Blood in the Snow: The Battle of the Washita River and Custer's Other Fateful Charge

John J. Dwyer

Hatred and a long train of atrocities between whiteAmerican settlers and Plains Indians multiplied followingthe War Between the States.

In 1867, a distressed Congress, with its post-war army concentrated across the Great Plains, called for another summit with the nomadic tribes of that vast, rugged region. This one took place just north of the Indian Territory line in Medicine Creek Lodge, Kansas. It took the savvy diplomacy of famed half-breeds Jesse Chisholm and Black Beaver, as well as peacemaking Army officer Edward Wynkoop, to bring in the winter-hibernating Natives.

They came, finally, in astonishing numbers— seven thousand Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa. And they came grim and suspicious. A government feast cheered them, but then they grew sullen and threatening. Sensing violence and perhaps a fresh massacre afoot, U. S. commanders formed their men into a hollow square around the peace commissioners. They aimed a Gatling gun at the Indians. The immediate threat melted away. Soon, however, the Indians learned that the federals intended for them to remain on their western Indian Territory reservations, and that those reservations now shrank.

Rarely has the historical record preserved more eloquent lamentations from such fierce warriors. Charismatic Kiowa chief Satanta, still fearsome after a half-century of life, told the vast assemblage:

I love to roam over the wild prairie, and when I do it I feel free and happy, but when we settle down, we grow pale and die. . . . A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers, but when I go up the river I see a camp of soldiers, and they are cutting my wood down or killing my buffalo. . . . When I see it my heart feels like bursting with sorrow.

Battle-hardened Yamparika Comanche chief Ten Bears, immortalized in Forrest Carter’s novel Gone to Texas and the classic Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales that it spawned, declared,

I was born upon the prairies, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls.

THE RISE OF CUSTER

Lt. Colonel George A. Custer

President Ulysses S. Grant

ALL THE TREATY OF Medicine Lodge seemed to accomplish was to provide the Plains tribes with enough food to energize their young (and sometimes not-so-young) warriors to mount and ride anew the vengeance trails to Kansas and especially Texas. In Texas lived the people so hated by these tribes that they considered them a separate, inferior, and more brutally violent species from other Americans.

These acts of vengeance exhausted the patience of William Tecumseh Sherman, famed Union Civil War champion now in military command of all territories west of Missouri. He ordered Major General Philip Sheridan, the decorated wartime Yankee cavalry chieftain and new head of the Department of Missouri, to launch a military campaign into Indian Territory. Sheridan’s mission: force the Plains tribes onto their reservations and out of the path of westward American migration to the north and south.

In late 1868, the fiery little Irishman built Camp Supply, a fort in the present-day northwest Oklahoma county of Woodward, between Kansas and the reservations. He then sent fellow Union horse soldier legend George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry after Sand Creek massacre survivor Black Kettle and the Southern Cheyenne, who were indeed off their reservation.

Of all the larger-than-life characters who emerged from the War Between the States and the nineteenth-century American West, few have eclipsed George Armstrong Custer as an enduring icon. The changing perceptions of him have in many ways reflected the shifting societal views of the American public. Was he the gallant and selfless hero whom Errol Flynn unforgettably portrayed in the 1941 film classic They Died with Their Boots On? Or the silly prima donna played by Richard Mulligan in the 1971 movie Little Big Man? Or the brave but arrogant fool embodied by Gary Cole in the 1990 motion picture, Son of the Morning Star? Or some of each?

Indeed, Custer was, to the end of his life, a fearsome and manly warrior. He was endowed with formidable talents, including a battlefield persona that, if not fearless, appeared to be so. He also possessed a remarkable capacity to lead men well in the midst of chaos and danger. He fought in all but one significant Civil War cavalry action of the Federal Army of the Potomac and Army of the Shenandoah.

Already famous during that war as the “Boy General,” youngest in either army, with the gaudy uniforms and flaxen ringlets falling about his shoulders, the Michigan native’s status as a national hero grew as he became the point man in the U.S. government’s desperate postwar campaign of total war with the Plains Indians. Thus, the Indian Wars coupled him with the same military command team that had won the War Between the States: President U. S. Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. They also revealed more clearly the characteristics that have not worn as well in American history annals—his ambition, glory-seeking, and brutality. Custer often dispensed savage discipline against his own troops. He was court-martialed and sent home for nearly a year after one such incident.

THE BATTLE(S)

Custer leads the 7th Cavalry through the snow on the march toward the Washita, winter of 1868.

THE RUGGED, COCKSURE CUSTER drove his men relentlessly through the bitter late-1868 winter cold and sprawling drifts of snow toward Black Kettle and the Cheyenne. He found them encamped along the Washita River, near the present-day northwestern Oklahoma town and Roger Mills County seat of Cheyenne.

