Military

Non-State War: The War Against The Plains Indians

 

 

CSC 1995

 

SUBJECT AREA - History

 

             

             

                            EXECUTIVE  SUMMARY

 

 

 

Title: Non-State War: The War Against the Plains Indians.

 

 

Author: Major William W. Bennett. Special Forces, United States Army.

 

 

Thesis: Examination of the condct of the United States government's war

against the Plains Indians will shed light on the current problems faced by

modern warriors dealing with non-state war.

 

 

Background: An early example of non-state warfare faced by the United States

was the war conducted against the indigenous people of the American frontier.

This paper will examine what led to the political-military  successes against one

group of those people, the Plains Indians, between 1866 end 1891. I have

provided an historic example of the weaknesses in the ability of the state to defeat

the non-state unless the state wishes to completely destroy the culture of the

non-state. The only succsses the state has had in defeating non-state enemies,

short of cultural eradication, has been when the state separates the non-state

enemy from its popular support. The only way that the state can accomplish this,

is through understanding the socio-cultural relationship between the non-state

enemy end its popular support. Such understanding will permit identification of

seams or weaknesses in that linkage, and permit exploitation politically,

socially, culturally, psychologically, economically, militarily end temporally.

When the state can package all these facets of national power end focus them on

the seams between the non-state enemy and its popular support, the state will be

successful. If the state fails to develop this synergy, it will fail.

 

 

Recommendation: Examine the non-state enemy, determine if there is a seam

his popular support end exploit it to do otherwise will result in failure or the

eradication of the non-state's culture.

 

     NON-STATE WAR:  THE WAR AGAINST THE PLAINS INDIANS

 

 

     The military record of the modern nation-state in state versus state

 

warfare is excellent; nations fight other nations with great success.

 

Unfortunately, the record against nonstate actors is less impressive.1 Recent

 

examples abound. Compare the results of the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq

 

and against the clans in Somalia, the British successs in the Falklands and the

 

campaign in Northern Ireland, or the successful Israeli campaigns against the

 

Arab States and the its inability to quell the Intifada.

 

     In each of these cases, the end result was the same. Despite being

 

militarily superior, a national military failed to defeat the non-state enemy.

 

Unable to force decisive battle, each national military eventually negotiated a

 

face-saving settlement, then abandoned the field to the non-state enemy.

 

     An early example of non-state warfare faced by the United States was the

 

war conducted against the indigenous people of the American frontier. This paper

 

will examine what led to the political-military success against one group of

 

those people, the Plains Indians, between 1866 end 1891. Examination of the

 

conduct of this war may shed some light on the current problems faced by modern

 

warriors dealing with non-state war.

 

                                          BACKGROUND

                     

     The conduct of the Civil War had prepared the United States Army to

 

employ a strategy of annihilation in its wars against the Indians because of

 

political, economic and social reasons. Post Civil War national policy eventually

 

imposed this approach on the American Indian. Until the Civil War, the

 

conscious purpose of the United States government in its relations with the Indian

 

nations was not to eliminate them but to move them out of territory desirable to

 

the white man end into lends where the white man was not yet ready to venture,

 

or where he would "never" settle.

 

     An Office of Commissioner of Indian Affairs existed in the War

 

Department, end a policy was taking shape for the office to administer. In 1825

 

Secretary of War Calhoun had recommended that the "Great American Desert"

 

area be set aside as a permanent Indian Country, and the eastern Indians be

 

moved there to find a permanent home. In 1830 Congress authorized the

 

President to exchange land beyond the Mississippi for lands held by the Indian

 

tribes in the east. President Andrew Jackson began a vigorous program of

 

negotiating removal treaties with the eastern nations, most of which were too

 

enfeebled and too hemmed in by overpowering numbers of whites to resist. The

 

Cherokees caused some trouble, end the resistance of the Seminoles, which

 

brought on the Seminole War of 1836-42, was a major exception to the general

 

acquiescence. But the Army escorted most of the eastern tribes westward during

 

the 1830s, with immense suffering and appalling loss of life.2

 

     To underwrite the idea of the permanency of the Indian Country, the

 

Indian Intercourse Act of 1834 forbade the intrusion of unauthorized white men

 

into Indian Country, while providing government agencies and schools to assist

 

the Indians. By 1840 the government had reasonably determined the boundary of

 

the Indian Country, and for the time being the strategic problem of the Army

 

regarding the Indian nations became that of guarding a border which amounted

 

almost to an international frontier.3

 

     Through the 1840s most Americans believed that the bulk of the Great

 

Plains which made up the Indian Country was unsuitable to agriculture end,

 

therefore, to white settlement. During the 1850s, the western expansion began

 

to erode the policy of the permanent Indian Country. After the Mexican War and

 

the Oregon settlement, the Indian Country no longer marked the effective western

 

boundary of the United States, but separated two parts of the United States, the

 

East from the Far West of California and Oregon. No such arrangement was likely

 

to remain permanent. The California gold rush immensely increased white

 

emigration over the trails westward through Indian Country, so much so that the

 

buffalo herds began to avoid the trails, consequently altering the environment and

 

Indian economy of the country.

