Indian Wars of Canada, Mexico and the United States, 1812-1900

Bruce Vandervort

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134590902
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Drawing on anthropology and ethnohistory as well as the 'new military history' Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States, 1812-1900 interprets and compares the way Indians and European Americans waged wars in Canada, Mexico, the USA and Yucatán during the nineteenth century.

Fully illustrated with sixteen maps, detailing key Indian settlements and crucial battles, Bruce Vandervort rescues the New World Indian Wars from their exclusion from mainstream military history, and reveals how they are an integral part of global history.

Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States:

* provides a thorough examination of the strategies and tactics of resistance employed by Indian peoples of the USA which contrasts practices of warfare with the Métis (the French Canadian-Indian peoples), their Canadian-Indian allies, and the Yaqui and Mayan Indians of Mexico and Yucatán
* presents a comparison of the experience of Indian tribes with concurrent resistance movements against European expansion in Africa, exposing how aspects of resistance that seem unique to the New World differ from those with broader implications
* draws upon concepts used in recent rewritings of the history of imperial warfare in Africa and Asia, Vandervort also analyzes the conduct of the US Army in comparison with military practices and tactics adopted by colonialist conquests worldwide.

This unique and fascinating study is a vital contribution to the study of military history but is also a valuable addition to the understanding of colonialism and attempts to resist it.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

Beecher Island

It was just before dawn on 17 September 1868 when the Cheyenne cutting-out party swept down on the white scouts’ camp on the banks of the Arickaree River in eastern Colorado Territory. There were only three or four of the raiders, young men who had defied their elders and gone off to steal the white men’s horses despite threats of a beating.¹ They came from a big Cheyenne camp about twelve miles upstream, to which a few Brulé Sioux and Northern Arapahos had attached themselves. The raid didn’t amount to much: only seven horses and two mules were driven off by the yipping, blanket-waving youths. But the commotion caused by the cutting-out party would make sure that the fifty-one scouts, who had slept on their arms that night, would be up and about when the big attack came a few minutes later.²

The men who now began moving about the camp, some saddling up to chase after the stolen horses, were not soldiers. Although commanded by an army officer and Civil War veteran, Major (Brevet Colonel) George A. ‘Sandy’ Forsyth, and looked after by an army surgeon, Dr. John G. Mooers, the scouts were civilians, ‘first-class hardy frontiersmen’ in the phrase of General Philip Sheridan, commander of the US Army’s Division of the Missouri. Sheridan had ordered Forsyth to recruit the men in the summer of 1868, to fill in for the regulars who had been diverted from the frontier to Reconstruction duty in the South, and, one suspects, in part to appease local sentiment, which maintained that the army was doing a poor job of protecting the growing number of settlements from Indian raids and that their salvation lay in the raising of a large body of frontiersmen, ‘children of the West’, who could fight the Indians on their own terms. An editorial on 21 June 1867 in the Leavenworth, Kansas Daily Times had given shrill voice to the settler viewpoint:

From the first alarm, up to the present moment, we have . . . urged the policy of hunting Indians by the Frontiersmen. They alone can do the work as it should be done. Regular troops are, in a great measure, the laughing stock of the Indians. . . . [But t]he border is in no humor for trifling. The howl of the savage comes too near to be musical.³

The fifty ‘hardy frontiersmen’ recruited on Sheridan’s orders had all the trappings of an elite force. To begin with, they were handpicked from a large group of volunteers by Major Forsyth, with the aid of his second-in-command, Second Lieutenant Frederick Beecher, nephew of the well-known New England abolitionist, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Pay was generous. Men who brought their own horses got $75 a month, men without horses $50. This at a time when Army privates were paid $15 a month (soon to be reduced to $13). The scouts also were well-armed. Each was issued with a Spencer seven-shot repeating rifle, a favourite of Union cavalrymen like Forsyth during the Civil War, an Army issue Colt revolver and a butcher’s knife.⁴ Forsyth’s Scouts, as the force would be known, were expected to travel light so as to be able to intercept fast-moving Indian war parties before they fell upon the farmsteads which had begun to encroach upon Cheyenne hunting grounds in western Kansas. Rations and other supplies were kept to a minimum; ammunition made up most of the load carried by the scouts’ four-mule pack train.⁵

