Lieutenant Colonel Elwell S. Otis’s encounters with the Hunkpapa of Sitting Bull and Gall are little known, as contemporary accounts of the Spring Creek skirmishes are extremely rare. I owe a great debt of thanks to historian Jerome Greene for the landmark work done in two of his books, for digging up what scant information does exist in what was left by three of the participants. For the military story of the “Spring Creek encounters” I relied upon the writings of Oskaloosa M. Smith and Alfred C. Sharpe. The lone Indian account was recorded by Stanley Vestal from the mouth of Lazy White Bull (Joseph White Bull).
We have more to rely upon when it comes to the Cedar Creek councils between Miles and Sitting Bull, and their Battle of Cedar Creek—although it is far from being a “wealth of information.” Not only did Miles leave an admirable record of his momentous talks with the Hunkpapa leader, but we again have White Bull’s remembrances, along with those of Long Feather, Bear’s Face, and Spotted Elk to give us an idea of what was going on in the Lakota camp during those crucial hours and heated deliberations.
Extremely critical, don’t you see, for this was the first time a representative of the white man’s government had met with a leader (if not
In addition, and by no means less important, these dramatic conferences exhibited to the war chiefs the readiness of Miles and his soldiers to bring the nomadic warrior bands to bay, and eventually in to their reservations. Because they could plainly see the Bear Coat’s resolve, on 27 October over four hundred lodges of Miniconjou and Sans Arc surrendered—some two thousand people. Since Miles had no way to feed that many additional mouths at the Tongue River, he took five of their chiefs as hostages for the good performance of the rest of their people, who promised to move in to their agency at Cheyenne River.
As it turned out, only some forty lodges ended up turning themselves in at the reservation. The rest hightailed it up the valley of the Powder to join what would become a large winter village of the Crazy Horse people and the Northern Cheyenne—an imposing gathering by any standard!
In the end that confrontation between Nelson Miles and the warrior bands in the valley of Cedar Creek in Montana Territory would set the stage for the colonel doggedly pursuing his winter campaign against the enemy, a story we will tell in the next volume of the Plainsmen Series,
In late October at the same time Miles was chasing Sitting Bull to the banks of the Yellowstone, and Crook sent Mackenzie to capture the Red Cloud and Red Leaf camps, Colonel Samuel L. Sturgis and his wounded Seventh Cavalry had marched away from Fort Lincoln to impose Phil Sheridan’s sanctions at the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River agencies. Sturgis and his troopers seized more than two thousand ponies and assorted weapons.
Few today know little of those military seizures on the reservations, wherein we see the army commanders once again persisting in their pattern of marching against those they can punish in a misguided belief that those agency bands were in fact supplying the nomadic hostiles with ponies, weapons, and warriors. In his autumn offensive, Sheridan used more than five thousand troops, those either directly involved or those who stood in reserve at the frontier posts should they be needed … a full fifth of the U.S. Army at that time!
Sheridan was proud to boast that, “For the first time, all the agencies ceased to be points of supply and re- enforcement for the hostile Indians; and henceforth the troops will have only to contend with the Indians hereditarily and persistently hostile.”
The pony and weapon seizures went on into the following year as one small warrior band after another limped in to their agencies to surrender, even after both Crook and Terry were reassigned.
But perhaps the real shame is that of all those ponies seized, the animals drew an average of only six dollars each in auction. Worse still was the fact that of the auction’s receipts, not a dollar was ever used to purchase cattle for the agencies, as had been promised. In military archives those thousands of dollars have never been accounted for.
It was surprising to me to learn that Mackenzie’s 1876 journey to that section of the Big Horn Mountains was not the first. Two years earlier in 1874 Captain Anson Mills of the Third Cavalry marched his Big Horn Expedition almost due north from Rawlins Station on the Union Pacific line, instead of starting out from Fort Fetterman to the southeast. In the fall of that year they had gone as far north as practicable before turning east, eventually reaching the rim of what is today called Fraker Mountain, which overlooks the valley where the Dull Knife Battle would take place. Because there was no way down for their horses and pack mules, Mills’s men were compelled to backtrack several miles until they could find a better way into the valley of the Red Fork. The expedition eventually did pass directly over the site in making their way downstream, exiting the canyon to the east through the same gap Mackenzie’s troops would use in approaching the Cheyenne village.
To better impress upon the reader just how steep and forbidding is the terrain at the upper end of the valley where Morning Star’s people took refuge, built breastworks, and eventually struggled in their nighttime winter climb out of the valley through what is today called Fraker Pass, let me quote that observer who accompanied Captain Mills in 1874:
The situation on the western end of the battlefield area, as I remember it from 1874, … is that of mountains, pure and simple—not “Bad Lands,” as understood by frontiersmen.
I am particularly indebted to the labors of historian Sherry L. Smith in recounting the journal of her relative, William Earl Smith—a private who served as one of Mackenzie’s orderlies during this critical campaign. Through him we have one of those rare firsthand glimpses into not only the day-to-day weather and human interest of the campaign trail, but a very microscopic look at the relations between soldier and officer in the frontier army.
She states:
The relationships among enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and commissioned officers—[were] relationships characterized at times by affection, at others by brutality. The army caste system is vividly revealed in Smith’s description of the expedition’s daily life. He is acutely aware of a system that allows officers to abuse soldiers verbally and physically with few restraints … Smith’s account (as well as those of his military superiors) undermines the notion of a purposeful, stately, tightly organized campaign.
I am most grateful that William Earl Smith left us another of those terribly personal records we chance upon from time to time, for history is not a dull recitation of historical facts. Instead, history is the record of
So I am in Sherry Smith’s debt, for she did in her
