Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (48 page)

There were no supplies at Fort Wallace, Custer’s horses were generally played out and unfit for service, he felt his command was incapable of setting forth on another scouting expedition, and, most of all, he was frantic about Libbie. The Indians had so thoroughly cut the whites’ communications that no mail could get through Kansas. Custer decided to call off his campaign, take the hundred best horses and most trustworthy men, and make a forced march to the east, toward Libbie. Since starting out with Hancock in March, Custer had covered nearly one thousand miles. More than 1,400 soldiers had scoured the countryside looking for Indians; the net result of this gigantic effort was two Indians killed, and they had been killed by the Kidder party. Meanwhile the Indians had left two hundred or more dead whites scattered across Kansas. Custer had not gotten off to much of a start as an Indian fighter.

Custer’s excuse for calling off the campaign was that his horses were worn out, but that excuse didn’t stand up when he immediately marched one hundred of those horses a total of 150 miles in fifty-five hours. His excuse for abandoning his command (not to mention leaving a fort that was under direct attack) was that he needed to get to Fort Harker, in central Kansas, to arrange for the shipment of supplies to Fort Wallace. The Kansas Pacific had reached beyond Fort Harker and there was a telegraph line there. Custer could send for supplies from Fort Leavenworth, which could be shipped to Fort Harker, where wagons could pick up the goods and return to Fort Wallace. The problem with that excuse was that the grazing was good around Fort Wallace; he could have stayed there until the horses recovered their strength. Besides, his enemies were doing just fine living off the countryside—the Indians certainly did not need to send for supplies every couple of weeks—and Custer could have emulated them. His real reason for pushing tired men and worn-out horses on a 150-mile forced march was to get to Libbie.

Custer started out on July 15. Many of his men could not keep up
with the pace and fell behind. Pawnee Killer attacked the stragglers on the second day and killed two of them. Custer refused to go back to either recover the bodies or to chase the hostiles, on the grounds that time was important. Why, he did not say, but the closer he got to Libbie the more difficult he found it to think of anything but her health. On the morning of July 18 he reached Fort Hays. There he left all but two officers and two men, with orders for the other ninety-four members of the party to rest for a day, then proceed at a leisurely pace to Fort Harker. Meanwhile he would push on. By the time the main detachment arrived at Fort Harker, Custer said, he would have arranged for supplies and wagons for the return trip to Fort Wallace.

With his brother Tom, another officer, and two troopers, Custer started off for Fort Harker. He rode sixty miles in less than twelve hours, without changing horses. At 2
A.M.
July 19 he entered Fort Harker and woke up General A. J. Smith, commander of the military district. As Smith rubbed the sleep from his eyes, Custer blurted out some details about the campaign, said that ninety-four members of the 7th Cavalry would be coming into Harker in two days, asked to have supplies sent from Fort Leavenworth, and then requested permission to get on the 3
A.M.
train headed for Fort Riley. Smith muttered his assent and went back to sleep.
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So Custer boarded the train for Fort Riley and Libbie. He had hardly slept for a week, had covered nearly five hundred miles on horseback during that time, and must have been exhausted. But a cat nap on the bouncing, jolting train restored his energy and the prospect of seeing Libbie revived his spirits. At noon the train pulled into Fort Riley. Libbie was in her quarters, pacing in her room, as worried about Autie as he was about her. Suddenly she heard the clank of a saber on her porch rails and the quick, springy steps that could mean only one thing. The door flew open, “and with a flood of sunshine that poured in, came a vision far brighter than even the brilliant Kansas sun. There before me, blithe and buoyant, stood my husband! In an instant, every moment of the preceding months was obliterated. What had I to ask more? What did earth hold for us greater than what we then had? The General, as usual when happy and excited, talked so rapidly that the words jumbled themselves into hopeless tangles, but my ears were keen enough to extract from the medley the fact that I was to return at once with him.”
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Custer rushed about making preparations. He told Eliza to get her cook-stove ready—she and it were coming with him and Libbie to Fort Wallace. He and Libbie spent the remainder of the day
alone. That evening, just as the Custers were preparing to get on the train for the beginning of the trip back to Fort Wallace, he received a telegraph message from General Smith, ordering him to return to Harker and consider himself under arrest. When Smith had awakened later that morning he had realized that he had no authority to give permission to Custer to go to Fort Riley to see his wife, and in any case, what was Custer doing leaving his command in the field? Court-martial charges were being drawn up, accusing him of leaving Fort Wallace without permission. Captain West of the 7th Cavalry was preferring additional charges, accusing Custer of excessive cruelty and illegal conduct when he ordered his officers to shoot the deserters, of abandoning the two soldiers who had been killed on the march from Fort Wallace to Fort Harker, and of pushing the men beyond human endurance.

