Roger Di Silvestro Read online

  Officers' quarters at Fort Keogh at about the time Lieutenant Casey lived there. One of two surviving houses is open to the public at the Range Rider Museum outside Miles City, Montana. (Christian Barthelmess, Montana Historical Society, Helena)

  Yearning for unmapped lands and far horizons, Casey must have rankled at inspecting slop barrels and setting policies for their care, but he soon found a more amenable assignment. Late in 1889 he read a paper on training Indians as soldiers, the first in a series of three written by army major William Powell, who suggested that the U.S. government should stop pushing agriculture on these natural warriors and instead "make soldiers of them." The idea had been in the air since at least 1878, when Ezra Hayt, commissioner of Indian affairs, urged the formation of an Indian cavalry force of up to three thousand men.18In 1880 an army captain published an article in a military journal, The United Service: A Monthly Review of Military and Naval Affairs, suggesting that the Indians, given their skills on horseback, be enlisted as cavalry.19

  Casey caught the fever and promptly recommended to Colonel Swaine that they enlist reservation Indians to form a regular troop.20Swaine liked the idea and told Casey to recruit local northern Cheyennes. From the commissioner of Indian affairs, Thomas Morgan, Casey got permission to enlist up to one hundred of them.

  Casey became so thoroughly identified with the idea of enlisting Indians that the plan was credited to him by another officer, Lieutenant S. C. Robertson of the First Cavalry, who commanded a contingent of Crow Indians:

  Last year Lieutenant Casey, of the Twenty-second Infantry, a dashing and able young officer, stationed then at Fort Keogh, Montana, conceived the idea of employing this Indian material on a more substantial and permanent basis. His idea was to enlist the Indians of the different tribes in separate troops or companies, and for definite periods of say a year or six months. They were to be thoroughly drilled and disciplined, required to keep two pony mounts of serviceable quality, for which the government was to allow forage and extra pay, and to be allowed to continue in the service, by re-enlistment, during good behavior. This was intended to serve the double purpose of giving a leaven of civilization and military training to each of the tribes represented, and at the same time furnishing the army with a number of bodies of light irregular cavalry scattered among its Western stations. These levies were to be known as "scouts," but in arms, equipments, uniform, and drill they were to be assimilated as rapidly as possible to the condition of regulars.21

  Robertson reported that Casey went to Washington, D.C., to win Secretary of War Redfield Proctor's support for raising a troop of Cheyennes.

  Indians had served in the military since the nation's beginnings. In 1637 Narragansett and Mahican fought beside New England colonists against the Pequot. Indians allied with both the British and the French in the aptly named French and Indian War, and the British rallied Indians against American patriots during the Revolutionary War.22The first army mustered by the thirteen original colonies to fight the British included a company of Stockbridge Indians from Massachusetts. Indians fought on both sides of the Civil War, and in 1866 Congress authorized enlistment of one thousand Indian scouts in the West. On behalf of the U.S. Army, Apache fought Apache, while the Pawnee, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, and Shoshone signed up to fight the Lakota, who in turn helped the army fight the Nez Perce.23

  Eventually, the secretary of war authorized twenty-six regiments stationed west of the Mississippi River to enlist a company of Indians each. These Indians generally signed up as civilian scouts and did not receive military training and other benefits. Casey instead would enlist his men as army regulars. They would sign up for six months at a time, receive standard uniforms and equipment, right down to the white gloves, and twenty-five dollars monthly, comparable to soldiers' pay.

  Enlisted Indians offered many advantages to the army.24On a practical level, as scouts they neutralized the only significant advantage the Indians had over the U.S. military, their superior knowledge of the land. Signing up the Indians was also a good safety valve for warrior aggression. Officers in the 1870s often enlisted former hostile Indians virtually on the day they surrendered, hoping to keep restless and potentially dangerous young men from starting trouble. For example, when some three hundred Cheyenne surrendered to Nelson Miles in late April 1877, he immediately signed on several of the warriors as scouts. Only a few days later, they helped lead him to Lame Deer on Muddy Creek.

