The Wild Frontier (40 page)

In the winter of 1867-68, the Cheyenne fought their old enemies, the Kaw and the Osage, and within a week after the Cheyenne got weapons from Wynkoop at Fort Lyon in August, they killed more than a dozen settlers, kidnapped some children, and forced hundreds of settlers to abandon their homes. In September there were more attacks. They continued into the fall.
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In the spring of 1868, the southern Plains tribes raided in Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. Goodrich noted that they burned, raped, and murdered. “In one month alone, seventy-five settlers were slaughtered.”
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I
N NOVEMBER
, Black Kettle tried to surrender for the last time at Fort Cobb. He talked with Major General William B. Hazen. He told Hazen that his camp of 180 lodges located on the Washita River wanted to make peace. Hazen informed him that he was not authorized to make peace. Exactly one week after Black Kettle’s talk with Hazen, Custer led the 700-man Seventh Cavalry to the peaceful Cheyenne camp and surrounded it. They charged at dawn. Major Joel Elliott led 15 soldiers along the riverbank, but was ambushed. He and all his men were killed, their naked bodies mutilated. But the soldiers killed 103 Indians. One of them was Black Kettle, who was buried in an unmarked grave so that soldiers would not find it, but his bones with his jewelry were recovered in 1934. The local newspaper put them on display in its window. The Battle of the Washita River was Custer’s only victory over the Indians.
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There were 4 white prisoners in Black Kettle’s camp when the cavalry attack began. The Indians killed 2 of them, one a woman, the other a small child. Andrist said they were killed by the women.
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Custer, newspaper reporter DeBenneville Keim, and others went in search of Major Elliott and his men. Keim wrote,

A scout for the army, Lem Wilson, was looking for water. He stumbled on an Indian, who attacked with a knife. Wilson killed the Indian instead and went wild. “I took his knife and scalped him…. It was th’ happiest moment of my life…. I was like a wild man. I was wavin’ th’ bloody scalp in one hand and th’ Indian’s knife in th’ other. All th’ hatred I had for them cusses that had been tryin’ to kill me for years was turned loose inside of me and outside.”
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Some settlers sought vengeance for family members killed by Indians. In 1868, a newspaper reporter interviewed George Porter, who had witnessed the rape and murder of his entire family. He followed Indians wherever he could find them for the purpose of killing them. He carried with him a canebrake about 12 inches long and made a notch on it whenever he killed. The canebrake had 108 notches on it at the time of the interview. Other relatives seeking vengeance left pieces of poisoned meat where Indians were likely to pass. In one instance, more than 20 Indians were poisoned.
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Indians attacked a Montana trading post in 1869. Several warriors were killed. Their heads were cut off, their ears pickled in whiskey, and the flesh boiled from the skulls. Inscriptions such as “Let Harper’s Tell of My Virtues” were put on them
(Harper’s Weekly
was sympathetic to the Indians).
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Shoshoni chief Washakie was born around 1798, and by the 1850s he led 1,000 disciplined warriors.
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In 1869, when Washakie was about 71 years old, he overheard some warriors complain that he was too old and should retire. He said nothing. The next day, he rode out of camp and wasn’t seen or heard from for 2 months. When he returned, he brought 7 scalps (probably Indian), which he had taken by himself. That no doubt ended the talk about retirement, and he continued to take an active part in wars against the Sioux. After his son was killed in a barroom brawl, he converted to Christianity.
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He died at age 101 or 102.
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Scout J. E. Welch wrote an account of the Battle of Summit Springs in
1869 to his comrade, Colonel Henry O. Clark. They found the trail of Cheyenne chief Tall Bull, who was a leader of the ferocious Dog Soldier Society, whose warriors earlier had raided the Pawnee, killing 15 men and raping 5 women.
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The camp was charged.

Welch saw a white woman run from the Indians. One fired and hit her, but she was only wounded and survived. About the same time, Welch saw another white woman seized by an Indian, who hacked her with a tomahawk. Several men rode toward the Indian and killed him. Welch dismounted to see if he could help the woman, but she was dead. She had been far along in pregnancy.

