Louis S. Warren (17 page)

“Say Teddy, I guess the ball's opened.”

“Yis, and by the way thim rid nagurs is comin' it's openin' wid a grand march.”
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For immigrant troopers anxious to grasp some fragments of elusive whiteness, fighting Indians was only half the battle. They scrambled constantly to put distance between themselves and other “nonwhites” who wore the same uniform. After one particularly grueling 1869 campaign, the all-black Tenth Cavalry nearly went to war against the heavily immigrant Fifth Cavalry. “Men on both sides appeared to be desperate, and it required all my time and careful watching to prevent a terrible conflict,” reported the white commander of the Tenth.
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Racial dissension in the army was so pronounced that to a limited degree even Indians exploited it. White commanders of the black Tenth Cavalry reported racial taunts “in plain English” by some of the hundreds of Cheyenne warriors who surrounded them on the Solomon River in August 1867. “Come here, come here, you sons of guns; we don't want to fight the niggers, we want to fight you white sons of guns.”
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Army race tensions were evident throughout Cody's own autobiography, in which he poked fun at black soldiers, mocking their aspirations to “sweep de red debels from off de face ob de earth.” In another anecdote, he recalled the night that a camp sentinel “who was an Irishman” bumped his head on a tree limb and insisted that Indians had hit him over the head. “As shure ez me name's Pat Maloney, one of thim rid divils hit me on the head wid a club, so he did.”
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Frictions between native-born English-speakers and immigrant Germans strained the Cody household. In 1904, Cody recalled an instance from early in his marriage when Louisa took umbrage that he, “not thinking any that her mother was German,” began “humming a little song that the soldiers used to sing there about the Dutch.” As he told Louisa's lawyers many years later, his thoughtlessness “made Mrs. Cody angry and she give me a good deal of trouble about it.”
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Whiteness within the frontier army was thus limited, contested, and often the provenance of a minority, and there was little hope for change in the short term. Popular theory, or wishful thinking, had it that the environmental influences of settling the land and sharing in America's abundance of nutrition could “whiten” immigrants, and for this reason many of the ethnic and racial conflicts that roiled the East were supposedly muted on the frontier.
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But army recruits were often very new to American shores. They were soldiers, not settlers. In fact, settlers despised them. Army rations constituted anything but good food, a fact made abundantly clear by the numbers of troopers who stole into town to buy meals, or filch them. And soldiers, like urban immigrants, were renowned for slovenliness, belligerence, and savage predilection for drink.
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Seen in the internally contentious, multiracial context of the frontier army, beleaguered by public hostility and congressional indifference, Cody's popularity with officers begins to make a certain sense. An energetic, courageous, buckskin-clad white scout who could steer troops across the Plains and back again, fighting hostile Indians, would be welcome indeed for the white middle-class commanders of the U.S. Army. But one final feature of Plains warfare upped the currency of Cody's white Indian imposture even more. White scouts, or at least competent ones, were almost impossible to find. Indeed, scouts were perhaps the most troublesome of all civilians for the American army.

While the army pursued Indians in combat, and fantasized about white Indian scouts who could lead them to glory, most of their best scouts were actually Indians. Army scouting parties were predominantly made up of Shoshones, Crows, Arikaras, Pawnees, Osages, Kaws, Cherokees, Delawares, and an assortment of other Indians who opted for the army in the war between expansionist nomads and expansionist Americans. In a reflection of their prominence, no fewer than sixteen Indian scouts won the Congressional Medal of Honor between 1869 and 1890.
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As effective as Indian scouts could be, army commanders suspected them of having their own agenda in the Plains wars. Such fears were often misplaced, but not always. Many Indian scouts
were
out to settle old scores against the numerous Sioux and Cheyenne who had displaced them from their Plains homes. At times, Indian scouts' eagerness for combat upset commanders' goals of stealth and reconnaissance, endangering military operations. Thus, Cody was chief of scouts for General Carr's Fifth Cavalry expedition against the Cheyenne in the summer of 1869, during which Carr hoped to track detachments of Cheyenne warriors to the elusive village of Dog Man chief Tall Bull, which he proposed to attack. But the strategy was almost undone by Pawnee auxiliaries who refused to stalk small contingents of Cheyenne and instead attacked them. Tall Bull soon learned of the army's presence. Other officers feared that Indian scouts would commit atrocities against Cheyenne and Sioux opponents, and sometimes their fears were justified.
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One of the reasons for the hiring of white scouts like Cody was that ideally they could serve as go-betweens for commanders and their Indian scouts, whose techniques and strategies were often mysterious or threatening to the army's own mission.