  Enlisted warriors also were good propaganda. By making scouts out of men who surrendered, the army showed hostile Indians that giving up was not all bad. And if that example did not tempt hostiles to surrender, the army was hoping that warriors would be demoralized into submission when they saw their own compatriots leading U.S. soldiers into their hidden camps.

  Indian recruits in turn had their own good reasons for signing up to fight other Indians. Among the plains tribes, warriors achieved status by fighting enemies and taking their horses. Allying with the U.S. Army allowed defeated warriors, who might otherwise be left idle on reservations, to pursue these traditional activities. Alliances among plains tribes were fluid—allies one season might be enemies the next—so in most cases, no loyalties were strained when Indians enlisted.25

  The Cheyenne at Tongue River fit the mold for eager recruits. On their enlistment papers, many who signed on with Casey put down their occupation as "hunter."26But little wildlife remained to hunt. The bison were gone, as were the pronghorn and deer. Even the Cheyenne who had been to the federal schools had no work. And here was the army offering them a chance to recapture their pride.

  Casey presented his plan to tribal elders at the Tongue River Cheyenne reservation. He needed their approval to approach younger men about enlisting, but at first the elders opposed him. After all, white men in blue uniforms had never brought good news to the Indians. Moreover, in a letter to his brother Thomas, Casey wrote that the Cheyenne were "much exercised over the report of the coming of a Christ and had been having religious dances before my arrival."27He was referring to the ghost dance. "The Indians are perfectly peaceful," he added, "as their new faith teaches good will to all—the punishment to be left to the Christ."

  The elders were vexed about Casey's proposal for scouts because they had heard that he would make Cheyenne troopers leave their families and cut their hair. But when he explained that neither would hair fall nor families break up, "their fears vanished," he wrote Thomas.28

  During a two-day visit at Tongue River, Casey enlisted twenty-seven Indians and turned away about half that number as unsuitable. Another sixteen soon volunteered. Within weeks Casey had more recruits than he could handle.

  Casey's challenge was to get the scouts to think as a unit, instead of functioning in battle as independent individuals, and to teach them fundamental skills that they tended to find repugnant, such as building cabins and gardening. At first the Indian troops lived with their families in tepees and tents on the bank of the Yellowstone River about a mile and a half from the fort. Casey led them into nearby mountains to cut trees so they could build their own cantonment. Other soldiers helped them float nearly three thousand logs downriver. Frederic Remington, an artist, magazine correspondent, novelist, and denizen of various troubled parts of the West who wrote for such popular magazines as Century and Harper's Weekly, described the results of their work in a magazine article.

  I saw a long line of well-constructed log buildings, corrals, and stables, also a large garden fenced and cultivated. I entered the houses and saw comfort and cleanliness. I saw smiling faces and laughing children. I saw perfectly kept cavalry arms and accoutrements, and fine Indian soldiers, who stood like bronze statues, and saluted in the best possible form, while never a muscle of their stern faces twitched, and they looked a soldier, and felt a soldier, and were in fact the finest I had ever seen. I saw them mount and fall in and drill in admirable shape, all by a sign of Lieutenant Casey's right hand, because they do not understand English well enough. I admired the indomitabl
e zeal of Lieutenant Casey, and hoped his work would lead to greater things. Indeed, if he were properly supported, why could not Fort Keogh be abandoned at some future day, and why could not Casey and his company of the First Irregular Cavalry do the work of the garrison, and let the Eighth Cavalry and the Twenty-second Infantry go to Fort Snelling, and there perfect themselves, so that when we call for the skeleton of our army organization in time of war, we will find it worthy to be built on to.29

  In a May 1890 letter to his brother Thomas, Casey wrote with pride of his troops: "Some of them have never handled an axe in their lives. Yet the first forenoon I put them to work they cut 275 logs. I had 18 axes when I made them stop as I had more than I could haul with my few teams."30The following July, he wrote again: "My Indians have done splendidly. They have worked harder by far more than [sic] white recruits would have done under the same circumstances." 31

