Louis S. Warren (18 page)

North had adventures aplenty on the Pawnee scouts' numerous forays against the Sioux and Cheyenne. He knew Cody well, rode with him more than once, and found his theatrics amusing. He even accompanied the Pawnee veterans in joining Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1883, and stayed with the show for two years, until he was injured in the arena. But something held him back. Photographs show him dressed in middle-class jacket and trousers, like a merchant. No buckskin for him. North was already so close to the Pawnees that perhaps he feared a white Indian pose would alienate him from his white neighbors, leery as they were of renegades. Perhaps he was weakened by poor health—his asthma finally killed him in 1885. In any case, he seems never to have understood Indian fighting as anything more than a distasteful, even tragic necessity. In the 1860s, he had little time for frontier imposture. In 1869, dime novelist Ned Buntline read about North in the newspapers, and sought him out at Fort Sedgewick, hoping to write a novel based on his adventures as a “white chief” of the Pawnees. Nobody knows what they said to one another, but according to one colorful (and probably apocryphal) story, North demurred. “If you want a man to fill that bill,” he is said to have told Buntline, “he's over there sleeping under the wagon.” The man sleeping under the wagon was, of course, William Cody.
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Other than Hickok, North, and Cody, there were only a few competent white scouts on the Plains. Among the best of these were Will Comstock, Abner “Sharp” Grover, John Y. Nelson, and Ben Clark. All of these men worked at one time or another with William Cody, or in nearby regiments. All of them came to the Plains as fur trappers and market hunters. All were superb at guiding, scouting, and fighting, and some of them were even drawn to white Indian performance (John Y. Nelson was, after all, a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show).

But, significantly, all had “gone native” in ways disturbingly like predecessors on other frontiers. All of them had married, or were rumored to have married, Cheyenne, Sioux, or Comanche wives. All of them spoke English and the language of their Indian families. Their Indian wives, to say nothing of their mixed-blood children, increased the plausibility that they might be spies, making them all the more suspicious to the American public, and to army officers.

Thus, even the best white scouts were a little too Indian to be acceptable in polite company. Although their talents were often appreciated, officers saw these so-called “squaw men” as peculiar at best and treasonous at worst. Until the post–Civil War period, mixed-race families had been common on the Plains. Many of the most successful traders had Indian wives, as we have seen, in part to better their alliances with powerful clients. But as their Indian in-laws lost power, and as middle-class America expanded onto the Plains, middle-class white women increased in number, and white men with Indian wives were shunted aside as racially degenerative vestiges of a bygone era.

The army, in pushing the Sioux and Cheyenne from the Plains and facilitating railroad construction and middle-class settlement, thus helped to marginalize mixed-race families at the same time they exploited the talents of their white patriarchs as scouts and guides. In the process, these men became, at best, quaint relics of an older time, backward white men with Indian ways of thinking. General Carr related that Sharp Grover “was a squaw man and had imbibed some of their [Cheyenne] superstitions.”
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Another Plains witness reported, “No Indian was ever half so superstitious” as Will Comstock. “He had his ‘medicine' horse, ‘medicine' field-glass, ‘medicine' everything, in fact. Even Will's evil-looking dog was ‘medicine,' and had a ‘medicine' collar. If he had bad luck his ‘medicine' was bad, and something must be done to change the condition of things.”
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Socially retarded throwbacks to a vanishing frontier, “squaw men” rarely climbed into the respectable white middle class after the Civil War. They were also a political threat. Despite their pro-U.S. leanings and, in some cases, army heroics, they could not escape the stigma of renegades.
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Colonel Richard Irving Dodge denounced them as “ruffians” whose large broods of “half-breed children” were “fed and fostered by the Government,” and whose propensity for suborning Indians against the interests of the nation made them a menace. “They are an injury to the country, a detriment to the Indian, and should be abolished.”
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Scouts' intimacy with Indians and the frontier was thus a double-edged sword. It provided the army with keys to white conquest of the savage wilderness, but simultaneously, it implied the danger of race decline, in which the savagery of the frontier essentially conquered the race, turning white men against civilization. In American cultural thought, men were less subject than women to corruption from interracial sex, but they were not immune to suspicions of weakened racial loyalty. In a sense, scout forays into Indian society and Indian sex raised the same fear that Attack on the Settler's Cabin raised for audiences of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show: the savage capture of civilization.

