Terrible Swift Sword (60 page)

 

THAT LEFT JUST ONE major Indian leader for Sheridan's generals to beat into submission—the wily Chiricahua Apache Geronimo. For two decades, Geronimo had alternately terrorized settlers on both sides of the border and lived quietly for years at a time. When in 1881 Geronimo's band left the San Carlos, Arizona, reservation and slaughtered dozens of settlers in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, Sheridan appointed Major General George Crook to command the Department of Arizona.

In 1883, Crook tracked Geronimo down in Mexico's Sierra Madre mountain range and persuaded him to surrender. But two years later, Geronimo again broke out of the reservation and, with forty-two warriors and ninety-two women and children, fled to Mexico. Geronimo's band raided southern Arizona and New Mexico, leaving a trail of thirty-eight settlers' bodies. With 3,000 men, Crook gave chase, but the Chiricahuas disappeared into the mountains.

These latest killings brought Sheridan to Fort Bowie, Arizona, where he informed Crook that he would end the Apache scourge by sending the Chiricahuas and the Warm Springs Apaches to the East. But Crook persuaded him to wait until Geronimo was brought in; if their wives and children were removed, Crook's Apache scouts would stop aiding his troops. Sheridan reluctantly acquiesced, although he disapproved of using Apache scouts to track Apaches, believing they did not try hard enough.
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The disagreement marked the further erosion of the friendship between onetime West Point roommates Crook and Sheridan—a friendship that over the years had deteriorated into a strained working relationship. The process had begun twenty years earlier in the Shenandoah Valley with Sheridan's displeasure over the rout of Crook's VIII Corps at Cedar Creek and Crook's resentment over Sheridan's receiving all the credit for the victories at Winchester and Fisher's Hill, when the flank attacks that won both battles had been Crook's ideas.

Then, there had been Crook's inexplicable—to Sheridan—defeat at the Rosebud in 1876 and his six weeks of inactivity afterward, which Sheridan partly blamed for the Custer massacre. His laggardly pursuit of the Sioux over the next months
caused Sheridan to bring in Mackenzie and Miles. There had always been extenuating circumstances, but Sheridan neither forgot nor altogether forgave failure, just as Crook resented Sheridan's begrudging him credit during the Civil War. “I regret that I learned too late that it was not what a person did, but it was what he got the credit of doing that gave him a reputation,” Crook wrote in his autobiography.
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Despite the souring relations between the two men, Crook, with his oddly parted beard, had become the army's best-known, most innovative field commander. His 1872–1873 Tonto Basin campaign in north-central Arizona had forced 6,000 White Mountain Apaches and Yavapais to enroll at reservations. Crook was the first to use Sioux scouts to track down renegade Sioux bands and Apaches to pursue Apaches. He pioneered the use of the mule pack train, which could both travel faster than wagon trains and go places wagon trains could not.
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Crook's second campaign against Geronimo ended in January 1886 in a two-hour battle between one hundred of Crook's Apache scouts and Mexican militia. The scouts and their leader, Captain Emmet Crawford, were riding to meet with Geronimo when the militia confronted them, accused them of marauding, and opened fire, fatally wounding Crawford. As Geronimo and his people watched, the scouts, infuriated by the shooting of Crawford, picked off every militia officer.

While the battle had disrupted the meeting with Geronimo, the Apache leader was weary of living as a fugitive. In March 1886, he and other Apache leaders met with Crook and agreed to go into exile in the East for two years. But on the same night, after drinking mescal, Geronimo was assailed by doubts and fled with twenty men and thirteen women.
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Both President Grover Cleveland and Sheridan renounced the broken deal with Geronimo anyway; they would accept only unconditional surrender. Sheridan insinuated that the Apache scouts had allowed the chief to get away. “It seems strange that Geronimo and his party should have escaped without the knowledge of the scouts,” he told Crook.

When Sheridan ordered Crook to stop pursuing Geronimo and to instead take defensive precautions to thwart any raids, Crook asked to be relieved. Sheridan promptly did so, sending Crook to the Department of the Platte. He appointed his current favorite field commander, Nelson Miles, to replace him.

