Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (51 page)

Sherman had a hard enough time getting Red Cloud to sign as it was. The general and the commission arrived at Fort Laramie in early April 1868, expecting to meet Red Cloud there. But Red Cloud had told the runners from Fort Laramie that he would sign nothing until the forts were actually abandoned. For nearly two months, Sherman sat at the fort and fumed. “The situation was little short of grotesque,” James Olson writes. “Here were representatives of the President—the intrepid Indian fighters Sherman, Harney, Terry, and Augur; the distinguished peace advocates Taylor, Henderson, Sanborn, and Tappan. They had come west with wagon-loads of presents and a treaty which conceded everything Red Cloud had demanded, and they could not even get him to come in and talk to them.”
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The commissioners signed up all the friendlies in the area (by this time it was becoming an annual event for these friendlies to sign a treaty of peace between Red Cloud and the Americans and receive handsome gifts in return), but mainly the commissioners sat, impatiently waiting for Red Cloud. The officers at the forts, meanwhile, were dragging their feet on vacating on the excuse that they needed to dispose of valuable property before leaving. In late May, disgusted, Sherman and the commissioners left Fort Laramie, leaving behind a copy of the treaty for Red Cloud to sign when, and if, he ever came in.

On July 29, 1868, the troops at Fort C. F. Smith finally marched away. At dawn the next morning Crazy Horse and his warriors swept down on the post and set it afire. A few days later the soldiers left Forts Reno and Phil Kearny, which the Indians also burned. Red Cloud then started out for Fort Laramie, but stopped to make meat when he ran into a herd of buffalo. He sent word to Fort Laramie that he would come in after his work was done. Not until late October 1868 had he made enough meat for the winter. Then he went down to Fort Laramie to see what the representatives of the Great White Father had to say.

On November 4 Red Cloud and about 125 Indian leaders, representing the Oglalas, Hunkpapas, Sans Arcs, and others (but not Crazy Horse, who stayed in the Powder River country) entered Fort Laramie to begin the conference. After they had settled down, the white representatives entered the lodge. Most of the headmen rose and shook hands cordially, but Red Cloud remained seated and
sulkily gave the ends of his fingers to the whites who advanced to shake hands with him. The conference then bogged down in two days of irrelevancies and misunderstandings. Eventually Red Cloud, “with a show of reluctance and tremulousness washed his hands with the dust of the floor” and put his mark on the treaty. Old Man Afraid and the other headmen followed.

Red Cloud then rose to make a speech. He was, he said, ready for peace. It would be difficult for him to control the young warriors, but as for himself he would live up to the treaty as long as the white man did so. He was as good as his word—never again did Red Cloud make war on the whites. He did not, however, fully live up to the treaty. If he ever understood the complex provisions about taking up farming and having the children educated, he had no intention of fulfilling those clauses. Instead, he announced his determination to return at once to the Powder River, where the Sioux would live among the buffalo during the winter of 1868-69 and make war on the Crows the following spring. The Sioux had no desire to abandon the chase at a time when their country abounded in game, they did not know how to farm, and so long as there were buffalo they did not care to learn. With that, Red Cloud marched out of Fort Laramie, the others following.
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The Powder River war was over.

Crazy Horse had much to celebrate. He had helped conquer from the Crows what was now the Oglala home territory, then played a leading role in turning back the white invaders. He could congratulate himself on a job well done. For the first time in his life he was entirely free of whites, free to live as a hunter and nomad in one of the most spectacular and bountiful wild game areas in the world. His freedom to roam had been somewhat curtailed—Red Cloud agreed in the treaty that the Oglalas would never again go south of the Platte River—but not enough to matter. For the next five years the Powder River Indians did as they pleased. Ho-ka hey! It was a good time to live.

