The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Read online

  The Battle of the Washita held another lesson for Sheridan: beware the public reaction. When word of Custer’s victory seeped out, harsh condemnation quickly followed from humanitarians and reformers. Though a few members of Black Kettle’s camp were no doubt responsible for some of the attacks on white settlements between the Platte River and Red River, the headman himself was known as a peace chief. Moreover, some Americans recoiled at the tactically sound but morally repugnant slaughter of the natives’ ponies and the destruction of their foodstuffs in winter, which mirrored the scorched-earth policy Sheridan had employed in the Shenandoah. Though he vigorously defended the actions of his troops, Sheridan never again trusted in the good will of an adoring but fickle public, explaining that “those very men who deafen you with their cheers today are capable tomorrow of throwing stones and mud at you.”19 With such thoughts in mind, he proceeded cautiously in formulating his plan for Montana.

  THOUGH MUCH IMPROVED since the steamboat era, travel from the eastern or central United States to Montana Territory was still no easy feat in the late 1860s. For Colonel James A. Hardie, inspector general of the Division of the Missouri and a loyal Sheridan confidant, the arduous journey from Chicago to Fort Shaw took twelve days. Leaving division headquarters in Illinois on 27 December, Hardie crossed the stark and frozen Great Plains on the Union Pacific, which just eight months earlier had linked with the Central Pacific to complete the nation’s first transcontinental line. At Corinne, in Utah Territory, Hardie boarded a stagecoach for the second and much less comfortable leg of his trip, arriving at Fort Shaw (via Helena) on 7 January 1870.

  Colonel Hardie was no stranger to difficult missions like this one. After all, it was he who on the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg had carried orders from Washington, D.C., to western Maryland transferring command of the Army of the Potomac from Joseph Hooker to George Meade. His present assignment, however, was less straightforward. Mindful of the public backlash following the incident on the Washita, Sheridan wanted to make certain that if he sent troops into the field against the Piegans no friendly Indians would be harmed, inadvertently or otherwise. He thus dispatched Hardie to make a full report on the conditions in Montana.

  From the moment he arrived at Fort Shaw, Hardie understood that the situation—as he described it with characteristic understatement—had experienced substantial “modification.” But it was much more than that, a complete chiasma. In conferring with de Trobriand on 7 January, Hardie was astonished to learn that the colonel now favored a strike against the Piegans, as quickly as it could be mounted. When the inspector general asked why, after more than three months of opposing such a plan, de Trobriand had changed course so abruptly, the Frenchman cited a rash of Indian depredations in December and especially the unexpected return of Mountain Chief’s band from Canada to the U.S. side of the line, affording a prime opportunity to assail them. In order to confirm the Indians’ whereabouts, Hardie immediately dispatched Joe Kipp, the mixed-blood son of the famous trader who served as an army scout, to reconnoiter along the winding Marias River.20

  While waiting on Kipp’s report, Hardie exchanged a series of telegraph messages with Alfred Sully in Helena. If de Trobriand’s volte-face had surprised him, the inspector general was even less prepared for Sully’s change of heart. The man who throughout the summer and fall had consistently urged military action against the Piegans now counseled restraint, insisting that, although his New Year’s Day meeting with the chiefs had not yielded results, “no blood should be shed.” Instead, Sully suggested that U.S. troops attempt to kidnap Mountain Chief and half a dozen of his men, holding them hostage until the Indians produced Owl Child’s gang and the stolen livestock. Hardie was nonplussed and could only guess at the reasons behind Sully’s second thoughts.21

  Joe Kipp returned on 12 January to report that he had found various Blackfeet groups dispersed in winter camps along the Marias, with Mountain Chief’s band among them. The next day, Hardie wrote to division headquarters to offer his assessment. The inspector general was intelligent, a thorough and careful man who presented the cases made by Sully and de Trobriand with evenhandedness. But in the end he endorsed the Frenchman’s perspective, and urged Sheridan to deploy Major Eugene Baker—who was already en route to Fort Shaw with four companies of the Second U.S. Cavalry—against the Indians. Sheridan wrote back by telegraph two days later with his instructions: “If the lives and property of citizens of Montana can best be protected by striking Mountain Chief’s band of Piegans, I want them struck. Tell Baker to strike them hard.”22 Sheridan’s emphasis on the final word was deliberate and offered a clear indication of what was in store.

