9
ON HIS RETURN FROM the north the Sioux-speaking scout Frank Grouard was paid in cash for his trip to the hostiles in the summer of 1875. This was the first money he had earned in five years—“or handled,” he said later, hoping to dispel rumors that he had robbed the mails on the upper Missouri. For some weeks after returning to the Red Cloud Agency he kept his hair long in the Indian way and continued to wear buckskin shirt, leggings, and breechcloth—“regular Indian costume.” For a time Grouard sought no job but lingered about the agency with his scouting money, “getting familiar with the English language again.”
Over the years Grouard gave differing accounts of his reasons for leaving the Indians. One was that he had married a Sioux girl and “a misunderstanding with his wife’s relatives made the village too hot for him.”1 At the agency that fall another woman caught his eye, a mixed-blood named Sally, the older half-sister of Billy Garnett. Grouard married the girl according to Indian custom, by simply moving in with her, and it was probably about this time, late one day in the middle of October 1875, that he stepped back across the line and rejoined the white world. From his friend the agency trader J. W. Dear he bought a suit of clothes, and he took a chair while a barber cut his hair. It chanced that on the same night a white man, Bill Rowland, killed a Cheyenne on the agency, infuriating the tribe and alarming officials that a serious outbreak of fighting might follow. Whites were warned to stay out of sight in their quarters but Grouard, short hair notwithstanding, agreed to go among the angry Indians to help quiet them. Soon thereafter he joined Rowland on the agency employment roll as a “laborer” at seventy-five dollars a month, but like Rowland his real job was to serve as an interpreter and to handle Indians. By the turn of the year Frank Grouard was married, had resumed dressing like a white man, and had found a profession—serving as a guide, scout, and interpreter until the Indian wars came to an end.2
That winter Grouard learned from white friends that the military was planning a big expedition; General Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, would be seeking scouts to lead the soldiers north against the hostiles. At dusk one afternoon in February, learning that Crook would soon be at Fort Laramie and told he needed to move quick if he wanted a job, Grouard set off on horseback from the Red Cloud Agency, rode ninety miles through the night, and reached the fort about eight o’clock the following morning.
He arrived to find the bustle and turmoil of a major expedition preparing to take the field. Wagons were loading with supplies, companies of cavalry and infantry were following the North Platte River north to the jumping-off point at Fort Fetterman, and a host of men claiming frontier experience had arrived seeking jobs as scouts. Crook would hire thirty of them before the end of the day on February 25. It was here that Grouard first met Baptiste Pourier, known as Big Bat, and renewed his acquaintance with Bat’s brother-in-law Louis Richard, who was just as deeply schooled in the Sioux language and frontier ways. But despite the long experience and deep knowledge of these men it was Frank Grouard who won General Crook’s confidence and became his favored guide.
That confidence was not won overnight. Crook’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant John Gregory Bourke, reported in his diary that on February 25 the general “was busy all day … in examining guides and scouts and studying maps of the country in which we are to operate.”3 Very little was known at the time of the vast country between the Missouri River and the old Bozeman Road and thence north to the Yellowstone. No map could lead Crook to the hostile camps; for that he needed a man who had been there. Years later, Grouard described his first meeting with the general:
I had an interview with General Crook. He asked me if I was acquainted with the country, and I told him I was. Wanted to know if there was any possible show of jumping Indians there in the wintertime. I told him if he worked it right, there might be … He said if I would furnish my own horse, he would give me $150, but I didn’t have a horse and told him that he would have to furnish the horse. So he said he would give me $125 a month. He said that he expected to start out the first of March.4
Crook knew what he wanted: a crack at the hostiles in their winter camp. Grouard promised to give it to him. But Crook did not trust Grouard entirely at first. Many of the Indians at the Red Cloud Agency had known Grouard in the north; some believed he lived with the Indians because at heart he was an Indian, and said he had taken part in the fighting with soldiers on the Yellowstone in 1873. It was said that Grouard helped the Indians kill mail riders and steal mail, that he read the officers’ letters to Sitting Bull so he might know their plans. Some whiff of this suspicion reached General Crook. He took no chances. About the time his expedition pushed off from Fort Fetterman in a snowstorm on March 1, the general spoke privately to the Bats, Pourier and Garnier. “General Crook told them to watch Grouard and if he betrayed his companions to shoot him.”5
George Crook brought with him a great reputation as an Indian fighter when he set out against the Sioux in March 1876. He had fought Indians in California as a young lieutenant fresh out of West Point in the 1850s, and he had fought Apache in Arizona in the 1870s. He carried an arrowhead in his leg from a Pitt River Indian but his reputation was unscarred; he had won all his battles and campaigns against Indians and had firm opinions about how Indian fighting ought to be done. Later he had risen high in the Union Army during the Civil War. The trick had been to get a command. As a captain in the regular army in the first summer of the war he was taken to meet President Lincoln in Washington—“the most ungainly man I had ever seen, particularly his legs and feet,” Crook recalled.6 From the president Crook learned that state governors, not the adjutant general of the Army, would be giving out the best appointments, and he soon accepted an offer to become colonel in command of Ohio’s 36th Voluntary Infantry Regiment, then stationed in Summersville, West Virginia.
