Terrible Swift Sword (53 page)

Custer's buffalo hunting career began in Kansas during the 1867 Indian war, with a tragicomic incident that he recounted in
My Life on the Plains
. Custer wrote that he and his greyhounds had ridden miles ahead of his men in excited pursuit of a large buffalo. As Custer drew abreast of it and took aim with his pistol, his horse suddenly jerked. He grabbed at the reins with his gun hand—and accidentally shot and killed his horse. Luckily for him, his troopers found him afoot on the prairie before the Indians did. Custer had since become an accomplished buffalo killer and a skilled taxidermist.
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Escorted by the 2nd Cavalry, the splendidly appointed hunting party rode to a camp already prepared on Willow Creek, near present-day Culbertson, Nebraska,
by Brigadier General Innis Palmer and troops from Fort McPherson. The 2nd Cavalry band heralded the grand duke's arrival by playing “Hail to the Chief.”
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The next morning, Spotted Tail's band reported a large buffalo herd ten miles to the southwest. Sheridan, Alexis, Cody, Custer, and two Indians made the first attack. The grand duke got his first kill, and before that morning's hunt was finished, he had nine. A Sioux warrior delighted Alexis by killing a buffalo with one shot from a bow and arrow. That night, Spotted Tail's band staged a war dance before a giant bonfire with further illumination provided by Chinese lanterns hung from the trees.
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They rode the train to Denver, where city leaders organized a grand ball for the grand duke. They had just set out by train from Denver for St. Louis when Sheridan was informed that a large herd had been spotted near Kit Carson, Colorado. A second hunt was hastily organized.

This time, the eager hunters converged from several directions on the herd, and it scattered. In the melee, Sheridan's horse fell, and he ended up on foot. Just then, Alexis, Custer, and other hunters galloped over a hilltop while blazing away at some wounded buffalo—and they nearly bagged Sheridan, who flung himself to the ground to avoid the fusillade. Angrily leaping to his feet, Sheridan proceeded to heartily curse the wild shooters, sparing neither Custer nor Alexis. “It was a liberal education in profanity to hear him,” a witness to the scene reported.
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Alexis returned to Russia with a slew of hunting trophies and stories. Later, Sheridan received a letter from Count Harry D'Offenberg of the Russian legation in New York conveying the czar's gratitude for the “cordial welcome and kind reception” accorded the czar's son.
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SHERIDAN REMINDED CODY THAT after the earlier expedition, publisher James Gordon Bennett had invited him to New York. He urged Cody to go, promising him a leave of absence with pay. Full of foreboding, Cody set out for New York, along the way stopping in Chicago and lodging with the Sheridan brothers.

To his surprise, Cody liked New York and loved the theater. And after more scouting in the West, Cody was invited back to New York in 1872 by Ned Buntline, who had written dime novels about “Buffalo Bill” Cody; Buntline wanted him to appear in his play
Scouts of the Prairie
. It was the beginning of Cody's show-business career, culminating in the Wild West Show and his tenure as the reigning celebrity of his era.
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BETWEEN THE TWO BUFFALO hunts, Sheridan was plunged into the middle of Chicago's worst disaster, the Great Fire. It began on October 8, 1871, near a barn owned by Patrick O'Leary (the story that the O'Leary cow kicked over a lantern
proved apocryphal). With terrific intensity, the conflagration roared through the city's largely wooden structures, fanned by a thirty-mile-per-hour wind from the southwest. By the time rains tamped down the flames on October 9, the fire had incinerated 17,500 buildings in a three-and-a-half-square-mile area. More than two hundred people were dead, and a fourth of the city's 300,000 residents were homeless. As soon as the fire was brought under control, the looting began.