Custer and Libbie, meanwhile, had moved from Fort Leavenworth to Monroe, Michigan, in June 1868, when the 7th Cavalry began its summer campaign in Kansas. In Monroe, Custer wrote his Civil War memoirs and killed time by hunting, fishing, and boating in Lake Erie. He also followed the news from Kansas, which was distressing. Sheridan had sent out search-and-destroy missions but the cavalrymen were still unable to catch any Indians; the hostiles, meanwhile, had killed 124 settlers in Kansas and Colorado. Sherman was nearly beside himself; he raged at the Army’s incompetence.
“The more we can kill this year,” he said pointedly, “the less will have to be killed the next year for the more I see of these Indians the more I am convinced that they will all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”
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The Monroe
Commercial
carried stories about outrages in Kansas “too horrible to detail.”
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The Cheyennes, southern Oglalas, Arapahoes, and other tribes of the central Plains were all on the warpath, a fact that was extremely disconcerting to Sherman and the Army, as these same Indians had signed a peace treaty the previous fall. The Army, indeed the whole frontier, was seized by a mood of self-righteous indignation. The government had lived up to its part of the treaty with the Kansas Indians; then those Indians, without provocation, had gone back to looting, burning, and murdering. Even the Indian agents had to admit that the warriors needed punishing. Frontier posts reverberated with tough talk about what would be done to the Indians, once caught, and it became an article of faith among the Army officers that “you could never trust an Indian.” Sheridan’s famous remark, “The only good Indian I ever saw was dead,” was often and gleefully quoted.

From the Indian point of view, the raids were a necessary part of their defense of their hunting grounds. The railroads were pushing west, bringing fingers of settlement with them, and the buffalo herds were disappearing from Kansas. These Indians of the central Plains were in much worse condition than Crazy Horse’s Oglalas because the white buffalo hunters had already reached the Kansas range and were reducing the herds at an alarming rate. Indian communications across the Plains were excellent, and the hostiles south of the Platte River knew about the abandonment of the Powder River forts. Perhaps they figured that if they fought as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse had fought, they too could secure permanent title to their land.
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Whatever the cause of the central Plains war, the Army was determined to prosecute it with full vigor. The trouble was the same as the previous summer, however—no one could catch the hostiles. Sheridan had troops roaming throughout Kansas, but the only action came when the Indians discovered and attacked the troops, not vice versa. In September 1868 a party of fifty-two soldiers was almost rubbed out by the Indians near the Republican River in south-western Nebraska. Totally exasperated, Sheridan consulted with Sherman and the two generals decided to ask Grant to reduce Custer’s sentence and allow him to take command of the 7th Cavalry, then at
Fort Dodge. Why they did so is something of a puzzle, since Custer was hardly a proven Indian fighter and indeed had been no more successful at catching hostiles than anyone else. But Sheridan had seen Custer in action in the Civil War and knew that the boy general would fight if he had the opportunity, while Sherman may have reasoned that Custer would be so determined to salvage his reputation that he would either get the job done or die in the attempt. After ten months in disgrace, they could count on Custer’s being like a coiled spring, ready to strike.

On September 24, 1868, Custer received a telegram:

Headquarters Department of the Missouri

In the Field, Fort Hays, Kansas

September 24, 1868

General G. A. Custer, Monroe, Michigan:

Generals Sherman, Sully, and myself, and nearly all the officers of your regiment have asked for you, and I hope the application will be successful. Can you come at once? …

P. H. Sheridan

Major General Commanding
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Custer was off immediately, on the first train headed west from Monroe. He left Libbie behind, but brought along two Scotch staghounds and a pointer. Early in the morning of September 30 he arrived at Fort Hays, Kansas, where he joined Sheridan for a full day of discussion.

