The Rev. Dr. Taylor Filmore Ealy faced many struggles, most not of his own making, while a Presbyterian medical missionary between 1874 and 1881—first at Fort Arbuckle, on the Chickasaw Reservation in Oklahoma Territory; then in volatile Lincoln, New Mexico Territory; and finally at Zuni Pueblo, also in New Mexico Territory. Some of that time he kept a journal. Daughter Ruth drew on his journal entries, as well as the recollections and correspondence of her father and mother, Mary, to write Water in a Thirsty Land—first privately issued in 1955 in a limited edition of 40 copies.

Editor David Thomas resurrects the Ealy chronicle as Vol. 10 of Doc45’s Mesilla Valley History series. In his excellent introduction Thomas provides not only overviews of the three Western locales where the Ealys lived, but also brief biographies of the major figures in Ruth’s narrative. Perhaps of greatest interest is the time the Ealys spent in Lincoln, as the family arrived on the day murdered English rancher John Tunstall’s body was brought into town. It was the latter’s murder that triggered the 1878 Lincoln County War, and it was the Rev. Dr. Ealy who delivered Tunstall’s funeral oration at the home of Alexander McSween. Forty-one days later the doctor and family witnessed the killing of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman, and the Ealys were also present for the five-day shootout in Lincoln that culminated with the burning of the McSween house and Alexander’s murder. In his journal Ealy noted that Colonel Nathan Dudley, the commander at Fort Stanton, “refused to protect McSween and ordered his men not to fire over Dudley’s camp, or he would turn the cannon on them. My wife read his note to reply to McSween’s request for protection. McSween’s house, where his party had taken refuge, was deliberately set on fire.”

Such violence is what ultimately drove the family out of Lincoln. The Rev. Dr. Ealy then spent nearly three years as a missionary teacher at Zuni Pueblo, 150 miles west of Albuquerque. There was no gunplay there, but Ealy experienced plenty of cultural shock. “He had gained the respect of many of the Indians who more and more were beginning to realize the value of an education,” wrote Ruth (who was born in East Waterford, Pa., in 1877 and died in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1959). “The religious dances still interfered with the school attendance, it is true, but the children seemed to be enjoying their schoolwork. He had learned to like his Indian friends.” It was—and remains—mighty dry country, and Ealy often noted in his journal how the Zunis danced day and night for rain. 

Water in a Thirsty Land

By Ruth R. Ealy, edited by David Thomas, Doc45 Publishing, 2022

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On August 30, 1813, a war party of 750 enraged American Indian warriors attacked a haphazard stockade known as Fort Mims in the southwestern corner of present-day Alabama, 50 miles from Mobile. After killing most of the 146 defending militiamen, the warriors turned on nearly twice that number of White, Black, and Métis (mixed indigenous and white) noncombatants, slaughtering scores of women and children with sickening ferocity.  

The victorious assailants called themselves the Red Sticks, after the traditional red war clubs they carried. Until 1812, they also had belonged to the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy, a loose alliance of largely autonomous villages, or talwas, that claimed a sprawling domain comprising modern Alabama and the western and southern portions of Georgia. Contact with British colonial traders in the late 17th century wrought the first significant change in the Creek domain. Those Creeks residing north and west of the trade route from the Carolinas became known as the Upper Creeks, those below it the Lower Creeks. The distinction was more than a matter of nomenclature. Living nearer to Whites, the Lower Creeks slowly shed much of traditional Creek culture in favor of accommodation. Upper Creeks tended to be traditionalists, profoundly distrustful of White encroachment, particularly once the American Revolution gave rise to an expansionist young Republic.  

At nearly 25,000 members, the Creeks were the most numerous Indian people in the American South. The other indigenous tribes in the region were the Cherokees in northern Georgia and western North Carolina, and the Choctaws and Chickasaws, who occupied the northern two-thirds of present-day Mississippi. All three would side with the United States in the pending conflict. Spanish Florida would prove sympathetic to the Red Sticks but remained effectively neutral.  

With the Fort Mims massacre, what had begun as a Creek civil war in 1812 metastasized into war with the United States. An outraged nation demanded vengeance against the Red Sticks. Total war was to be the price they paid, retaliation complete and unsparing. There was just one catch. The U.S. government, preoccupied with the War of 1812 against Great Britain, possessed neither the resources nor the will to confront the Red Sticks threat. Prospects consequently seemed good for the Red Sticks, who hoped not only to subdue the Lower Creeks, but also perhaps roll back the border with Georgia and expel White and Métis settlers from southwestern Alabama. Although the future of the Deep South hung in the balance, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Mississippi Territory would have to defeat the Red Sticks largely on their own. Georgia and the Mississippi Territory contributed invading columns to the conflict, but they made only brief and inconclusive gains. It fell to Tennessee to press home the fight.  

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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Enthusiasm for war ran high in the Volunteer State. “I hope to God,” said a Tennessee senator after Fort Mims, echoing the sentiments of his constituents “that as the rascals have begun, we shall now have it in our power to pay them for the old and new.” Tennesseans need look only to their own recent past, when Indian attacks were frequent and the state neglected by the federal government, to emphasize with the citizenry of the Tensaw. None reveled more in the prospect that victory offered to open vast new lands to Southern speculators and settlers than did the fiery, 46-year-old commander of the West Tennessee militia, Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson.  

“Brave Tennesseans,” he proclaimed in a florid general order that exploited both frontier fears and avarice to spur recruitment, “your frontier is threatened with invasion by the savage foe. We must hasten to the frontier, or we will find it drenched in the blood of our citizens.” Jackson and Governor Willie Blount both were clear on the unique opportunity that the present crisis presented. Victory over the Red Sticks would be but the prelude to dispossessing all Creeks of their lands, dislodging the Spanish from West Florida, and preventing the pernicious hand of Great Britain from grasping the Gulf Coast.  

Volunteers flocked to the banner. From his home in the quaint settlement of Kentuck, Tenn., the 27-year-old farmer and expert marksman David Crockett saddled his horse and journeyed 10 miles to join a new regiment of mounted riflemen. Crockett enlisted over the earnest objections of his young wife, Polly. They had only just settled on their latest homestead—the peripatetic Crockett frequently uprooted his family—and had two young boys and an infant girl to raise. David wrestled with his emotions. (The future American icon—the “king of the wild frontier”—never cared for the nickname “Davy.”) Although a proficient game hunter, he doubted his fitness for combat; he had killed plenty of bear, but never a man. “There had been no war among us for so long, that but few who were not too old to bear arms knew anything about the business,” he recalled. “I, for one, had often thought about war and had often heard it described, and I did verily believe that I couldn’t fight in that way at all.”  

Then, too, there were Polly’s pleas to consider. “She said she was a stranger in the parts where we lived and that she and our little children would be left in a lonesome and unhappy situation if I went away.” Loyalty to a larger cause won out, however. “It was mighty hard to go against such arguments as these,” Crockett ruminated, “but my countrymen had been murdered, and I knew that the next thing would be that the Indians would be scalping the women and children all about there if we didn’t put a stop to it.” Besides, the term of service was merely three months, and the prospective pay hardly paltry. And so, on September 24, 1813, Crockett enlisted as private in the Second Regiment of Mounted Riflemen in General John Coffee’s cavalry brigade.  

Crockett’s baptism by fire came little more than a month later. Jackson had penetrated the wild, mountainous northern fringe of the Red Sticks country hopeful of striking deep into the heart of the enemy domain. First, however, he must clear his left flank of 2,000 Red Sticks warriors purportedly gathered at Tallushatchee, a talwa resting eight miles from his newly constructed Coosa River supply-depot. Jackson assigned the task to Coffee’s mounted brigade.  

Dawn on November 3, 1813, broke clear and chill over the clearing that cradled the clapboard cabins of Tallushatchee. As the darkness melted, General Coffee and 900 troopers glided undetected through the pine barrens. Two friendly Creek warriors guided them. Three miles short of Tallushatchee, Coffee divided his command into two parallel columns—the left element comprised of the cavalry, the right of the mounted riflemen clad in coarse linen trousers, long-tailed civilian shirts, and caped jackets called hunting shirts. Some men donned animal-skin caps, but not Crockett; he thought they made him look short. Suddenly, recalled Coffee, “the drums of the enemy began to beat, mingled with their savage yells, preparing for action.” Armed with bows and arrows, their sacred red war clubs, and a handful of muskets, the outgunned and outnumbered warriors (fewer than 200 actually were on hand) spilled from their cabins.  

Coffee opened the fray. As the Red Sticks formed a hollow square, he hurled a company of mounted rangers at them. The rangers galloped to within musket range, fired some scattered shots, and then dared the Red Sticks to pursue. With a series of yells, the warriors complied “like so many red devils,” said Crockett, who watched from his position in the militia column. Catching sight of Crockett and his comrades, the massed Red Sticks veered toward them, unaware of the long line of cavalrymen in the timber on the opposite side of Tallushatchee. “We gave them a fire,” Crockett recalled, “and they returned it, and then ran back to their town.” Coffee ordered the encircling files to advance dismounted.  

Pandemonium ensued. “Women and children darted from the cabins to surrender. Crockett saw seven women clutch at the hunting shirt of a stunned militiaman. He also counted 46 warriors running into a single cabin for a last-ditch defense. As Crockett’s company approached, a woman sitting in a doorway prepared to resist. “She placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand,” Crockett marveled, “and then took the arrow, and raising her feet, she drew with all her might and let it fly at us, and she killed a lieutenant.” The dead subaltern’s enraged men fired at least 20 musket balls into the woman. Her death elated the Tennesseans, who showed the Red Sticks in the cabin no mercy. “We now shot them like dogs,” Crockett confessed.  

Bullets penetrated the thin clapboard walls handily, shredding those inside with splinters, balls, and buckshot. To complete the carnage, Crockett’s detachment set the cabin ablaze, burning the wounded inside to death. The gore made an indelible impression on Crockett. “I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house.” Crockett would wrote in his 1834 Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of Tennessee. “His arm and thigh was broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him. In this situation he was still trying to crawl along, but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only about twelve years old.”  

Scarcely a warrior escaped death, while Coffee counted just five of his men killed and 40 wounded, most slightly. Returning in triumph to Jackson’s supply depot, the victors, who had been on half-rations for days, discovered that the contractors engaged to feed the army had failed to deliver provisions. A ravenous Crockett and several of his companions returned to the battlefield in search of food. Combing the charred cabins and blood-soaked grounds, they found a potato cellar under the wreckage of the same cabin that had claimed the lives of the 46 doomed warriors. They hauled out a large cache of nauseating tubers. “Hunger compelled us to eat them,” remembered Crockett, “though I had a little rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and [the potatoes] looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.”  

Five days later, Crockett again saw combat. An allied Creek chief had called upon Jackson to save his people, whom he said a large Red Sticks war party had besieged at the fortified post of a trader named Lashley near Talladega, a talwa just six miles distant. Jackson’s scouts returned with a heartening report. The Red Sticks had not encircled the friendly Creeks. Rather, they were congregated in a shrub-choked valley below the hilltop fort.  

At sunrise on November 9, Jackson halted on the northern rim of the valley, his presence undetected by the Red Sticks. He quietly arranged his troops in battle order, telling Coffee to deploy his mounted men on the high ground to the east and west of the valley and join their flanks behind Lashley’s fort. To Crockett’s delight, the friendly Creeks streamed from the stockade, waving and crying, “How-dy-do, brother, how-dy-do.” After aligning his infantry on the northern rim of the valley, Jackson opened the action with an old Indian tactic. He sent three companies into the valley to roost the Red Sticks from their camp, and then wheel and dash back to the infantry lines. Painted scarlet and stripped to their breechclouts, the Red Sticks took the bait and chased the soldiers straight into Jackson’s ranks. Smoke rolled down the ridge, and the Red Sticks reeled in confusion. Repelled on one front, the Red Sticks rallied and then charged Coffee’s line.

“They came rushing forward like a cloud of Egyptian locusts and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head,” wrote Crockett. “The warriors came yelling on, meeting us, and continued until they were within shot of us, when we fired and killed a considerable number of them.” Crockett described the ensuing slaughter. “They broke like a gang of steers and ran across to our other line, where they were again fired on; and so we kept them running from one line to the other, constantly under a heavy fire.”  

After an hour of futile battering at Jackson’s lines, several hundred Red Sticks survivors slipped through a gap between two units and fled. Nearly 400 Red Sticks died in the one-sided struggle. Jackson had inflicted a shattering but by no means war-ending defeat on the Red Sticks; they were too numerous and dispersed to collapse under the twin losses at Tallushatchee and Talladega.  

David Crockett had no desire to stick around for the denouement. Together with most of Jackson’s volunteers, he quit the war at the expiration of his term of enlistment. In late January 1814, Crockett returned home to a joyous Polly, with $65.59 in pay and allowances in his pockets. Crockett would reenlist nine months later for a brief stint against the British in the Gulf Coast, but he saw no combat, his service ending before the Battle of New Orleans. “This closed out my career as a warrior, and I am glad of it,” he later wrote. Crockett had seen slaughter enough, and as his Narrative reveals, it clearly sickened him.  

The 21-year-old fellow Tennessean Sam Houston began his Creek War odyssey a few weeks after David Crockett headed home from his first enlistment. A non-conformist by nature, at age 15 Houston abandoned the Kingston general store in which he clerked to live with the Cherokees, whose country abutted his family’s East Tennessee farm. The Cherokees took to the strapping white adolescent. The chief of the band adopted him, naming Houston “the Raven” after the bird the Cherokees believed symbolized good luck and wanderlust. Houston had not bucked the family traces entirely, however. He regularly visited his widowed mother and siblings, wheedling money from her with which to purchase a generous quantity of gifts for his adopted Cherokee kin.  

In 1811, Houston returned to frontier society, fluent in Cherokee but intent on filling the gaps in his white education. He studied under a tutor and then opened a school for local children. Debt, however, soon drove him to resume clerking as well. Houston loathed the work no less than he had three years earlier. When in March 1813 the opportunity to enlist in the 39th U.S. Infantry regiment, then recruiting in East Tennessee, ostensibly for service against the British in the ongoing War of 1812, presented itself, Houston hastened to seize it. Being underage—the legal minimum age for service in the Regular Army was then 21—Houston first needed to obtain his mother’s permission, which she granted with an apparent admonition to never “turn his back to save his life.” That said, she slipped onto his finger a thin gold band with the word “Honor” etched in the inner curve.  

A friend remembered when Houston “took the silver dollar.” Following the custom of the day, a recruiting detail from the 39th paraded up the dirt thoroughfare of Kingston with fife and drum. Silver dollars glinted on the drumhead as tokens of enlistment. Houston stepped forward, snatched a coin, and “was then forthwith marched to the barracks, uniformed, and appoint the same day as a sergeant.” Shortly after Houston left Kingston, admiring friends secured for him an ensign’s commission. Promotion to third lieutenant came apace. Lieutenant Houston cut a fine figure in uniform. Powerfully built, at six feet, two inches tall, he towered over most of the men of his platoon. His deep, commanding voice and eyes, as brilliant a shade of blue and as transfixing as those of Andrew Jackson, enhanced Houston’s natural gift for leadership.   On the morning of March 27, 1814, staring intently at a gun-smoke-draped barricade, behind which thronged confidently jeering Red Sticks, the young lieutenant awaited his first test of combat.    

At last awakened to the danger a Red Sticks victory posed for the South, particularly if the British were to land on the Gulf Coasts, early in 1814 the War Department diverted the untried 39th U.S. Infantry to service under Andrew Jackson. With a command now numbering 3,200 men, Jackson advanced from his central Alabama supply depot on March 25, 1814, to challenge the strongest remaining Red Sticks contingent, nearly 1,000 warriors defending an enclave in a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River, 70 miles northeast of present-day Montgomery. Along the south bank of the river rested the Red Sticks village of Tohopeka. Across the land approach to the village, the warriors had fashioned the most formidable obstacle American Indians would ever construct in their century of conflicts against the United States. A 350-yard-long wall of massive pine logs held in place with upright pine posts and props zigzagged across the neck of the 100-acre peninsula. In places the breastworks rise to a height of eight feet; nowhere were they less than five feet high. Clay chinking filled gaps between the logs. Two rows of firing ports were cut in the logs at regular intervals.  

Jackson had devised a simple but ingenious plan—theoretically at least—to obliterate the Red Sticks and their refuge. At daybreak, General Coffee would ride down with his mounted brigade of Tennessee militia and 500 Cherokee warriors. They were to ford the river, come up on the Red Sticks from behind, and throw a cordon around the far bank of the horseshoe-shaped bend to prevent escape. Jackson, meanwhile, would march directly against Tohopeka with the infantry and an artillery company, batter openings in the breastworks with his two cannons, and then launch a grand bayonet charge against the weakened defenses. The 600 blue-coated soldiers of the 39th U. S. Infantry would lead the attack.  

The battle did not unfold according to plan. The small cannon blasted away for two hours without even denting the barricade. Aligned in close order within musket range of the Red Sticks, the Regulars took casualties from enemy sharpshooters. Sam Houston and his comrades grew restless. Not until the Cherokee warriors spontaneously surged across the Tallapoosa and seized the Red Sticks village, causing warriors to stream from the barricade to rescue their families, was Jackson able to launch his assault.  

The fight at the barricade was bitter but brief. Cheering Regulars rapidly punched gaps in the sagging Red Sticks ranks. On the extreme right of the regimental line, Lieutenant Houston climbed the wall with his platoon. He slashed at Red Sticks with his sword until a barbed arrow buried itself in his right groin. Hobbling about exhorting his men, Houston kept on his feet until the warriors opposing his platoon retreated to a log-roofed redoubt in a ravine beside the riverbank. Then he sank to the ground, bleeding and helpless.  

Houston begged a fellow officer to extract the arrow. The man tried, but the arrow refused to budge. He tugged at it again with the same result. Furious and perhaps delirious with pain, Houston lifted his sword and threatened to cleave the officer’s skull if he failed a third time. The man yanked, and the arrow came out, together with a mass of tissue and a torrent of blood. Houston righted himself, struggled back to the barricade, and delivered himself to the regimental surgeon, who staunched the flow of blood.  

After the collapse of the barricade, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend degenerated into a five-hour slaughter of Red Sticks that ended only with nightfall. Nearly 300 warriors died trying to flee across the Tallapoosa. Those who remained behind fought and died until only two clusters remained, one of which was the redoubt in the ravine near where Houston had been wounded. Jackson personally called for volunteers to storm the place. Houston, who lay near enough to hear the summons, labored to his feet, grabbed a musket, and summoned his men to follow him. Stumbling down the rocky ravine as twilight settled over the forest, Houston came within 15 feet of the redoubt before two musket balls struck him simultaneously, one in the right arm, the other in the shoulder. Drawing on his last reserve of strength, Houston turned to order his men to charge, only discover that he was alone. Houston staggered back up the ravine before collapsing. After dark, soldiers burnt the redoubt, immolating the occupants.  

Night fell. The occasional musket shots, which signified Red Sticks survivors rooted out and dispatched, at least ceased. Surgeons, meanwhile, attend to army wounded, which numbered 159 in addition to 47 killed. Jackson’s Cherokee and Lower Creek allies suffered 23 dead and 47 wounded. The Red Sticks force had been all but annihilated, with nearly 900 dead and fewer than three dozen escaping unhurt. The Battle of Horseshoe Bend effectively ended the Creek War. It also catapulted Andrew Jackson to national fame and earned him a major general’s commission in the Regular Army.  

On the battlefield that night, Sam Houston received only cursory care from the surgeons. A doctor bandaged his groin and extracted the bullet from his right arm. He was about to probe for the second musket ball when another surgeon suggested he desist. Houston, he said, had lost too much blood to survive the night, better not to torture him gratuitously. Laying Houston on the ground, the surgeons ministered to men whose odds of recovering they judged better.  

Houston, however, refused to die. Shivering with cold, tormented by thirst, and racked with spirit-shattering pain, he passed the night of March 27, alone and ignored. When daybreak confounded the surgeons’ prediction, Houston was placed on a litter and carried swinging and jolting between two horses 60 excruciating miles to Jackson’s forward supply depot, where me might expire in relative comfort. Instead, he lingered on. Placed on another litter and fortified with whiskey between blackouts, Houston made it home alive. It would take him three years to recover fully.  

David Crockett and Sam Houston had faced their respective baptisms by fire in the most consequential war between American Indians and the United States in the nation’s history. The Creek War opened the Deep South to the Cotton Kingdom, setting the stage for both the expulsion of all Indians from the South in the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and the Civil War three decades thereafter.  

Destiny would eventually lead Crockett and Houston to Texas, where Crockett would meet his end on a merciless March 1836 morning at a crumbling former Spanish mission called the Alamo, and Houston would chart the course of Texas independence from Mexico. For both, the road to glory had begun in battle against the Red Sticks.  

Peter Cozzens is the author of A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023)

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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The year 1870 was a time of war on the northwest Texas frontier. Kiowa and Comanche raiders striking out of the vast southern Plains punished the line of Anglo settlement as it inexorably pushed its way north and west. The Indians felt compelled to lash out, given renewed postwar encroachment into their lands, unfair or broken treaty agreements, the impending specter of forced reservation life and their own intertribal politics. The U.S. Army was likewise compelled to maintain peace and safety for its citizens on the Texas frontier.

For 15 years one of the hottest spots in this unrelenting contest was sparsely populated Jack County, up near the Red River in north-central Texas. Settlers there were usually the first to suffer with the coming of each full moon, and their protests and cries for protection had resulted in 1868 in the establishment of a military post, Fort Richardson, on the outskirts of the county seat, Jacksboro. If the settlers thought their problems were solved, however, they were soon bitterly disappointed.   

Fort Richardson became the headquarters of the 6th U.S. Cavalry, a regiment that boasted a far thicker record of desertions than of Indian fights. Over its 39-month tenure at the fort the regiment sent out 26 full-scale scouting parties, but only five intercepted Indian raiders, resulting in the deaths of three troopers and unknown casualties to the warriors. During that same period Indian raiders killed or captured more than 200 settlers and drove off thousands of head of livestock. The 6th seemed powerless to prevent such depredations. The carnage reached a crescendo in June 1870 when raiders killed another 15 settlers. Letters, protests and petitions flew from the pens of the settlers to both the officers at Fort Richardson and the government in Washington, D.C. How could the vanquishers of the Confederacy be so ineffective against a few hundred poorly armed Indians?

Aggravating the situation was the fact that in the wake of the Civil War, Washington had forbidden the re-formation of the Texas Rangers, the one group that had had some success against the southern Plains Indians. Stung by the continual criticism and charges that soldiers trained only for the parade ground were no match for veteran warriors adept at guerrilla warfare, the officers of the 6th waited and watched for any opportunity to restore their honor and morale in the ranks.

Whether they were ready or not, opportunity came knocking.

“A Galling Fire from All Sides”

In early July a party of more than 100 Kiowa warriors crossed the Red River into Texas from Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). It was led by Kicking Bird (or Eagle Striking With Talons, as his name has been translated more recently), among the best-known war leaders on the southern Plains. Long distinguished among the Kiowa for his courage and military prowess, he was also a signatory of both the 1865 Little Arkansas Treaty and the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty. He even had admirers among the Anglos. “Though a wild, untutored savage,” one Indian agent wrote of the chief, “he was a man of fine native sense, and thoroughly educated in the habits of his people, and determined to make a reputation for himself, not in bad acts, but in elevating his people.” Kicking Bird was perhaps second in influence only to the acknowledged principal chief, Lone Wolf.

In more recent years, however, Kicking Bird had spoken once too often of seeking peaceful accord with the whites, prompting the more radical elements among the Kiowa to question his abilities and fitness to lead. Some warriors went so far as to claim that his consorting with white men had made him a coward and a traitor. To restore his honor, Kicking Bird agreed to lead a major war party against the white soldiers, and the men of Fort Richardson were selected as the target, mainly because they were the only force in north Texas opposing the southern Plains Indians.

