US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0046/00465.txt

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$Unique_ID{USH00465}
$Pretitle{58}
$Title{American Military History
Chapter 14  Winning the West - The Indian Wars:  1865-1890}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Matlof, Maurice, General Editor}
$Affiliation{US Army}
$Subject{indian
indians
army
war
river
fort
frontier
sioux
tribes
custer}
$Volume{CMH Pub 30-1}
$Date{1985}
$Log{The Apaches Surrender*0046501.scf
}
Book:        American Military History
Author:      Matlof, Maurice, General Editor
Affiliation: US Army
Volume:      CMH Pub 30-1
Date:        1985

Chapter 14  Winning the West - The Indian Wars:  1865-1890

     Perhaps because of a tendency to view the record of a military
establishment in terms of conflict, the U.S. Army's operational experience in
the quarter century following the Civil War has come to be known as the Indian
wars.  Previous struggles with the Indian, dating back to colonial times, had
been limited as to scope and opponent and took place in a period when the
Indian could withdraw or be pushed into vast reaches of uninhabited and as yet
unwanted territory to westward.  By 1865 this safety valve was fast
disappearing; routes of travel and pockets of settlement had multiplied across
the western two-thirds of the nation, and as the Civil War closed, white
Americans in greater numbers and with greater energy than before resumed the
quest for land, gold, commerce, and adventure that had been largely
interrupted by the war.  The showdown between the older Americans and the new
- between two ways of life that were basically incompatible - was at hand.
The besieged red man, with white civilization pressing in and a main source of
livelihood - the buffalo - threatened with extinction, was faced with a
fundamental choice:  surrender or fight.  Many chose to fight, and over the
course of some twenty-five years the struggle ranged over the plains,
mountains, and deserts of the American West, a guerrilla war characterized by
skirmishes, pursuits, massacres, raids, expeditions, battles, and campaigns,
of varying size and intensity.  Given its central role in dealing with the
Indian, the Army made a major contribution to continental consolidation.

The Setting and the Challenge

     After Appomattox the Army had to muster out over a million volunteers and
reconstitute a Regular establishment that had languished during the Civil War
when bounties and short enlistments made service in the volunteers more
profitable.  There were operational commitments to sustain during and after
the transition, some an outgrowth of the war just ended, others the product of
internal and external situations that could not be ignored.  Whereas the
prewar Army of the 1850's was essentially a frontier Army, the postwar Army
became something more.  To defense of the frontier were added military
occupation of the southern states, neutralization of the Mexican border during
Napoleon's colonial enterprise under Maximilian, elimination of a Fenian
(Irish Brotherhood) threat to Canada in the Northeast, and dispersion of white
marauders in the border states.  But these and other later involvements were
passing concerns.  The conflict with the red man was the overriding
consideration in the next twenty-five years until Indian power was broken.

     Unfortunately, the military assets released from other tasks were lost
through reductions in force instead of being diverted to frontier defense.
For even though the country during the Indian campaigns could not be said to
be at peace, neither Congress nor the war-weary citizens in the populous
Atlantic states were prepared to consider it in a state of war.  And in any
case, there was strong sentiment against a large standing army as well as a
widely held belief that the Indian problem could be settled by other than
military means.

     As the postwar Army took shape, its strength began a decade of decline,
dropping from an 1867 level of about 57,000 to half that in the year that
General Custer was killed, then leveling off at an average of about 26,000 for
the remaining years up to the War with Spain.  Effective strength always lay
somewhere below authorized strength, seriously impaired, for example, by high
rates of sickness and desertion.

     Because the Army's military responsibilities were of continental
proportions, involving sweeping distances, limited resources, and far-flung
operations, an administrative structure was required for command and control.
The Army was, therefore, organized on a territorial basis, with geographical
segments variously designated as divisions, departments, and districts.  There
were frequent modifications of organization, rearrangements of boundaries, and
transfers of troops and posts to meet changing conditions.

     Development of a basic defense system in the trans-Mississippi West had
followed the course of empire; territorial acquisition and exploration
succeeded by emigration and settlement brought the whites increasingly into
collision with the Indians and progressively raised the need for military
posts along the transcontinental trails and in settled areas.

     The annexation of Texas in 1845, the settlement of the Oregon boundary
dispute in 1846, and the successful conclusion of the Mexican War with the
cession to the United States in 1848 of vast areas of land, all drew the
outlines of the major task facing the Army in the West in the middle of the
nineteenth century.  During the period between the Mexican and Civil Wars the
Army established a reasonably comprehensive system of forts to protect the
arteries of white travel and areas of white settlement across the frontier.
At the same time, operations were launched against Indian tribes that
represented actual or potential threats to movement and settlement.

