It simply would not do to leave so fruitful a region in the hands of savages who were doing nothing to reap the harvest from that land.
But now that Reynolds had been driven off the Powder, now that Crook had been forced back to Goose Creek to lick his wounds, now that half of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been rubbed out, forcing General Alfred Terry back to tend to his own psychic wounds on the Yellowstone—now that the army had suffered so many setbacks, Congress was suddenly of a new mind. Washington’s conscience was a’changing.
Yet it wasn’t just the nation’s representatives who clamored for results. Reeling from the startling banner headlines that second week of July in their very own Centennial summer, the body politic, the public itself, raised a strident demand for action. Raised their own call to arms!
As John S. Gray puts it:
The Secretary [of War J. D. Cameron] solemnly proclaimed that the terms of the Sioux treaty had been “literally performed on the part of the United States.” (By sending thousands to invade the reservation?) Even most of the Sioux had likewise honored the treaty, but some “have always treated it with contempt,” by continuing “to rove at pleasure.” (A practice legalized by the treaty!) They had even gone so far as to “attack settlements, steal horses, and murder peaceful inhabitants.” (These victims were white violators of the treaty who dealt the Indians worse than they received!)
Cameron’s report went on to read like nothing more than perfect bureaucratic doublespeak:
No part of these operations is on or near the Sioux reservation. The accidental discovery of gold on the western border of the Sioux reservation, and the intrusion of our people thereon, have not caused this war …
Citizens back east knew their government had been feeding, clothing, educating the Sioux and Cheyenne at their agencies. And now those ungrateful Indians had bitten the hand that fed them! Shocked and dismayed, the public cried out that simple justice required stern punishment.
So Sherman and Sheridan wouldn’t find it at all hard to get what they wanted by midsummer, within days of the disastrous news from the Little Bighorn reaching the East. Suddenly after three years of balking at General Sheridan’s request for money to build two forts in the heart of Sioux country, Congress promptly appropriated the funds to begin construction at a pair of sites on the Yellowstone: one at the mouth of the Big Horn and the other at the mouth of the Tongue.
A few weeks later—after a delay caused only by some heated, vitriolic debate over the relative merits of Volunteers versus Regulars—Congress additionally raised the ceiling on army strength, a move that allowed recruiting another twenty-five hundred privates for a sorely tried U.S. cavalry. By railcar and riverboat steamer, these new privates were uniformed and outfitted and were being rushed to the land of the Sioux by late summer.
On the last day of July, Congress authorized the President to take all necessary steps to prevent metallic cartridges from reaching Sioux country. Two weeks later Grant signed into law a bill that raised the strength of Enlisted Indian Scouts to one thousand. And only three days later he put his name on a bill raising the manpower strength of all cavalry companies to one hundred men for each company.
Sherman and Sheridan now had their “total war,” just the same sort of scorched-earth warfare they had waged so successfully through Georgia and the Shenandoah. In their minds there were no noncombatants. Any woman or child, any Indian sick or old, was deemed the enemy by virtue of not huddling close to the agencies. As far as General Sheridan was concerned, it wasn’t just a matter of using his troops to drive the roamers back to their reservations. This was a war of vengeance against an enemy who had embarrassed, even humiliated, his army.
The last, but by no means the least, of the pieces to their plan, was that Sheridan was finally to get what he had wanted ever since he had come west at the end of the Civil War.
With war fever infecting Washington by the end of that July, Secretary of the Interior Chandler turned over to the army “control over all the agencies in the Sioux country.” Both the agents at Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were to be removed without cause and their duties assumed by the commanders of the nearby Camp Robinson (at Red Cloud) and Camp Sheridan (at Spotted Tail). The army would soon begin to demand the “unconditional surrender” of every Indian who returned to the reservations in the wake of the army’s big push. No matter that they might be coming in from a hunt, all Indians on the agencies had to surrender their weapons and ponies. They were considered prisoners of war.
So what of those who had remained on the reservations?
It made no difference to the army now in control of the agencies. Not a single penny of their appropriations, not one mouthful of flour or rancid ounce of bacon would be given out until the Sioux had first relinquished all claim to their unceded lands.
“Give back the Black Hills or starve!”
Only 40 of the 2,267 adult males required by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 to sell their Paha Sapa eventually signed the agreement the government commissioners foisted upon them.
But by then the Battle of Slim Buttes had already taken place. And Slim Buttes was clearly the beginning of the end.
The Sioux and Cheyenne had already ridden the meteor’s tail to the zenith of their success at Rosebud Creek and the Greasy Grass. Yet within eleven weeks of their stunning victories, their demise and ultimate defeat were already sealed at what was an otherwise inconsequential fight at Slim Buttes. In a matter of months Crazy Horse would surrender in the south, and Sitting Bull would limp across the Medicine Line into the Land of the Grandmother with the last of his holdouts.
Both of them giving up the good fight.
To learn more about what took place during that dramatic summer among both the warrior villages and the army camps in the territory surrounding the Little Bighorn River country, I offer the following suggested titles I have used to write my story of this Summer of the Sioux:
Across the Continent with the Fifth Cavalry, by George F. Price
Battles and Skirmishes of the Great Sioux War, 1876-1877, the Military View, edited by Jerome A. Greene
Blood on the Moon: Valentine McGillycuddy and the Sioux, by Julia B. McGillycuddy
Campaigning with Crook, by Captain Charles King, U.S.A.
Campaigning with King: Charles King, Chronicler of the Old Army, edited by Paul L. Hedren
Centennial Campaign: The Sioux War of 1876, by John S. Gray
The Chronicles of the Yellowstone, by E. S. Topping
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors, by Stephen E. Ambrose
Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mari Sandoz
Death on the Prairie: The Thirty Years’ Struggle for the Western Plains, by Paul I. Wellman
First Scalp for Custer: The Skirmish at Warbonnet Creek, by Paul L. Hedren
Following the Indian Wars: The Story of Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners, by Oliver Knight
Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars, by Don Rickey, Jr.
Frank Grouard, Army Scout, edited by Margaret Brock Hanson
Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891, by Robert M. Utley
General George Crook: His Autobiography, edited by Martin F. Schmitt
The Great Sioux War, 1876-77, edited by Paul L. Hedren