When Crook joined his new regiment in September he found a little-trained rabble of Ohio farm boys fresh from the plow—“rare as a piece of beefsteak,” in his words. Many still had no uniforms and the summer clothes they had brought from home were in rags. Many had no boots or shoes of any kind and went barefoot. They did not know the manual of arms or how to march and did not think they needed to know. The officers were not much better; they could read, but had no knowledge of things military. Crook went to work to turn his regiment into a disciplined fighting force while attempting to deal with the immediate challenge posed by irregular Confederate forces—the “bushwhackers” who infested the forested valleys of West Virginia, shooting passers-by from ambush and in general conducting themselves more like bandits than an army.
The men of the 36th Ohio were not alert to the danger; they were careless about posting guards or challenging suspicious persons. “Being fresh from the Indian country where I had more or less experience with that kind of warfare,” Crook wrote, “I set to work organizing for the task.”7
Half the job was acquiring intelligence—detailed knowledge of the mesh of country roads, isolated farms, and tiny hamlets and the men who lived there. Some were plain country folk, while others were rebel partisans waiting for a chance to shoot nodding pickets or careless travelers and maybe pocket something of value at the same time. The other half of the job required a certain kind of character which Crook had—a combination of realism, resolution, and hardness of spirit.
This hardness of spirit was partly learned, partly born in the man. The colonel’s commanding volunteer regiments at the outset of the Civil War were all appointed by their governors, as Crook had been, but most at heart were political men, gregarious and widely acquainted, which Crook was not. Like the enlisted men in his regiment he was an Ohio farm boy, raised on hard physical labor. He liked to hunt but got little opportunity. The ninth of ten children, son of a prosperous farmer with 340 acres along the Miami River, he was sent to school in Dayton, where a classmate, James Greer, remembered him as “a farmer’s boy, slow to learn, but what he did learn was surely his. He was older, somewhat, than his comrades, and was good-natured, stolid, and was like a big Newfoundland dog among a lot of puppies. He would never permit … bullying of smaller boys.”8
For boys like Crook the United States Military Academy at West Point offered a free practical education in engineering and surveying along with the chance for a career in the Army. Crook at nineteen apparently had no wish for either when his father was approached by a political friend, Congressman Robert P. Schenck, in 1847, asking if any of his boys might want an appointment. The father was as deliberate as the son: “After studying awhile he said he didn’t know but what he had.” The young Crook submitted to an interview. It is clear that Schenck was not bowled over.