Then Welch saw an Indian getting away by himself. Welch gave chase, the Indian turned, fired, and wounded Welch in the leg. Three arrows also were shot at him, the third splitting his left ear. Welch then shot the Indian through the head and scalped him. Welch later discovered that he was Chief Pretty Bear. The Pawnee scouts knew him and wanted his scalp, which Welch gave them. It was learned that the surviving white woman was German. She said both women had been “beaten and outraged in every conceivable manner.”
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The Blackfeet had committed many crimes in Montana, so the army in 1870 under the command of Colonel E. M. Baker struck the Piegan camp of Heavy Runner and Red Horn. (The Piegans were a band of the Blackfeet.) The army was tracking several warriors who had killed a settler. There were 173 Blackfeet killed; 90 were women and 50 children. After the raid on the Piegans, General Sheridan estimated that at least 800 men, women, and children had been murdered by Indians since 1862. The
New York Times
countered that it was indefensible, needlessly barbaric and brutal, and a wholesale slaughter.
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K
IOWA LEADER
Satanta liked to live the good life. He lived in a carpeted tipi and called guests to dinner by blowing on a French horn.
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Fanny Kelly heard the story that Satanta’s people in Texas had captured Mrs. Clara Blynn, her 2-year-old son, Willie, and others in a raid on the Arkansas River. The Indians refused to give the Blynns any food after a couple of days except for the little bit Mrs. Blynn could get from the women, who were jealous of her. The women in Satanta’s band believed that an Indian girl had become a spy because Satanta had murdered her best friend. The girl furnished food and carried a letter from Mrs. Blynn to the commanding general addressed to “Kind Friend,” pleading for help. Whenever Satanta was gone, the women would burn the Indian girl with sharp sticks and resinous splinters. Her face, breasts, and limbs
were scarred in this way and her baby was held by the hair and punished with a stick in her presence. The army arrived at the camp. Mrs. Blynn cried, “Willie, Willie, saved at last!” but Satanta buried his tomahawk in her brain, grabbed Willie, dashed his head against a tree, killing him, and threw his body on his dying mother.
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In north central Texas in 1871, 3 years after the Blynns were killed, Henry Warren, a government contractor, was at the head of his wagon train when the group was attacked by a raiding party of Indians, mostly Kiowa. The wagonmaster and 6 other men were killed. One of the men was tied to a wagon wheel and burned. At Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Satanta boasted that he had led the attack. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Humanitarian groups (today they would be called Indian advocates) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs argued that the sentence was too harsh. The death sentence was revoked, he was imprisoned, and then paroled in 1873. The next year, General Sheridan ordered 74 militant Indians, including Satanta, to prison again. When Satanta was told he would never be released, he committed suicide by jumping from a prison hospital window.
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Even Custer wrote that except for Satanta’s “restless barbarity” and “merciless forays” against the frontier, he was “a remarkable man—remarkable for his powers of oratory, his determined warfare against the advance of civilization, and his opposition to abandoning his accustomed way of life.”
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T
HE ARMY
had established several feeding stations where friendly Indians could find food and, they hoped, safety. One of these stations was at Camp Grant, north of Tucson. A band of Apache numbering 500 appeared there in 1871 and surrendered their weapons. Citizens of Tucson organized a vigilante group consisting of 7 white settlers, 48 Mexicans, and 92 Papago Indian mercenaries. The sleeping Apache were massacred.
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Helen Hunt Jackson said that 21 women and children were killed.
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This finally ended the war against the Apache begun by General James H. Carleton in 1862, a war that had cost many settler and soldier lives.
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In California, T. T. Waterman wrote that in 1871 some settlers with dogs chased a band of Indians into a cave because Indians had wounded a steer. On entering the cave, they found some small children. One of the men said he couldn’t kill the babies with his heavy .56-caliber Spencer rifle because “it tore them up too bad,” so he shot them with his .38-caliber revolver. About 30 were killed.
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Texas forces had attacked Mexican Kickapoos. Because the 2 were at war, the Kickapoos raided for horses and cattle in Texas and sold them in Mexico. Texas asked the federal government for troops. They were sent in 1873 under the leadership of Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie. He learned when the men would be gone from the Kickapoo villages, raided them, burned them, and captured 40 women and children, who were held as hostages to try to get the group to go to the reservation in Oklahoma. About half of them did.
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A wagonload of 17 Modoc prisoners was being transported in Oregon to Boyle’s camp in 1873. Some were women and children. They were unarmed and without an escort. A group of armed men thought to be Oregon volunteers attacked the wagon. Several of the Indians were killed before a squad of soldiers drove the volunteers away.
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The Modocs and Klamaths ceded most of their territory in 1864 and retired to a reservation in Oregon. The Modocs were unhappy there and asked for a reservation in California. Their request was denied. A group of Modocs under Captain Jack nevertheless went to California and established a village there. The government sent troops to evict them. There was a fight at the village, and a soldier and an Indian were killed. Captain Jack and his group escaped to a lava field. Another group of Modocs under Hooker Jim had been away from the village when the soldiers arrived. That group carried out raids on ranchers, killing 15, then fled to the lava beds.
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After Captain Jack had surrendered at the end of the Modoc War in 1873, 4 warriors decided to surrender too. They went to a friendly rancher, John Fairchild, to whom they had gone for counsel earlier to see if they could stay out of the war. Fairchild put them in his wagon to take them to surrender. Some settlers stopped the wagon, made Fairchild get out, and killed the 4 Indians. The settlers wounded a woman bystander in their enthusiasm.
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Captain Jack, Boston Charley, Black Jim, Schonchin John, and 2 others were tried by a military commission in 1873 for the murder of Peace Commissioner General Edward R. S. Canby
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and Commissioner Reverend Eleasar Thomas, who were seeking to end the Modoc War. All were sentenced to death. Canby was the only general killed in the
American-Indian War. President Grant commuted the sentences of the other 2 to life imprisonment. The 4 named Indians were hanged. Their heads were removed and sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington.
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T
HOMAS GOODRICH
described a poignant atrocity occurring to the surviving members of the German family, which ended in 1874. Earlier, the family of 17-year-old Catherine German, consisting of her parents and her 6 siblings, were on the way west. Cheyenne Indians attacked, putting an arrow in her thigh and killing her parents, 2 sisters, and her brother. A sister with long hair was scalped. Catherine was compelled by the Indian who had captured her to become the tribe prostitute. When forced to get water or wood, she was often raped as many as 6 times a trip.

