Terrible Swift Sword (58 page)

SHERIDAN HAD ENERGETICALLY PROMOTED Yellowstone since 1870, when he encouraged the first important exploration of the region. While inspecting military posts in Montana, Sheridan had met a mountain man who told him wild stories about “wonderland,” as some Montanans called the strange region of geysers, volcanoes, and boiling springs to the south.

Sheridan was highly intrigued. When he reached Helena, a group of men approached him about mounting an expedition into the unmapped Yellowstone country. Sheridan agreed to provide a six-man cavalry escort led by Lieutenant Gustavus Doane; exploration, after all, was one of the army's manifold duties in the West. Led by Henry Washburn, the Montana Territory's surveyor general and a major general during the Civil War, the expedition confirmed everything that trappers and traders had been saying about the Yellowstone country since John Colter's famous exploration during the winter of 1807–1808.

In 1871, separate expeditions organized by Sheridan and Ferdinand Hayden of the US Geological Survey marched independently to the source of the Yellowstone River. The military expedition, led by Army Corps of Engineers captains John Barlow and David Heap, returned with satchels of scientific observations, surveying measurements, and detailed journals. All of Barlow's documents were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire in October, but Heap had kept his own notes—and with them he drew the first accurate map of Yellowstone. An enduring legacy of this expedition was the christening of Mount Sheridan, a 10,308-foot peak overlooking Heart Lake.

Hayden's expedition was arguably more consequential than Sheridan's. It, too, was government sponsored, but the expedition's co-leader, Nathaniel Langford, worked for Jay Cooke, the financier behind the Northern Pacific Railroad. The railroad at that time was steadily advancing across the Dakota Territory toward the Montana Territory.

Two artists also traveled with Hayden: Thomas Moran, whose paintings Cooke had commissioned, and photographer William Henry Jackson. Their depictions of the stunning scenery attracted widespread attention.

The Hayden and Barlow-Heap expeditions produced a trove of incredible artwork and fresh, colorful accounts of mud pots, geysers, and waterfalls. When Jay Cooke had seen and heard it all, he vowed to turn the “Great Geyser Basin” into a public park.

Cooke and the Northern Pacific lobbied Congress hard to make Yellowstone the first national park. Hayden and Langford were the campaign's public faces. Jackson's iconic photos of the park were reproduced and bound in folios; each member of Congress got one.

By December, a bill transforming the wild country into a national park had been introduced. On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses Grant signed the law creating Yellowstone National Park, but without a cent appropriated for its management or maintenance. Fittingly, Langford became the park's first superintendent—without pay.
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The Northern Pacific's ambitious plans for the park were interrupted by the railroad's collapse and Jay Cooke & Company's bankruptcy during the Panic of 1873. The railroad was stranded in Bismarck for six years before resuming its westward march.
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SHERIDAN ORGANIZED EXPLORATIONS TO Yellowstone in 1873, 1875, and 1876. Captain William Ludlow of the Corps of Engineers led the 1875 expedition, accompanied by a young naturalist and Yale PhD, George Bird Grinnell, future editor of
Forest and Stream
magazine and a founder of the Audubon Society. The expedition transformed Grinnell into one of the park's fiercest defenders.
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At the geysers, Ludlow and Grinnell were dismayed to discover that tourists had used hammers to steal ornamental rocks from the formations and had carved their initials into the remaining rocks. Nearly everywhere they went in the park, they saw the carcasses of butchered wildlife. Because no one was there to protect it, the park was under imminent threat; Superintendent Langford, forced to earn a living elsewhere, seldom visited.

In his report, Ludlow recommended that the War Department take over the park and send troops to police it until “a Civilian Superintendency, living in the Park, with a body of mounted police under his orders can suffice for its protection.” Seventy citizens of Bozeman, Montana, signed a memorial to the interior secretary demanding the appointment of a salaried commissioner and assistants.
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SHERIDAN'S REPORT ON HIS 1882 expedition brimmed with passion. Clearly, he believed that Yellowstone was being degraded by neglect: 4,000 elk shot in one winter,
2,000 killed on the park's margins during the past winter, and large numbers of mountain sheep, antelope, deer, and other game destroyed as well. If nothing was done, all the game might be wiped out, Sheridan warned.

Make the park a big game preserve, he urged, and expand it 40 miles to the east and 10 miles to the south—adding 3,444 square miles. Such an expansion would displace no one from what was in fact “rough, mountain country, with an altitude too high for cultivation or winter grazing for cattle,” he wrote.

Sheridan called for quick, decisive action and sought the support of sportsmen's clubs around the country for his plan to make the park a wild game refuge, protected by the army. “If authorized to do so, I will engage to keep out skin hunters and all other hunters, by use of troops from Fort Washakie on the south, Custer on the east, and Ellis on the north, and, if necessary, I can keep sufficient troops in the park to accomplish this object, and give a place of refuge and safety for our noble game.”

Superficially, Sheridan's impassioned defense of the park wildlife appeared to be at odds with his earlier support for the annihilation of the Great Plains buffalo. But in Sheridan's view, there was no inconsistency: two wholly different issues were involved. The buffalo slaughter was necessary to suppress the Plains Indians; the wild game slaughter in Yellowstone served a narrow commercial interest and outraged his sensibilities as a lifelong hunter and former amateur ornithologist.
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In its enumeration of the serial game killings and its detailing of the Northern Pacific Railroad's plan to commercialize Yellowstone, Sheridan's report provoked public indignation. Just five hundred tourists a year on average visited the park, but with the Great Plains at peace and access to the park steadily improving, tourism was going to explode—and the legion of potential visitors wanted their park to remain pristine.