Tragically, Osage Indian scouts, themselves at war with the Cheyenne and other Plains tribes, reported to Custer that the Natives’ trail led back to devastated American pioneers’ homes. What followed became another piteous example in the Plains Indian wars of a (at least temporarily) peaceful Native band paying the price with their own blood of other Indians’ slaughter of white settlers. That said, some in Black Kettle’s camp, likely had engaged in recent raiding.

In what Edward Everett Dale, dean of Oklahoma historians, called “the most important conflict between soldiers and Plains Indians ever fought in Oklahoma,” Custer caught the Natives sleeping at dawn, November 27, 1868. He unleashed a blazing slaughter on them. Dozens of Cheyenne— warriors, as well as women and children—died in the desperate fight, as did twenty soldiers. The latter included Major Joel Elliott, as well as Captain Louis Hamilton, grandson of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.

The Battle of the Washita, like many mortal confrontations in American history, spawned enduring controversy. From the beginning, some within the army and the broader American society criticized it, particularly for the killing of Cheyenne women and children. The Native casualty count has ranged from a couple dozen to in the hundreds, depending on the source.

The reality was that a tough column of what American general and historian S. L. A. Marshall called a “battled-seasoned” and “rowdy” army marched through an Indian country blizzard that would have killed most men. They found what they thought were not only off-reservation Indians, but brutal raiders, and did what their Native opponents would have done to them—attacked. While sensitive critics could rightly criticize the killing of probably forty women and children, they tend to overlook the following considerations:

• Like most large shootouts, it was a fast-moving melee, on unfamiliar terrain for the troopers, in freezing, snow-blanketed, early dawn light.

• Some of the Native women apparently defended themselves with guns.

• Custer had no idea who all was in the camp or nearby—indeed, thousands of other Indians were encamped in the area along the Washita River.

• A throng of Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho from other camps overran and massacred a nearby detachment of Custer’s men in a separate fight.

• Custer took over fifty women and children alive as prisoners.

Chief Black Kettle

Major Joel H. Elliot

In addition, it is very likely that only Custer’s shrewd inclusion of those prisoners in his column as it returned to Camp Supply prevented the swarming Native hosts from the neighboring camps from wiping out his entire command. His stunning decimation of Black Kettle’s camp, meanwhile, including its lodges and nearly a thousand precious Cheyenne ponies, severely crippled the tribe’s ability to conduct war on the Southern Plains.

Distinguished historian Paul Andrew Hutton offered perhaps the most learnedly objective and succinct post-mortem of the Battle of the Washita River: Although the fight on the Washita was most assuredly one-sided, it was not a massacre.

Black Kettle’s Cheyenne were not unarmed innocents living under the impression that they were not at war. Several of Black Kettle’s warriors had recently fought the soldiers, and the chief had been informed by (American officials) that there could be no peace until he surrendered to Sheridan. The soldiers were not under orders to kill everyone, for Custer personally stopped the slaying of noncombatants, and fifty-three prisoners were taken by the troops.

CLASH OF TITANS

THE BATTLE(S) OF THE Washita deepened the enmity of the Plains tribes toward the U.S. government and army. The relentless campaign ramrodded by Sheridan and Custer, however, forced most Natives on the Southern Plains onto their reservations—whether temporarily or permanently—by 1870. Most of them went only by compulsion, and scattered, unvanquished bands such as Quanah Parker and his Quahada Comanche remained at large.

History, that silent, observant sentinel, would disapprove of many violent and cruel acts committed by the United States against the aboriginal tribes of North America. In the same manner, it would recognize that the fierce Plains tribes had stolen, kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered their own way to preeminence across the American West. They had done so over the dead and mutilated bodies of weaker tribes, as well as whites, blacks, and Mexicans. Some of those other Natives shed few tears over the conquest of the warrior tribes. Some, as well as the aforementioned Osage, aided the American army and settlers with that conquest.

The Plains Indian wars cast a giant shadow of legend and lore over American history, in part because they pitted two determined juggernauts of willful and violent martial power—the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa, and the United States military and armed frontier citizenry—against one another. Such formidable hosts, including during their actions at the fights along the Washita River, form both parent and child for much of the distinctive American character and its history.

These relentless adversaries displayed, on a sprawling canvas, across decades of national life, all the courage, sacrifice, loyalty, initiative, passion, great-heartedness, and valor we Americans so yearn to claim as our own. And they evidenced the vanity, greed, pettiness, brutality, cruelty, arrogance, and small-mindedness we disclaim, even while struggling not to practice these sins in our own lives.

—John J. Dwyer has taught history at Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma City since 2006. He is the author of numerous books, including the Will Rogers Medallion-winning The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People, Vol. 1. He is a regular contributor to Saddlebag Dispatches.