In 1874, the army attacked a Cheyenne village in Texas. The Indians fled, but one returned and fired his rifle at a pile of buffalo robes and blankets. He was killed by a soldier. The pile moved, so the soldiers investigated, thinking they might find a Cheyenne, but it was Catherine’s sister, Julia German. Sister Addie, 5 years old when captured and now near starvation in a lodge, so moved Sergeant Mahoney that he wept and held her close. She asked the soldiers, “What kind of Indians are you?”

Catherine remained with some Cheyenne who decided they should return to the reservation. They got to the army camp, where the soldiers “stood at the side of the trail cheering.”
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By 1874, the Cheyenne on their reservation in Oklahoma were starving to death. The army was directed to prevent them from leaving their reservation to search for food, but the next year they broke away and pillaged and even murdered. General Pope was sympathetic. “It is inhuman to compel Indians to remain at the agencies on their reservations slowly starving to death…. In other words, the military forces are required to compel these Indians to starve to death quietly or be killed if they are not willing to do it.”
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The same year, the Cheyenne under Tall Bull raided the Pawnee, killing 15 men and raping 5 women.
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Comanche and Cheyenne warriors, 700 in all, attacked Adobe Walls, Texas, in 1874. The trading post was defended by 27 buffalo hunters with long-range rifles. At the end of the unsuccessful all-day fight, the Indians turned on the Kansas travel routes, the Texas frontier, Colorado, and New Mexico. Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn stated that “men, women, and children were tortured, slain, or taken
captive.” About 80 settlers were killed. Patrick Hennessey and 3 other men were bringing a wagonload of supplies for the Indians, but the Cheyenne killed and scalped 3 of them. Hennessey was put on a pile of grain and burned to death by some Osages who just happened to be passing by.
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Adobe Walls was abandoned after the attack. The defenders left behind them the heads of 12 warriors on posts.
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