Part 6

Later came the Custer affair. Probably no action in our history has been more discussed and less understood. The story goes back a long way and doesn’t show us up in any fine colors. The government had made a treaty with the Great Sioux Nation in which it gave to these tribes the Black Hills and all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River. Gave them what was theirs in the first place. Kind of us. Another law confirmed by our Senate, made it a crime for a white settler to go into this region. Well, the whites as usual went in, because the land appealed to them. And they went out of their way to trespass because the Indians were six hundred miles from the nearest railroad and far from white settlements. When the Indians complained and got no redress, they went upon the warpath. Did so for the same reason that we took up arms in the Revolution--from behind each “farmyard fence and wall.” The Secretary of the Interior ordered the troops to put the Indians on their reservations. He made a consistent sweep of things for he not only violated the treaty, but did not uphold the law. So, little companies of Infantry and Cavalry under General Terry, were ordered to drive the victimized Indians to where neither the Indian nor the soldier wanted to go. Fifteen hundred troops, half of whom were afoot, were sent against six thousand hardy Sioux who were well-mounted. Why such a small body of soldiers? Because other little groups were busy with Assineboines, Piegans, Arapahoes, Kiowas, Pawnees, Commanches and Flatheads. And there weren’t any more troops. The entire regular force on the plains would scarcely have been a match then for the Great Sioux Nation, but we were content to send this paltry number out against this overwhelming force. Terry’s command accordingly advanced toward the Indians. Custer, who was in command of the Cavalry, was sent ahead with instructions to move toward the Tongue River, keep on the flank of the Sioux, and not let them escape. It was an impossible task in the face of so many Indians. But the soldier couldn’t know that such a big force was there, for there were too few troops to scout the Sioux country and find out. And if they could have found out, what was there to do about it? They had to go against the Indians. No matter how perfectly Terry’s force might act, it was in for a licking. So Custer split his command into three parts in order to keep the Indians from escaping. The irony!--from escaping. Well, it happened just as you would expect. Custer’s little band was overwhelmed and annihilated. The other two parts were backed against the wall and had to fight in desperation for their lives. It was not a real massacre. It was a fight in which the Indian used his normal methods of no quarter. We knew his methods. And we unjustly and murderously sent a puny force against him to be butchered to the extent of two hundred sixty-five killed and fifty-two wounded.

The Indians could have overwhelmed the rest of the force, but feeling they had taught the white man a lesson in fair play, they drew off. But the ones who bore the brunt of the punishment by paying the extreme penalty, were innocent soldiers, who had had nothing to do with the cause of the fight. The instigators were walking the eastern streets crying for an investigation. And how the affair was investigated! After reams of testimony had been taken down, and much money expended, it was found that we had sent a pigmy out barehanded to fight a giant. The result? True to form.

Would we have been a little more decent, had we spent more on soldiers beforehand and less on testimony afterward? If we had, it’s quite possible we wouldn’t have needed the testimony. For it’s an accepted fact that had we had ten thousand trained men for the Sioux alone, placed in some conspicuous spot, the Custer fight would never have been. The Indian would have been too wary. He always was. And many another fight would not have taken place, as we’ll see. Going back over the true events of these times, are we made to wonder whether we really do care about human life? We talk a lot about it. Is it another starched sham?

_X_

MORE FIDDLING

Abraham Lincoln one afternoon sat listening to the members of a committee arguing. The next day he heard them arguing _more_ without arriving anywhere. In a pause, he said, “I am reminded of old Zeke Williams out in my home town. Zeke was the finest rifle shot with his Brown Bess in those parts. One day he took his young son out hunting with him. They approached a tree. Said Zeke, ‘Boy, shake that ’ar tree. They’s a squirrel in it.’ The lad shook the tree, the father blazed away, but nothing happened. Said Zeke, ‘Shake that ’ar tree agin.’ The boy obeyed. The father blazed away and _still_ nothing happened. The father brought his gun down from his shoulder and almost wept as he said, ‘I must be gettin’ old. I can’t hit ’em no more.’ The son was very sorry for his father. So he went and looked the tree all over. Seeing no sign of a squirrel, he came over to his father and gazed intently into the old man’s face. ‘Why pap,’ exclaimed the boy, ‘That ’ar ain’t no squirrel in the tree. That ’ar a _louse_ on your eyebrow’.”