ONLY THE MOST concerted effort at simplification could reduce the complex and confusing racial dynamics of the Plains conflicts to a white-on-red war. Even during the Plains wars, Cody himself provided a means to do so. He was that rarity, a competent white scout. Even rarer, he had a white wife and a white daughter, although they were far away from him at the moment. Until he could bring the family together again, he was not without prospects in his effort to become a leading army scout. On the one hand, Indian and mixed-blood scouts had skills, including bilingualism, he could not match. But, on the other, his very ignorance of Indian language protected him from the suspicions swirling around men like Grover and Comstock.

Cody exploited these social assets through an imposture so aggressive and so skillful that it allowed, even invited, commanders to overlook his shortcomings. He obscured his limitations as a tracker by sticking close to the Indians and mixed-bloods in his scouting parties, and accepting credit for their accomplishments. This was no trivial skill. Most white men, after all, were so afraid or scornful of Indians that they kept their distance even from Indian allies. Cody was not self-conscious about riding with them, and he was even curious to watch them work. Thus, in 1869, he followed a Pawnee trailer in pursuit of a Cheyenne band for miles across a grassland where he and the other white scouts could find no trace of the enemy. When the grass gave way to sand, the tracks of the Cheyenne suddenly were visible. The Pawnee's abilities awed Cody: “I take off my hat to him, he is the best I ever saw.”
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In 1876, officers with General Crook were all but certain that a plume of dust rolling into the distant sky was a huge party of approaching Sioux. Cody bolted from his coterie of Shoshone scouts and dashed toward it, seemingly unafraid. “He's going to reconnoiter,” remarked Captain Royall. “That's Bill's style, you know.” At that remark, a young Shoshone approached the officers, to tell them what he had already told Cody. “No Sioux,” he said. “Heap pony soldier.” Sure enough, the men kicking up that dust cloud turned out to be General Terry's cavalry.
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Cody's imposture, his artful deception that combined some degree of scout skill with some sleight of hand, allowed officers to go about the serious business of fighting Indians while believing in the superiority of white men, and as his celebrity increased, their views seemed ever more vindicated. In the 1890s, the rising militarism of American society, along with the nostalgic paintings of Frederic Remington, and Cody's own Wild West show, which began to glorify the army as a frontier institution in 1887, would elevate the memory of the U.S. military's western service. In no small measure, the new appreciation stemmed from the whitewash in these popular images, in which the impoverished, multilingual, multihued troopers, and their weird assemblages of Indian, mixed-blood, and bicultural white scouts, too, all became battle-hardened Anglo-Saxons. But the frontier itself was far more confusing than these later images conveyed. In the 1860s and '70s, officers and soldiers of the Plains campaigns had no idea they would ever be so appreciated. Between the end of the Civil War in 1865, and the end of hostilities against the Sioux in 1877, the U.S. military struggled to establish dominance on the Plains, in a context of low morale, high desertion in the ranks, pervasive ethnic and racial frictions, and weak political support at home.

