The Real Custer (41 page)

Such nuances did not impress General Sherman, who wrote to Secretary of War John M. Schofield, “All the Cheyennes & Arapahoes are now at war. Admitting that some of them have not done acts of murder, rape, etc., still they have not restrained those who have; nor have they on demand given up the criminals as they agreed to do. The treaty made at Medicine Lodge is, therefore, already broken by them.” Sherman said
that “after a reasonable time given for the innocent to withdraw, I will solicit an order from the President declaring all Indians who remain outside of their lawful reservations to be outlaws, and commanding all people—soldiers & citizens—to proceed against them as such.”
¹⁴

After the failure of Hancock's wandering expedition the previous year, the Army experimented with other tactics. At the end of the summer of 1868, Sheridan organized a fifty-four-man mobile force of experienced frontiersmen commanded by brevet Colonel George A. Forsyth, his former chief of staff during the Shenandoah Valley campaign. The concept was to send out a light mobile force without baggage trains, carrying their supplies and ammunition with them, to match the Indians' mobility and fight them in their own manner.
¹⁵
But this increased mobility came at the expense of firepower; even if Forsyth found the Indians, his men could not bring on a decisive fight.

In any case, they did not have to track down the enemy—the Indians came looking for them. On September 17, after two weeks in the field, Forsyth's group was waylaid on an island in the Arikaree River in Colorado by Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under the command of Roman Nose. The Army troops were quickly pinned down and surrounded. They fought a three-day siege, eating meat from their fallen horses and drinking muddy river water. By the time a relief party arrived, they had suffered six men killed (one of them, Beecher, gave his name to the island) and fifteen wounded. Forsyth was severely wounded and reported dead, but he recovered. The Indians lost an estimated ten to thirty, including Roman Nose, who died charging the soldiers on horseback.
¹⁶
Custer later called it “the greatest battle on the plains.”
¹⁷
But other than killing Roman Nose, the Battle of Beecher Island only showed the limits of trying to fight Indian style.

So Sheridan turned to a new strategy. The Indians lacked the capacity and inclination to campaign in the winter. The signing of the
Medicine Lodge Treaty in October underscored the traditional pattern of Indian warfare, with intervals of peace in the winter followed by renewed activity once the grass reappeared in the late spring. In the summer of 1865, Major General Grenville M. Dodge laid out the logic of striking the Indians off-season, observing that the Indians on the warpath were “not making any provisions for winter; are not hunting, planting, laying in meat, or in any way providing for the future as they usually do. The consequence will be that we will in the fall and winter have them at great disadvantage.”
¹⁸

Reporter Theodore Davis interviewed a messenger heading for Hancock's command in April 1867. The seasoned Plainsman thought talk of treaties was an attempt to buy time. “The soldiers will learn what nonsense it is to undertake to fight Indians during the summer season,” he said, offering that winter was “the time to go for their villages. They know they can't escape, because their ponies are too poor to carry them; so they will stay by and fight.” Defeating Indian mobility was the key to victory. “If the Indians are whipped at this time of year there will be some show for peace for the rest of the summer; otherwise they will fight all summer, and make peace in the fall.”
¹⁹
Everything the anonymous messenger predicted came true.

As the fall of 1868 approached, Sheridan began planning for a winter campaign. Some thought the plan was too risky, but Sheridan reasoned that “as the soldier was much better fed and clothed than the Indian, I had one great advantage.” He planned to “fall upon the savages relentlessly, for in [winter] their ponies would be thin, and weak from lack of food, and in the cold and snow, without strong ponies to transport their villages and plunder, their movements would be so much impeded that the troops could overtake them.”
²⁰

Sherman approved the concept. He wrote to General Dodge, then a member of Congress from Iowa, “[W]e propose not to let up all winter
& before spring comes I hope not an Indian will be left in that belt of country through which the two railroads pass.”
²¹
It was the same rapacity he had brought to his march through Georgia.

Sheridan wanted Custer to lead the winter campaign. He appealed to Sherman, who approved Custer's reinstatement in late September, cutting about eight weeks off his sentence. He was ordered “to report in person without delay to Maj. Gen. Sheridan for duty.” George left Michigan immediately, eager to validate the trust that Sheridan and Sherman were placing in him. “I rely in every thing upon you,” Sheridan wrote, “and shall send you on this expedition without giving you any orders leaving you to act entirely upon your judgment.”
²²

“I can whip the Indians if I can find them,” Custer wrote, “and I shall leave no effort untried to do this. I have a difficult task before me but I am confident that if the Indians can be found I can do it as well as most persons could.”
²³

The impending winter campaign was by no means a secret. The Army would have preferred the Indians come onto the reservations, so they spread the word. In late September, Sherman instructed Colonel Hazen to “give out general notice that all Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, that wish to escape the effects of the present Indian war, should now remove to the Reservation assigned them in their treaty at the Medicine Lodge.” He went on to say, “General Sheridan shall prosecute the war with vindictive earnestness against all hostile Indians till they are obliterated or beg for mercy, and therefore all who want peace must get out of the theatre of war.”
²⁴
Indian agents Boone and Wynkoop would be on hand to distribute annuities to Indians who came in. They were supplied with $50,000 to make the arrangements for food, blankets, and other materials. Hazen was to establish himself at Fort Cobb after sending word out, and “if the Indians do not come, it is not his or our fault.”
²⁵

Hazen got the word out as ordered, but it offended more Indians than it attracted. Part of the problem was that the Indians did not know the limits of the reservations, and some of the agents had established their headquarters far outside reservation lands, defeating the purpose of keeping the Indians stationary.

