The Mammoth Book of the West (44 page)

All had been scalped, save for two, whose heads had been placed in buffalo-skin bags, a signal dishonour reserved by the Sioux for cowardly foe.

The so-called Fetterman Massacre so reduced the Fort Phil Kearny garrison that Carrington feared that his entire command might be destroyed. Despite a raging blizzard, a miner staying at the fort volunteered to ride the 235 miles to Fort Laramie to obtain reinforcements. This was John (“Portugee”) Philips. He refused pay, but took one of the colonel’s horses. Before riding off, Philips visited the pregnant wife of Lieutenant Grummond, killed alongside Fetterman, and told her: “I will go if it costs my life. I am going for your sake.”

John Philips’s ride, through snow and Indians, is an epic in the folklore of the frontier. With only hardtack to eat and temperatures reaching 20 below, he somehow made the 190 miles to Horse Shoe Station in four days, from where the news was flashed to Fort Laramie. For good measure, he rode on to Fort Laramie to report in person. He arrived on Christmas night, as the officers were holding a ball.

Less well known is that Carrington sent out another volunteer messenger from the fort, George Bailey, who also made it through the blizzards and hostile Native Americans, meeting up with Philips sometime before Horse Shoe Station. Both men arrived together at the
telegraph office and later at Fort Laramie.

Within hours of their arrival, reinforcements were struggling towards Fort Phil Kearny. With them went orders relieving Carrington of his command.

These fresh troops did not intimidate the Sioux, who continued to besiege Fort Phil Kearny and virtually halt travel along the Bozeman Trail.

In the late summer of 1867 there came another battle at Fort Phil Kearny. At dawn on 2 August Red Cloud and a thousand Sioux warriors, wearing their white and green and yellow warpaint, attacked a 36-man detail working under Captain James Powell at the pinery. Anticipating such a fight, Powell had taken the precaution of building an oval barricade of the large wooden boxes from the wagon beds. Thirty-two of the detail made it to shelter behind the wagon boxes. For four hours, to the vast surprise of the Sioux, the soldiers kept up an almost continuous fire. Braves fell in futile charge after charge.

Unknown to Red Cloud, the soldiers had the new breech-loading Springfield rifles instead of muzzle-loaders. “Instead of drawing ramrods and thus losing precious time,” recalled Sergeant Samuel Gibson, “we simply threw open the breech-blocks of our new rifles to eject the empty shell and slapped in fresh ones.” These Springfield rifles, along with Powell’s wagon boxes, enabled the work detail to hold off the Indians until reinforcements arrived. Years afterwards Red Cloud said he lost the flower of his fighting warriors in the Wagon Box Fight.

The day preceding the Wagon Box Fight, an attack by Cheyenne at Fort C.F. Smith — the Hayfield Fight – had also been beaten off with Springfields.

For weeks, Red Cloud believed he had suffered a fatal defeat. But the government in Washington had been so shocked by the previous disasters on the Trail – especially the Fetterman Massacre – that it wanted to make peace. A commission was sent out to Wyoming to draw up a treaty. Red Cloud refused to sign. Sensing his advantage, he demanded that the blue-coat soldiers abandon their forts in Sioux country. Wearied of a war that was costly and unpopular in the East, the government took the unprecedented step of agreeing to an Indian’s terms. Forts C.F. Smith, Phil Kearny and Reno were abandoned in the summer of 1868.

As the soldiers departing Fort Phil Kearny looked back, they saw a band of Indians under Little Wolf set fire to the buildings.

When he saw that the posts had truly been evacuated, Red Cloud rode into Fort Laramie and signed the treaty. Under its terms, the government agreed to abandon the Bozeman Trail, and define the Powder River country as “unceded Indian territory” from which White persons would be excluded. Red Cloud had won his war to retain his people’s traditional hunting grounds. In return, the Indians agreed to settle on a giant reservation in Dakota and cease hostilities. “From this day forward,” the treaty began, “all wars between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease.”

A pious hope. But peace of a sort held for eight years on the northern plains. And when it was finally broken, it was broken by the White man.

“They have run over our country; they have destroyed the growing wood and green grass; they have set fire to our lands. They have devastated the country and killed my animals, the elk, the deer, the antelope, my buffalo. They do not kill them to eat them; they leave them to rot where they fall. Fathers, if I went into your country to kill your animals, what would you say? Would I not be wrong, and would you not make war on me?”