According to Indian participants interviewed in the 1920s at Fort Sill, Okla., by Colonel Wilbur Sturtevant Nye, no warrior was supposed to leave the war party to steal. Yet, on July 5 a handful of Kiowas attacked a mail wagon at Rock Station, 16 miles west of Fort Richardson. A challenge to the Army thus delivered, the 6th Cavalry quickly responded. At the head of two officers, one surgeon and 53 enlisted men culled from six companies of the 6th, Captain Curwen B. McLellan led out his men on July 6 with orders to “pursue and severely chastise the Indians.”

Born in Scotland, McLellan (no relation to Union commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan) was a veteran of the Civil War. Commended for his bravery and tactical skill at Gettysburg, he’d received a brevet promotion to major, only to revert in rank to captain amid the general postwar reduction of the Army. It would seem fate had chosen a worthy opponent for Kicking Bird.

At Rock Creek Station scouts picked up the trail of eight to 10 Kiowa warriors. Slowed by heavy rains and rough terrain, the column followed the trail northwest, McLellan assuming the raiders intended to slip across the Red River into Indian Territory, where, by federal edict, the troopers were forbidden to follow. Only, this band of Indians had no intention of fleeing. On the contrary, the captain and his men were being drawn into an ambush on ground of Kicking Bird’s choosing.

McLellan’s error is understandable. Like most Civil War officers, he’d been trained and disciplined to fight 19th century set-piece battles. But such an approach could only end in frustration on the frontier, as Plains Indians were seldom willing to engage in straight-up fights. Instead, they relied on their advantages of surprise and mobility, employing mostly hit-and-run tactics before withdrawing to their Oklahoma reservations as an untouchable home base. Thus, many Army officers had come to regard patrols sent in pursuit of Indian raiders as mere exercises in herding the hostiles back across the Red River, dismissing warnings of the Indians’ skill in preparing ambushes. McLellan would pay dearly for such a miscalculation.

On July 9 the captain resumed his march northwest to the headwaters of the South Fork of the Little Wichita River, where his scouts found the mail wagon driver’s whip and an indistinct trail leading west. Continuing northwest past the headwaters of the Middle Fork, McLellan and his men soon reached a bluff on the south bank of the North Fork. As the heavy rains had obscured all signs of the raiders’ ponies and rendered the North Fork impassable, McLellan ordered his men into camp, where they remained until July 12.

Around 11 that morning, an hour after decamping, the advance guard encountered what appeared to be a Kiowa scouting party. Anticipating that the main body of Indians was nearby, McLellan had his troopers form ranks, unfurl their banners, unsling their weapons and advance at a quick trot, soon outstripping the column’s packtrain, loaded with ammunition and supplies. After covering about a half mile, the troopers spotted a large band of Kiowas some 1,000 yards distant. McLellan had found Kicking Bird—or, rather, Kicking Bird had allowed himself to be found. The captain had closed within 500 yards of the Kiowas when two other bands, together equaling the first in strength, popped up on his flanks, threatening to cut off his packtrain and rear guard, which had fallen some 400 yards behind. Realizing he could no longer safely move forward, McLellan ordered his troopers to open fire.

At that point Kicking Bird ordered a full-scale charge on three sides. The Kiowas attacked with a ferocity for which the troopers of the 6th were unprepared. Years later warriors who participated in the battle reported that Kicking Bird rode at the head of his men and counted first coup by impaling a soldier on his lance. Surely McLellan would have reported such a dramatic action, yet there is no mention of it in his after-action report. Embarrassment is one possible explanation. That an Indian could ride into the face of more than 50 professional soldiers, kill one with a lance and slip away unscathed would be a distressing event. Whether it happened or not, the Kiowas clearly had the upper hand. For a half hour the troopers endured what McLellan called “a galling fire from all sides,” at which point it became apparent the command was in danger of being overrun. It must have dawned on the captain how far he had ventured from any defensible position or any possible help—in other words, how perfect the battlefield was for Kicking Bird.

The pursuer had become the pursued. McLellan realized that the only way to preserve his command from “total annihilation” was to retreat.

Desperate Retreat

McLellan dismounted his men, every fourth trooper holding the reins of the mounts while the other three fired between the horses. They formed a box around the packtrain, with roughly 10 men to a side and a 10-man reserve in the middle, and began to effect what McLellan described in reports as “an orderly withdrawal,” but which in truth was a desperate fight for survival. Many of the Indians were armed with Spencer repeating rifles, which complemented their mounted tactics perfectly. The men of the 6th were using the single-shot breech-loading Springfield trapdoor carbine, a weapon with a comparatively slow rate of fire, though it could send a bullet up to 400 yards downrange with accuracy and power. As a result, the Kiowas kept their distance, swarming first around one flank and then another, several times forming up to block the troopers’ line of retreat. McLellan frantically redeployed his men to meet each threat that arose, but his casualties were mounting and his ammunition waning.   For some four and a half hours under a hot July sun Kicking Bird mercilessly drove the 6th Cavalry over the plains and back down across the North and Middle forks of the Little Wichita, pouring a constant and devastating fire on the bluecoats from all sides.

Kicking Bird maintained a strong, steady pursuit by keeping three-fourths of his men engaged while holding the others in reserve, then steadily replacing tired warriors with fresh ones from the reserve. The unrelenting stream of strikes by seemingly tireless Indians surprised McLellan and his officers, who found it all they could do to hold their own while retreating.

Around 4 p.m. the captain and his exhausted troopers forded the South Fork of the Little Wichita, at which point Kicking Bird called for his warriors to abandon the pursuit, confident his honor had been restored. The Kiowas had killed or wounded nearly a quarter of McLellan’s command and nearly half his horses.

Though no longer under fire, McLellan felt his position remained untenable, so he ordered his men to continue the southeasterly retreat toward Fort Richardson. Ultimately, however, sheer mental and physical fatigue forced the 6th Cavalry into camp within sight of Flat Top Mountain.

Early the next morning, July 13, McLellan dispatched couriers to Fort Richardson, requesting ambulances for the wounded. But his intention to remain encamped until the ambulances arrived was thwarted when a band of several dozen Kiowas attacked and drove in the pickets. Fearing that Kicking Bird’s entire war party was close at hand, the captain ordered all supplies burned and his weary men to saddle up the remaining horses and begin another forced retreat. After resting a few hours at Rocky Station, the scene of the attack on the mail stage a week prior, the command continued southeast toward Fort Richardson. Meeting the ambulances en route, the battered column went into camp that night, arriving back at the garrison at noon on July 14.

Saving Face

In his after-action report McLellan listed two men killed and 11 wounded, and eight horses killed and 21 wounded. Though he had obviously suffered a humiliating rout, the captain estimated far higher enemy losses, claimed the expedition had been a “perfect success” and insisted he had “taught them a lesson they will not soon forget.” A far less rosy assessment was reported by his troopers, however, many of whom were incensed that McLellan had abandoned the two slain enlisted men’s bodies during his retreat.

In the aftermath Fort Richardson post surgeon Dr. Julius H. Patzki interviewed members of the command. One constant in his report was the emphatic bafflement of troopers to the overwhelming demonstration of military skill by Kicking Bird and his warriors. “The systematic strategy displayed by the savages, exhibiting an almost civilized mode of skirmish fighting, struck the officers and men engaged,” Patzki wrote. It was a compliment McLellan could never pay Kicking Bird.

The Army praised the captain for having kept his command from being wiped out, and 13 members of the 6th Cavalry later received the Medal of Honor for “gallantry in action at the North Fork of the Little Wichita River.” Thus, McLellan, like Kicking Bird, managed to save face.

The events along the Little Wichita served to demonstrate warriors were capable of far more cunning than their stereotypical “savage” reputation implied. Kicking Bird’s systematic and precise formations were those only the most adept tacticians are able to pull off in the heat of battle. He executed his ambush and flanking maneuvers with a striking ease that overwhelmed the rigid professional tactics of the 6th Cavalry and did so with minimal loss. Kiowa participants later insisted no warriors had been killed. That said, tribal society was highly stratified, and the loss of a low-ranking warrior might not have warranted mention in their oral history.

Kicking Bird had set out to restore his honor in action against the bluecoats, and he succeeded. Expressing regret that he’d resorted to violence, he never again rode into battle against the soldiers, instead preaching the road of peace. After the 1874–75 Red River War the Army gave him the onerous task of selecting the requisite Kiowa warriors and chiefs who would be sent to prison in Florida. Among the exiles was the powerful medicine man Maman-ti, who threatened Kicking Bird. “You remain free, a big man with the whites, but you will not live long,” he vowed. “I will see to that.” Kicking Bird had told an Anglo friend his heart was as a stone, broken in two. “I am grieved,” he said, “at the ruin of my people.” Two days later the chief died at his camp under mysterious circumstances. While some Kiowas claimed it was the curse of Maman-ti, Army doctors suspected poison.

McLellan never led another major expedition in Texas. Within nine months of its fiasco on the Little Wichita the 6th Cavalry was transferred to Kansas and replaced by a more vigorous unit, the 4th Cavalry, led by the legendary hard-charging Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie. With its arrival the people of north Texas would finally get their protection from the Indians.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Allen Lee Hamilton, a history professor at St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, is the author of six books, a novel and numerous magazine articles. His eldest son, Clinton Chase Hamilton, holds a master’s degree in history from Texas State University. For further reading they suggest Sentinel of the Southern Plains: Fort Richardson and the Northwest Texas Frontier, 1866–1878, by Allen Lee Hamilton; Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill, by Colonel W.S. Nye; and Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars, by Don Rickey Jr.

By the early 1880s encounters with eastbound American Indian delegations arrayed in furs, buckskins and eagle-feather warbonnets had become rather commonplace, their arrival in Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston and other big cities provoking curious glances and photo ops. Easterners might spot Sac and Foxes on museum visits, Osages sharing lobster with congressmen or Sioux entering the White House grounds to speak with the “great white sachem.”  

One cool night in March 1882 at Harvard’s Hemenway Gymnasium gathered New Englanders watched with rapt attention as Zunis filed out from beneath the balcony to center stage. Turbaned heads held high, clad in moccasins, leggings and navy pullover shirts bound with red sashes and dripping with shell-and-turquoise necklaces, the stoic quintet was a revelation to the Eastern audience members, whose idea of Indians was, as journalist Charles F. Lummis put it, “a hazy cross between a cigar-store wooden eikon [sic] and dime-novel scalp taker.”  

The Zunis were priests of the Bow Society, a secretive order charged with the tribe’s welfare. Leading them, hushing the crowd in harangues of Zuni and English, was one of the oddest figures the elites had ever seen—a pale, long-haired man of delicate build dressed like the others but with the added flourishes of glittering conchos hammered from coins, resplendent garters, beaded bracelets, hooped earrings and a scalping knife in a flamboyant brass-buttoned sheath.  

Aside from his mustache, he looked more Indian than his entourage. But Frank Hamilton Cushing had been born a quarter century earlier in Pennsylvania and raised in western New York. A sickly child who barely survived infancy, he’d grown to be a self-taught prodigy who, smitten by Indian lore, studied nature, learned to replicate arrowheads and birchbark canoes, and, at age 17, published his first scientific paper. Dropping out of Cornell University, he hired on with the Smithsonian Institution to curate exhibits under the tutelage of Western explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, founding director of the national museum’s Bureau of Ethnology. Powell dispatched “Cushy,” as colleagues knew him, to New Mexico to live among Pueblo dwellers, hunt for relics and “lost civilizations,” and publish his findings.  

While carrying out Powell’s mandate, Cushing unexpectedly “turned Zuni,” learning their complex tongue, absorbing their lifeways and recording their rituals. To gain entrance into the Bow Society, he collected a Havasupai scalp—presumably from a corpse. Philosophically tolerant, a quick study in linguistics and proficient in herbal cures, he was soon adopted into the tribe, the Zuni dubbing him Tenatsali, or Medicine Flower.  

By the spring of 1882 he’d been living among the Zunis two years. As promised, he would now share his world with his hosts. Coincidentally, Tenatsali also needed cash to further his work for the bureau. So, in a timely ploy arranged with Powell and journalist Sylvester Baxter of the Boston Herald, he would both raise funds and, hopefully, escape proffered Zuni matrimony by wedding longtime fiancée Emily Magill come July.  

This night in March the crowd quieted, and the lights dimmed. On a signal from Tenatsali his quintet launched into a heel-and-toe stomp dance, drums pounding to wails, chants, keening war cries and the rise and fall of feathered prayer sticks.   

At the final thud Cushing took the podium to explain to attendees—in English and Zuni—what they had seen, describing tribal land and the mode and habits of the people. Then, with dramatic flair, the white Zuni lapsed into bilingual fragments of indigenous poetry that began “May-a-wee! May-a-wee!” (“Spirit of the Antelope. Spirit of the Antelope!”)  

“He sang in a sweet voice,” fellow ethnologist John Gregory Bourke recalled of Cushing, “a little bit tremulous from nervousness.” There followed more dances, drumming, creation tales and courtship chants, all translated by Medicine Flower. The exotic presentation ended with a Zuni elder beseeching the Great Spirit for a bountiful harvest for their kind American hosts. Bostonians leaving the Harvard campus that night gushed over the spectacle they’d witnessed and opened their financial coffers to Cushing.  

“It was,” Lummis wrote, “the ‘cleverest’ thing that has ever been devised and carried out by a scientific student anywhere.” Cushing showed he could “out-Zuni the Zunis,” wrote Baxter in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. As spring lapsed into summer, the entourage encored at Massachusetts’ Wellesley College and in churches, clubs and theaters in Salem and Philadelphia, feasting on “oysters and frozen pudding and cake”—a far cry from such traditional dishes as fried maize tortillas stuffed with roasted locust. In one reported side venture the Zunis waded into the Atlantic Ocean to draw sacred seawater from the “Ocean of Sun Rise.”   

On his return to Washington with the Zunis, Cushing was the talk of the town. Artist Willard Metcalf “took notes on all that occurred” and sketched Medicine Flower in full regalia. Portraitist Thomas Eakins rendered him in oil among Zuni accoutrements. Cushing also sat for a portrait by Powell’s staff photographer John Karl Hillers. By day the celebrated ethnologist labored at his desk, polishing his field notes into lyrical books on the Southwest, Zuni life and esoteric religious rites, their eventual publication opening a rift between him and his adoptive Zunis. By night he and the priests performed. Few knew he was plagued with tapeworm and diverticulitis, prompting hospital stays, stomach pumping and fad diets that left him gaunt and debilitated.  

Meanwhile, his effective advocacy on behalf of the Zuni thwarted a brewing land-grab scheme by Senator John A. Logan of Illinois, eventually resulting in Cushing’s permanent recall to the Smithsonian, where he transcribed Cheyenne sign language before venturing south to research extinct Calusa settlements along Florida’s southwest coast. Battling illness, mosquitoes and the sweltering heat, he managed to write a landmark journal and unearthed a cache of masks, figurines and pottery that remain on display in the Marco Island Historical Museum.  

Cushing’s work and life came to abrupt end in the spring of 1900 amid a research trip to Maine. One evening while dining, he swallowed a fish bone that scored his throat. The resulting hemorrhaging claimed his life on April 10. He was only 42. Some Zunis deemed it retribution for his having broken tribal taboos by revealing their sacred rituals. Others wept.  

Contemporary Zunis reportedly remain wary of anthropologists. Artist Phil Hughte’s cartoon collection A Zuni Artist Looks at Frank Hamilton Cushing gently parodies the tribe’s ambivalence regarding his subject’s intrusion into Zuni culture—seen either as an act of betrayal or as a sincere attempt to understand it.  

Though in retrospect his methods pose ethical dilemmas, Cushing—the first known anthropologist to have interpreted tribal peoples cross-culturally as a “participant observer” and to have employed relativism to find value in their world—is regarded by many as a brilliant researcher ahead of his time. He published more than a dozen books, and universities still teach his immersive method as “reflexive anthropology.” Thus, from academe’s halls to the American West there remains a unique historical niche for Frank Hamilton “Medicine Flower” Cushing. 

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The view is spectacular from the ancient cliffside villages in the Southwest’s Four Corners region—chiseled canyons; orange, coral, and copper sandstone; desert flora; a sky that stretches forever.  

But this view was just a bonus for the Pueblo ancestors who constructed these dwellings not far from the point where Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico meet. No one’s sure quite why the Ancestral Pueblos decided to build these houses in cliffside alcoves instead of on the ground. Theories include: the apartment-like clusters were sheltered from the elements; stored food was safer here from animals; and the ground below was freed up for planting. Then there was security from enemies. Gene S. Stuart, a writer with an exploration party for National Geographic, summed up the obvious defensive advantage: “One toddler with a long-stemmed lily could have held me at bay.”  

The Ancestral Pueblos started settling into different pueblos (Spanish for “villages”) in the region around 900 CE, a time of increased rainfall in the desert that promoted their transformation from hunter-gatherers into farmers. Pueblos at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Betatakin, and Keet Seel featured as many as hundreds of rooms that could house thousands.  

The people may have concentrated their homes like this for the sake of easier trade or to form tight religious communities. The largest Pueblos had dozens of kivas, circular rooms where ceremonies were held. It may have been religious leaders who were able to persuade the residents to build the multistory sandstone structures, staircases, roads, and the reservoirs and canals that managed water to make the dry environment livable.  

Eventually drought won out. By about 1300, lack of water had forced the inhabitants to flee Four Corners for more habitable locations. The ruins they left behind remain here due in large part to the Antiquities Act of 1906, which banned unauthorized digging on federal and Native American lands. Regional authorities acted quickly after that to establish cliff dwelling locations as protected places.

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This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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At times American history—and especially American Indian history—takes a dive down the rabbit hole with its twists and contradictions. The 1842 Cherokee Slave Revolt is one of those rabbit holes. The idea the Cherokee, or any tribe, owned slaves is not that alien a concept. For centuries before the arrival of Europeans on the continent American Indians had been enslaving captive enemies, and many tribes continued this practice well into the 1800s, much to the dismay of a paternal U.S. federal government. Each tribe had differing ideas on how to treat captives. Some regarded them, particularly young ones, as extended family members; others considered them disposable property. On an 1880 trip to Alaska with naturalist John Muir, Protestant Missionary S. Hall Young met one Huna Tlingit subchief who confessed to having ritually sacrificed two of his slaves, a husband and wife, in a bid to halt an advancing glacier.

But the slaves at the center of the 1842 revolt were black men, women and children working Cherokee plantations and farms in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The breakout came less than four years after the last group of Cherokees had walked the Trail of Tears from their traditional homeland in Georgia to hinterlands of the southern Great Plains. President Andrew Jackson had ordered the forced march of some 16,500 Cherokees, a quarter or more of whom died en route (estimates range upward from 4,000 to as many as 8,000 fatalities). To transport such a vast number of people federal troops used 645 wagons, 5,000 horses and oxen, and a steamboat. The cost of the Cherokee removal came to $1,263,338 and 38 cents, which the government unabashedly deducted from the $4.5 million in federal funds promised to the tribe as reimbursement for its seized homelands.

Yet, in the midst of this human tragedy, another human tragedy was taking place. The Cherokees, for all their personal suffering, dragged along with them nearly 1,600 black slaves—the mobile human property that had been working their plantations and farms. En route to Indian Territory these slaves hunted game, gathered firewood and performed other chores, in many ways softening the blow of the trek for their Indian masters. Yet neither the Cherokee Nation nor the U.S. government recorded how many of the slaves perished en route.

Cherokee Plantations

The seeds by which the Cherokees would imitate their white neighbors had been laid years earlier in the wake of continuous warfare between them and first the British and then American forces. The wars left Cherokee towns in ruin and disarray, while a primary source of meat for the tribe, the whitetail deer population, crashed due to overhunting. 

George Washington had evinced sympathy for American Indians since his youth as a surveyor on the Virginia frontier. As newly elected president of a nascent nation, he sought to work the concepts of tribal sovereignty and Indian assimilation into his economic plans. As tribal chiefs noted, Washington was a hard bargainer who seemed to covet their land, but not all of it. He also had a reputation among the chiefs as a fair man, and a generation of tribal males grew up with a “George” or “George Washington” in their names in honor of the man.

Washington took direct action to aid the Cherokees. His administration assisted in the rebuilding of their towns and sent agricultural agents to show the Cherokees how to successfully manage domestic animals and a variety of cash crops. 

What changed the dynamics of the Southern economy was Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop to process. But Whitney’s invention eased the labor costs of cotton production. American growers duly increased their crop yield to satisfy European demands for cotton, and the resulting industry boom in the South lasted well beyond the Civil War.

Like fellow Southerners, Cherokee growers went for the money crop in a big way. They increased their tillage, then bought additional black slaves to satisfy the corresponding demand for labor. Soaring profits in turn led more than 200 Cherokees to start their own plantations. 

With the influx of black slaves into their culture, the Cherokees in 1819 passed strict codes to forbid intermarriage with slaves, regulate the buying and selling of slaves, set punishments for runaways and prohibit slaves from owning property. Another period Cherokee law called for a fine of $15 against any master who allowed a slave to buy or sell alcohol.

There were differences between the Cherokee plantations and those of Southern whites. Cherokee plantations had fewer slaves for their size, and the Cherokees themselves worked alongside their slaves in the fields. Their slaves were also permitted to grow food for their own consumption.

Cotton and tobacco were less than ideal crops, as they drained farmland of nutrients. That sparked an increasing demand for virgin land, in turn leading to the rapid settlement of what became Alabama and Mississippi. Before long Southern whites were eyeing the large tracts of uncultivated Cherokee lands immediately to their west. That the Cherokees also had black slaves infuriated whites trying to start their own plantations and farms. After all, slaves were a status symbol denoting economic success.

Starting with Thomas Jefferson, presidents looked for ways to reinterpret Washington’s concept of tribal sovereignty. In 1802 President Jefferson signed a compact with Georgia, paying the state $1.25 million for its western two-thirds (present-day Alabama and Mississippi) and committing the U.S. government to obtain title through purchase to all Indian lands within Georgia itself. No longer would federal power be the shield for tribes it had been. Jefferson then created government trading posts on Indian lands, extending unlimited credit to tribal leaders. Eventually the federal government demanded repayment of such debts in the form of more tribal land. After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson viewed the newly acquired region as a place Eastern tribes might be relocated. James Madison continued that policy. James Monroe initially sought to revert to Washington’s vision of relations between whites and Indian societies, though by his last year in office even he was calling for “Indian removal.” John Quincy Adams was likewise torn between the policies of assimilation and outright removal.

Then came the 1828 election of slave-owning Southern plantation owner and land speculator Andrew Jackson. In the colonial era Jackson had fought the Cherokee and every other major tribe in the Southeast and had personally profited from the sale of seized Cherokee lands. In 1830, at President Jackson’s urging, the Indian Removal Act passed the Senate 28–19 and the House of Representatives 101–97. In vain Cherokee leaders repeatedly visited the White House to ask Jackson to safeguard their property rights, including those governing their black slaves. Though the respective parties still needed to negotiate an actual removal treaty, most Cherokees saw the handwriting on the wall. Some 600 moved west to future Indian Territory on their own. Other Cherokees sought refuge in east Texas, in February 1836 signing a treaty with President Sam Houston, president of the newly independent republic. By the time the U.S. Congress ratified the Treaty of New Echota with the Cherokee Nation that spring, the tribe had split into four component bands.

Tensions Rise

Despite tensions between the Cherokees who had preceded most others to Indian Territory and those who later arrived on the Trail of Tears, the tribe as a whole rebounded surprisingly fast. The Cherokee Nation set up schools, a court system and law enforcement as individuals set to work establishing farms.

While most Cherokees lived on farmsteads in simple log cabins, more than 300 families started Southern-style plantations, living in two-story mansions and growing cotton using black slaves. The plantations ranged in size from 600 to 1,000 acres and put to work some 25 to 50 slaves. The Cherokees cultivated wheat, corn, hemp and tobacco and raised cattle and horses. Cotton remained king, however, and by 1840 the nation, thanks to its plantations, boasted a higher standard of living than that of neighboring Arkansas, Kansas or Missouri.