  THE SECOND U.S. CAVALRY traces its origins to May 1836, when it was established to defend the nation’s borders and facilitate westward expansion. Known until 1861 as the Second Dragoons, the regiment developed a lasting reputation for valor on the battlefield and liquor-fueled unruliness in the garrison. Though the unit earned laurels in combat against Seminoles and Mexicans during the 1840s, it secured immortality in the crucible of the Civil War. That conflict produced luminaries like General John Buford, who served as “the beau ideal of later generations of cavalrymen” for his heroic performance at Gettysburg, in which he seized the high ground for the Union on the battle’s first day and refused to surrender it.23

  The troops of the Second Cavalry exhibited similar fortitude in the opening weeks of 1870, when the United States was engaged in a battle against another internal foe: the native peoples of the trans-Mississippi West. Few were tested quite like the detachment that marched nearly two hundred miles from Fort Ellis to Fort Shaw in eight days, arriving on 14 January. Like most of the army’s western outposts, the fort—named in honor of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of Massachusetts, who had died leading one of the first black regiments during the Civil War—was little more than a collection of squat adobe buildings ringing a small parade ground. Given the inadequate shelter for both the men and their animals, the soldiers pitched their field tents outdoors and tried to keep warm, despite the most unforgiving winter weather seen in Montana in more than a decade. At such times troops often wore everything they had: several layers of shirts and underclothes, two pairs of pants, and an overcoat of buffalo or bearskin. Sometimes even these measures were insufficient: one contemporary observer estimated that frostbite blackened the faces and extremities of more than 10 percent of soldiers stationed on the northern Plains.24

  Commanding this squadron was Major Eugene M. Baker, a thirty-two-year-old native of rural upstate New York with extensive military experience in the West. Though he had muddled through the USMA without drawing much notice, Baker had developed into an accomplished officer during the Civil War. In fact, while leading a cavalry regiment during Sheridan’s ravaging of the Shenandoah Valley, he had so impressed the general that five years later Sheridan handpicked him to lead the expedition against the Piegans. Baker was equally popular with his subordinates, who marveled at his stature (tall, strong, and thickly bearded—the epitome of an American frontier soldier) and delighted in his common touch, born of a humble upbringing. However, as one member of the Second Cavalry remembered, these qualities also had a sanitizing effect, as they “did much toward bringing [the troops] into forgetfulness [of] some of the reprehensible traits of his character,” which included alcoholism and the loose exercise of authority.25

  Joining the Second Cavalry at Fort Shaw were 130 soldiers of the Thirteenth U.S. Infantry (55 mounted troops and 75 foot soldiers) as well as a few dozen civilians, none more important than the two scouts, Joe Kipp and Joe Cobell. The twenty-year-old Kipp was an obvious choice, given his earlier work at the post and especially his familiarity with both the landscape and the Blackfeet, who called him Choe Keepah. The selection of Cobell, an Italian immigrant who had come to the Upper Missouri as a fur trader in the 1850s, was more surprising, because his marriage to one of Mountain Chief’s sisters should have raised concerns about his partiality.26

  Eugene M. Ba
ker, ca. 1859. Baker’s class photo from his time at West Point shows a young officer on the rise. The Empire State native became a personal favorite of General Phil Sheridan’s during the Civil War, but Baker’s destruction of Heavy Runner’s camp in 1870 shattered the reputations of both men and hastened Baker’s retreat into alcoholism. Courtesy of the U.S. Military Academy Archives, class album collection.

  Barracks, Fort Shaw, 2007. While some members of the force that traveled to the Big Bend of the Marias bunked here in January 1870, many others had to pitch tents on the parade ground and brave the winter weather, which was brutal even by Montana’s standards. Photograph by the author.

