Terrible Swift Sword (57 page)

The warriors' initial preoccupation with annihilating Custer's command gave Reno time to find a good defensive position and join forces with Captain Frederick Benteen, whose four companies had been held in reserve to prevent the Indians from escaping to the south. Together, they survived a two-day siege by the warriors who had wiped out Custer.

After studying battle reports and interviewing or corresponding with the officers involved, Sheridan concluded that the disaster was due both to Custer's tactical mistakes and the swiftness of his attack on the Sioux village. With no time to flee, the inhabitants could only stand and fight. Custer's failure to reconnoiter the village and his decision to divide his 650-man regiment into three columns had sealed his fate. The calamity resulted from “misapprehension and a superabundance of courage—the latter extraordinarily developed in Custer,” Sheridan wrote to Sherman.
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Later, Sheridan confided to his childhood friend Henry Greiner, “Poor Custer, he was the embodiment of gallantry. . . . . But I was always fearful that he would catch it if allowed a separate command. . . . . He was too impetuous, without deliberation; he thought himself invincible and having a charmed life. When I think of the many brave fellows who went down with him that day, it is sickening.”
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SHERIDAN PULLED IN TROOPS from all over the Division of the Missouri to pursue Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the renegade bands. But the chase was laggardly under Terry and Crook. Crook, a good combat leader, had become unusually cautious after being bloodied on the Rosebud. The bookish Terry, a trained lawyer and excellent administrator, lacked confidence in his abilities as a field commander. They combined their columns into one force, 3,900 strong. But it required such a large supply train and moved so ponderously that it appeared Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse might run free forever.

This was disappointing, and a shake-up was needed. Eventually, Sheridan moved Terry and Crook to St. Paul and Omaha, respectively, to supervise the flow of supplies to the troops in the field. He appointed Colonels Nelson Miles and Ranald Mackenzie to run their field commands—Miles to command a new Department of the Yellowstone in Montana and Mackenzie to lead operations in the Black Hills, Wyoming, and Nebraska. To Sherman, Sheridan wrote that Miles and Mackenzie must “kill [the renegades] or compel them to take refuge at the several agencies.”
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It was an inspired move. Crook and Terry excelled at getting supplies to the troops, and Miles and Mackenzie were aggressive, energetic, and utterly relentless. Miles would operate from a winter base at the mouth of the Tongue River in Montana, while Mackenzie's winter camp was located in Wyoming's Powder River country.

 

AT 4 A.M. ON October 23, 1876, Mackenzie and eighteen companies surrounded and pounced on the Sioux chief Red Cloud's camp. The attack was a complete surprise, and the soldiers seized the village and all of the band's ponies without loss of life. They disarmed and escorted the Indians to Fort Robinson.
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A month later, Mackenzie led 1,100 cavalrymen in a night march over the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming. At dawn on November 25—five months to the day after the annihilation of Custer's command—the troopers charged through the 173-lodge Northern Cheyenne village of Lone Wolf and Dull Knife near the Red Fork of the Powder River. Although four hundred warriors resisted fiercely, they were driven from the village.

Before burning the lodges, the troopers confiscated loot from the Custer massacre: the regiment's silk guidon and memo books and Tom Custer's buckskin jacket. The Northern Cheyennes lost their lodges, six hundred horses, and thirty warriors killed. Five troopers died. The previously unassailable Northern Cheyennes never fully recovered from the blow struck by Mackenzie's men that day.

After chasing Sitting Bull around Montana for two months, Miles's scouts located Crazy Horse's camp on the upper Tongue River. On January 9, 1877, Miles's 5th Cavalry defeated five hundred Sioux and Northern Cheyenne warriors at Wolf Mountain.
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Throughout the remainder of the winter, Miles and Mackenzie harried the Indians through blizzards and subzero temperatures. Their aggressive pursuit wore down their quarry.

 

THE TENSE I876 PRESIDENTIAL election unexpectedly drained potential resources from Sheridan's campaign. The contest between Ohio's Republican governor, Rutherford Hayes, and Samuel Tilden, the Democratic governor of New York, was expected to be close, and Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan feared that a tie might reignite the Civil War. Sherman and Sheridan also believed that if Tilden won, he would replace them with former Confederates. President Grant ordered Sheridan to ready 4,000 troops from across the West to move east to preserve order if needed.

When the votes were counted, Tilden appeared to have narrowly won both the popular and electoral votes. But Republicans claimed that blacks had been illegally prevented from voting in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, and they challenged Oregon's results too. If Republicans won all four states, Hayes would win by one electoral vote.

Congress named a fifteen-man electoral commission to determine who had won the four states. Grant asked Sheridan to go to Louisiana to protect the canvassing board. Sheridan was reluctant to leave Missouri division headquarters in the middle of the Great Sioux War, but he went anyway.

Sheridan's sudden appearance in New Orleans alarmed Democrats, certain that he had come to ensure that the canvassing board certified Hayes as the winner. He tried to reassure them that he was there only to safeguard the canvass. But then the all-Republican canvassing board threw out enough Democratic votes to give Hayes Louisiana's electoral vote. Disgusted with the process, Sheridan returned to Chicago.

A grand compromise by congressional Democrats and Republicans pronounced Hayes the winner and pledged to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction.
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IN JANUARY I877, SITTING Bull, tired of running from Miles, announced to the Sioux that he was moving his Hunkpapas to the land of the “Great Mother”—Canada, so named by the Indians for the monarch who ruled England and her dominions, Queen Victoria.
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Between March and May 6, 1877—the day that Crazy Horse and 889 of his people came in to the Red Cloud Agency—thousands of gaunt, ragged, and frostbitten hostiles surrendered at the agencies. Sheridan's troopers disarmed and dismounted them. Dull Knife, while surrendering his band of 524 Northern Cheyennes to Mackenzie, told the cavalry officer, “You were the one I was afraid of when you came here last summer.”