  Casey soon found that the Cheyenne were more diligent in meeting their responsibilities than was the U.S. Army. He persistently complained to Thomas that the army had not sent promised equipment. Once he asked Thomas to use his influence to get uniforms that were two months overdue. "Pardon this letter Tom," he wrote. "It is one string of 'wants'—but what can a miserable Lieutenant do single handed especially when he is in the wilderness."32

  One thing he did was pay for his troop's general expenses from his own beleaguered pocket. But Casey offered his scouts more than financial support. When Colonel Swaine commandeered the wagons Casey was using to move logs and supplies at the Indian camp, the lieutenant persuaded Swaine's superiors to order the colonel to give back the wagons. Casey also sided with the Indians in disputes with civilians. In one case he filed a complaint with the post commander on behalf of an Indian boy who was assaulted by the son of the fort's hospital matron. And when three of Casey's scouts were accused of killing a rancher, Casey scraped the bottom of his pocketbook to help pay for their legal defense. He also determined to investigate the scene of the shooting personally, even though it was three hundred miles from the fort. To his brother Thomas he wrote:

  Lieutenant Casey (seated on a tree branch) with his new Indian scouts, camped in 1889 on the Yellowstone River west of Fort Keogh. (Christian Barthelmess, Montana Historical Society, Helena)

  The Cheyennes have been charged with the murder of a white man. Three of my scouts have been arrested. I believe it is a put up plan on the part of rich cattlemen to oust the Cheyennes from their Reservation. I see by the papers they have sent their representative to the Secretary of War for more troops to protect the settlers. On my honor as an officer there is no more need of protection for those miserable rascals than there is for your family now. The cattlemen are working this for all it's worth. . . . A number of the officers came to me and told me they would subscribe towards the expense of council [sic] for the Indians now in jail. I have employed council & we will see the Cheyenne have a fair play as long as our money lasts but we can never stand against the cattlemen. Could not the Indian Dept. lend a hand in some way—if only for the sake of fair play and simple justice. These people are bound to hang some body [sic] and they do not care whether it is a guilty or innocent party. As soon as I get my camp established I will leave [Lieutenant Robert] Getty in charge and go to the scene of the murder to collect evidence for the defense. It is a 300 mile trip & I dread it but there is no body [sic] else to go or that will go.33

  Casey's concern for his scouts paid off in their response to his training. Remington described Casey's men, whom he first saw on a cool Montana morning at Fort Keogh: "Patter, patter, patter—clank, clank, clank; up comes the company of Cheyenne scouts who are to escort the general—fine-looking, tall young men, with long hair, and mounted on small Indian ponies. They were dressed and accoutered as United States soldiers, and they fill the eye of a military man until nothing is lacking."34

  In December 1890 Fort Keogh shrugged off the tranquil regularity of peacetime life. The Lakota, scattered across six reservations in South Dakota and into North Dakota, were engaged in the frenzied religious dancing that newspaper editors, nervous settlers, and skittish reservation administrators interpreted as a prelude to "a Sioux outbreak." Nelson Miles, now a general headquartered in Chicago as commander of the army district that included the Dakotas, began pouring troops into the Lakota reservations as winter began. When the shooting started at Wounded Knee, Miles had 3,500 men ready to fight and 2,000 more in reserve. Add to that number a few hundred Indian troops, and he had more than a fifth of the entire U.S. Army concentrated primarily on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation. Nothing like this buildup had been seen in the United States since the Civil War.35

  Casey received orders on December 12, 1890, to lead his men to the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, where the most zealous of the Lakota dancers were concentrated. He wrote his brother Thomas, "Our orders are to capture the Sioux, which of course means fight should we meet them. . . . I hope and pray my Scouts will acquit themselves well as so much will depend upon their example." 36The "much" that made him fretful was a bill Congress had just passed authorizing the enlistment of one thousand Indian recruits.

