The Wild Frontier (39 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
What could have motivated Chivington and Evans? Both had run for Congress and lost. Schultz believed both thought they could get favorable publicity by fighting the Indians, thereby winning Chivington a seat in the House and Evans a seat in the Senate.
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Although this belief may have been true, the only hard evidence as to either hoping an Indian fight would advance his career is congressional testimony about Chivington that “he thought he had done a brilliant thing which would make him a brigadier general. I think the expression was ‘that he thought that would put a star on his shoulder.’ “
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I
NDIAN RAIDS
intensified greatly after Sand Creek. Axelrod observed that “far from disheartening the Indians, as Chivington had hoped, the
Battle of Sand Creek galvanized their resolve to fight, as Southern Sioux, Northern Arapaho, and Cheyenne united in a spasm of savage raids during late 1864 and early 1865 called the Cheyenne-Arapaho War.”
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In January 1865, more than 1,000 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians raided Julesburg, about 190 miles northeast of Denver. War parties as large as 500 warriors burned coach stations and ranches as far as 80 miles west of Julesburg. Eight settlers were killed. For about 150 miles in the South Platte Valley, everything was burned and no settlers were safe. Denver was isolated and threatened with famine. Some 50 settlers died and others were captured. There was burning and violence from the Missouri River in Kansas to Salt Lake City. Chivington’s successor declared martial law in Denver and closed down all businesses until 360 replacements could be found for the Hundred Dazers.
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Debo and Wilson said this Cheyenne-Arapaho War killed more whites than the number of Indians killed at Sand Creek.
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T
HE INDIAN
raids following Sand Creek could have been predicted. What was less predictable was the government reaction. On January 10, 1865, the U.S. House of Representatives directed the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the [Civil] War to investigate what eastern newspapers were calling a “massacre of friendly Indians.” Curtis requested and received Chivington’s immediate resignation, hoping to prevent an army inquiry. But the next day, Chief of Staff General George Halleck ordered Curtis to investigate charges that the conduct of Chivington toward the friendly Indians “had been a series of outrages calculated to make them all hostile.” Curtis wrote to both Halleck and Evans condemning Chivington. He also ordered Wynkoop to take command of Fort Lyon again and investigate the massacre. Wynkoop collected affidavits and on January 15 sent Curtis a strong condemnation of Chivington. The report labeled him an “inhuman monster” and the attack an “unprecedented atrocity.” It estimated there were from 60 to 70 killed at Sand Creek, two thirds of whom were women and children.
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A 3-day congressional hearing (the first) began on March 13, 1865. Evans himself testified evasively on the last day. Chivington gave an affidavit and answered questions put in writing by congressmen. He insisted he had attacked because he thought the Indians were hostile.
The committee’s final report found the attack at Sand Creek to be “an atrocity of the highest order” and condemned it as “the scene of murder and barbarity.” Men, women, and children were “indiscriminately slaughtered.” “From the suckling babe to the old warrior, all who were
overtaken were deliberately murdered.” “The soldiers indulged in acts of barbarity of the most revolting character; such, it is to be hoped, as never before disgraced the acts of men claiming to be civilized.” The report stated that the dead bodies revealed
evidence of the fiendish malignity and cruelty of the officers who had so sedulously and carefully plotted the massacre, and of the soldiers who had so faithfully acted out the spirit of their officers. It is difficult to believe that beings in the form of men, and disgracing the uniform of the United States soldiers and officers, could commit or countenance the commission of such acts of cruelty and barbarity.
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Considerable blame was assigned to Evans. Anthony was chastised. The report dealt most harshly with Chivington. Schultz quoted from the report the assertion that Chivington had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre.” He took advantage of the Cheyenne “to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man. [He] surprised and murdered, in cold blood, the unsuspecting men, women, and children on Sand Creek.”
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Congress also made partial reparations to the widows and orphans of the Indians killed there. Each woman who lost a husband and each child who lost a parent was awarded 160 acres of land.
