Philip Sheridan - Indian Wars

Indian Wars

The Indians on the Great Plains had been generally peaceful during the Civil War. In 1864, Major John Chivington, a Colorado militia officer, attacked a peaceful village of Arapahos and Southern Cheyenne at Sand Creek in Colorado, killing over 150 Indians. That attack ignited a general war with the Indians. The protection of the Great Plains fell under the Department of the Missouri, an administrative area of over 1,000,000 mi.², encompassing all land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock was assigned to the department in 1866, but had mishandled his campaign, resulting in Sioux and Cheyenne raids of retaliation. The Indians continued to attack mail coaches, burn the stations, and kill the employees. They also raped, killed, and kidnapped a considerable number of settlers on the frontier. Under pressure from the various governors in the Great Plains, General Grant turned to Phil Sheridan. In September 1866, Sheridan arrived at the former Fort Martin Scott near Fredericksburg, Texas, where he spent three months subduing Indians in the Texas Hill Country.

In August 1867, Grant appointed Sheridan to head the Department of the Missouri and pacify the Plains. His troops, even supplemented with state militia, were spread too thin to have any real effect. He conceived a strategy similar to the one he used in the Shenandoah Valley. In the Winter Campaign of 1868–69 he attacked the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, taking their supplies and livestock and killing those who resisted, driving the rest back into their reservations. By promoting in Congressional testimony the hunting and slaughter of the vast herds of American Bison on the Great Plains and by other means, Sheridan helped deprive the Indians of their primary source of food. Professional hunters, trespassing on Indian land, killed over 4 million bison by 1874. Sheridan wrote, "Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated". When the Texas legislature considered outlawing bison poaching on tribal lands, Sheridan personally testified against it in Austin, Texas. He suggested that the legislature should give each of the hunters a medal, engraved with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged-looking Indian on the other. This strategy continued until the Indians retreated to their designated reservations. Sheridan's department conducted the Red River War, the Ute War, and the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, which resulted in the death of a trusted subordinate, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer. The Indian raids subsided during the 1870s and were almost over by the early 1880s, as Sheridan became the commanding general of the U.S. Army.

Comanche Chief Tosawi reputedly told Sheridan in 1869, "Me Tosawi. Me good Indian," to which Sheridan supposedly replied, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead." This may have then been paraphrased as "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." Sheridan denied he had made the statement. This sentiment was widely held and expressed by others, notably in 1869 when Rep. James M. Cavanaugh said in Congress, "I have never seen in my life a good Indian ... except when I have seen a dead Indian."