Back on the Arickaree, Major Forsyth had not been slow to realise that the raid by the cutting-out party betokened the presence of a larger body of Indians, and had ordered scouts out to reconnoitre the low hills surrounding the camp. Minutes later, they came galloping back. Chief guide Abner ‘Sharp’ Grover seized Forsyth’s arm and, pointing up the river valley, shouted, ‘My God, Major, look at the Indians!’⁶ There were a lot of them, five to six hundred, some Brulé Sioux along with a few Northern Arapahos, but for the most part Northern Cheyennes, many of whom belonged to the formidable Dog Soldier warrior fraternity.⁷ The scout John Hurst recalled his first sight of the charging mass of warriors: ‘[T]he Indians were in full view, and such a view! All were mounted on their war horses, in war costume, with feathers and plumes flying, shouting war whoops, their horses running at full speed.’⁸

And they were very close. Forsyth invoked the classics to underscore just how close they were. ‘Cadmus-like they appeared to spring full armed from the very earth’, he wrote.⁹ Teenage scout Sigmund Shlesinger, who had come West the year before from New York City, drew upon the Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott to paint the scene. ‘[The Indians] seemed to spring from the ground like Roderick Dhu’s Highland Scots’, he said. Scots or Indians, Shlesinger was terrified by the onrushing warriors. ‘I will frankly admit I was frightened almost out of my senses. I felt as if I wanted to run somewhere, but every avenue of escape seemed closed.’¹⁰

This was the scouts’ dilemma. With the Indians so close, escape was impossible and a running fight would probably have ended in the loss of the entire command. The only real option available to the scouts was to make a defensive stand. Major Forsyth would later claim that it was he who hit upon the idea of making for the island – an overgrown sand bar, really – in a dry channel of the Arickaree just across from the camp.¹¹ Some of the scouts recalled the episode differently. One of them, George Washington Oaks, later insisted it was his comrades Thomas Murphy and Jack Stillwell who called out, ‘Go on the island’.¹²

Whoever may have thought of it, the scouts’ retreat to the island was no orderly withdrawal. ‘[W]e all made a grand rush for cover like a flock of scared quail’, John Hurst recalled.¹³ Nevertheless, the dawn raid on their camp by the wayward Cheyenne youths had alerted the white men to their danger and given them enough time to reach the island before the Indian mass descended upon them, although, as we will see, in their great haste they left behind supplies that would be sorely missed.

Having failed to overrun the scouts before they gained refuge on the island, the Cheyenne warriors and their allies now dismounted and, creeping through the tall river grass, proceeded to shoot down the scouts’ horses. Their foe effectively immobilised, the Indians launched the first of a series of mass attacks on their position. Although John Hurst thought ‘we were all going to be killed and scalped’, the attacking warriors broke off their charge at the last moment, divided into two groups and veered around the sides of the island.¹⁴ All, that is, except the half-Cheyenne, half-Sioux warrior Bad Heart, who ‘counted coup’ on the astonished scouts by riding over the island and back unscathed. The white men fired at the swirling mass of Indians from behind willow trees and brush and from rifle pits they scooped out for themselves with cups, plates, knives, anything that could be used to dig. There were two more large-scale attacks that first day, during the latter of which the great Cheyenne war leader, Roman Nose, was killed. Following a half-hearted assault early the next morning, the Indians gave up on mass attacks, and began a siege of the island. On 21 September, after three days of desultory sniping, the Cheyennes and their Sioux and Arapaho allies broke off the siege and rode away.

The departure of the Indian war party left Forsyth’s men in possession of the field of battle. But their ‘victory’ had come at a heavy price. Already on the first day about a third of the scouts had been killed or wounded. The dead included the scouts’ second-in-command, Lieutenant Beecher, and their doctor, the surgeon Mooers. The wounded included Major Forsyth, who was hit three times on the first day of the battle and was for all practical purposes unable to move. The death of Dr. Mooers only compounded what was already a looming medical crisis. In their hurry to escape to the sandbar, the scouts had left behind most of their medical supplies. This meant that wounds were never properly attended to and, as in the case of Major Forsyth, became infected. Equally troubling for the scouts was the lack of food. They had been almost out of rations the day before the Indian attack and had unwisely consumed what little was left for their evening meal. By the time the siege of the island came to an end, the scouts were living on decaying horse flesh, liberally seasoned with gunpowder to hide the taste, supplemented by the flesh of a coyote that had ventured too close and the fruit of the prickly pear that proliferated on the prairie nearby.

