Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

For the better part of seven years following the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, Congress had steadfastly refused to entertain any idea of taking back the territory it had granted the tribes in that historic agreement—despite the growing clamor from various and powerful economic and political constituencies back east who were coming to agree that the Black Hills, rich in gold that could be found at the grass roots, should be settled and mined. In a turn of the biblical phrase: it was the duty of white Christians to subdue that portion of the earth and make it fruitful.

It simply would not do to leave so fruitful a region in the hands of savages who were doing nothing to reap the harvest from that land.

But now that Reynolds had been driven off the Powder, now that Crook had been forced back to Goose Creek to lick his wounds, now that half of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been rubbed out, forcing General Alfred Terry back to tend to his own psychic wounds on the Yellowstone—now that the army had suffered so many setbacks, Congress was suddenly of a new mind. Washington’s conscience was a’changing.

Yet it wasn’t just the nation’s representatives who clamored for results. Reeling from the startling banner headlines that second week of July in their very own Centennial summer, the body politic, the public itself, raised a strident demand for action. Raised their own call to arms!

As John S. Gray puts it:

The Secretary [of War J. D. Cameron] solemnly proclaimed that the terms of the Sioux treaty had been “literally performed on the part of the United States.” (By sending thousands to invade the reservation?) Even most of the Sioux had likewise honored the treaty, but some “have always treated it with contempt,” by continuing “to rove at pleasure.” (A practice legalized by the treaty!) They had even gone so far as to “attack settlements, steal horses, and murder peaceful inhabitants.” (These victims were white violators of the treaty who dealt the Indians worse than they received!)

Cameron’s report went on to read like nothing more than perfect bureaucratic doublespeak:

No part of these operations is on or near the Sioux reservation. The accidental discovery of gold on the western border of the Sioux reservation, and the intrusion of our people thereon, have not caused this war …

Citizens back east knew their government had been feeding, clothing, educating the Sioux and Cheyenne at their agencies. And now those ungrateful Indians had bitten the hand that fed them! Shocked and dismayed, the public cried out that simple justice required stern punishment.

So Sherman and Sheridan wouldn’t find it at all hard to get what they wanted by midsummer, within days of the disastrous news from the Little Bighorn reaching the East. Suddenly after three years of balking at General Sheridan’s request for money to build two forts in the heart of Sioux country, Congress promptly appropriated the funds to begin construction at a pair of sites on the Yellowstone: one at the mouth of the Big Horn and the other at the mouth of the Tongue.

A few weeks later—after a delay caused only by some heated, vitriolic debate over the relative merits of Volunteers versus Regulars—Congress additionally raised the ceiling on army strength, a move that allowed recruiting another twenty-five hundred privates for a sorely tried U.S. cavalry. By railcar and riverboat steamer, these new privates were uniformed and outfitted and were being rushed to the land of the Sioux by late summer.

On the last day of July, Congress authorized the President to take all necessary steps to prevent metallic cartridges from reaching Sioux country. Two weeks later Grant signed into law a bill that raised the strength of Enlisted Indian Scouts to one thousand. And only three days later he put his name on a bill raising the manpower strength of all cavalry companies to one hundred men for each company.

Sherman and Sheridan now had their “total war,” just the same sort of scorched-earth warfare they had waged so successfully through Georgia and the Shenandoah. In their minds there were no noncombatants. Any woman or child, any Indian sick or old, was deemed the enemy by virtue of not huddling close to the agencies. As far as General Sheridan was concerned, it wasn’t just a matter of using his troops to drive the roamers back to their reservations. This was a war of vengeance against an enemy who had embarrassed, even humiliated, his army.

The last, but by no means the least, of the pieces to their plan, was that Sheridan was finally to get what he had wanted ever since he had come west at the end of the Civil War.