     Militarily successful in some cases, these operations nevertheless
hardened Indian opposition, prompted wider red provocation, and led to the
delineation of an Indian barrier to westward expansion extending down the
Great Plains from the Canadian to the Mexican border.  Brig. Gen. William S.
Harney, for example, responded to the massacre of Lt. John L. Grattan's
detachment by Sioux with a punishing attack on elements of that tribe on the
Blue Water in Nebraska in 1855.  Farther south Col. Edwin V. Sumner hit the
Cheyennes on the Solomon Fork in Kansas in 1857, and Bvt. Maj. Earl Van Dorn
fought the Comanches in two successful battles, at Rush Spring in future
Oklahoma and Crooked Creek in Kansas, in 1858 and 1859, respectively.

     In the Southwest between the wars, Army units pursued Apaches and Utes in
New Mexico Territory, clashing with the Apaches at Cieneguilla and Rio
Caliente in 1854 and the Utes at Poncha Pass in 1855.  There were various
expeditions against various branches of the elusive Apaches involving hard
campaigning but few conclusive engagements such as the one at Rio Gila in
1857.  It was in this region in 1861 that Lt. George N. Bascom moved against
Chief Cochise, precipitating events that opened a quarter century of
hostilities with the Chiricahua Apaches.

     In the Northwest, where numerous small tribes existed, there were
occasional hostilities between the late 1840's and the middle 1860's.  Their
general character was similar to operations elsewhere:  white intrusion,
Indian reaction, and white counteraction with superior force.  The more
important events involved the Rogue River Indians in Oregon between 1851 and
1856 and the Yakima, Walla Walla, Cayuse, and other tribes on both sides of
the Cascade Mountains in Washington in the last half of the 1850's.  The Army,
often at odds with civil authority and public opinion in the area, found it
necessary on occasion to protect Indians from whites as well as the other way
around.

     The Regular Army's frontier mission was interrupted by the onset of the
Civil War, and the task of dealing with the Indians was transferred to the
volunteers.  Although the red man demonstrated an awareness of what was going
on and took some satisfaction from the fact that white men were fighting each
other, there is little evidence that he took advantage of the transition
period between removal of the Regulars and deployment of the volunteers.  The
so-called Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862 that produced active
campaigning in the Upper Missouri River region in 1863 and 1864 was
spontaneous, and other clashes around the West were the result, not of the
withdrawal of the Regular Army from the West, but of the play of more
fundamental and established forces.  In any case, by 1865 Army strength in the
frontier departments was about double what it had been at the time of Fort
Sumter.  The volunteers were generally able to keep pace with a continuing and
gradually enlarging westward movement by developing further the system of
forts begun by their predecessors.

     Thus the regional defense systems established in the West in the 1850's
and 60's provided a framework for the deployment of the Army as it turned from
the Civil War to frontier responsibilities.  In the late summer of 1866 the
general command and administrative structure for frontier defense comprised
the Division of the Missouri, containing the Departments of Arkansas,
Missouri, Dakota, and the Platte; the Division of the Pacific, consisting of
the Departments of California and the Columbia; and the independent Department
of the Gulf, whose area included Texas.

     The Army's challenge in the West was one of environment as well as
adversary, and in the summer of 1866 General Grant sent a number of senior
officer inspectors across the country to observe and report on conditions.
The theater of war was uninhabited or only sparsely settled, and its great
distances and extreme variations of climate and geography accentuated manpower
limitations, logistical and communications problems, and the difficulties of
movement.  The extension of the rail system only gradually eased the
situation.  Above all, the mounted tribes of the Plains were a different breed
from the Indians the Army had dealt with previously in the forested areas of
the East.  Despite the fact that the Army had fought Indians in the West in
the period after the Mexican War, much of the direct experience of its
officers and men had been lost during the Civil War years.  Until frontier
proficiency could be re-established, the Army would depend upon the somewhat
intangible body of knowledge that marks any institution, fortified by the
seasoning of the Civil War.

     Of the officers who moved to the forefront of the Army in the Indian
wars, few had frontier and Indian experience.  At the top levels at the
outset, Grant as a captain had had only a taste of the loneliness of the
frontier outpost.  Western duty was unknown to Sherman, and, while Sheridan
had served about five years in the Northwest as a junior officer, neither
Nelson A. Miles nor Oliver Otis Howard knew frontier service of any kind.
Wesley Merritt, George Armstrong Custer, and Ranald S. Mackenzie all graduated
from West Point into the Civil War, and John Gibbon had only minor involvement
in the Seminole War and some garrison duty in the West.  Alfred Sully, also a
veteran of the Seminole War and an active campaigner against the Sioux during
Civil War years, fell into obscurity, while Philip St. George Cooke was
overtaken by age and Edward R. S. Canby's experience was lost prematurely
through his death at Indian hands.  George Crook almost alone among the Army
leaders at the upper levels of the Indian wars had pre-Civil War frontier
experience, dating from 1852, that he could bring back to the West in 1866.