But tensions in the nation were on the rise. For one, it had become common knowledge among the Cherokee slaves that Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829. A decade later incoming Texas President Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar drove the Cherokees from his republic. While most fled north into the Cherokee Nation as refugees, others crossed into Mexico. The number of blacks in the nation was also on the rise, not only through the purchase of additional slaves, but also with the arrival of runaway black slaves seeking refuge. Like their Southern white counterparts, however, the Cherokees only responded with a stricter slave code.

Adding to tensions was the manifest disparity between the lot of Cherokee slaves and those held by the Seminole. Seminoles passing through the Cherokee Nation in those years were technically captives from the ongoing Seminole wars in Florida en route to federally allotted lands farther west. Shipped up the Arkansas River from New Orleans, many disembarked at the Cherokee trading post of Webbers Falls to await transportation west. Striding down the riverboat gangplanks alongside their masters were flamboyantly dressed black Seminole slaves, many of whom bore arms. For Cherokee slaves witnessing their arrival, the blurred line between master and slave among the Seminoles must have been galling.

In the summer of 1842, given the rising prosperity the Cherokee Nation was enjoying, Sequoyah—the creator of the Cherokee alphabet, then in his 70s—led a small party into Mexico to find and return home with those Cherokees who had fled from Texas across the Rio Grande. He hoped for the unification of his people. (As it turned out, Sequoyah wouldn’t return home; he died in Mexico of a respiratory infection the next year.)

Whether inspired by the sight of the black Seminole slaves or the reawakened siren song of freedom in Mexico, slaves on the Cherokee plantations around Webbers Falls reached their threshold that fall. In years past black slaves had fled from their Cherokee masters back East and in Indian Territory, but only singly or in pairs. Dozens now waited for a signal.

Daring Escape

In the predawn darkness of November 15 the slaves on neighboring plantations rose quietly, made their way to their respective masters’ houses and overseers’ quarters, and barred the doors from the outside to ensure their occupants did not have an easy time getting out. Then they gathered at a predetermined rallying point for the planned breakout for Mexico.

Most escapees hailed from the plantation of mixed-race Cherokee Joseph Vann. In 1834, after being evicted from his family estate in Georgia, Vann had established a large plantation in southeast Tennessee. Then, in 1837, a year before the main Cherokee removal, he preemptively moved to the newly relocated Cherokee Nation, settling on promising ground around Webbers Falls. On the backs of labor provided by 200 slaves, the Vann family prospered, ultimately holding title to thousands of acres ranging from the Kansas border to the southern boundary of the Cherokee Nation. The rich soil yielded consistently profitable crops of cotton and corn, which Vann plowed back into his ever-expanding holdings of land and slaves. By 1842 he had 300 slaves and even owned a steamboat, named Lucy Walker after a favorite thoroughbred.

On leaving their rallying point, the escapees made their way to Webbers Falls, where they broke into a store for supplies, weapons and ammunition. With the coming dawn many lost their nerve and scattered into the surrounding woodlands. The remaining 20 men, women and children headed southwest into the neighboring Creek Nation on stolen horses and mules. A few were riding Vann’s blooded racehorses.

Meanwhile, back on their plantations, the bewildered Cherokees finally broke out of their lodgings. There was no sign of their slaves. Mounted owners and overseers were soon scouring the countryside. As the patrols drove their wayward property from the woods individually and in small groups, it became apparent many were missing. On questioning the slaves, the Cherokees discovered the fugitives had struck out for Mexico.

Miles to the southwest, soon after the runaway Cherokee slaves crossed into the Creek Nation, 15 slaves from the Bruner and Marshall plantations joined them in the bid for freedom, swelling the party’s number to 35. On their heels galloped some 40 armed Cherokees with dogs, soon joined by a smaller party of Creeks equally determined to retrieve their property.

The combined Cherokee-Creek posse caught up with the fugitives in the Choctaw Nation, 10 miles south of the Canadian River. Spotting their approaching pursuers across the prairie, the runaways sheltered in a buffalo wallow big enough to hold them and their horses. Though few of the slaves had ever fired a gun, they decided to fight it out. In the ensuing skirmish the posse managed to kill two fugitives and recapture a dozen others. Fortunately for the remaining 21 escaped slaves, however, the firefight convinced the Cherokees and Creeks to turn back for reinforcements.

With no time to savor their victory, the fugitives continued their race south for Mexico. 

Pursuit and Capture

The next day, 15 miles from the battle site, the fugitives happened across a pair of slave hunters wholly unaware of the breakout from the Cherokee Nation. James Edwards, who was white, and Billy Wilson, a Delaware, were transporting eight black captives—one man, two women and five children—belonging to a white man named Thompson who had married into the Choctaw Nation. In their own bid for freedom the Choctaw slaves had bolted west, hoping to link up with a Plains tribe, when another white in the nation spotted them and told Edwards and Wilson.

In a reversal of roles, however, the Cherokee and Creek runaways demanded Edwards and Wilson turn over their Choctaw captives. When the pair refused, the fugitives shot them. Though the five additional children would slow their progress, the party welcomed the Choctaws to join them on the road to Mexico. They would need to hurry, as their pursuers were regrouping.

On November 17 the Cherokee National Council authorized a company of tribal militiamen under the command of Captain John Drew to pursue, arrest and deliver the fugitive slaves to Fort Gibson, a U.S. Army post 20 miles north of Webbers Falls. The council also passed a resolution absolving the nation of any liability to the plantation owners if their runaway slaves were killed while resisting arrest. The Cherokee treasury would recompense Drew’s men for supplies and ammunition, while the commander at Fort Gibson loaned the captain 25 pounds of gunpowder. 

Captain Drew left Webbers Falls on November 21 with 87 well-armed militiamen. Arriving at the skirmish site in the Choctaw Nation on November 26, they picked up the fugitives’ trail and soon found the bodies of slave hunters Edwards and Wilson.

Two days later the Cherokee militia finally caught up with the runaways some 7 miles north of the Red River—the border between the United States and the Republic of Texas. Had they managed to cross it, the fugitives still would have had to traverse the expanse of slave-holding Texas to reach Mexico. But they had already run out of supplies and were starving.

The exhausted, dispirited fugitives offered no resistance. They must have picked up additional runaways, as Drew tallied 31 men, women and children, and two men off hunting remained at large. The militia and their captives reached Webbers Falls on December 7. The Cherokee National Council ordered five of the slaves held at Fort Gibson pending investigation into the killings of Edwards and Wilson, and two were tried for murder, though their cases appear to have been dismissed on technicalities. The Choctaw slaves were held until Cherokee authorities had determined Thompson’s claim to them.

The remaining Cherokee slaves were turned over to Vann, who put the runaways to work shoveling coal on his growing fleet of steamboats plying the Arkansas, Mississippi and Ohio rivers. In an instance of poetic justice, two years later a boiler explosion on one of his steamboats killed Vann.

Not the Last Struggle for Freedom

The 1842 revolt inspired other slaves to seek their freedom. Four years later Cherokee plantation owner Lewis Ross, a brother of Principal Chief John Ross, discovered his slaves had been collecting and hiding guns and ammunition. By 1851 nearly 300 blacks had attempted escape from plantations owned by members of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole). Most fugitives tried for Mexico, taking their chances with the slave hunters of Texas, while others headed north for the unorganized territory that in 1854 would become Kansas Territory, where slavery was prohibited.

True to form, the Cherokees reacted with stricter slave codes, expelled freedman from the nation and established a slave-catching or “rescue” company to prevent additional losses. Prior to the revolt such units comprised non-Cherokee slave hunters, like the pair killed by the fugitives in 1842. That changed in the wake of the revolt, as economically struggling Cherokees realized the money to be made catching and returning runaway slaves. The nation authorized them to charge any ammunition and supplies used in their hunts to the tribal treasury.

By the 1861 onset of the Civil War the Five Civilized Tribes held more than 8,000 black slaves, representing 14 percent of the population of Indian Territory. Members of the Cherokee Nation alone held 4,600 slaves.

An oddity in the Cherokee slave code held that blacks with even a trace of tribal ancestry were considered quasi members of the nation and thus granted certain rights, such as marriage into the tribe and the possibility of eventual citizenship. In 1847, when slavers kidnapped two such mixed-blood girls—whose father was Cherokee and mother was black—and took them across the border into Missouri, newspaper editorials within the nation demanded their return. Cherokee Sheriff Charles Landrum of the Delaware District took it on himself to enter Missouri with two deputies and rescue the girls before they could be sold. The Cherokee National Council financially reimbursed Landrum and his men for their daring “invasion” of Missouri. 

Other blacks enslaved by the Cherokees weren’t as fortunate, at least until another president emancipated them on paper and hundreds of thousands of Americans spilled one another’s blood to affirm that proclamation. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on the topic author Mike Coppock recommends The Cherokee Nation: A History, by Robert J. Conley, and Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom, by Miles Tiya.

“Texas Charlie” Bigelow, a U.S. Army scout, was patrolling Indian Territory when he contracted a fever that left him so weak he could barely open his eyelids. An Indian chief took pity on Bigelow and nursed him back to health using a mysterious medicine he called sagwa. When Bigelow begged for the recipe of this wonder drug, the chief sent five tribal medicine men to accompany the scout to the East Coast, where they created “Kickapoo Sagwa,” the magic elixir sold in medicine shows that traveled America from 1881 to 1912.  

Or so the story goes, as recounted in countless Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company advertisements. But the story—like the medicine itself—was totally bogus.  

Bigelow was never an Army scout and never healed by an Indian chief. He grew up on a Texas farm in the 1850s, then fled the rigors of the plow for a life peddling patent medicines across the West and on the streets of Baltimore. In 1881, Bigelow teamed up with John “Doc” Healy, a former Union Army drummer boy, shoe salesman, proprietor of a traveling theatrical troupe called “Healy’s Hibernian Minstrels,” and the inventor and chief pitchman of a bogus liver medicine and a dubious liniment he dubbed “King of Pain.” When he joined forces with Bigelow, Healy concocted a new product, a fake “Indian” medicine he called “Kickapoo Sagwa.” And he proposed a brilliant idea for promoting it.  

“His plan was to hire a few Indians, rent a storeroom, and have the medicine simmering like a witch’s brew in a great iron pot inside a tepee,” recalled “Nevada Ned” Oliver, a veteran pitchman hired by Healy and Bigelow.  

Healy set up his first Kickapoo showroom in Providence, R.I., then moved to Manhattan before settling in New Haven in 1887. In a huge warehouse decorated with tepees, shields, spears, and other Native American curios, Healy hired Indians—none of them from the Kickapoo tribe—to entertain audiences with songs and dances while stirring huge pots of fake medicine. He advertised his Sagwa as a secret Indian recipe consisting of “Roots, Herbs, Barks, Gums and Leaves,” but it was actually a completely Caucasian concoction containing sugar, a mild laxative, and a dollop of alcohol.  

From their headquarters, Healy and Bigelow dispatched teams of real and ersatz Indians, plus vaudeville performers, and pitchmen posing as doctors to stage shows across America. The shows proved popular and the “doctors” sold oceans of Kickapoo Sagwa, as well as spinoff products—Kickapoo Buffalo Salve, Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure, and Kickapoo Indian Worm Killer. Healy and Bigelow became, as historian Stewart Holbrook wrote in his classic 1959 book, The Golden Age of Quackery, “the Barnum and Bailey of the medicine show business.”  

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The two partners didn’t invent the traveling medicine show: For decades, patent medicine pitchmen roamed rural America, attracting crowds with musicians and other entertainers. Nor did Healy and Bigelow invent the notion that Native Americans were “children of nature” who possessed a mystical knowledge of healing plants. Throughout the 19th century, Americans bought books purporting to reveal the secrets of Indian medicine—The Indian Guide to Health and The Indian Doctor’s Dispensary, among others. What made Healy and Bigelow rich was their ingenious combination of the age-old appeal of miracle cures with the whiz-bang theatricality of Barnum’s circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.    

Early in the 1880s, Kickapoo shows were modest affairs—a few Indians performing dubious native dances, a few White singers and acrobats and a fake doctor, who sold Sagwa and served as master of ceremonies. One of those “doctors” was Nevada Ned Oliver, who described the shows decades later in a magazine article.  

“The show customarily began with the introduction of each of the Indians by name, together with some personal history,” Oliver recalled. “Five of the six would grunt acknowlegements; the sixth would make an impassioned speech in Kickapoo, interpreted by me….It was a most edifying oration as I translated it. What the brave actually said, I never knew, but I had reason to fear that it was not the noble discourse of my translation, for even the poker faces of his fellow savages sometimes were convulsed.”  

By the 1890s, Healy and Bigelow were dispatching more than a dozen Kickapoo shows across America every summer. The larger troupes played for weeks in big cities, staging elaborate spectacles in tents that held 3,000 seats. Admission cost a dime and shows included a dozen performances, interrupted by three or four pitches for Kickapoo cure-alls. The shows were wildly eclectic. The Indians performed war dances and an “Indian Marriage Ceremony,” and sometimes staged brutal attacks on wagon trains. The White performers included singers, acrobats, contortionists, comedians, and fire-eaters. Occasionally, Texas Charlie Bigelow himself appeared, a cowboy hat perched theatrically atop his shoulder-length hair. Billed as the world champion rifle shooter, Texas Charlie demonstrated feats of marksmanship and told dubious tales of his adventures.  

“Later, there were aerial acts, a great deal of Irish and blackface comedy, and such exotic novelties as a midget Dutch comic, the ‘Skatorial Songsters,’ who performed while gliding around the stage on roller skates, and Jackley, ‘the only table performer on earth’ who turned somersaults on a pile of tables that extended 25 feet in the air,” Brooks McNamara wrote in Step Right Up, his 1975 history of medicine shows.  

“If the combination of burning wagon trains and blackface minstrel routines was somewhat eccentric, “ McNamara continued, “no one seems to have cared or even noticed—especially not Healy and Bigelow, who refused to trouble themselves about complex artistic questions so long as the Kickapoo shows continued to attract crowds and sell medicine.”  

The crowds kept coming, and kept buying Kickapoo potions, into the 20th century, enabling Healy and Bigelow to purchase expansive mansions near Kickapoo’s Connecticut headquarters.  

In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, regulating the contents and the advertising of medicines—which put a damper on the more…um…poetic claims of Kickapoo’s pitchmen.  

By then, Healy had sold his half of the operation to Bigelow and moved to Australia. In 1912, Bigelow sold the company for $250,000 to a corporation that continued selling Kickapoo Sagwa in drugstores but ended the traveling medicine shows.  

Texas Charlie moved to England, where he manufactured a potion much like Sagwa. He called it “Kimco,” a tip of his cowboy hat to the scheme that made him rich—the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company.  

Decades later, the hillbilly characters in Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” comic strip drank a potent moonshine called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” In 1965, the Monarch Beverage Company introduced a citrus-flavored soft drink called “Kickapoo Joy Juice.” It’s still around, and quite popular in Southeast Asia. The company never claimed the soda cures ailments, but it does brag that it contains enough caffeine “to give you the kick you crave.”  

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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One stipulation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie called for the establishment of a Crow agency running parallel to the Yellowstone River in Montana Territory. The site was to become Fort Parker, named for newly appointed U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ely S. Parker, a Seneca-born Civil War veteran. The construction of the post deposited thousands of federal dollars into the outstretched hands of businessmen in nearby Bozeman, and the flow of government funds only increased. For the period between Nov. 1, 1870, and Nov. 26, 1871, Fort Parker agent Fellows D. Pease submitted a staggering tab of $133,936 (nearly $3.2 million in today’s dollars) for services and supplies from local merchants and contractors. But what of the agency’s Crow wards? Did they share in the boon? 

Bozeman traces its origins to Southern-born pioneer John Bozeman, who amid the Civil War instead ventured to Montana Territory in search of gold. Soon realizing it would prove more fruitful to mine the prospective miners, he forged his namesake trail through the Gallatin Valley and platted his namesake town in 1864. Bozeman set the precedent for merchants to follow.

War’s end marked the starting gun for a flood of inbound travelers on the Bozeman Trail, exacerbating tensions with regional tribes. The Crows held the right to the contested ground, and the 1868 treaty stipulated the government would supply them goods as payment for their seized lands. If things went according to plan, at least they would give up their lives as transient buffalo hunters to engage in peaceful agricultural pursuits.

In 1869 the government commissioned Bozeman businessman Leander Black to build Fort Parker and serve as temporary agent to the Crows until their formal agent, Capt. E.M. Camp, arrived from Washington, D.C. The fort comprised a warehouse, living quarters for the Indian agent, various outbuildings and a billet for a sergeant and a dozen men of Company A of the 7th U.S. Infantry. Stored within the warehouse were flour, sugar, beef, pork, rice, hominy, beans, blankets, kettles, clothing and various and sundry other items for distribution to the Crows. The agency hired local citizens to work at the post and relied on Bozeman merchants to supply its every need. The town’s proximity made it especially convenient for local vendors to bid on government contracts.

Unfortunately, as at other reservations, the wares unloaded on the Crows at Fort Parker were subpar. Chief Sits in the Middle of the Land described worthless tin kettles that burned up in the fire and blankets so threadbare they offered no protection against the high plains wind. Truth be told, the Crows discarded most of the annuity goods. Women poured the flour onto the ground and used the sacks for other purposes. Accustomed to the sweet taste of bison, the Crows were loath to eat the comparatively bland flesh of the “spotted buffalo,” the name they applied to cattle. Other goods they simply had no use for, preferring, for example, their soft tanned leggings, moccasins and hide dresses to the stiff and unfamiliar agency-​issued clothing.

By 1875 Fort Parker had moved east to the Stillwater Valley, in part to make way for the fast-​approaching tracks of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the Crows were on their fourth agent. A change in Indian policy saw Captain Camp replaced by the civilian Pease, who in turn was replaced by his boss, the Rev. James Wright, superintendent of Indian Affairs for Montana. The latter’s appointment followed President Ulysses S. Grant’s direction to select Indian agents endorsed by religious organizations for their high ideals. Wright proved more of an unpopular zealot and lasted little over a year, resigning his post in October 1874.

The June 10, 1875, edition of the Helena Weekly Herald touted the former agent as an “honest and faithful servant.” Even before his departure, however, the good reverend was suspected of bad faith. A subsequent investigation into alleged fraud at Fort Parker revealed a den of corruption under Wright’s so-called oversight. Even his wife was implicated.

Of course, Wright only represented the government side of the equation. Town alderman and serial entrepreneur Nelson Story was at the controls in Bozeman. The full degree of his involvement came to light in a report filed in 1876 by Colonel James Brisbin, newly arrived commander at neighboring Fort Ellis, based on information from a whistleblower at Fort Parker. Brisbin forwarded his report to Lt. Gen. Phil Sheridan, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. The charges it contained were damning.

Bozeman gristmill operator William McAdow detailed how Story, who had the agency flour contract, had paid him to bag such flour in double sacks. As the agency inspector marked the flour sacks as delivered, Story’s cohorts would remove the unmarked inner sacks behind the agency man’s back and present those for counting. A final tally would record the Crows had received two bags of flour when in fact they’d received but one. Thus, Story was able to deliver half the contracted flour while pocketing the full payment.

Another agency employee, backed up by agency physician Dr. Andrew Jackson Hunter, accused Story of having agency cattle seared with his own brand and then driven to trading posts along the Missouri River, where he sold them for 100 percent pure profit. Though beef wasn’t the Crows’ first choice of meat, in the absence of buffalo they needed the beeves to survive. 

Story’s greed knew no bounds. On opening his own trading post in the Judith Basin, he stocked it with goods meant for distribution to the Crows. Agency employees recounted having witnessed wagonloads of food and supplies rolling out of Fort Parker under cover of darkness.

While Story was certainly the main character in this melodrama, there were plenty of supporting cast members, and through it all the Rev. Wright and others had turned a blind eye. As a result, from 1869 to ’75 the equivalent in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars of more than $30 million filtered into Bozeman’s economy, much of it tainted. While the fraud emanating from Fort Parker clearly helped fuel Bozeman’s growth, the Crows meant to benefit from its operations were literally left out in the cold with subpar blankets.

Neither Wright nor Story was ever brought to justice over his ill-gotten gains. The reverend and his wife retired in comfort back East, while Story became Bozeman’s first millionaire before making a second fortune as a Los Angeles real estate developer.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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While a number of enslaved African Americans looked on, 40-year-old Thomas Jefferson, shovel in hand, began poking into the side of the large Indian mound. Spherical in shape and 40 feet in diameter, it sat on the flood plain of the gently flowing Rivanna River, six miles north of Monticello, his mountaintop home. Jefferson was standing in a ditch surrounding the “barrow,” as he called it, when he commenced. “I first dug superficially in several parts of it,” he wrote, “and came to collections of human bones, at different depths, from six inches to three feet below the surface. These were lying in the utmost confusion….”

Americans can usually rattle off a few of Thomas Jefferson’s titles and achievements. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, our third president, was the driving force behind the Louisiana Purchase and the wildly successful Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Expedition. But he was much more. Jefferson was a true Renaissance man, a brilliant polymath with an eclectic and dizzying array of interests.

Of these, he called science his “passion,” and over the course of his busy life, despite devoting more than 30 years to public service, Jefferson made contributions to botany, paleontology, meteorology, entomology, ethnology, and comparative anatomy. He was also an amateur archaeologist, and in 1783, spurred on by a document sent him by the French government, Thomas Jefferson excavated a Monacan Indian burial mound. It was one of his greatest scientific accomplishments. “In applying his innate sense of order and detail,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “he anticipated modern archaeology’s basis and methods by almost a full century.”

Born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, his father’s plantation in the Virginia Piedmont—the western edge of European settlement—Thomas Jefferson studied in private schools prior to his 1760 enrollment at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. There, as he later wrote, it was his “great good fortune” to study under and befriend, Dr. William Small, a disciple of the Scottish Enlightenment who “probably fixed the destinies” of his life. “[F]rom his conversation,” Jefferson wrote, “I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed.”

It was in Williamsburg, too, that young Jefferson had an encounter that helped foster his fascination with Native Americans. In the spring of 1762, a party of 165 Cherokee from the Holston River Valley accompanied their chief to Williamsburg prior to his journey to London. Called “Ontesseté,” this chieftain delivered a stirring farewell oration the evening before he departed. Enthralled, Jefferson looked on from the edge of the native’s camp. “The moon was in full splendor,” he later wrote, “and to her he seemed to address himself….His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people…filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.”

After college, Jefferson practiced law for seven years. Then, following service in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Continental Congress, and the Virginia House of Delegates, he was elected governor of the Old Dominion in 1779 during the American Revolution. In October 1780, the same year he was reelected governor, Jefferson received a fascinating set of 22 queries—in essence, a questionnaire—from the secretary of the French legation to the United States, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois (who in 1803 would play a large role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase). The questionnaire sought out some of the basic statistical information on the nascent American states, then embroiled in a war with France’s common enemy.

The Virginia copy had been forwarded to Jefferson by a member of the state’s congressional delegation. Query number three, for example, asked for “An exact description of [the state’s] limits and boundaries,” while seven inquired about “The number of its inhabitants.” Others sought out details on the state’s religions, rivers, mountains, flora, seaports, colleges, commercial productions, and military force, as well as customs and manners.

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An inveterate compiler of data, Jefferson was well-prepared to respond. As he later noted in his Autobiography: “I had always made it a practice whenever an opportunity occurred of obtaining any information of our country [Virginia], which might be of use to me in any station public or private, to commit it to writing. These memoranda were on loose papers….I thought this a good occasion to embody their substance, which I did in the order of Mr. Marbois’ queries, so as to answer his wish and to arrange them for my own use.”