If Lincoln were alive today, I fear he’d discover many lice on our eyebrows--many fancies about our past that are contrary to reality. And nowhere would he find more than in our mistaken notions of the Indian struggles in our West. Soldiers fighting Indians! That’s what the school histories lead us to see. We get the feeling that the soldier was a bloodthirsty fellow who loved to go out before breakfast and kill a few redmen for pastime. The truth of the matter is that he was the best and almost the only friend the Indian had. The reason for this relationship is natural and simple. The soldier had no personal gain to get from the West. He wanted nothing that belonged to the redman. If he were out for greed, as the settlers, traders, trappers and adventurers too often were, he wouldn’t have been a soldier at his paltry wage. And as a hardy fellow, he appreciated the good points in other hardy fellows like the Indians. So let us look at real scenery and not at lice for a few minutes. Here is the tale of the Modocs.

The Modocs had always been a peaceable tribe, often assisting the whites in their undertakings, and even going so far as to help save a California town from fire. The government had made a treaty with them. As usual it violated it. All that these Indians asked was to be moved to a small strip of land, no good to anybody. General Canby, known as the Indian’s friend, tried to make the Indian Agents and Washington see the point of view of these redmen and begged and entreated that their simple request be granted. But the powers stubbornly refused. The Indians, denied and double-crossed, went on the warpath. The soldiers were ordered to fight them. In the ensuing engagements many of them were killed. But that was not all. General Canby, Dr. Thomas and other soldiers, in trying to carry out the government’s unjust orders, were killed also. The very men who had tried to avert injustice and bloodshed, were butchered. Dr. Thomas’ son has always claimed that the government murdered his father. But the tragic irony of this whole affair is that after all this debauch of human life and craze of injustice, General Canby’s advice was finally heeded. Those that were left of the Modocs, were transported to where they wanted to go in the first place. But General Canby and many another good soldier and Indian were dead. This story does not stand alone by any means. That of the Nez Perce’s is even worse. This tribe was more peaceful, high-minded and friendly than the Modocs. From the time that it had helped the Lewis and Clark expedition, way back after our Revolution, it had held uninterrupted good-will with the whites. But the government defrauded these Indians of a little strip of poor land where they wanted to go. They asked to be taken there. Chief Joseph, handsome, intelligent, upright, patiently pleaded his cause. General Howard naturally interceded and begged the government to let them go. But he also like Canby was met with curt refusal, over and over again. After long drawn-out insults by our government, the Nez Perce’s rebelled, and Howard was ordered to fight them. An officer and thirty-three of our soldiers were killed in the first action. Then began a chase through three territories. In one instance, so few were the troops that a general had to use a rifle himself and was severely wounded. The tribe was finally captured after much loss of life to white and redman. The government, contrary to General Miles’ recommendation, transported what remained of the tribe to an unhealthful region where they quickly perished. And that was our way of disposing of the Nez Perces. The Ute uprising of 1879 was in principle a repetition of these events. Major Thornburg and a large part of his command were killed because of the stubbornness of an Indian Agent.

Let’s look for a moment at another tribe. In 1870 the Apaches, the most subtle redmen we’ve ever dealt with, broke from their reservations and went upon the warpath. The cause as usual was our injustice. Colonel George Crook with a small force was sent against them. He was the kind of man who believed in a square word rather than a round bullet. He was in every way (unlike his name) the kind of man you’d want your boy to be like. But he faced a racking problem. The Apache country in the rugged Sierras was one of the toughest spots anybody could search, and when you added to it a wily Indian, ready to snare you at every turn, you had something that looked hopeless. It meant that the soldier had to master the country, know the valleys, streams, canyons, water holes, and unexplored mountain ranges; and hang doggedly on the trail, hour by hour, day by day through exhausting privation and bitter disappointment. Crook trailed the Apaches, but not with menace or threats. With a small escort he sought out the chiefs, ever imperilling his life by exposing himself. After months of effort he succeeded in getting a few of the chiefs to come in for a talk. Little by little his strong personality and shining integrity led them to listen to him. More chieftains came in. At length they talked to him freely, and he in turn saw that they were well cared for. He offered them forgiveness for any past misdeeds and urged a life of peace. Slowly they began to believe in him. At the end of six years of utmost patience he had calmed them, brought them into the reservations and made them contented--without bloodshed.