With his usual presence of mind in emergencies, Sheridan had organized residents to deliberately destroy buildings at key points in the fire's path, and the firebreaks had helped check its spread. Afterward, a delegation of city leaders sought Sheridan's help in feeding and sheltering the fire's victims. With Mayor R. B. Mason's consent and the backing of the War Department and President Grant, Sheridan sent for troops from Nebraska and Kansas and arranged for the delivery of 300,000 rations, tents, and blankets. By the next evening, some of the estimated 75,000 people left homeless by the fire were receiving government rations and shelter.

When looting and violence became widespread, the mayor asked Sheridan to restore order. Sheridan organized army units and 1,000 local volunteers to patrol the streets, and the law-and-order crisis subsided.

 

THE FIRE DESTROYED THE Division of the Missouri headquarters, all of its records, and all of Sheridan's letters, papers, maps, and journals. Army mules and horses perished—one of them Sheridan's beloved gray charger Breckenridge, captured on Missionary Ridge. The destruction of Sheridan's Civil War papers and journals deprived him of irreplaceable materials, making the composition of his
Personal Memoirs
exponentially more difficult. Future biographers, too, were deprived of insights that might have better explained the inner man.

The fire had one positive outcome, however. The Sheridan home, spared by the flames, became a temporary refuge for friends and army officers needing lodging. Put out of their home by fire damage, the Missouri division's quartermaster general, Colonel Daniel Rucker, his wife, and his teenage daughter, Irene, were invited by Sheridan to stay in his roomy home until they could find new quarters. Although busy and often absent, Sheridan managed to make the acquaintance of Irene—the young woman who would one day become his wife.
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1874–1877

PHIL SHERIDAN'S WASHITA WINTER CAMPAIGN of 1868 to 1869 had forced the Southern Plains Indians onto the reservations, where they had been promised food, clothing, and education. The government, however, had largely reneged on these promises. In 1874, the shortage of government rations had become critical. The annual food allotment typically lasted just seven months—which was bad enough—but in May 1874, no rations were delivered, and the Indians began to starve.

Worse, nature conspired to thwart their pitiful attempts to grow their own food. Drought withered their crops. Then, as the Southern Plains baked in 110-degree temperatures, locust swarms stripped the land of vegetation.
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In order to survive, the warriors rode south of the Cimarron River in search of their onetime food staple—the buffalo. But everywhere they went, it seemed, teams of white buffalo hunters were at work efficiently killing the shaggy beasts with their
powerful “Big Fifty” Sharps rifles. Having wiped out the buffalo herds in southern Kansas, the hunters, with the military's tacit approval, had moved into northern Texas, where vast herds still roamed the hunting grounds reserved for the tribes under the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty.

The buffalo hunters' wastefulness had long disgusted the Indians. After watching soldiers shoot up a small herd, cut out their tongues, and leave the carcasses to rot, the Kiowa chief, Satanta, had railed years earlier, “Has the white man become a child, that he should recklessly kill and not eat? When the red men slay game they do it so they may live, and not starve.” The situation had worsened exponentially since then, until finally the combination of the omnipresent buffalo hunters, food shortages, and white rustlers' thefts on the reservations pushed the Indians to the breaking point.

That point came in 1874, when rustlers stole forty-three ponies from Little Robe, the popular Cheyenne “peace chief,” and when buffalo hunters built a depot at Adobe Walls in the middle of the Indian buffalo hunting grounds in northern Texas. Adobe Walls, where Colonel Kit Carson and his Union troops had stood off the Kiowas in 1864, became the transit point from which the hunters shipped their hides to the railroad center at Dodge City, Kansas. From there, trains sped them to tanneries in the East.
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In May, a young Comanche shaman named Isa-Tai (in English the name roughly translated to “Wolf Shit”) and half-breed leader Quanah Parker summoned the Comanches to a sun dance on the North Fork of the Red River. Isa-Tai, who claimed to be immune to white men's bullets and able to vomit ammunition, urged war against the whites. The Comanches sent runners to the Kiowa, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne camps and invited them to a grand council. At the meeting, war factions from all the tribes agreed to fight.
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BY JUNE 26, ABOUT seven hundred warriors had gathered near Adobe Walls. A few miles from the compound, they ambushed two hunters and tortured them to death.

