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The Indian Wars Begin

The regular army was as woefully neglected during the Civil War as it had been during the previous periods when there were only the Indians to fight. Its increase was one regiment of artillery of twelve companies, making a total of five regiments; one regiment of cavalry of twelve companies making a total of six regiments; and nine regiments of infantry added to the ten in service. The old infantry regiments had ten companies each, with only 52 enlisted men in a company, a regiment consisting of 582 officers and enlisted men. The nine new infantry regiments, however, had twenty-four companies, each divided into three eight-company battalions (the companies lettered from A to H in each battalion). The aggregate strength of such a regiment would have been 2,444, but none of them reached it during the war.

The Regular Army got few recruits in competition with the recruiting for state volunteers, and all regiments dropped far under authorized strength. Had they been full, however, there would have been no officers to command them. Nearly all field officers, and many captains and lieutenants, accepted commissions in the volunteers. They retained their Regular Army commissions and assignments, and were duly promoted in their permanent ranks throughout the war. There was no provision for filling vacancies, and captains commonly commanded Regular Army regiments in battle.

Officers were advanced one grade in brevet (a former type of military commission or promotion: a temporary promotion of a military officer without an increase in pay: to promote a military officer by brevet. In the military, brevet refers to a warrant authorizing a commissioned officer to hold a higher rank temporarily) rank after every battle in which they were recommended "for gallant and meritorious service." Brevet commissions in the volunteers terminated at the end of the war, but a Regular Army brevet was permanent, and had many privileges besides the honor that went with it. By courtesy and custom an officer was addressed in his highest brevet rank, even in official correspondence. He could be called to duty in his brevet rank by special assignment, and he served in his brevet rank when a member of a court-martial or in command of a detachment composed of different corps. In these cases he received the pay and allowances of his brevet rank.

The Regular Army as of 1866 had one general of the army (Ulysses S. Grant), one lieutenant general (William Tecumseh Sherman), five major generals and nineteen brigadier generals, including nine heading such staff departments as quartermaster, subsistence, pay, ordnance and so on. The country was divided into five military divisions-geographical divisions, not divisions in the sense of army units, active or inactive. Within the divisions were departments, and the departments were subdivided into districts. Thus the Military Division of the Missouri included the Department of Missouri, the Department of Arkansas, the Department of the Platte and the Department of Dakota. The District of the Republican was one of the districts of the Department of the Platte.

Each of the former Confederate States became a department under the congressional plan of Reconstruction. Each division, department and district was the proper command of a general officer; there were only sixteen general officers of the line, so considerable employment was available for the 152 brevet major generals and 187 brevet brigadier generals commissioned during the war. In those days regiments rarely saw their colonels, or even lieutenant colonels, except perhaps as brevet generals commanding expeditions "composed of different corps" sent to chastise Indians.

In 1866, however, it was supposed that the Indian wars were near an end. General Curtis, who had wanted no peace until the Indians suffered more, had made a treaty with the Sioux, signed by the chiefs who customarily pitched their tents within hearing of the reveille gun and mess call at army posts. It was recognized that the treaty, opening the Bozeman Trail - a short cut through Sioux country to the mines in Montana - should be signed also by the chiefs who had been at war, and they were summoned to Fort Laramie, in June, 1866, to meet a new peace commission headed by E. B. Taylor of the Indian Bureau.

In May the Second and Third battalions and Company F of the First Battalion, 18th Infantry, were assembled at Fort Kearny, Nebraska, under command of their colonel, Brevet Brigadier General Henry Beebe Carrington. This was the largest gathering of one of the triple-deck regiments ever seen in Indian country, and it was almost immediately dispersed. As Carrington marched westward he sent detachments to garrison Fort Sedgwick at Julesburg, Colorado; Fort Bridger in the southwest corner of Wyoming; Camp Douglas at Salt Lake City; and other posts.

General Carrington himself with the Second Battalion carried orders to march north from the big bend of the Platte to establish three posts along the Bozeman Trail. These orders were based on assurances by the Indian Bureau that the Sioux Nation, meaning the chiefs who had already signed, had consented to the opening of the road, but when Carrington reached Fort Laramie he found the peace commission still negotiating with the chiefs who had been on the warpath. Red Cloud and Man Afraid of His Horses refused to be coerced into signing the treaty and walked out. Indian Bureau officials brushed this protest aside with assurances that the two chiefs were unimportant and uninfluential. The upshot was that some 2,000 Sioux accepted the treaty and remained at peace, while 4,000 or more took part in Red Cloud's War.

Red Cloud's War

General Carrington marched north as ordered, into the country where the much larger Powder River Expedition had accomplished little the previous year. On the upper Powder River, at the site of Fort Connor, Carrington established Fort Reno and manned it with Companies B and F of his Second Battalion. Marching on to the Little Piney, he retained Companies A, C, E and H to build Fort Philip Kearny (usually shortened to Phil and commonly misspelled, even by its commander, as Kearney). Companies D and G were sent on to build Fort C. F. Smith on the Big Horn.

Red Cloud and his following lost no time in making the troops unwelcome. During the last five months of 1866 Indians made fifty-one attacks in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny. This has been called a siege, but the garrison was never isolated by an impenetrable line of Indians. A wood train went out every day to get timber for building the fort. Supply trains came and went. The mail went through, carried both ways by soldiers or scouts. An inspector general came by and claimed an escort from the meager garrison - replaced after three months' delay by Company C, 2nd Cavalry.