White emigrants had been streaming into the trans-Mississippi West since the 1840s, along roads which disfigured the landscape and scared away the buffalo. To keep them in contact with the East, stagecoach lines and telegraph poles sprang up in the wilderness, stretching to Santa Fe, Salt Lake, Denver and beyond. But not until 1862 were the forces set in motion which would transform the Wild West beyond redemption. In that year, Lincoln’s Congress passed the Homestead Act, which offered parcels of 160 acres of free land to anyone willing to work it. Millions took up the offer, and began pushing out into the
Great Plains. In the same year, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act, which made possible the first transcontinental railway.

The iron horse had already penetrated to Omaha. Now it would push westwards from Omaha into the wilderness, while a line would come eastwards from Sacramento, California to meet it. With the end of the Civil War in 1865, the pace of expansion quickened at a fantastic rate. National energies which had been directed North and South were now focused West. Emigration boomed. Demobbed soldiers and men desperate for work flooded to work on the transcontinental railroad. By the end of 1866, the Union Pacific was advancing into Nebraska at the rate of a mile a day. Another railroad, the Kansas Pacific, was started towards Denver, Colorado.

The railway was the engine of ultimate destruction for the Native American. The railway would bind East and West the plains across in bands of steel. It would make possible the settlement of the interior frontier, and it would give the Army an added mobility in the Indian Wars. And it would bring the buffalo to near extinction.

There were around 25 million buffalo on the High Plains before the White man came. A few nomadic pedestrian Indians followed the buffalo on their great seasonal migrations, killing the beasts en masse by stampeding them over a cliff, or by stalking them individually whilst disguised under a buffalo robe. Most Native Americans in aboriginal times, however, were part-time buffalo hunters, venturing out from the sheltered woodlands and tall grass prairies in fall and winter. In the fall, the buffalo was fat from summer grazing. Around February, its winter coat was thick and warm to wear. Men were the hunters, dogs (the Indians’ only domesticated animal) and women the transport. A dog with
travois
, two tipi poles which trailed the ground and were attached to a
collar around the animal’s neck, could carry 75 pounds of meat.

The arrival of the horse changed everything. When in 1603 the Spanish began to settle in earnest along the Rio Grande, they forbade the Indians the use of the horse. Neither the Indians nor the horses were tractable to Spanish wishes. Horses escaped; Indians raided. By about 1640 the southern Apache were mounted, and not long afterwards the Kiowa were trading horses to the Wichita, and so the equine revolution proceeded north. The Comanche were horsed by about 1700, the tribes of the central Great Plains by the 1720s.

With the horse, the buffalo became an easy target. Tribes surged West to become horse-riding, exultant nomadic hunters of
bos bison Americanus
. The Teton (Western) Sioux, Assinboin, Cheyenne, Crow, Arapaho and others abandoned digging-sticks entirely (“We lost the corn,” say the Cheyenne). Others, like the Osage, maintained static agricultural villages and rode out for a great fall buffalo hunt.

For those tribes typical of the new Plains culture, such as the Teton Sioux, the buffalo was almost everything. It was food and it was clothing. A dozen cured buffalo hides made a tipi home. Buffalo leather could also make war shields, kettles and even coracle-like boats. The brains in the skull, cracked open with a buffalo hoof, helped tan the hide. Horns were used for drinking cups, and ceremonial dress. Large bones were weapons, small ones awls and needles. Buffalo dung made “chips” for fires. The Blackfoot extracted no fewer than 88 commodities from the buffalo, excluding food.

Since Indians believed that the buffalo, like every animal, was an other-than-human-person, the beast had to give its consent to die. This was obtained by prayer and reverence. Intricate ceremonials preceded the kill.

Unknown to the Plains Indians, the buffalo on which they had based their lifestyle, culture and religion was already in crisis before the railroads came. At their peak there were probably 25 million buffalo on the Great Plains (50 million less than the traditional estimate), and by the early 1800s these were suffering competition from mustang and Indian horse herds for water and grazing. The cattle brought to the Plains by Native American raiders and White migrants gave the buffalo brucellosis and tuberculosis. Emigrant trails – which cut the immense herds in two – and White settlement on the edges of the grasslands obliterated areas of range which were critical in times of drought.

