WHILE RED CLOUD WAS STILL resisting the westward march across Wyoming, another great Indian was striving to settle his differences by diplomatic means. Black Kettle, one of the most famous chiefs of the southern Cheyennes, was the leader of the Colorado tribes whose existence had been menaced by the discovery of gold in that territory.
Black Kettle had tried to keep his people at peace with the invading whites, but in spite of his efforts unavoidable clashes occurred between the Colorado gold miners and the Indians of that region. Upon the advice of Major E. W. Wyncoop, commandant at Fort Lyon, some of the Colorado Cheyennes went to Denver in 1864 to talk with the governor of the territory. As a result of this conference Black Kettle brought his people in to the Big South Bend of Sand Creek, thirty miles northeast of Fort Lyon. To prove his loyalty to the United States. Black Kettle mounted an American flag over his own tepee.
For no apparent reason other than hatred. Colonel J. M. Chivington and his Colorado Volunteers attacked this camp in a surprise dawn raid on November 29, 1864. It has been charged that the goldfield volunteers, fearful of being called east to tight in the Civil War, deliberately attempted to foment an Indian war which would keep them at home. Whatever the reason, the indiscriminate slaughter of the surprised Cheyennes—men, women, and children—was so appalling that some of the most hard-bitten frontiersmen were disgusted. Kit Carson, who could scarcely be called a lover of the Indians, described the Sand Creek affair as a cold-blooded massacre. “No one but a coward or a dog would have had a part in it.” he said. In the thick of the battle. Black Kettle had seen his wife shot down as she tried to flee up a streambed.
But as usual, nothing was done by the officials. The Cheyennes and their Arapaho friends were left to take care of themselves, and they did so in the only practicable manner they knew. For weeks, it was not safe for a lone white man to cross a Cheyenne’s path in Colorado or western Kansas.
Finally in 1865, Black Kettle was persuaded to sign a new peace treaty. Then when the government almost immediately ignored its guarantees, he lost his prestige with his followers. In October 1867, after regaining his supremacy over the southern Cheyenne bands, he tried for the third and last time to make a just peace by negotiation in the famed Medicine Lodge Creek Council in Kansas.
This time Black Kettle and the Cheyennes might have retired to a peaceful existence in the Indian Territory reservation assigned to them, had it not been for the rivalry between various factions in the U.S. government. Lack of a definite policy in Washington resulted in a great deal of confusion, and a corresponding ascendancy of authority was given the army in the West. The end of the Civil War added to the growth of the army’s power in the West, with the release of thousands of officers and soldiers who preferred to serve on the plains rather than return to civilian life.
Among these officers was a dashing young cavalryman. George Armstrong Custer, who came to the West with the cold-blooded intention of making a glorious career out of the business of slaying Indians.
Ever since the closing days of the Civil War when George Custer was a much-publicized military idol riding up Pennsylvania Avenue in the Grand Army review with his yellow hair flying in the breeze, he had longed for his lost days of glory. He had been reduced from his temporary rank of major-general to a mere captaincy, and that seemed to gall him. Even after he worked himself back up to the rank of lieutenant-colonel with the Seventh Cavalry, he was irascible, cruel to his men, and completely barbarous in his relations with the Indians.
Custer had tried to whip the Seventh Cavalry into shape during the desultory campaign under General W. S. Hancock in western Kansas in 1867. But during this period he more than met his match in the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Kiowas, who resisted all the army’s efforts to chase them from the plains. The Indians literally ran circles around him, and Custer took his spite out on his men. He was so unreasonable that many soldiers went AWOL. He ordered them shot without trial, then went AWOL himself in order to visit his wife.
For these military crimes, George Custer was court-martialed in November 1867. One year later, however, he was back at the head of the Seventh Cavalry. After reorganizing the outfit, he decided to win back his prestige and even his score with the Indians simultaneously, by some sort of bold stroke. Since he had been unable to best the Indians in open and fair fighting on the plains, he planned to surround the peaceful bands in their winter lodges and wipe them out en masse.
In November 1868, the Seventh Cavalry moved out of Fort Dodge, Kansas, ostensibly “to make the savages live up to their treaty obligations.” The “treaty obligations” signed by the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas, and Comanches stated that “in case crimes or other violations of law shall be committed by any persons, members of their tribe, such person or persons shall, upon complaint being made, in writing, to their agent, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, or other proper authority, by the party injured, and verified by affidavit, be delivered to the person duly authorized to take such person or persons into custody, to the end that such person or persons may be punished according to the laws of the United States.”
