Terrible Swift Sword (59 page)

Writing to Sherman in December 1878, Sheridan vented his frustration with the reservations' management: “We have occupied his [the Indian's] country, taken away from him his lovely domain, destroyed his herds of game, penned him up on reservations, and reduced him to poverty. For humanity's sake, then, let us give him enough to eat, and integrity in the agents over him.”

Sherman wholeheartedly agreed. The army, he said, had become “the peripatetic police of civil Indian agents who are, in many cases, selected for no other reason than that of political expediency.”
¹³

 

THE ANNUAL REPORTS SUBMITTED by the army's military division commanders normally passed into the records unremarked upon, but Sheridan's 1878 report, unique in its bitterness and eloquence, attracted attention. In it, Sheridan blamed the government's “injudicious treatment” of the Indians and its failure to move the Sioux to the Missouri River for the 1876–1877 Great Sioux War. And he deplored the ridiculously heavy demands placed on the undermanned army to control the 192,000 Indians in ninety-nine tribes that resided in the 1 million square miles of Sheridan's Missouri Military Division. “No other nation in the world,” he wrote, would have attempted to subdue the Plains Indians with fewer than 60,000 or 70,000 men, yet his forces on the plains never numbered more than 14,000, with one-third of them stationed along the Rio Grande. As a result, every encounter between troops and Indians became “a forlorn hope,” with “the most barbarous cruelties staring [the soldiers] in the face in case of defeat.”

The 1868–1869 Southern Plains war, he wrote, was the inevitable result of the region's rapid settlement and the government breaking every promise that it had made to the Indians. When the tribes reacted by robbing, raping, and murdering settlers across western Kansas, the government sent after them “an army too small to intimidate or even punish.” Only “by the constant hammering of an inadequate force” was the military able to force the Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes onto the reservations, Sheridan wrote.

But there was nothing inevitable about the 1876–1877 Great Sioux War, he said. The Indians were not getting the food and supplies that they had been promised; some were half starving. “We took away their country, and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this that they made war,” Sheridan wrote with unusual asperity. “Could any one expect less? Then why wonder at Indian difficulties?”

The Indian Bureau had then inexcusably let thousands of Northern Plains Indians leave their reservations after they had received “their annuities and rations” and then return “well loaded down with plunder.” “Kind treatment administered
with steadiness and justice” might have forestalled the Plains Indian wars, Sheridan wrote, but there never was “much steadiness in the management of the Indians.”

Sheridan's blunt cataloguing of the Indian Bureau's failures enraged Interior Secretary Carl Schurz, the onetime German revolutionary and Union army general. “There is, it seems to me, a certain fairness due from one branch of the public service to another” that his department did not receive from the War Department before Sheridan's report was made public, Schurz sputtered. He was highly offended, too, by Sheridan's “supercilious” tone. Schurz demanded that Sheridan supply proof of everything that he had said.

Sheridan responded by forwarding copies of reports dating to 1874 filed by his Division of Missouri field officers that pointedly described the desolation of the reservation Indians—reports that Schurz already possessed. Why was the Interior secretary challenging Sheridan's conclusions when he knew the facts very well? Sheridan wondered. “Surely the officers who guard his agencies and who are held responsible for lives and property on the frontier should have a right to report the causes of trouble without the danger of being lectured into silence by the Secty of the Interior,” Sheridan wrote, suggesting that Schurz was trying to intimidate him and his subordinates into remaining quiet about the problems.

Schurz appointed his own committee to conduct its own investigation and make its own findings, without any of Sheridan's information. Then, to his credit, Schurz began implementing reforms, while insisting that the reservations must remain under civilian control—this being the reason for Schurz's actions.

At the inevitable congressional hearing that followed, Schurz accused the War Department of a long history of dishonest dealings with the Indians, dating to the Cherokee removal of 1838. Schurz's energetic response to Sheridan's report preempted the last serious attempt to move oversight of the reservations to the War Department—which had administered the Indian Bureau until its transfer in 1848 to the Interior Department.