Custer knew he was in big trouble, but nothing could dampen his spirits now that he had found Libbie safe and healthy and had spent a day with her. Better yet, they were together now. Custer arrived at Fort Harker with Libbie on July 21, 1867. General Smith, who liked the Custers, decided to send them back again to Fort Riley, where the couple would be more comfortable. Custer would wait there, under house arrest, for his court-martial to begin.

Was the visit to Libbie worth the price he was going to have to pay? Libbie gave the answer years later, when she wrote the conclusion to her memoirs of her first year on the Plains: There was in that summer of 1867 one long, perfect day. It was mine, and— blessed be our memory, which preserves to us the joys as well as the sadness of life!—it is still mine, for time and eternity.”
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If Custer had had an opportunity to do it all over again, he would not have changed a thing.

Back East, meanwhile, the politicians were furious. A senator from Missouri pointed out that “the war is now costing daily at least $150,000 and, if it lasts through the summer, (and at the present rate it will certainly do that) it will cost us $100,000,000 without having accomplished anything.”
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The railroad builders were just as angry. The Cheyennes had derailed a train on the Union Pacific line and thereby obtained vast quantities of supplies. Although this was the first time the hostiles had thought to make a train the target of an attack, the railroad men knew how vulnerable they were to such actions and they told Sherman they would build no farther until he could guarantee peace.

No American believed more thoroughly in the nation’s destiny
than General Sherman, and none was more committed than he to the idea that the transcontinental railroads were the carriers of that destiny. Despite Hancock’s failure, Sherman still thought that forcing the Indians onto reservations was a better policy than bribing them there. On July 16 he wrote his brother Senator John Sherman to explain the problems of fighting Indians: “They operate in small, scattered bands, avoiding the posts and well-guarded trains, and hitting little parties who are off their guard.” That was inaccurate— the Indians had attacked Custer’s wagon train and hit the post at Fort Wallace. Sherman’s explanation of the Army’s failure was more to the point. Admitting that he had “a much heavier force on the plains” than any group of Indian warriors, he said the trouble was the vast expanse of the territory.

The truth was that fighting Indians on the Plains was more like naval warfare on the high seas than anything else. In effect, Sherman was lumbering around with battleships and cruisers, chasing pirates in sleek, much faster vessels. Worse, his ships had no staying power; they had to put into port (the forts) every other week or so to replenish their supplies. The pirates could live off the ocean. To continue the image, the wagons were merchant vessels. When they traveled alone, as did the stagecoaches, the pirates gobbled up every one they saw. When the wagons traveled in convoy, protected by fighting men, they got through.

In the Civil War, Sherman’s great contribution to the Union victory was to destroy the enemy’s resources, but the Indians had no base camps so the Army could not get at their resources. Treaties with the hostiles would do no good, Sherman said, because “they won’t last twenty-four hours.” Therefore, “we must fight the Indians, and force them to collect in agreed-on limits far away from the continental roads.” Finally, to put things in perspective for his brother, who was one of the most influential men in the Senate, Sherman concluded: “I do think this subject as important as Reconstruction.”
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Congress, however, had no faith left in the Army. Ignoring Sherman’s plea for a more active war, it instead (July 20, 1867) provided for a peace commission to meet with the Plains Indians and see what could be done about negotiating an end to the war. In order to take some of the sting out of the Army’s objections to this policy, Congress required that four of the seven commissioners be Army officers. Sherman himself was one of them, along with old General Harney, the pre-Civil War Indian fighter.