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Another congressional report proclaimed, “To the honor of the government it may be said that a just atonement for this violation of its faith was sought to be made in the late treaty with these tribes.”
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A second congressional investigation inquiring into plunder allegedly taken from the Indians by soldiers also concluded that Chivington’s men had perpetrated a massacre of the Indians.
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A third 3-man military commission met for 76 days but rendered no conclusions because the commission charter required that it simply find facts.
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About a month after the final committee report was released, Secretary of State William H. Seward advised Evans that President Andrew Johnson wanted his resignation without delay. Evans resigned.
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Chivington was dismissed from the Methodist Church. Later he married his son’s widow, prompting her parents to publish a letter condemning the marriage.
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A
TROCITIES, OF
course, continued elsewhere. Charles Bent, a Dog Soldier leader and another of William Bent’s sons, was in Black Kettle’s village at the time of the Sand Creek Massacre. He and some other
Cheyenne raided a station the following year, captured 2 men there, and in sight of their fellow workers staked one of the prisoners on the ground, cut out his tongue, built a fire on his stomach, and performed “other abominations.”
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When settlers returned to Arizona after the Civil War, they confronted the Apache, who were a ferocious tribe. It was claimed that the Apache captured women, then literally tore their bodies apart. The settlers also reported that prisoners were hung head down over small fires, their uncontrolled jackknifing giving amusement to the Apache for hours while the prisoner’s brain slowly roasted until death.
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In 1865, Lieutenant William Drew saw a soldier fall off a bluff during the Battle of Platte Bridge in Wyoming Territory:
An Indian [Sioux] rode up to his body and commenced shooting arrows into it. After firing four or five arrows the Indian dismounted, took his tomahawk and commenced to hack him with it.
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Soldier Hank Lord fired his rifle, hitting the Indian when his hatchet was in midair. The next day, a supply train guarded by troops was attacked. After the Indians had withdrawn, troops went to the scene. Drew said,
A horrible sight met our gaze. Twenty-one of our dead soldiers were lying on the ground, stripped naked and mangled in every conceivable way. I noticed one poor fellow with a wagon tire across his bowels, and from appearances, it had been heated red-hot and then laid upon him while still alive.
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A
Chicago Journal
reporter at the same scene wrote that “Lieutenant [Casper] Collins was horribly mutilated, his hands and feet cut off, heart taken out, scalped, and one hundred arrows in him.”
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The Boxx, or Box, family was attacked by Kiowa Indians in Texas in 1865. Their home was destroyed, the father and the youngest daughter killed when she would not stop crying, the mother and 2 teenage daughters raped, and daughter Ida, age 7, tortured by being compelled to walk barefoot on live coals because she could not understand the commands of the Indian women. When rescued only 10 weeks later, Ida had almost forgotten the English language.
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F
ORT PHIL KEARNY
, in Wyoming, was the site of Fetterman’s Massacre in 1866. Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington was the commander of
the fort, one of a series built to protect travelers on the Bozeman Trail. Captain William J. Fetterman, who was stationed there, had bragged that with only 80 soldiers he could defeat the entire Sioux nation. The Sioux had attacked a wagon train hauling wood. Colonel Carrington ordered Fetterman to relieve the besieged train, drive the Indians off, then return to the fort. He was not to pursue the Indians beyond Lodge Trail Ridge, which would be out of the range of the fort’s howitzers.
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Fetterman picked 49 experienced infantrymen. Lieutenant George W. Grummond followed with 27 cavalrymen, and 2 civilians and Captain Frederick H. Brown went along to observe. These 80 men left the fort in 2 groups, the infantrymen first, then the faster cavalrymen. The orders were repeated again to Fetterman and to Grummond at the gate. Disobeying orders, Fetterman led the group off the road, past Lodge Trail Ridge, and out of sight of the fort. Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 Sioux led by Crazy Horse were waiting in ambush for them.
