villages. While Sheridan's
orders stated the operations “should be made without concert,” he made it clear that he would not object if the commanders chose to work together.

Sheridan was concerned, however, that the campaign's late start—after the January 31, 1876, deadline for the Indians to report to their reservations—gave him too little time to locate and destroy the renegade bands before springtime restored their vaunted mobility. As the columns ventured out onto the cold plains, Sheridan renewed his request for the two new military posts in the Yellowstone Valley.
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Winters on the Northern Plains were harsher than those on the Southern Plains, Sheridan discovered. The weather was so bad in Bismarck that General Terry professed he could not send a column until springtime. Blizzards, temperatures reaching thirty below zero, and deep snow hampered the two remaining columns: George Crook, plodding north from Fort Fetterman, Wyoming, with twelve companies, and Colonel John Gibbon, marching east from Forts Ellis and Shaw with ten companies.

Gibbon found no Indians along the Yellowstone River, but when Crook's column reached the Powder River, his scouts spotted a Northern Cheyenne–Sioux village with 102 lodges. On March 1, Colonel Joseph Reynolds attacked with three hundred men and captured the village and the Indians' horses. The next morning, the Indians counterattacked and got back what they had lost. With his men suffering from frostbite because of the bitter cold, Crook limped back to Fort Fetterman.
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THE WINTER CAMPAIGN HAVING been a failure, Sheridan prepared for a summer campaign, working from the same blueprint. A total of 2,740 men in three columns, from the west, east, and south, would converge on the Powder River country.

Worrisome reports, however, were reaching Sheridan's Chicago headquarters of 1,000 lodges on the Little Missouri, representing Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, Northern Arapahoes, and others, and of additional warriors each day slipping away from the reservations. But Sheridan was convinced that while the bands might briefly unite in large numbers, they would quickly disperse. In this, he was tragically wrong.

He insisted that Custer, with General Terry in overall command of the 1,200-man column, lead the 7th Cavalry from Bismarck. But his favorite cavalry officer was under suspension, just as he had been prior to the Washita expedition. This time, Custer was being punished for more than dereliction of duty; he had offended the Grant administration.

Custer had testified at a congressional hearing convened to determine whether War Secretary Belknap had sold army trading post positions and presided over a corrupt sutler system that diverted supplies from the reservation Indians. Custer's testimony against Belknap and his sutlers was damaging enough, but the loquacious
cavalry hero had then gone on to implicate Grant's brother, Orvil, and the president's brother-in-law.

In a letter to Grant, Sheridan tried to mitigate Custer's transgressions, but he had to admit, “Custer was in error, and I wish only to set it right.” The unappeased Grant ordered Custer stripped of his command of the 7th Cavalry. As the time to begin the summer campaign drew near, Sheridan, Sherman, and General Terry all appealed to Grant to lift Custer's suspension. With great reluctance, the president permitted Custer's reinstatement.
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DURING THE 7TH CAVALRY'S leave-taking from Fort Abraham Lincoln, the troopers' doom-ridden wives wept copiously, and Libbie Custer witnessed an eerie vision. As she rode with the regiment onto the prairie, the troopers seemed to her to be marching simultaneously on the earth and in the sky. The result of an atmospheric phenomenon, Mrs. Custer's vision seemed ominously portentous.
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The supreme leader of the Sioux, Sitting Bull, also had a vision. After dancing for a day and a half during a “sun dance” ceremony, in which fifty pieces of flesh were cut from each of his arms, he reported seeing soldiers, horses, and some Indians falling from the sky, “like grasshoppers.”
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At about the same time, Sheridan was writing to Sherman that he was “not at all sanguine” about the coming campaign but added, “We might just as well settle the Sioux matter now; it will be better for all concerned.”
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CROOK WENT INTO ACTION first and fulfilled Sheridan's misgivings about the campaign. On June 17 at the Battle of the Rosebud—near where Reynolds was beaten on March 1—1,000 Cheyenne and Sioux warriors led by Sitting Bull and their war chief, Crazy Horse, attacked Crook's 1,100-man column from Fort Fetterman. While numerically equal to the Indians, Crook's men were overmatched in ability, and only their tenacious Crow and Shoshone auxiliaries prevented a disaster.

Still, it was a defeat, with Crook's losses totaling twenty-eight killed and fifty-six wounded. The Indians, who fought superbly for six hours before breaking off the attack, lost thirty-six dead and sixty-three wounded. Claiming victory, Crook withdrew to Little Goose Creek in northern Wyoming and did not stir from there for six weeks, except to hunt and fish.
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Sheridan was visiting the Sioux agencies and Camp Robinson while Crook was fighting for his life on the Rosebud. He departed for Chicago on June 18, not knowing about the Rosebud defeat or that Custer was about to enter a hornet's nest.
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PHILADELPHIA WAS IN A celebratory mood on July 4, 1876. Not only was it the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, but thousands of people—Generals
Sheridan and Sherman among them—were attending the first world's fair ever held in the United States, the Centennial International Exposition. A wildly popular exhibit was the gigantic hand and torch of Frederic Bartholdi's work in progress, “Liberty Enlightening the World”—the future Statue of Liberty.

