Sitting Bull's War, page 7
Shortly after the observant Wolf Ears departed the Indian camps on the Yellowstone, some two hundred lodges of Black Moon’s and Long Dog’s Hunkpapas went north to Fort Peck, where in December they drew rations. There were no buffalo in that vicinity or on the Yellowstone, the local agent observed, and the people were hungry. The agent also acknowledged that Sitting Bull and fourteen other lodges were camped at the head of the Red Water River, some fifty miles away. Some of those Hunkpapas may have been among those noted by Wolf Ears as trailing north at the time of his visit. The agent observed that these people preferred peace and provisions over further warfare and starvation, and in addition to rations he was liberally distributing clothing and blankets.42
On one occasion in December, Black Moon and the Fort Peck agent conversed about the Baker fight, as the Arrow Creek episode of August 14 was coming to be known among the Whites. Black Moon told him that some 1,400 warriors had participated in the clash, and that they had actually started out intending to fight Crows but learned of those soldiers and charged them instead. Black Moon’s number does not comport with other accounts, but that his people still fixated on the Crows resonates. In some Lakota circles, enmity with that old enemy remained more important than stopping a railroad, although the agent closed his letter predicting that opposition to the Northern Pacific Railroad should be expected next year, particularly from the south, meaning from tradition-minded Indians other than the Hunkpapas.43
Other government officials were seeing matters much the same way. A particularly telling insight penned by an officer with Stanley that summer said all. In a letter to his wife written while still in the field, Clarence Bennett of the Seventeenth Infantry predicted that “We are going to have a big Sioux War. Next year will be the death struggle of the Sioux. We will have to put in this country a great many hundred troops by the thousands to whip them effectually for all time.” Bennett was correct in part. There would be a big Sioux war. But he underestimated the number of troops required for it by a few thousand.44
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As tumultuous as events had proved to be for the Northern Indians in the Yellowstone country, chaos of another sort dominated the lives of the Southern Lakotas at much the same time. Since the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty, the Oglalas and Brulés willing to attach themselves to an agency, even if only seasonally or when not hunting buffalo in the Republican River Basin or the Powder River country as permitted by the treaty, squabbled over agency locations as variously proposed. The government preferred the Missouri, where the Brulés were now congregating because annuities could be delivered there more easily by steamboat, or at Fort Laramie, long the preferred trading home of the Oglalas. While Sitting Bull’s followers eyed Métis traders and railroaders, Red Cloud’s Oglalas were relocated down the North Platte River to a location in Nebraska thirty miles east of Fort Laramie, and then moved again northward in the Pine Ridge country. Spotted Tail, meanwhile, finessed the relocation of his people westward from the Missouri, which he disliked for numerous reasons, to more welcome locations along the White River and in the Pine Ridge.