     Thus to a large degree the officers of the Indian wars were products of
the Civil War.  Many brought outstanding records to the frontier, but this was
a new conflict against an unorthodox enemy.  Those who approached their new
opponent with respect and learned his ways became the best Indian fighters and
in some cases the most helpful in promoting a solution to the Indian problem.
Some who had little respect for the "savages" and placed too much store in
Civil War methods and achievements paid the penalty on the battlefield.  Capt.
William J. Fetterman was one of the first to fall as the final chapter of the
Indian wars opened in 1866.

The Bozeman Trail

     While the Civil War was still in progress, gold was discovered in Montana
and fortune seekers flocked to the area.  Lines of communications to the
fields around Virginia City lay along circuitous routes and pressure mounted
for more direct access.  The Army explored the possibilities and adopted a
route, pioneered by John Bozeman, extending from Fort Laramie on the North
Platte River and Oregon Trail, northwestward along the eastern base and around
the northern shoulder of the Big Horn Mountains.  Unfortunately, the trail cut
through hunting grounds reserved to the Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, and
Arapahoes by treaty in 1865.

     The Indians resisted white incursions and Maj. Gen. Patrick E. Connors
Powder River Expedition failed to stop their depredations.  In 1866 the
government, under public pressure and officially attracted to the gold
resources as a means of relieving the financial strains of the Civil War,
opened new negotiations, but with indifferent results.  A few friendly chiefs
signed a new agreement at Fort Laramie, but others led by Red Cloud of the
Sioux stalked out defiantly when Col. Henry B. Carrington marched in with a
battalion of the 18th Infantry, on his way to establish posts along the
Bozeman Trail even before agreement with the Indians had been reached.

     Although motivated by a sense of justice, treaty-making with the Indians
more often than not constituted an exercise in futility for both parties.  On
the Indian side the tribes were loosely knit societies of individualists
living a nomadic existence under leaders whose control and influence
fluctuated with the fortunes of war.  A treaty was no more binding than the
degree of power, authority, and allegiance a leader might muster at any given
time, Washington's understanding to the contrary.  On the white side, although
the authority of negotiating officials was unquestioned, the power to enforce
treaty provisions on highly independent westering whites was another thing,
and as breach after breach provoked the red man to action the Army was
invariably called in to protect the offending citizens and punish the Indians.

     Colonel Carrington's battalion of about 700 men departed Fort Laramie in
June 1866 for the Big Horn country.  Despite Red Cloud's threat to oppose the
move, several families, including the commanding officers, accompanied the
force.  At Fort Reno on Powder River, some miles beyond the end of the
telegraph, Carrington with a Regular company relieved two companies of the 5th
U.S. Volunteers, former Confederate prisoners who became so-called galvanized
Yankees when they agreed to frontier Indian service in exchange for their
freedom.  Farther northwestward, 225 miles from Fort Laramie, he selected a
site on the Piney tributary of Powder River to construct his headquarters post
- Fort Phil Kearny.  Five companies remained there while the remaining two
were sent another 90 miles out to establish Fort C. F. Smith at the northern
edge of the Big Horns.

     Fort Phil Kearny became the focus of enemy attention and during its brief
existence remained virtually in a state of siege.  On December 21, 1866, the
Indians attacked a wood train six miles from the fort.  Captain Fetterman, who
had been brevetted lieutenant colonel in Civil War actions and now boasted
that with eighty men he could ride through the whole Sioux Nation, asked to
lead a relief column.  Indian decoys demonstrated invitingly before the rescue
party, withdrawing gradually over Lodge Trail Ridge northwest of the post.
Fetterman fell for the ruse and, against Carrington's orders, with eighty men
at his back crossed the ridge.  In a carefully executed ambush the Indians
wiped out the entire force, including two civilians who had gone along to try
out their new Henry repeating rifles, weapons far superior to the Springfield
muzzleloaders carried by the infantrymen and the Spencer carbines carried by
the cavalrymen in the detail.

     The Army was more successful in two other notable actions on the Bozeman
Trail.  In August 1867 the Indians launched separate but apparently
coordinated attacks against a haying detail near Fort Smith and a wood detail
outside Fort Kearny.  In the Hayfield Fight 19 soldiers and 6 civilians, under
Lt. Sigismund Sternberg, equipped with converted breech-loading Springfields
and several repeating rifles, held of vastly superior odds with a loss of only
3 killed and 3 wounded.  In the Wagon Box Fight, Capt. James Powell, with 31
men similarly armed and stationed behind wagon boxes removed from their
running gear, held off an investing force of several thousand Sioux and
Cheyennes for a good four hours, withstanding mounted and dismounted attacks
by several hundred warriors at various times with only 3 killed and 2 wounded.

