Bill Dugan (14 page)

T
HE WINTER OF 1865 WAS THE HARDEST
anyone could remember. The snows came early and often. The high plains were covered in drifts, the mountains covered deeper still. For the Sioux, hostile and peaceful alike, the toll was incalculable. Spotted Tail and his Brule were starving. Trapped north of the Platte by the hostilities, they had found the buffalo scarce when they found them at all. Red Cloud and his Oglala band also found the hunting paltry. Even for the Laramie Loafers, some of whom still clung to the security of the tails of the bluecoats, times were hard. The annuities were suspended due to the ongoing hostilities, all Sioux being punished by Washington for the depredations of some.

And the hurdy-gurdy of politics continued to grind, the crank turning slowly but surely, sending new monkeys in for old. Indian agents came and went over the years, arriving with empty pockets and leaving with the clink of silver to announce their departures. The turnover among the military men was just as frequent, and even more significant. The Sioux had no one to turn to, at least not
with assurances that the same man would be there six months later.

And as the personnel changed, so did the policy. Good intentions went back East with the few men who professed them, and newcomers, more often than not, were determined to show that they were the men to put an end to the Sioux problem notwithstanding the failures of their predecessors.

Col. Henry Maynadier had taken command of Fort Laramie. The colonel was the closest thing to a reasonable military man in the area since Colonel Collins had mustered out. Aware of the hardships the winter had been wreaking on the Sioux, he sent emissaries, including two Laramie Loafer chiefs named Big Ribs and Big Mouth, out among the hostiles with a request that the chiefs come in for a council.

At first, the results were slow in coming. But Swift Bear and his Brule band, their numbers reduced by heavy losses to cold and starvation among the women and children, agreed to come in. Old Man Afraid and his Oglala followed. They, too, had suffered severely under the harsh winter snows. Spotted Tail, too, agreed to come and talk. His daughter was desperately ill, and she had expressed the desire to be buried in the white man’s cemetery at Fort Laramie.

When Spotted Tail asked if this could be done, Maynadier assured him that it could, and the great Brule chief agreed to bring his people to the council. The child, Yellow Buckskin Girl, was not yet seventeen, and died on the long trip to the fort. Maynadier was as good as his word, and at the funeral, he saw to it that all off-duty soldiers were in attendance.

Afterward, he met with Spotted Tail in his quarters. The chief, grieving at the loss of his daughter, was also moved by the kindness of the colonel.

Maynadier patted the chief’s shoulder. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said. “But the Great Spirit has taken your child to a better place. At night, the darkness of your lodge will be hard to bear, because it will remind you of that darkness in your heart where your daughter’s light used to shine. It is hard to lose a child, but you must believe that one day you will see her again in that better place, when the Great Spirit sees fit to bring you to join her.”

“It is like a dream,” Spotted Tail said, “to sit here in such a room. This place is warm, and the feelings are of friendship. We feel that we have been done much wrong, and that justice has not been done to our people, but I am too sad to talk of such things now. I will wait until the council and the time when the peace commissioners from the Great Father arrive. Then we will discuss these things. But I thank you for your kindness.”

Maynadier was not alone in his hopes that reasonable treatment and fairness would win the peace that guns and soldiers had so far been unable to impose on the fiercely independent Sioux. The head of the peace commission, the journalist E. B. Taylor, and the new agent for the territory, Vital Jarrot, were also committed to a satisfactory and just resolution of the impasse.

But Gen. John Pope, back in Omaha, was impatient. He knew that the plan of the commission was to bargain for a new road through the region to establish supply lines to the newly opened gold
fields of Montana, and ordered troops into the Powder River country to establish two new forts. He placed Col. Henry Carrington, a career officer with no Indian experience, in charge of the construction, and ordered him into the field at the head of a column of seven hundred men.

The peace commission was scheduled to hold its first meeting in early June, but Carrington left on May 19, and word of his coming spread rapidly. By the middle of June, with the peace discussion already underway, and many of the major Sioux chiefs, including Red Cloud, in reluctant attendance, already at Fort Laramie, the talks had started to founder.