Sheridan reached out to potential allies to help him save Yellowstone National Park from developers, hide hunters, and vandals. Conservation-minded congressmen, chief among them Senator George Vest of Missouri, and naturalists such as Grinnell rallied under Sheridan's banner. Grinnell's
Forest and Stream
demanded that Congress take steps to protect Yellowstone from hide hunters and commercial exploitation.

But the Northern Pacific officials and their financial backers—the so-called railroad gang—were just as determined to not permit the public backlash to derail their plans. They dug in for a long fight.
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THE GREAT SIOUX WAR crushed the power of the Northern Plains Indians, and the Sioux—Sitting Bull and his defiant Hunkpapas in Canada excepted—settled on reservations in the Dakota Territory. But not all of the tribes were resigned to their fate as wards of the federal government.

The Northern Cheyenne and Nez Perce bridled at their resettlement on new reservations in Indian Territory and Idaho, respectively. Trouble continued to flare along the Rio Grande, with Lipans, Kickapoos, Comanches, and even Mexican revolutionaries mounting sporadic raids from Mexico into Texas. (Sheridan considered imposing martial law in the Texas border counties and occupying towns in northern Mexico, and Congress provisionally approved seizing Mexican territory if the raids continued, but the crisis passed.) And the White River Utes in Colorado and Geronimo's Chiricahua Apaches in Arizona rebelled at becoming farmers after having flourished for generations as hunter-gatherers.

But these uprisings between 1877 and 1886 were small affairs compared with the Great Sioux War, the Washita campaign, and the Red River War. And they were relentlessly quashed by Nelson Miles and Ranald Mackenzie, as well as others schooled in the hard-handed “total war” strategy pioneered by Sheridan, William Sherman, George Armstrong Custer, and George Crook.

Between 1868 and 1883, Sheridan directed the rise of a great chain of new forts across his sprawling Division of the Missouri to make it easier to suppress future Indian outbreaks quickly. It was frustrating work because budget constraints almost always required one fort to be abandoned when a new one was built. Worse, the Indian Bureau, which Sheridan believed deliberately moved its Indian agencies away from the forts to avoid the army's criticism of the agents' management, usually then belatedly discovered that it needed troops close at hand. And so the army was then required to build a new fort near the new agency. These unnecessary relocations cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Sheridan complained to Sherman.

The forts protected citizens and profited local businesses. Politicians, citizens, and businessmen ceaselessly petitioned Sheridan to station troops in their districts. To one such petition, Sheridan replied in exasperation, “If the wishes of the settlers on the frontier were to be gratified, we would have a military post in every county, and the Army two or three hundred thousand strong.”
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But the rapid settlement of the West by whites was as effective a deterrent as the army forts. Each year, the Indians found themselves hemmed in further by forts, railroads, towns, and new roads to speed the proliferating settlers to their destinations.

 

SHERIDAN BEGAN TO OPENLY question whether treaties and military campaigns had been the best policies for dealing with the Plains Indians. “It would have been better if the Indians had been considered as part of the population of the United States, and dealt with generously,” Sheridan wrote in one of his annual reports.

He also sharply criticized the Indian Bureau's management of the contractors that supplied the reservations, suggesting that lax oversight was the primary cause
of the Indian wars of the 1870s. The contractors, Sheridan wrote in disgust, were interested solely in what would “best subserve their money-making interests. . . . . I see enough to satisfy me that it is not the Government which is managing the Indians, it is the contractors, traders, and supply interests.”

Sheridan told Sherman there was no question why the Indians had gone to war during the past several years. “The answer is hunger. This cannot be disguised.” The Indians told him that they never received enough food or even the government's attention, except “after making war on its citizens and soldiers.” “Many of the troubles that have occurred on the frontier have grown out of bad feeling superinduced by want of needed supplies,” he wrote. The contractors delivered just part of what the government paid for and pocketed the rest as profit.

Sheridan's solution, which he expounded upon year after year, was to let the army manage the reservations; the army would cut costs by one-third and root out the corruption rampant among contractors and agents. But the army's bête noir, the so-called Indian Ring—the Indian Bureau, Interior Department, their contractors, and their congressional supporters—efficiently blocked every attempt to transfer control to the army.
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Failing to persuade Congress to give the War Department control of the reservations, Sheridan tried to thwart pork barrel military construction and scurrilous trading practices wherever he found them. He won some battles and lost others. He recommended revoking Belker & Company's permit to trade with the Indians after years of “irregular practices,” notably dealing in smallpox-infected buffalo robes. Sheridan stopped a speculator's scheme to transfer Fort Kearney to North Platte, Nebraska, but failed to prevent Fort Abraham Lincoln from being built on a windy bluff near Bismarck. The Northern Pacific Railroad had claimed the more suitable nearby site on the plains for land development and track construction.

After the Great Sioux War, Sheridan urged the relocation of the Sioux reservations to the Missouri River to avert Indian–gold miner clashes in the Black Hills. Not only did the Black Hills treaty specify the relocation, but the Missouri River site had superior timber, soil, and game. But contractors and Indian traders, whose livelihoods would be damaged if trade goods were transported by boat rather than by railroad, persuaded President Grant not to move the agencies. Sheridan resignedly remarked to Sherman on Grant's concession to the businessmen, “He could not well help himself.”

Sheridan objected to placing the Northern Arapahoes and Shoshones, which were ancient enemies, on the same Wyoming reservation. It was a “grave mistake,” Sheridan said, adding that the Northern Arapahoes should have instead been paired with either the Sioux or the Southern Arapahoes. The decision stood.