Sheridan had taken command on the Plains after Hancock’s disastrous 1867 campaign, just as in the Civil War he had been brought into the Shenandoah Valley to save the situation there for the Union after other generals had failed. Next to Grant and Sherman, he was the most popular general in the country. Thirty-six years old and a bachelor, he liked to think of himself as the hardest-bitten commander in the Army. He cursed as naturally as he breathed; an English nobleman found Sheridan “a delightful man, with the one peculiarity of using the most astounding swear words quite calmly and dispassionately in ordinary conversation.”
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He owed his Civil War reputation, thought a West Point classmate, to his audacity coupled with “a perfect indifference as to how many of his men were killed if he only carried his point.”
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Like Sherman, he believed in
the doctrine of total war. His orders from Sherman, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, reflected their mutual belief that all Indians, women and children as well as men, must be made to feel the horrors of war before the warriors would lose their will to fight.

Sheridan now told Custer that he wanted to carry out a winter campaign with the 7th Cavalry in order to hit the Indians literally where they lived. It was intolerable that the hostiles should be free to move near the agencies every winter, draw supplies, rest and refit, and then hit the warpath when their ponies fattened up in the spring. They were much too mobile to catch in the summertime—a fact Custer knew full well—so the thing to do was to locate their winter villages and strike them there, when they were more or less immobile because of the weakness of the ponies. Sheridan confessed that when he talked with the white scouts about the possibilities of a winter campaign, they were all against it on the grounds that if a column of troops were caught by a blizzard on the open prairie, every man in the command would perish. But Sheridan was not ready to give up. What did Custer think?

“How soon do I start?”

No wonder Sheridan and Sherman had pulled strings to get the boy wonder back on active duty! After telling Custer to go at once to Fort Dodge to assume command of the 7th Cavalry, then whip it into shape for a winter campaign, Sheridan concluded, “Custer, I rely on you in everything, and shall send you on this expedition without orders, leaving you to act entirely on your own judgment.”
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Custer dashed off a note to Libbie, telling her to come to Fort Leavenworth at once and promising to go back there and see her at every opportunity. Then he rode off for Fort Dodge.

Custer did a masterful job of getting his men ready. He held target practice twice daily, taught the recruits to ride, saw to it that they were properly equipped, and took them on a two-week shakedown march that put them into fighting trim. He fought a number of skirmishes with marauding Indians who attacked his wagon train or attempted to run off his herd. He regarded the engagements as excellent training for the men. He hired some Osage guides and a number of white scouts, who were paid $75 per month; Custer promised a $100 bonus to the first scout who led the regiment to an Indian village. He maintained formal, but correct, relations with those officers of the 7th Cavalry who hated him and resumed his fun-loving pranks with his friends, most of all with his brother Tom. To get himself into shape, Custer went on long hunts across the prairie, along with some duck hunting on the Arkansas River
sloughs. Once he bagged a pelican and sent the specimen to the Audubon Society of Detroit. He obtained special overshoes of buffalo hide with the hair inside and started growing what became an enormous beard. In his fringed leather jacket covered by a buffalo robe and wearing a fur cap, he looked rather like a grizzly bear. By early November he was ready to start. “I do not long for glory or fame,” he told Libbie, who knew better. “My reward is centered on ending this trying separation.”
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On November 12, 1868—a week after Red Cloud signed the Fort Laramie treaty—Sheridan and Custer started off at the head of a mixed force of infantry and cavalry. They marched straight south to the North Canadian River, near the Oklahoma panhandle, where they built Camp Supply, just south of the Kansas boundary. Camp Supply would be the base of operations for a winter campaign against the Indians who had been raiding into Kansas the past summer. Oklahoma was supposed to be safe territory for the hostiles, who had never been attacked there; indeed, the previous summer all the Indians ever heard from the whites was, “Move south of the Arkansas River and we will leave you alone.” Complicating matters, the Army had established Fort Cobb on the Washita River, about 150 miles south of Camp Supply. Cobb was more an agency than a fort, its purpose being to provide protection and food for friendly Indians. The tribes camping on the Washita drew their supplies there and felt they were safe. Their hot-blooded young warriors, however, were still making raids north into Kansas and south into Texas and the chiefs could not or would not control them. Sherman had made it clear that in a case of hot pursuit, the troops could attack any villages they encountered near Fort Cobb.
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