Equally prominent among scouts were so-called “half-breeds,” mixed-blood men descended from white-Indian unions. Among these were French-speaking mixed-bloods like the legendary Baptiste “Little Bat” Garnier, Baptiste “Big Bat” Pourier, Ed Guerrier, Louis Richard, and the Shangrau brothers, Louis and John. Descendants of French traders who married into Indian families as early as the seventeenth century, these French- and Lakota-speaking families were traditionally cultural brokers and conduits between Indian tribes, Europeans, and Americans. But as they lost wealth and influence in the increasingly American nineteenth century, their declining fortunes seemed proof of frontier degeneration and the power of interracial sex to weaken a race that had once been vital.
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By their very existence, mixed-blood scouts hinted at uncomfortable facts, at the oft-unspoken transgressions of white Indians who rather than retaining white virtue as they crossed into savagery, became deviant and indulged in interracial sex. The idea was so loaded because popular beliefs equated race with species. Mixed-blood people were infertile hybrids, like the mule, the sterile offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. Thus the term
mulatto,
from the Spanish word for mule (
mulato
), and frequently applied to children of white-black unions, also found wide use on the Plains.
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Racial theories maintained that sex between “proximate” and “distant” races, between whites and Indians, for example, produced
mulato-
like, degenerate races, prone to infertility, but also possessed of excessive (white) intelligence, in the service of inescapable (dark) savagery.
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On the frontier, the children of Indian and white unions were “like the mulatto, quasi-mules,” in the words of one observer, “untrustworthy, and disposed to every villainy.”
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Such ideas gained a special purchase after the Civil War. At a time when the South was infused with white hysteria over the supposed need to contain the lust of free black men, the westward edge of the nation was by definition a place where widely divergent races met.
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Anglo-Saxonists reassured themselves that the white race—and its civilization—were hardened by the bloodletting of frontier war, and in the 1880s and '90s Buffalo Bill's Wild West show reinforced such notions with its triumphalist pageantry of white victory on the Plains. But during the Plains Indian wars, mixed-blood scouts aggravated an old fear of frontier degeneracy, the destabilizing of the white race in lusty entangling of limbs with primitive peoples in the forests and prairies of the American interior. Their very presence called to mind Washington Irving's 1832 warning that on the Plains “may spring up new and mongrel races,” the “amalgamation of the ‘debris' and ‘abrasions' of former races, civilized and savage.”
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In this sense, the frontier held out the possibility that if Americans were to be transformed into a new race, it would be a darker, not a lighter one.

