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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806147062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 04/08/2015 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 514 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d) |
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The Gray Fox
George Crook and the Indian Wars
By Paul Magid
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4950-9
CHAPTER 1
Changing the Old System of Warfare
December 1866–December 1867
The two officers' journey to remote Fort Boise began in a deceptively agreeable manner. Boarding the Central Pacific Railway, Crook and Nickerson enjoyed an easy passage from San Francisco to the railroad's then-terminus, the hamlet of Cisco, high in the Sierras. There, they left the train and proceeded east via Overland Stage, luxuriating in the relative comfort afforded by springs and padded seats, while delighting in the majestic scenery that unfolded outside the open windows of their coach—a succession of snow-covered peaks, girded by towering stands of Ponderosa and Lodge Pole pines, their craggy summits outlined against cerulean skies. At intervals, the mountains receded as the road descended into grassy vales, partly covered in this season with a patchwork of early snow against which Crook's hunter's eye picked out herds of grazing deer and elk. That night, they slept in a fine hotel on Donner Lake, not far from Tahoe, savoring creature comforts for what they knew would be the last time in a great while.
The next day, the realities of frontier travel intruded. The landscape abruptly changed as they descended from the Sierra foothills onto the alkali flats of the Great Basin. Here, they exchanged the coach's padded interior for the hardwood seat of a "dead-axe" wagon that the war-damaged Nickerson found a torment. Having "neither springs nor any other convenience for the comfort of the traveler," he lamented, "it was all one could do to cling to his seat when he was wide awake and in the full possession of all his strength and faculties; but when tired out, exhausted, and sleepy, it was next to an impossibility."
The clumsy vehicle jolted along the rough trail for six days and nights, stopping only briefly at intervals to permit a change of horses at way stations, rude dugouts excavated into the sides of hillocks that rose like outsized prairie dog mounds in the monotonous desert terrain. At these stops, the two men purchased the only food available—an unvarying fare served regardless of time of day—doughy bread and half-fried, fatty pork, washed down with tea brewed with the bitter alkaline water of the region.
The scenery, only dimly visible through billowing alkali dust, perfectly complemented the accommodations—barren ground, broken only by withered stands of sagebrush. The dust was everywhere, "permeating the beard, hair, eyes and ears...." Nickerson, a keen observer, noted that Crook, normally "a model of personal cleanliness," did not bother to wash it from his face. Asked why, the colonel (for he preferred to be addressed by his current rather than his brevet, or honorary, rank) informed his companion that when the alkali mixed with water, it became lye, which, he advised, would "endanger my eyesight, take the skin from my face, and make me an altogether undesirable traveling companion." For the remainder of the trip, the lieutenant meekly followed his colonel's example, avoiding water and removing such grit as he could with a dry handkerchief.
A succession of drivers relieved the tedium by regaling the officers with lively accounts of the atrocities committed by the Indians of the region. Their tales of depredation were familiar to Crook, and indeed, it was to correct this situation that he had been assigned to Fort Boise. Still, the drivers' narratives provided an impressive litany of dead miners, settlers, and hunters, mutilated corpses, stolen horses and cattle, and burned-out farms and mining camps. One story vividly imprinted itself on Nickerson's mind, an attack on about a hundred or a hundred fifty unarmed Chinese laborers en route to one of the many mining claims in the area. Slaughtered to a man in what the driver callously described as a Mongolian picnic, their unburied bodies were found strewn for six miles along the trail.
To avoid falling victim to similar "festivities," Nickerson wryly noted, whenever the wagon passed through country that seemed a likely spot for an ambush, the two officers descended, double barreled shotguns in hand, and "acted as skirmishers, [Crook] on one side and I on the other, until the danger point had been passed. We intended that, if the Indians proposed adding a Buckeye picnic to their list of entertainments, we would endeavor to furnish part of the music." Notwithstanding the dire tales of their drivers, the trip proved uneventful, and Crook and Nickerson, who had begun to form an enduring relationship through shared hardship, arrived safely at Fort Boise on December 11, 1866.
The post, an unprepossessing scattering of log structures and a single sandstone edifice that housed the post quartermaster, had been built in dry, treeless surroundings on a creek that flowed into the Boise River some forty miles from where it joined the rushing waters of the Snake. Established to guard the Oregon Trail and the miners prospecting in the area, the fort afforded protection from the Indians, and a rough mining town had grown up beside it, its dusty streets lined with saloons and dry goods stores.