But then the Sioux uprising called him and his troops away to the north, because of the smallness of the army. Crook, a general now, tried to round up the Sioux with two thousand soldiers, whom he had drained the west to get. Conditions there wouldn’t permit him to use his Apache methods. Even under his able leadership he was nearly trapped and reduced to starvation. All he could do was to make his escape and let the Indians roam on. The Sioux were too strong for his puny force. Meanwhile the Apaches were left to the control of Indian Agents, who mishandled, defrauded and abused them. So awful did the conditions become, that even in the east the President felt obliged to send General Crook back to the Apaches in 1882. There Crook, after six years’ absence, found his previous work had been worse than undone. The Agents had ejected the Indians from their reservations because silver had been found there, had thrown them into prison to languish for months without trial, starved them, stolen their crops and in general treated them like cattle. Crook set himself to win them back by his old methods. But it was a monstrous task now, since the Indian had been infuriated afresh and had lost faith in all whites. In his old, bold way Crook set out through the trails to investigate complaints and find out the causes. Fortunately the Indians recognized and remembered him. They told him stories that would have wrung pity from a hardened criminal. But the way they met him--a real friend and champion after all these years of cruelty--was pathetic in its child-like appeal. The faces of the old men brightened and the squaws wept when they saw him again. The chieftain, Old Pedro, with dimmed eyes spoke to him pitifully. His words were taken down at the time and here they are:

“When you, General Crook, were here, whenever you said a thing, we knew it was true, and we kept it in our minds. When Colonel Green was here, our women and children were happy and our young people grew up contented. And I remember Brown, Randall, and the other officers who treated us kindly and were our friends. I used to be happy. Now I am all the time thinking and crying, and I say, ‘Where is old Colonel John Green, and Randall, and those other good officers, and what has become of them? Where have they gone? Why don’t they come back? And the young men all say the same thing’.”

That was how the Indian in his simple faith, trusted and regarded the soldier, who was too often unjustly sent out to fight him. And how do you suppose the soldier felt when he had to? Certainly he could have no relish for such dismal, perilous work. Anyway Crook and his small command kept up their exhausting efforts to avoid bloodshed. But all the while the Indian Agent Ring was sending out newspaper accounts of murder and depredations by the Indians, in order to involve Crook in a fight, which would drive the Indian away from the land on which the agents wished to profiteer. These stories Crook investigated and wherever he could, gave the lie to the rumor. Despite this knifing in the back, he again restored peace and contentment to the Apache--after two years.

And so I could recount for many evenings true incidents like this. In five years one regiment had sixty-seven battles and skirmishes and another marched sixty-four hundred miles. In the first six years after the Civil War, the army experienced two hundred three actions with the redmen. And Indian troubles didn’t dwindle out until over 30 years after the Civil War. But the uphill work with the redman was by no means all that the soldier had to encounter. Between 1886 and 1895, he was called upon to restore order in civil uprisings throughout every state and territory in our country to the number of three hundred twenty-eight. And he accomplished these tasks with almost no bloodshed. The show of trained force was enough, small as it was. But during all this time when the soldier was enduring the hardships of intense heat and cold, and running untold risks for his nation, his work was little understood or appreciated. Once Congress tried to reduce the army to ten thousand, which would have brought on more slaughter, especially to the whites, and prolonged the Indian troubles indefinitely. Fortunately the reduction didn’t succeed. But something else did. No appropriation for the pay of the army for the fiscal year 1877-78 was made by Congress, and this right after the Custer fight. The soldier without his meager wage had to borrow money at interest, in order to live--to go on--go on enduring rude conditions and the hazards of life and death. There was a faction back east which believed the Indian should be exterminated. There was another which believed the Indian was right and should be left alone. There were very few who realized that there were good Indians and bad Indians just as there are good and bad white men. When the soldier lost battles, he was investigated. When he won some, he was branded as a butcher. Meanwhile the settlers were crowding in and had to be protected, and the Indian Agent Ring was forcing Crook, Canby, Howard, Miles and many others into fights they wished to avoid.

But the soldiers’ position was unfortunate mostly because his force was not large enough to awe the Indian into peace without fighting. For no one more than the Indian respected _size_. He was an expert scout and had a keen eye for numbers. One hundred thousand soldiers would doubtless have cut the losses in half. And had the government used the Indian with common decency, they would have been cut to nothing. We talk a lot about the violation of Belgium and we are justly enraged at the Germans. But the Germans at least didn’t murder their soldiers in addition to their enemies. Are there lice on our eyebrows? Are there sins of our own? Greater sins?

_XI_

THE BLACK HOLE

One day in Texas after a long hike through broiling heat and alkali dust, we came at last to our camping-place. Weary officers and men went about their appointed tasks of setting up tentage, attending to the water-supply and sanitation and generally making the place livable. After a brief meal from rattling mess-kits, most of us lay down to get the kinks out of our muscles. One company on a little hill in plain view of the rest of the brigade, was resting quietly under its pup-tents. Suddenly a Texas twister, one of those little mysterious whirlwinds, came tearing along out of the silent, clear afternoon. It pounced upon the most conspicuous tent, grabbed the canvas and personal covering off the big First Sergeant, lifted them high in the air, and left him lying in the open like a plucked chicken. A thousand pairs of eyes fastened on him. He slowly awoke, rubbed his face, squirmed a little and squinted at his coverings swishing about in the heavens. “Well,” he said, “Who in the devil started that?”--and rushed threateningly toward the nearest group of soldiers.