SCOUT HERO OF' 69

Following Cody's progress through the campaigns of 1868–69 is difficult, because army documents seldom record the achievements or even the presence of civilian scouts. Most of the testimony to Cody's valor came years later, after he was a famous showman. Nonetheless, sifting the sources carefully we can see how he negotiated the complex multiracial terrain of the army scout's world, and how he began to position himself as the deliverer of an anxious white officer class from a racially corrosive frontier. In the fall of 1868, the Fifth Cavalry joined Sheridan's winter offensive. The general hoped to catch Indian warriors in their winter camps and destroy their horses, stores of food, and weapons, leaving them unable to mount an offensive when warm weather returned. The most notable event of this campaign was Custer's attack on Black Kettle's band of Cheyenne at the Washita River. While Custer and the Seventh Cavalry journeyed to the Washita, Cody guided General Carr and seven troops of Fifth Cavalry from Fort Lyon, in eastern Colorado, southward to the North Canadian River, in western Indian Territory (today's Oklahoma). The seventy-five supply wagons of the Fifth Cavalry were vital support for General William Penrose's Third Cavalry, which had ventured out earlier with scant provisions and was now enduring frigid winter conditions. Tracking through thick snow and freezing cold, Cody led Carr to the Third Cavalry. Upon hearing from straggling soldiers that Penrose's troops were near starvation, Carr ordered Cody ahead with two troops of cavalry and fifty pack mules. Despite fierce cold and still more snow, Cody located the Penrose command on Paloduro Creek, where the Third Cavalry—with Wild Bill Hickok among its scouts—had been on quarter rations for two weeks, and two hundred horses and mules had perished from exhaustion and lack of food.
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As much as Cody contributed to Carr's success that fall, at times he displayed the very characteristics of distracting entrepreneurialism, conviviality, and combativeness that troubled commanders where scouts were concerned. The racially mixed crowd of scouts, only nominally under military authority, could be as explosive as the troopers. After leading Carr to Penrose's command, Cody teamed up with Hickok and persuaded a Mexican wagonmaster on a passing beer train to advance them his cargo in exchange for a share of the profits. The two scouts sold the beer “to our boys in pint cups, and as the weather was very cold we warmed the beer by putting the ends of our picket-pins heated red-hot into the cups. The result,” recalled Cody, “was one of the biggest beer jollifications I ever had the misfortune to attend.” A subsequent spree resulted in a brawl between white scouts, led by Hickok and Cody, and the Mexican and Mexican American scouts, notably the Autubees brothers. Cody said the fight was a result of “a feud” between the “fifteen Mexicans” scouting for Penrose scouts and the white scouts, led by himself.
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Indeed, the instigation for the fight hinted at the simmering white resentment of degenerate race mingling. Fists flew after Hickok called the Autobees brothers a bunch of “mongrels.”
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Carr had no intention of letting the scouts repeat the episode. He sent Cody and Hickok to scout for a five-hundred-man detachment marching into the Texas Panhandle in search of Indians. They found none. By the end of the campaign, the troops were suffering from scurvy, and Cody was dispatched to hunt fresh meat. With twenty wagons in tow, Cody searched four days for buffalo before sighting a herd. Stampeding them into a snow-choked arroyo, he killed fifty-five. The next day, he killed forty-one more. In the following two days, he nearly doubled this total again. His shoulder was beaten black and blue by the kick of his rifle, and swollen so badly that he needed help to get his coat on. In February 1869, Cody returned to Fort Lyon with the Fifth Cavalry.
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At the end of the campaign, as other scouts were paid off and sent on their way, Carr retained Cody's services. The scout requested a leave to visit his wife in St. Louis, and Carr agreed.
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The visit with Louisa went well. Cody later said it was because he was not there long enough to fight with her.
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But there may have been other reasons for the couple's placidity, among them Cody's recent ascension to the respectable wage of $125 per month.
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If his pay increase reflected his success in fighting the Cheyenne, the rapprochement between William and Louisa Cody coincidentally resonated with a primary aim of the Indian wars, to shore up American families threatened by the Indian destruction of their homes, and the abduction of settlers, especially women and children. Even if no white women had been abducted, Americans so imagined Indian men as rapists that the ideology of captive redemption would have motivated hostilities anyway. But enough settlers were abducted by Indians in the combat theater that in the public eye the multihued, squabbling army and its equally diverse, contentious scouts were ironically arrayed in an ongoing defense of white womanhood.

