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Tribal Passages by Regina McLemore
AHAVEN FOR exhausted cowboys, unscrupulous cardsharps, painted ladies, and fast guns, Dodge City has been called “The Wickedest Town in the American West.” It is easy to forget that, without the creation of a military presence in the form of Fort Dodge, Dodge City would likely not have survived to play a part in American history.
The namesake for Fort Dodge was Grenville Mellen Dodge, originally a railroad construction contractor, as well as one of General Ulysses S. Grant’s most successful generals during the Civil War and a well-known Indian fighter. Dodge’s particular expertise led to the construction of several military forts to protect trails and projected railroads across the plains. He established Fort Dodge in 1865 on the Santa Fe Trail, primarily to protect the trail and the area’s inhabitants from Indians.
Of course, the problematic Indians who had ridden the plains around the fort for hundreds of years operated from a different point of view. Several tribes camped and hunted along the Santa Fe Trail, such as the Kansa, Osage, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche. One well-known leader, Satanta, a chief of the Kiowa, likely spoke for all Plains Indians when he said, “I have heard you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don’t want to settle. I love to roam the prairies. Then I feel free and happy, but when we settle down, we grow pale and die.”
In June, the Cheyenne attacked the Kansa Indians near Council Grove and raided white settlements. In July, more Kiowa and Comanche arrived to collect their annuities, which were, unfortunately, still not available. More violence ensued, and the Kansas Governor, Samuel J. Crawford , complained to President Johnson saying, “Last week they killed and wounded thirty men, women, and children, ravished seven women, and carried away one young lady—burned a number of houses and captured a large amount of stock and other property….”
General Philip Sheridan, another favorite general under Grant, had been brought in to take care of the Indian problem. Sheridan estimated the combined tribes’ total to be about six thousand warriors, and his troops amounted to about fourteen hundred infantry and twelve hundred cavalry soldiers. All he could do was concentrate his men to defend the main supply route from the railroad at Hays City to Fort Dodge, scatter the rest through the various forts in the area, and wait for reinforcements.
Before the additional men could arrive, the Cheyenne and Arapaho turned up the heat, attacking and robbing wagon trains and white settlements. On August 21st, a large group of Arapaho camped a mile west of Fort Dodge and sent word that the Cheyenne were preparing to attack the fort. Although the report proved to be false, General Sheridan declared war against the Cheyenne and Arapaho for “the recent open acts of hostility… embracing the murder of twenty armed citizens of the State of Kansas, the wounding of many more, and acts of outrage against women and children, too atrocious to mention in detail.”
Sheridan instigated a campaign to destroy Indian villages and drive the Indians back to the reservations. He believed if he could destroy their ability to sustain their way of life, they would be forced to become dependent on the government and stay on the reservation. On September 3rd, a party of desperate Comanche and Kiowa attacked Fort Dodge. Battling fiercely, the Indians killed four soldiers and wounded seventeen before they were driven away from the fort.
Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer arrived on October 9th to assist Sheridan with his war against the Indians. He and his troops camped about ten miles below Fort Dodge and began drilling continuously to prepare for the winter campaign. Custer attacked the Indians several times during the winter, but the most famous of these engagements was the Battle of the Washita, November 27, 1868. In this attack, Custer captured the Cheyenne village and killed the peaceful Chief Black Kettle, along with more than one hundred others. He also took fifty-three prisoners and destroyed some eight hundred horses. Custer was implementing Sheridan’s plan to force the Indians out of their homes and into the reservations.
The government’s winter campaign ended in the spring of 1869. Most, but not all, Indians grudgingly surrendered their freedom and accepted life on the reservation. In the 1870s, the extermination of the buffalo completed the destruction of the Indians’ way of life. They had always used every part of the buffalo for food and shelter, and without this basic staple, the tribes suffered. The buffalo hunters slaughtered millions and were encouraged to do so. General Philip Sheridan was named as the commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. In 1875, he said that the buffalo hunters “have done more in the last two years and will do in the next year more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire army has done in the last thirty years.”
Sheridan hoped that the loss of the buffalo would be the final act needed to force the Indians to become completely dependent on government annuities to survive. Fort Dodge served as a distribution point for these annuities, which included food rations and other supplies for members of the Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. Sheridan was not above withholding annuities from tribes he deemed to be troublesome.
Dodge City was the center of the buffalo slaughter, supplying the hunters with what they needed and providing a means of transporting their goods. From 1872 through 1874, an estimated 850,000 hides were shipped from Dodge City.
By September 1878, the northern Cheyenne had tired of reservation life in Indian Territory. Led by Chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf , three hundred Cheyenne set off across the plains to their hunting grounds in Montana. They ran into some trouble in Kansas.
While foraging for food within twenty miles of Dodge City, the Cheyenne attacked several cattle camps, killed men, and butchered cows. A mail carrier was slain, and two ranches were robbed of horses and cattle. This was enough to throw the citizens into a panic, which was helped along by the exaggerated accounts of the Dodge City Times, such as “news brought almost hourly of murder and depredations by the straggling bands of northern Cheyenne.”
When a fire broke out on a homestead just four miles westward, which was thought to have been set by the Cheyenne, one of Dodge City’s most famous citizens, Wyatt Earp , led a party to put out the fire. Earp’s actions were reported in the September 21, 1878, issue of the Dodge City Times. Later, it was said that both Bat Masterson and Doc Holiday assisted Earp in safeguarding the area and protecting the townsfolk in Dodge City from the fearsome Cheyenne.
Despite their ferocity, the Cheyenne party included only seventy-five men, with the rest being women and children. The soldiers from Fort Dodge and Fort Riley pursued the Indians northward across the rough terrain, finally catching up with them at Punished Woman’s Fork near Scott County, Kansas. Somehow the Cheyenne eluded them.
In Decatur County, Kansas, the party killed nineteen citizens to avenge the killing of twenty-seven Cheyenne by soldiers at Sappa Creek in 1875. Riding on, the party reached Nebraska where they split into two bands. Dull Knife surrendered his followers at Camp Robinson in Nebraska, but Little Wolf’s group reached Montana.
After Dull Knife’s group escaped Fort Robinson on January 9, 1879, they were chased through the snow, losing nearly half of their number to soldiers’ bullets. Some of them were sent to Dodge City for trial but were released on technicalities. Later, many of them made their way to Montana where they rejoined Little Wolf and his band. They had finally made it home and were eventually allowed to remain there.
The military’s engagements with the Cheyenne in 1878 and 1879 are considered to be the last major Indian raids. By the early 1880s, with the eradication of the Indian threat, Fort Dodge had served its purpose. On September 16, 1882, General John Pope issued the order to remove the garrison and abandon the post. On February 7, 1890, the fort, which was now a soldiers’ home, admitted its first occupants.
Never again would the grounds reverberate with the commanding voice of a general, the peals of a bugler sounding reveille, or the fearsome battle cry of an attacking warrior. The sights and sounds of the past could only be discerned in the stories told by the aging men who had once soldiered at old Fort Dodge.
—REGINA MCLEMORE is a retired educator of Cherokee heritage. Her great, great grandmother, Susie Christie Clay, survived the Trail of Tears in 1839.