     It is risky to deal in statistics concerning Indian participation and
casualties in western campaigns.  Accounts vary widely, are founded on shaky
evidence, and require some balancing and juggling merely to reach a general
order of magnitude, much less an accurate assessment of the facts in a given
situation.  There is no doubt that the Sioux and Cheyennes suffered serious
casualties in the Hayfield and Wagon Box fights.  For the Army, however, these
were defensive engagements and it lacked sufficient force in the Upper Plains
to undertake offensive operations.  At the same time there was sentiment in
the East to treat with rather than chastise the Indians.  The government
withdrew the garrisons and abandoned the Montana road in July 1868.

The Southern Plains

     The Army during the Indian wars was habitually unable to balance
resources with requirements, both because of limited manpower and because of
the continental size of the theater of operations.  As Lt. Gen. William T.
Sherman, commanding the Division of the Missouri, put it, "Were I or the
department commanders to send guards to every point where they are clamored
for, we would need alone on the plains a hundred thousand men, mostly of
cavalry.  Each spot of every road, and each little settlement along five
thousand miles of frontier, wants its regiment of cavalry or infantry to
protect it against the combined power of all the Indians, because of the bare
possibility of their being attacked by the combined force of all the Indians."

     It was the good fortune of both the Army and the citizen in the West that
the Indians rarely acted in concert within or between tribes, although had
they done so the Army might have been able regularly to employ large units
instead of dispersing troops in small detachments all over the frontier, and
might also have had better luck in forcing the elusive opponent to stand and
fight.  But troops and units were at a premium, so much so in 1868 that Maj.
Gen. Philip H. Sheridan decided to try an unusual expedient to carry out his
responsibilities in the Department of the Missouri.

     Sheridan directed Maj. George A. Forsyth to "employ fifty first class
hardy frontiersmen, to be used as scouts against the hostile Indians, to be
commanded by yourself."  Recruited at Forts Harker and Hays in Kansas, the
command took the field in late August in a region frequented by Comanches,
Kiowas, Southern Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, augmented by some Sioux roaming
south of the Platte.  The tribes were restive.  The Kansas Pacific Railroad
was advancing through their country, frightening the buffalo - their source of
food, clothing, and shelter - and attracting white settlement.  The Cheyennes
were still smoldering over the massacre of some 200 of Black Kettle's band,
including women and children, by Col. John M. Chivington and his Colorado
volunteers on Sand Creek in 1864, and had demonstrated their mistrust of the
whites when Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock penetrated their area with a
large and presumably peaceful expedition in 1867.

     Forsyth and the Indians collided on the Arickaree Fork of the Republican
River at dawn on September 17, 1868, when a combined war party of about 600
Cheyennes, Sioux, and Arapahoes attacked him in a defensive position on a
small island in the river bed.  The Indians pressed the fight for three days,
wounding Forsyth and upwards of 20 of his scouts and killing his second in
command, Lt. Frederick H. Beecher, and his surgeon and 3 scouts.  Among Indian
casualties in this Battle of Beecher Island was the influential Cheyenne
leader Roman Nose.  The first rescue force on the scene was Capt. Louis H.
Carpenter's company of Negro troopers of the 10th Cavalry Regiment.

     By the late 1860's the government's policy of removing Indians from
desirable areas (graphically represented by the transfer of the Five Civilized
Tribes from the Southeast to Oklahoma - the Cherokees called it the "Trail of
Tears") had run its course and was succeeded by one of concentrating them on
reservations.  The practice of locating tribes in other than native or
salubrious surroundings and of joining uncongenial bands led to more than one
Indian war.  Some bands found it convenient to accept reservation status and
government rations during the winter months, returning to the warpath and
hunting trail in the milder seasons.  Many bands of many tribes refused to
accept the treaties offered by a peace commission and resisted the
government's attempt to confine them to specific geographical limits; it fell
to the Army to force compliance.  In his area, General Sheridan now planned to
hit the Indians in their permanent winter camps.

     While a winter campaign presented serious logistical problems, it offered
opportunities for decisive results.  If the Indians' shelter, food, and
livestock could be destroyed or captured, not only the warriors but their
women and children were at the mercy of the Army and the elements, and there
was little left but surrender.  Here was the technique of total war, a
practice that raised certain moral questions for many officers and men that
were never satisfactorily resolved.