Although burdened with the responsibilities of his governorship, Jefferson began working on his reply immediately. Unfortunately, the declining state of military affairs in Virginia for Jefferson’s last seven months as governor meant that he had to set aside the project that so sparked his enthusiasm. During this tumultuous time, he was forced to flee twice from Richmond, the new state capital he had established. And—after Jefferson and the legislature relocated to Charlottesville to escape the enemy—he was compelled to even abandon Monticello when a British raiding party rode up the “little mountain” and captured his neoclassical home.

Although Jefferson later termed this troubling period the very nadir of his public career, the termination of his governorship in early June 1781 did nevertheless give him the time he needed to focus on the French questionnaire. Organizationally, each query became the topic of a chapter. In December 1781, Jefferson had the first version sent to Barbé-Marbois, but he immediately began enlarging the manuscript—indeed, tripling the length—until it was published in Paris in 1785 and then in London two years later by John Stockdale as Notes on the State of Virginia.

Most of the information came from Jefferson’s personal papers, his large library at Monticello, and his numerous learned correspondents. One query, however, animated him to travel afield. It asked for: “A description of the Indians established in the State….An indication of the Indian Monuments discovered in that State.” After writing about Virginia’s “upwards of forty different tribes”—and compiling a table of their numbers, “confederacies and geographical situation”—the former governor tackled the query’s second section. “I know of no such thing existing as an Indian monument…,” he wrote, “unless indeed it be the Barrows, of which many are to be found all over this country.”

Jefferson penned that these were “of considerable notoriety among the Indians,” and that one stood in his neighborhood. He recalled that, in the mid-1750s, a party of Native Americans “went through the woods directly to it…and having staid about it some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road” about six miles distant. (While some writers claim that young Jefferson, then only 10 to 12 years old, witnessed this incident himself, it is much more likely he heard this story secondhand.)

These Native Americans were most certainly Monacans, a Siouan-speaking people who, in the dim past, had journeyed from the Ohio River Valley across the Appalachian Mountains. Up through the late 1600s, the Monacan Nation—a confederacy of like-speaking Native American tribes—controlled a vast region of the fertile Virginia Piedmont, including the valleys of the Rivanna and upper James Rivers. By the time of the arrival of Europeans in the Piedmont in the 1720s, the Monacan had long since removed to the southwest.

Monacan men stalked elk, deer, and small game through the open woods and sometimes pursued bison over the beautiful Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Dressed in animal skins, and sporting wildly cut manes, they adorned themselves with necklaces made of copper they had mined. Much prized, the copper they sometimes traded with the Powhatan, an Algonquin people who occupied Tidewater Virginia to the east. The Monacan and the Powhatan also frequently fought.

The Monacan women raised crops of corn, beans, and squash in the fields surrounding their villages. Often comprising scores of bark-covered domed structures, these villages were surrounded by 7-foot-high palisade enclosures (a feature that made them resemble the English-built forts). One such town, Monasukapanough, had once stood near the Rivanna River in close proximity to the “barrow” in Jefferson’s neighborhood. He noted the connection between the two sites when he wrote that the mound was located “opposite to some hills on which had been an Indian town.”

To better answer Marbois’ query and to satisfy his own curiosity, Jefferson determined to “open and examine” this mound thoroughly. Prior to the excavation, however—in anticipation of what was later termed the “scientific method”—he posited questions he hoped to find answers for in the earth. It was obviously a repository of the dead, but when was it constructed? How was it constructed? Was it true that those interred were the casualties of Native American battles fought nearby? Was it the common sepulcher (or tomb) of just one town? This supposition came from a tradition, Jefferson wrote, “handed down from the Aboriginal Indians, that, when they settled in a town, the first person who died was placed erect and earth put about him, so as to cover and support him….”

When another person died, the dirt was removed, he was reclined against the first, and then the earth was replaced. (In this manner, therefore, a burial mound would grow outward from the center.) Another question—inferred but never stated exactly—was this: Rather than being related to just one Indian village, was this barrow a sacred burial place for an entire section of the Monacan Nation?

Interestingly, a theory at the time—popular among members of the nation’s foremost scientific organization, the American Philosophical Society, which Jefferson had been elected to in 1780—claimed that Native Americans were too primitive to have erected the barrows, also called “tumuli,” which had been encountered in numerous states. Instead, they attributed their construction to a much earlier people descended from either Phoenicians, Israelites, or perhaps even Scandinavians (think Vikings). These ancient “Mound Builders,” they theorized, were subsequently driven away by the barbarous ancestors of the Native Americans with whom they were familiar. Some of the Mound Builders journeyed south, they believed, and founded the Aztec civilization. While Jefferson was certainly familiar with this racist hypothesis, it is unknown whether he was considering it as he began his dig.

Unfortunately, too, the exact date of the excavation is not known. Concerning this important detail—and so uncharacteristic of Jefferson, who was normally minutiae-obsessed—his Notes on the State of Virginia is silent. Historian Douglas L. Wilson, however, who studied the original manuscript at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the “setting copy” for the 1785 Paris edition, has concluded that the dig “must have been performed after…the summer or early fall of 1783 and before [Jefferson] left for Philadelphia on 16 October.”

The circular barrow was large, 40 feet in diameter, encircled by a ditch five feet across and five feet deep. It had been 12 feet high, Jefferson observed, “though now reduced by the plough to seven and a half, having been under cultivation about a dozen years.” Prior to that, it had been covered with a small stand of trees one foot in diameter.

Restored Honor

Finally recognized as an official state tribe by Virginia in 1989, the Monacan Indian Nation has made considerable strides in reestablishing its ancestral legacy. Its headquarters is located on Bear Mountain, Va., not far from Lynchburg. For more information, visit www.monacannation.com.

Jefferson’s poking around quickly established that the mound contained human bones. They were lying in disarray, “some vertical, some oblique, some horizontal…entangled, and held together in clusters by the earth. Bones of the most distant parts were found together, as, for instance, the small bones of the foot in the hollow of a scull…to give the idea of bones emptied promiscuously from a bag or basket….”

These were “secondary burial features,” wrote University of Virginia anthropology professor Jeffrey L. Hantman, “the comingled remains of numerous individuals” who had been initially buried elsewhere, “then moved collectively at designated ritual moments….”

Jefferson marveled at the number of remains he uncovered; the vast majority being skulls, jaw bones, teeth, and the bones or arms, legs, feet, and hands. Some he extracted intact, but others, such as the skull of an infant, “fell to pieces on being taken out” of the mound.

Next began the most commented-upon aspect of Jefferson’s archaeological endeavor. “I proceeded then,” he wrote, “to make a perpendicular cut through the body of the barrow, that I might examine its internal structure. This… was opened to the former surface of the earth, and was wide enough for a man to walk through and examine its sides.” Typical of Jefferson’s writings, this passage disguises the fact that he alone could not possibly have performed this labor. Surely, the “perpendicular cut” was dug by a rather large number of enslaved African Americans, perhaps as many as 30 or 40, whom he had either transported from Monticello or leased from a nearby plantation owner. These sentences, too, reveal Jefferson’s utter insensitivity to the site’s sacred status.

Now the amateur archaeologist was able to determine how the barrow was constructed. “At the bottom, that is on the level of the circumjacent plain,” he wrote, “I found bones; above these a few stones brought from a cliff a quarter of a mile off…then an interval of earth, then a stratum of bones, and so on.”

At one end of the trench he found four strata of bones; at the other, three. The bones in the strata closest to the surface were the least decayed. Down through the ages, therefore, the barrow had grown taller with recurring layers of bones, stones, and earth. Next, he was able to determine whether any of those interred had fallen in battle. Of the bones he pulled from the mound’s various strata: “No holes were discovered in any of them, as if made with bullets, arrows, or other weapons.”

What of the other questions? Naturally, Jefferson wasn’t able to determine when the Monacan burial mound was initiated, but—thanks to his methods—he was able to answer two others. For the following reasons, he wrote, it was obviously not one town’s common sepulcher: The number of skeletons it contained (he “conjectured” 1,000); None of them were upright; The bones lay in different stratas, with no intermixing; And, the “different states of decay in these strata” seemed to indicate “a difference in the time of inhumation.” This burial mound, therefore, must have appertained to a fairly large region of the Monacan Nation. “Appearances certainly indicate,” he wrote, “that it has derived both origin and growth from the accustomary collection of bones, and deposition of them together….”

In the balance of his response to the aborigine-related query, Jefferson briefly mentioned two other barrows (one of which also contained human remains), presciently noted “the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia,” and urged the collection of Native American vocabularies so that those skilled in languages could “construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.” He concluded with a seven-page table listing the tribes residing within, and adjacent to, the United States, their names, approximate numbers, and the locations of their tribal lands.

Ambitious in scope, Notes on the State of Virginia—with its double-entendre title—won for Jefferson considerable notoriety. In 1785, the year of its French publication, Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson, a fellow member of the American Philosophical Society, called it “a most excellent natural history not merely of Virginia but of North America and possibly equal if not superior to that of any country yet published.”

Wrote English professor William Peden, who edited a 1954 edition of the work: “The Notes on Virginia is probably the most important scientific and political book written by an American before 1785; upon it much of Jefferson’s contemporary fame as a philosopher was based.”

And no small amount of that fame was due to the “sage of Monticello’s” archaeological dig (the only such of his lifetime). Unfortunately, other than what was published in Notes on the State of Virginia, there is no other information about the Monacan burial mound. Jefferson left no field notes. Its exact location has never been pinpointed, although many individuals have tried, including professor Hantman and a team of anthropology students from the University of Virginia.

Unfortunate, too, is the fact that Jefferson never mentioned refilling the trench. If it was indeed left open, the examined remains strewn across the ground, the Rivanna River, which frequently inundates the plain upon which the mound stood, would have washed it away within a few decades. Jefferson obviously believed that the benefits of scientific inquiry greatly trumped the barrow’s importance to the Monacan people.

All that being said, the dig was nonetheless a major scientific achievement. “The importance of Jefferson’s experience and his report of it cannot be overstressed,” wrote science historian Silvio A. Bedini, “for he introduced for the very first time the principle of stratigraphy in archaeological excavation.” With this discipline, examining the layers—“strata,” Jefferson called them—provides a calendar for determining the age of items or human remains contained therein. In his description, Jefferson “not only indicated the basic features of the stratigraphic method, but also virtually named it,” wrote German archaeology writer C.W. Ceram, “although a hundred years were to pass before the term became established in archaeological jargon.”

Most important is the fact that thanks to his excavation of the Monacan Indian burial mound—and the detailed account of his posited questions and scientific methodology—Thomas Jefferson became known as the “father of American archaeology.”

Rick Britton is a historian and cartographer who lives in Charlottesville, Va., in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson’s “Little Mountain.”

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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As Brig. Gen. Benjamin Alvord sat in his office at Fort Vancouver contemplating the operational season that had just concluded, he had every reason to feel satisfied about his first full year as District of Oregon commander. Almost everything he had asked of his forces, especially the 1st Oregon Cavalry, had been achieved. The only thing his mounted command had not done was largely out of its control: “chastise” the Snake Indians, more specifically the Northern Paiute. To accomplish that, as regimental commander Colonel Reuben Maury could point out after two years, one needed to find them first.

During the winter of 1863–64, Alvord mulled over how to make certain the Oregon Cavalry found the Snakes. On February 10, 1864, he mapped out his plans for the coming campaign in a letter to Oregon Governor Addison Gibbs, telling Gibbs: “I shall recommend to the general commanding the department [Department of the Pacific] that troops be sent to traverse thoroughly the whole region” from Canyon City to the California border, and as far east as Fort Boise.

While the Oregon Cavalry had spent the past two summers and falls in the field, Alvord planned to deploy them differently in 1864. “I hope to put two expeditions in the field the whole season for that purpose against the Snake Indians…,” he detailed. “I shall also recommend a movement from Fort Klamath easterly; but as that post is not in my district I cannot speak so definitely in reference to it.”

The plan was textbook military strategy: Alvord’s concept was to constrict the open spaces as the various Oregon Cavalry companies moved toward each other. If all worked well, one or more of those contingents would finally have the clash they sought with Chief Paulina’s band of Northern Paiutes. This differed in two ways from what the Oregon Cavalry had done the previous two years. First, the operations area would be shifted; instead of spending most of their time from Fort Boise eastward, along the immigrant trails, they would operate in eastern Oregon and western Idaho Territory, south of Canyonville, Ore. Next, this would entail multiple expeditions taking place at the same time.

With the three-year enlistments of most of the Oregon cavalrymen set to expire between December and March, this was likely the troopers’ last chance to prove their loyalty to the Union. Alvord was empathetic, knowing the “ardent desire of many of them would be to join in the war in the East.” Since that had never been possible, a well-coordinated military campaign to stamp out any Indian raiders along the immigrant trails was their only chance to prove their patriotism for the larger Union cause.

Raising a Loyal Regiment

It had been more than two years since federal officials finally decided to raise a regiment of Oregon volunteers to replace the departing Regular Army units in the District of Oregon. From its origins, the 1st Oregon Cavalry was different than the Union’s other volunteer commands. Not only would its service be different, the manner in which it was formed also differed from other volunteer commands. While governors in other states played prominent roles in raising regiments by appointing officers to lead them, that was not the case in Oregon.

From the start of the war, federal officials had concerns about the loyalty of Oregon’s governor, John Whiteaker, who had supported John Breckinridge’s presidential candidacy in 1860. Since the start of the secession crisis, Whiteaker had made a number of public statements supporting the South’s right to leave the Union. Those comments culminated with a set of lengthy remarks that were widely circulated in the Oregon newspapers in June 1861. Not only did the South have the right to secede, but, according to the governor, the Confederates had the right “if need be, to use every just means within their power to defend themselves, their property and institutions, against the unjust encroachments of the North.”

As the Army authorized the raising of a regiment of Oregon volunteers, the only question was whether Whiteaker was a Confederate sympathizer or just a local Copperhead. One regional newspaper editor felt Whiteaker was the former, calling him “as rank a traitor as Jolane [Joe Lane],” the former Oregon senator who ran as the vice presidential candidate on John Breckinridge’s ticket. Federal military and political officials in Washington, D.C., agreed and decided they would not work through the governor, opting to maneuver around him. Doing so was not an easy matter, even as his popularity eroded considerably throughout the summer.

The political and military leaders in the U.S. capital had not circumvented a governor before and did not have a clear alternative in place. They knew they needed to ensure that any Oregon Volunteers were led by men loyal to the Union cause, but they were not sure how to go about it. So, on September 24, the adjutant general of the Union armies informed Thomas Cornelius, Reuben Maury, and Benjamin F. Harding they had been selected, “upon the strong recommendation” of Oregon Senator Edward Baker—President Lincoln’s dear old friend—who “relies confidently upon the prudence, patriotism, and economy with which you will execute” the raising “for the service of the United States one regiment of mounted troops.” The three men were informed they would “be governed by any directions sent to you by Col. E.D. Baker, and will under all circumstances report your conduct to the premises of the War Department.”

Senator Baker’s role ended abruptly on October 21, 1861, when he was killed at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, Va. Upon his death, the challenging task of recruiting what became the 1st Oregon Cavalry fell solely to the trio in Oregon. The difficulties were exacerbated by the onset of the worst winter in a generation. Desperate to put a large mounted force in the field, the U.S. Army decided it could not wait to recruit a full complement of men, if it were even possible. In March 1862, the regiment formed with just six companies. A seventh company was added the following year.

For two years, the seven companies traversed thousands of miles in some of the country’s most inhospitable regions, from north central Oregon to southeastern Idaho Territory. At times, individual companies went into the field; at others, several served together for as long as seven straight months. They rode through mountain passes in the midst of snowstorms as late as June and as early as September, and across scorching high plains deserts. During those first two years, they had provided security for whites streaming into the Northwest, but they had not forced a large engagement on the various tribes they simply called Snakes. Despite their frustration, they were achieving part of the objective their leaders set for them—just not the one most of the troopers had sought. Alvord’s plan for 1864 just might give them the opportunity to finally prove, in the only way they could, “to the world, by acts rather than by words, our love and veneration for this blessed heritage bequeathed us by our [fore]fathers.”

Engaging the Paiutes

Four weeks into the 1864 campaign, Captain John M. Drake had nothing to show for his efforts except growing frustration over the numerous delays. As a result, the column had reached a point only about 125 miles southeast of his base at Fort Dalles. While he and some of his men took note of the vegetation and nature of the terrain they had ridden over, most of that land had been explored before. The fact his column had ridden on existing, though rough, roads most of the way, made it clear they had yet to explore any true frontier regions. Worse, given Alvord’s objectives, the only Indians the Oregon Cavalry had encountered during the campaign thus far were their own Warm Springs scouts. As his force continued southeast, he sent small patrols and some of his Indian allies fanning out on his forward flanks to find Paiute encampments or at least some indication they had been in the area. On May 17, that discovery occurred two miles below Drake’s camp, at the junction of the North Fork Crooked River and the main river channel. A Warm Springs scouting party that Drake subsequently sent out revealed a Paiute “camp about 12 or 15 miles [northeast] distant, numbering 9 lodges, and a large band of horses, 100 or more.”

Eager to engage the Paiutes, either in a confrontation of arms or to verbally impress upon them the cost of attacking Whites, Drake moved quickly. He ordered Lieutenant John M. McCall to make a night march to the site of the Paiute camp with a force including 26 of his own men from Company D; Lieutenant Stephen Watson and 10 men from Company B; and 21 Warm Springs scouts led by Stock Whitley. The objective was for McCall to surprise the camp in the pre-dawn hours, despite having no evidence they had done any raiding. Drake would follow with the rest of the command in the early morning.

At 9:30 p.m., McCall left Drake’s camp on the Crooked River and headed in a northeasterly “direction over an extremely rockey [sic] country for some 12 miles,” before coming to “the vicinity of the camp, where we found our [Warm Springs] scouts.” Traveling guardedly in the dark, McCall’s force did not reach his scouts’ location until about 2 a.m. He sent four Warm Springs scouts ahead to find the best way to close the mile gap between his men and the Paiute camp. The scouts reported they could close to within 500 or 600 yards without being discovered. McCall quietly moved his force as near as possible, noticing the camp was on flat ground, under juniper trees, with the Paiute horses herded together in two groups above and below the camp.

On his scouts’ advice, McCall decided to approach from the west, dividing his force into three groups. Watson would be in the center, as Whitley and his 21 Warm Springs scouts moved to the left and McCall advanced with Company D on Watson’s right.

The crucial coordination between the three columns—made more challenging in the dark—quickly unraveled after the advance started about 4 a.m. The eager Watson, who had the easiest path, quickly outpaced the other two wings. McCall’s men literally bogged down while crossing treacherous ground and then having to traverse “a quagmire” with some difficulty.

By this point the Paiutes, discovering they were being attacked by a force of undetermined size, sent a man out to gather their horses. McCall’s men drove the man off and “immediately secured these, and put them in charge of a corporal and two men.” The struggle through the quagmire and disorganization caused by capturing the horses left McCall well behind Watson’s group, although the Warm Springs scouts were making steady progress on the far left.

After detailing the three men to take charge of the horse herd, McCall moved the rest of his wing toward the Paiute encampment. According to McCall, upon hearing firing to their left, they turned to find “we were going directly under the fire of Lieutenant Watson’s men.” Shifting to the right to get out of the line of fire as they moved forward, McCall’s men “found Lt. Watson’s party all cut to pieces.” As Watson’s men emerged into the open, the Paiutes had fallen back to a defensible position among some rocks on the hill, where they fired both guns and bows. “Lieutenant Watson was the first to arrive in front of the Indians,” one of his men observed, “and on the first fire fell mortally wounded from his horse—two of his men were killed at the same time.”

Others were hit during the ensuing firefight, including five more troopers. A civilian named Richard Barker was shot in the thigh, breaking the bone, and one of the Warm Springs scouts was also hit. Their leader, Whitley, was struck at least four times. One of the bullets “entered just under his ear and came out of his mouth carrying away two teeth, another fracturing his collar bone.”

After emerging on the right, and out of the line of friendly fire, McCall “found on examination that the Indians were completely fortified in a cliff of rocks.” With both Watson’s troopers and the Warm Springs Indians receiving heavy fire and his own group of troopers starting to come under fire, McCall decided that if he was going “to save my wounded men and the horses, my only recourse was to retire to a safe place, and send for reinforcements.” At 6 a.m., McCall’s situation was precarious; he believed reinforcements were nearly 30 round-trip miles away. About 8 a.m., a worried McCall “reached what I considered a safe place” near a spring.

Fortunately for McCall’s force, Drake had led a patrol out of camp at the usual time, heading generally in McCall’s direction. Thus, Drake was already an hour out of his camp when he saw two riders “approaching at full speed.” Learning from the messengers—a trooper and one of the Warm Springs Indians—that Watson had been killed and McCall was in danger, Drake “and a detachment of 40 men” from Captain Henry Small’s Company G “proceeded with all possible speed to the scene of the conflict.” 

Having ridden “at a plunging trot,” Drake arrived at McCall’s defensive position three long hours after the call for reinforcements had gone out. While his surgeon attended to the wounded, Drake rode the extra mile to the scene of the firefight. As near as Drake could tell the Paiutes had left in considerable haste about an hour before his arrival, leaving a large quantity of provisions and some equipment. They fled on foot because the Warm Springs scouts managed to capture the horse herd after the three cavalrymen fell back with the rest of McCall’s command, abandoning their prizes. Drake’s men also recovered the bodies of their dead comrades, who had been stripped and mutilated. The Warm Springs scout had been disemboweled and scalped.

After burning the Paiute encampment with “an immense amount of provisions, robes, saddles and plunder,” Drake’s men gathered the remains of their dead comrades and headed back to McCall’s position. From there, the wounded who were able to ride mounted horses while the two most severely wounded were carried on impromptu stretchers; they slowly returned to the campsite selected by Lieutenant William Hand, finally reaching it at 11 p.m.—in Drake’s words, “weary, tired and gloomy.”

May 19 “was consumed in the necessary preparations for the burial of our fallen comrades,” Drake recorded in his journal. “Their graves were dug side by side on a small knoll south of camp in the edge of the timber and the three bodies were buried with appropriate [military] honors.” The surviving Warm Springs scouts gathered their wounded and dead and returned to their reservation. Drake acknowledged “a sad feeling pervades the command on account of Watson,” who, according to one trooper, “was about the most popular officer in the regiment.”

Once their dead comrades were buried and the initial shock wore off, the camp was rife with talk about Lieutenant McCall’s conduct during the firefight. Most blamed him for the disaster. Drake, however, did not. While he repeatedly criticized his fellow officers when he felt they were not performing their duty effectively, he was pragmatic and restrained in his assessment of McCall’s actions. Drake told Lieutenant John Apperson: “I am not disposed to censure McCall in this matter at all. He obeyed his orders. I did not send him out there to get a lot of men butchered for the mere glory of the thing.”

Drake dismissed camp talk that McCall had not moved fast enough to relieve Watson’s force, noting that the Paiutes’ position was strong and they had already shown their ability to crush a frontal attack. Even criticism that he could have used his remaining force to pin the Paiutes in their position did not impress Drake, who noted McCall had no way of knowing how long it would take for help to arrive. In the meantime, “the wounded were groaning and writhing in their agony, and a man whose heart is not very hard, could not be blamed much for trying to alleviate their sufferings as much as possible.”

Drake’s command spent the next 17 days building a defensible supply depot before resuming the march deeper into southeastern Oregon. Once the depot was fully constructed, most of the troopers continued their march to meet up with Captain Currey’s eastern prong of the operation. While the meeting eventually occurred, neither Drake’s nor Currey’s columns (nor Lt. Col. Charles Drew’s third column) ever caught up with a large body of raiders. In October, after an arduous seven months, the Oregon Cavalry companies returned to their bases of operation—Forts Dalles, Walla Walla, and Klamath—with most mustering out when their enlistments expired during the winter.