 

     In 1849 the government transferred the Office of Indian Affairs to the

 

westerner dominated Department of the interior. White men along the border of

 

the Indian country and travelers passing through it ware learning that much of it

 

was not as unsuitable as white settlers had believed, especially the well-watered

 

grasslands in the eastern part of it.  Conseuently, the United States drew up

 

treaties with the Indian nations during the 1850s to define the boundaries

 

between the various nations. These treaties nibbled away at the Indian Country.

 

For example, the treaty with the Sioux in Minnesota restricted them to a

 

reservation 150 miles long but only 10 miles wide along the Minnesota River.

 

Despite these treaties the Indians remained sufficiently undisturbed in Indian

 

Country with only a few serious armed clashes between Indians end white

 

soldiers marring the decade of the fifties.4

 

     From 1851 to 1853 the government negotiated the Fort Laramie and Fort

 

Atkinson treaties with all the the major tribal groups of the plains. The

 

objective was no longer to separate whites and Indians by an artifical barrier.

 

Now the government not only intended to clear the Indians away from white travel

 

routes and keep them off white settlements, but to restrict them to specific areas

 

called "territories." Policy makers were beginning to look to a time when the

 

reservation would serve not only to control the Indians but to "civilize" them as

 

well.5

 

     In 1861 the majority of white soldiers left their posts on the Indian

 

border to travel eastward and fight in the Civil War. Local volunteers from the

 

western states and the territories replaced the Regular Army in garrisoning the

 

border forts. In the eyes of the Indians, the volunteers seemed more vulnerable

 

then the professionals, and they were more likely to bear malice toward the

 

Indians. These developments occurred just as limitations over their territory

 

angered the Sioux in Minnesota, and as the consequences of white emigration

 

across their ranges to the gold fields in the central Rockies began to impact on the

 

Cheyenne and Kiowa, between the Arkansas end South Platte rivers.

 

     In August,1862, the anger of the Sioux culminated in a mascre of

 

whites around their reservation along the Minnesota River. Minnesota

 

volunteers were able to repulse Sioux attacks on Fort Ridgely and New Ulm and

 

then to suppress the uprising. Here the weight of white population was already

 

great enough to be decisive as it had earlier been east of the Mississippi. In the

 

new territory of Colorado in the Rocky Mountains, misunderstandings and armed

 

clashes between the Indians and the settlers provoked the raising of regiments of

 

Colorado volunteeers who not only pacified the Indians but massacred many of

 

them in the process.6

 

     By the time the Regular Army returned to the Indian frontier in 1865-

 

66, the policy of the permanent Indian territory was obsolete. The Homestead

 

Act of 1862 opened the prospect of cheap farmsteads throughout the national

 

domain. The idea of the Great American Desert had changed from a negative to a

 

positive one. By 1865, the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific Railroads were

 

working their way westward from Omaha and Kansas City into the Indian

 

Country, carrying homesteaders and revolutionizing the Army's old problems of

 

mobility and logistics in the West.

 

     Federal policy could no longer be one of removal of the Indians to some

 

distant place. There was no place left to relocate them. The remaining options

 

were extremely difficult.  White men who knew the Indians and were sympathetic

 

toward them such as William Bent and Kit Carson, began to believe that if

 

Indians were to live close to white men, they must abandon their own way of life

 

and take up way of life of the white man. Otherwise, there could be no lasting

 

peace between the white men and Indians, for their cultures and their economies

 

were incompatible; and if the white men continued invading the Indian Country

 

without the Indians' adopting white ways, the white man would eventually

 

exterminate the Indian.7

 

     While the government developed long-range policies, the immediate

 

military problem after the Civil War was the protection of the white man's trails

 

through the Indian Country. The increasing numbers of white men traversing the

 

trails, the new railroads along the trails, and the resulting increase in

 

restlessness of the Indians who began to discern the coming calamity to their

 

independence and their way of life, served to exacerbate the problem.

 

     During the war, John M. Bozeman had opened a trail to take miners from

 

the Oregon Trail on the North Platte River through the Powder River country and

 

up the Yellowstone to newly discovered gold fields around Virginia City, Montana

 

Territory. The trail led through the domain of the most powerful of all Plains

 

Indian nations, the Teton Sioux or Teton Dakotas.