The boy was exceedingly non-communicative. He hadn’t a stupid look, but was quiet to reticence. He didn’t seem to have the slightest interest or anxiety about my proposal. I explained to him the requirements … and finally asked him, “Do you think you can conquer all that?” His monosyllabic reply was, “I’ll try.”9
Hadn’t a stupid look seems faint praise at best. Noncommunicative—watchful, silent, contained—Crook remained for life. But Schenck had an appointment to give and Crook got it. Four years later he graduated thirty-eighth in a class of forty-three but with a clean nose. West Point is stickling about rules; every infraction is punished and recorded. But Crook’s record is short and dull: fined for breaking dishes in the mess, absent from drill, confined to quarters for submitting work that was not his own. Likely it was a friend’s. The Point didn’t think it mattered much. At West Point, Crook made only a faint impression. On the first day of December 1852 he arrived in San Francisco, reported for duty as brevet second lieutenant with Company F, 4th Infantry. He was immediately assigned as a file closer at the funeral of a fellow officer, dead of drink at the age of fifty-one. Crook “was very abstemious,” a military aide wrote many years later; “in no case was he ever known to drink to excess. He did not use tobacco in any form … to all forms of gambling he was bitterly opposed.”10
Perhaps the abhorrence of drink came early in Ohio, perhaps he learned it in California. There the ranking officer at the funeral gathered the dead man’s fellows around his corpse and said, “Well fellows, Old Miller is dead and he can’t drink, so let us all take a drink.” Crook was horrified by the whole bunch of them. “Not a day passed but what these officers were drunk at least once, and mostly until the wee hours of the morning. I never had seen such gambling and carousing before or since.”11
Crook soon found an escape from this chaos—the field. He was stationed at Fort Jones in a mining district of California north of Sacramento, near the town of Yreka. The officers’ mess in those days was run and paid for by the officers themselves. California prices were painfully high; Crook’s share threatened to consume his entire monthly pay of sixty-three dollars.
He took to hunting. “For over a year we never had any meat on our table except game.” When he was not on duty he was out with rifle or shotgun in all weather, in every kind of country, alone or with a local Indian as guide and companion. Crook had always loved hunting, rarely got the chance as a boy in Ohio, and now roamed the mountains and rivers all about the post. Crook was so successful that a fellow officer was soon selling meat to the miners in Yreka; the mess operated at a profit and even declared cash dividends. But it was the country and the hunting that enthralled him. The forests were virgin, the rivers were filled with fish, deer abounded. It was the discovery of America all over again—rich, empty, and free for the taking. In California, Crook confirmed a lifelong passion for hunting; in the field his solitary, reflective character restored itself. The numbers of birds and game he shot, the fish he caught, are astonishing. In the late summer of 1854 he was camped with his unit surrounded by mountains on the Deschutes River:
I upon one occasion took a couple of the soldiers and went up to the summit on a hunt. It was one of the grandest and most picturesque countries I had ever seen. The summit must have been from twenty to forty miles in breadth, covered with lakes and parks scattered amongst a heavy growth of pine and spruce timber … In some lakes were runs of magnificent trout, which could be had in the greatest quantities just for the catching. In one lake I killed two loons and shot at a beaver. In another, while walking close to its edge, I heard snorting in the tule which bordered on the shore for half a dozen yards, sounding like hogs rooting. Finally I discovered them to be otter. I shot one that measured five feet three inches from tip to tip. Half a dozen others swam out into the clear water at the report of my gun, cocking their eyes up at me, seemed quite tame. I could have killed several others, but had no use for them, the one being all I could carry.12
Late one afternoon as Crook was setting up camp near one of these pristine lakes far from any other human being, or so he thought, the young lieutenant was startled to see a fellow officer emerge from the dusk—not just any fellow officer, but his West Point classmate Lieutenant Philip Henry Sheridan, a boy from Ohio like himself. They had begun together in the class of 1852 but Sheridan, an Irish Catholic of plain origin, was prickly and combative. In his third year, infuriated by a peremptory order from one of the old-family Virginians who ruled social life at West Point, Sheridan attacked his fellow cadet with his fists. Sheridan was small—five feet six inches on Army records but perhaps shorter still. In a surviving photograph of Sheridan between his two great Ohio friends at the Point—George Crook on his right, John Nugen on his left—Sheridan in the middle seems diminutive. At West Point, a much-bigger cadet sergeant from Virginia was giving Sheridan the worst of it when an officer stopped the fight. Physically attacking a cadet who ranked him was no modest slip; Sheridan was lucky to escape with only a year’s suspension. He graduated in 1853, a year late, thirty-fourth in a class of fifty-two. Fresh out of West Point, Crook and Sheridan did not seem bound for glory, but they were friends, Crook was delighted to see him in the mountains of California, and they stayed up late “talking over what we had seen, etc.” What they had seen at that point was miners who earned more than Army officers, bleak frontier posts run by drunken despots, and a lot of Indians distinguished for poverty, misery, and a sneaking way of war.
