American Rifle - Alexander Rose [82]
To make room for the new arrivals, the West’s other prewar inhabitants—some 270,000 Indians, divided into about 125 tribal groups—would have to make way. The official policy was to chivvy them onto reservations, establish a Bureau of Indian Affairs to oversee matters, teach them how to cultivate their land, Christianize them, and gradually wean them off the traditional ways so that ultimately their grandchildren could leave the reservation and join civilization. Another school, more romantically minded, felt that the Indians were the last remaining free spirits, poignant and potent reminders of what life was like before the onslaught of the modern industrialized age, that era of hourly constraints, starched collars, and weekly pay packets.
Even at the height of the Indian wars, fewer than 100,000 native Americans were counted as active hostiles, and they were, in any case, greatly outnumbered by European settlers.1 The tribes basked in widely varying reputations among the soldiery. Some bands of the Plains Sioux were regarded as treacherous, barbaric, and vicious (though the Yankton and Santee bands were very friendly), while the Utes of the Rocky Mountains were seasoned warriors who unfortunately practiced the most terrible mutilations of corpses. The Cheyennes, thought George Custer, were “the Dog Soldiers, the most mischievous, bloodthirsty, and barbarous band of Indians that infest the Plains.” The Crows were widely believed to be amicable but “arrant thieves” and “beggars.” Pawnees were the “most reliable friends of the whites.” The Nez Percés, who did not scalp their enemies, were seen as the most honorable of Indian foes, while the Apaches of the Southwest, ferocious as they were (“tigers of the human race” was what General George Crook called them, not a little admiringly), were easy enough to get along with so long as they were “treated right,” in the words of Sergeant George Neihaus. Corporal Emil Bode thought the Comanches were overrated, for they “generally frightened a timid person half to death with their yells” but nevertheless lacked the martial swagger of the Apaches.2
Many of the Indian tribes historically detested one another, but the European settlers needed to keep them divided, for the 100,000 hostiles greatly outnumbered the U.S. Army, which averaged about 25,000 soldiers. Worse, during the Civil War soldiers had been able to count on decisively engaging the enemy en masse on the field of battle, but in the postwar West (as the pre– Revolution British had discovered to their cost and as Americans were painfully relearning) Indians adhered to their age-old guerrilla tactics of swooping ambushes, sneak flank attacks, and lightning raids on the enemy’s vulnerable points. “Their tactics are such as to render the old system [of army-versus-army battles] almost wholly impotent,” noted the experienced western hand Captain Randolph Marcy.3
Whites were again confronted by a “skulking” enemy who was far more adept than they at exploiting the natural environment.4
Whereas eighteenth-century fighting had been confined to the dense, forested tracts of New England and the Appalachians, the Indian wars of the latter part of the nineteenth occurred in a far more diverse set of terrains. In the dark, entangled woods where the likes of Washington and