Indian Warfare on the Frontier

THERE never has been adequate public recognition of the inestimable service rendered by the small United States regular army in the Indian campaigns of the last forty years. With the close of the war with Mexico we acquired, substantially, our present national limits ; but these limits held good only as against foreign powers. The great area between the Mississippi and the Pacific was still a wilderness, held by powerful tribes of singularly warlike and bloodthirsty savages. Year by year the frontier of civilization was pushed westward across this wilderness; year by year the map showed growing areas of civilization in isolated tracts on the Pacific coast and in the mining districts of the Rocky Mountains, until within the last half dozen years the westward extension of the frontier has been pushed so far forward as to make it join with many of these hitherto island-like areas. In other words, the frontier proper has come to an end. The expression “on the frontier,” which for more than a century of our national existence had a most definite and significant meaning, is now meaningless, for the frontier itself no longer exists.

This marvelously rapid westward extension of our people across the continent would have been impossible had it not been for the quiet, faithful, uncomplaining, often heroic, and almost always absolutely unnoticed service rendered by the regular army. Abreast of the first hardy pioneers, whether miners or cattle men, appeared the West Point officer and his little company of trained soldiers; and the more regular settlers never made their appearance until, in campaign after campaign, always very wearing and harassing, and often very bloody in character, the scarred and tattered troops had decisively overthrown the Indian lords of the land. Save for the presence of the regular army a large portion of the territory inclosed within the limits of the flourishing States of the great plains and the Rockies would still be in the possession of hostile Indians, and the work of settlement in the West could not have reached its present point.

The lonely little posts on the waters of the Platte, the Powder, the Yellowstone, the Columbia, or the Colorado, where for many weary years at a time the soldiers wearing the national uniform lived and warred and died, with quiet endurance, surrounded by the desolation of vast solitudes and menaced by the most merciless of foes, have now either been abandoned, or are the seats of flourishing towns which but for the exertions of these soldiers would never have come into being; and the memory of the deeds done during the lonely years of peril fades as rapidly as the log walls of the cantonments crumble. They attracted scant notice at the time, in the roar of our huge and busy national life ; and they were forgotten almost as soon as done. Yet their consequences were of far-reaching importance, and it is eminently fitting that they should be appropriately commemorated.

It is therefore with peculiar pleasure that we welcome the appearance of a book¹ dealing with certain of the more recent Indian campaigns in the West. No man is better fitted, by experience, training, and mental habit, than Captain Bourke to describe these campaigns, and none other of our Indian fighters of recent times played so long, so varied, and on the whole so important a part in this phase of the conquest of the continent as did General Crook. Other men, notably General Custer, have played parts which were at times more brilliant. No single victory of Crook’s was either as dramatic or as important as Custer’s triumphant night fight on the Washita, and no scene in the former’s life equaled, either in picturesque quality or in tragedy, the battle which resulted in Custer’s death. But Crook saw very much more service against the Indians ; he saw it under far more varied conditions ; and on the whole, when everything is summed up, he accomplished more not only than Custer, but than any other Far Western commander of recent years.

Captain Bourke begins his book with a description of the conditions of life in Arizona in 1870, the chief of these conditions being unending and ferocious warfare with the Apaches. He describes very graphically and interestingly General Crook’s victorious struggle with these most intractable of American savages, on assuming command of the Arizona department. The warfare must have been grim and dreary enough, too, at the time, to those taking part in it, but in its recital it is full of picturesque incidents. Nowhere else would it be possible to obtain so vivid a picture as is here given of the incredible dangers and hardships attendant upon life in Arizona in the early seventies, or so sympathetic and yet humorous a description of the soldiers, American settlers, and Mexicans who made up the motley population. The Apaches were able to cause trouble out of all proportion to their numbers. They were foot, not horse Indians. They never stood the shock of battle unless the odds were enormously in their favor. They were most dangerous when their bands were scattered and they were acting as individuals ; and they could endure heat, thirst, hunger, and fatigue in a way which no white man could rival. Captain Bourke brings out very clearly the disadvantages under which any civilized troops necessarily labored in making war upon these untamable barbarians. He also shows, what is well known to all men who have had any experience on the frontier, but what is rarely admitted in frontier communities, that it is impossible to organize a really efficient force of any size composed of white frontiersmen. There are a few old hunters, trappers, mountain men, and plains men who become as hardy, and almost as expert in tracking and hiding, as the Indians, and even better shots and fighters ; but these men are very few in number, and they are usually nearly valueless, except as individual fighters, because of their singular intolerance of restraint or command. The average frontiersman, whether cowboy or miner, affords good material out of which a force can be constituted for a sudden dash; but the men composing such a force are entirely unfit for a long campaign. They are brave enough, — indeed, they are often brave to the verge of recklessness, — but they do not have the resolution which comes only with discipline. They are fickle, impatient of restraint, and sure to grumble, and finally to break out in open revolt if the campaign is not brought to a speedy and successful issue; and nineteen out of twenty Indian campaigns cannot possibly be thus speedily and successfully brought to a close. General Crook appreciated all these facts very keenly, and it was he more than any other man who introduced the system of employing Indians themselves to fight Indians. To all the tribes in the West he was known as the Gray Fox, a name given him in compliment to his wisdom, foresight, and remarkably successful management, whether of a negotiation or of a campaign. He was also most honorably known to them as a man who invariably kept his word, and never promised more than he could perform. They trusted and respected him as they have trusted and respected few whites. It was therefore comparatively easy for him to organize a force of Indian scouts. With these bands of Indian scouts under picked white leaders, and assisted by small parties of regular troops and a few white frontiersmen, General Crook, in a remarkably short space of time, brought the long-lingering conflict with the Apaches to a happy conclusion, and completely pacified Arizona.