This wrangling over agency locations for the Oglalas and Brulés vexed the government until 1873, when all parties agreed to respective agencies along the White River in Nebraska’s Pine Ridge. That they were located in Nebraska and not on the Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota perplexed many people, especially land-hungry Nebraskans, but momentary contentment justified the decision for the time being. The locations came to be known as Red Cloud Agency and Spotted Tail Agency, or collectively often simply as the White River or Pine Ridge agencies. Red Cloud Agency was located eighty-two miles northeast of Fort Laramie, and roughly 125 miles north of the Union Pacific Railroad line at Sidney, Nebraska. Spotted Tail Agency was more distant, 125 miles from Fort Laramie and 170 miles from Sidney. In a parallel interim measure, the Northern Cheyennes and Northern Arapahos also received rations and annuities at the Oglala agency, which they too called the White River Agency. Both agencies were endlessly chaotic and figured deeply in coming events, as did a well-scored trail westward from both places heading into the buffalo country of the Powder, a pathway soon to be known variously as the Red Cloud or Powder River Trail.45
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In the Yellowstone country, Lakota problems with the Métis surfaced again. In April 1873 Métis men fired on several young Lakotas, wounding one and capturing his horse. Sitting Bull sent ten scouts to locate the interlopers who were discovered corralled at the mouth of the Rosebud on the south bank of the Yellowstone. He followed his scouts with one hundred warriors to the Métis corral. They rather immediately found it impenetrable. Its defenders were well-armed, including with a small cannon. The fight that ensued was an unequal confrontation. The Sioux were mostly armed with bows and arrows and a few old trade guns. The Slotas were armed with long-range guns and plenty of powder. At best a few Slota horses were killed, but the Sioux suffered greatly, with nine named warriors killed among others whose names are forgotten. Many more were wounded. Finally, as White Bull recalled, Sitting Bull cried out an order: “We have fought enough. We can do no more. Let’s go home.” This time the young men obeyed him.46
Peaceful trading with the Métis was a paradoxical thing. Not all Métis had befriended the Sioux and not all Sioux were as acquainted with them and their ways as were the Hunkpapas. What the Sioux feared most was the Métis’ capacity to kill buffalo. They made regular hunting forays throughout the year and killed animals by the thousands, serving market needs almost exclusively and taking meats and fats, and retaining the skins in season. Summer skins were valueless and the wastage was astounding. No one was more destructive, thought White Bull. This alone may have been an overriding consideration prompting the Rosebud confrontation. As White Bull told of it, Métis caravans were not known to venture this far south into Sioux Country, and their doing so now was costly—to the Sioux.47
The Métis episode also revealed a critical dimension of Lakota life that vexed them now and throughout the coming war: They lacked dependable access to modern weaponry, fixed ammunition, and loose powder and lead. By whatever source, serving that need was complicated, and timing was always an issue especially in the coming years when the government carefully regulated agency arms trading or banned it outright. That, in turn, led to a near total dependence on the illegal marketplace inevitably existing in the back country. Access concerns merely laid atop the parallel issue of the enormous costs associated with acquiring weapons and munitions. Addressing this with a people the Lakotas befriended one day and warred against the next only complicated matters.
Gall was among those who frequented the agencies. In April 1873 he visited Fort Peck and openly traded furs for arms and ammunition. Reportedly, he had access to all he was able to pay for. The medium of exchange was, as always, tanned buffalo robes. The business peeved military authorities. Colonel Stanley, who learned of Gall’s presence at Fort Peck and had fought him the previous fall, labeled it an issue of gravity. The notion, he suggested, of the Indian department prohibiting arms sales was a “dead letter” because traders at those places would never refuse arms and ammunition to Indians. An army surgeon familiar with the matter was similarly outraged, writing several years later specifically of the illegal trading occurring at Fort Peck. “Since 1872,” he wrote, “some parties have stationed themselves at that place for the purpose of obtaining a monopoly in bartering with the Sioux, and the only inducement to bring their customers forward was the offer of arms—Winchester rifles.”48