     Sheridan devised a plan whereby three columns would converge on the
wintering grounds of the Indians just east of the Texas Panhandle, one from
Fort Lyon in Colorado, one from Fort Bascom in New Mexico, and one from Camp
Supply in Oklahoma.  The 7th Cavalry Regiment under Lt. Col. George Armstrong
Custer fought the major engagement of the campaign.  Custer found the Indians
on the Washita River and struck Black Kettle's Cheyenne village with eleven
companies from four directions at dawn on November 29, 1868, as the regimental
band played "Garry Owen."  A fierce fight developed which the Indians
continued from surrounding terrain.  By midmorning Custer learned that this
was only one of many villages of Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, and Comanches
extending for miles along the Washita.  Facing such odds, Custer hastened to
destroy the village and its supplies and horses, used an offensive maneuver to
deceive the enemy, and under cover of darkness withdrew from the field, taking
53 women and children as prisoners.  The 7th lost 21 officers and men killed
and 13 wounded in the Battle of the Washita; the Indians perhaps 50 killed and
as many wounded.

     The Kiowas and Comanches did not lightly relinquish their hunting grounds
and forsake their way of life.  Some lived restlessly on a reservation in
Indian Territory around Fort Sill, others held out.  Sherman, now Commanding
General of the U.S. Army, Sheridan, commanding the Division of the Missouri,
and their field commanders were forced into active campaigning before these
tribes were subdued.  In 1871 reservation Kiowas raided into Texas, killing
some teamsters of a government wagon train.  General Sherman, visiting at Fort
Sill, had the responsible leaders - Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree - arrested
in a dramatic confrontation on the post between armed Indians and soldiers in
which only Sherman's coolness prevented an explosion.  Satank was later killed
attempting escape, while Satanta and Big Tree were tried and imprisoned for
two years.  Again in custody in 1876, Satanta took his own life.

     There were other incidents on the Southern Plains before the Indians
there were subjugated.  An Army campaign in 1874, involving about 3,000 troops
under Col. Nelson A. Miles' over-all command, was launched in five columns
from bases in Texas, New Mexico, and Indian Territory against the Texas
Panhandle refuge of the Plains tribes.  On September 24 Col. Ranald S.
Mackenzie and the 4th Cavalry found the winter camp of the Comanches, Kiowas,
Cheyennes, and Arapahoes in a last stronghold, the deep Palo Duro Canyon on
the Staked Plains.  Mackenzie's surprise attack separated the Indians from
their horses and belongings, and these were destroyed.  With winter coming on
the Indians had little alternative to the reservation.

The Northwest

     Not all the Indian wars were fought with Plains tribes.  The Army engaged
in wars with several Pacific slope tribes in the 1870's and the operations
were widely scattered over the mountainous northwestern quarter of the
trans-Mississippi West.

     The Modoc War of 1872-73 began when the Modocs, who had been placed on a
reservation in southern Oregon with the more numerous and traditionally
unfriendly Klamaths, returned without permission to their home in the Lost
River country on the California border.  When the Army attempted in November
of 1872 to take them back to the reservation, fighting broke out and the
Indians retreated into a natural fortress - the Lava Beds at the southern end
of Tule Lake.  Over the course of six months there were four engagements in
which Regular and volunteer troops with superior strength and weapons incurred
heavier losses than their opponents.  Extended efforts by a peace commission
made little headway and ended in tragedy when two of the members, Brig. Gen.
Edward R. S. Canby and Reverend Eleaser Thomas, both unarmed, were shot while
in conference with the Indians.  The Modocs finally surrendered and four of
their leaders, including Canby's murderer, Captain Jack, were hanged.

     The practice of uprooting the Indians from their homeland was also the
cause of the Nez Perce War in 1877.  The Nez Perces had been friendly to the
whites from the days of their contact with Lewis and Clark.  Although they
ceded some of their lands to the whites, they refused to give up the Wallowa
Valley in northeastern Oregon.  White encroachment increased, stiffening the
lines of political pressure back to Washington and leading inevitably to
decisions favorable to white settlement and removal of the Nez Perces to the
Lapwai Reservation across the Snake River in Idaho.  Some elements of the
tribe complied, but Chief Joseph and his people did not and the Army was
ordered to move them.  An inevitable course of events and irresponsible
actions by both reds and whites made hostilities unavoidable.