Thus, at the Washita, Custer sought to redeem from Cheyenne captivity one Mrs. Blynn, who was killed in the onslaught.
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Subsequently, as the war continued through the spring of 1869, the army secured the release of several white women from Indian captivity. George Custer finally caught up with a large contingent of Dog Men, in March 1869, at Sweetwater Creek. After opening negotiations with a number of chiefs, Custer took three of them hostage. He had learned that two white women captives, Anna Morgan and one Mrs. White, were in the village. Custer announced that unless they were returned, and unless all 260 lodges went to the reservation south of the Arkansas River, he would hang the hostages. Ultimately, the Indians handed over the white women, and agreed to go to the reservation.
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Meanwhile, farther north, Cody's star continued its rise, in another effort at captive redemption. In May 1869, the Fifth Cavalry moved to Fort McPherson, in Nebraska. Along the way, the regiment fought two skirmishes against Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, with Cody earning extraordinary praise from General Eugene Carr for his tracking and marksmanship, as well as his bravery. According to Carr's report, Cody “displayed great skill in following” the trail, and also “deserves great credit for his fighting in both engagements, his marksmanship being very conspicuous.” In June, the secretary of war himself approved Carr's request for a $100 bonus for Cody to honor his service.
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The coming battle would be the largest and, militarily, the most consequential of his life. In May of 1869, Cody marched with a battalion of the Fifth Cavalry from Fort Lyon, Colorado, to new headquarters at Fort McPherson, Nebraska. On the way, he saw more fighting at Beaver Creek. The Dog Men were out in force that month. Joined by at least three bands of Sioux and by various Arapaho warriors and their families, they warred across northern Kansas, attacking a crew on the Kansas Pacific, destroying homesteads, killing settlers, and finally carrying off two German immigrant women, Mrs. Maria Weichell and Mrs. Susanna Alderdice, who was abducted with her baby. Although many children, women, and sometimes men were adopted by the Cheyenne after abduction, murder of captives was permissible and even standard when they were in flight from the army. A Cheyenne warrior strangled the Alderdice infant shortly after the abduction. Tall Bull and other leaders of those Dog Men now decided to break for the north. In the Powder River country of Wyoming, they hoped, they would find allies among the Northern Cheyenne and Sioux, and respite from army patrols. Sheridan, knowing that the Dog Men were headed north, sent Carr and the Fifth Cavalry in pursuit.
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The Republican River expedition, as it became known, was the largest in the history of Fort McPherson, and amid the unwieldy, contentious mixture of officers, soldiers, white scouts, Indian scouts and auxiliaries, civilian teamsters, wagons, mules, and horses, we get a glimpse of young Cody, chief of scouts, his abilities as Indian fighter and his significance as a symbol for a beleaguered army. We sense, too, how the campaign to turn the weird assemblage of peoples into a unified force through pageantry, drill, and celebration later inspired his development of multiracial traveling amusements.

At fewer than 400 men, the expedition was small for the challenge of fighting the Dog Men. Numerical shortcomings made it ever more dependent on Indian knowledge, guidance, and fighting power: 150 Pawnee scouts, under the nominal command of translator and scout Frank North and his brother, Luther, set out alongside the expedition. Trundling after the command was a heavily overloaded supply train, driven by civilian teamsters. The day before the expedition departed, the Fifth Cavalry paraded at the fort, performing mock charges with sabers glinting in the sun. The Pawnee scouts matched their display, borrowing full dress uniforms and making some mock charges of their own, as if to declare their alliance—and equality—with the U.S. Army.