 

COLONEL RANALD MACKENZIE, SHERIDAN'S hard-driving campaigner, might have appeared to be Crook's logical replacement. He had long been Sheridan's troubleshooter and had campaigned for years in the Southwest. But because of mental illness, possibly early dementia, Mackenzie had been judged unfit for command and forced into an early retirement.

“General Mackenzie was sent to Bloomingdale [Asylum, in New York] after a full consultation with his friends,” Sheridan informed Mackenzie's sister Harriet in
1883. Mackenzie was later discharged to live with relatives, but he steadily declined until his death in 1889, at the age of forty-eight.
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CROOK NEVER FORGAVE SHERIDAN, bitterly remarking in his autobiography, written after Sheridan's death, “The adulations heaped on him by a grateful nation for his supposed genius turned his head, which, added to his natural disposition, caused him to bloat his little carcass with debauchery and dissipation.”

After he was promoted from field command, Sheridan certainly gained weight—his five-foot-five frame, which had carried 115 pounds after Missionary Ridge, now packed 200 pounds. His detractors suggested that his high color was due to heavy drinking, but Sheridan imbibed moderately. High blood pressure and the congenital heart problem that would end his life might better explain Sheridan's ruddiness.
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Miles was no more successful than Crook in tracking down Geronimo in Mexico, although not for lack of effort; his expedition logged 2,000 miles. But while the pursuit failed, Miles's summary exile of the Chiricahuas and Warm Springs Apaches to Florida—Sheridan's plan, which Crook had opposed—worked brilliantly. Geronimo's followers became so thoroughly demoralized that they gave up.

Geronimo surrendered unconditionally to Miles on September 4, 1886—becoming the last tribal leader to submit to the US government and concluding twenty years of Indian wars. Years later, while living at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Geronimo earned money by selling his photograph and souvenir hunting bows inscribed with his name. He died at Fort Sill in 1909.
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AS THE ARMY'S COMMANDING general, Sheridan had charge of about 26,000 men—a smaller force than he had commanded in the Shenandoah Valley or at Five Forks. Moreover, he quickly discovered that the secretary of war was the de facto military commander—his departmental commanders reported directly to War Secretary Robert Todd Lincoln, the late president's oldest son. Often, Sheridan first learned of orders that had gone out with his supposed authorization when he read about them in the newspapers.

As had Sherman, Sheridan bridled at Lincoln's high-handedness, only to have the war secretary rebuke him, then rub it in by sending copies of the scolding to Sheridan's subordinate commanders. While his first months as commanding general were disconcertingly humbling, even humiliating, he found that his happy domestic life, comfortable salary, and high profile mitigated his dissatisfaction.
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REMOVED FROM DAY-TO-DAY DECISION making, Sheridan devoted himself to modernizing the army, a process begun by Sherman, who had been impressed by the reforms proposed by the brilliant warrior-scholar Lieutenant Colonel Emory Upton. Sheridan continued Sherman's effort to make the officer corps more professional:
upgrading the Artillery School at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and obtaining more funds for the School of Application for Cavalry and Infantry begun by Sherman at Fort Leavenworth—the basic training school for officers.

Sheridan crusaded to improve army marksmanship, and he succeeded Grant as president of the National Rifle Association. Upon his recommendation, the first army shooting team was formed; Sheridan oversaw the construction of army rifle ranges around the country. He arranged for marksmanship medals to be cast at the Philadelphia Mint.

Sheridan's keen interest in modern weapons inspired his promotion of breech cannons and the “magazine gun,” which he called “the gun of the future.” Yet, like nearly all Civil War–vintage officers, he was prejudiced against the Gatling gun. Spurned by most Union army officers even though the continuous-firing gun was available in 1862, the Gatling was not accepted by the American army until 1866.

Unwieldy as a cannon, the Gatling also wasted ammunition, Sheridan observed, and the gunner was highly vulnerable to sniper fire. When Brigadier General Alfred Terry requested more Gatlings, Sheridan replied that he didn't believe that the Gatling had killed a single Indian. “What we want on the frontier against Indians is more soldiers not new Gatling guns,” Sheridan wrote.