  By contrast, there was no doubting the motives of two other civilians preparing to ride out with the Second Cavalry. Having received de Trobriand’s permission to join the expedition, Horace and Nathan Clarke joined Baker and his men when the cavalry passed through the Prickly Pear Valley on its way to Fort Shaw.27 De Trobriand probably struggled with the decision; the boys’ desire to avenge their murdered father would no doubt add an unpredictable element to the mission. Moreover, Horace—though fully recovered—was still only a few months removed from his brush with death. In the end the Frenchman may have regretted his acquiescence, as Horace rashly spilled the particulars of the campaign to a newspaper reporter; that scuttled de Trobriand’s best efforts to keep all military preparations secret, lest the Indians get warning from liquor traders eager to protect their best customers.28

  Nevertheless, by the time this story appeared in print on 21 January 1870, it proved too late to warn the Piegans. Two days earlier, Baker had taken advantage of a slight break in the weather to lead his party, swollen now to nearly four hundred men, away from Fort Shaw and on toward the Indians’ winter camps along the Marias River, seventy-five miles to the north. De Trobriand’s simple orders to Baker left much to the discretion of the commanding officer. But on one thing he (and especially his superiors in Chicago) had steadfastly insisted: the troops were not to molest in any way the friendly camps of Heavy Runner and the other Piegan chiefs who had met with Sully on New Year’s Day. Phil Sheridan was determined that this victory would be as clean as it was decisive, denying the humanitarians who had fulminated against him after the Washita battle the chance to wring their hands or shake their fists.29

  THE SUN RIVER rises in the Rocky Mountains and then flows in a southeasterly course through north-central Montana, traveling 130 miles before emptying into the Missouri at the present-day city of Great Falls. The Piegans called the stream Natoe-osucti, which means “sun” or “medicine” river, the latter referring perhaps to the extraordinary purity of its cold waters. In the 1860s, as whites began to pour into the region, the Sun River provided another sort of medicine, serving as a de facto boundary between the Blackfeet and the newcomers. South of the river lay the mines and the major American settlements, Helena chief among them, but north of the stream was Indian country, stretching out 120 miles to the Canadian border.

  At around ten in the morning on Thursday, 19 January 1870, Major Eugene M. Baker and his troops splashed across the icy Sun as they moved out to the north from Fort Shaw.30 The few men remaining behind in the garrison stood at attention as the band played a musical salute, but these gestures probably did little to cheer the outbound soldiers. Though the weather had warmed a bit in the morning light, the mercury still registered a blistering thirty degrees below zero, and adding to the troopers’ discomfort, no doubt, were the unknown dangers ahead. If the U.S. military had won several victories over Plains Indian groups in recent years, it had also tasted some wrenching defeats, like the Fetterman Massacre of December 1866, in which a combined force of Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux ambushed a detachment of U.S. soldiers near Fort Phil Kearny in what is now north-central Wyoming, killing all eighty of the soldiers, including twenty-seven members of Company C, Second U.S. Cavalry.31

  Baker’s column on that mid-January morning was formidable, a long procession of men, horses, and supply carts threading across the valley. To ward off the chill, the soldiers wrapped their torsos in blankets and their feet in burlap, casting them as dark figures that stood out in high relief against the pale background of the snowy terrain. Their visibility worried Baker, who wanted to preserve the element of surprise, not only for his advantage on the battlefield but also to prevent his Indian quarry from fleeing to safer realms in Canada. Baker thus settled on a strategy that, while reasonable, only added to his detachment’s misery: after the first day’s march, the column would lay up during daylight hours and push onward through the night. The soldiers made twenty miles before darkness fell on 19 January, at which point they pitched their camp in the shadow of Priest Butte, a 4,100-foot summit near the Teton River. Despite the brutal cold, the few fires that Baker allowed were kept small in order to preclude detection.