Early the next morning, the outpost's twenty-nine buffalo hunters and storekeepers were jolted from their slumbers by war whoops and gunshots. Bizarrely, the Indians were guided by army bugle calls blown by a deserter from a black army regiment, and the buffalo hunters initially believed cavalry had come to their rescue.

The vast disparity in numbers might have suggested that the whites stood no chance. But the buffalo hunters, among them Bat Masterson, were all superb marksmen, and most were armed with “Big Fifties”—the .50-caliber cannons that fired three-inch bottleneck cartridges loaded with up to 110 grains of powder. One shot could kill a robust buffalo at six hundred yards.
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Unable to wipe out the stubborn hunters during the hours-long battle, the Indians settled for destroying all of their livestock, then left. The bodies of thirteen warriors lay outside the complex. Three hunters died.

A hunter who arrived later that day on horseback agreed to make the dangerous ride to Dodge City to summon help. At Dodge, the Kansas governor was contacted, and he notified the Missouri Department commander, Brigadier General John Pope.

Pope refused to send troops to Adobe Walls. The buffalo hunters had made thousands of dollars poaching on Indian hunting grounds, he said, and they had gotten what they deserved. Hunters in Dodge City were left to organize a relief force. By the time it reached Adobe Walls, the large war party had broken up and had gone raiding.
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IN A SPEECH, POPE once said that army officers serving on the frontier saw firsthand the conditions that forced Indians to go raiding, “beginning in injustice and wrong to the Indian, which he [the officer] has not the power to prevent; he sees the Indian gradually reach a condition of starvation impossible of long endurance and thus forced to take what he can get to save himself from dying of hunger, and cannot help sympathizing with him for doing so.” But when the Indians went raiding, even out of desperation, the army had to act.
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Many frontier army officers, especially those who had fought in the Civil War, felt as Pope did. In his
Life on the Plains
, Colonel George Custer wrote, “If I were an Indian, I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plain” rather than live on a reservation.
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Texas fell within Sheridan's jurisdiction, having been added to the Division of the Missouri in 1872. Sheridan, too, sympathized somewhat with the Indians' “fading out race,” but he also believed that they should be held accountable for their crimes, just as whites were when they killed and robbed.

Sheridan supported the buffalo hunters, believing that the key to pacifying the Plains Indians was wiping out the buffalo, which provided them food, clothing, and shelter. Sheridan reproved Pope for not sending troops to Adobe Walls, and he complained about it to General of the Army William Sherman.
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With warrior bands now robbing and killing homesteaders and travelers, Sheridan began planning a Southern Plains campaign. But he first sought new authority to pursue the renegades onto their reservations. “Their reservations have furnished them with supplies with which to make the raids, and sheltered them from pursuit when they returned with their scalps and plunder,” Sheridan grumbled.

Backed by his powerful patrons, Sherman and President Ulysses Grant, Sheridan received what he sought. On July 20, 1874, Interior Secretary Columbus Delano authorized the army, for the first time, “to punish the hostile Indians wherever found”—even in their reservation sanctuaries.
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SHERIDAN, SHERMAN, GRANT, AND pragmatic, hard-eyed army officers like them had understood for years that the solution to the Plains Indian “problem” was extermination of the buffalo. Sheridan's and Sherman's prosecution of “total war” during the Civil War had taught them that destroying an enemy's means of resupply and crushing his people's fighting spirit were as important as defeating him militarily.

As early as 1868, Sherman had warned Sheridan that the Indians would continue to terrorize the Republican River region so long as buffalo roamed there. “I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffalo and consequent[ly] Indians are out [from between] the [Kansas Pacific and Union Pacific] Roads we will have collisions and trouble.” The following year, the
Army and Navy Journal
reported that Sheridan had proposed that ten army regiments be assigned to slaughter buffalo until too few remained to support the Indians.
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