Soon afterwards he was called to take command in a very different country, against Indian foes of a very different kind. He exchanged the arid deserts and dry rugged mountains of Arizona for the vast rolling prairies and pine-clad hills of Wyoming, Montana, and western Dakota; and confronted as antagonists the warlike tribes of the Horse Indians, the Sioux, the Cheyennes, and the Arapahoes. These Indians were many times as numerous as the Apaches, and far more dangerous in actual warfare, though much less able to carry on the long-drawn hostilities of a conflict where skulking; and murder take the place of fighting in the open. General Crook had supreme command in the doubtful and hard-fought campaign of 1876, of which the most noted battle was the fight on the Rosebud, where General Custer and his three hundred followers were slain to the last man. The campaign opened in the early spring, and in the first fight one of Crook’s subordinate officers was defeated by the great Sioux chief Crazy Horse. Three months later, Crook himself, with his white troops and bands of Crow and Shoshone allies, fought a fierce drawn battle with the same redoubtable chief, and following this came Custer’s defeat. All the Indians of the Northwest were on the warpath, save that, some of the Cheyennes were kept on the reservation as the result of a victory, in which one of the most marked incidents was the slaying of the chief Yellow Hand by the then famous scout Buffalo Bill.

Up to the beginning of the fall, the advantage in the fight had certainly rested with the Indians. Crook, however, excelled especially in dogged endurance, and instead of giving up and pushing for one of the forts, where he could have obtained reinforcements and supplies, he kept the field with his starving, ragged, almost worn - out soldiers, made a wonderful march southward from the lower waters of the Little Missouri, whipped the Sioux under American Horse and Crazy Horse in the fight at Slim Buttes, and relieved the threatened settlements in the Black Hills. Then he organized a winter campaign such as those which Custer had first successfully tried. In this campaign a decisive blow was struck by McKenzie’s brilliant night surprise of the Cheyenne camp on the Big Horn. As a sequel of this victory, the great bulk of the hostile Indians came into the reservations and surrendered. In passing, it may be mentioned that one of the most interesting descriptions of this campaign of 1876 is to be found in ex-CongressmanFinerty’s book, Warpath and Bivouac.²

Crook had but little rest, for he was shortly again sent to Arizona, where governmental ignorance and red tape, the rascality of Indian agents and the greed and lawlessness of the white frontiersmen, had undone most of the work which had been accomplished during the early seventies. He speedily restored confidence in the minds of the well-affected Indians, and from among them organized a very efficient expeditionary force, with which he brought in the hostiles. This was his last service in the field, but before his death he did important work with both Utes and Sioux in preserving peace, and procuring sessions of their lands on terms favorable to the Indians and advantageous to bona fide white settlers.

Captain Bourke not only describes the actual campaign and fighting with great force and clearness, but he draws many vivid and truthful pictures of that strange and hazardous frontier life which is now completely a thing of the past. He also presents us with much curious information about the life and tribal and individual customs of the Indians themselves, of whom he has been a most close, intelligent, and sympathetic observer. Moreover, his remarks upon our Indian policy have a very great value, as being the words of an expert. No man, whether in Congress or out of it, who appreciates the gravity of the Indian problem, and is anxious to grapple with it intelligently, should fail to read Captain Bourke’s book. What he says about the Indian schools is well worthy of attention, and so are all his remarks in relation to breaking up the tribal system, the absolute need of treating the Indians with justice, and the folly of waging war upon every tribe where there happens to be an epidemic of dancing and ghost - seeing. The book is very pleasantly written, and there is no little humor in some of the descriptions, such as that of the amateur soldier “ bronco busters ” and their experiences, given on page 5, or the account of the Indian scout Ute John, who scorned to discuss the campaign with any of the subordinate officers, and always greeted General Crook with the affability of a friend and equal, hailing him with " Hello, Cluke, how you gettin’ on ? Where you tink dem Settin’ Bull and Crazy Horse is now, eh, Cluke? ” Captain Bourke’s style, however, is susceptible of improvement, and he could do much by merely reading over his manuscript aloud and striving to make his sentences shorter and more simple. Moreover, while we wish his work were twice as long as it is, it is yet true that it could with advantage be compressed in some respects, notably where he gives lists of names. Some of his pages (page 390, for instance) look like the roster of a regiment. There is no more object in printing the names of a hundred or so lieutenants and captains who accompanied a given expedition than there would be in printing the names of all the private soldiers who accompanied it. So with the names of the Indians on page 391. They would be interesting in an appendix devoted to the subject of Indian nomenclature, but they are entirely out of place where they break in on the narrative.