  Casey and his men rode out of Fort Keogh on Sunday morning, December 14.37He was eager to test the mettle of his troops in the field. A week later he wrote from Pine Ridge to Nettie Atchison: "My scouts have behaved splendidly. . . . They are full of fight and I think I can make a good showing when the time comes. If I don't, I don't care to come back."38

  CHAPTER 2

  Conflict on the Plains

  PLENTY HORSES IN 1891 GAVE his age as twenty-two, suggesting that he may have been born in 1868 or 1869, because the Lakota measured their lives by winters rather than calendar years. They gave each year the name of an event important to them or their tribe, although different individuals kept differently named winter counts. The Miniconjou Iron Shell called 1868 the Year Fish's Wife Died. Eighteen sixty-nine was the Year the Sun Died.1A count kept by another Miniconjou, based on his people's history, covered the years 1781 to 1932.2He called 1868 the Year Fifteen People—meaning Lakota—Were Killed (in a battle with the Crow Indians). He called 1869 the Year Thirty Crows Were Killed.

  If Plenty Horses was born in the Year the Sun Died, the name was fitting, because in 1869 the world of the Brulé Lakota—his people—had began to spin out of orbit. The Brulé would soon give up their life of freedom and of the hunt, of wandering across wild lands and of warfare, and begin life on the reservation. For them, as for all Lakota, the reservation would be a twilight world where the old ways were well remembered but impossible to follow.

  LONG BEFORE THE LAKOTA BECAME the masters of the northern plains they had lived much farther to the east, perhaps in the Ohio Valley or even in the Southeast. They were pushed out of there late in the fifteenth century by the well-organized and powerful Iroquois. By the 1600s they were living in what is now northern Minnesota, hunting in the forest and gathering wild rice in marshes.3Colonial Europeans found them there and came to know them as the Sioux, a name derived from the Ojibwa word nadoweisiw, for snake—and meaning, in this context, enemy.

  The Sioux had become a powerful force in their region. They were divided into seven tribes: the Mdewakanton, Sisseton, Wahpekute, and Wahpeton, collectively known as the Santee; the Yankton and Yanktonais; and the Teton. They called themselves "the allies," although tribal dialects varied the name. Among the Santee it was "Dakota." The Yankton and Yanktonais rendered it "Nakota," and the Teton, "Lakota."4They warred successfully on neighboring Cree and Ojibwa until the arrival of the French and English in the Great Lakes region abruptly changed the balance of power.5By the 1650s the Ojibwa and Cree, in regular contact with the Europeans, were trading furs for firearms. The more distant and isolated Sioux, lacking access to guns, soon found themselves fighting with arrows against rifles.

  Staggering under the effects of European weaponry, Sioux tribes one by one began leaving the Mississippi headwaters, eventually crossing the Minnesota River and going first south and then
west toward more open country, where they found vast herds of buffalo, creatures that offered huge amounts of meat as well as hides for clothing and shelter.6Around 1700 the Tetons, who became known as the Lakota, joined this westward movement, which continued for roughly a century as they spread across the plains and even beyond the Missouri River, pushing out other Indian peoples, such as the Omaha and Iowa, and evolving into wandering hunters ever in search of game, particularly buffalo. As the eighteenth century progressed, fur companies began sponsoring annual trade fairs on the plains, giving the Lakota access to firearms.7Then, late in that century, the Lakota encountered another of the benefits of European contact: the horse.

  Horses had originated in the New World and had emigrated into Siberia and across Asia millions of years before humans arrived in North America. When the ancestors of the American Indians arrived in the New World, at least fifteen thousand years ago, horses were extinct in North and South America. But they survived in Eurasia, where they were widely hunted for food until agricultural peoples started to domesticate them about six thousand years ago. They soon became draft animals, pulling wagons, and also were used for riding. The Spanish first brought the horse back to North America early in the 1500s. Ponce de Leon took horses with him to Florida, and the conquistadores who invaded the Southwest brought in herds of horses and began breeding them. Some horses escaped, and some were traded to the Indians.8

  One turning point for the horse in North America, and therefore for the Indians, was the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which sedentary, agricultural tribes in what is now New Mexico drove out the Spanish, who had virtually enslaved them. The Spanish left horses in their wake, and the Indians quickly took advantage of these animals. The more nomadic tribes of the Southwest, such as the Apache, became master horsemen. Through trade and theft, horses passed from tribe to tribe, arriving in the northern plains, where they fell into the hands of the Lakota.9