The scouts had realised the extent of their peril early on in the encounter and had taken desperate measures to bring a relief column to their rescue. Volunteers were found to slip through Indian lines at night and make their way across the prairie to get help from the army garrison at Ft. Wallace, some 85 miles away in Kansas. Although even the veteran guide ‘Sharp’ Grover believed it was a suicide mission, the volunteers managed to get through. On 26 September, nine days after their flight to the island in the Arickaree, now named Beecher Island after the slain lieutenant, Forsyth’s Scouts were relieved by a detachment of ‘Buffalo Soldiers’, black troopers from the Tenth US Cavalry out of Ft. Wallace.

The scouts must have seemed a sorry sight. By the time the cavalry showed up, nearly half their number had been killed or wounded. All of their horses were dead. Many of the wounded were in parlous shape for lack of medical attention. One scout, whose leg wound had become gangrenous, died when the doctor with the relief column tried to amputate the limb. Major Forsyth, although he affected a Victorian stiff upper lip – his rescuers found him ‘nonchalantly’ reading a copy of Oliver Twist – was in serious condition.¹⁵ He had been wounded in both legs, gangrene had set in and amputation was recommended. Forsyth had refused and, though he eventually recovered, it took two years before he could walk unaided. A head wound would produce mental aberrations later in life.

Thanks to the telegraph, the Forsyth Scouts’ ‘stand’ on Beecher Island would become headline news across white America even before the Buffalo Soldiers rode to the rescue. The scouts who made their way across the Kansas prairie to Ft. Wallace had told their story to a reporter there on 24 September and the next day the plight of the force received prominent play on the front page of The New York Times. Almost immediately the scouts were acclaimed national heroes and their ordeal on Beecher Island began its quick passage from newspaper story to frontier legend.¹⁶ Just six years later, no less a figure than the commander of the US Seventh Cavalry, Colonel George Armstrong Custer, was ready to accord the scouts pride of place in the Valhalla of the Indianfighting army. Oblivious of course to how ironic his remarks would seem in just two years’ time, Custer wrote that ‘In all probability, there will never occur in our future hostilities with the savage tribes of the West a struggle . . . equal [to it]’.¹⁷

The story of the September 1868 Battle of Beecher Island has been recounted here at great length, not only or even mainly because of its prominent place among the epic engagements of the North American Indian wars, but because of the insights it offers into the principal themes of this book.

Ways of war

The Battle of Beecher Island offers a classic demonstration of what anthropologists call the Horse and Gun Pattern of Plains Indian warfare. The Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho warriors who descended upon the scouts in the early morning hours of 17 September ranked among the American West’s most famed practitioners of the fluid style of warfare developed by the Plains Indians with the advent of the horse. Horses had come to the Cheyennes in the eighteenth century, guns perhaps earlier. Lieutenant Beecher, in a reconnaissance of Indian camps in western Kansas before his secondment to Forsyth’s Scouts, had come away convinced that the Cheyennes he and his comrades were destined to face were armed to the teeth – even the women and children – with top-of-the-range weapons, repeating rifles and Colt pistols. This was something of an exaggeration, it can be assumed, but the Indians who fought the scouts do appear to have been relatively well armed with gunpowder weapons.¹⁸ This combination of horse and gun transformed Plains Indians like the Cheyennes and Sioux into what US Army officers were wont to describe as ‘the best light cavalry in the world’.