“[T]he results achieved,” Captain Drake candidly admitted, “are not all that I hoped for at the beginning” of the 1864 campaign. In truth, it was the Paiutes who had defeated the Oregon Cavalry twice—one of those, near the Crooked River, was the bloodiest day of the Oregonians’ cavalry service. Though disappointed at missing their last chance, to “chastise” the Paiutes, the Oregon cavalrymen had, to a large degree, succeeded in their three years of service. Indian raids in the District of Oregon did not end during the war years, but the cavalry’s roving presence did at least provide considerable protection, especially for inbound immigrant trains. Had they failed, there would have been no choice but to redirect forces recruited for the main fronts of the war, as had happened during the fighting against the Sioux in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory in 1862.

There would be no national coverage of romanticized raids as there would be for Confederates such as J.E.B. Stuart or Union leaders like Benjamin Grierson. After gathering reports from several Oregon Cavalry officers in 1866, Cyrus A. Reed, the state’s adjutant general, concluded that even though serving in the Pacific Northwest was different than service elsewhere during the Civil War, the Oregon troopers were “ready and willing…to imperil lives in their country’s cause.”

Noted Reed: “[O]ur troops have not been idle; that a large scope of our country has been explored, which is now being settled under their protection, metals brought into circulation, and, I can say without fear of contradiction, that for long, and tedious marches, excessive privation and hardship, that our troops can produce as fair a record as any; still they have encountered a sufficient number of hostile Indians in every conceivable phase of attack to demonstrate how ready and willing they were to imperil lives in their country’s cause.”

Not long after the Oregon Cavalry’s defeat near the Crooked River, one of Drake’s men wrote to a Portland newspaper, observing bitterly that “though public opinion did not so vote, it was just as deserving of praise to die here in the discharge of one’s duty as it would have been to fall at Chickamauga or Gettysburg.” This was their war. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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James Robbins Jewell, a frequent America’s Civil War contributor, writes from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. This article is adapted from his latest book Agents of Empire: The First Oregon Cavalry and the Opening of the Interior Pacific Northwest During the Civil War (University of Nebraska Press, 2023).

After solemnly surveying the mingled corpses of fellow warriors and 7th U.S. Cavalry troopers on the hillside above Montana Territory’s Little Bighorn River (the Greasy Grass to Indians), the pair of Lakota warriors focused on the lifeless body of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at their feet. “Long Hair thought he was the greatest man in the world,” one said. “Now he lies there.” White Bull, the warrior he was addressing, had killed two men in battle that morning, June 25, 1876. “Well,” White Bull replied, “If that is Long Hair, I am the man who killed him.”

Historian Stanley Vestal recounted this alleged conversation in the February 1957 issue of American Heritage, published a decade after White Bull’s death. Vestal had interviewed the warrior chief and said White Bull had asked not to be revealed as Custer’s killer during his lifetime, to avoid retaliation. 

“A tall, well-built soldier with yellow hair and a mustache saw me coming and tried to bluff me,” White Bull had told Vestal. The soldier drew a bead on the warrior with a rifle. Before he could fire, White Bull rushed in, and the soldier threw the rifle at him, missing. According to White Bull, the two then locked in hand-to-hand combat. Amid the dust and smoke, he noted, “It was like fighting in a fog.” Grabbing White Bull’s braids, the soldier pulled the warrior close and tried to bite off his nose. White Bull called for help from a pair of fellow Lakotas, but their blows mostly landed on their friend as the combatants whirled around. Finally, the soldier drew his pistol. Wresting it away, White Bull repeatedly struck the soldier over the head with it and then delivered two shots—one to the soldier’s head, another to his chest. Though he didn’t recognize the man he’d killed, White Bull knew he’d slain a worthy opponent.

With the publication of Vestal’s article Minneconjou Chief White Bull joined the short list of possible candidates for the man who killed Custer. While the lens of time will forever blur the specifics of Custer’s death, two facts remain clear—White Bull was a dynamic participant in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and his demonstrated courage over 11 years on the warpath is well documented.

In 1932 Vestal visited the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, in north-central South Dakota, to interview 83-year-old White Bull, who poured out his life story to the prolific journalist and biographer. According to his own account, the future warrior chief entered the world in April 1849 in the Black Hills of what a dozen years later would be designated Dakota Territory. Known as Bull-Standing-With-Cow until the summer of his 16th year, he was born into a lineage of strong Sioux warriors. His father, Makes Room—like his father before him—was a chief of the Minneconjou, and his mother, Good Feather Woman of the Hunkpapa, the favorite sister of the legendary Sitting Bull.

The games of Bull-Standing-With-Cow’s youth often centered on simulated combat. He and his friends formed their own warrior societies and learned the intricacies of warfare by play fighting. To count coup on one’s enemy by striking him with a hand or a stick was considered especially courageous.

Up to four warriors were permitted to count coup on a single foe in the same fight—the most honored being the one who counted first coup. Such feats were recorded in the language of feathers. The man striking first coup could wear a single eagle feather lodged upright in his hair at the back of his head. A second coup was identified by a feather angling upward, a third by a horizontal feather and a fourth by one sloping downward. In their war games Bull-Standing-With-Cow and friends would count coup on each other and keep score by sticking small feathers in their hair. 

As childhood gave way to adolescence, Bull-Standing-With-Cow grew determined to make his reputation as a warrior. In July 1865 noted Minneconjou warrior High Hump recruited volunteers for a war party. White soldiers had violated a recent treaty, and High Hump resolved to seek enemy scalps and horses.

Sixteen year old Bull-Standing-With-Cow didn’t need to be asked twice, and Makes Room saw there was no stopping him. After presenting his son with a fast dapple-gray pony, the chief had half brother Horse Tail, a medicine man, create protective “medicine” for the boy and his horse. Horse Tail hung a leather pouch painted with a war eagle around the gray’s neck, then painted its legs and jawline with wavy red lines. After fastening a soft eagle plume in Bull-Standing-With-Cow’s hair, he finally draped a leather thong suspending an eagle-bone whistle around the boy’s neck.

“Nephew,” he declared, “this medicine will make your horse strong and long-winded.”

Following an evening of singing and dancing, the warriors left camp early the next morning. One evening several days later a scout pinpointed an enemy camp. Anxious to be the first to the fight, Bull-Standing-With-Cow slipped away from camp early. When the sun broke over the horizon, he made a solo charge into the soldiers’ remuda. Cutting out eight horses, he blew his eagle-bone whistle to scare them into a run. 

Unfortunately for him, the whistle also roused the enemy. Moments later the neophyte warrior found himself the target of a running pursuit by 10 mounted bluecoats. Lashing his pony’s flanks while bullets whizzed past, he likely prayed his uncle’s medicine would indeed make his horse “strong and long-winded.” Just when his pony began to tire and the soldiers were about to catch up with him, he encountered his own war party. His pursuers abruptly retreated.

Bull-Standing-With-Cow’s daredevil spirit and eight captured horses made quite an impression on his friends. Meanwhile, the dissatisfied High Hump organized another raid. Near the headwaters of the Powder River the party encountered seven bluecoat scouts driving horses. Bull-Standing-With-Cow was riding down on one of the scouts with his lance when the soldier whirled in his saddle and fired a revolver at nearly point-black range. Miraculously, the bullet missed. Moments later Bull-Standing-With-Cow stabbed the bluecoat in the shoulder, counting first coup. By the time the party turned for home he’d counted three coups and stolen 10 horses. 

When Bull-Standing-With-Cow returned to camp, his father arranged a victory dance for his son. Astride his horse, resplendent in warpaint, the boy warrior rode toward a black pole in the center of the ceremony grounds. “From this day,” proclaimed his Uncle Black Moon, “Bull-Standing-With-Cow will lay down his boy name. From this time, he shall be called by the name of his grandfather, White Bull.”

In the coming years White Bull racked up an impressive string of coups, finally realizing the future he’d envisioned when he and young friends ran about play fighting and sticking small feathers in their hair. As a member of both the Minneconjou and Hunkpapa bands of the Lakota Nation, he fought in nearly every battle waged by either band—and who knows, he just may have counted coup on Custer. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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The ragged force of 250 French Canadian, Abenaki, Huron and Mohawk warriors hunkered down in the snowy underbrush just before midnight on Feb. 28, 1704. They wrapped their blanket coats and furs tightly about themselves and kept careful watch for any signs their presence had been detected. The men had arrived at a frozen meadow just north of the village of Deerfield, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, after an arduous journey of more than 300 miles on snowshoes from Chambly, Quebec. Although they surely smelled the wood fires burning in nearby hearths, the warriors could only huddle together for warmth—campfires would risk the all-important advantage of surprise. They chewed on the last of the dried pemmican and corn to ease the gnawing in their bellies. If everything went according to plan, they would all soon eat their fill from the kitchens of New Englanders.

While some warriors quietly chanted tribal war songs, others, particularly the French Canadians and their Roman Catholic Mohawk and Huron allies, whispered Christian prayers for the success of their raid against the heretic English Protestants. For the French and some warriors the expedition was a religious crusade, encouraged by Roman Catholic priests in New France. For the Mohawks the raid also offered the promise of captives to be adopted into their clans. For some of the Abenakis the attack would serve as vengeance against the English for having been evicted from their lands. All warriors looked forward to the rewards of plunder and the wealth the sale of captives could bring.

In the predawn darkness Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Hertel de Rouville, the expedition’s French Canadian commander, quickly dispatched scouts to observe the sleeping hamlet. The 35-year-old Hertel was the son of renowned bush fighter Joseph-François Hertel de la Fresnière. The younger Hertel was no stranger to frontier partisan warfare, having accompanied his father on raids against the English settlements of Salmon Falls and Casco, in what today is Maine, and Schenectady, N.Y. But this was his first command.

Philippe de Rigaud, the Marquis de Vaudreuil and governor general of New France, had ordered the raid deep into New England. His instructions were in keeping with directives from the court of Louis XIV to conduct offensive actions that would strike terror into the English and deter their territorial expansion in North America. The expedition had the secondary goal of drawing northern tribes into the broader struggle between the European powers by binding them to the French through plunder, captives and bloodshed. On a more personal level, Hertel hoped a successful outcome would finally convince the Crown to approve his family’s petition for nobility, a request previously denied due to his father’s lack of wealth. As he waited in the darkness, however, Hertel must have been singularly focused on ensuring the war chiefs of the various tribes, as well as his French Canadian subordinates, clearly understood the plan of attack.

Ensconced within Deerfield’s stockade walls, the Rev. John Williams lay in bed beside his wife, Eunice. He had likely read Bible passages to his seven children as they gathered around the blazing stone hearth after dinner. Perhaps the Williams’ slaves, Frank and Parthena, and the pair of militiamen quartered in the house had joined them by the fire until it was time for bed.

They and their fellow townspeople slept soundly. True, back in October two settlers working in the fields outside the village had been captured by marauding warriors, stoking fear. But such risk was part of the price Deerfield’s 270 inhabitants were willing to pay for fertile farmland on the western fringes of Massachusetts. Months had passed with no attacks.

Not to say townspeople were complacent. Reasonable precautions could reduce the risk of French and Indian attack, and the Rev. Williams and other prominent leaders had petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature for protection. Indeed, it was in the best interest of Massachusetts, as well as Connecticut, to defend Deerfield and other frontier settlements rather than do battle with raiders in the streets of Boston or Hartford. The Legislature duly dispatched soldiers to Deerfield and approved a tax abatement so the town could repair the crumbling wooden stockade that enclosed the heart of the village. Connecticut also sent troops.

Periodic reports about a large force of French and Indians assembling near Montreal had reached Deerfield as early as the summer of 1703, but there had been scant enemy activity, other than the autumn marauders. Subsequent reports generated fresh anxiety, but the rumored threats never materialized, and Massachusetts and Connecticut had ultimately withdrawn their forces. Finally, the leaves turned crimson and gold, temperatures dropped and the snow fell.

By the morning of February 29 a 3-foot-deep blanket of snow lay on the ground, further lulling townspeople into a sense of security. Surely such deep snow would impede the progress of any attacking force, or at least slow them to the point the alarm could be sounded in plenty of time to establish a solid defense. Furthermore, 20 militiamen had arrived just four days ago. So, the townspeople slept on.

Two hours before dawn Lieutenant Hertel listened with eagerness to the hushed reports of his scouts. Snow had drifted up against the 10-foot-high northern wall of the Deerfield stockade. Nimble men on snowshoes should be able to scamper up over the wall and drop down into the village. Once inside, the advance party could open the gates for the attacking force.

Hertel ordered his men to advance to concealed positions just outside the stockade. Rather than approach en masse, small squads rushed forward for short distances to mimic the sound of wind gusts. Once the entire force was in position, they awaited their opportunity to strike. The only complication was a lone militiaman on night watch, keeping a listless patrol inside the stockade.

The militiamen had undoubtedly taken turns at watch, patrolling the perimeter through the long winter’s night, trudging through the snow and lugging their heavy muskets up and down the watchtower ladders. Like most colonial militiamen, they were probably poor, unskilled young men offered up by neighboring towns to fill the militia levy.

Perhaps they assumed no raiding party of any size could advance quickly and quietly through the deep snow. Perhaps they thought the reinforced palisade would thwart any invaders from entering the village. Perhaps, like the sleeping townspeople, they were wrong.

Lieutenant Hertel squinted in the predawn gloom as he scanned the north side of the stockade. Suddenly, a gap opened amid the timbers, and he cautiously led his force forward through the north gate of the stockade. The first phase of his plan had gone perfectly. Several chosen men had silently crept up the snowdrifts against the north wall and dropped down into the village. Undetected, they had swung open the gate’s heavy doors for their waiting comrades.

The next phase, a standard procedure for French-led raids, was to array small squads around each house. Once all squads were positioned, the attacks would commence simultaneously, thus attaining total surprise, minimizing resistance and limiting one’s own casualties.

But something went wrong. While Hertel’s raiders were still pouring through the north gate, a musket shot rang out, probably fired by the late-reacting sentry. Chaos erupted as mixed bands of French, Mohawks, Abenakis and Hurons fanned out through the sleeping village.

The Rev. Williams leaped from his bed at the commotion and hurriedly retrieved and cocked his flintlock pistol. As a clutch of warriors burst into his bedroom, he pointed its muzzle at the leading Abenaki and pulled the trigger. The resulting harmless click of a misfire probably saved the reverend’s life. Had Williams shot the Abenaki, follow-on warriors would almost certainly have slain him on the spot. Things were bad enough.

His assailants overpowered the reverend and bound his hands. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the house warriors murdered his 6-year-old son, John, and smashed 6-week-old Jerusha’s head against a doorway, killing her. Parthena, the Williams’ female slave, was also killed, likely defending the children.

One of the militiaman quartered in the house, garrison commander Lieutenant John Stoddard, jumped from an upstairs window, the deep snow breaking his fall. Clad only in his nightshirt and a cloak, he bound his feet with strips of cloth and ran through the snow to raise the alarm in the village of Hatfield, nearly 12 miles away.

The remaining occupants of the house—Eunice Williams, her surviving five children, Frank the slave and the other militiaman—were ordered to dress and ready themselves for the northbound trek into captivity.

Gunshots, war whoops and screams resounded through the village lanes and in homes where residents had quietly slumbered just moments before. Lieutenant Hertel must have been exasperated as he watched his plans evaporate into mayhem. All hope of command and control was gone.

Several townspeople, particularly those in the southern end of the village, fled in the direction of the nearby towns of Hatfield and Hadley. Some managed to shelter south of the village in the garrison house of Captain Jonathan Wells. Others burrowed into cellars and likely nooks to evade the attackers. Several of those in hiding survived the raid. Other unfortunates burned alive when their houses were set afire.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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The raiders spread death and destruction throughout the village, indiscriminately killing babies and young children who would prove a burden to them on the return march to New France. They set torch to all structures in the village and slaughtered as many cows and sheep as they could while plundering food stocks and portable items of any value.

Entire families were rounded up and herded into the meetinghouse, which served as a holding area for captives. The raiders captured 112 residents of Deerfield and killed 50 others during the attack. But not all villagers were slain or taken without a fight.

Sergeant Benoni Stebbins had escaped from Indian captivity as a young man and resolved never to be captured again. Built for defense, the inner and outer walls of his house were filled with “nogging”—unfired bricks certain to stop musket balls. At the first sounds of the attack Stebbins had rushed to secure his home, which sheltered seven men, five women and several children. The well-armed defenders were determined to hold out as long as possible.

Hertel sent wave after wave of attackers in a costly effort to either overwhelm Stebbins’ outpost or set it afire. It would have proved smarter to bypass it. A Huron chief, an Abenaki captain and Ensign François-Marie Margane de Batilly were among the raiders killed or mortally wounded during the assaults. Hertel himself was wounded while leading one of the attacks, though the wound didn’t appear serious. At one point the French offered the defenders terms of surrender, but Stebbins would have none of it. After a firefight of more than two and a half hours, the raiders finally broke off the attack, but only after they’d wounded one of the women and a militiaman and killed the valiant Sergeant Stebbins.

As the first rays of dawn shone through the thick smoke, small groups of attackers made their way back toward the meadow where they had gathered the night before. Their progress was slowed by the plunder they carried and the bound prisoners who stumbled through the snow, choking on acrid smoke and their bitter tears. Behind them lay the blood trails of slain villagers and butchered farm animals, as well as the smoldering remains of their homes and everything they owned.

Lieutenant Hertel, anticipating counterattackers would not be far behind, sternly ordered his men to hurry. The chastened raiders in turn brandished hatchets and threatened their weeping captives to pick up their pace or face a quick death. Not all raiders heeded their commander’s warnings, however. Some lagged behind in the greedy search for further plunder or drunken bloodlust as they searched the ruins for more victims.

By early morning a force of armed New Englanders, alerted to the attack on Deerfield, rode to its relief from villages to the south. The force gained strength along the way, adding to their number soldiers who had taken refuge in Captain Wells’ fortified home. Other militiamen who’d fled the attack joined the group of 30-odd avenging New Englanders as they approached the charred village and engaged in a chaotic running fight with the last of the straggling raiders. Faced with the fury of the enraged militiamen, the attackers dropped their plunder and fled north.

Hertel knew from experience the New Englanders would follow. He also realized that his force, strung out and burdened by captives and plunder, would never be able to outrun pursuers hellbent on vengeance. But the experienced officer also understood that emotionally charged counterattackers were likely to act in haste, without proper reconnaissance. So, he rallied 30 reliable men and concealed them along a riverbank with clear fields of fire.

The New England relief force, having chased the last of the raiders out of the village, soon gained a true understanding of the wanton carnage resulting from the attack. Giving vent to anger and rage, some militiamen threw aside their coats and cumbersome equipment and ran in pursuit of the French and their allied warriors. Cooler heads, like Captain Wells, tried to establish command and control, but to no avail.

As the infuriated New Englanders ran headlong toward the river, Hertel sprang his trap. The concealed raiders opened fire, killing nine counterattackers and wounding many more. Though the raiders also suffered casualties, they succeeded in driving the New Englanders back behind the Deerfield stockade.

By nightfall the next day nearly 250 soldiers and armed citizens from western Massachusetts and Connecticut had gathered amid the smoking rubble of Deerfield. Though many were anxious to begin the pursuit of the French and Indian raiders, their leaders convened a war council. As they weighed the merits of various courses of action, the weather warmed and rain began to fall. Those with prior military experience realized the deep slush would slow progress to a crawl. Their plodding approach would in turn alert the raiders, who would probably massacre their captives. In the end, wiser voices prevailed, and the counterattack was called off.

The New Englanders returned to their homes harboring grief and hatred while the raiders and their captives slogged north through the snow.

The long and torturous journey to New France was marked by atrocities, including the drunken murder of Frank, the Williams’ slave, and the heartless killing of Eunice Williams, who was unable to keep pace because she’d recently given birth. A few Englishmen escaped, but warriors killed all those who fell behind. Of the original 112 captives, 89 survived the trek. Firsthand accounts also record small acts of humanity, like the strong words and actions of Huron warrior Thaovenhosen as he implored fellow tribesmen to spare captives from torture and mutilation.

On his triumphant return Lieutenant Hertel received widespread praise for the success of the Deerfield raid. While he led other raids and held additional commands, nothing compared to the devastating impact of the 1704 attack. Hertel was eventually promoted to captain, founded and served as commandant of Fort Dauphin (present-day Englishtown, Nova Scotia) and was decorated with the prestigious Ordre de Saint-Louis. The Hertel family finally received its patent of nobility in 1716.

The fate of the surviving Deerfield captives varied considerably once they reached Montreal and environs. Two men were worked and starved to death by their Abenaki captors. Most townspeople, however, were ransomed by French Canadian citizens, who treated them with compassion and humanity. Though not compelled by force to remain in New France, those who did stay were strongly encouraged to embrace Roman Catholicism. Some captives were adopted as full members of warriors’ tribes. Of the captives who survived the trek, some 60 eventually returned to New England. Many others married and began families, choosing to remain in New France the rest of their lives.

The Rev. Williams and four of his children were among those who returned home, in 1706. By then his 10-year-old daughter, Eunice, had been adopted by the Mohawks. She later married a Mohawk and bore their children in New France. Though she visited her New England relatives on several occasions, she and her growing family made their home in Kahnawake, a Mohawk community on the St. Lawrence River opposite Montreal.

Such happy endings aside, the Deerfield raid had been an act of terrorism, intended to strike fear into a target population through brutal violence, indiscriminate destruction and random victimization of noncombatants. Like many such terrorist acts, the raid was successful in the short term, as the fear of further French and Indian attacks discouraged English settlement in northern New England, if only temporarily. The raid also prompted overreaction against New England tribes as the English launched their own savage, punitive raids.

In the end, however, the policy of terrorism initiated by the French Crown only served to inflame England and her colonists and prompt acts of retribution, like the sorrowful expulsion of French Canadians from Acadia a half century later. Ultimately, the bitter harvest reaped at Deerfield contributed to the final defeat of New France in the 1754–63 French and Indian War.

Retired Brig. Gen. P.G. Smith, a former commander of the Massachusetts Army National Guard, teaches counter-terrorism strategy at Nichols College in Dudley, Mass. For further reading he recommends Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield and Captive Histories: English, French and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid, both by Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, as well as The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America, by John Demos.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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For nearly a decade after the Civil War southwest Texas was a land in torment. Emboldened Indians striking from below the Rio Grande stole tens of thousands of head of livestock, burned out countless ranches and murdered scores of settlers. Many such raiders were from the Kickapoo, a tribe that had migrated to Mexico from the United States.

As late as the 17th century the Kickapoos had made their home south of the Great Lakes, but pressure from competing tribes and westering Anglo-Americans had pushed them steadily southwestward until, by the early 19th century, most lived in the region encompassed by present-day Texas and Oklahoma. In 1839 a small band agreed to move to Mexico, where, in return for land grants and annuities from the Mexican government, they promised to help defend that country’s northern frontier against marauding Comanches and Kiowas. Their alliance with the Mexicans worked so well that over the next quarter century many other bands of Kickapoos joined their tribesmen. In the wake of the Texas Revolution, most settled just across the Rio Grande in the state of Coahuila.

But in December 1862, and again in January 1865, Texas frontier patrols encountered such bands of migrating Kickapoos and attacked them. To the Texans, who had suffered decades of Comanche and Kiowa raids, the presence of large groups of Indians so near their settlements presented a very real threat that required swift and unwavering action. To the Kickapoos, however, the attacks were unwarranted and represented a declaration of war. Once safely settled in Mexico, they swore vengeance against the Texans.

The Kickapoos soon discovered a profitable side to their vendetta, for South Texas, from San Antonio to the Rio Grande, was home to some 90,000 head of horses, mules and cattle with fewer than 4,500 residents to protect them. Thus rustling was ridiculously simple. As Mexican government officials steadfastly refused to allow U.S. troops to pursue raiders into Mexico, the Kickapoos could easily and openly dispose of their plunder in the small-town marketplaces in northern Coahuila. By 1873 they and raiders from other Mexican tribes were responsible for an estimated $48 million in property damage and livestock losses.