     In a remarkable campaign that demonstrated the unique capabilities of
guerrilla forces and the difficulties that formal military units have in
dealing with them, the Nez Perces led the Army on a 1,300-mile chase over the
Continental Divide, punctuated by a number of sharp engagements.  The Indians
used the terrain to great advantage, fighting when circumstances favored them,
sideslipping around opposing forces or breaking contact when the situation
dictated it.  They lived off the land, while the Army was tied to supply
trains that were vulnerable to Indian attack.  But their freedom of movement
was hindered by their women and children, while Army superiority in strength
and weapons gradually began to tell.  Indian rifles were no match for
howitzers and Gatling guns, and Indian mobility could not outstrip the Army's
use of the telegraph to alert additional forces along the Nez Perce line of
flight.  The battles of White Bird Canyon, Clearwater, Big Hole, Canyon Creek,
and Bear Paw Mountain involved hundreds of troops and numerous units under
Howard, Gibbon, Samuel D. Sturgis, and Miles.  There were heavy casualties on
both sides before Chief Joseph, in a poignant speech, surrendered.  "Hear me,
my Chiefs," were his closing words to Generals Howard and Miles, "my heart is
sick and sad.  From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

     In 1878 and 1879 Army forces took the field against various bands of
Indians in mountain areas of the Northwest.  Operations against the Bannocks,
Sheepeaters, and Utes were relatively minor.  The Bannock War was caused by
white intrusion on the Camas Prairie in Idaho, where camas roots were a prime
source of food for the Indians.  The Sheepeater War, also centered in Idaho,
broke out when the Indians were charged with several murders they probably did
not commit.  The Ute War in northwestern Colorado grew out of the misguided
methods and impractical idealism of Indian Agent Nathan C. Meeker.  All of
these clashes represented a last convulsion against fate for the tribes
involved, while for the Army they meant hard campaigning and casualties.

The Southwest

     The Apaches were among the Army's toughest opponents in the Indian wars.
The zone of operations embraced the territories of Arizona and New Mexico,
western Texas, and Mexico's northern provinces, and, despite the fact that
hostile Apaches were relatively few in number and the theater was essentially
a secondary one, they tied down sizable forces over a long period of time.

     Post-Civil War Apache troubles extended from the late 1860's when the
Army campaigned against Cochise on through the seventies and eighties, when
Victorio and Geronimo came to the fore.  On the Army side the important factor
was the assignment of Bvt. Maj. Gen. George Crook to the Southwest, where he
served two tours between 1871 and 1886.  Crook was an able administrator as
well as an outstanding soldier, and proved to be a relentless opponent of the
Indian on the battlefield and a steadfast friend off it.  As commander of the
Department of Arizona he organized at key locations a number of mobile
striking forces under experienced Frontier officers and launched them in a
concerted campaign supported by mule pack trains.  Acting under an 1866
Congressional act, which authorized the Army to enlist up to a thousand Indian
scouts (they came from traditionally friendly tribes like the Crow and Pawnee
or from friendly elements of warring tribes), Crook also employed Apache
scouts.  Converging columns and persistent pursuit brought results, and he
left Arizona in relative quiet when he went to the Department of the Platte in
1875.

     But the quiet in the Southwest did not last long.  Largely at the
instigation of politicians, merchants, contractors, and other self-serving
whites, several bands of mutually uncongenial Apaches were transferred from
desirable areas to the unhealthy San Carlos Reservation in the Arizona
lowlands.  As a result, much of what Crook had accomplished was undone as
disgruntled Apaches again turned to raiding and killing.  In the summer of
1881, for example, an Apache medicine man stirred the Indians to heights of
religious fervor that led to a sharp clash on Cibicu Creek with troops
commanded by Col. Eugene A. Carr, one of the Army's most experienced Indian
fighters.  The action was highlighted by perhaps the most notable instance of
disaffection when the Indian scouts with the command turned on the Regulars.

     Throughout the Indian wars there was constant friction between the War
and the Interior Departments over the conduct of Indian affairs.  A committee
of the Continental Congress had first exercised this responsibility.  In 1789
it was transferred to the Secretary of War, and in 1824 a Bureau of Indian
Affairs was created in the War Department.  When the Department of the
Interior was established in 1849, the Indian bureau was transferred to that
agency.  Thus administration of Indian affairs was handled by one department
while enforcement lay with another.  As General Crook put it to a
Congressional committee in 1879:  "As it is now you have a divided
responsibility.  It is like having two captains on the same ship."

     Crook returned to Arizona in 1882 to restore confidence among the Apaches
in white administration, move them along the paths of civilization, and spar
constantly with the Indian bureau.  On the military side, he took the field
against dwindling numbers of hostiles, co-operating with Mexican officials and
authorized to cross the international boundary in pursuit of the renegades.
Crook met with Geronimo in the Sierra Madre Mountains in March of 1886 and
negotiated a surrender that brought in all but Geronimo and a few followers
who backed out at the last moment.  When Washington failed to back the field
commander in the conditions on which he had negotiated the surrender, Crook
asked to be relieved.  Nelson A. Miles replaced him, and Lt. Charles B.
Gatewood entered Geronimo's mountain fastness to arrange a surrender and bring
the Apache campaigns to a close.