French-speaking mixed-bloods were not the only harbinger of this fate. Much of the West had belonged to Mexico as recently as 1848. Mexican scouts, including Charles Autubees and his sons, from Bent's Fort, in Colorado, guided with Cody in 1868.
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Mexicans themselves were ubiquitous reminders of the frontier's potential for “unfit amalgamation” of Europeans and Indians, a racial mixture that resulted in Mexico's political weakness and, ultimately, conquest by the racially vigorous United States.
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But as much as the imagined specter of the mongrel, miscegenated, monstrous half-breed haunted the westward passage of white America, in real life, mixed-bloods proved indispensable as scouts. Mixed-blood children were potential translators, because they frequently spoke both English or French and one or more Indian languages. Raised among Indians, they often knew the whereabouts of different Indian bands at any time of year. Tutored by Indian uncles, they learned to track—and fight—like few settlers could. The long list of mixed-blood men who rode with Cody in the late 1860s grew longer as the wars continued. For the Powder River campaign of 1876, the army hired “every half-breed at Red Cloud or Spotted Tail agency who could be secured.”
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Army men might have been able to overlook some of their prejudices against mixed-blood scouts, if only mixed-blood politics had not been so conflicted. Mixed-blood men with family on both sides of the Indian wars did not always flock to the American banner. George Bent, son of American trader William Bent and his Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman, grew up speaking Cheyenne and English. Although he was educated at a boarding school in St. Louis, he chose to live as a Cheyenne, and fought Americans at Sand Creek and in other battles. His brother, Charley Bent, attended the same boarding school as George did. He became one of the most fearsome leaders of the Dog Men, taunting and battling American troopers with startling effect, leading them against Custer's Seventh Cavalry outside Fort Wallace in the summer of 1867. He became so menacing in American imaginations that settlers and soldiers reported seeing him at the head of war parties from Texas to Nebraska.
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Ed Guerrier was a mixed-blood scout who joined Cody in scouting for the Fifth Cavalry in 1876. In 1867, he was planning to marry George and Charley Bent's sister, Julia. He was therefore profoundly uncomfortable to find himself that summer guiding Custer's Seventh in pursuit of the very village in which Julia was living. Unbeknownst to Custer, he located the village and warned them away, then steered Custer's troops in another direction.
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The Bent brothers and their brother-in-law Ed Guerrier were just three of many mixed-bloods who, in the minds of army officers, turned on the higher civilization. To most Americans, the frontier was the boundary line between the white and the red, and the army stood in defense of white homes from Indian raiders who carried white women away into savagery. But mixed-bloods were proof that the central institution of frontier life, the family, sometimes straddled racial lines, and that the settler's cabin could be the hearth of race mixing. The mixed-blood scout—light-skinned, fluent in English and the enemy language, too—could as easily be a renegade spy.

With so much suspicion to go around, it is not surprising that white scouts were often tarred with the mixed-blood brush. With a reputation as frontier confidence men, they made dubious scouts at the best of times. And if they
could
track Indians, were they white men at all? The best of them were suspiciously well informed about the ways of these mysterious Plains nomads. Besides, popular beliefs maintained that tracking was the province of dark-skinned people, who were closest to nature. In the words of one army captain, white men “have not the same acute perceptions” in “the art of trailing or tracking men and animals” that characterized “the Indian or the Mexican.”
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Where the white Indian was often heroic in American literature, he was in fact a notoriously unstable figure, who could be either hero or villain. In the conquest of Kentucky, Daniel Boone, the consummate white Indian hero, faced off not only against the Shawnees, but against Simon Girty and Alexander McKee, two white men who had become Shawnee. The story of that confrontation between the virtuous white Indian and his renegade alter egos inspired thousands of American stories and novels in the nineteenth century.
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White Indian renegades embodied a dark warning about the frontier's potential to convey savagery to the very white people who were supposed to conquer it. Many Americans suspected that absence from white civilization would eventually overwhelm a person's race loyalty. “Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him,” wrote Herman Melville, “
i.e.
what is called savagery.”
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In Kansas, in the late 1860s, soldiers and civilians alike attributed frequent army defeats to phantom white-men-turned-red, and the Plains was rife with the rumor of renegades.
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A reluctance to confront suspicions of being a renegade likely limited the willingness of other scouts to assume the pose of the white Indian. Certainly there were white scouts who, given a greater willingness to play the game, might have matched Cody's rise or even surpassed it. Hickok quit scouting for the army after 1868. But even if he had not, his moodiness with journalists and officers made him unpopular with various commanders, including Carr. After Hickok, the scout best situated to capitalize on his fame as a white Indian was probably Frank North. A resident of Colville, Nebraska, North was a middle-class store owner with a wood frame house and a white wife and family. He was highly unusual, though, in that he spoke fluent Pawnee, a language he learned while working as a clerk at the nearby Pawnee reservation. Beginning in the 1860s, he helped organize and rode with three battalions of Pawnee scouts fighting the Sioux and Cheyenne alongside the army. He was the Pawnees' putative commander, although in reality he appears to have been their translator and liaison to the army command.
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