The treaty then specifically stated that “such hostile acts or depredations shall not be redressed by force or arms.” This provision was meant to protect innocent Indians from being slain for the crimes of the guilty. Yet it was against the villages of peaceful Indians under Black Kettle that Custer was riding in the late autumn of 1868.
General Philip Sheridan agreed with Custer’s plans. In fact, he gave the official order: “To proceed south in the direction of the Antelope Hills, thence toward the Washita River, the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies; to kill or hang all warriors and bring back all women and children.”
In fairness to the Washington authorities who backed General Sheridan and Lieutenant-Colonel Custer in their action against the Indians along the Washita, it must be made clear that there had been occasional raids, some cattle had been stolen, and a few farmhouses burned. But these were isolated offenses committed by a few guilty Indians, actions of which most members of the tribes concerned knew nothing. Yet the deeds had been so magnified by distance that in Washington they appeared to be the grossest of crimes.
When Black Kettle and his people went into Fort Larned, Kansas, in July 1868 to obtain the supplies promised them in exchange for moving onto their barren reservation, the authorities refused to give them arms and ammunition necessary for their annual buffalo hunt. This refusal was in direct violation of the Medicine Lodge treaty.
“Our white brothers,” said Black Kettle, “are pulling away from us the hand they gave us at Medicine Lodge, hut we will try to hold on to it. We hope the Great White Father will take pity on us and let us have the guns and ammunition he promised us so we can go hunt buffalo to keep our families from going hungry.”
Finally in August, Black Kettle’s old friend of Colorado days, E. W. Wyncoop, now a United States Indian agent at Fort Larned, succeeded in obtaining permission from Washington to give out supplies, including arms and ammunition for the annual buffalo hunt. Soon afterward the Cheyennes departed for the autumn hunt, which was very successful. Black Kettle then led his followers, as directed by the government, to a site on the cottonwood-fringed Washita River. After the strenuous hunts were over, the warriors would return to their lodges to rest, and the women and children would perform many of the tasks necessary for establishing a winter encampment. They would cut the buffalo meat into thin strips, which were hung on pole frames and left to dry in the hot early-autumn sun. Preserved in this manner and then put away into rawhide packs, pemmican was the main winter diet of the plains Indians. The women would also stretch and treat the skins of the buffalo. The texture of the buffalo hide was such that it could not be finely dressed, but it was made into heavy clothing for winter, into moccasins and tent covers. Small hunting parties went out again in the early winter to obtain pelts suitable for bedding and robes.
The Araphoes had followed their Cheyenne friends to Indian Territory and were also busy establishing new winter lodges on the banks of the Washita River. They set up tepees near the villages of the Cheyennes, and awaited the coming of the moons of the short days and deep snows.
For his own lodge. Black Kettle chose a site under a giant cottonwood at the edge of the camp, where he set up his tepee and displayed his brilliantly colored trophies of the chase. He thought that surely now his people had nothing to worry about all winter—nothing except the ugly rumor that the U.S. government was planning to move them into a more restricted reserve and make them live in houses and till the soil like the whites.
Late in November, Black Kettle, Big Man, Little Rock, and some of the other chiefs went to Fort Cobb to talk over this alarming rumor, but they received little consolation. Indeed, they heard further disquieting news. Many soldiers were said to be coming south on a winter campaign. By the time the chiefs returned to the encampment the night of November 26, a blizzard was raging, and it any of the leaders had thought of moving farther south out of range of the approaching army, they would have delayed such action until after the storm had passed.
These are the Cheyenne and Arapahoe chiefs who went to Denver, Colorado, in 1864 to make a treaty with the governor. Left to right, front row: One-eye, Black Kettle (holding pipe), Bull Bear, White Antelope. Back row (order uncertain): Neva, Heap O’Buffaloes, and No-ta-nee (Knock Knee). (Photograph courtesy of the Archives and Manuscript division of the Oklahoma Historical Society.)
Custer, however, marched steadily onward until the sky cleared and moonlight shone brightly upon the snow. Meanwhile, his hired Osage scouts brought back the information that Black Kettle’s village was directly ahead. There were more women and children than warriors, the scouts said; the Cheyennes’ total fighting strength was only about one-fifth that of the soldiers. Custer decided to surround the camp and attack immediately. Certainly now he had a chance to win a “great victory.”