Crook was divided in his opinion of Indians. The first ones he ever encountered were the Wiyot on Humboldt Bay in northern California—“they are filthy, odiferous, treacherous, pitiless, cruel and lazy,” he wrote later. But Crook had an even lower opinion of the whites who stole from the Indians, killed them on a whim, and raped their women. “Such a thing as a white man being punished for outraging an Indian was unheard of … It is hard to believe now the wrongs these Indians had to suffer in those days.” Throughout the 1850s, he traveled all over California to deal with one tribe after another as white abuse led to Indian outbreaks. Between fights he hired Indians as hunting guides. Around campfires in the evening he listened to their grievances, stories, and beliefs about things supernatural. “Most of their little legends I have forgotten, and in fact,” he confessed, “I fear I was not a very good listener.”
But his Autobiography contradicts him. He has a great deal to say about the culture and religion of California Indians. His goal, he wrote, was to understand “all these little ‘bed rock’ secrets, especially those of a sacred character,” in order to better control the Indians. Maybe so, but a reader of the Autobiography gets the strong impression that Crook was in fact intensely interested by the Indians. Suffering once with an infection in his arm his fears were aroused when “a squaw came into my room one day, and wanted to know to whom I was going to give my things when I died.” She seemed to know something Crook didn’t. At that moment he realized the infection might well kill him, and he “finally took my own case in hand,” treating the injury daily with calomel and jalap for the month it took to heal.13
One of the tribes he got to know well was the Ala-a-gnas, who lived along the banks of the Klamath River, subsisting on fish, acorns, wild grains and roots, “and occasionally a little venison.” The Indians talked to Crook by the hour about God and the devil. They confessed to him they had never personally seen the devil but had sometimes heard him nearby, and they knew of people who had seen him. From various reports they knew the devil to have “long claws, hooked bill, long tail, and was covered all over with pitch.” A man caught unaware by the devil in the brush would be snatched away and never seen again. “It was regarded as an insult to express any doubt as to the truth of these stories.”
Crook was a practical sort of fellow. He thought life was contrary and it didn’t take evil spirits to explain trouble and difficulty. But the Indians took an entirely different view. They described the world as broadly and uniformly alive with power to help men or hinder them; a rock could be more than a rock, a tree more than a tree, and a gust of wind or a bolt of lightning might spare a man, or seek him out. All these powers could be controlled by witches.
These Al-a-gnas … were particularly superstitious … Nothing that occurred, it made no difference how insignificant, but what they had some reason to account for it that was satisfactory to themselves. For instance, if they went out hunting and failed to see game, or if they saw some and failed to kill it, or if it rained while they were out, or if they lost something, and a thousand and one things like that, they would declare that some person had bewitched them, and generally they would tell you the person that did the mischief. I used to try to reason with them that the deer were not where they hunted, but they would answer that they saw so many deer there before, and they were there now, but someone had turned them into brush or rocks, and nothing could shake their belief.14
God, Crook was told once, had visited the Indians long ago, coming with his son from the east. God’s name was Wa-peck-a-maw15 and he did many good things for the Indians, but the son was trouble, unruly in behavior and “bad after women.” Fed up with the son at last, the Indians killed the boy, but the father was too clever for them. Wa-peck-a-maw escaped down the coast and turned himself into a tree, thereby eluding the Indians. A crow refused to help the god escape from the tree and was turned black as a punishment, but a woodpecker worked so hard to free him that Wa-peck-a-maw gave him a brilliant red head as reward. When white prospectors first appeared in the Indian country the Al-a-gnas welcomed them as relations of Wa-peck-a-maw and rubbed their skin to see if the white would rub off. But soon rapes and killings by whites angered the Indians, and they determined to kill them all as their ancestors had killed Wa-peck-a-maw’s son. Listening to these stories made Indian fighting difficult for Crook. He knew how severely the Indians were abused by whites. But “when they had been pushed beyond endurance and would go on the warpath,” the military officer’s duty was to fight them, and this Crook did.