In defending himself later that fall, Fort Peck agent A. J. Simmons revealed some of the complexities inherent in regulating such trade on the Milk River Reservation. This was foremost the designated home of Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Indians. Many Mountain and River Crows who had yet to be congregated on the Crow Reservation south of the Yellowstone were also there, as were even some scattered Yanktonai and Santee Sioux from the Missouri River in Dakota. These people were not hostile, Simmons declared, but extremely friendly and well-disposed to the Whites. Hunting, for them, was an essential element of agency life and self-support. The agent noted the existing multiple outlets for the legal trade of firearms by firms properly permitted to do so and who were duly submitting monthly reports on their sales. The agent was discreetly silent on the well-known Métis trade occurring simultaneously on the margins of the reservation and sometimes even within its bounds. How Gall got his guns and ammunition can only be surmised.49
Among the Northern Indians, this matter of arms trading was not confined to Fort Peck. In mid-July the Grand River agent similarly reported a pleading coming from his charges that they be furnished with quantities of powder and ball for hunting purposes. “They are much in need of many articles they manufacture from the skins obtained by hunting.” This agent was relatively new and at a loss what to do.50
The Grand River agent’s puzzling query came on the heels of an outburst of hostilities occurring that May and June at Fort Abraham Lincoln, the renamed and expanded Fort McKeen. The post had been directly fired upon on two separate occasions, and those episodes were followed by another incident on June 17 when a surveying party working along the Heart River was attacked and forced to retire to the safety of the post. The garrison was duly mustered on each occasion, and army accounts said five warriors were killed and eleven others wounded altogether. The army reported losing only one of its own killed, an Arikara scout. A party of Sioux Indians numbering nearly one hundred was implicated in the episodes. Gall’s name was linked to the Heart River encounter.51
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As Gall had dogged the army column in 1872 on its return from the Yellowstone, so did he and a band of warriors again shadow a new column a year later as it ambled westward, apparently again bound for the buffalo country. This time warriors at first were rarely seen aside from pony tracks. Lakota camps farther west were well alerted to this sequential invasion, which had been foreshadowed, too, by the incessant, annoying movement of steamboats on the Yellowstone beginning in early June, depositing supplies and forage at an army camp established first at the mouth of Glendive Creek and then moved to the south bank of the Yellowstone eight miles upriver. One boat ventured farther upstream to the Wolf Rapids, just downstream of the mouth of the Powder. The Lakotas knew of such boats on the Missouri, but they were rarely seen on this long reach of the Lower Yellowstone.52
The soldiers from the east made their way to the Yellowstone and the mouth of the Powder without interruption. Their particular interests were west of there, in a reach of the Yellowstone Valley not yet explored by railroad surveyors, and they especially focused their attention on the north bank of the river. Most of the traditionals were then camped in the Rosebud drainage farther along. All were aware of these soldiers, even while the Hunkpapas remained transfixed by the lingering Métis, who had not yet departed the Yellowstone country.53
Soon, however, all bands turned their attention to this looming soldier threat. From camps along the Yellowstone, warriors tracked the soldier advance, and on August 4 just upstream of the mouth of the Tongue a small band confronted a party of blue coats who had advanced well ahead of their wagons. As those soldiers lazed in the hot midday sun several warriors attempted to run off their horses and they taunted the Whites to fight. The soldiers charged the attackers but the warriors stood their ground, even though well exposed, and then withdrew to a dense copse behind them. As the Whites advanced they quickly confronted 250 warriors, mostly Miniconjous with a few Hunkpapas and Brulés, who emerged from the cottonwoods. Both sides backed off and the exchange of fire degenerated into a fight not unlike the Arrow Creek encounter, sparked by long-range shooting, taunts, and individual dashes into the open to demonstrate daring. Neither side gained an advantage.54
When the fighting opened not all the soldiers and wagons of the strung-out column had come up, and Rain in the Face, a thirty-eight-year-old Hunkpapa warrior, seized an opportunity to harass other blue coats still coming on. With five or six others they circled downstream and confronted two men riding alone far ahead of the others. The warriors killed them both, one with arrows in the back and the other with a death blow to the head. Those were the only two Whites killed this day, and although neither man was mutilated or scalped their pockets were rifled and their horses and equipment taken. Rain in the Face was ever after linked to the killing of one of them, a civilian named John Honsinger, an army veterinary surgeon. The Hunkpapa never shied from this claim and later brandished a watch and saddle recognized as belonging to the veterinarian. In Indian Country that claim was disputed, however, with some holding that a warrior named Prairie Chicken killed the man.55