At dawn on the morning of November 27, snow blanketed the plains around Black Kettle’s village. A film of ice covered the Washita. The old chief must have been filled with foreboding, for he rose earlier than usual that morning and walked out from his lodge to survey the horizon. He was worried about the bad rumor of the soldiers.
If the peaceful winter scene reassured him, his calm was broken a few minutes later by the cries of a squaw running madly down a pony trail just across the narrow river. “Soldiers!” she shouted to her chief.
Undoubtedly the dark memory of Sand Creek must have flashed across Black Kettle’s mind, the violent death of his first wife as she ran beside him up the dry streambed. Would this happen all over again? He ran into his lodge, awakened his young squaw, and picked up his rifle. He then stepped quickly outside and fired off the weapon to alarm the village.
From the nearest lodge, his friend Magpie came hurrying to see what was wrong. It was then that the air was split with the blasting of trumpets signaling a cavalry charge, followed by a few shrill bars of “Garryowen.” Even when bent on a massacre, Custer was a showman, but the muffled drumming of hooves on the snow soon drowned out the music.
Black Kettle and his wife had no more than mounted their pony when the cavalrymen charged through the village, firing volleys from carbines and pistols, and slashing at fleeing Indians with their sabers.
Magpie ran back a few steps, watching his beloved chief and his chief’s wife moving away toward the river on the pony. But Black Kettle had slumped forward, a bullet burning into his stomach, and another must have hit his shoulders for his arms fell limply as the pony splashed into the shallow river crossing. Unable to aid his chief. Magpie watched him slide into the water, dead, and a moment later his wife was dead also, the pony fleeing riderless across the drifted snow.
Although Magpie and some of the others escaped to tell the true story of the massacre, more than a hundred Cheyenne warriors were killed, as well as many more women and children never counted. Their tepees were knocked down and heaped into piles with the winter supply of buffalo hides and pemmican. Then everything was burned. Several hundred ponies were also destroyed. Most of the Indians who were left alive were now captives.
Custer withdrew from the Washita swiftly, fearing retaliation from the Kiowas and other Cheyenne camps nearby. Major Joel Elliott and a detachment of eighteen men, pursuing the fleeing warriors, had all been surrounded and slain by Indians from some of these neighboring villages, but Custer did not know this at the time of his flight.
The army moved hurriedly north to Camp Supply, the troops’ winter base, with the prisoners, who were herded on foot through the bitter cold weather. Around the warm campfires at the supply base, the soldiers celebrated their great “victory.” One of the features of the evening’s revelry was a dance by Custer’s hired Osage scouts.
There was one very beautiful captive, Monahseetah, the daughter of one of Black Kettle’s subchiefs who had been killed in the battle. Custer took such a liking to Monahseetah that he persuaded General Sheridan to let him keep her with him as an interpreter, though she neither spoke nor understood a word of English. When Custer went back to Fort Hayes four months later to join his wife, he had to leave Monahseetah behind.
As for the remainder of the southern Cheyennes in the Indian Territory, they knew they could never again trust in the word of any white man or in his treaties or scraps of paper. And their friends the Kiowas and Comanches knew also. For a long time the southern Cheyennes would remain scattered and powerless, broken into small bands, wandering over the southwestern plains. Except for some of the unyielding Dog Soldier bands, the Cheyennes were beaten, but the Kiowas and Comanches were still strong with spirit.
During the Battle of the Washita, a visitor called Trailing-the-Enemy from the powerful Kiowa tribe had joined the Cheyennes in the fighting. Now the burden of resisting the invasion of the southwestern hunting grounds would fall upon him and his warrior brothers of the mighty Kiowas—the fighting Kiowas who had lived for generations in the lovely Wichita Mountains and along the waters of the Red, the Washita, and the Canadian rivers.
Outnumbered by vastly more powerful forces and operating in territory filling rapidly with hostile settlers, the Kiowas and the Comanches would wage a continuing guerrilla struggle for almost a decade after Custer’s “war to make peace” along the Washita in that winter of 1868-69.
And fittingly enough, it would be the blood brothers of Black Kettle, the Cheyennes in the north, whose might joined with that of the Sioux would finally destroy George Armstrong Custer in the midst of his imagined glory.