——
In the summer of 1857, following a handful of indecisive expeditions, Crook found himself in a serious Indian campaign, pursuing Indians who had attacked whites living in the Pitt River valley, about a hundred miles east of Yreka. The challenge was to find the Indians. One day out scouting on horseback Crook spotted the track of a woman; other tracks soon joined it, and all were running. His command was several miles back, but Crook spurred his horse into a gallop—“The chase had now become so exciting that I thought but little of the danger.” Sighting a man he shot him once, then shot him a second time, killing him with his pistol. At that moment Indians appeared all around him “with frightful yells, letting fly a shower of arrows at me.” Crook spurred his horse for safety and barely escaped his pursuers. When he returned to the site with his command the Indians had fled, leaving only an old woman grieving beside the body of the man Crook had killed with his pistol. “This was my first Indian,” he writes. The woman told them nothing.
A few days later—on June 10, 1857—Crook killed his second Indian. His men were with him but again he rushed ahead of his command to reach a camp of Indians down a steep bluff along a riverbank below. The alarmed Indians scattered; some plunged into the water and started to swim for the far shore. Crook proceeded pell-mell down a faint trail in hope of getting close enough for a shot. “I saw a buck swimming with his bow and arrows and wolf robe held above his head,” Crook recalled. “I aimed at the edge of the water. At the crack of the rifle he sank, and the robe and the weapons floated down the stream.”
Crook was reloading his rifle when a shower of arrows came at him. One plunged into his right thigh. He grabbed the shaft and tugged; the shaft slipped away from the arrowhead and came out with two inches of blood smearing the wood. The Indians commenced to yell when they saw Crook was wounded and from their hiding places across the river chased him back up the trail with more arrows. Luck spared him a second wound, but by the time he had pulled and scrambled his way back to the top he was sinking into shock, “deathly sick” and pouring sweat. “Excruciating pain” wracked his hip on the horseback journey back to camp, and by the time he arrived “my groin was all green.”
At this point in the narrative of his life, Crook digresses to explain what sort of poison the Indians might have smeared on the arrow that wounded him. Taking the liver of a freshly killed deer, he writes, the Indians would attach it to a long stick with a string, then taunt a coiled rattlesnake with the dangling liver, provoking the snake to strike again and again, until the liver was well saturated and dripping venom. The final step was to run an arrow shaft through the liver, smearing it thoroughly. “Under the most favorable circumstances this poison would retain its strength about one month,” Crook writes, “but during moist weather it would not last over a few days.” Weak or strong, the poison failed to kill him. Two weeks later he was back on his horse chasing Indians who had run off some cattle. But for the rest of his life Crook carried that arrowhead in his hip.16
He did not let up on the Indians but pursued them relentlessly all summer through the mountains to their camps. In relating the campaign Crook eases back on the detail of his own kills, simply noting the bag—“I killed one, and the soldiers the other.” But sometimes the details were too interesting to omit. In an attack on a camp at first light he notes that he killed two Indians early in the fight. It was the second that interested him.
He was half-bending and half squatting, with his breast toward me, jumping first to one aside, and then to the other, evidently trying to draw my fire, keeping an arrow pointed at me all this time … He was singing his death song. I took a rest on my knee, and, moving my rifle from one side to the other, following his movements, I got a good aim, when I pulled the trigger, and broke his back. In this condition, while lying on the ground, he shot five arrows into the soldier’s mule … before I could kill him with my pistol.17
A moment later Crook killed a third Indian. From that point on the count grows hazy. The campaign continued into the fall but after awhile there were no more battles; the Indians grew too cautious, like spooked game, and try as he might Crook surprised no more sleeping villages. But at the same time the Indians quit attacking white settlements in the area and when they asked for peace in September, Crook agreed to end the war. The Indians then moved camp close to the soldiers “and seemed to feel perfectly at home.” Crook renewed his education in Indian ways, taking careful note of “their cunning in all their little ways of capturing a livelihood.” He describes their skill in digging pits as animal traps, from which the Pitt River Indians took their name. What particularly struck him, however, was their method of tracking down yellow jackets—not for honey, of course, which yellow jackets do not make, but for the larvae of their young. An Indian would take a single plume of duck down, the frailest sort of white fuzz attached to a tiny quill. To this he would tie a tiny bit of meat. Yellow jackets love meat. One would seize the meat and start for the hive but the duck down offered just drag enough through the air to slow the yellow jacket and allow an Indian to follow it to its nest. A smoky fire would then deal with the yellow jackets and leave the larvae for the Indians’ dinner. Crook remembered it all thirty years later, and records in tones of evident admiration their many techniques for making the wilderness “pay tribute to them. Game, fish, nuts, roots, grass seed, grasshoppers, crickets, water fowl and their eggs, the larvae of hornets, yellow jackets etc.”18
The many similar passages in Crook’s unfinished autobiography are evidence he spent a lot of time listening to Indians, but at the same time he did not hesitate to kill them in battle, and he is not shy about recording a hunter’s pride in the rigors of the chase, outwitting his quarry, or making a difficult shot. When his blood was up he forgot danger and plunged on till he had made his kill. But it took a fight to get his blood up. Absent the heat of battle, killing itself made Crook uneasy. Indians were masters of escape and evasion, and fighting them was mostly hard slogging followed by brief, violent encounters. But not always. Sometimes Crook’s blood was cold when killing was required.