Official Washington was inundated with letters and petitions from settlers demanding help and protection. President Ulysses S. Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish grew concerned the Texans might launch retaliatory raids of their own if something wasn’t done. But when Fish tried diplomatic pressure, the Mexican government claimed that local authorities had done all in their power to prevent raiding, that most Kickapoos were peaceful farmers, and that the Mexican settlements had suffered far more from Indian raiders striking from the United States than Texans had from Mexican Indians. The raids continued unabated, as did the outcry.

Finally, in January 1873 President Grant’s patience with the Mexican government was exhausted; the problem, he decided, required a military solution. Grant turned the problem over to Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan, commander of the encompassing Military Division of the Missouri, who immediately ordered the 4th U.S. Cavalry to move from North Texas to Fort Clark in the southern Rio Grande area.

Sheridan’s choice of the 4th was not random. Inspection reports rated it as the finest cavalry regiment in the Army. More important to Sheridan was the knowledge that the 4th was commanded by a young officer of extraordinary talent and ability—Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie.

“I want you to be bold”

Ranald Mackenzie’s career has few equals in American military history. Born on July 27, 1840, into a distinguished family (his father was a noted Navy commander, while one of his uncles was Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who opened Japan to the West), Mackenzie was a frail youth who compensated for his lack of physical stamina with an iron determination and a stern dedication to duty. In June 1862, at age 21, he graduated first in his class from West Point and received an appointment as a second lieutenant in the Army of the Potomac. Over the next 33 months he participated in eight major battles, including Gettysburg, as well as the 1864 Overland campaign and subsequent siege of Petersburg. He rose to the brevet rank of major general, collected seven brevets for gallantry in action and suffered six severe wounds, including the loss of the first two fingers on his right hand, a deformity that earned him the nickname “Bad Hand” among American Indians.

Mackenzie earned repeated praise for his “courage and skill” under fire from such vaunted superiors as Grant, Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman and George Meade. He also earned the respect of those who served under him. One such impressed lieutenant deemed him “a greater terror to both officers and men than [Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal] Early’s grape and canister.” Commanding General Grant was so impressed by Mackenzie’s integrity and devotion to duty that he personally requested the young officer be present at Appomattox and afterward take custody of surrendered Confederate property. Grant praised Mackenzie in his memoirs as “the most promising young officer in the Army.”

After the war Mackenzie reverted to his permanent rank of captain in the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1867 he was appointed colonel of the 41st U.S. Infantry, a newly formed black regiment that two years later was reorganized as the 24th U.S. Infantry. In 1871, with the assistance of President Grant, he assumed command of the 4th Cavalry, and in the space of a few months he transformed it from a lackluster outfit into a hardened, disciplined, highly effective frontier fighting force. Operating out of Fort Richardson, in north-central Texas, Mackenzie relentlessly drove himself and his regiment. By the time Sheridan’s orders arrived transferring the unit south, Mackenzie and his men had completed their fourth major campaign against hostile Kiowas and Comanches in just 18 months.

By late March 1873 six companies of the 4th were encamped in and around Fort Clark, near the Rio Grande. That April Secretary of War William W. Belknap and General Sheridan paid a surprise visit to Fort Clark on what was officially termed an “inspection tour.” But behind the facade of a full field review and a grand ball given in their honor, Belknap and Sheridan engaged in two days of secret meetings with Mackenzie. According to later published accounts, Sheridan wasted no time in making his wishes known.

“Mackenzie, you have been ordered down here…because I want something done to stop these conditions of banditry…[and] killing by these people across the river,” the general told the colonel. “I want you to be bold, enterprising…[and] when you begin, let it be a campaign of annihilation, obliteration and complete destruction.”

When Mackenzie asked under whose orders and on what authority he was to act, Sheridan pounded the table and exclaimed: “Damn the orders! Damn the authority! You are to go on your own plan of action, and your authority and backing shall be General Grant and myself.…You must assume the risk. We will assume the final responsibility.”

Sheridan’s inference was unmistakable. Mackenzie was to strike at the raiding Indians’ operational base, which meant crossing into Mexico. In the absence of anything in writing, the responsibility for such an action could very well come to rest wholly on his own shoulders.

For a month Mackenzie made secret preparations for his dangerous assignment. He ordered daily drills for officers and men. Special attention was paid to such field tactics as charging by platoon and dismounted skirmishing, maneuvers that would prove especially useful against Indian villages. In the meantime, Mackenzie’s trustworthy civilian scouts had discovered three large Kickapoo, Lipan and Mescalero villages on the banks of the Rio San Rodrigo, some 40 miles inside Mexico. The scouts spent weeks observing the villages, calculating their strength and mapping the terrain. Finally, on the night of May 16 they reported to Mackenzie that most of the warriors of the Kickapoo village had ridden off to the west that morning. The time to strike was at hand. 

By 1 p.m. on May 17 the combined command of 360 enlisted men, 17 officers, 24 Seminole scouts and 14 civilians began to move slowly toward the Rio Grande. Mackenzie planned to arrive at the river at sundown so darkness would shroud the column’s movements. Just before reaching the border, Mackenzie halted his men and in a brief address revealed to them their mission. They listened silently as he explained the ordeals and risks that lay ahead: at least 24 hours of hard riding, a major battle to be fought, the possibility of being hanged or lined up against a wall and shot. He did not tell them he was acting without official written orders or authority, or that, even if successful, the raid might cost him his career. Such were Mackenzie’s burdens; his men had plenty enough to worry about.

Sobered to the realities of their mission, it was a grim and determined column of bluecoat raiders that waded their horses belly-deep in the muddy Rio Grande that evening and splashed up on Mexican soil to ride swiftly and silently westward. For many the next 40 hours would be the most arduous of their lives.

In the darkness the troopers blindly followed their scouts on a winding, tortuous route through dense canebrakes, fields of cactus and chaparral, down rocky ravines and over open dusty ground. In the distance they could see the lights of small and isolated ranch houses, but the scouts had chosen routes that detoured far around these places. It was vital to the success of the mission that the countryside be aroused as little as possible to the Americans’ presence.

Throughout the night they rode. Mackenzie wanted to be in position to attack at daybreak, and he pushed the troopers unmercifully. The heavily loaded pack mules began to fall behind, so Mackenzie impatiently ordered the packs cut loose and abandoned. Onward the command rode, short on supplies and rations, racing against the dawn. “Sleep almost overpowered us, and yet on, on we went,” one officer recalled. “Nothing was heard save the ceaseless pounding of the horses and the jingle of the saddle equipment.”

Surprise Attack

Shortly before sunup, having ridden 63 hard miles since crossing the Rio Grande (23 more than the straight-line distance), the raiders reached the San Rodrigo just upstream of the Indian villages. Mackenzie called a halt so the men and animals could refresh themselves in the cool water and prepare for the attack. Saddles were re-cinched and girths tightened, carbines were checked and loaded, and sabers were strapped on and adjusted.

Just as dawn was breaking, Mackenzie led his men down the riverbed, using its high banks for cover. Abruptly, the instructions “prepare to charge” were passed down the column. The troopers wheeled and spurred their mounts up the bank into full view of their objective. Below them ran about a mile of gently sloping ground, and at its base the Americans could see huts and wickiups stretched along the winding San Rodrigo. The Kickapoo village was the nearest and largest, while that of the Lipan lay a quarter mile or so beyond, with the Mescalero encampment beyond that. To any early risers in the Indian camps, it must have seemed as if the soldiers had suddenly risen from the earth.

Orders flew up and down the line, and the soldiers deployed into platoons. The gray horses of I Troop, the leading unit, lengthened their gait from a trot into a canter. Then, some 150 yards from the village, the command, “Charge!” rang out, and I Troop broke into a full gallop. “And then,” recalled Mackenzie’s adjutant, 2nd Lt. Robert Carter, “there burst forth such a cheering and yelling from our gallant little column as that Kickapoo village never heard before. It was caught up from troop to troop and struck such dismay to the Indians’ hearts that they were seen flying in every direction.…I never saw such a magnificent charge as that made by those six troops of the 4th U.S. Cavalry on the morning of May 18, 1873.”

The Kickapoos were taken completely by surprise. Many of their warriors had left the day before, and those who remained stood no chance. As the men of I Troop slashed through the outer perimeter of their village, the Indians fled in all directions, across cornfields and irrigation ditches, through swampy bogs and out among the stands of cactus and bayonet grass, with the soldiers in close pursuit.

The rest of Mackenzie’s command charged through the village by platoons, volley firing as they went, then wheeling out of the way to reload and prepare to charge again. The rear elements dismounted and began to set fire to the canvas tepees and grass huts. The initial panic of the surprise attack overcome, the surviving Kickapoos—men, women and children alike—fought back like demons. For those involved, the sights and sounds of battle blended. The chaos of forms rushing in all directions through the smoke and dust merged with the crack of carbines and pistols, the screams of women and children, and the shouts of soldiers and warriors to create an awful and unforgettable spectacle.

But in a matter of minutes it was over, and the troopers moved on to the other villages. The Lipan and Mescalero bands had taken flight at the first sound of shots, and the soldiers moved unopposed among their deserted dwellings, setting them afire. Soon all three villages had been razed to smoking embers.

The exact number of Indians killed is not known. Mackenzie counted 19 bodies, but many more must have remained undiscovered in the ditches, beneath the riverbanks and in other hidden places. Forty women and children were taken prisoner, as was Costilietos, principal chief of the Lipans, who was literally roped in by one of the Seminole scouts as he tried to flee through the brush. The soldiers also captured 65 ponies. These were parceled out as a reward to the civilian scouts who had surveilled the villages. Mackenzie’s losses were remarkably light. One soldier was killed in the charge, and two were wounded, one so severely the surgeon had to amputate his arm on the spot.

A Long “Night of Horror”

By 1 p.m. the preparations for the long march home were completed. Travois had been crafted to carry the wounded, and the Indian prisoners had been assigned captured ponies to ride. After a last sweep to assure the complete destruction of all Indian property and stores, Mackenzie and his men started for the Rio Grande.

They soon rode through the nearby town of Remolino, whose villagers met the Americans with sullen scowls and curses muttered in Spanish. Beyond town the scouts wisely chose a more direct route to the border than the one used to reach the Indian villages. Mackenzie’s overriding concern was to get his men across the Rio Grande before the Mexican populace rose against them.

But the men and horses were too exhausted to move with much speed. The constant fear of ambush by overwhelming numbers of Indians or Mexican soldiers combined with fatigue, searing heat and choking dust to make the return trek an agonizing experience. The miles and hours crawled by. Nightfall brought relief from the heat, but for many in the command it marked their third straight night in the saddle, and the need for sleep became almost overpowering. Officers and sergeants used any means at their disposal to keep the men awake and moving. The scouts reported groups of riders on their flanks, but no attacks came. One officer later called it a “long, interminable night of horror, of nightmare.”

Finally, the gray light of dawn revealed in the distance the welcome sight of the Rio Grande. The bone-tired men and horses waded into its refreshing waters, and soon the entire column stood once again on U.S. soil. The troopers made camp, and shortly thereafter a supply train loaded with rations and forage arrived. The command spent the rest of the morning sleeping and feasting. The return to Texas had come none too soon, for that afternoon a large body of Indians and Mexicans appeared on the south side of the river. They hurled challenges and abuse at the troopers and several times appeared ready to attack. But Mackenzie ordered his best marksmen to take positions covering the ford, and by sundown the would-be avengers had withdrawn. After a night of badly needed rest the command marched to Fort Clark at a leisurely pace.

Favorable Response

Mackenzie’s raid into Mexico was one of the most demanding and daring missions ever undertaken by the post–Civil War U.S. Cavalry. Mackenzie and his men rode more than 140 miles in 38 hours, violated Mexican sovereignty, attacked allies of the Mexican government, destroyed three large villages and captured 40 prisoners—all without official orders or authority.

The response to the action was immediate and favorable. Sheridan enthusiastically supported Mackenzie, saying, “There cannot be any valid boundary when we pursue Indians who murder our people and carry away our property.” The San Antonio Daily Express was effusive in its praise. “If western Texas had the sole command in electing the next president, [Brevet] General Mackenzie would be the man,” it wrote. “Three cheers for General Mackenzie’s pluck and energy—three cheers for his brave boys!” On June 2 the Texas Legislature passed a joint resolution extending “the grateful thanks of the people of our state and particularly the citizens of our frontier…to General Mackenzie and the troops under his command for their prompt action and gallant conduct in inflicting well-merited punishment upon these scourges of our frontier.” A week later the War Department officially commended Mackenzie for his action. 

The fact Mackenzie had attacked villages that did not have their full complement of defenders didn’t seem to faze either American citizens or the government in the least. As many Texans pointed out, such were the very same tactics Indian raiders had employed for decades against isolated farms and ranches on the frontier, so Mackenzie’s actions were wholly justified. Years of cruelty and brutality by both sides had combined to make chivalry on the frontier, if it ever existed, an outdated concept. 

Understandably, the Mexican government was less than happy about the raid, but it chose not to turn it into an international issue. Notes were exchanged between the Mexican minister and Secretary of State Fish, and with that mild protest, the matter was dropped.

As for the border situation, Indian raids all but stopped. Mackenzie’s attack had shattered the complacent belief of Mexican tribes in the protection offered by the Rio Grande. Fearing similar strikes, many bands split up and moved into the mountains. The Kickapoos, in exchange for the release of their captive wives and children, agreed to return to the United States. By 1874 more than half the tribe had resettled at Fort Sill in Indian Territory.

Mackenzie’s bold expedition did not prove the final answer to the problem of Indian depredations in southwest Texas, but it did succeed in bringing peace and order to the area for a span of years. It also provided one of the most thrilling exploits in the annals of Indian warfare and made Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and his raiders living legends on the frontier.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading on the topic author Allen Lee Hamilton recommends On the Border With Mackenzie, by Robert G. Carter; The Kickapoos: Lords of the Middle Border, by Arrell M. Gibson; and Bad Hand: A Biography of Ranald S. Mackenzie, by Charles M. Robinson III.

The Cheyenne hunter’s horse kicked clods of earth skyward as the warrior drove hard alongside the buffalo. Within seconds the experienced hunter let fly several well-placed arrows into the flanks of the charging beast. The shafts sank deep, piercing vital organs and sending the buffalo crashing to the ground. By the time the warrior circled back, his quarry’s labored breathing had ceased.

Such a scenario played out repeatedly on the Great Plains following the introduction of the horse into Cheyenne society, a happenstance that dramatically changed the tribe’s way of life.

When most people think of Plains Indians, what comes to mind are 19th century Cheyenne and Lakota warriors riding hard across open grasslands to bring down their enemies, either bluecoats or rival warriors. But for centuries prior neither tribe lived on the plains, nor were they particularly migratory. The Cheyennes originally hailed from the region between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River headwaters in what today is Minnesota. In the late 1700s, while Anglos in the 13 colonies back East were immersed in a revolution to free themselves from British rule, the Cheyennes were experiencing an upheaval of their own. Theirs was not a martial revolution, however, but one of transportation, sparked by the arrival of the horse on the northern Plains. The Cheyennes in turn are thought to have introduced the horse culture to Lakota bands, perhaps as early as 1730. The horses themselves traced their lineage to those brought to North America by 16th century Spanish explorers.

It isn’t exactly known how the sedentary Cheyenne first acquired horses—perhaps by roping free-roaming animals, in trade with other tribes or when fending off mounted enemies (for more on that subject see “Riding Toward a Blue Vision,” Indian Life, by Lance Nixon, in the February 2019 issue of Wild West). Whatever the scenario, it came as a godsend to the Cheyennes, who had begun to migrate west under pressure from other tribes.

Prior to the introduction of the horse the Cheyenne and other tribes were limited in how and where they could hunt buffalo. The surest method was to drive the great herds en masse to their deaths over steep cliffs known as “buffalo jumps” (for more on that mode of hunting see “Jumping Buffalo,” by Todd J. Kristensen and Michael Donnelly, in the April 2018 issue of Wild West). Once they were mounted, Cheyennes could achieve kills anywhere the buffalo roamed.

The average Cheyenne family of the plains numbered eight individuals and possessed 10 or more horses. While that may seem extraneous to a modern-day two-car family, the Cheyennes needed every mount in their remuda. One horse would carry the heavy buffalo hide lodge cover; another two would lug the lodgepoles; two others would serve as pack animals, carrying victuals and sundry camp items; three ridden by women would drag travois on which the children rode; and the final two were held in reserve as reliable buffalo-hunting horses. A family might also own draft horses or mules.

The Cheyennes bred light riding horses just over 14 hands high (roughly 4 ½ feet) at the withers, typically paints with patchwork coats of black or brown on white. The men and boys of the tribe reserved the swiftest stallions and geldings for the hunts. Horses were set out to graze, never hobbled or tethered. Riders forged exceptional bonds with their ponies, as a rule treating them kindly, though captured horses reportedly received no such consideration.

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Cheyennes living between the Platte and Arkansas rivers plied an especially profitable trade in stolen Mexican and Spanish horses. They also bartered with white traders, exchanging buffalo hides for rifles and ammunition. But that relationship changed with the influx of settlers. Emigrant trails and trade routes interrupted the buffalo ranges, while an uptick in the killing of the woolly beasts by sport hunters and Indians trying to fill orders for Eastern buyers decimated the herds. Between 1872 and ’82 the measure of buffalo hides sent eastward reached 1 million a year, leaving the prairies littered with bleached bones. Infighting among tribes over the extents of hunting grounds and increasingly hostile interactions between Indians and interlopers raised tensions on the plains.

By the mid-1800s the Cheyennes were justly esteemed for their horsemanship. An experienced rider could remain astride his pony yet keep both hands free to let loose arrows or fire a carbine. Bands of such adept Cheyenne warriors raised havoc, attacking settlers’ cabins, railroad camps and passing emigrant wagon trains alike, leaving dead in their wake, running off cattle and horses, and absconding with newly acquired mounts and other plunder. When the outcry grew loud enough to bring the muscle of the U.S. Army into play, the Cheyenne raiders were usually able to elude their bluecoat attackers. A notable exception came on July 11, 1869, at Summit Springs, Colo., when a punitive expedition of 5th U.S. Cavalry troopers, with a young Bill Cody and 50 Pawnees serving as scouts, thundered into Chief Tall Bull’s village and dealt a blow to the Cheyennes. By then the tribe had sundered in two. The Northern Cheyennes were ultimately fated to reservation life in Montana Territory, while the Southern Cheyennes and their Southern Arapaho confederates were destined for confinement in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Before that happened, however, the Northern Cheyennes and their Lakota allies waged the Great Sioux War of 1876, culminating with the defeat of Lt. Col. George Armstrong’s 7th U.S. Cavalry command on Montana Territory’s Little Bighorn River that June 25–26.

Echoes of the horse culture reverberate in Cheyenne art. Tribal ledger art from the period prominently feature men and mounts alike dressed and painted for warfare, though some works depict more peaceful pursuits, including one in which a mounted Cheyenne courts a woman. 

In the end, neither their riding skills nor the great herds of ponies they accumulated could save the Cheyennes from the seemingly ceaseless influx of settlers. The nomadic lifestyle made possible by the horse reverted to a pedestrian one lived within the confines of the reservations.

The Cheyennes’ love affair with the horse did not end there, however. Right up till present tribal members have displayed their horsemanship in fairs, rodeos and the like. Wallace Bearchum, tribal services director for the Northern Cheyenne, points to several annual events that center on equine competition, including the Fourth of July Rodeo, in Lame Deer, Mont.; the Little Bighorn Memorial Ride, near that southeastern Montana battlefield; the Cody Stampede; and the World Championship Indian Relay in Sheridan, Wyo. In 2016 Linwood Hisbadhorse, a Northern Cheyenne from Lame Deer, helped coordinate the inaugural Ioway Invitational Indian Relay Race, in Perkins, Okla., and his team remains among the most celebrated Indian relay teams in the country. Seems natural, as the champion rider is simply keeping up a time-honored tribal tradition.

Canyon de Chelly, in the Four Corners region of northeastern Arizona, is among the most spectacular natural wonders of the American Southwest. It is also one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. Archaeologists estimate humans have lived in the canyon for more than four millennia. By the late 17th century Navajos had made their home there, and in the 19th century they waged two battles in Canyon de Chelly central to tribal history.

The canyon floor is anywhere from 100 to 300 yards wide and flanked by sheer red rock walls up to 1,000 feet high. About 3 miles from its east entrance the canyon splits into two main branches, with Canyon del Muerto running off to the northeast. Five miles up Canyon del Muerto is another junction at a prominence called Fortress Rock. Black Rock Canyon splits off due east, while Canyon del Muerto courses another 15 miles northeast.

In January 1805 a force of 500 Spanish soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Antonio Narbona entered Canyon de Chelly in response to a Navajo raid against the Spanish military post at Cebolletta. In the resulting battle near the northeast end of Canyon del Muerto the Spanish claimed to have killed 115 Navajos, including 90 warriors, while taking 33 women and children as slaves. Navajo tradition relates a different story—that most of the warriors were away hunting that day, and almost all of those killed were women and children. As the Spanish troops approached, the Navajos sheltered in a cliff dwelling high on the canyon wall, where they were trapped and picked off by Narbona’s marksmen. The only Spanish casualty was a soldier tackled by a Navajo woman while he was scaling the cliff. Both fell to their deaths. Narbona ended his career as the fifth Mexican governor of New Mexico.

Fifty-nine years later the Navajo fought another battle in Canyon de Chelly, this time against the United States. While the Civil War was raging east of the Mississippi, the U.S. government sent troops to the Southwest to put an end to persistent raids by emboldened Navajos. In 1864 Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, commander of the military Department of New Mexico (which spanned what today comprises New Mexico and Arizona), ordered Lt. Col. Kit Carson of the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry to clear the canyon of Navajos and relocate them to a reservation at Bosque Redondo, nearly 400 miles southeast at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory.

That January 12, in the face of a blinding snowstorm, Carson led 389 troopers into Canyon de Chelly. The Navajos, under the leadership of Chiefs Barboncito and Manuelito, skillfully used skirmishing parties to fight delaying actions while their main body withdrew into Canyon del Muerto. On reaching the junction with Black Rock Canyon, they scaled Fortress Rock with the help of ladders prepared ahead of time. By the time Carson’s force reached the far end of Canyon del Muerto, it had destroyed the tribe’s camps, crops and supplies and taken more than 200 captives. But more than 1,000 Navajos had evaded to the top of Fortress Rock, where they had stockpiled food. It wouldn’t be enough.

Biding his time, Carson withdrew from the canyon to wait out the Navajos, who were bereft of the necessities to survive winter. The strategy worked. By that summer Carson had accepted the surrender of some 8,000 Navajos, the largest such capitulation in American Indian history. In its wake the Navajos were forced to make what they recall as the “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo. But the tactical success for the U.S. government turned out to be a strategic failure in the end. Some 3,000 Navajos died at the meagerly supplied reservation before they were finally allowed in 1868 to return to their homeland in the Four Corners region.

Present-day Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “de SHAY”) National Monument lies entirely within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation, thus all visitors to the canyon floor must be accompanied by a licensed Navajo guide. Its sheer walls are pocked with the ruins of centuries-old cliff dwellings and etched with pictographs. A particularly striking 200-year-old pictograph on the wall below Massacre Cave depicts the invading Spanish cavalry force, replete with lances and cross-bearing tunics. The North Rim Drive provides a number of spectacular overlooks, including Antelope House Overlook (directly across from Fortress Rock) and Massacre Cave Overlook, while the South Rim Drive ends at an overlook of the 750-foot sandstone spire known as Spider Rock. There is just no substitute, however, for exploring the canyon floor with a knowledgeable guide, one for whom it is especially personal hallowed ground.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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Francis Whitebird hails from a long line of soldiers. His great-grandfather, grandfather and father all saw service in the U.S. Army dating back nearly 150 years. At the outset of the Vietnam War he honored that family legacy and the warrior tradition of the Rosebud Lakotas of South Dakota by enlisting. Whitebird endured 19 months of intense fighting as a combat medic in 1969 and ’70. After the war he graduated from Harvard, became a teacher, served in tribal government, received a presidential appointment to a national advisory committee and worked to preserve the Lakota language. He also raised two sons, Colin and Brendan, who carried on the family tradition by joining the Army and fighting in Iraq. At the 2022 National Memorial Day Concert in Washington, D.C., actors and co-hosts Gary Sinise and Joe Mantegna honored Whitebird in person for his service. Military History recently sat down with the 80-year-old veteran to learn more about his experiences and legacy of service.

