Crazy Horse by Larry McMurtry Page A

much of what it did allot was immediately siphoned off by corrupt Indian agents. Sherman, in charge of a large and unwieldy district, was for a time helpless. He could not put enough men in the field to scorch the vast earth of the west, while the money that could then be offered for peace did not impress hardheaded negotiators such as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. If they were going to sell their patrimony for goods, they wanted fine goods, not tacky goods.
    The strategic flaws in the military approach were demonstrated conclusively in 1867 when General Hancock led a large and well-publicized expedition into thecentral plains, accomplishing almost nothing. This lumbering force annoyed the southern Cheyennes, who had not been causing much trouble at the time. George Armstrong Custer had some fun shooting buffalo along the Smoky Hill River, but very few Indians were fought or even seen. This campaign was such an embarrassing failure that the army, for a time, gave up on a military solution to the problem of the Plains Indians. It was once again demonstrated that large forces of soldiers, dragging mostly useless equipment, could rarely catch up with the hostile Indians; the army was far more likely to blunder into peaceful villages of Indians who were merely minding their own business.
    Not much has been written about Indians who scouted for the army—and such scouts existed virtually from the time the first white man met the first Indian—but the fact is that if the army had not been able to employ Indian scouts, they would never have found any Indians. The Indian scouts were essential, not merely to help the army find Indians but to help the army find its own way as well. A few such scouts, because of their great knowledge of the country, acquired a certain fame. Black Beaver, a Delaware who scouted for Captain Randolph Marcy in Texas, was said to know every creek between the Columbia River gorge and the Rio Grande. In any pursuit situation the army would have been helpless without their Indian—or, often, half-breed—scouts. General Crook would never have found Geronimo inMexico without Apache scouts to lead him, and the same is true of much Plains Indian warfare. Even with the scouts the army was rarely able to move fast enough to catch up with the hostiles they sought. When the whites did surprise a village, as Custer surprised Black Kettle on the Washita, it was usually because the Indians felt too secure in the knowledge that they were living peaceably to post adequate guards. If they weren’t bothering the whites, they did not expect the whites to bother them. The lesson learned on the Bluewater in 1855 had to be learned over and over again: when white soldiers were in the mood to punish Indians, they would punish whatever group of Indians they came across, whether that particular group had committed hostilities or not.
    Stephen Ambrose believes that it was Sherman who decided, after the miserable failure of the Hancock expedition, that he might as well give the peace policy a chance. Ambrose’s contention is that Sherman, taking the long view, thought he saw a better way to eliminate the Indians than to keep sending out armies that couldn’t find them. The better way would be to wait for the railroads. In a decade or less the hostiles of the northern plains would be caught between the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific. Then the buffalo hunters—and, for that matter, the soldiers too—could ride at their ease right into the heart of Indian country and destroy the buffalo, the Indians’ subsistence animal. This amounts to a leisurely—but sure—version of scorched earth, withE. H. Harriman and the other railroad magnates bearing much of the expense. The railroads would soon hurt the Indians far worse than the army had yet managed to. If this was indeed Sherman’s thinking, then he was right. The buffalo lasted barely ten years after the railroads came.

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