Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (50 page)

With peace seemingly assured along both rail lines, Sherman and the peace commission hurried north to Fort Laramie, where they hoped to persuade Red Cloud to touch the pen. But when the commissioners arrived at Fort Laramie on November 9, they found a few Crows—always friendly to the whites, who after all were enemies of their enemies—but only Old Man Afraid from the Oglalas. Old Man Afraid informed them that the Sioux were making war in order to save the only hunting grounds left to them. He assured the commissioners that when the troops were withdrawn from the Powder River forts the war would cease. Sherman might have been willing to go along, but it was too late in the season to start the infantry at Fort C. F. Smith and Fort Phil Kearny on a 250- or 300-mile march. Besides, Army morale would sink with such an abject surrender. Sherman still hoped the Army could save some face. The council broke up with nothing accomplished.
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Crazy Horse spent the winter of 1867-68 on the Powder River, living the free life he loved best. Still unmarried, suffering the pangs of unrequited love, he felt satisfaction and happiness in providing for the helpless ones. Although there was plenty of dry buffalo meat in camp, the old folks and the widows and orphans appreciated it when Crazy Horse would drop by with some elk or other fresh meat. He came to be known as a reliable provider for those in need, a fact that enhanced his reputation. Sitting Bull once explained to a white reporter how reputations were made among the Sioux. The reporter had asked him why the tribe looked up to him. Sitting Bull replied with a question, “Your people look up to men because they are rich; because they have much land, many lodges, many squaws?”
“Yes,” the newspaperman replied. “Well,” said Sitting Bull, “I suppose my people look up to me because I am poor.”
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Crazy Horse was repaid for his leadership and generosity, in other words, with prestige only, which was just the way he wanted it.

Custer, meanwhile, had gone from Fort Riley to Fort Leaven-worth. His court-martial proceedings began in September 1867. At the fort, Lawrence Frost writes, “sides were taken and wagers made. Would they throw the book at Custer? Was he the one selected by the brass to be the goat? … Could Custer beat the rap? Was General Grant bucking for President and aiding his political ambitions by placing General Custer on the sacrificial altar so that the blame for the disastrous summer Indian campaign would be taken off the army’s ranking general officer?”
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Custer was confident, even cocky. Libbie helped him prepare his defense, copying down a fifty-page statement The main charges were abandoning his command without authority and shooting the deserters without a trial. Captain West, who was responsible for all the charges but one, could not appear because of drunkenness. He had always been in the anti-Custer clique and had smarted under a reprimand given him by Custer on the day they had arrived at Fort Wallace, for “becoming so drunk as to be unfit for the proper performance of his duty.” After receiving the reprimand, West preferred charges against Custer, then went back to the bottle, which shortly killed him.

Tom Custer testified for his brother, as did Major Elliott, Lieutenant Cooke, and the regimental surgeon. No other officer of the 7th Cavalry was willing to testify in Custer’s behalf, but the 7th was still at Fort Wallace, so the anti-Custerites did not come to Leavenworth to testify against him either, even though most wanted to do so. Despite these advantages, on October 10 the court found Custer guilty on all counts. It suspended him from rank and command for one year, with forfeiture of all pay.
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Custer hoped to have the decision overturned by a reviewing board, but on November 18 Sherman issued a statement that the “proceedings, findings and sentence in the case of Brevet Major General Custer
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are approved by General Grant … in which the levity of the sentence, considering the nature of the offenses of Bvt. Major General Custer… is to be remarked on.” Grant was “convinced that the Court, “in awarding so lenient a sentence for the offenses of which the
accused is found guilty, must have taken into consideration his previous record.”
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Custer was far from chagrined. As Libbie wrote a friend during the trial, “When he [Custer] ran the risk of a court-martial in leaving Wallace he did it expecting the consequences … and we are quite determined not to live apart again, even if he leaves the army …” Custer had written her repeatedly during the campaign that he was “tempted to desert” and fly to her before accepting a long separation. Now they were together, happy.”
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Custer and Libbie spent the winter of 1867-68 at Fort Leaven-worth. General Philip Sheridan had taken over Hancock’s command of the Department of the Missouri and Sheridan gave the couple his suite of nicely appointed apartments at the fort.
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Fort Leavenworth was the largest post on the frontier and the closest to civilization. There were parties, dances, parades, and good hunting available. Sheridan promised to use his connections in Washington to try to get the sentence reduced so that Custer could look forward to another opportunity to prove himself as an Indian fighter. It was a fine winter.

* The phrase indicated that the Indian chief had literally held the pen in his hand; a white man then wrote down the chief’s name.

† Post-Civil War soldiers nearly always referred to each other by the highest rank held, no matter what the current rank. “Brevet” means temporary.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Treaty of 1868 and the Battle of the Washita

“Go ahead in your own way and I will back you with my whole authority. If it results in the utter annihilation of these Indians, it is but the result of what they have been warned of again and again … I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops from doing what they deem proper on the spot, and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty and inhumanity to tie their hands, but will use all the powers confided to me to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race and of our civilization, shall not again be able to begin and carry out their barbarous warfare on any kind of pretext they may choose to allege.”  Sherman to Sheridan, October 9, 1868

By the spring of 1868 the war on the Powder River had settled into a stalemate. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and the Sioux warriors were unwilling to try their luck in any direct assaults on the forts, while the whites were equally unwilling to venture onto the Bozeman Trail. The only fighting Crazy Horse did was during occasional raids against the Crows. The forts belonged to the white soldiers, but the trail and everything else in the Powder River country still belonged to the Sioux. The region contained what may have been, at this time, the largest remaining buffalo herd on the continent, so the Indians lived well while the soldiers ate stale bread and beans.

