Indian Fights and Fighters: The Soldier and the Sioux

by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Reams have been written about his unfortunate campaign upon the Little Big Horn, in which he went down to such awful destruction, but little is known of some of the exploits of his early career on the plains. After the war, more fortunate than most of the younger general officers who were forced to content themselves with captaincies or less, General Custer was appointed Lieutenant-Colonel of the new Seventh Regular Cavalry, a regiment which was born with him, lived with him, and a large part of which died with him.

The officers of the regiment were a set of unusual men. Custer himself was allowed considerable voice in the selection of them, and such a body of officers had been rarely assembled in one command. Most of the troopers were not at first of the high grade to which they afterward attained. The best men, in the ranks at least, at the close of the Civil War, had had enough of fighting. They wanted to get back to civil life once more. Not frequently it was only the inferior soldiers who could be induced to re-enlist from the volunteer into the regular regiments which were being organized or reorganized.

There were in the ranks, however, a leaven of veterans who were soldiers from love as well as from habit. With these as a nucleus, Custer and his officers, by a judicious weeding out and a rigorous course of discipline, soon gathered a body of troopers than which there were none finer in the service of the United States, nor, in fact, in any other service. Owing to the fact that the colonel, a distinguished general officer in the war, was on detached service commanding a department, the regiment was practically continuously under the command of Custer until his death in 1876.

The duty that devolved upon it was the protection of the settlers in Kansas. The job was no sinecure. In the last half of the year 1868 statistics, which do not pretend to be comprehensive, for they are only facts reported officially to the headquarters of the Department of the Missouri, show one hundred and fifty-seven people killed, fifty-seven wounded, including forty-one scalped, fourteen women outraged and murdered, one man, four women and twenty-four children taken into captivity, one thousand six hundred and twenty-seven horses, mules and cattle stolen, twenty-four ranches or settlements destroyed, eleven stage coaches attacked, and four wagon trains annihilated. This with a total loss to the Indians of eleven killed and one wounded. Truly there was a reign of blood upon that frontier. Every man murdered was also frightfully and disgustingly mutilated. This record takes no account of soldiers who were killed.

In one instance ten troopers under Lieutenant Kidder, of the Second Cavalry, with a message for Custer’s command, then in the field, were overtaken and slaughtered to a man after a desperate defense. When Custer came upon the scene of battle the bodies were so mutilated that it was impossible to tell one from the other. The only distinguishing mark upon any one of them was a shirt neckband made of a material of a peculiar marking, which was yet a common article of wearing apparel at that time. It was by this shirt collar that the body of Lieutenant Kidder was subsequently identified by his mother and taken East for burial.

As usual, there was strife between the Indian agents and the army. There always has been, there always will be. The agents invariably declared that there was peace in the land and sought to embarrass the army in its efforts to protect the frontier. Popular indignation, however, at last forced the government to act, and the campaign was long and arduous during the latter part of the summer of 1868.

The success of the soldiers was not pronounced at first. The extent of territory was great, the force available small, the Indians exceedingly mobile, and the troopers had as yet scarcely learned the rules of the game, so that it was a matter of extreme difficulty to get at any considerable body of Indians and inflict a crushing blow. As we have seen, General Forsyth’s command barely escaped annihilation in the great battle of the Arickaree. Matters dragged on, however, with nothing decisive happening until the summer and fall had slipped away and winter was at hand. The Indians rarely did any fighting in the winter. It was difficult and dangerous for horsemen to move on the exposed prairies in the winter season, and hitherto fighting had been abandoned with the advent of the cold. The Indians, during the winter, naturally tended southward, seeking a less severe climate if it might be had, and from November to April had been considered a closed season.

II. The March in the Blizzard

General Sheridan, however, who had command of the department, determined to inaugurate a winter campaign in the hope that the Indians, who would naturally congregate in large villages in secluded spots sheltered by trees along the river banks, might be rounded up and defeated decisively. The force at his disposal for these projected operations consisted of eleven troops of the Seventh Cavalry, four companies of infantry, and the Nineteenth Kansas Volunteer Cavalry, a regiment of settlers and old soldiers which had been organized for the campaign.

The expedition was under command of Sheridan himself. The rendezvous was at Camp Supply, in the Indian Territory, about one hundred miles south of Fort Dodge, Kansas. No Indians—in any considerable body, that is—had been seen by any of the scouts sent out, and no outrages were reported. It was evident that the hostiles were lying snugly concealed somewhere for the winter season. Sheridan determined to detach Custer and his regiment from the command and send them scouting farther southward, while with the rest of the force, so soon as it should be in condition to march, he himself would explore the country in other directions.