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

Winning The West: The Army In The Indian Wars

The Northwest

Not all the Indian Wars were fought with Plains tribes. The Army engaged in wars with several Pacific slope tribes in the 1870's, and the operations were widely scattered over the mountainous northwestern quarter of the trans-Mississippi West.

The Modoc War of 1872-73 began when the Modocs, who had been placed on a reservation in southern Oregon with the more numerous and traditionally unfriendly Klamath, returned without permission to their home in the Lost River country on the California border. When the Army attempted in November of 1872 to take them back to the reservation, fighting broke out and the Indians retreated into a natural fortress -- the Lava Beds at the southern end of Tule Lake.

Over the course of six month there were four engagements in which Regular and volunteer troops with superior strength and weapons incurred heavier losses than their opponents. Extended efforts by a peace commission made little headway and ended in tragedy when two of the members, Brigadier General Edward R. S. Canby and Reverend Eleaser Thomas, both unarmed, were shot while in conference with the Indians. The Modoc finally surrendered and four of their leaders, including Canby's murderer, Captain Jack, were hanged.

Captain Jack was hanged for killing General Canby

during peace negotiations..

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The practice of uprooting the Indians from their homeland was also the cause of the Nez Perce War in 1877. The Nez Perces had been friendly to the whites from the days of their contact with Lewis and Clark. Although they ceded some of their lands to the whites, they refused to give up the Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon. White encroachment increased, stiffening the lines of political pressure back to Washington and leading inevitably to decisions favorable to white settlement and removal of the Nez Perces to the Lapwai Reservation across the Snake River in Idaho. Some elements of the tribe complied, but Chief Joseph and his people did not and the Army was ordered to move them. An inevitable course of events and irresponsible actions by both reds and whites made hostilities unavoidable.

In a remarkable campaign that demonstrated the unique capabilities of guerrilla forces and the difficulties that formal military units have in dealing with them, the Nez Perces led the Army on a 1,300-mile chase over the Continental Divide, punctuated by a number of sharp engagements. The Indians used the terrain to great advantage, fighting when circumstances favored them, side slipping around opposing forces or breaking contact when the situation dictated it. They lived off the land, while the Army was tied to supply trains that were vulnerable to Indian attack. But their freedom of movement was hindered by their women and children, while Army superiority in strength and weapons gradually began to tell. Indian rifles were no match for howitzers and Gatling guns, and Indian mobility could not outstrip the Army's use of the telegraph to alert additional forces along the Nez Perce line of flight. The battles of White Bird Canyon, Clearwater, Big Hole, Canyon Creek, and Bear Paw Mountain involved hundreds of troops and numerous units under Howard, Gibbon, Samuel D. Sturgis, and Miles. There were heavy casualties on both sides before Chief Joseph, in a poignant speech, surrendered. "Hear me, my Chiefs," were his closing words to Generals Howard and Miles, "my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."

In 1878 and 1879 Army forces took the field against various bands of Indians in mountain areas of the Northwest. Operations against the Bannocks, Sheepeaters, and Utes were relatively minor. The Bannock War was caused by white intrusion on the Camas Prairie in Idaho, where camas roots were a prime source of food for the Indians. The Sheepeater War, also centered in Idaho, broke out when the Indians were charged with several murders they probably did not commit. The Ute War in northwestern Colorado grew out of the misguided methods and impractical idealism of Indian Agent Nathan C. Meeker. All of these clashes represented a last convulsion against fate for the tribes involved, while for the Army they meant hard campaigning and casualties.

Bannock Indians

The Southwest

The Apaches were among the Army's toughest opponents in the Indian Wars. The zone of operations embraced the territories of Arizona and New Mexico, western Texas, and Mexico's northern provinces, and, despite the fact that hostile Apaches were relatively few in number and the theater was essentially a secondary one, they tied down sizable forces over a long period of time.

Post-Civil War Apache troubles extended from the late 1860'S, when the Army campaigned against Cochise, on through the seventies and eighties, when Victorio and Geronimo came to the fore. On the Army side the important factor was the assignment of Brevet Major General George Crook to the Southwest, where he served two tours between 1871 and 1886. Crook was an able administrator as well as an outstanding soldier, and proved to be a relentless opponent of the Indian on the battlefield and a steadfast friend off it.

As commander of the Department of Arizona he organized at key locations a number of mobile striking forces under experienced frontier officers and launched them in a concerted campaign supported by mule pack trains. Acting under an 1866 Congressional act, which authorized the Army to enlist up to a thousand Indian scouts (they came from traditionally friendly tribes like the Crow and Pawnee or from friendly elements of warring tribes), Crook also employed Apache scouts. Converging columns and persistent pursuit brought results, and he left Arizona in relative quiet when he went to the Department of the Platte in 1875.

But the quiet in the Southwest did not last long. Largely at the instigation of politicians, merchants, contractors, and other self-serving whites, several bands of mutually uncongenial Apaches were transferred from desirable areas to the unhealthy San Carlos Reservation in the Arizona lowlands. As a result, much of what Crook had accomplished was undone as disgruntled Apaches again turned to raiding and killing. In the summer of 1881, for example, an Apache medicine man stirred the Indians to heights of religious fervor that led to a sharp clash on Cibicu Creek with troops commanded by Colonel Eugene A. Carr, one of the Army's most experienced Indian fighters. The action was highlighted by perhaps the most notable instance of disaffection when the Indian scouts with the command turned on the Regulars.

Throughout the Indian Wars there was constant friction between the War and the Interior Departments over the conduct of Indian affairs. A committee of the Continental Congress had first exercised this responsibility. In 1789 it was transferred to the Secretary of War, and in 1824 a Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in the War Department. When the Department of the Interior was established in 1849, the Indian bureau was transferred to that agency. Thus administration of Indian affairs was handled by one department while enforcement lay with another. As General Crook put it to a Congressional committee in 1879: "As it is now you have a divided responsibility. It is like having two captains on the same ship."

Crook returned to Arizona in 1882 to restore confidence among the Apaches in white administration, move them along the paths of civilization, and spar constantly with the Indian bureau. On the military side, he took the field against dwindling numbers of hostiles, co-operating with Mexican officials and authorized to cross the international boundary in pursuit of the renegades. Crook met with Geronimo in the Sierra Madre Mountains in March of 1886 and negotiated a surrender that brought in all but Geronimo and a few followers who backed out at the last moment. When Washington failed to back the field commander in the conditions on which he had negotiated the surrender, Crook asked to be relieved. Nelson A. Miles replaced him, and Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood entered Geronimo's mountain fastness to arrange a surrender and bring the Apache campaigns to a close.

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