The government compelled the reservation Sioux—threatened with denial of rations—to sign documents giving up the Black Hills and their hunting grounds. What the government had proposed to pay $6 million for in October 1875 it now obtained free of charge.

During the spring of 1877, Sheridan dispatched military crews to build the two forts in the Yellowstone Valley. Fort Custer was erected at the mouth of the Little Big Horn River. The second fort, at the mouth of the Tongue River, was named Fort Keogh, for Captain Myles Keogh, who died with Custer.

From Fort Keogh, Miles's command pursued the few straggling bands that had not yet come in to the Indian agencies. The last of them surrendered in September, ending the Great Sioux War and safeguarding the Yellowstone country for settlers, miners, developers, and railroaders.
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DURING THE SUMMER OF 1877, Sheridan and his staff made an inspection tour of Wyoming and Montana. As they traveled through the Big Horn Mountains, a zoologist with the party discovered a new butterfly species. He honored Sheridan by naming it
Theela sheridani
.

The peaceful Yellowstone Valley and the new forts, Custer and Keogh, inspired Sheridan with optimism; he foresaw an era of uninterrupted prosperity for the region. Already, he wrote, a growing population “[is] engaged in mining, grazing, and agricultural pursuits, pays taxes, builds farmhouses, and constructs fences, plows up the ground, erects school-houses, and founds villages . . . . [adding] so much more to the trade, commerce and prosperity of the world.”

In July, the party reached the Custer battlefield in southern Montana. Sheridan toured it with his aides, Sioux guides, and others—seventy men in all. The enlisted
men killed in the battle were buried where they fell, while the remains of Custer and his officers had been sent to Fort Leavenworth to be shipped to their survivors. Custer was interred at West Point.

As Sheridan walked the grassy, shadeless hillside in the midday heat, trying to make sense of how his friend and his men had perished here, he conceived the idea of preserving the site as it was, as a national cemetery.
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1882–1884

BEGINNING IN 1871, Philip Sheridan had planned and sent four exploration expeditions into Yellowstone National Park. In 1882, he personally led a large expedition into the enchanted province of geysers and spectacular vistas.

Everything pleased him at first. The Union Pacific Railroad transported the expedition party to Green River Station in Wyoming. The party traveled by wagon to Lander and Fort Washakie, entering the park in mid-August. With Sheridan were his brother, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Sheridan, and a half-dozen Chicago friends, including Anson Stager, the head of Western Electric; fellow officers and a
company of the 2nd Cavalry led by Captain J. N. Wheelan; and five Shoshone scouts. The party numbered 130 men and three hundred horses and mules.

Each day, the expedition followed Sheridan's unvarying routine of breaking camp by 6:15 a.m., marching fifteen to twenty-five miles, and stopping in the afternoon to enjoy the stunning scenery and to reel in brook trout from the clear streams and rivers. Good weather favored them each day. Following the course of the Snake River, they blazed the first trail connecting present-day Jackson Hole and the Thumb of Yellowstone Park.

In Yellowstone, they witnessed repeated eruptions of Old Faithful and many other geysers. Sheridan noted that the geysers had not changed since his visit in 1881, with the exception of the Sheridan Geyser, which had become “very violent” and whose crater now measured 125 feet, compared with 70 feet a year earlier.
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Sheridan enjoyed himself—until he left the park and encountered Northern Pacific Railroad construction crews that were extending the track to Livingston, Montana. Sheridan rode a work train into Billings, where enthusiastic railroad officials described their plan to transform Yellowstone National Park into a lucrative tourist destination.

 

DURING THE NORTHERN PACIFIC railroad's fitful march across the Northern Plains from Duluth toward its destination, Tacoma, there had been no more faithful protector of the railroad's interests than Sheridan's troopers from Fort Abraham Lincoln; they had guarded survey parties and track crews against Indian attacks. The army command and the executives of all the railroads shared wartime friendships, as well as an abiding faith in the nation's Manifest Destiny and the railroads' role as civilization's vanguard.

Not only had the army watched over the Northern Pacific as it marched west, but it had also guarded the construction crews of the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific Railroads as they laid track across the Great Plains. And in 1877, when railroad workers went on strike in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and other cities in the East, President Rutherford Hayes had called on the army to restore order.
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AS THE RAILROAD OFFICIALS eagerly described their plans for Yellowstone, Sheridan's eyes narrowed, glinting with suppressed anger, and his pleasure with the wilderness trip ebbed. The Northern Pacific planned to lay an eighty-mile-long spur line into the park. Interior Secretary Henry Teller had tentatively granted the railroad's development company, Yellowstone Park Improvement Company, the exclusive rights to 4,400 acres on seven tracts.

The tracts were located at the park's most desirable locations, including Old Faithful, Mammoth Hot Springs, Lake Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. For an annual lease fee of just $2 per acre, the improvement company
was permitted to cut all the timber that it needed for fuel and telegraph poles and to clear land for forage. Plans were already moving ahead for a large hotel near the geysers.

“I regretted exceedingly to learn that the National Park had been rented out to private parties,” Sheridan wrote in his report, “for money making purposes, from which claims and conditions will arise that may be hard for the government and the courts to shake off.”
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