War for the Bozeman Rail
Throughout the Civil War, warfare with the Apaches continued. Wars also broke out with the Shoshoni, Bannock, Utes, and Northern Paiutes—also called the Snakes—in parts of Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, and Idaho. Wars erupted with the Navajo in the Southwest and with the combined forces of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Colorado. All of these wars ended badly for the Indians, although, as one official observed, “Ten good soldiers are required to wage successful war against one Indian.”
One of the few conflicts from which the Indians emerged victorious broke out just after the end of the Civil War. Military authorities had anticipated that the collapse of the Confederacy would free up many troops for service in the West. What actually happened is that the Union army rushed to demobilize, and the army of the West shrunk rather than expanded. A modest force under Colonel Henry B. Carrington was sent to protect the Bozeman Trail, a major route of western migration through Wyoming and Montana. The trail was being menaced by Oglala Sioux led by Red Cloud, who was determined to resist white invasion of his people’s land. Carrington was not popular with his officers, who felt that he devoted too much time to building forts and not enough to fighting Indians.
One subordinate, Captain William J. Fetterman, boasted that with 80 men, he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. On December 21, 1866, Fetterman was given his chance to make good on the boast. Sent with a detachment of 80, his mission was to relieve a wood-hauling wagon train that was being harassed by Indians. Fetterman found himself Lip against 1,500 to 2,000 warriors led by Crazy Horse, and his command was wiped out in what came to be called the Fetterman Massacre.
A peace commission concluded a treaty with Red Cloud on April 29, 1868, promising (among other things) to abandon the Bozeman Trail—which (the commissioners well knew) was about to be rendered obsolete by the transcontinental railroad.
The Campaigns of Hancock and Sheridan
General William Tecumseh Sherman, in charge of western operations, found the peace with Red Cloud humiliating. Sherman advised army General-in-Chief Grant that “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.” But the mood in Washington drifted toward conciliation, and Sherman continued to prosecute “punitive campaigns” in the West with little support and, ultimately, to little purpose.
From April through July 1867, one of Sherman’s best commanders, Winfield Scott Hancock, fruitlessly pursued the Cheyenne and Sioux through Kansas. The following year, Sherman’s most able lieutenant, General Philip Sheridan, conducted a brutal winter campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne. This campaign proved almost as punishing to the pursuers as to the pursued, all of whom suffered in snows and bitter cold.
The colorful colonel of the 7th Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer, laid claim to the biggest victory of “Sheridan’s Campaign,” when he attacked a peaceful Cheyenne camp on the Washita River. Among the 103 Indians he and his men killed were 93 women, old men, and children. Chief Black Kettle, actually a leading advocate of peace, was slain along with his wife.
War for the Black Hills
The futility and tragedy of Hancock’s and Sheridan’s campaigns were the hallmarks of the so-called Indian Wars. Weeks and months of fruitless pursuit characteristically culminated in wanton spasms of violence in which innocent victims perished alongside “hostiles.” In 1873, the brief but intense Modoc War broke out in California because a tiny tribe stubbornly refused to leave an utterly worthless volcanic wasteland. In 1874, the Red River War was launched to punish the Comanches and Cheyennes for attacking a group of white hunters at Adobe Walls, Texas. Then, in 1874, an expedition led by George A. Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills, the land most sacred to the Sioux. When government attempts to persuade the Indians to sell or lease the land failed, they were ordered to vacate. They refused, and war erupted.
The army never had an easy time fighting the Indian Wars, but now they found themselves up against an enemy equipped with formidable riding and warrior skills, motivated by religious fervor in defense of a sacred land, and led by the charismatic Tatanka Iyotake, better known as Sitting Bull. On June 17, Sitting Bull led a pounding attack against General George Crook’s column at the Rosebud Creek in southern Montana. This event made George Armstrong Custer more determined to pursue and destroy the “hostiles.”
Defeat of Custer
On the morning of June 22, 1876, to the strains of its regimental tune, “Garry Owen,” the 7th Cavalry passed in review before Generals Alfred Terry and John Gibbon. They were embarking on what the commanders conceived as a final pincers campaign against the Sioux. As Colonel Custer rode off to join his men, Gibbon called after him: “Now, Custer, don’t be greedy, but wait for us.” Custer answered, “No, I will not.”
Frustrated by long, fruitless pursuits, Custer was determined to fight it out whenever and wherever he could. That is why, on June 25, when his scouts discovered a Sioux camp and warriors near the Little Bighorn River, Custer decided not to wait until the next day, when he was supposed to rendezvous with the others. He decided to attack now. First, Custer sent Captain Frederick Benteen with 125 men south, to make sure the Sioux had not moved to the upper valley of the Little Bighorn. Then he sent another 112 men under Major Marcus A. Reno in pursuit of a small body of warriors he had sighted. With his remaining troops, Custer planned to charge the Sioux village. But it was soon apparent that Reno and his men were being overwhelmed, and Custer dispatched his bugler to recall. Benteen. Custer then charged, only to be engulfed himself by massive numbers of Sioux warriors, who killed the colonel and 250 cavalrymen. Reno, joined by Benteen—368 officers and men total—held off a relentless siege for the next two days.
“I Will Fight No More Forever”
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was the last major Indian victory of the Indian Wars. In subsequent engagements, the Sioux were defeated by the army’s two most successful Indian fighters, Ranald Mackenzie and Nelson A. Miles. It was Miles who finally defeated the Nez Perce at the five-day Battle of Bear Paw Mountain (September 30-October 5, 1877) in Montana, bringing to an end an epic pursuit that had begun in June.
Led by Chief Joseph the Younger, a faction of the Nez Perce refused to leave their homeland in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon. Troops under the command of General Oliver O. Howard and Colonel Miles pursued and battled some 800 Indians over 1,700 miles of the most inhospitable terrain on the continent. When it was over, Joseph and his people had earned the respect of their pursuers. Both Howard and Miles joined in Joseph’s petition to the White House to return to the Wallowa Valley. The petition was nevertheless denied—for the valley was rich in minerals—and Joseph lived out the remainder of his long life with his people on a reservation near Colville, Washington.