Indian Fights and Fighters: The Soldier and the Sioux

by Cyrus Townsend Brady

All except General Henry from contemporary photographs

One of the bravest of our Indian fighters was Guy V. Henry. Personally, he was a typical representative of the knightly American soldier. Officially, it was his fortune to perform conspicuous services in at least three expeditions subsequent to the Civil War. He was a West Pointer, and the son of another, born in the service at Fort Smith in the Indian Territory. Graduating in 1861, a mere boy, he participated in four years of the hardest fighting in the Civil War, from Bull Run to Cold Harbor. At the age of twenty-three, his merit won him the appointment of Colonel of the Fortieth Massachusetts Volunteers, “a regiment that was never whipped.” The tall, brawny Yankees fairly laughed at the beardless stripling who was appointed to command them. “They laugh best who laugh last,” and Henry had the last laugh. He mastered them, and to this day they love his memory.

He was thrice mentioned in despatches, and brevetted five times for conspicuous gallantry in action during the war, out of which he came with the rank of brigadier-general. For heroic and successful fighting at Old Cold Harbor, he received the highest distinction that can come to a soldier, the medal of honor. Having two horses shot from under him in the attack upon the Confederate lines, he seized a third from a trooper, mounted him under a withering fire, and led his soldiers forward in a final assault, which captured the enemy’s intrenchments; this third horse was shot under him just as he leaped the breastworks.

“Thin as a shoestring and as brave as a lion,” he was a past-master of military tactics and a severe disciplinarian. “I tell you he is a martinet,” cried one young officer angrily, smarting under a well-deserved reproof. “You are wrong,” replied a wiser officer, who knew Henry better; “he is trying to make your own record better than you could ever make it yourself.” Sudden as a thunderbolt and swift as a hawk when he struck the red Sioux, in his family and social relations he was a kindly, considerate, Christian gentleman. He could kill Indians—but never cruelly, mercilessly, only in open warfare—and teach a class in Sunday-school. I’ve seen him do the latter, and no man did it better; the boys of his class simply idolized him. And his men in the army did the same. Cool and tactful, a statesman, for all his fiery energy, he was perhaps the best of our colonial governors. When he died the people of Porto Rico mourned him as a friend, where the little children had loved him as a father.

II. A March in a Blizzard

At the close of the Civil War he was transferred to the Third Cavalry, a regiment with which he was destined to win lasting renown. It must have been hard for men who had exercised high command, and who had proved their fitness for it, to come down from general officers to subalterns; but Henry accepted the situation cheerfully. He was as proud of his troop of cavalry as he had been of his regiment and brigade of volunteers. His new detail took him to Arizona, where for two years he commanded a battalion engaged in hard scouting among the Apaches. The winter of 1874 found him at Fort Robinson in the Black Hills. While there he was ordered to go into the Bad Lands to remove certain miners who were supposed to be there in defiance of treaty stipulations.

The day after Christmas, with his own troop and fifteen men of the Ninth Infantry under Lieutenant Carpenter, with wagons, rations, and forage for thirty days, the men set forth. The expedition involved a march of three hundred miles, over the worst marching country on the face of the globe, and in weather of unimaginable severity, the cold continually ranging from twenty to forty degrees below zero. The miners were not found, and on the return journey the command, which had suffered terrible hardships, was overtaken by a blizzard.

When, in an Eastern city, the thermometer gets down to the zero mark, and it blows hard, with a heavy snow for twenty-four hours, people who are not familiar with the real article call such insignificant weather manifestations a blizzard. Imagine a fierce gale sweeping down from the north, filled with icy needles which draw blood ere they freeze the naked skin, the thermometer forty degrees below zero, a rolling, treeless country without shelter of any sort from the blinding snow and the biting wind, and you have the situation in which that expedition found itself. The storm came up an hour after breaking camp on what was hoped to be the last day on the return journey. To return to the place of the camp was impossible. To keep moving was the only thing to be done. The cold was so intense that it was at first deemed safer to walk than ride. The troops dismounted and struggled on. Many of the men gave out and sank exhausted, but were lifted to their saddles and strapped there, Henry himself doing this with his own hands. Finally, the whole party got so weak that it was impossible for them to proceed. In desperation, they mounted the exhausted horses and urged them forward. Henry had no knowledge of direction, but trusted to the instincts of his horse. He led the way. Many of the men had to be beaten to keep them awake and alive—to sleep was death.

Finally, when hope and everything else was abandoned, they came to a solitary ranch under the curve of a hill, occupied by a white man and his Indian wife. They were saved; that is, they had escaped with their lives. The horses were put in shelter in the corral, the men crowded into the house, and the painful process of thawing out was begun. The ranch was fifteen miles from Fort Robinson, and when the blizzard abated the next day wagons and ambulances were sent out, and the helpless soldiers were carried back to the post.

Most of them were in a terrible condition, and few had escaped. They were broken from the hardships they had undergone, especially from the freezing, which those who have suffered from declare causes a prostration from which it is difficult to recover. When Henry entered his quarters his wife did not recognize him. His face was black and swollen. His men cut the bridle reins to free his hands, and then slit his gloves into strips, each strip bringing a piece of flesh as it was pulled off. All his fingers were frozen to the second joint; the flesh sloughed off, exposing the bones. One finger had to be amputated, and to the day of his death his left hand was so stiff that he was unable to close his fingers again. As he was a thin, spare man, with no superfluous flesh, he had suffered more than the rest. Yet he made no complaint, and it was only due to his indomitable persistence that the men were not frozen to death that awful day. Henry’s winter march is still remembered, by those in the old service, as one of the heroic achievements of the period.