The Indian Wars
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 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. Discovery of gold in the mountains and in California brought a rush of emigrants. Naturally the Indians resented this high-handed incursion. Beginning in 1857, when Sumner campaigned against the Cheyennes, the frontier was always in danger of a raid, and the youths of that frontier were reared in the art of Indian fighting, taught the secrets of woods and plains craft, and schooled in all the fine arts of combating at their own game the fierce nomads of the wilderness. This was the period when most scouts got their training and fitted themselves for their strenuous and important adventures. In the big Indian campaigns between 1860 and 1878 — scouts were the real leaders in every one. Scouts were the keen-eyed followers of the trail; the canny diagnosers of ambuscades; the wise advisors to ward off the duplicity of Indian diplomats; the interpreters at the councils. The position of the scout was often far more important than was the position of the commanding officer himself.
In 1858 gold was found in Colorado and a new rush of emigrants started up the Santa Fe and Platte trails. The passage of thousands of white men with their stock and their families up these trails, frightening away the game, excited and angered the Indians. Trouble soon broke out. There were brushes with the red men on the overland trails, and then sporadic raiding began against isolated settlements. In the main, however, the tribes kept the peace until 1863, when minor depredations increased to a point where they resembled a general war, and the government, in the throes of civil war, decided it. must do something to put an end to these troubles. There were several minor fights with the Indians, and on November 29, 1864, occurred the massacre of Black Kettle's village on Sand creek by Chivington which set the whole Indian country into a blaze of hatred. The chief theater of war was in Wyoming and the Platte valley of Nebraska during 1865 and 1866. In 1867 occurred the campaign by General Hancock in southern Kansas and present-day northern Oklahoma, which resulted in nothing except to give the Indians renewed confidence. The following year, 1868, saw the red men receive three stunning defeats — the repulse of Roman Nose's band by Col. G. A. Forsyth's command at Beecher's Island; Gen. George A. Custer's winter attack on Black Kettle's village on the Washita; and Gen. Eugene A. Carr's defeat of Tall Bull's band at Summit Springs. In each case the leading chief was killed. Born in Kentucky in 1842, Charlie Reynolds came to West when only a boy of sixteen, by way of an emigrant train bound for California. The train was attacked by Indians on the Platte and most of the emigrants were killed, but Reynolds escaped to become a Nemesis to the race which had done that deed. At the end of the Civil War he went on a trading expedition and again ran afoul of the Indians when his party was attacked on the Smoky Hill. Reynolds' fellow trader was killed, but he took refuge in a Wolfer's dugout and stood the Indians off until nightfall, when he escaped and finally reached Santa Fe in safety. Reynolds was chief of scouts in the ill-fated expedition to the Little Big Horn. He died trying to stave off the rush of the Sioux warriors who were shooting down the soldiers of Major Reno as they tried to retreat across the Little Big Horn river. He is buried, and a tablet shows where he died bravely fighting, on the field of the Little Big Horn. Sharp Grover is said to have been a "squaw man," having lived as a member of the Sioux tribe and been married to a Sioux wife. When Colonel Forsyth organized his famous expedition for the Beecher Island campaign Grover went along as chief of scouts. At the time he scouted for Forsyth, Grover was suffering from a still unhealed wound in the back which he had received when his friend Billy Comstock was treacherously killed by Sioux Indians, in August, 1868, on the Solomon river. This occurred only a month before the Forsyth expedition, yet the painful hurts did not prevent him from riding, fighting and scouting as daringly and as intelligently as at any period in his life. Billy Comstock was born in Wisconsin, but came west at an early age, living on the frontier by preference. He was one of the original pony express riders, at the time when Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody were similarly employed. In 1868, when the Indian war broke out, Gen. Phil Sheridan sent for Comstock for the purpose of employing him as chief of scouts. It was during this service that he met Custer. He was chief scout for that officer during the campaign which resulted in the massacre of Lieutenant Kidder and his men, and also in the fight of Colonel Cook with the hostiles between Fort Wallace and Fort McPherson.
Jack Stillwell was another member of the Forsyth expedition who later became famous as a scout. At the time he enlisted with Forsyth at Fort Hays he was just a boy, only nineteen years old, but already an experienced hunter and plainsman. He took part in the Beecher Island fight, and, with Pierre Trudeau, was the first to volunteer to get through the Indian cordon when night fell and go for help. He served with distinction under Custer and was guide for the Nineteenth Kansas during its winter campaign in 1868. He also served during the campaign of 1874, and made a daring ride from the Darlington agency to Fort Sill, seventy-five miles alone through hostile country, to bring news of the outbreak and get help. Later he was a scout for Gen. "Black Jack" Davidson. At the close of the war he acted for a time as a deputy United States marshal, and later was a United States commissioner at Anadarko. He spent his last days on the Wyoming ranch of Buffalo Bill Cody.
Billy Dixon was born in West Virginia, but came west to Missouri at the age of twelve to live with an uncle. Two years later he went "on his own" to Kansas and the plains. At Leavenworth he obtained a job as a bullwhacker for a wagon train operating between that city and Fort Scott. Later he freighted between Leavenworth and Fort Collins, Colo., and drove a wagon for the government peace commission to the treaty of Medicine Lodge in 1867. While traveling with a small party with dispatches from Gen. Nelson A. Miles, then camped on McClellan creek, to Fort Supply, was surrounded by a war party of approximately 100 Kiowas and had to fight for his life in a buffalo wallow. In the party were Amos Chapman, another scout, and four soldiers. One of the soldiers was killed and every man in the party was wounded more or less seriously, but they succeeded in repulsing the Indians and holding them off until help came. Dixon rescued his friend Chapman from under the very guns of the Indiana during the fight. Every member of the party received congressional medals of honor for their bravery. Dixon died in 1913. He had taken up ranching near the scene of the Adobe Walls fight and was successful. His widow authored his spirited biography. Comparatively little is known about William Mathewson, although he was an associate and friend of Kit Carson and did many highly important scouting services for the government. Mathewson, of Scotch descent, trapped all over the Rockies in the days before there was any thought of settlement. Later he traded among the Indians in western Kansas for years. In 1853 he established a post known as the Cow Creek ranch on the great bend of the Arkansas. It was here that Mathewson earned the Kiowa name Sillpah Sinpah, signifying "Long Bearded Dangerous Man," from his treatment of the celebrated chief, Satanta, who attempted to help himself to a part of Mathewson's trade stock without paying for it. Mathewson gave the Indian a terrific beating with his fists and ended by kicking him and his friends out of the store room. Strangely the incident made a life-long friend out of Satanta, who rode hundreds of miles to warn Mathewson when the Kiowas went on the warpath in 1864. In 1864 Mathewson rode as a scout for General Blunt's expedition. Later he did much to bring the Indians together for the Little Arkansas treaty which preceded the great Medicine Lodge peace council. Among Mathewson's exploits was the rescue of the two Kirkpatrick girls, Helen and Louisa, from captivity among the Indians. Through his influence with the savages he is said to have made arrangements for the release of no less than fifty-four women and children during his years on the frontier. Mathewson's extreme reticence and modesty were such that he never would talk to newspaper men or relate his adventures except on rare occasions. He is deserving of a much greater place in history than he has thus far received.
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