You didn’t set out to be a medic. How did that transpire?

Well, I volunteered for the infantry. After basic training they assigned me to Fort Sam Houston [in San Antonio, Texas], where there was a center to train all the medics. Wherever the Army is, of course, they have to have medical support, and so we wind up all over the place. I wound up with an infantry company as a combat medic.

When you’re assigned to an infantry company, you’re in charge of a platoon—about 40 men. In addition to wounds, you treat them for heat casualties, sores and other injuries. There’s something in Vietnam called elephant grass, and when you pass through it, it cuts into your arms. There’s other stuff like jungle rot and creeping crud. I don’t know their scientific names, but that’s what we called them. There’s also mosquitoes and leeches and whatnot.

Some men experienced malaria and sprains. Leg injuries were common, because we’d be up in the mountains, and people would twist their ankles. It’s a full-time job just to keep them healthy. Then you get into a firefight, and you have to drag them back, treat them and get them out of there.

You have to earn your Combat Medical Badge, just like the Combat Infantryman Badge. You have to serve at least two months in a jungle or get into four firefights, and then they give it to you. You earn it through longevity. I was assigned to the 196th Light Infantry Brigade as a platoon medic with Bravo Company for two months, then became company medic for Charlie Company, where I was in charge of three medics.

What was it like serving as a combat medic in Vietnam?

For the first nine months when I was the company medic for Charlie Company, we went through 27 medics. That was, like, one medic per platoon per month killed or wounded. When somebody starts yelling, “Medic!” they’re counting on you. I don’t know why we do it. I guess we’re young and foolish and don’t know any better.

I remember the Battle of Hiep Duc. The fourth longest battle in Vietnam, it went for 13 days. Infantry companies were being rotated in and out. We had lots of casualties. That was in August of 1969—same time as Woodstock. That battle followed Hamburger Hill. I always thought, Why didn’t they just pull us back and B-52 the place? Some general probably wanted to earn another star. Anyway, at that battle there was a guy named Rocky Bleier, who later played for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was wounded there. He has a great story about recovery and going into the NFL.

At Hiep Duc my company hit booby traps—they call them IEDs now. They were strung out along the top of the hill. We had 38 casualties, and my three medics went down. I collected all the morphine syrettes and started treating people. If one needed a shot of morphine, I gave him one and then just kept going. We were lucky there were no fatalities.

After the third booby trap went off, I called for the “Dustoff”—that’s what we called the medevac helicopter. I put on the guy who set off the booby traps—his name was Marty, and he was from Vermont. He was filled with wounds. I had already given him a shot of morphine. As I was putting him on the chopper, he looked at me and said, “Doc, I’ll see you back in the world,” and gave me a peace sign. He was just smiling, because the morphine had kicked in. I did meet him again, at a reunion in St. Louis in 1988. And he came over with his family and told them, “This is the guy who saved me.” That means a lot when somebody does that. When people thank me for saving their lives, I tell them, “I’m only one—there are nurses and doctors that take care of you too.” One of them said, “Yeah, but you’re the one who pulled me out of the line of fire.”

Tell us about your own experience of being wounded.

I was hit by shrapnel from an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. A large sliver hit my side, and it burned like hell. It came in so hot, it cauterized the wound. I used clamps to pull out the shrapnel and threw it away. There was a big firefight at the time. I was running toward somebody who was wounded when I got hit. So I just put on a piece of tape to keep the dirt out and kept on going. Other people needed my help.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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How did you deal with fear when helping the wounded amid a firefight?

Adrenaline kicks in. It takes over, and you don’t have that fear. You do what you’re trained to do—go in there and get the guy out. I didn’t think about fear; I just thought about saving the guy. After the firefight adrenaline is still in your body. Sometimes, you’re just shaking from it. You think, Holy crap! I survived that! Then you go on to the next battle.

Of course, there’s always the possibility you could get killed. When I was in jungle training, this instructor said that in a firefight the longevity of an officer, RTO [radio telephone operator] or medic is about 90 seconds. I thought, Oh, no, I’m dead.

You must have been under incredible stress. How did you handle it?

Well, there’s only so much you can take. In that humidity and heat you could smell human blood. It gets on your hands, on your jungle fatigues. You don’t go back and take a shower. I think the longest we stayed in the jungle was 69 days. You just need to go day by day and survive. Don’t worry about the future.

One of the loneliest times was radio watch. Every half hour the men had to check in with a squelch on their radios so we knew they were awake. You’re lying there in between check-ins, and you think about home. You think about different things and how you should have done them. Some of the people were married, and some had girlfriends. Of course they think about them. There was nothing to do.

The worst times were when guys got a “Dear John” letter. Their minds weren’t right. In the next firefight they wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. We called it the “John Wayne syndrome.” It didn’t happen very often, but it happened. So, to get away from that, we’d send them to the rear, get them drunk a couple of days, and they’d come back feeling better.

Describe your Lakota family’s time-honored warrior tradition.

One of my great-grandfathers was an Indian scout for Company E of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, and I have an uncle who was a World War I vet with the infantry. We [Lakotas of the Rosebud Indian Reservation] had, I think, 200 people serving in World War I when probably fewer than 5,000 people lived on the reservation. My uncle was with the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia.

In World War II my dad was a Lakota code talker. He took an oath that he could not tell anyone about it. Not like the Navajos in the Pacific. After World War II [the Navajo code talkers] were beating their chests and jumping up and down. There were about 30 tribes involved as code talkers in Europe then, and they all took an oath they could not tell anyone, because the United States might go to war with Russia.

Code talking started in World War I. There were zero Navajo code talkers and about 40 Lakota code talkers then. There was even a team of code talkers in Korea. They never talked about it until 1968, when they lifted the ban. My dad told me then he was a code talker.

What was it like to receive public recognition at the 2022 National Memorial Day Concert?

To tell you the truth, I thought I was going to be among a whole bunch. I didn’t know I was one of two people being honored. I knew I was into something when they put us in the front row. My good friend from Vietnam, Paul Critchlow, was with me. He’s from Omaha, Neb., and was a paratrooper pathfinder.

How did Vietnam change your life?

Change came very slowly. First of all, I had to deal with PTSD, which I did by running 5 miles a day. Then I went to Harvard for four years. It didn’t really sink in, though, until I attended a “rap group” at the VA. It was for combat people, and it was the first time I told stories about my combat experience to anyone. That really helped. The other thing that was helpful was something English speakers call a sweat lodge. It really should be called a prayer lodge, because that’s what you do. It cleanses your body but also cleanses your mind. Praying is primary, sweating secondary. When we started doing these prayer lodges, a lot of the combat people started coming in and getting better. You’ve got to let the stories out. I keep telling my kids, “Tell your story.”

Do you ever wonder how you survived Vietnam and so many other challenges?

You know, I’m a cancer survivor for 19 years—probably got it from Agent Orange—and, well, I’m doing okay. I’m still aboveground!

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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The success of U.S. Army expeditions on the Western frontier depended on many factors. The acumen of the commander was a primary consideration, of course, but the availability of water, accurate maps, adequate supplies, healthy troops and horses, and favorable weather all played a role. In many cases the reliability of information was the indispensable component, making the difference between brilliant success and abject failure, even disgrace. Thus, perhaps no other member of a force was as irreplaceable as an experienced and trusted scout.

In an age without drones, satellite intelligence, telephones or even radios, scouts were the eyes and ears of an army. Field officers depended on the intelligence these hardy denizens of the plains and mountains provided, from approximate distances and descriptions of terrain to the likely behavior of Indian tribes and, foremost, the position of enemy forces. 

Western films often depict the Old West scout as a scruffy, buckskin-clad white man, and many real-life scouts fit that description, notably Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok. But perhaps the most successful scouts were those with one leg in white culture and the other in Indian culture. Half-blood scouts who could move easily between both worlds were much in demand.

One such member of this small but prized club was Johnnie Bruguier, who was born in 1849 in a cabin built by his father, Théophile, at the confluence of the Missouri and Big Sioux rivers, on the site of present-day Sioux City, Iowa. A onetime trader with the famed American Fur Co., Montreal-born French Canadian Théophile Bruguier had struck out on his own and did a brisk business with the Yankton Sioux. He was also simultaneously married to two Indian wives, a common practice in that time and place. Together they bore him 13 progeny. Johnnie was the third of seven surviving boys. His mother, Dawn, was the second of Théophile’s Indian wives, both of whom were daughters of Yankton Chief War Eagle. Théophile gradually expanded his trade to the military. The family also received substantial land and cash payments stemming from the 1858 Yankton Treaty between the U.S. government and the tribe.

So, while Johnnie grew up on the frontier, it was not in hardscrabble circumstances. Théophile was determined his children receive an excellent education, and his financial acumen enabled him to send them in turn to the College of Christian Brothers in St. Louis, which remains in operation as a prep school. Founded in the 1670s by French priest Jean-Baptiste de la Salle (since recognized by Roman Catholics as the patron saint of teachers), the religious order that ran the college championed La Salle’s innovative teaching practices, thus Johnnie received a cutting-edge education.

Théophile’s first wife, Blazing Cloud, died in 1858, while Dawn died just three years later. In 1862 Théophile took a third wife. This time he chose a white woman, refined St. Louis native Victoria Brunet. Apparently, she was ill-equipped to mother such rambunctious children of the frontier, as Johnnie and his siblings spent increasingly longer periods with relatives of their late mothers on the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation, in southeastern Dakota Territory.

On Sept. 3, 1863, 13-year-old Johnnie was a passenger aboard the mail coach from Fort Randall, Dakota Territory, returning east to Sioux City on the stage road along the Missouri River. Accompanying him was a soldier he’d befriended, 24-year-old Sergeant Eugene Trask of the 7th Iowa Cavalry Regiment. As usual the sergeant was entertaining the someday scout with tales of Indian battles and massacres, perhaps relating depredations committed during the 1862 Sioux Uprising in nearby southwest Minnesota. (That spring the Army had settled the exiled Santee Sioux from Minnesota on a reservation along the stage road in Dakota Territory.) Suddenly gunshots rang out around the coach, and Trask dropped dead at Johnnie’s side. As the driver reined the horses to a standstill and bolted for his life, four Santees in warpaint rode up to the coach. Recognizing his own peril, young Bruguier spoke to the attackers in their language. Presumably assuming the boy, though light-skinned, must be one of their own, the four raiders let Johnnie be. After rifling through the contents of a trunk, they rode off with the coach’s team.

Perhaps emboldened by his first brush with death, Johnnie pressed to accompany his father’s far-flung trading ventures. He often joined Théophile’s wagon trains as they made their way up the Missouri with trade goods and then returned with expansive loads of furs and buffalo robes that further added to the family coffers. As he gained experience, young Bruguier took on greater responsibilities with the company. But while he might someday have inherited his father’s business empire, Johnnie had other ideas.

Scouting Career

In 1868 the U.S. government negotiated the Treaty of Fort Laramie, establishing the 60-million-acre Great Sioux Reservation in Dakota Territory (west of the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota). Various Indian agencies were established west of the Missouri, and in the fall of 1870 Johnnie’s older brother Charles took a job with the Grand River Agency, near the mouth of the namesake river along the present-day inter-Dakota border. Johnnie joined him there the next summer. Many Sioux, mostly Hunkpapas and Yanktonai (the latter one of the seven subtribes of the Dakotas who spoke the same dialect as the Yanktons), still roamed free, and agency officials had been tasked with turning such “renegades” into “civilized” Indians.

On July 12, 1871, Johnnie signed up as a scout and interpreter for the soldiers assigned to protect the agency. He served in that capacity through March 31, 1872, and the next day hired on with J.C. O’Conner, Grand River’s civilian agent. Johnnie’s little brother Billy took a job with O’Conner that year, as did youngest brother Sam the following June. The Bruguier boys, though serving mainly as interpreters, were jacks-of-all-trades at the agency. During slow periods they hired out for various enterprises, even working at times for local farmers.

While most of the Sioux were adjusting to reservation life, several troublesome non-agency bands remained at large, including the Hunkpapa one under de facto leader Sitting Bull. Such bands were upset with the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was laying track ever closer to the last of their traditional buffalo hunting grounds. In August 1872 the government scheduled a follow-up peace conference at Fort Peck, a trading post in northeastern Montana Territory. As in the past, Sitting Bull refused to attend. Instead, he sent his brother-in-law with instructions to inform the assembled officials Sitting Bull would only consider attending “whenever he found a white man who would tell the truth.” His absence didn’t stop the government from recruiting Sioux of lesser standing for a goodwill trip that fall to Washington, D.C. Assigned to the party as an interpreter, Johnnie handled not only the day-to-day communications between federal officials and their wards, but also the flood of reporters who swarmed the Indian contingent at every whistle-stop. Arriving in Washington on September 15, the group returned to the reservation via New York City in late October.

Bruguier resigned his agency position on May 31, 1873. By then the Army had sent Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th U.S. Cavalry to Dakota Territory to protect Northern Pacific surveyors from attack. According to author and researcher John S. Gray, although Johnnie’s name doesn’t appear in official Army records as having accompanied Custer’s forces, he likely came along as an interpreter or scout or both.

During the 1873 Yellowstone Expedition two civilians—Dr. John Honsinger, a veterinarian, and Augustus Baliran, a sutler—were riding ahead of Custer’s main column, seeking water for their horses, when a party of Sioux warriors ambushed and killed them. Bruguier would soon learn the identity of the killer. That fall Edmond Palmer, O’Conner’s successor at the Grand River Agency—which had been moved up the Missouri and renamed Standing Rock—hired Johnnie. During that bleak and bitter Dakota winter some of the non-agency bands camped near the agency to take advantage of government rations. Lingering around the lodges of these new arrivals, Johnnie overheard Rain-in-the Face, the Hunkpapa war chief, bragging about having murdered Honsinger and Baliran.

On Feb. 10, 1874, Bruguier resigned his agency job and returned south along the Missouri to visit his family in Sioux City. En route he informed Colonel David S. Stanley, the commander at Fort Sully, about Rain-in-the-Face’s boastful confession. Stanley forwarded the information in a March 1 letter to department headquarters in St. Paul:

“John Bruyere [sic], an educated half-breed, came here from Standing Rock yesterday. He informs me that the Indian who murdered the veterinary surgeon, Honsinger, and Mr. Baliran last August on the Yellowstone is now at Standing Rock Agency and boasts daily of having killed both these men with his own hand. The Indian says that the rest of the party wanted to spare the lives of the two unfortunate men, but that he killed them himself. Besides Bruyere, several white men have heard the Indian make this boast. To corroborate all this, Bruyere brought down Honsinger’s saddle and equipment, which he bought from the Indian. There is no difficulty of proving the murder, if the Indian can be caught. The arrest of the Indian will be a matter requiring address and force, as it may lead to a collision with all the Uncpapas [sic] camped at Standing Rock. I respectfully advise that the arrest be entrusted to Lt. Col. G.A. Custer, with not less than 300 men.

“John Bruyere will be at home, 2 miles from Sioux City, about the time this letter reaches St. Paul and is perfectly willing to go as guide. He was out as scout last summer and is well known to General Custer. If the department commander thinks favorably of this arrest, I would suggest that he summon John Bruyere to come to St. Paul to learn the full probabilities of success. A dispatch, care of Captain [W.W.] Foster or Mr. John H. Charles, would reach Bruyere at once.

“Notwithstanding all the murders the Sioux have committed on this river, there has never yet been an arrest, and this seems to me to be a favorable opportunity. Standing Rock is only 25 miles from Fort Rice, and the march can be made in one night.” 

Stanley’s superiors met his letter with decided inaction. But later that year Rain-in-the-Face, unrepentantly boastful as ever, reappeared at Standing Rock. Apparently, that bit of news made its way north to the desk of Colonel Custer at Fort Abraham Lincoln. Still furious over the two civilian murders during the Yellowstone Expedition, Custer dispatched Captain George W. Yates and two companies of cavalry to arrest Rain-in-the Face. Yates did so on December 14, and in his report the captain gave high praise to Bruguier for his reliability and good service to the troopers by helping them identify Rain-in-the-Face. 

Cloud of Suspicion

Till then Bruguier’s life and career had run along fairly conventional lines. He might have gone down as an obscure footnote in the chronicles of the Old West. But an incident at the agency on Dec. 14, 1874—exactly a year to the day after Rain-in-the-Face’s arrest—recast Johnnie in the minds of many from trusted scout to wanted murderer. The Bismarck Tribune broke the news:

“STANDING ROCK, D.T., Dec. 16: A sad affair occurred here Tuesday evening [December 14] about 10 o’clock that has resulted in the death of William McGee, an employee at the agency, from a blow delivered by Billy Brughier [sic], a half-breed Indian. It seems McGee was about retiring when Brughier and his brother John, the agency interpreter, entered the room considerably under the influence of liquor. McGee evidently endeavored to get one or both of the boys to bed when Billy fired two shots at him from his revolver, missing his aim entirely; he then struck him a terrible blow with his revolver just above the left ear, fracturing the skull in four different places. Word was immediately sent to the guard at the garrison for assistance in searching for the murderer, who had immediately proceeded to the stable and, mounting his pony, had fled to Two Bear’s camp, about 2 miles above the agency. Lieutenant G.B. Walker, of the 6th Infantry, proceeded to the Indian camp yesterday with a small party in search of Brughier, but it was found that he had fled. He is supposed to have gone to Bismarck and from there to Minnesota in order to get among the Red River half-breeds, he having expressed such as his intention.

“McGee was a quiet, hardworking man and leaves a father, mother and daughter living at last accounts near Martinsburg, [W.]Va. 

“Assistant Surgeon T.A. Davis and Dr. S.S. Turner held a postmortem examination of the remains this morning.

“This same Brughier, but a few days ago, attempted to shoot John McCarthy, of Bismarck, and when under the influence of liquor is always trying to kill someone.”

Within days an Army patrol tracked down Billy and turned him over to federal officials in Bismarck. Sentenced to a 10-year prison term in June 1875, he was pardoned by the Dakota territorial governor on New Year’s Day 1882, having served just seven years of his sentence.

Although Johnnie hadn’t struck the deadly blow, he, too, had fled and was eventually charged as an accomplice in the murder. In the minds of many of his contemporaries, as well as subsequent historians investigating the matter, his flight only established his guilt.

The Bruguiers had both relatives and fast friends among the Sioux, and Johnnie drew on those contacts to hide him. On hearing a warrant had been sworn out against him, he headed southwest into the Black Hills. In February 1876 the warrant reached the U.S. marshal in Yankton, who dispatched a posse into the hills to seek out the half-blood fugitive. But Johnnie eluded them, and the posse returned to Yankton in July without its man.

According to a 1932 letter written by nephew John Bruguier, his uncle soon sought refuge in the lodge of Sitting Bull himself. In late August 1876, mere weeks after the shocking defeat of Custer’s 7th Cavalry command on Montana’s Little Bighorn River, Johnnie arrived in the Hunkpapa camp wearing the garb of an Army scout. Warriors were ready to brain him on the spot until Sitting Bull intervened. “Well, if you are going to kill this man, kill him,” the iconic leader reportedly told his warriors, “and if you are not, give him a drink of water, something to eat and a pipe of peace to smoke.” Thus accepted into Sitting Bull’s band, Bruguier served as an interpreter in many tense encounters between the Army and the fugitive Hunkpapa leader, who stalwartly refused to surrender, let alone move to the reservation. 

By year’s end a weary Bruguier resolved to get back into the good graces of his former employer. Breaking off from Sitting Bull, he joined Iron Dog’s Hunkpapa band, which that October 31 made a winter truce with agent Thomas J. Mitchell at Fort Peck. Johnnie approached Mitchell with a Little Bighorn relic one of Sitting Bull’s warriors must have looted from the battlefield—a paymaster’s check for $127 made out to Captain Yates and endorsed over to Captain William W. Cooke. Both Yates and Cooke had died with Custer on June 25. The peace offering worked, as Mitchell welcomed Bruguier back into the fold.

Meanwhile, the Army kept hot on the trail of Sitting Bull. Colonel Nelson Miles, tasked with bringing in the elusive chief, tapped Bruguier for advice. On November 17 the two made a deal: Johnnie would employ his significant skills to track down and bring Sitting Bull to the negotiating table, and Miles would do what he could to assist Bruguier with his legal trouble. When Miles set out with his troops after Sitting Bull, he made use of Johnnie’s intelligence. The colonel must have been pleased, as on December 17, a month after striking their deal, Miles hired Bruguier as a regular Army scout.

Johnnie proved invaluable in subsequent Army campaigns against Crazy Horse, Lame Deer and Chief Joseph. He frequently rode alone into hostile Indian camps, bearing messages to and from field commanders and Indian chiefs. His superiors praised his courage and mentioned him in dispatches as a reliable and trusted scout. 

Regardless, Bruguier remained under a cloud of suspicion in the murder of William McGee, and on Sept. 27, 1879, authorities finally arrested the fugitive scout at Fort Keogh, in southeastern Montana Territory. Though Johnnie faced federal prosecution, he took heart from the fact that nearly every citizen of neighboring Miles City signed a petition of clemency on his behalf. Town namesake Colonel Miles also let it be loudly known Bruguier was the best scout he had ever employed, and that he was convinced of Johnnie’s innocence. The case went to trial in Fargo on December 30 and 31. Despite the determined efforts of the district attorney to blacken the scout’s character, the jury deliberated but a half hour before returning a verdict of not guilty.

Bruguier continued to serve off and on as a scout for his old friend Miles, who was promoted to brigadier general in 1880 and major general in 1890. That year Johnnie retired from Army service and settled near Poplar, Mont., on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. There, on June 13, 1898, the old scout’s lifeless body was discovered on a lonely road. His head had been caved in with a wagon wrench. Authorities soon arrested another half blood, Ernest Strikler, for the crime. The motive went unrecorded, but it’s ironic that a man who had been in the thick of things on either side of the Indian wars was ultimately brought down by a wrench rather than a bullet or a tomahawk. 

Aaron Robert Woodard, who writes out of Hartford, S.D., teaches history and government at Purdue University Global and American history at Bellevue University. For further reading he recommends The History of Dakota Territory, by George W. Kingsbury; History of South Dakota, by Doane Robinson; and “What Made Johnnie Bruguier Run?” by John S. Gray, published in the spring 1964 (Vol. 14, No. 2) issue of Montana: The Magazine of Western History and available online.

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This 1892 map depicts the Oklahoma and Indian Territories not long after the famous Oklahoma Land Rush that started April 22, 1889, and eventually brought 50,000 White settlers into the area—a significant development in the establishment of the state of Oklahoma. Settlers who had slipped over the border before the rush’s official start date to claim land were called “Sooners.”

The eventual dissolution of c has a sad and complex history. The term originated in 1835 when Southeastern Indian tribes were forcibly displaced from their native lands and moved west of the Mississippi River, an event the Cherokee called the “Trail of Tears.”

Over the ensuing decades, through a number of federal acts and treaties, Indian Territory continued to shrink until it consisted of the area represented on this map. Through a number of congressional decrees—33 alone in 1870–79—White settlers were allowed to move in and take up residence in Indian Territory.

After the Land Rush, the Organic Act of 1890 created the new Oklahoma Territory boundary. Plains Tribes were placed on reservations in Oklahoma, while Indian Territory remained the home of southeastern tribes. The map includes the years the treaties were drafted giving the land to the respective tribes.

Eventually, both territories were merged into one, the Oklahoma Territory, and the term Indian Territory disappeared from federal lands. After four separate plans, the state of Oklahoma was created in 1907.