Sheridan grumbled that the Interior Department could run its affairs to suit itself. “It's none of my business who they cheat as long as they don't cheat the Army.”
¹⁴

As the contretemps subsided in January 1879, the
St. Louis Times Journal
wrote, “If Mr. Schurz is in earnest in his professions of reform he should have thanked General Sheridan for calling the attention of the country to abuses that have been too long tolerated.” Instead, Schurz had responded with an “absolute and contemptuous . . . . style of treatment of General Sheridan,” which deserved a “rebuke for its bad manners.”
¹⁵

 

MORE THAN ANY OTHER American, Sheridan had been responsible for safeguarding Western immigrants at the height of the Plains Indians' dominance—a bloodstained
era of slaughter, rapine, and total war.
^c
After dedicating more than a decade to smashing the power of the monarchs of the Great Plains—the Cheyennes, Sioux, Kiowas, Kickapoos, Apaches, Arapahoes, and Comanches—Sheridan now did something wholly unexpected. The most famous living Indian fighter in America decided to sponsor an ethnological study of the Plains Indians' culture before it vanished. He named two army officers from General Crook's staff, William Clark and John Bourke, to analyze the northern and southern tribes. The result was an essay by Bourke on the Arizona Moquis Indians' snake dance and Clark's landmark book
The Indian Sign Language.
¹⁶

Sheridan's sympathy for the conquered Plains Indians became evident when President Grover Cleveland sent him to arbitrate a dispute between cattlemen and the Southern Plains tribes in Indian Territory. The two sides were on the brink of open warfare.

Indian agent John Miles had persuaded the Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe chiefs to lease 2.4 million acres to seven cattlemen for a ridiculously low two cents per acre. Tribal members were outraged when they learned what their chiefs had done. Cattlemen who had been left out of the deal egged on the protesters. John Miles's successor, Indian agent D. B. Dyer, sided with the chiefs and cattlemen and requested that federal troops be sent to protect them

In July 1883, Sheridan and Brigadier General Nelson Miles met with all of the involved parties. Two dissenting leaders, Little Robe and White Shield, complained that cattlemen were building fences everywhere. Others claimed that cowboys had shot and killed an Indian when he tried to stop cattle from being run across his property. Whites were stealing their horses and cattle, they said, and agency officials were shortchanging them on rations and supplies.

The chiefs who signed the deal confessed to Sheridan that they now regretted having done so. The cattlemen blamed the dispute on Indian troublemakers; the deal was fair, they said, and they had met all of the terms.

After Sheridan and Miles had listened to everyone, Sheridan recommended that President Cleveland order the cattlemen to leave the reservation. He proposed that agent Dyer be replaced with Captain Jesse Lee of the 9th Cavalry.

Cleveland removed Dyer and gave the cattlemen forty days to clear out their cattle, which soon joined the herds on the already crowded Texas and Kansas ranges. During the winter of 1885–1886, when storms killed hundreds of thousands of cattle on the southern plains, cattlemen bitterly blamed Sheridan.
¹⁷

 

DURING SHERIDAN'S REINCARNATION AS a defender of the Plains Indians, he came to believe the reservations were so flawed that they should be abolished and the Indians gradually assimilated into society. He drew up a plan to wean the Indians and the US government from the reservation system. Each Indian family would receive an allotment of 320 acres of reservation land. The government would “buy” the unallocated Indian land from the tribes for $1.25 an acre, investing the money in government bonds. It then would sell that land to settlers, recouping the money it had paid the Indians.

The Interior Department would send the Indian families annual interest payments, at roughly 4 percent, on the bonds. The interest payments would build homes and schools and purchase farming equipment. The annual proceeds would have totaled as much as $1 million in the Dakota Territory and $223,000 in Montana. “The Indians are not poor, they are only incompetent at the present time to take care of their property,” Sheridan wrote. They would receive the bonds' principal only when they were judged competent to manage their affairs.