In the late summer of 1858, Crook was ordered north to the Washington Territory to join an expedition against Yakima Indians. The commander of the expedition was Major Robert S. Garnett, who had been commandant of cadets at West Point during Crook’s last two years. Crook much admired Garnett. “He was strict but just, and those who did their duty well were certain to be rewarded, while those who failed … were made to feel it.”19 Garnett, recently married and the father of a six-month-old son, was a first cousin of another officer, Captain Richard B. Garnett, and was thus—although it is unlikely he knew it—a first cousin once removed of the mixed-blood toddler Billy Garnett, then three. To Crook, of course, Garnett was just another professional soldier from Virginia.
Major Garnett’s task was to chastise some Yakima Indians who had whipped an Army unit the previous year, and to track down another smaller group who had killed a party of prospectors that spring. These Indian raiders were considered to be murderers, and Garnett’s orders were to kill them in battle or execute them after capture. In the course of the expedition Crook was sent ahead up the Wenatchee River with his company to seize some of the killers reported to be living with a band of friendly Yakima. “Game was scarce,” Crook notes, “except sage hens and a few sharp-tailed grouse.”
At the end of two days’ hard going, Crook and his men suddenly encountered a young Yakima standing beside the trail, leaning on his old muzzle-loading rifle. Questioned by the Indian guides, the young man divulged that the killers sought by Crook were in camp a few miles ahead where the young man’s father, Skimarwaw, was chief. This set Crook’s mind to working. When his company was close to attacking distance of the camp he took the young man to one side and presented him with a careful argument:
I … explained to him what we had come for, the great risk they ran in harboring those men, that in a fight we would have to kill many of our friends, which we were anxious not to do, that they would lose all their stock and many of their families, camp equipage, etc. etc. I suggested that he go to the village and tell his father privately what I had told him, and also to have his father come with him to see me.20
These suggestions were accepted and the following day as arranged Skimarwaw brought his whole band into Crook’s camp, where the unsuspecting killers were quietly pointed out to the white soldiers and then, on Crook’s signal, were seized by the soldiers who had sidled up to each of the accused men. Once they were tied up and powerless Crook “told them the object of my mission, and that I intended shooting them before I left. I wanted them to make any final preparations they wished, and a reasonable time would be given them, etc. etc.” The five accused men were now condemned men. While they began alternately to make excuses and to pray, twenty soldiers were detailed for the firing squad. To ease their conscience, five guns were loaded with powder only; no man need be sure he had fired a fatal round. No such evasion would be available to the officer who gave the command to fire, however, and Crook did not want to do it. “This whole business was exceedingly distasteful to me,” he wrote, “and as my 2nd Lieutenant [T. E.] Turner rather enjoyed that kind of thing, I detailed him to execute them.”21
Fighting Indians in the far West as a young officer developed in George Crook the hardness of spirit which he displayed in the first summer of the Civil War. He drilled and trained his men from the farms of Ohio, detailed his most apt officers to learn the countryside, and ordered them after the bushwhackers. “Very soon they commenced … bringing them in as prisoners.” Crook sent the captured men across the border into Ohio, where they were briefly held at Camp Chase and then turned loose by the officers there. Soon they were back in the region of Summersville, “fat, saucy, with good clothes … in a defiant manner, as much as to say, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’ ”
Crook bristled at a challenge; he detested behavior he called “insolent” or “impudent.” We may recall the schoolmate who said the young Crook would not abide a bully. In California his orders from Major Garnett had been clear: execute any of the Yakima killers who might be captured. He does not cite his orders in West Virginia and on this point probably did not have any—at any rate, not explicit orders put down in writing. But Crook was in command and his task was to clear the country of bushwhackers:
In a short time no more of these prisoners were brought in. By this time every bushwhacker in the country was known, and when an officer returned from a scout he would report that they had caught so-and-so, but in bringing him in he slipped off a log while crossing a stream and broke his neck, or that he was killed by an accidental discharge of one of the men’s guns, and many like reports. But they never brought back any more prisoners.22
The progress of General Crook as he set forth in March 1876 to attack the “hostiles” in their winter camps was recorded by his personal Boswell, an aide-de-camp who maintained a voluminous diary, Lieutenant (later Captain) John Gregory Bourke. What Bourke knew of Indian fighting had been learned during four years in Arizona with Crook, and he embarked on the campaigns of this fateful year with opinions equally acerbic of the Sioux and the government alike. “We are now,” he wrote in Cheyenne’s Inter-Ocean Hotel in mid-February, freshly arrived from Omaha, “on the eve of the bitterest Indian war the Government has ever been called upon to wage: a war with a tribe that has waxed fat and insolent on government bounty, and has been armed and equipped with the most improved weapons by the connivance or carelessness of the Indian agents.”23 In one diary entry after another he expressed confidence that victory over “the haughty Sioux”—“the castigation so long merited”—“may be accepted as a foregone conclusion.”24 Bourke was a few months short of his thirtieth birthday; he had fought as an enlisted man during the Civil War, gone on to West Point, from which he graduated in 1869, and chased Apache all over Arizona in Crook’s company between 1871 and 1875, when the general was transferred to command of the Department of the Platte. Bourke knew nothing of the Sioux but much of Crook, and with the loyalty required of an aide-de-camp he asserted that the general was up to any challenge. In mid-March on the road north Bourke described his commander at length:
The General in size is about six feet even, weight one hundred and seventy pounds, built very spare and straight, limbs straight, long and sinewy; complexion, nervo-sanguine; hair, light-brown; cheeks, ruddy without being florid; features, delicately and firmly chiseled, eyes blue-gray; nose, a pronounced Roman, and quite large; mouth, mildly chiseled, but showing with the chin much resolution and tenacity of purpose. His general expression is placid, kind and good-humored. Unaffected and very accessible in his general demeanor there is a latent “noli mi tangere” [don’t-touch-me] look of dignity about him repelling undue familiarity. His powers of endurance are extraordinary and his fortitude remarkable. A graceful rider, a noted hunter, and a dead shot, skilled in all the secrets of wood-craft and Indian warfare, having the prestige of complete success in every campaign hitherto undertaken, he is by all odds the worst foe the Sioux have ever yet had to meet.25
About the Sioux soon to be whipped by General Crook, Bourke knew almost nothing—barely their names. At Fort Fetterman, shortly before jumping off, Crook had learned from the Arapaho chief Black Coal that “Sitting Bull and the Minneconjous” were camped beside the Powder River about one hundred miles north of Fetterman. Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa; various bands of the Miniconjou were led by Lame Deer, Hump, and Touch the Clouds since the death of Lone Horn a few months previous. This sort of elementary knowledge would be picked up by Bourke over time, but it hadn’t happened yet.
Of the causes of the war Bourke also appeared to know nothing. The hotels and saloons of Cheyenne were chockablock with whites eager to push into the Black Hills, but between gold and the war against the Sioux Bourke seems to have drawn no connection—none, at any rate, he was willing to write down for posterity in his diary. Two weeks later, on the eve of the first battle in what came to be known as the Great Sioux War, writing with numbed fingers and the stub of a pencil because his inkwell had frozen, Bourke tried to explain what it was all about:
Our government has been so vacillating in its deportment towards these Indians … that the Sioux, proverbially insolent, have grown bolder and more haughty, imagining our people subsidiary to them. I speak now of those on the reservations. The sentiments entertained by chiefs like Sitting Bull of the North, Crazy Horse and Little Big Man, who have never gone on a reserve, and refused all offers of peace, scorned all concessions and particularly adhered to a career of spoliation and murder, would not be exaggerated by any flight of rhetoric.26
Insolent, bold, haughty, scornful—to Bourke these affronts seemed cause enough for war.