[See The Apaches Surrender: Geronimo at the Conference with General Crook,
1886.]

The Northern Plains

     All of the elements of the clash of red and white civilizations were
present in the events leading to final subjugation of the Indians.  The
mounted tribes of the Great Plains were astride the main corridors of westward
expansion, and this was the area of decision.  The treaty of 1868 had set
aside the Great Sioux Reservation in South Dakota and the Army had abandoned
the Bozeman Trail, leaving the Powder River region as unceded Indian country.
The Sioux and their allies were thus north of the main transcontinental artery
along the Platte.  Although the arrangement worked for several years, it was
doomed by the irresistible march of civilization.  The Sioux rejected white
overtures for a right-of-way for the Northern Pacific Railroad, and when
surveyors went ahead anyway they ran into Indian resistance, which led to the
dispatch in 1873 of a large military expedition under Col. David S. Stanley up
the Yellowstone Valley.  The next year General Sheridan sent Custer and the
7th Cavalry on a reconnaissance through the Black Hills, within the Sioux
Reservation.  When geologists with the expedition found gold, the word spread
rapidly and prospectors filtered into the area despite the Army's best efforts
to keep them out.  Another treaty was broken and, band by band, angry
reservation Indians slipped away to join nontreaty recalcitrants in the
unceded Powder River region of Wyoming and Montana.

     In December 1875 the Indian bureau notified the Sioux and Cheyennes that
they had to return to the reservation by the end of the following month.
Since the Indians were in winter quarters in remote areas and would have had
little chance against the elements, they did not obey.  As the deadline
passed, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs appealed to the Army to force
compliance.  Sheridan, mindful of his success with converging columns against
the Southern Plains tribes, determined upon a similar campaign in the north.

     Columns were organized to move on the Powder River area from three
directions.  Brig. Gen. Alfred H. Terry marched westward from Fort Abraham
Lincoln in Dakota Territory, his principal element the 7th Cavalry under
Custer.  Col. John Gibbon moved eastward from Fort Ellis in western Montana
with a mixed force of infantry and cavalry, while Brig. Gen. George Crook
moved northward from Fort Fetterman on the North Platte in Wyoming with a
force heavily weighted in cavalry.  In March 1876 a part of Crook's force
under Col. Joseph J. Reynolds had entered the valley of the Powder and
surprised a Cheyenne-Sioux camp, but Reynolds had failed to press an initial
advantage and had withdrawn without punishing the Indians.  In June, with the
major campaign under way, Crook made the first contact.  The Sioux and
Cheyennes learned of his approach along Rosebud Creek, and some 1,500 warriors
moved to meet him.  Crook had fifteen companies of cavalry and five of
infantry, about 1,000 men, plus another 300 friendly Indians and civilians.
The two forces met on roughly equal terms on the 17th in heavy fighting.
Tactically, neither side carried the field conclusively enough to claim a
victory.  Strategically, Crook's withdrawal to a supply base to southward gave
the Battle of the Rosebud the complexion of a defeat for the Army, especially
in view of developments on the Little Bighorn River about fifty miles to
northwestward, which his continued advance might have influenced decisively.

     While Crook was moving northward to his collision on the Rosebud, Terry
and Gibbon, marching from east and west, had joined forces on the Yellowstone
River at its confluence with the Powder, where a supply base serviced by river
steamer was established.  Terry sent out the 7th Cavalry to scout for Indian
sign, and Maj. Marcus A. Reno with six companies (the cavalry "company" was
not called a "troop" until 1883) reconnoitered up the Powder, across the
Tongue River, and into the valley of the Rosebud.  Here on June 17 Reno found
a fresh trail leading west out of the valley and across the Wolf Mountains in
the direction of the Little Bighorn.  He was unaware, and was thus unable to
inform his superiors, that Crook was also in the Rosebud valley and had been
engaged and blocked by a large force of Indians not far upstream on this very
same day.

     Terry held a council of war aboard the steamer Far West to outline his
plan.  Custer's 7th Cavalry would move south up the Rosebud, cross the Wolf
Mountains, and enter the Little Bighorn valley from the south.  Gibbon, joined
by Terry, would ascend the Bighorn River and its tributary, the Little
Bighorn, from the north, trapping the Indians between the two forces.

     As it happened, Custer moved at least a day early for the co-operative
action envisioned in Terry's plan.  On June 25, 1876, the 7th crossed the Wolf
Mountains and moved into the valley of the Little Bighorn.  Custer was
confident of his capability to handle whatever he ran up against, convinced
that the Indians would follow their usual practice of scattering before a show
of force, and completely unaware that he was descending upon one of the
largest concentrations of Indians ever assembled on the Plains - perhaps as
many as 12,000 to 15,000 Sioux and Northern Cheyennes, with between 3,000 and
4,000 warriors under such leaders as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall, Crow
King, Lame Deer, Hump, and Two Moon.

