Winning the West: The Army in the Indian Wars, 1865-1890

Winning The West: The Army In The Indian Wars

In the Southwest between the wars, Army units pursued Apaches and Utes in New Mexico Territory, clashing with the Apaches at Cieneguilla and Rio Caliente in 1854 and the Utes at Poncha Pass in 1855. There were various expeditions against various branches of the elusive Apaches involving hard campaigning but few conclusive engagements such as the one at Rio Gila in 1857. It was in this region in 1861 that Lieutenant George N. Bascom moved against Chief Cochise, precipitating events that opened a quarter century of hostilities with the Chiricahua Apache.

In the Northwest, where numerous small tribes existed, there were occasional hostilities between the late 1840's and the middle 1860's. Their general character was similar to operations elsewhere: white intrusion, Indian reaction, and white counteraction with superior force.

The more important events involved the Rouge River Indians in Oregon between 1851 and 1856 and the Yakama, Walla Walla, Cayuse, and other tribes on both sides of the Cascade Mountains in Washington in the last half of the 1850's. The Army, often at odds with civil authority and public opinion in the area, found it necessary on occasion to protect Indians from whites as well as the other way around.

Geronimo was one of the fiercest Apache Chiefs

that ever lived.

This image available for photographic prints HERE!

The Regular Army's frontier mission was interrupted by the onset of the Civil War, and the task of dealing with the Indians was transferred to the volunteers. Although the red man demonstrated an awareness of what was going on and took some satisfaction from the fact that white men were fighting each other, there is little evidence that he took advantage of the transition period between removal of the Regulars and deployment of the volunteers. The so-called Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862 that produced active campaigning in the Upper Missouri River region in 1863 and 1864 was spontaneous, and other clashes around the West were the result, not of the withdrawal of the Regular Army from the West, but of the play of more fundamental and established forces. In any case, by 1865 Army strength in the frontier departments was about double what it had been at the time of Fort Sumter. The volunteers were generally able to keep pace with a continuing and gradually enlarging westward movement by developing further the system of forts begun by their predecessors.

Thus the regional defense systems established in the West in the 1850's and 60's provided a framework for the deployment of the Army as it turned from the Civil War to frontier responsibilities. In the late summer of 1866 the general command and administrative structure for frontier defense comprised the Division of the Missouri, containing the Departments of Arkansas, Missouri, Dakota, and the Platte; the Division of the Pacific, consisting of the Departments of California and the Columbia; and the independent Department of the Gulf, whose area included Texas.

The Army's challenge in the West was one of environment as well as adversary, and in the summer of 1866 General Grant sent a number of senior officer inspectors across the country to observe and report on conditions. The theater of war was uninhabited or only sparsely settled, and its great distances and extreme variations of climate and geography accentuated manpower limitations, logistical and communications problems, and the difficulties of movement.

The extension of the rail system only gradually eased the situation. Above all, the mounted tribes of the Plains were a different breed from the Indians the Army had dealt with previously in the forested areas of the East. Despite the fact that the Army had fought Indians in the West in the period after the Mexican War, much of the direct experience of its officers and men had been lost during the Civil War years. Until frontier proficiency could be re-established the Army would depend upon the somewhat intangible body of knowledge that marks any institution, fortified by the seasoning of the Civil War.

Of the officers who moved to the forefront of the Army in the Indian Wars, few had frontier and Indian experience. At the top levels at the outset, Grant as a captain had had only a taste of the loneliness of the frontier outpost. Western duty was unknown to Sherman, and, while Sheridan had served about five years in the Northwest as a junior officer, neither Nelson A. Miles nor Oliver Otis Howard knew frontier service of any kind. Wesley Merritt, George Armstrong Custer, and Ranald S. Mackenzie all graduated from West Point into the Civil War, and John Gibbon had only minor involvement in the Seminole War and some garrison duty in the West. Alfred Sully, also a veteran of the Seminole War and an active campaigner against the Sioux during Civil War years, fell into obscurity, while Philip St. George Cooke was overtaken by age and Edward R. S. Canby's experience was lost prematurely through his death at Indian hands. George Crook almost alone among the Army leaders at the upper levels of the Indian Wars had pre-Civil War frontier experience, dating from 1852, that he could bring back to the West in 1866.

Thus to a large degree the officers of the Indian Wars were products of the Civil War. Many brought outstanding records to the frontier, but this was a new conflict against an unorthodox enemy. Those who approached their new opponent with respect and learned his ways became the best Indian fighters and in some cases the most helpful in promoting a solution to the Indian problem. Some who had little respect for the "savages" and placed too much store in Civil War methods and achievements paid the penalty on the battlefield. Captain William J. Fetterman was one of the first to fall as the final chapter of the Indian Wars opened in 1866.

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