Just after midnight, early on the Fourth of July, a band played the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and the Liberty Bell was rung thirteen times before an audience of a quarter-million people gathered outside Independence Hall. Later that day, a Salt Lake City–datelined Associated Press report was handed to Sherman and Sheridan: Custer and five companies of the 7th Cavalry had been wiped out. The generals refused to believe the news; it was simply impossible.

The next day, however, a 15,000-word report from General Terry confirmed the AP story. Terry's report began, “Bismarck, D.T., July 5, 1876:—General Custer attacked the Indians June 25, and he, with every officer and man in five companies, were killed.”

Custer had divided his regiment into three columns along the Little Big Horn River. Then, with 215 of his men, he had attacked an Indian village without realizing its enormous size until it was too late. As many as 2,000 warriors—Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, Blackfeet, Sans Arcs, Brules, and Northern Arapahoes—had wiped out Custer and all of his men before an hour had passed.
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NO COMPARABLE MILITARY DISASTER had befallen the army in the United States' one hundred years of existence. And even though the Civil War's long casualty lists had numbed Americans to loss, the news of the violent death of the nation's best-known cavalryman and Indian fighter, along with two of his brothers (one of them, Tom Custer, the only Union soldier to win two Medals of Honor), a brother-in-law, a nephew, and more than two hundred others, sent a galvanic shock wave through the nation.
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Eastern opinion, which had supported Grant's Peace Policy and condemned Custer's attack at the Washita River and the Piegan massacre, underwent a seismic shift. The
New York Times
declared that many Easterners now believed the Indians should be exterminated, “as though they were so many mad dogs.” The
Nation
wrote, “Our philanthropy and our hostility tend to about the same end, and this is destruction of the Indian race.”
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Sheridan sent Terry and Crook into Montana to hunt down the Indians that killed Custer and his men. But as he had predicted in early June, the great encampment had broken up, and the tribes had scattered. The army faced the old problem of chasing bands of warriors that would strike and run but not stand and fight. Never seeing the sense in prosecuting this kind of futile warfare, Sheridan began planning a Red River War–style winter campaign to destroy the Indians' means of sustenance and hound them until they surrendered or died.

The Custer massacre embittered Sheridan toward the Sioux, whom he now regarded as his mortal enemy. Yet he refused to acknowledge his and the government's provocations—violating the Fort Laramie treaties by letting gold prospectors flood the Black Hills and forcing the Sioux onto their reservations. It was all the Indians' fault, Sheridan said. “They wanted to fight, and have been preparing for it for years back,” he wrote. “It is their glory, their profession, and the only thing that stirs them up from absolute idleness.”

Congress now belatedly approved construction of the two forts on the Yellowstone River that Sheridan had thrice requested. It also authorized the enlistment of 2,500 new cavalry privates. Had the forts existed in 1876, Sheridan believed, there would have been no Great Sioux War, and Custer and his men would still be alive.

The forts could not be built until spring 1877 at the earliest. In the meantime, Sheridan sent infantry and cavalry units to the Sioux hunting grounds to harry the warriors. “There will be no letup on the hostile Indians on my part until they are finally subdued,” Sheridan vowed.
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The Interior Department took the unprecedented step of voluntarily ceding control of the Sioux agencies to the army. Sheridan stationed troops at the agencies to dismount and disarm the renegade bands when hunger drove them there. He also sent Lieutenant Colonel Fred Grant, the president's oldest son, to the Sioux agencies to conduct a head count. Unsurprisingly, the Indian agents had submitted wildly inflated numbers, and only one-half of the Indians reported as present were actually on the reservations. The rest were with the wild bands, which explained why Crook and Custer had faced such surprisingly large numbers of hostile warriors.
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CUSTER AND FIVE COMPANIES of the 7th Cavalry had ridden off to attack the north side of the Sioux's sprawling village alongside the Little Big Horn River while Major Marcus Reno and three companies struck the south end. Four days before the battle, General Terry had told Custer that he planned to attack the village from the north while Custer, on the south side, blocked the Indians' escape. But Terry also said that if Custer reached the village before Terry, he should not wait if he believed he could win. Custer had believed, and he had acted accordingly. Unfortunately for him, a bend in the river and the heavily wooded riverbanks concealed the village's terrible secret—its six great tribal circles stretching for miles, with 10,000 to 15,000 Indians.