The Fetterman Massacre

On December 21, 1866, a signalman reported that the wood train was being attacked, not an uncommon occurrence. Brevet Lieutenant Colonel William J. Fetterman led a relief party of eighty-one, including two officers and two civilian scouts. Fetterman is said to have boasted a few days earlier: "Give me eighty men and I'll ride through the whole Sioux nation." If he said it, which somehow seems doubtful, he was actually reflecting the official view that had sent 700 soldiers to fight 4,000 Indians. Carrington officially reported that he had ordered Fetterman "under no circumstances pursue over Lodge Trail Ridge." But Fetterman followed a decoy party across the ridge, and his small force was slaughtered to the last man. Ironically the wood train he had been sent to rescue reached the fort safely.

The Indians made no attempt to follow up their victory, even when the snow piled up to the top of the fort's stockade making it possible for them to walk in on the greatly reduced garrison. It was assumed thereafter that Plains Indians would not attempt to storm a fort, and stockades now fell into disfavor. Many officers held that stockades afforded Indians a hiding place to lurk for scalps; they preferred a clear field of view for rifle fire.

Carrington lacked battle experience in the Civil War and was distrusted by his veteran officers; his cautious tactics in Indian fighting, however, were approved by a court of inquiry that met at his request after his transfer to Fort McPherson to investigate his conduct of his command at Fort Phil Kearny, including the Fetterman disaster. However, he failed to survive the army cutback of 1869.

The Wagon Box Fight

In the spring and summer of 1867 the wood train again made daily trips from Fort Phil Kearny. Where trees were being cut, a corral had been made by forming a circle of the wagon boxes that had been taken off to free the wheels and running gears for the hauling of logs. (These wagon boxes were of wood, not lined with sheet steel or boiler iron, as some accounts state.)

On January 1, 1867, the Second Battalion of the 18th Infantry had become the 27th Infantry. On August 2, Brevet Major James Powell, captain of its Company C, was in command of the escort when the wood party was attacked by an estimated 3,000 Sioux.

Thirty-two men took refuge in and among the wagon boxes. Some 500 overconfident Indians charged on horseback, apparently hoping to draw the fire of the soldiers and then close in while the defenders were reloading. However, the troops were armed with "Allin alteration" Springfield rifles, Civil War muzzle-loaders converted into breechloaders by a method developed by E. A. Allin, master armorer at Springfield Arsenal. They could be reloaded very quickly - so quickly that the wall of fire never stopped and the horsemen of the Plains were turned away with heavy casualties.

The Indians rallied and attacked again, this time on foot and more cautiously. In early afternoon a relief party with a howitzer arrived from the fort and drove them off. Powell reported 40 Indians killed and 120 wounded, but some estimates put the dead at 400, 800 and even the improbable figure of 1,137 - Six soldiers were killed and two wounded.

The Hayfield Fight

Unlike Fort Phil Kearny, Fort C. F. Smith, ninety-one miles farther up the Bozeman Trail, was isolated by hostile Indians. No party entered or left it between November 30, 1866, and June 8, 1867. On August 1 - the day before the Wagon Box Fight - a fatigue party cutting hay for the fort was attacked by 800 Cheyenne. The haymakers had built a corral of logs, which the Indians charged again and again, both mounted and on foot. The Allin alteration Springfields again surprised the Indians, and several civilians did even better with repeating rifles.

The troops, commanded by Second Lieutenant Sigismund Sternberg, who was killed, included detachments from Companies C, D, G and H, 27th Infantry, and Company I, one of two new companies added to complete the 27th. A howitzer firing case shot scattered the Cheyenne. Their known loss was eight killed and thirty wounded. The most optimistic estimate upped this to 150. The defenders had three killed.

After these fights along the Bozeman Trail the peace that followed was of a kind that had become characteristic of United States diplomacy. Red Cloud was allowed to save face by appearing to have won the war - and many have interpreted it that he did. In March, 1868, General Grant ordered abandonment of the Bozeman Trail and its three posts, Forts Phil Kearny, C. F. Smith and Reno. Actually the Bozeman Trail had ceased to be of importance, for the advancing railroad was making other routes to the Montana gold fields more feasible.

After a summer of negotiation, Red Cloud was persuaded to sign a treaty on November 6, 1868. It provided a Sioux reservation that included all of what became South Dakota west of the Missouri River. Most of the Sioux who had been fighting were on lands they were in the process of taking away from the Crows, a tribe generally friendly to the United States. In fact, Ab-sa-ra-ka, meaning "Home of the Crows," was the title of the book about Fort Phil Kearny written by Mrs. Margaret Irvin Carrington, wife of the colonel. It was not Sioux country, but the treaty allowed them hunting rights there, mainly because they were there and there was no practical manner of getting them out - appeasement, if you will, or certainly status quo ante bellum.

And if in Red Cloud's own mind he had won, he nevertheless stayed on the reservation and never again dug up the hatchet. He obviously wanted no more of the kind of battles he had won, or lost. Reports of Indian casualities may have been exaggerated, but there had been many more than he wanted.

Jay Monaghan. The Indian Wars Begin. The Book of the American West. Simon & Schuster New York, NY 1969.

North American Indian Wars Essays discuss cultural differences between Native Americans and early white settlers, and look at warfare, forced relocation, exploitation, and current attempts at restitution.

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