The plan, generous and farsighted, was not adopted. Instead, in 1887 Congress approved the Dawes Severalty Act, which gave each family 160 acres and opened the surplus lands for settlement. The Indians were supposed to receive annual interest payments on the land sold to whites but only got occasional small payments.
¹⁸

 

GENERAL OF THE ARMY William Sherman announced that he would go on the army retirement list on his sixty-fourth birthday, on February 8, 1884. It was now the turn of Sheridan, the last member of the great triumvirate that had led the Union army to victory in 1865, to become the army's commanding general. The promotion did not mean that Sheridan became a four-star general of the army like Sherman; he retained his three-star lieutenant general rank. The transition began on November 1, 1883, when Sherman stepped down from his command position while remaining on active duty for three months to instruct Sheridan in his new duties.
¹⁹

At the age of fifty-two, Sheridan became the army's first general in chief whose entire adult life, thirty-four years, had been spent in uniform. Sheridan's immediate predecessors—George McClellan, Henry Halleck, Grant, and Sherman—had all graduated from West Point but resigned from the army as captains, then returned to serve during the war. None of the antebellum commanders of the US Army had attended West Point, and all had received their commissions as civilians.
²⁰

Reaching the pinnacle of his profession was not an unalloyed joy for Sheridan; he had to leave Chicago, where he had sunk deep roots over sixteen years. During the 1871 fire, Sheridan had won the city's abiding gratitude by swiftly restoring order and bringing food, clothing, and blankets to homeless residents. Chicago was where he and Irene had married in 1875, where their four young children had been
born, and where some of his closest friends lived. But Washington, DC, would now become the Sheridans' home.

Thirty-one of Sheridan's Chicago businessman friends—including Marshall Field, George Pullman, Joseph Medill, and Philip Armour—made the transition easier by purchasing a roomy, three-story brick home in Washington for the Sheridans. Located at the corner of Rhode Island Avenue and Seventeenth Street, the four-year-old home, for which the benefactors paid $44,000, was a dozen blocks from the War Department. At one of the numerous receptions and dinners honoring Sheridan before his leave-taking, civic leaders presented him with the deed to his new home. In the accompanying letter, they wrote, “Citizens of Chicago . . . . can never forget the great services rendered to their city by you at the time of its surest need.”
²¹

 

IN CANADA, SITTING BULL and 4,000 Sioux, joined in October 1877 by 150 bedraggled refugees from Chief Joseph's Nez Perce's band, remained the last major holdouts of the Great Sioux War. Sitting Bull “abruptly and disdainfully” spurned a delegation of US commissioners who wanted to discuss surrender terms. Miles agitated unsuccessfully for an across-the-border expedition on the order of Mackenzie's illegal Mexican raid against the Kickapoos.

One of Sheridan's great strengths was his ability to adapt a strategy to the situation, and he did so now. While publicly disavowing any plan to force the Sioux's surrender, “so long as they behave themselves and keep north off the Missouri,” he quietly executed a plan to starve Sitting Bull into submission. He hinted at such a stealth program in a letter to Sherman in March 1878. “I think an international understanding to prevent the wild buffalo herd of that region from crossing the line to and fro, would be about as sensible as an understanding to control the Indians,” he wrote.
²²

While there is no official US record of such an understanding, Canadian historian C. M. MacInnes wrote that beginning in 1878, US cavalry and Indian auxiliaries drove the buffalo southward whenever herds approached the border. Other early-twentieth-century Canadian historians, relying on eyewitnesses, related similar accounts.
^d

During this period buffalo hunters were also shipping tens of thousands of hides from Montana down the Missouri River each year. In a letter, Sheridan wrote, “If
I could learn that every Buffalo in the north herd were killed I would be glad. The destruction of this herd would do more to keep Indians quiet than anything else that could happen, except the death of all the Indians.”
²³

Whether compelled by a clandestine US policy of deliberate starvation or not, hungry Sioux from Canada began straggling south into the reservations in small groups in 1879 and 1880. On July 19, 1881, Sitting Bull led 185 men, women, and children into Fort Burford and surrendered. Of the virtual annihilation of the northern buffalo herd, Sitting Bull bitterly commented, “A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell—a death wind for my people.”
²⁴