The Forsyth Scouts, on the other hand, were something of an anomaly in the US Indian-fighting army. Irregulars like the white scouts had played a prominent role in Indian fighting in colonial days and on into the early national period, but, despite a revival during the manpower-scarce Civil War period, the trend from the War of 1812 onwards had been steadily in the direction of confining Indian fighting to the regular army. This tendency, strong though it might have been in official circles, still met with considerable hostility amongst the general public. There continued to be a deep distrust of professional armies in the Anglo-Saxon countries – not just the USA, but Canada as well – as sanctuaries for would-be gentry and handmaidens of tyranny. In Mexico, the regular army was feared by the population, and with reason, as an instrument of repression. People who felt like this reposed their trust in the people in arms, ordinary citizens in the militia or in ranger formations who would rise to the cause when needed and return to their homes when the crisis had passed. This sentiment waxed strong in Mexico, Canada and the USA during most of the 1800s, but especially in the first half of the century. But more to the point here, since colonial days large sections of the civilian population in the USA had argued that only frontiersmen, organised as rangers or scouts, men who could ride and shoot and ‘knew’ Indians and were able to fight them on their own terms, could protect settlers from Indian war parties. Many such critics would have agreed with this Kansas settler that it was the Army’s very professionalism that made it unsuitable for fighting Indians. ‘Talk about regulars hunting Indians!’ he scoffed.

They go out, and when night comes, they blow the bugle to let the Indians know that they are going to sleep. In the morning they blow the bugle to let the Indians know that they are going to get up. Between their bugle and their great [supply] trains, they manage to keep the redskins out of sight.¹⁹

This sort of complaint usually went hand in hand, as shown above, with demands for raising a force of frontiersmen to fight the Indians, men like the white scouts we have just followed to the Arickaree. Whatever else such demands might have represented, dislike for standing armies or contempt for what the Jacksonian tribune, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, called ‘pothouse soldiers and schoolhouse officers’, they also expressed a belief in a notion its supporters never would have articulated in these terms, a notion that today’s military historians call ‘symmetry’. To them, it was simply a matter of matching up plains-savvy frontiersmen with Plains Indian warriors. These critics would have been aware that the army thought it had taken the necessary step towards achieving ‘symmetry’ with Plains Indian opponents by making fighting them the almost exclusive province of its mounted arm. But these same critics would have been quick to reply that this was only a half step towards curbing the ‘red devils’ who raided settlements and impeded commerce on the prairies, that the cavalry (really mounted infantry) not only lacked the special skills needed to fight Indians, but also the mobility required to catch and destroy their fastmoving raiding parties before they vanished into the wilderness. Those damned bugles and long supply trains!

The Beecher Island scrap also demonstrates, however, that the belief of settlers in the West that ‘symmetry’ in Indian fighting could be achieved by replacing the ‘yellow legs’ of the US Army with their own kind was by and large an illusion. That Forsyth’s Scouts were not the elite outfit the Kansas settlers and perhaps even General Sheridan expected them to be may come as a surprise to many American and European readers, brought up as they have been on a cinema and TV diet of tales of bold and intrepid frontiersmen, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Buffalo Bill Cody and so on.

Though all of Forsyth’s scouts had lived on or near the frontier, only a few qualified as ‘frontiersmen’ in the popular sense of the term, and while some were Civil War veterans (from both sides), not many had done any Indianfighting. While it may not have been entirely the case that, as one recent historian has charged, what Forsyth got ‘were a lot of young drifters who would turn their hand to anything’ (including robbing stagecoaches),²⁰ it was nonetheless true that the majority lacked the skills normally associated with Plains scouting, the ability to live off the land, to ‘read sign’, and, especially, to ‘think’ like an Indian.²¹

But we should not single out Forsyth’s Scouts for criticism. No frontier commander who was serious about fighting Indians really believed that white men, even ‘hardy frontiersmen’, could do as good a job of scouting Indians as other Indians could. General George Crook, who probably employed Indians as scouts (and combatants) more effectively than any soldier in the West, never used white scouts when he could help it. Few of them really knew the country, he said, and it was hard to get them to go out any distance. ‘I always try to get Indian scouts’, Crook wrote,

Because with them scouting is the business of their lives. They learn all the signs of a trail as a child learns the alphabet; it becomes an instinct. With a white man the knowledge is acquired [later] in lif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Maps
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion: Long Shadows
• Notes
• Bibliography