The American people, after a sleep of a quarter of a century, woke up one morning in 1898 to find that a twister out of the blue had pitched the battleship Maine to the bottom of Havana Harbor, and tossed us into war. Amazed, we asked, “Who started that?” Amazed, we said, “How could war have come upon us?” Amazed and confused we rushed threateningly this way and that. And why the surprise when for three years we’d been shaking angry fists at the Spaniard--when we’d been lying in the path of twisters from a land of twisters. And how completely we’d been lying.

All the while we were provoking Spain to wrath, we were using sugared cut-throat words to our own people. Well-meaning idealists, thinking to calm our citizens, were really running them into misery. Two years before the twister struck us, Mr. Livingstone in the Congress of our nation, rose and stated: “I do not take much stock in an early war with Spain or England.” The same day on the same floor Uncle Joe Cannon said, “I want to say that I do not believe we will have war the coming year, nor the year after. I doubt if there will be any during this century or perhaps the early years of the next century.” At the same time in Europe, Czar Nicholas II of Russia showed how arbitration would settle everything; and books and articles were published proving that modern mechanisms would make war result in suicide--in short that war was impossible. Under this dangerous racket of propaganda the only attention paid to our land forces, was to pick at them and tear off little pieces. Any attempt to keep us from slaughtering and distressing our youth needlessly as we’d done in the past, was laughed out of court. When the twister struck us, the army was just the same size it had been twenty-two years before. Little groups of soldiers were scattered all over the west and on our borders. The overhead of these little posts had become drab routine. The War Department was clogged with thirty years’ mold. Its personnel was just sufficient to carry on a peanut-stand administration and supply. There was no thought for expansion or operating the army as a whole. There were no plans, no staffs, no proper maps of Cuba, no set-up for any respectable force. The army had not been brought together since the Civil War--a third of a century before. No officer in the service had commanded more than a regiment, about 700 men, and few had seen that many together. The soldiers had had no chance to act as a unit, as an organization, as a going concern. Supplies of all sorts were lacking--food, equipment, guns and ammunition, everything. We had not learned a single lesson from a hundred years of horrible disasters of our own making. We showed to the world the greatest unreadiness we’d had since we’d been a nation.

We still persisted in the idea that an able bodied man was a soldier. The President in this belief called out one hundred twenty-five thousand volunteers when there wasn’t ammunition enough in the country to let them fight one battle. The people seemed to feel we were going out with brass bands playing to bag the Spaniard. One day in a conference, the President turned to the Secretary of War and asked, “How soon can you put an army into Cuba?” Said the Secretary, “I can put 40,000 men there in ten days.” Later we found out we couldn’t put half that number there in two months.

General Miles, the head of the army, suggested the training of fifty thousand soldiers rather than put in jeopardy a great quantity of untrained men. But the President rejected that expert advice and called out seventy-five thousand more volunteers to be exposed to death in camp. The people were crying “On to Havana!” as they had yelled, On to Richmond, Mexico and Canada. What matter utter extravagance and human life?

The government now had two hundred thousand men on its hands. Where would they put them? O yes, the question of camps. Tampa, New Orleans and Mobile were decided upon. It was found that all but Tampa were unsuitable. After much investigation and delay. Camp Alger in Virginia, and Camp Thomas in Tennessee were selected. They afterwards proved to be far too small. Meanwhile the volunteers were flocking in much as they had done in the Civil War--in a sad state of neglect. Unequipped, untaught, unfed, uncared for, uneverything, they were all struggling to the front. The little crippled War Department was beset with every kind of request it could not fill. Congressmen who had taken delight in blocking legislation for preparedness were the loudest in crying for guns and vessels to protect their districts. Where were any implements for the crises? Without having any, the President ordered General Miles to take to Havana seventy thousand troops--(troops, mind you--real troops)--when such an irregular mass could have fired little more than one shot, if they had been troops. Then he ordered General Shafter at Tampa to the north coast of Cuba, but it was found there were no transports. Then he ordered twelve thousand troops to Key West, but the place was found unsuitable.

A month and a half passed. Why weren’t we getting on? General Miles went to Tampa to see. There he found what you’d expect. Troops were slowly assembling. Why not? One regular regiment had to come clear from Alaska. Supplies were failing. Loading of transports was helter-skelter. Miles reported that the principal part of the regular army was there, but that of the fourteen regiments of volunteers nearly forty per cent were undrilled and in one regiment over three hundred men had never fired a gun. And these were the pick of the untrained men.