The assembling mass of soldiers this day was daunting and after three or four hours warrior gunfire diminished and then ceased altogether. Warriors fired the grass behind them and disappeared, the rising curtain of blue smoke from the dense green grass quickly shrouding the scene. No known Indian account of the day mentions their own casualties, but soldiers claimed that two warriors were killed and perhaps a half dozen wounded.56
Sitting Bull was not in the fight, and neither was White Bull. The two and most of their people apparently remained in camp that day. But those soldiers were close enough and the camps were vulnerable. While the record is unclear it seems that Sitting Bull principally oversaw the safe flight of his followers. The soldiers, meanwhile, camped on the field that evening and in the morning continued their deliberate advance upstream. Two days later they encountered the tell-tale remains of a recently abandoned village, presumed to be Sitting Bull’s, with tipi poles, camp kettles, clothing, saddles, playthings, and foodstuffs scattered about, and the grass nibbled short. The next day the soldiers encountered yet another abandoned camp that seemed to have been this time hastily vacated. The Indian trail from both sites tracked westward and then crossed the Yellowstone several miles short of the mouth of the Big Horn River. The soldiers themselves found the river an impossible obstacle and continued their own march westward, hugging the north side.57
What the soldiers missed were five different traditional camps scattered up the lower Big Horn: Hunkpapas, Sans Arcs, Miniconjous, Oglalas, and Cheyennes. But warriors in those camps did not miss these hated wasicus, and just below the mouth of the Big Horn River in the breaking light of August 11 they struck again. A small number crept through the brush at riverside and fired across and into the army camp. Soon a few shots became many, mostly aimed at the soldier’s horses. One soldier was killed, as were four horses, with many other horses wounded before being led away. Meanwhile other warriors crossed the Yellowstone both above and below the soldier camp and engaged soldier pickets. The soldier camp divided. Some met the attackers coming from downstream, dispersing them, and others advanced on the apparent greater threat coming from upstream. A bounding chase ensued covering several miles before the warriors scattered.58
Only one Indian name emerges in the various contemporary accounts of the day, that of Gall. A newspaperman noted simply: “One conspicuous Indian in a red blanket, supposed to be Gall, an important chief, had his pony shot dead from under him. He leaped on a fresh horse and got away.” An unnamed Indian informant said much the same thing at the Grand River Agency several months later: “We were under several leaders, among them Gall. Sitting Bull [was] not in the fight.” Several accounts of the day also mention Indian women, old men, and children gathered on a distant hillside south of the river watching the spectacle and themselves drawing long-range artillery fire from the soldier camp, which readily dispersed them.59
By midmorning the so-called Big Horn River fight was over. A Miniconjou informant at the Cheyenne River Agency mentioned later that four warriors were killed and twelve others wounded in the two engagements on the Yellowstone, plus twenty-six ponies killed.60
The soldiers continued their westward trek, reaching Pompeys Pillar on August 15 where they encountered surveyor’s stakes marking field work accomplished the year before. At this point the surveyor’s duties were complete and the return journey to Dakota began, with the soldiers mostly following the Musselshell Valley eastward toward the supply camp on the Yellowstone, and from there overland across western Dakota to the Missouri. Indian harassment at this stage of the work was slight, and the men in the column turned their attention instead to hunting buffalo.61
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On reflection, although one of the officers returning from the eastern 1872 railroad survey predicted that “we are going to have a big Sioux war,” what occurred a year later was considerably less obstructive and hardly matched the rhetoric. The government understood that it faced an obstacle on the Yellowstone River and to protect the survey work intended in 1873 assembled a military escort substantially stronger than had been deployed in the two previous years. But Lakota resistance, while annoying, was never particularly insurmountable. The two notable clashes occurring in August did not stop the surveyors, and this a reflection as much on the Lakota’s own inability to coalesce against this threat, or a simpler statement yet that the soldier presence was no threat at all, annoying though it may have been, with some northern bands fighting, others hunting as usual, and still others stalking traditional enemies. But warriors did love pulling survey stakes. Eagle Elk, an Oglala hunting in the Yellowstone country that fall, recalled encountering surveyor stakes, and learned that the wasicus intended to make another iron road. “We pulled up all we saw and threw them away.” In a similar vein, Rain in the Face remembered with obvious delight that he and fellow Hunkpapas “made some trouble for the men who were building the great iron track north of us.”62