During the preceding winter the Army had decided it would have to abandon its hard-won positions on the Bozeman Trail. Its reasons were manifold. First, Sherman wanted to launch an extensive search-and-destroy campaign in Kansas in the coming summer and he badly needed the contribution of the regiment of infantry stationed on the Bozeman Trail. The total strength of the United States Army was around 55,000, but more than half these troops were on occupation duty in the former Confederate states, while a significant portion of the rest were on coastal defense duty.
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The troops at Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C. F. Smith represented more than
10 per cent of Sherman’s total frontier force—and they were totally wasted, as they could neither guard emigrants nor attack Indians.
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Despite these obvious facts, Army officers generally were opposed to abandoning the forts. They had paid a terrible price in blood to establish them and abject surrender hurt their pride. To a man, they expected to have to fight the Sioux again; the idea that the Plains of Wyoming and Montana would be left to the savages for any length of time was inconceivable. Sooner rather than later the Indians would have to be driven onto reservations, and when the time came to settle the score with the Powder River hostiles, the forts would be invaluable as bases of operation. Most of all, the forts represented a threat to the Sioux and there was no point in abandoning them without getting something in return.

Sherman took all these considerations into account as he prepared in the spring of 1868 to resume his peace-making role on the peace commission. He needed troops for Kansas; he had to shut up congressional critics, who were asking embarrassing questions about the cost-effectiveness of the Powder River war; he needed to get the Sioux to agree to something in return for abandoning the forts; he needed to maintain Army morale. He met all these objectives in the peace treaty of 1868.

Sherman was more convinced than ever that eventually the white buffalo hunters would force the Indians to become wards of the government, but the buffalo hunters could not do their work if the railroad did not continue to push west. In the meantime, what he feared most was a resumption of active warfare along the Powder River, which would tie down the Army and make it difficult for it to extract itself. Grant, the General-in-Chief of the Army, had the same fear. On March 2, 1868, after consultation with Sherman, Grant issued an order requiring the abandonment of Forts Smith, Phil Kearny, and Reno as soon as weather permitted. He told Sherman to speed up the movement as much as possible, “because by delay the Indians may commence hostilities and make it impossible for us to give them up.”
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In drawing up the treaty, Sherman and his fellow peace commissioners seemed to give in to Red Cloud’s demands. The Sioux could keep forever all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River, while the territory between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains (the Powder River country) would be “unceded Indian territory.” No whites would be allowed to enter it and the Sioux could hunt there as long as there were sufficient buffalo to justify the chase. No changes could be made in the treaty without the consent of
three quarters of the adult male Sioux population (how on earth the commissioners thought this clause could ever be fulfilled among wild Indians is a mystery).

The main point was that the Army agreed to abandon the forts. As Doane Robinson puts it, “It is the only instance in the history of the United States where the government has gone to war and afterwards negotiated a peace conceding everything demanded by the enemy and exacting nothing in return.”
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Over the century and more that has elapsed since the signing of the treaty, the Oglalas have argued that this treaty, properly ratified by the Senate and therefore carrying the pledged word (not to mention the good faith and honor) of the United States Government, has been deliberately and illegally ignored by that government, beginning with the theft of the Black Hills in the 1870s. In 1973, Russell Means and other members of the American Indian Movement, at the head of a force of young warriors and in defiance of the tribal elders, took possession of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Their major demand was restoration of Sioux rights under the treaty of 1868.

But the whites were not the only signatories to the treaty, nor were they the only violators of it. Sherman had put a joker in the deck, a joker that represented the common ground on which both the Indian lovers and the Indian haters on the commission and throughout the nation could stand. The joker was civilization. When the Sioux signed the treaty, they agreed to become civilized (i.e., to take up farming and live in houses). The whites could think of only two solutions to the Indian problem—civilization or extermination. As the Army was not strong enough to exterminate them, Sherman agreed to give civilizing a try.

The civilizing portions of the treaty were like a dream come true to the Indian Bureau and to friends of the Indian everywhere. The Sioux agreed to settle down on farms when the buffalo were gone, and there were complex provisions requiring the government to provide them with wagons, plows, oxen, and other necessary items. Further, the Sioux agreed to compulsory education for their children between six and sixteen years of age. In Sherman’s view it didn’t hurt to try; in the Indian Bureau’s view, cutting the children’s hair and teaching them to read the Bible would solve the Indian problem.
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But neither side kept its promises. The Indians, however, always claimed that the treaty had not been properly explained to them, and although this point has been disputed,
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it is difficult to believe that Crazy Horse, Hump, Young Man Afraid, or any of the warriors
could have agreed to Red Cloud’s touching the pen had they known that they were thereby promising to send their children to the white man’s schoolhouse, which had all the appearance of a prison to them.