It is much to be regretted that Captain Bourke has not included in his book the best piece of literary work he has ever done. A year or so ago he wrote an account of McKenzie’s surprise of the Cheyenne camp in the early winter of 1876. This was published first in the Army and Navy Journal, and afterwards in pamphlet form. It need scarcely be said that a magazine article and a pamphlet alike are but one degree less ephemeral in character than an article in a newspaper. Captain Bourke’s account of McKenzie’s night attack is one of the most thrilling bits of war narrative which it has ever been our good fortune to read. It is, without exception, the very best description of an Indian battle to be found in American literature; yet he has not reproduced it in his book, contenting himself with a mere bald statement of the results of the fight.

In this striking sketch, which would so well bear reprinting in permanent form, Captain Bourke brings vividly before our eyes the beginning of the winter campaign amid the snow-clad wastes of northern Wyoming. He shows us the march of the troops through the arctic severity of the weather ; the ground like ringing iron under their feet, while sundogs glimmered luridly in the foggy sky. He writes with keen insight and sympathy not only of the rugged soldiers and their commanders, but also of the stalwart frontiersmen who acted as scouts and managed the pack-trains, and of the great band of Indian allies, forming nearly a third of the expeditionary force; it was composed of Pawnees, Shoshones, Sioux, and Arapahoes, under some of their most noted chiefs and warriors. He shows clearly the inestimable service performed by these Indian scouts, and he also makes equally clear the benefits accruing from the extreme efficiency which General Crook had introduced into the whole packtrain service. He then describes the accidental discovery of the Cheyenne village, and McKenzie’s night march through a vast, grim cañon of the Big Horn Mountains. In stirring words he portrays the halt of the white troops and their red allies so near the Cheyenne camp that they could hear the ominous throbbing of the war-drums and the pattering of feet and the shouts of the dancers, as the warriors celebrated a recent surprise of a Shoshone village. Then he describes the thundering rush with which the red and white horsemen stormed the camp at dawn, the foremost in the charge being the Indian allies, headed by half a dozen West Point officers and white scouts ; the Pawnees being led by their own medicine men, sitting naked and unmoved on their horses, and crooning weirdly on their sacred flageolets in the midst of the hail of bullets. After this came the fight and slaughter, the destruction of the Cheyenne camp, the capture of the Cheyenne pony herd and of all the goods of the tribe, as well as of their ghastly trophies of former victories, including scalps, necklaces of finger-bones, and the dried hands and arms not only of men, but of women and little children. Yet all day long the Cheyennes, as remarkable for their bravery as for their inhuman cruelty, stood at bay, and withdrew under cover of night, to begin their long flight, fraught with unspeakable hardship and suffering, through the iron winter weather, to the camp of Crazy Horse.

Not the least of the many admirable qualities of Captain Bourke’s book is its healthy and thorough-going Americanism. It is a good thing to have some adequate tribute paid to the generals and soldiers who have done honor to the nation by their feats of arms during the last quarter of a century of what we are accustomed to consider profound peace. We are, as a people, curiously ignorant of the noteworthy military deeds performed by our troops in the grim frontier warfare of this period. In this we offer a by no means pleasant contrast to the English, who always show a prompt and hearty appreciation of what their soldiers accomplish on their Indian and African frontiers. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has done nearly as much for Tommy Atkins and his Indian friends and foes as Bret Harte before him did for the Californian miners; but no such writer has arisen to bring home to us the life work of our own Western soldiers. So it is with their commanders. It is to the credit of the English that their reading public is so quick to recognize and record the services of Sir Frederic Roberts and Lord Wolseley. Contrast this with the attitude of our own reading public. Only a small fraction thereof is acquainted with the campaigns waged against foes more terrible than Pathan or Zulu — infinitely more terrible than the contemptible soldiery of Arabi Pasha — by Crook, Custer, and Miles, to mention American soldiers with whose exploits and military standing those of Roberts and Wolseley can legitimately be compared. Many of our people who know well enough by name the Sikh and Ghoorka auxiliaries of the British army would be puzzled by a reference to Major North’s Pawnee scouts or the Apaches of Captain Crawford; and it is possible that some of them, at least, are better acquainted with the campaigns in Ashantee land and Afghanistan than with those in Montana and Arizona. To these good persons we recommend Captain Bourke’s book as an urgently needed piece of missionary work concerning their own history and their own land; and we earnestly hope that we shall see more such books in the future.