     Around noon of this Sunday in June, Custer sent Capt. Frederick W.
Benteen with three companies to scout to the left of the command, not an
unusual move for a force still attempting to fix the location of an elusive
enemy and expecting him to slip away on contact.  About 2:30 p.m., still two
miles short of the river, when the upper end of an Indian village came into
view, Custer advanced three more companies under Major Reno with instructions
to cross the river and charge the Indian camp.  With five companies Custer
moved off to the right, still screened by a fold of ground from observing the
extent of his opposition, perhaps with the thought of hitting the Indians from
the flank - of letting Reno hold the enemy by the nose while he, Custer,
kicked him in the seat of the pants.  As he progressed, Custer rushed Sgt.
Daniel Kanipe to the rear to hurry the pack train and its one-company escort
forward, and shortly afterward dispatched Trumpeter John Martin with a last
message to Benteen informing him that a "big village" lay ahead and to "be
quick - bring packs."

     The main phase of the Battle of the Little Bighorn lasted about two
hours.  Reno, charging down the river with three companies and some Arickara
scouts, ran into hordes of Indians, not retreating, but advancing, perhaps
mindful of their creditable performance against Crook the week before, and
certainly motivated by a desire to protect their women and children and cover
a withdrawal of the villages.  Far outnumbered, suffering heavy casualties,
and in danger of being overrun, Reno withdrew to the bluffs across the river
and dug in.

     Custer and his five companies - about 230 strong - moved briskly along
the bluffs above the river until, some four miles away, beyond supporting
distance and out of sight of the rest of the command, they were brought to bay
and overwhelmed by an Indian force that outnumbered them by perhaps 20 to 1.
When the last man had fallen and the dead had been plundered, the Indians
turned their attention to Reno once again.

     While the Indians had been chiefly absorbed on the Custer section of the
field, Benteen's battalion and the pack train and its escorting company had
moved up and gone into a defensive perimeter with Reno's force.  An attempt to
move in force in Custer's direction, despite a complete lack of knowledge of
his location and situation, failed; the Reno defensive position was reoccupied
and remained under attack until dark of the 25th and on through daylight hours
of the 26th.  The siege was finally lifted with the arrival of the
Terry-Gibbon column on June 27th.

     The Custer disaster shocked the nation and was the climax of the Indian
wars.  The Army poured troops into the Upper Plains and the Indians scattered,
some, like Sitting Bull's band, to Canada.  But gradually, under Army pressure
or seeing the futility of further resistance, the Indians surrendered and
returned to the reservation.

     The last gasp of the Indian wars occurred in 1890 and grew out of the
fervor of the Ghost Dance religion.  The Sioux were particularly susceptible
to the emotional excitement and the call of the old way of life represented in
these ceremonies, and their wild involvement frightened the agent on the Sioux
Reservation into calling for military protection.  The 7th Calvary, now
commanded by Col. James W. Forsyth, moved to Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine
Ridge Agency where, on December 29, 1890, the regiment attempted to disarm Big
Foot's band.  An Indian's rifle was discharged into the air as two soldiers
disarmed him, precipitating a battle in which more than 150 Indians, including
women and children, were killed and a third as many wounded, while 25 soldiers
were killed and another 37 wounded.

     The Battle of Wounded Knee was the last Indian engagement to fall in the
category of warfare; later incidents were more in the realm of civil
disturbance.  The nineteenth century was drawing to a close and the frontier
was rapidly disappearing.  Territories were being replaced by states, and
people, settlements, government, and law were spreading across the land.  The
buffalo were gone and the Indians were confined to reservations and dependent
upon the government for subsistence.  An expanded rail system was available to
move troops quickly to trouble spots, and the Army could now concentrate its
forces at the larger and more permanent posts and relinquish numerous smaller
installations that had outgrown their usefulness.  By 1895 the Army was
deployed more or less equally around the country on the basis of regional
rather than operational conspirations.

     In the quarter century of the Indian wars the Army met the Indian in over
a thousand actions, large and small, all across the American West.  It fought
these wars with peacetime strength and on a peacetime budget, while at the
same time it helped shape Indian policy, contributed to the red man's
acculturation, and was centrally involved in numerous other activities that
were part and parcel of westward expansion and of the nation's attainment of
its "manifest destiny."  Operations against the Indians seasoned the Army and
forged a core of experienced leaders who would serve the republic well as it
moved onto the world scene at the turn of the century.