With the spring thaw, grass had returned to the plains, the hunting improved, and the Sioux, ambivalent at best about the white man’s intentions, were beginning to doubt the wisdom of agreeing to any terms which would require them to cede still more territory to the whites. One of the chiefs, Standing Elk, got word that Carrington’s column was approaching, and he rode out to meet the colonel.

Carrington received him hospitably, but was unprepared for the chief’s direct approach. In a meeting in Carrington’s tent, Standing Elk demanded, “Where are you going?”

“To build forts along the new road through the Powder River country,” Carrington told him.

Standing Elk smiled. “The Sioux won’t let you do that. The Indians in the Powder River country are wild Indians. They have no use for the white man, and they hate the bluecoats. There is no treaty that allows you to build anything there.”

“I have my orders, Chief,” Carrington said.

“You should wait for the treaty to be signed. Maybe then. But if you take the road before we give it to you, that will not be good.”

Carrington shrugged. He wasn’t sure what he ought to do, but orders were orders, and there was no time to send back to Omaha for Pope’s opinion. Standing Elk tried once more to convince Carrington to hold off, but when he failed, he rode back to the peace council with his news.

The following morning, Carrington covered the last four miles to Fort Laramie. When he arrived, he was introduced to the chiefs at the council as the “White Chief” going to the Powder River country to build forts. The news did not set well with the Sioux chiefs. Red Cloud, especially, was annoyed. Only halfheartedly committed to peace to begin with, the arrival of Carrington struck him as one more instance of white deception.

He announced, “The White Father sends us presents and asks us to give him land for the new road, but other white men come to steal the road before we can give it to them.”

The other chiefs gave an assenting “Hou!” They were distressed and angry, but Taylor and Maynadier tried to keep the talks going nevertheless. Red Cloud stalked out of the meeting. Over the next few days, he and most of his warriors left the campground near the fort and headed back to the Powder River.

Spotted Tail, the only significant chief among those remaining, signed the treaty, then left immediately for hunting south of the Platte River. But his warriors were in Red Cloud’s frame of mind,
and most of them headed north to join the Oglala chief, leaving Spotted Tail the chief of old men, women, and children.

Taylor, despite the obvious disaster over which he had presided, tried to put the best face on the affair, and wired East that a satisfactory treaty had been concluded. Then, quietly, he stored away the gifts and annuities intended for the Oglala, hoping that they would cool down and return. But it would be a long wait.

Carrington, in the meantime, pushed on toward the Powder River. Apprised that the treaty had been signed, he assumed that his men were going to spend most of their time in construction of the forts and their buildings. Red Cloud, though, had other ideas. Almost as soon as he’d left the fort, he and his Oglala, including Hump and Crazy Horse and Little Hawk, began a series of raids all along the route staked out for the new road.

Nothing and no one was safe. The telegraph again came under siege. Freighters carrying supplies to the mines were attacked almost daily. The stage lines and the wagon trains of new settlers came in for their own share of harassment. Over the next three months, hundreds of raids, resulting in hundreds of white casualties, were perpetrated. As always, the soldiers sent out to relieve those under assault were a day late and a dollar short.

Crazy Horse had been studying his adversaries, and now understood how to make the best use of the Sioux warriors. Although Red Cloud was nominally in charge, the warriors looked more and more to Crazy Horse for their leadership. Red Cloud was by no means a figurehead. Still a great warrior in
his own right, and a crafty politician, he was consolidating his dominance over not only his own branch of the Oglala, but of considerable numbers of Brule, Miniconjou, Sans Arc, and Hunkpapa warriors, as well. It seemed as if the disaffected warriors, regardless of their tribe, were gravitating toward Red Cloud’s band, in large measure because Crazy Horse was there.