The formal pageantry over, the Pawnees spent the night in war dances and traditional recitation of personal battle histories. Together, all of these preliminaries were a Wild West show in their own right, with an appreciative audience, too: soldiers and their families, as well as other residents of the fort and dozens of teamsters, all turned out to watch. The next day, under regimental flags and to the accompaniment of the regimental band, this motley assemblage officially known as the Fifth Cavalry—but actually the Fifth Cavalry plus many Pawnees, some white scouts, and a lot of civilians— headed out. Cody, the North brothers, and the Pawnee scouts led the way.
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On this journey, as on others, Cody exercised his customary entrepreneurship, as well as the chaotic social latitude of the typical scout. Along with two other civilians, he invested in a wagon of tinned goods to sell to soldiers, and it lumbered along with the other fifty or so wagons which carried the command's provisions. Financially, the venture failed. At least Cody never paid his partner, Eric Ericson, for his share of the investment, something Ericson resented for years afterward.
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Keeping order among his scouts would trouble General Carr on this journey as on others. A few nights before the expedition departed, Cody was drinking at the California Exchange Keg House in North Platte, and ended up getting the worst of a fistfight with the saloonkeeper, Dave Perry, a friend with whom Cody subsequently reconciled.
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On the first night of the march, he and Luther North left the command for a private dinner at Cody's house, back at the fort. A storm broke out on their return, and they were unable to find their way back to the command in the lightning. “Well, we are fine scouts,” commented Cody, “lost within three miles of the fort.” They had to wait till dawn to find their way back to Carr's troops. Only their good fortune prevented the regiment from needing their services in the meantime.
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For Cody, numerous encounters with Cheyenne and Sioux parties began the next week, and the scout's autonomy agitated Carr. A week out, a Sioux raiding party tried to stampede the army mule herd and thereby strand the supply train. Officers were too stunned to give orders. The scouts did not wait for them. Cody leapt onto his horse and pounded after the raiding party, with scouts Frank and Luther North and dozens of Pawnee auxiliaries right behind him. They soon passed Cody, whose mount was exhausted. Cody caught up with them as they recovered the mules, and two of the Pawnees killed two of the retreating Sioux. The scout party continued the pursuit, in vain, until after dark. When they returned, Carr was furious. Luring soldiers away from the main command was a standard Sioux tactic. Captain William Fetterman had fallen for the trick just three years before, at Fort Phil Kearny, in Wyoming Territory, and he had perished with his entire command of eighty-one men. Careful not to offend Cody, Frank North, or the Pawnees, Carr vented his fury on Luther North, the youngest and most dispensable of the scouts.
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Although the command followed the trail of a large village to the North Fork of the Solomon River the next day, the Cheyenne scattered and even the Pawnees could not pick up the trail. For the next ten days, Carr's command wandered through the valley of the Republican River, searching for Indians.
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After several more brief skirmishes, Carr ordered a forced march across the Sand Hills to catch up to the retreating Cheyenne. Moving rapidly through abandoned Cheyenne campsites along the way, the command was soon approaching its limits. Grass gave way to yucca and cactus. There was no wood for fires. The horses were exhausted. Selecting only those men whose mounts were still fit for duty—244 cavalry, 50 Pawnee scouts, the North brothers, and William Cody—Carr set out at dawn on July 11 with rations for three days. If they did not find the Cheyenne in that time, the Dog Men would escape.
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Cody later wrote that on Carr's order he handpicked “five or six of the best Pawnees,” with whom he found the Dog Men's camp. But regimental records credit the Pawnee scouts, not Cody: “The Pawnees with General Carr's column soon reported an Indian village near ‘judging from signs.' Ten minutes later the Indian village was discovered.” Cody's eagerness to receive credit for the discovery was in keeping with his artful claim to supreme scouting abilities for the rest of his career. But, if the account does not say who first saw the village, all battlefield reports credit the Pawnees for their scouting and fighting; none so much as mentions Cody.
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Galloping together in three parallel columns, double file, Carr's command roared into a valley thick with Cheyenne tipis. Although the Pawnee horses were in poorer condition than the cavalry mounts, the Pawnees actually arrived among the Cheyenne lodges first. In a reflection of how much the army depended on Indian scouts and allies to win the Plains wars, Maria Weichell, the only captive to survive the fight, feared she was being rescued from the Cheyenne only to become the captive of other Indians.
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