American Rifle - Alexander Rose [113]
Progressive officers were shocked at the romantic bloodthirstiness inherent in the diehard view of the world. They believed in the redeeming benefits of Science and were convinced that Indians would shuck off their savage habits if given the chance at respectability. The burden of the white man, they claimed, was to extend a helping hand to those still mired in ignorance. Like all other societies, Indian societies must (and this was a very nineteenth-century conception) pass “through the stages of the hunter, the herdsman, [and] the agriculturalist” to reach the exalted realms of “commerce, mechanics and the higher arts,” wrote General Nelson A. Miles, a leading progressive (though stoutly conservative politically).71
Hoping to show recalcitrant Indians the way ahead, Miles argued that access to “modern appliances” would persuade them to accommodate themselves to the inevitable. After Custer’s death at the Little Bighorn he had divided some Sioux veterans of the battle into two groups, separated them, and allowed them to talk to each other on the telephone. “They recognized the voices of their friends so clearly . . . it was surprising to see the effect upon these aborigines, stalwart, bold, hard-nerved men as they were who scorned to show the least emotion.” Holding “the little telephone instruments,” their hands shook visibly, their bodies trembled with emotion, and great drops of perspiration rolled down their bronzed faces,” he reported. Awestruck by the power of Alexander Graham Bell’s magical invention, they said they would war no more and turned instead to Christ.72
Diehards dismissed their progressive counterparts as wide-eyed appeasers who shuddered at the horrid necessity of whites fighting the untamable Indian on his own terms. For the diehards, allowing a Plains-bred Sioux to chat on the phone for a minute or two would never suffice to erase thousands of years of breeding for war; hostiles respected only troopers who were equally adept at jerking open their entrails with a serrated bayonet. They were wild people accustomed to the open prairies and would never settle down to a life of happy respectability. After all, in 1876, when the government built ten grand houses at Fort Sill for those chiefs who had stayed peaceful, the Indians proudly showed them off to their comrades but continued to camp and sleep outside. Their dogs lived in them instead.73
On the issue of marksmanship, the differences between diehards and progressives were perhaps nowhere more blatant. Always preferring the civilized way, progressives preferred the distant clean shot to the up-close dirty kill. Naturally they found common ground with the gentle-manly eastern shooting establishment, whose abstract Creedmoor rules were the deliberate antithesis of brutal frontier warfare. For that reason, in his analysis of the lessons of the Battle of Plevna between the Russians and Turks, William Church of the Army and Navy Journal completely omitted any mention of the Winchester repeaters’ devastating close-range fire. Instead, he concentrated exclusively on the Turks’ “firing at distances ordinarily regarded as not to be compassed by anything except the fancy shooting of rifle ranges or the tentative practices of sharp-shooters.”74
Battles could be won, Church argued, antiseptically. In the future, any man could be a “sharp-shooter” and stand well back from the dangerous front line. For the first time in history, war could be safe. Marksmanship was thus identified with rationalist, modern, enlightened aims. To be a