Carrington heard heavy gunfire and sent 40 men to assist Fetterman. When they got to the ridge, they saw hundreds of warriors and 80 dead soldiers and civilians. Carrington was deemed partly responsible for the massacre and relieved of his command, but subsequent investigations exonerated him.
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He prepared his official report 2 weeks later. He stated that he had found his soldiers’ bodies just at dark. They were naked and frozen with
eyes torn out and laid on rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers, brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out from sockets; private parts severed and indecently placed on the person; eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spear-heads, sticks, and arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knives; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms, and cheeks taken out. Punctures upon every sensitive part of the body, even to the soles of the feet and palms of the hand. All this only approximates the whole truth…. [One had] 105 arrows in his naked body.
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Once more, an entire military force had been wiped out by the Sioux. The army demanded vengeance, but there was a peace treaty instead. The Fetterman defeat, together with constant Sioux guerrilla warfare, had closed the Bozeman Trail and worn down the government.
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The military capabilities of Red Cloud and his Sioux warriors resulted in the 1868 Second Fort Laramie Treaty, which provided that the Sioux would stop fighting and that a Sioux reservation would be established for the
absolute and undisturbed use of the Sioux.
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After gold was discovered in the Black Hills (part of the reservation), the government tried to keep prospectors out for a time, but with little success. Finally, President Grant reportedly met with the army, and it was agreed that the government would no longer interfere with the prospectors.
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M
R
. R. J. S
MYTH
was a teamster at Fort Phil Kearny. While making a trip to the hayfield outside the fort, he was accompanied by an artist from
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly.
The artist insisted on getting off partway to make some sketches. Smyth advised him to stay with the outfit, but the artist insisted. On the way back he was found dead, a cross cut in his chest, indicating that the Indians thought him a coward, and his head completely skinned. Smyth speculated that the Cheyenne had killed the artist because they typically cut scalps into many pieces. Later, soldier Pate Smith got too far ahead of the outfit and the Crows claimed the Sioux caught him and skinned him alive.
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The Marysville, Kansas,
Enterprise
reported in 1866 that Indians surrounded a home, and while the husband looked on, his wife, who had fled,
was led from her tent and every remnant of clothing torn from her body. A child that she was holding to her breast was wrenched from her arms and she was knocked to the ground. In this nude condition the demons gathered round her and while some held her down by standing on her wrists and their claws clutched in her hair, others outraged her person. No less than thirty repeated the horrible deed!
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In Texas, attacks by the Indians had not abated either. In 1867, Texas governor Throckmorton reported that since the end of the Civil War, the Indians there (mostly Comanche and Kiowa) had killed 162 settlers and captured 43. Twenty-nine of the captives had been returned. Rupert Norval Richardson said,
Ordinarily the Indians would not give up a captive without the payment of a reward…. Some of the more responsible chiefs tried to stop this stealing of white women and children…. But some of the most prominent Comanche chiefs either participated in or condoned this practice of taking captives.
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Cheyenne and Arapaho war parties also rode north into Kansas, killing 117 settlers and taking 7 women captive.
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The same year, after a fight with soldiers near Fort C. F. Smith, the Sioux retired, leaving a dead warrior behind. The soldiers “scalped the dead Indian in the latest and most artistic western style, then beheaded him, placing his head on a high pole, leaving his carcass to his friends or the wolves.”
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Eight months after Fetterman’s Massacre, there was another fight at the same place. The Sioux again attacked the woodcutters at Fort Phil Kearny. Earlier, Fetterman had had cumbersome muzzle-loaders, but at this second fight, called the Wagon Box Fight because the soldiers made a defensive formation behind a circle of wagons, the soldiers had more efficient breechloaders and survived. Surgeon Horton was appalled to learn that the soldiers had brought back the head of an Indian “for scientific study.” Horton sent it to Washington.
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