 

     The Chippewas had pushed the Sioux out of the forest country of Minnesota

 

in the early days of the white man's westward expansion, when the Chippewas had

 

acquired firearms, but the Sioux had not.  The Sioux had adopted superbly to the

 

plains and had become excellent horsemen and mounted warriors. The Sioux made

 

the Bozeman Trail extremely perilous, and during the Civil War the Army was

 

not able to do much to protect it.  In 1866 the Regular Army initiated a major

 

effort to safeguard the trail, strengthening Fort Reno at the crossing of the main

 

branch of the Powder River and building Fort Phil Kearnay and Fort C.F. Smith

 

farther up the trail. Red Cloud ably led the Sioux who ware fierce and determined

 

to keep white travelers off their range. The Army only consisted of

 

approximately 57,000 officers and men and could only make a token effort to

 

police the conquered South, and defend the Indian border and keep the trails

 

through Indian Country open. About 7O0 men of the 18th infantry guarded the

 

Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud's Sioux put the soldiers effectively under siege, and on

 

December 21, 1866, the Indians wiped out all eighty men of a detachment under

 

Captain William Fetterman who ventured out of Fort Phil Kearny to protect a

 

woodcutting party.8

 

     The commanding general of the Military Division of the Missouri,

 

encompassing the Indian Country, was Lieutenant General Sherman. Sherman

 

reacted to the Fetterman fight with a characteristic proposal for a long-range

 

policy to deal with the Sioux: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against

 

the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."9 Sherman

 

spoke in anger and embarrassmnet over Fettermans's defeat, but his subsequent

 

policies made it clear that he was not simply speaking in the heat of the moment.

 

     Instead of following Sherman's prescription, Congress responded to the

 

Fetterman fight by creating the 1867 Peace Commision to negotiate for the

 

restoration of order. The purpose of the commission was to deal with the Sioux

 

and other restless northern tribes, and with the Cheyennne and other southern

 

tribes still fighting in Colorado. But the means of restoring peace proposed by

 

Congress, nevertheless, implied the elimination of the Indian nations as

 

sovereign politles and military powers.  A Congressional Committee recommended

 

dealing with Indians as individuals rather than as nations and eliminating the

 

Indian Country by concentrating the Indians on much more restricted

                     

reservations. The Peace Commisssioners spent the summers of 1867 and 1868

 

on the Plains attempting to persuade the Indians to retreat into reservations

 

whose boundaries would open a large central area of the old Indian Country to

 

white settlers and their railroads.10

 

     Enough Indian leaders had some inkling of the whites potential power that

 

the Peace Commissioners enjoyed considerable succss, at least in securing

 

agreement to treaties. Red Cloud of the Sioux signed a treaty on November 6,

 

1868, only after the Army had abandoned the Bozeman Trail and the United States

 

had agreed that the Powder River country should remain unceded Indian country,

 

closed to whites, not a mere reservation.11

 

     The Army remained as undermanned as before the Civil War in proportion

 

to the vastness of the Indian territory it had to police. In 1869, another

 

reduction followed, resulting in a total force in the neighborhood of 25,000

 

which remained constant until the Spanish-American War.

 

     The new policy of abolishing the Indian Country and forcing the tribes into

 

limited reservations did ease the military problems of strategy. Before the Civil

 

War, the Army largely had to confine itself to passive patrolling of the Indian

 

boundary. The disproportion between its small numbers and the extent of

 

territory to be patrolled imposed special hardship. In contrast, the new policy

 

implied that the Army would focus on the offensive, to force the Indians into their

 

reservations, and to punish them if they did not go promptly or if they wandered

 

astray. On the offensive, the Army could choose its targets, and by concentrating

 

its limited strength increase its effectiveness.

 

     The weaker tribes immediately felt the effects of their acceptance of the

 

reservations and treaty limitations. They could not venture across the

 

emigration routes westward. General Grant, still the Commanding General of the

 

Army, said in 1868 that the Army would protect the routes "even if the

 

extermination of every Indian tribe was necessary to secure such a result."12

 

     In the fall of 1868, the commander of the Department of the Platte, Major

 

General Philip Sheridan, prepared to force into the reservations the Indians of

 

four principal southern nations: the Southern Cheyenne, the Arapeho, the Kiowa,

 

and the Comanche. The strategy Sheridan chose was an innovative one for an

 

Indian campaign, reflecting his and Sherman's experience in carrying war to the

 

enemy's resources and people'.  He would wage a winter campaign, thus striking

 

when the Indian's grass-fed ponies were weak from lack of sustenance and the

 

Indians' mobility was at a low ebb. He would strike against the fixed camps in

 

which the Indians huddled against the rigors of winter. The camps would then

 

either submit to him, or if their occupants fled, he would destroy the provisions

 

they had accumulated for the winter and starve them into helplessness. To

 

execute this strategy, Sheridan planned for three columns to converge upon the

 

Indian camps scattered through the northern Texas panhandle and the extreme

 

western part of Indian Territory (presently Oklahoma). The plan succeeded with

 

brutal efficiency. It included Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's