Nor was he impressed by an innovation known as the “trowel bayonet,” which he said was too cumbersome to carry on a rifle and would only encourage infantrymen to dig holes when they should be advancing.
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Sheridan represented the army at ceremonial events. He was grand marshal at the commemoration of the completed Washington Monument in 1885 and attended the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. He was a pallbearer at the funerals of two former presidents, Ulysses Grant and Chester Arthur. And as the last of the Civil War's victorious triumvirate still in active service, Sheridan was an enormously popular keynote speaker at veterans' reunions. “You know we old cavalrymen are very clannish and look upon you as our leader,” wrote the president of Pennsylvania's Grand Army of the Republic chapter, in asking Sheridan for a photo so that “a large crayon” could be made of it for the post. Letters such as this and autograph requests crossed Sheridan's desk almost daily.

Sheridan attended many reunions of Civil War veterans. Although he never put his private thoughts about the war to paper—at least not after his personal papers and journals were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire—Sheridan, like thousands of veterans, evidently enjoyed the company of men who had shared the terror and exhilaration of combat. But he objected to the reunions' politicization by candidates for office, and he was uninterested in becoming a candidate himself. “I never had the presidential bee in my bonnet, and I don't intend to have it,” Sheridan told an Associated Press reporter in 1887 after his name had surfaced for a potential candidacy.
“There is nothing that would induce me to leave the profession [in] which nearly forty years of my life have been spent to enter upon a civil career.”

 

BECAUSE HIS JOB WAS relatively undemanding, Sheridan was able to devote plenty of time to his family. The Sheridans had brought their four young children with them from Chicago to Washington, three girls and a boy born between 1876 and 1880: Mary, twin sisters Irene and Louise, and Philip Jr.

Sheridan was an attentive father, as well as an attentive son-in-law, performing a great service for his father-in-law, Colonel Daniel Rucker, the army's assistant quartermaster general. At Sheridan's quiet urging, President Chester Arthur compelled the retirement of sixty-six-year-old Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, whose son, the late Lieutenant John Meigs, was killed in 1864 in the Shenandoah Valley. Meigs's retirement cleared the way for Rucker, who was seventy years old, to at last reach the summit of the Quartermaster Corps after forty-five years of army service. Ten days as quartermaster general was enough for Rucker, who then followed Meigs into retirement with the rank of brigadier general.
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The Sheridans entertained frequently—their guests included the president, diplomats, cabinet members, judges, and congressmen. Irene Rucker Sheridan was one of Washington's most popular hostesses, sometimes receiving more than one hundred callers in a day in her high-ceiling sitting room with a bay window.

Sheridan preferred the library, with its red silk wallpaper covered with portraits of army friends, living and dead, and with shelves reaching to the ceiling, full of books. It was there, beginning in 1886, that he wrote his
Personal Memoirs
on a thick pad of white paper—necessarily lonely, tedious work that spanned a year and a half. Because his Civil War journals, reports, and diaries had been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, he had to piece it together from memory and the War Department's archives. Poor health forced him to conclude the memoirs with an account of his trip to Europe in 1870 and 1871.
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While the war secretary had arrogated to himself the army commander's authority in most important matters, Sheridan occasionally got his way in small concerns, such as the fight over the Confederate battle flags. In 1887, War Secretary William Endicott ordered the Rebel flags returned to the states from which they were captured. Endicott had not served in the Union army, and so he did not anticipate the howl of protest that his proposed action would evoke. Led by Sheridan, prominent members of the Grand Army of the Republic and Northern politicians violently objected. President Cleveland rescinded Endicott's order.
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SENATOR GEORGE VEST OF Missouri had been a Confederate congressman and a senator; unsurprisingly, he was a Democrat. Those credentials made him an improbable ally of Phil Sheridan. But Sheridan's years as a quasi public servant had
made him a political pragmatist, and Vest happened to be chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. He became Sheridan's most important partner in his crusade to protect Yellowstone National Park from developers, poachers, and vandals.
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