The civilian population of Boise and its surroundings, having endured almost a decade of Indian warfare, welcomed Crook enthusiastically, their interest aroused by an article appearing just before his arrival in the Owyhee Avalanche, a paper published in nearby Silver City. Informed of Crook's Indian-fighting experience prior to the Civil War as a young officer in the Pit River country of northern California, the Avalanche concluded that he was "a splendid Indian exterminator, and if he will only do half as well as a General [sic] as he did as a Lieutenant, the Lo family may expect much trouble."
Crook set to work immediately. Though not quite the bloodthirsty "Indian exterminator" described by the Avalanche, he began to formulate plans for the aggressive campaigning that he fervently believed would bring peace to the region. Aware that good intelligence was essential to the success of such operations, he spent his first week calling upon members of the military and civilian community to assess the situation, determine the extent of his resources, and fix upon a course of action. As would become his habit, he listened attentively throughout, but kept his own counsel.
He soon learned that the massacre of the Chinese miners, the Mongolian picnic referred to by his driver, was widely believed to have been perpetrated by one of the small, autonomous bands of Northern Paiutes who, together with related Bannocks and Shoshones, occupied this vast, arid territory. Frontier whites, who had little interest in distinguishing among the various tribes or learning their proper names, collectively referred to them simply as Snakes, in accordance with a common custom of naming tribes after the nearest river.
John C. Frémont, one of the first whites to enter the region, christened it the Great Basin, as he was struck by the land's resemblance to a huge bathtub: a depression, hemmed in on all sides by high plateaus and mountain peaks and drained by streams that flowed inward from its rim toward its center. Frémont's seemingly benign appellation failed to capture the area's daunting nature. Subject to subzero temperatures and raging blizzards in winter, the Great Basin in summertime saw temperatures that often reached one hundred degrees. Far from flat, its surface was broken by ravines and jagged mountain ranges that made travel arduous. And its low annual rainfall and alkaline soil ensured that few varieties of plants and animals could survive in this barren landscape. Nevertheless, the tribes that made it their home had adapted to its peculiarities and eked out a satisfactory, though precarious, existence through a carefully balanced nomadic lifestyle. Generally peaceful peoples, they fished, hunted small game, and gathered grasshoppers, roots, nuts, and berries as these became available during their seasonal migrations.
The white man first intruded into this simple way of life in the 1840s. "They came like a lion, yes like a roaring lion," recalled the daughter of a Paiute chief, a youngster at the time. But their rapaciousness was not immediately evident. And for a time, white and red man coexisted, aided by the fact that the first intruders were merely transiting the country en route to the Pacific. But before long, the Basin revealed its enormous mineral wealth, and immigrants began to settle in the region, their numbers soon rivaling the Indian population. Inevitably, relations between the two peoples deteriorated.
The army was keenly aware of both the reasons for and the consequences of the growing conflict, but held little hope for a solution beneficial to the Indians. As General Halleck perceptively described the situation to the secretary of war, the infertile character of the Basin demanded that the Indians range over a large area throughout the year to meet their minimum food requirements. But the settlers and miners had seized "all the good lands in the valleys and on the borders of the lakes and streams," killed off the game, chopped down the trees, and claimed the best habitat for the natural bounty the Indians required. "Almost their only means of subsistence now," he wrote, "are fish and the few rabbits, quails, and small birds and grasshoppers, which they can find upon the barren sage-brush plains and deserts. And even here, ... they are pretty certain to be shot down without notice or inquiry. ..." "Hence," he concluded, "these Indians are almost forced into collision and hostilities with the whites, ... which will be ended only with [their] removal or entire destruction."
In 1860, a harsh winter and the wanton killing by whites of two young Paiute girls brought the situation to a head, igniting what became known as the Paiute or Pyramid Lake War. Unable to end the war by force of arms, white volunteers negotiated an agreement that allowed the rebellious Paiutes to return peacefully to their homeland around Pyramid Lake in northern Nevada. But the discovery of gold and silver, some of it on Indian land, drew a fresh influx of miners into the area. The Indians responded with guerrilla warfare. Three separate bands of Paiutes, joined by disaffected Bannocks and Shoshones, each raided within a defined area under its own chief. The regular army, preoccupied by the Civil War, left the protection of this frontier to volunteer units composed of miners and settlers. Many were rough and bloodthirsty Indian haters who made little effort to distinguish between hostile and friendly Indians or, for that matter, between warriors and their wives and children. Their conduct exacerbated a bloody cycle of violence and revenge. For their part, the Indians stole livestock and arms, and when the opportunity presented, murdered whites, including women, and savagely mutilated the dead, before disappearing into the trackless landscape as effortlessly as they had arrived.