On November 20–21 Hazen met with a delegation of Arapahoe and Cheyenne chiefs headed by Little Big Mouth and Black Kettle. Both said they wanted peace, but they could not control every band in their tribes. “I do not represent all the Cheyennes,” Black Kettle said. “I come from a point on the Washita River, about one day's ride from Antelope Hills. Near me there are over one hundred lodges of my tribe, only a part of them are my followers. I have always done my best to keep my young men quiet, but some of them will not listen.” Black Kettle said he would “like to stop fighting, and come here soon with my people, and stay here with these Indian friends of mine, and be fed until the war is over.”
²⁶

Hazen warned the chiefs he faced a similar situation. “North of the Arkansas is General Sheridan, the great war-chief,” he told them. “I cannot control him, and he has all the soldiers, who are fighting the Cheyennes and Arapahoes. . . . You must go back to your country, and if the soldiers come to attack you, you must remember they are not from me, but from that great war-chief, and with him you must make Peace.”

Hazen quickly sent word to Sherman that a deal with these two bands would bring in most of the Indians “on the war-path south of the Arkansas.” But Hazen was unclear what he could promise them, or whether he had any authority to negotiate peace. “I should prefer that General Sheridan should make peace with these parties,” he wrote, and feared that “as General Sheridan is to punish those at war . . . a second Chivington affair might occur which I could not prevent.”
²⁷

Hazen was referring to the incident that took place November 29, 1864, near Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado, when the Colorado
Militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked Black Kettle's camp without provocation and killed over 150 men, women, and children. Black Kettle thought his people were safe and flew an American flag to show loyalty to the Union. Indian agent Ned Wynkoop, then a major in the 1st Colorado Volunteer regiment, had tried to broker a peace deal, but Chivington attacked anyway. The Sand Creek Massacre became a notorious incident in the history of relations with the Indians.

Despite Hazen's wish for peace, the next day Custer was on the march. On November 23, his regiment moved south from their base at Camp Supply on the North Canadian River in what today would be western Oklahoma. The weather was cold, and as the column began its march, a fresh snowstorm blew in, adding to the foot-deep snow blanket that covered the countryside. But Custer's force of around eight hundred was well trained and motivated, and the fresh snow would make tracking the Indian bands that much easier.

Custer's column was accompanied by
New York Herald
reporter DeBenneville Randolph Keim, a friend of president-elect Grant's who had accompanied Sherman on the march to the sea.
²⁸
He wrote that Custer's operations order from Sheridan was straightforward: “To proceed south, in the direction of the Antelope hills, thence towards the Washita river, the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies; to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.” Sheridan believed this no-quarter approach would level the playing field with the Indians and represented “two parties playing at the same game.”
²⁹
He declared he would march over the Indian villages “if he had to go all the way to Texas.”
³⁰

Custer's column moved toward the Indian winter villages along the Washita River led by Osage scouts, the traditional enemies and frequent victims of the more numerous and warlike Cheyenne. Also along were experienced trackers “Old California Joe” Corbin, Raphael Romero, and Little Beaver. On November 26 the scouts “called our attention to a trail
resembling a ‘buffalo path' which was covered with snow,” Albert Barnitz wrote. But “it should have been deeper, if the path had been made by buffaloes”—the track had actually been made by a band of Indians, but “whether a war party or a hunting party we could not tell.” They followed this trail for some distance until they came to another, fresher trail, “which had obviously been made in the afternoon of the previous, by a war party of from one to two hundred Indians. It was known to be a war party from the fact that the Indians had no dogs with them, whereas hunting parties are always accompanied by dogs.”
³¹
They sent word to Custer that they were going to follow the trail until they received further orders, and made sure their weapons were loaded and unfrozen in case of trouble.

That night the Osage scouts reported that they had tracked the war party back to a village on the Washita, where they had seen “heaps ponies.” Custer went forward to scout the location himself. He crept through the snow along a ridgeline to look down on the valley by the light of the half moon. They were looking at the pony herd, but the figures were indistinct in the dim light; one officer said they were buffalo, until they heard the tinkle of a bell. The leader of the Osages repeated, “Heaps ponies.”

“I am satisfied they are ponies, the herd of the village,” Custer whispered back. “Buffaloes are not in the habit of wearing such ornaments as bells in this country.”
³²
Below them, across the Washita on a high bank in a strip of trees, stood the fifty-one lodges of Black Kettle's band.

Custer left eighty men back with the baggage train, and as quietly as possible brought up the rest. He divided them into four columns, which would attack the village from separate directions. They moved cautiously into position in the darkness, making as little noise as possible, to preserve the element of surprise. When they reached their attack positions, the men waited, standing in the deep snow, some of them sleeping leaning on their horses. As dawn approached, Captain Francis M. Gibson
recalled listening intently for the attack signal, the regiment's trademark song, “Garryowen”: “At last the inspiring strains of the rollicking tune broke forth, filling the early morning air with joyous music. The profound silence that had reigned through the night was suddenly changed to a pandemonium of tumult and excitement; the wild notes of ‘Garryowen' which had resounded from hill to hill, were answered by wilder shouts of exultation from the charging columns.”

“We had just reached the edge of a shallow ravine beyond which we could see the clustered tepees, situated among wide-branching cottonwood trees,” Albert Barnitz wrote,

            
when a shot was fired in the village, and instantly we heard the band on the ridge beyond it strike up the familiar air “Garry Owen” and the answering cheers of the men, as Custer, and his legion came thundering down the long divide, while nearer at hand on our right came Benteen's squadron, crashing through the frozen snow, as the troops deployed into line at a gallop, and the Indian village range with unearthly war-whoops, the quick discharge of fire-arms, the clamorous barking of dogs, the cries of infants and the wailing of women.