Despite the colorful, engrossing appearance of this map, it actually documents one of many steps in the marginalization of Native Americans in the United States.

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In his reminiscences, written in Rome in the 1830s, Pablo Tac, a former Luiseño Indian and devoted Catholic, expressed his affection for the bygone mission life of Spanish Alta California. At Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, Tac’s former home, Indians partook in such religious aspects of daily life as the choir, enjoyed the protection of soldiers (“so that nobody does injury to Spaniard or to Indian”) and were cared for by Franciscan fathers who “[know] the customs of the neophytes well.” In a letter to Alta California Governor José Figueroa written around the same time, Narciso Durán, father-president of the missions, contrasted the “far more wretched and oppressed” existence of Indians living outside their walls. “All in reality,” he wrote, “are slaves, or servants, of white men.”

Overlooking such advocacy of the mission system, Mexican government officials moved to secularize (i.e., nationalize) all California missions in the 1830s, transferring the lands once owned by the Franciscan order of the Catholic Church to the state. Under the Secularization Act of 1833 and a subsequent gubernatorial order, the former mission lands were confiscated and then made available for private ownership, ostensibly enabling Indians to purchase property. However, the stark reality for most “emancipated” Mission Indians was a slide into destitution. Dispossessed of their mission holdings, few became private landowners.

When founded in the late 17th century, the missions formed part of a tripartite settlement arrangement in Spanish California comprising presidios (military outposts) pueblos (adjacent villages) and misións (centers of religious worship and instruction usually within proximity of the former two). Mission de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó (aka Mission Loreto), founded in 1697 by Jesuit priest Juan María de Salvatierra, was the first successful mission of 20 the Jesuit order established in Baja (Lower) California. In 1767 distrust of the wealthy and powerful Jesuits by King Charles III prompted him to expel them from Spain and its colonies, particularly from distant California. He turned over the 14 operating missions in Baja California to the Franciscan order, which ultimately established 21 new ones in Alta (Upper) California. Father Junípero Serra founded the first of the latter in San Diego in 1769.

Incentivized to live on mission settlements by the protection afforded from marauders and the prevalence of food, local Indians became a captive audience of potential neophytes (converts). The Franciscans adopted the practices of reducción and congregación in their administration of the missions, instilling in their wards Western culture and values in hopes of “reducing” Indians from their comparatively undisciplined ways, while “congregating” them together for the purpose of instruction. Baptized neophytes were expected to adopt the worship practices, marital customs and other behaviors promoted by the Franciscans. Those yet to be converted were referred to as gentiles.

Though Indians were not compelled to reside at the mission, once one had converted and adopted it as home, he had to remain a resident for 10 years, after which time the land he’d farmed would revert to his ownership. Rarely could neophytes or gentiles come and go as they pleased. To enforce the rules and maintain discipline the Franciscans sometimes resorted to draconian measures. In 1831 Frederick William Beechey, an English ship’s captain, recalled having witnessed reprisals against runaway Indians. “Armed force is sent in pursuit,” he wrote, “and drags him back to punishment apportioned to the degree of aggravation attached to his crime.” Beechey questioned the Franciscans’ commitment to Indian autonomy. “Having served 10 years in the mission, an Indian may claim his liberty.…A piece of ground is then allotted for his support, but he is never wholly free from the establishment, as part of his earnings must still be given to them [the Franciscans].” Disaffected Indians sometimes staged revolts, including uprisings at Mission San Diego in 1775 and Mission Santa Inés, in central California, in 1824. 

In theory, under both Spanish and Mexican rule, each mission was to operate only 10 years. The expectation was that the Franciscans would have converted and instructed an ample Indian populace within that time, after which the mission lands were to be distributed among them. Nonenforcement of that decree in California in part prompted secularization. Justly concerned the entire scheme was a pretext to diminish the influence of the Catholic Church, one Franciscan challenged Mexican officials to step up. “Let the latter begin to work, to found establishments and schools, and to practice arts and industries,” he wrote. “Then will be time to lead the Indians to follow a good example.” The process called for the missions to become pueblos, allowing for Indian landownership. Yet only one, Mission San Juan Capistrano, did so. All others transferred to ranchos owned by wealthy Californios (descendants of Spanish colonists). By one estimate the ranchos swallowed up some 90 percent of former mission lands.

A few Indians received sizable allotments. In 1838 Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado granted Ignacio Pastor of Mission San Antonio de Padua a whopping 43,000 acres. Widow Cristina Salgado, who’d been emancipated with her husband from Mission Carmel prior to secularization, gained title to 3,200 acres near the Salinas River, making her perhaps the only female Indian awarded a grant. However, most Indians—notably the Chumash of Mission Santa Barbara—received little more than small plots on which to raise vegetables. Adding insult to injury, the government officials who administered secularization, like commissioner José Antonio Romero of San Carlos, challenged the very right of Indians to own land. 

In the wake of the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War and ceded California to the United States, land disputes between Californios and the federal government routinely bypassed any concerns about Indian landownership in the new territory. By then, in an echo of Father Durán’s observation of non–Mission Indians decades earlier, most California Indians lived in a state of destitution.

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In the 1897 edition of the annual Eskimo Bulletin, between a sales ad for walrus heads and word of the discovery of ancient Eskimo armor made from iron slats, appeared the following news item:

“The success attending this third year of the mission herd of domestic reindeer at the Cape [Prince of Wales] speaks well for the faithfulness and skill of our Eskimo herders, all of whom are Christians.…Each of them has driven more than 500 miles during the winter.”

The author and publisher of those lines, Congregational missionary William Thomas Lopp, briefly served as superintendent of the District of Alaska reindeer station in Teller. The driving he mentioned referred to reindeer-drawn sleds whose drivers balanced on the runners in the style of dog mushers.

On Independence Day five years earlier, amid a flag-raising ceremony, cheering onlookers and a herd of 53 Siberian reindeer, district officials had opened Teller Station in Port Clarence Bay, a large, sheltered bight east of the Bering Strait. Those animals laid the foundation for a population of reindeer on the Seward Peninsula that would peak at 640,000 animals and support a booming industry that inexorably shaped the welfare of the region’s Alaska Natives.

By century’s end commercial hunting had depleted whale, walrus and caribou populations on the peninsula, and starvation haunted the local Iñupiat, an ethnic group closely related to Canada’s Inuit. Believing “God blesses aggressiveness,” the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister, missionary and Alaska’s general agent of education, repeatedly sailed to Siberia in 1892 and imported 171 reindeer to feed the Iñupiat and provide them with livelihoods. Escorting that first shipment were four Chukchi Siberian herders he’d employed as instructors. Iñupiat flocked from hundreds of miles away to see what the missionaries at Teller were up to. Their intentions were implicit in The Eskimo Bulletin and explicit in Jackson’s reports to the federal government. The reverend—who stood just 5 feet tall but was colossally ambitious, egotistical and often tactless—considered reindeer “an important factor in the civilization of the Eskimos.”

Iñupiaq chronicler Inez Ayagiaq Black instead recalled how the newcomers’ dealings unraveled the cultural fabric of northwestern Alaska Natives. “When the young men started working, their lifestyle changed,” she said. “They didn’t eat only Eskimo food. Their clothing changed. They didn’t use winter furs all the time, like the fur pants they used to wear.”

Jackson taught Iñupiat of both sexes English, math and domestic skills to prepare them for doing business with whites. Consider, for example, the following passage from a mission school language lesson sheet:

We-mok has 10 deer.
They are big deer.
Some of them are fat.
Four of them are sled-deer.

Printed below it were verses from abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic praising the fearful “grapes of wrath” and the beautiful lilies in which “Christ was born.”

Tensions flare

Underlying Jackson’s agenda was his generation’s overarching belief in Manifest Destiny. Reindeer would not only turn hunters into herders, he thought, but also “utilize hundreds of thousands of square miles of moss-covered tundra…and make those now useless and barren wastes conducive to the wealth and prosperity of the United States.”

Yet for millennia such “barren wastes” had sustained people who were neither ranchers nor miners nor farmers. The North Country animals (fish and sea mammals) were their crops. “Anytime that we wanted an ‘apple,’” recalled Iñupiaq leader Eben Hopson from Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), “we went out and got it. We got what we wanted to live on, got what we needed.”

In place of that carefree subsistence lifestyle those Iñupiaq apprentices selected by the mission instructors received five years of schooling, room and board included. His first year an apprentice earned the loan of two female reindeer (and any offspring they bore), the second year five, the third and each year after 10. At the end of five years, if judged adequately skilled, each was loaned enough reindeer to increase his herd to 50 head.

From the outset tensions flared between the missionaries and their Chukchi instructors. Among other “transgressions,” when the Chukchi were thirsty, they would lasso reindeer cows, kneel and drink directly from their teats, quaffing milk, Jackson observed, “with as much enjoyment as if it had been pure nectar.” More offensive still was their practice of leading the salt-loving reindeer by marking the ground with streams of urine poured from a sealskin bag. To missionary sensibilities such behavior would do nothing to help civilize the Iñupiat.

In 1894 the exasperated missionaries recruited 16 Saami (seven herders and their families) from Lapland to replace the Chukchi instructors. A clause in their contract bound the Saami to behave “orderly and decently and to show discipline.” Each brought his own sled and herding dogs and would receive 100 deer for three to five years of service. The Iñupiat soon warmed to the “Card People,” as they dubbed the Saami, whose traditional curled toe boots and Four Winds hats reminded them of the garb of playing card jokers, jacks and kings. But the trainees continued to chafe at their subordinate status, the monotony of herding (compared to hunting or fishing) and the lack of immediate payback.

Ironically, considering Jackson’s stab at acculturation, the need to continually shift reindeer to prevent overgrazing required the Iñupiat to lead more nomadic lives than they had as hunters and fishers. Shadowing the herds all summer, they walked or jogged up to 30 miles daily. “The deer run the herder,” Saami instructor Andrew Bahr said. Iñupiaq herder Chester Seveck, who tended reindeer for 46 years, summed up the herders’ existence. “We keep moving camp every 10 days or two weeks to another grazing ground in wintertime,” he recalled in his clipped English. “In summertime we keep reindeer on the coast near ocean side where flies and mosquitoes not so many.”

In the winter of 1897–98 the owners of eight whalers trapped in an ice field near Point Barrow appealed to President William McKinley on behalf of their 265 stranded crewmen. As it was too late in the year for the U.S. revenue cutter Bear to push through the pack ice, the rescue party disembarked at Cape Vancouver and traveled overland, first stopping by Teller Station to purchase a herd of reindeer—food on the hoof. In what became known as the Overland Relief Expedition they were to drive north “40 tons of meat.”

Six men—including officers from Bear, station superintendent Lopp and native herder Charlie Antisarlook—set out for Point Barrow in mid-December. Picking up more Iñupiaq herders along the way, they sledged provisions 1,500 miles by dog and deer while the men snowshoed and skied. As they crossed exposed Kotzebue Sound, they had to cut steps into pressure ridges and burn several sleds to keep warm. Approaching North Slope villages whose residents had never encountered reindeer, Lopp’s men clarified that the animals were not caribou to be hunted. After suffering blizzards, frostbite, polar bear attacks, 70-below temperatures and snow blindness, the men reached the stranded crews at Point Barrow by late March 1898, having lost only one-sixth of the herd.

That same year, with Nome in the grip of gold fever, outlying fortune seekers clamored for meat and regular freight and mail delivery. To supply their needs, Lopp and his herders established a “reindeer express” between Nome and the mining camps in the York Mountains. The first government mail route to St. Michael, a Yukon River gateway to the Klondike, opened in 1900. Draft reindeer quickly surpassed sled dogs, as the former grazed freely, while food for the latter had to be bought, fished for or shot and then carried. Hauling up to 300 pounds each, mail service reindeer could cover 30 to 50 miles in a stretch. The animals rested at way stations, pawing lichen from beneath the snow. In a land of few trees, makeshift fences of burlap, willow or slabs of lake ice easily held them. Some traveled 6,000 miles in a single winter. That said, most Iñupiat preferred dogs, as reindeer kicked up snow into a driver’s face and tended to slip and fall on glare ice. One storm toppled reindeer and overturned loaded sleds like toys, and at least one Saami mailman froze to death.

Arrival of the Lomen family

Around the turn of the century the winds of opportunity blew a particularly enterprising family into Nome. In June 1903, having spent a working vacation there at the height of the gold craze, Carl J. Lomen and his father, Judge Gudbrand J. Lomen, of St. Paul, Minn., moved to town. Carl’s mother, four brothers and sister soon followed. As shrewd hawkers of reindeer meat and the Christmas holiday, the Lomens would rise to become Nome’s wealthiest family.

Carl’s initial reindeer sighting paints him as something of a citified “dude,” for while he was crossing the tundra near Nome in the summer of 1900, a herd stopped him dead in his tracks. Ignorant of the habits of reindeer, he feared they might attack.

By the time of his family’s move chances to score still abounded in the territory’s most-populous city. In 1908 the Lomen brothers bought a photo studio, stocking it with cameras and glass-plate negatives acquired from other photographers. They soon mastered the craft while learning to keep their gear and fingers functioning at subzero temperatures. Cashing in on the soon-to-be-territory’s aura and newfound popularity, the brothers sold their images as postcards and to various newspapers and scientific publications. In 1914 the family launched the Lomen Co., a meatpacking business stocked with 1,200 reindeer purchased from an aging Saami. Within a couple of years the enterprise was shipping meat to the Lower 48.

Carl Lomen, who boasted of the family’s “many pleasant relationships with the native people,” pledged that he and his brothers represented no threat to local herders, as they’d focus on national markets. By then, however, most miners had left the region, leaving no significant local buyers. Lacking the funds to build slaughterhouses or underground cold storages—natural freezers that took advantage of permafrost—Iñupiaq herders couldn’t compete on the national stage, not that they had any stateside connections. Conflict over prime rangeland mounted as Lomen came to control the best grazing grounds, charging native herders a use fee and collecting a herding fee for each Iñupiaq reindeer that got mixed up with his animals. While the Lomens did hire native herders and buy their excess steers, such were largely token gestures to maintain goodwill. Regardless, the natives were far from throwing in the towel. With seed stock from the firmly established mission herds, additional Iñupiaq reindeer stations sprung up in Iliamna, Barrow, Kivalina, Nulato and as far inland as Bettles.

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In his 1954 memoir Fifty Years in Alaska Lomen gave patronizing due to native resilience and good humor. “Civilized men,” he wrote, “would become despondent living under like conditions, but the Eskimo meets them lightheartedly. He exhibits no concern for the morrow.” Pages later, however, the entrepreneurial meat-packer belied his true feelings with a quote from Iñupiaq herder William Allokeok of Shishmaref: “If you wish a good living from your deer, you should think and plan how to care for them. If you don’t, your herd will decrease.”

Unfortunately, no amount of skill and dedication could guarantee an Iñupiaq herder’s success. By 1896 Jackson had changed the apprenticeship terms so that no animals could be earned during the period of instruction, and native herders could no longer expect the loan of a starter herd on graduation. The new rules also specified that when an Iñupiaq herder died, half of his herd reverted to the mission.

Lopp and others sincerely concerned about native livelihoods raised the alarm, prompting a 1905 Interior Department investigation of the mission stations. It found that the missions, their supervising Scandinavians and the government itself, not native herders, owned most of the 10,000-plus head then in Alaska. Jackson, singled out for his conflicting interests as the district’s agent of education and field agent of the Presbyterian missions, resigned, and a new policy was implemented to place more reindeer into native hands. Instead of having to qualify through apprenticeships, Iñupiat could simply purchase reindeer from fellow herders, though they were still not permitted to sell female breeding deer to nonnatives. Only through a legal technicality had Lomen been able to buy his original herd, as no sales restrictions had been imposed on nonnative herds.

Alas, the government reforms benefited few native herders, and most of those only temporarily.

Queen of Reindeer

Among the few truly successful native herders was “Sinrock Mary.” Born Changunak in 1870 to an Iñupiaq mother and a Russian trader father, she was raised in bustling St. Michael. Growing up trilingual, she worked as a linguist and interpreter for Jackson and legendary U.S. Revenue Service Captain Michael A. Healy before achieving fame herself as the “Queen of Reindeer.”

In 1889 Mary married Charlie Antisarlook—the Teller Station herder who a decade later would join the Overland Relief Expedition. The couple moved to Cape Nome, where Charles had established a modest herd, the first owned by an Alaska Native. When her husband succumbed to measles in 1900, Mary worked diligently to maintain the herd, selling meat to local businesses and the Army station. Her second husband wasn’t interested in reindeer, so Mary adopted 11 children, among them little ones the epidemics had orphaned. She transformed them and other Iñupiat into “deer men” able to manage their own herds.

At one point “Queen Mary” reigned over the largest herd in the North Country. Through her children she also managed to uphold such Iñupiaq traditions as gathering berries and greens, fishing and preparing skins for sewing. Conniving to cheat her out of her inheritance, rumrunners and drifters slurred the stately, curly-haired woman, threatened and sued her, shot at her deer to scatter them, killed and left some rotting on the tundra, and proffered her liquor to cloud her judgment. One Swedish schemer pretended to be her third husband, while relatives of her dead husband, inflamed with a new kind of fever—the lust for unearned wealth—tried to disown her, stating that Iñupiaq inheritance rules favored males. 

Changunak had long witnessed the effects of greed, disease and lawlessness. Miners staking claims within grazing ranges often destroyed the natural reindeer and caribou forage by burning off vegetation. Scores of other reindeer were lost to rustling. With the proliferation of Nome honky-tonks and home brewing, alcoholism became rampant. The encroachment on native hunting and fishing grounds brought new diseases—smallpox, influenza, measles, etc.—to which Alaska Natives had little resistance. By century’s end more than half the native population in northwestern Alaska had died. According to Sister Frances Kittredge of the Cape Prince of Wales mission, whose sister Ellen had married Teller Station superintendent Lopp, hardly any Iñupiat over 50 years old was left, and few younger than 5. “There is hardly a family where someone is not gone,” she wrote to her mother.

A 1916 influenza epidemic practically wiped out Sinuk, aka “Sinrock,” the village from which Mary took her nickname and where she tended her herd. Lomen, who paid his helpers in cash, lured ever more herders away from the widow, who could only pay in reindeer and whose herd withered away in the absence of competent care.

“The deer is just like money”

In 1915, to better integrate herding into Iñupiaq culture, Interior’s Bureau of Education began organizing weeklong annual fairs in centrally located settlements. As described by Lomen, these were splendid affairs, versions of Rocky Mountain fur rendezvous that echoed the ancient trans–Bering Strait barter gatherings at Sisualik, a spit near Kotzebue. Clanging brass bells and the old man grunts of sled deer announced the arrival of delegates representing herds from all points of the compass. The herders wore fine costumes, while harnesses blazed with dangling yarn pompoms, and hand-carved walrus ivory buckles and clasps fastened the straps. 

At times the pageant resembled a fashion show. Pukiq, snow-white fur from the animal’s belly or throat, was especially valued. It looked dashing on chocolate-colored summer hides or in contrasting panels or inserts of geometric motifs, like checkered parka hems. White deer leg skins made for fancy mukluk boots. Surviving photos of duotone skin rugs, whose designs mimic Navajo weaving, hint that some items were meant for collectors or other commercial markets.

The fairs adopted a flag—a red reindeer on a white field bordered in blue—which snapped in the arctic breeze beside the Stars and Stripes. Attendees field-dressed animals, cooked, shared stories and sang. “They had races using one sled deer, then two sled deer and then four sled deer and eight sled deer,” longtime herder Seveck recalled. There were shooting and heavy-pull contests (with 1,600-pound loads of sand), men’s and women’s snowshoe races, and bow drill fire-starting and snow-melting competitions. In one popular rodeo contest a man roped and then harnessed a feisty bull reindeer, drove a distance and then sped back to the start. When herders wanted to perfect their throwing skills without disturbing their grazing animals, one of their own would play the target, scampering about with antlers atop his head. Another amusing winter exercise for ropers, Ellen Lopp wrote in a letter, “was to go to a long hill, get some children to coast down on sleds or barrel staves and lasso them as they went sliding down.”

Fall and spring roundups likewise were social events. Families camped at the corrals and chipped in on such tasks as separating out the respective herds, choosing steers for future draft duty and castrating newborn calves. Castrating calves allowed selective breeding and improved the meat of steers that skipped the fall rut. It also made males more docile for pulling sleds. A family culled its herd for food and clothing and tallied how much it had grown. As cows sometimes bear twins and calve annually after becoming yearlings, well-serviced herds could swell by more than a third every spring. Like the Saami, the Iñupiat ear-notched reindeer for identification, as their fur is too thick for branding.

Exponential growth. Investment and interest. Supply and demand. By the late 1920s many Iñupiat had joined the capitalist venture. For the first time they owned live animals individually. “The deer is just like money,” herder Cudluck Oquilluk aptly put it.

And therein lay the seed for the industry’s demise. Despite Lomen’s salesmanship, his attempts to sell “America’s New Health Meat” to a nation raised on beef, mutton and pork yielded only modest results. Seeing their returns threatened by reindeer meat, the big beef producers fought the Lomen Co.’s every effort to ramp up sales. Reindeer hides earmarked for glove making fetched good prices at Seattle auctions, and thousands of reindeer were slaughtered for their leather alone. As outside markets collapsed, people fed excess reindeer meat to dogs or used carcasses to bait fox traps.

The Depression and mysteriously crashing herds—a “great die-out” between the 1930s and ’50s—doomed lucrative herding in Alaska. A flurry of protests from native herders precipitated the 1937 Reindeer Industry Act, which transferred all nonnative herds and equipment to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and, therefore, to the Iñupiat (until 1997, when a court decision reopened the industry to nonnatives). Lomen in particular had been a target of Interior Department investigations for about a decade. At the liquidation of his depleted herd in 1940 the government paid just $3 to $4 a head, whereas in the industry heyday a reindeer had sold for upward of $65. “By the late 1930s the Eskimos of Alaska had taken both legal and cultural control of what was originally designed to be a project of assimilation,” environmental historian Roxanne Willis observed.

Precipitating a crash of the Seward Peninsula herds in the winter of 1938–39 were wolf kills and losses of reindeer the Iñupiat believed had tired of being herded and wandered off to join migrating caribou. Seveck had vivid memories those weeks, the twilight of an era. “Three big herds of reindeer follow the caribou and lost completely,” he recalled. “The caribou very wild and travel day and night. We must let them go because we could not catch them. They too fast for us to follow.”

The last great trail drive left Kotzebue Sound in 1929, an epic five-year trek plagued by wolves, storms, deserting Saami herders and mosquitoes that stampeded reindeer into the wilds. The Canadian government had contracted with Lomen to deliver a herd of 3,000 reindeer to the Mackenzie River delta, as officials there also wanted reindeer stations to boost native economies. But herding also failed to root deeply in Inuit culture.

Alaska’s Iñupiat and their Yup’ik neighbors, who’d adapted to changes in nature over millennia, were not particularly upset by the reindeer’s disappearance. The endeavor had brought more toil than reward, and many men gladly spent more time with their families again, embracing ingrained, engaging subsistence. 

Interviewed at age 83, Seveck reminisced about what the ex-herders sought to reclaim, a time before businessmen came into that country. “Many Eskimo people were old ages, brave and long life,” he said. “Never sick, only dying by accident and starvation. They works together. They hunt together to help one another. They divided equally things among themself.” 

Michael Engelhard, who lived briefly on Lomen Avenue in Nome, is the author of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon. For further reading he recommends Saami, Reindeer and Gold in Alaska: The Emigration of Saami From Norway to Alaska, by Ornulv Vorren; Ice Window: Letters From a Bering Strait Village, 1892–1902, by Ellen Louise Kittredge Lopp and William Thomas Lopp; The Eskimo and His Reindeer in Alaska, by Clarence L. Andrews; and The Yukon Relief Expedition and the Journal of Carl Johan Sakariassen, edited by V.R. Rausch and D.L. Baldwin.