 

destruction of the camp of the friendly Cheyenne chieftain Black Kettle on the

 

Washita River on November 29. This action pleased Sheridan's immediate

 

superior, General Sherman. Just before the campaign opened, he told his

 

brother, "The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next

 

war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all

 

have to be killed or maintained as a species of paupers. Their attempts at

 

civilization are simply ridiculous."13 After the campaign, Sherman told his

 

officers he was

 

 

      ... well satisfied with Custer's attack.... I want you all to go ahead, kill

and punish the hostile, rescue the captive white women and children, capture and

destroy the ponies, lances, carbines &c &c of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes and

Kiowas; mark out the spots where they must stay,and then systematize the

whole (friendly and hostile) into camps with a view to economical support until

we can try to get them to be self-supporting like the Cherokees and Choctaws.14

 

     The reservation system dissolved tribal sovereignty and military power

 

and reduced the source of the Plains Indians' economy, the buffalo herds, from

 

which the Indians took food, clothing, and shelter. The advance of the railroads

 

into the Plains greatly increased the opportunity for indiscriminate hunting of

 

buffalo as a sport.  In 1871 a tannery discovered a way to turn buffalo hides into

 

good leather, redoubling the white man's slaughter of the buffalo to obtain hides.

 

The consequent threat to their livelihood mobilized the southern Plains Indians to

 

attack white buffalo hunters outside their reservations. The Army responded

 

with another campaign, the Red River War of 1874-75, aimed at the

 

destruction of the Indians' military power and ability to live their indepedent

 

way of life.

 

     Sheridan, now a lieutenant general commanding the Division of the

 

Missouri, again ordered a cold-weather campaign. Again he sent converging

 

columns against the Indians in the north Texas panhandle, this time from the

 

south as well as north, east, and west. Again the Army destroyed the Indians'

 

winter camps to deprive them of sustenance and shelter. This time the Army

 

followed its attacks by shipping Indian leaders to exile in Florida. The Red River

 

War, combined with the extermination of the buffalo, fulfilled its purpose,

 

destroying the independence of the southern Plains tribes.15

 

     The independence of the northern tribes, even of the redoubtable Sioux,

 

was shortly to suffer the same demise. In 1864 President Lincoln signed a bill

 

chartering a second transcontinental railroad, the Northern Pacific.  The railroad

 

began building in 1870, and by 1872 it was approaching Montana Territory. A

 

preliminary survey indicated that the most feasible route through the territory

               

was the course of the Yellowstone River, within the unceded domain of the Sioux.

 

Commissioners sent to negotiate with the Sioux early in 1873  found them

 

unwilling to grant a right of way.  Nevertheless, a column of more than 1,500

 

soldiers under Colonel D. S. Stanley escorted surveyors far up the Yellowstone

 

during the summer. The Panic of 1873 kept the railroad temporarily at

 

Bismarck, Dakota Territory. But the next year Lieutenant Colonel Custer, who

 

had been with Stanley, led ten companies of the 7th Cavalry and two companies of

 

infantry into the Black Hills to find a suitable site for a fort to protect the

 

railroad.

 

     The Custer expedition also included geologists to investigate rumors that

 

there was gold in the Black Hills, and Custer sent back somewhat

 

overenthusiastic reports that there was. These reports naturally touched off a

 

gold rush, which sent hundreds of prospectors into the Black Hills by the

 

following summer. All of this was dangerous business, because the Black Hills

 

were not only part of the unceded Sioux territory; they were also sacred to the

 

Indians. 16

 

     In September, 1875, federal commissioners made another effort to

 

persuade the Sioux to open their country to white men, and this time to sell the

 

Black Hills as well. The commissioners accomplished nothing and were lucky to

 

escape a threat against their lives. Their angry report encouraged the

 

Commissioner of Indian Affairs in November to order all Indians to return to

 

their reservations and report to their agencies by January 31. The order should

 

hardly have been applicable to the Sioux, for those Sioux bands that were not on

 

reservations were in their own uncoded country. Furthermore, the months from

 

November to January were the wrong time for Plains Indians to travel.

 

Nevertheless, the government assumed those Indians not on reservations by

 

January 31, 1876 were at war with the United States, and General Sheridan

 

planned a punitive expedition, three columns, from east, south, and west, to

 

converge on the Souix and drive them into reservations.17

 

      The southern column, under Brigadier General George Crook, met a

 

repulse when its advance guard attacked a camp of Northern Cheyennes on March

 

17 and suffered defeat.  This action also had the effect of pushing the previously

 

quiet Northern Cheyennes into an alliance of convenience with the Sioux. The

 

other Army columns did not move until the return of warm weather, and then

 

they found even more trouble.  With the heart of their homeland under attack, the