Carrington, in the meantime, had begun his construction. The first thing completed at the new Fort Phil Kearny was the stockade. But wood was not that easily available in the region, and it was necessary to send daily details out of the stockade for more timber and hay for the cavalry mounts. Whether Carrington realized it or not, he and his men were in a very precarious position. Although well armed with repeating rifles, seven-shot Spencers, and even a few sixteen-shot Henry carbines, the whites at Phil Kearny were vastly outnumbered. And the Sioux were fighting for their very survival against interlopers, an edge that Carrington, not surprisingly, did not understand.

In July, Red Cloud led an assault that drove off nearly two hundred horses. Over the next three months, Crazy Horse led several raids that destroyed telegraph communications and significantly reduced the stocks of hay for the white soldiers’ horses. The pressure was virtually nonstop. Almost every day, either a work detail was attacked, or word reached the fledgling fort of a raid on other whites moving along the new road.

By the middle of September, the new fort was under virtual siege. And his superiors were pressuring Carrington to do something to make the road
safe. The colonel complained almost constantly about his shortage of supplies and the lack of trained men. Most of his cavalrymen, to his amazement and dismay, knew next to nothing about horses. His infantrymen were untrained in the use of their weapons, poor shots who spent all their time sawing timber and building quarters.

And the number of hostile Sioux in the area continued to grow almost weekly.

Crazy Horse was growing impatient with the sporadic nature of the conflict. He sensed that a war of attrition was one the Sioux could only lose. Still convinced that the best, and perhaps the only way to defeat the bluecoats was to roll them back along the roads from west to east, taking one fort at a time, he collared Red Cloud one morning in late November.

“Always we go out,” he said, “and we burn a few wagons, steal a few horses, maybe even meet the bluecoats and kill one or two of them. But it is not enough.”

Red Cloud shrugged. “We cannot make them fight. If they will not come out to meet us, there is nothing we can do.”

“We have used decoys in the past. We have tricked them, and it worked. It worked at the bridge over the Platte River, when my friend Lieutenant Collins was killed. It can work again.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to put an end to this new fort. I want to drive the white men away, I want to defeat them so badly that they will count themselves lucky if they never see another Sioux warrior.”

“And how would you do this?”

Crazy Horse outlined his plan. Red Cloud was skeptical as he listened. But he knew that many of the warriors would rather follow Crazy Horse than follow him, so it was better to go along. If the plan worked, then as chief he would get the credit. And if it failed, as he expected it would, he could shift the blame to Crazy Horse. The others would know whose idea it was. There was the risk that success would lure many of the best warriors away from him and into Crazy Horse’s camp, but it was a risk he would have to take.

The other chiefs agreed, and Crazy Horse was given permission to outline his plan to several key warriors. He insisted that discipline was critical. “If we do not hold ourselves on a tight rein, then the bluecoats will know what we are planning, and it will not work. Remember at the Platte River bridge how well it worked. It can work that well again. But we must be patient. And this time we must position ourselves more wisely, so that we do not shoot our own warriors.”

In early December, they were ready to go. In order to avoid making the whites suspicious, raids were continued against work details from Fort Phil Kearny, but they were just for show. The real battle plan would take a few days to set up. And Crazy Horse knew that they would have just this one chance to make it work. If the plan failed, then the Sioux would revert to the old ways of making war, and the war would be their last.

In the meantime, Colonel Carrington, feeling ever increasing pressure from his commanders, was finding that he had a handful of restless subordinates. Two of them, Captains Fred Brown and
William Fetterman, made no secret of their contempt for Carrington’s timidity. Word of their dissatisfaction was filtering back to Omaha, and Carrington had already had his position curtailed. No longer commander of the Department of the Plains, he was simply post commander at Kearny, and plans were underway for his reassignment at the first opportunity.

One of the Sioux raids captured several dozen horses, and Captain Brown led a detachment out to recover the stolen animals. He encountered very little resistance and recaptured all the stolen stock. The success reinforced his belief that the Sioux were far less of a threat than Colonel Carrington believed.

Captain Fetterman, almost daily, would buttonhole the colonel. “Let me have a hundred men, Colonel,” he’d say. “I can clear out the entire Powder River valley.”