The buffalo only appeared to be infinite. By the mid-nineteenth century the animal was struggling to maintain its numbers. And then came the railroads.

The iron horse scared away the herds and destroyed the range. To feed the railroad crews with meat, the companies hired hunters to slaughter the conveniently placed bison. A discovery that buffalo hides made cheap machine belts for Eastern factories increased the demand for the animal’s skin – which could now be shipped back on the railroads. Buffalo hunters galloped to the end of the line, and the carnage began.

A skilled marksman, using a heavy Sharps rifle and staying down wind from the herd, could kill – with luck – around 150 of the short-sighted animals per day. A former Pony Express rider and crack-shot called William F. Cody killed 4,280 buffalo for the Kansas-Pacific in eight months in 1867–8. This feat won him the soubriquet “Buffalo Bill”. Hide hunters took an estimated 4,374,000 from the southern plains alone between 1872 and 1874. The Great Plains were being turned into a wasteland and a charnel-house.

Great Plains Indians began to attack the railroad, striking
at Union Pacific grading crews, even speeding locomotives. Rails were ripped up, obstacles tied to the track. Once, a group of braves tried to capture a moving locomotive by pulling a rawhide lariat taut in front of it. Several were pulled under the wheels. A more effective attack came in the late summer of 1867.

On the night of 6 August 1867, the telegraph wire at Plum Creek, Nebraska, went dead. William Thompson and a crew of five went down the Union Pacific line in the dark to investigate – and ran headfirst into a Cheyenne barricade made from a section of ripped-up track. Within moments the crew were dead, and Thompson had been knocked unconscious. He woke to feel himself being scalped, but feigned death. Lying inert, he witnessed another attack by the Cheyenne nearby. This time a freight train came along and piled up on the barricade; the driver and fireman were killed by the Indians, but four men travelling in the caboose escaped. Still pretending death, Thompson watched the Cheyenne loot the cars. When the war party finally moved on, Thompson retrieved his bloody scalp and stumbled back to Plum Creek, from where he caught a train to Omaha. Among those who visited the scalpless repairman there was the journalist Henry Stanley: “In a pail of water by his side, was his scalp, somewhat resembling a drowned rat, as it floated, curled up, on the water. At Omaha, people flocked from all parts to view the gory baldness which had come upon him so suddenly.”

As the attacks on the railroad increased, the Army turned its attention to the central and southern plains. To protect railcrews and emigrants in Kansas and Nebraska, the irascible commander of the Military Division of the Missouri,
General William Tecumseh Sherman, wanted to remove all Indians from a wide corridor between the Platte and the Arkansas. Sherman was itching for war, complaining in 1866: “God only knows when, and I do not see how, we can make a decent excuse for an Indian war.” Desultory attacks on the iron horses did not quite justify wholesale war on the Indians, but Sherman got his excuse when his subordinate, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, burned a Cheyenne village because it was a “nest of conspirators”. Scott added that it was not “of much importance” whether the villagers had actually committed depredations. Thus provoked, the Cheyenne took to the warpath. Sherman got his Indian War.

To fight the war against the Cheyenne, Sherman employed the talents of Hancock and another celebrated officer, George Armstrong Custer. Although Custer had graduated 34th of a class of 34 at West Point (and collected 726 demerits), he had gone on to establish a Civil War reputation as an able cavalry leader, being breveted Major-General of Volunteers at the age of 25. Sherman held Custer in high esteem, but was not blind to his failures:

G. A. Custer, Lieutenant Colonel, Seventh Cavalry, is young, very brave, even to rashness – a good trait for a cavalry officer. His outstanding characteristics are his youth, health, energy and extreme willingness to act and fight. But he has not too much sense.

As if to prove the truth of Sherman’s latter assessment, Custer mounted one of the most capricious and ineffectual cavalry campaigns seen on the plains. Pained at being separated from his wife, Libby, Custer became moody and erratic. Men were given brutal punishments for the slightest reason. Rather than engage the enemy he went buffalo-hunting. When his men, exhausted by four months
of fruitless careering about the plains, began to desert, he sent out a posse with the order to “shoot them down, and bring none in alive.”