Sherman agreed to serve because he really had no choice. Further,
he was beginning to see a way out of his difficulties, one that would not bring any glory to his beloved Army but which would accomplish the main objective. What Sherman realized was that the coming of the railroad to the Plains would eventually mean an end to the Indian’s way of life. The advancing railroad brought settlement with it, and the settlers would crowd the Indians out. More immediately important, the railroad opened the country to the buffalo hunters. Eastern tanners were developing methods of curing buffalo hides and making them into acceptable coats and robes. There was a huge potential market for the hides. As the railroad reached ever deeper into the buffalo country, hunters would reduce the herds, then ship the hides east. By that system, the herds could be eliminated in a decade or less, and without the herds the Indians would have to go to reservations or starve. It would be, in short, a campaign with the enemies’ resources, not the enemy himself, as the target.

The white hunters, shooting a thousand and more buffalo a week per gun, were Crazy Horse’s and the Plains Indians’ real enemies, not the soldiers. The hunters’ vulnerability was the railroad line, for without it there could be no great buffalo hunt Had the Indians concentrated on cutting the railroad line they could have stopped the buffalo hunting and, as a bonus, immobilized much of the Army. But except for the one time the Cheyennes derailed a Union Pacific train, the Indians left the “iron horse” alone, so the hunters were able to get to the range, then ship the hides east. Sherman counted on the completion of the railroads to solve the Indian problem. He did not want to make peace with Red Cloud; rather, he very much wanted to punish the Oglalas and Cheyennes for humiliating the Army. But even more important to him than vengeance was the completion of the railroad, so he agreed to serve on the peace commission. As he told his brother, the commission would have “to concede [to the Indians] a right to hunt buffaloes as long as they last, and this may lead to collisions, but it will not be long before all the buffaloes are extinct …”
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The program worked. In slightly more than ten years, a continental herd of buffalo numbering fifty million was reduced to a few thousand stragglers. By 1888 there were less than one thousand buffalo in the United States. So many buffalo robes were shipped east that the price quickly fell to $1.00 per hide.
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The buffalo hunters, not the Army, cleared the Indians off the Plains.

Up on the Powder River in the summer of 1867, Red Cloud’s forces had split. Tiring of the endless and fruitless skirmishes with
the soldiers in Fort Phil Kearny, the northern Cheyennes had left. They went northwest to try their luck against Fort C. F. Smith. Crazy Horse also got bored with the daily skirmishes and took off a couple of times to steal a few horses from the Crows. Red Cloud may have decided that he had better do something dramatic before his whole force melted away; whatever his reasoning, he decided in late July to make a big effort against the white soldiers. Merely keeping the Bozeman Trail closed was not enough. It was true that the forts protected only their inhabitants, that the road they were supposed to keep open had been deserted by the public, but still the troops were there, in the heart of Oglala territory, and if the white soldiers stayed, more could come the next year. Then the Bozeman Trail would fill up with emigrants, just as the Holy Road had done two decades earlier, and the game would be frightened away. Where could the Oglalas go then?
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On the evening of August 1 Crazy Horse, Hump, Red Cloud, the other shirt-wearers, and other war leaders considered their tactical problem. They had so closely blockaded Fort Phil Kearny that the troops had had to fight just to obtain wood and water; eventually Captain J. N. Powell, with a detachment of twenty-six men, had set up a miniature fort on the edge of the Bighorn Mountains, where the pines grew. Powell had taken the boxes off the wagons and placed them in a circle. Inside the enclosure he had some tents for his men and room for the horses and mules at night. Within the corral Powell also had several carefully arranged boxes filled with several thousand rounds of ammunition, and his men were much better armed than Fetterman’s had been, as they had the new breech-loading Springfield rifles.
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The woodcutters had a small camp about a mile away.