  The next day was full of little else but waiting. Because the men would not move out until nightfall, they huddled for warmth in the frozen camp, tending their horses and checking their equipment while trying to ward off the strange emotional twins typical of a military campaign: anxiety and boredom. Some of the troops may have turned to the bottle for comfort, as was later claimed by one member of the company, who remembered that throughout the mission the soldiers “tried to keep their spirits up by taking spirits down.”32 This charge—to which Baker was highly susceptible, given his widespread reputation as a drunk—would prove particularly damaging in the aftermath of the operation.

  As light faded on the evening of 20 January, the column resumed its march, following the south bank of the Teton River in a northeasterly direction for twenty-two miles. With the first fingers of dawn on the next morning, Baker ordered another halt, and the soldiers bivouacked at the mouth of Muddy Creek. There was no rest for Joe Cobell and Joe Kipp, however, as Baker dispatched his scouts to reconnoiter the area and make certain that the column’s intended route was clear of Indians and whiskey traders who might alert the enemy to the advancing troops.

  At dusk on 21 January the men once again broke camp, though now they left the Teton and traveled north across open country, right into the heart of the Blackfeet winter campgrounds. The terrain in this part of Montana is perilous: undulating plain fractured by hundreds of coulees, steep gulches that run dry in the summer but fill with snow during the colder months and thus pose a considerable hazard for travelers, especially those on horseback. After twenty exhausting miles, the column struck the dry fork of the Marias River around daybreak on 22 January and set up camp. This time Baker forbade the making of any fires, for he was certain that the Piegan hostiles were close at hand. His shivering men had no choice except to bundle themselves against the piercing chill and to stave off their hunger with cold food.

  As the sun slipped behind the Rockies that afternoon, the column shoved off once again, moving to the northeast along the riverbed toward its intersection with the Marias. Sometime that night, after the soldiers had traveled about eleven miles, Baker’s intuition was rewarded—his scouts located a small group of five Piegan lodges pitched near the juncture with the Marias. The troops quickly surrounded the encampment and awakened the sleeping inhabitants. From the terrified Indians, Baker learned that the camp belonged to a headman named Gray Wolf, but that Mountain Chief and two other wanted Indians—Big Horn and Red Horn—were settled together five to ten miles downstream, at the Big Bend.

  With this news, Baker swung into action. First, he sent a small detachment twenty miles upriver to the North West Company fur post under the command of a trader named Riplinger. (De Trobriand had written such instructions into Baker’s orders, so that in the event of Indian retaliation the dozen or so employees there would have protection.) Next, he broke off the supply train from the main column, leaving the wagons, their drivers, and a squad of infantrymen to keep watch over Gray Wolf and his followers. Baker then directed the balance of his troops to move rapidly downriver, following a wide trail that ran parallel to the river. He hoped to reach the camp before daybr
eak.

  IN THE GLOAMING, Bear Head worked his way through the timber in search of his horses. The boy was frustrated, for he had planned to go out with a hunting party the day before but had been unable to locate his mounts, which had drifted off into the woods above the camp at the Big Bend. Still, the young Piegan was determined to join the buffalo hunters, even if it meant an arduous ride to overtake them. Though he was only fourteen years old, many people depended upon him. Two years earlier, Owl Child had killed Bear Head’s father in a dispute, leaving the boy to care for the dead man’s four wives as well as their daughters. Hence the boy’s desperation to bring food back to the campsite, where his leader, Heavy Runner, had settled his smallpox-ravaged band in mid-January after Mountain Chief abandoned the location in favor of another spot a few miles downriver.33

  Just as Bear Head spotted his horses on that frigid morning, a throng of soldiers apprehended him. He recalled years later, “I was so astonished, so frightened, that I could not move.” One of the troops, who the boy guessed was an officer because of the yellow metal stripes on his uniform, seized Bear Head by the arm and touched his finger to his lips. Still clutching the boy, the soldier advanced toward the camp, dragging Bear Head behind him. When they arrived at the edge of a bluff overlooking the Big Bend, the boy was petrified to see dozens of soldiers stretched out in a line to his right. Despite the troops left upriver and the fact that every fourth man on the bluffs that morning was a horse holder, Baker still had nearly two hundred guns trained on the thirty-seven lodges below.