The frontier folk who met with Crook at Fort Boise had lost family, friends, and property as a result of these raids and were untroubled by the brutality of the volunteers. Indeed, many favored extermination as the only solution to the "Indian problem." Local newspapers like the Owyhee Avalanche, which had lauded Crook as an Indian exterminator, fanned these sentiments with detailed accounts of Indian atrocities and scorching editorials advocating annihilation of the "bi-ped hyenas" and "red rapists."
When the Civil War ended and volunteer enlistments expired, responsibility for frontier defense returned to the regular army, which now underwent a radical shift in outlook. Prior to the war, when government policy toward the Indians was still in flux, regulars had served as a buffer between the Indians and settlers. During the 1850s, Crook and many of his contemporaries sympathized with the Indians. Observing that rapacious settlers and miners often initiated the violence, they often strove for evenhandedness, sometimes defending the Indians, sometimes the whites. Following the war, to satisfy a pent-up demand for land and wealth, the army, at the government's behest, refocused its energies on the subjugation and removal of the Indian as an obstacle to expansion into western lands. General Sherman, who would become the commanding general during the Grant administration and was by no means the most virulent Indian hater in the military, described this new mission in chilling terms. "The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed in the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers. Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous."
In 1866, Major General Fredrick Steele, a West Point graduate and veteran of the Mexican and Civil Wars, was given command of the Department of the Columbia, which included the Great Basin. To garrison this vast area, he was given a force of only 870 volunteers, whose enlistments were to expire shortly. They were replaced by regular infantry of indifferent quality, a force drawn disproportionately from among unskilled workers, the urban poor, and recent immigrants, who, for one reason or another, had difficulty thriving in civilian life. As a whole, the new recruits reflected a marked decline in ability, physical health, and motivation when measured against the men who had served in the Civil War. And neither they nor their officers, a mix of West Pointers and veterans of Civil War volunteer regiments, had much, if any, experience fighting Indians. Suddenly, experienced Indian fighters like Crook became an important and scarce asset.
Steele consolidated the bulk of the troops in his department in the Great Basin, creating a new Military District of Boise administered from Fort Boise, but extending west into Oregon, where most of the depredations were occurring. He appointed Major L. H. Marshall, then in command of the Second Battalion, Fourteenth Infantry, to head the district. To strengthen Marshall's hand in dealing with the Indians, Steele requested, and was given, reinforcements, particularly cavalry, as foot soldiers were considered virtually useless in this kind of warfare.
In May, six months before Crook's arrival, the major, eager to demonstrate his martial ardor, engaged a large Paiute band believed to have been responsible for the massacre of the Chinese miners. But after trading fire ineffectually with the Indians for four hours, Marshall precipitously withdrew from the field, losing his only artillery piece and most of his provisions and abandoning four of his soldiers. His performance sparked an outpouring of mockery in press accounts, which Crook undoubtedly found illuminating.
Not only were the local citizens contemptuous of the regulars' ineptitude on the battlefield, but they had become increasingly resentful of the troops' undisciplined off duty behavior, conduct that included public drunkenness and theft of civilian property. Besieged with complaints, General Steele grew so weary of Marshall's performance that, in September, he named Crook to replace him. The latter, en route to California by sea at the time, had not been aware of the full extent of the problem or that he would be charged with correcting it until his arrival at Fort Boise. Now his investigations disclosed a situation even more perilous than he anticipated. "That whole country ..." he later recalled, "was in a state of siege. Hostile Indians were all over the country, dealing death and destruction everywhere they wished. People were afraid to go outside their own doors without protection. There was scarcely a day that reports of depredations were not coming in." Further, he learned, "the feeling against Marshall and many of his officers was very bitter. They were accused of all manner of things. One thing was certain: they had not, nor were they, making headway against the hostile Indians."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Gray Fox by Paul Magid. Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
1. Changing the Old System of Warfare,
2. A Summer and Fall Campaign,
3. Winter Campaigning,
4. Assignment to Apacheria,
5. A March into the Country,
6. The Sword and the Olive Branch,
7. The Wickenburg Massacre,
8. The Last Peace Offensive,
9. The Tonto Campaign,
10. "Their Future Depended Very Much upon Themselves",
11. Removal,
12. Final Days in Arizona,
13. Department of the Platte,
14. Rails to Riches,
15. Prelude to War,
16. Preparing for Battle,
17. The Big Horn and Yellowstone Expedition,
18. March to the Rosebud,
19. The Largest Battle,
20. The Rosebud Revisited,
21. Paralysis at Cloud Peak,
22. The Last Stand,
23. Merritt Joins the Campaign,
24. Uniting with Terry,
25. The Horsemeat March,
26. Slim Buttes,
27. Dealing with the Agency Sioux,
28. The Second Powder River Expedition,
29. Surrender,
30. Loose Ends,
31. The Death of Crazy Horse,
32. Removal,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,