Free The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch Page A

Custer’s absence from duty, government policy with respect to the “Indian problem” had been the subject of fierce contention between two diverse factions. The Eastern humanitarian groups combined with the Indian Bureau to favor a policy of tolerance, generosity, and fair treatment for the Indian, which they believed would encourage the Indians to respond in kind. Westerners allied with the army to scoff at this idealistic and impractical notion. The only manner in which to deal with the Indian, according to Westerners, was by a demonstration of military might—punishment and supervision.
    Both sides, however, agreed that all Plains Indians should be removed from the pathway of westward expansion between the Platte and Arkansas rivers and resettled onto reservations north of Nebraska and south of Kansas. To that end, a peace commission was created by Congress and the Medicine Lodge and Fort Laramie treaties were negotiated. Due to cultural differences and miscommunication, peace was elusive and before long renegade warriors were raiding across Kansas, attacking settlements as well as detachments of the army that had been dispatched to subdue the hostiles.
    Finally, in a victory for the army, Generals William T. Sherman and Phil Sheridan were called upon in the fall of 1868 to embark on a major winter campaign designed to restore peace on the plains. The army was directed to take whatever measures were necessary to force the hostiles onto reservations and punish those responsible for the atrocities. The two men had decided that a new ruthless measure was required to punish the Indians and implemented the concept of “total war,” which both had pioneered in the Civil War—Sherman burning his way through Georgia on his March to the Sea and Sheridan trashing the breadbasket of the Shenandoah Valley.
    Total war meant subjecting the civilian populace, not just the enemy fighting force, to a reign of terror. By invading the enemy’s homeland and mercilessly destroying property—lodges, food stores, and ponies—the army would break their will to fight. Rarely could these nomadic Indians be caught in the summer, but a winter campaign would find them vulnerable. They would be camped along some waterway, ponies weakened from lack of forage and caches of food barely sufficient to last until spring. Sherman and Sheridan held the view that the torch was as effective a weapon as the sword and that poverty would bring about peace more quickly than the loss of human life. And if noncombatant lives happened to be lost, that would simply be a regrettable but excusable tragedy of war.
    The campaign had an inauspicious beginning. In August, General Phil Sheridan had created an elite force of fifty-one seasoned scouts under trusted aide Major George A. “Sandy” Forsyth with orders to guard the railroad up the Smoky Hill Trail. On September 16, the command, which had been following the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River, camped for the night. At dawn, they mounted to resume their patrol when without warning hundreds of Indians attacked from the nearby hills.
    Forsyth led his men to refuge on a timbered island about two hundred feet long by forty feet wide. The scouts frantically dug entrenchments as best as possible in the soft sand as the Indians raked the position with deadly rifle fire—inflicting numerous casualties, including Forsyth, who was wounded, and killing all the horses.
    This siege, led by Chief Roman Nose, who was killed, would continue for nine days. Forsyth’s couriers, however, had reached Fort Wallace, and on September 25 a detachment of the Tenth Cavalry—black “Buffalo Soldiers”—arrived to rescue Forsyth and his beleaguered men and escort them to Fort Wallace for treatment of their wounds, thus ending what could be considered one of the most heroic episodes in Western history. The tiny speck of land situated in the Arikaree would become known as