continued until two in the morning. The Fourth dawned hot. To avoid the worst heat of the day, the planned military parade of ten thousand troops was scheduled for early in the day. Taking part in the parade were two dozen regiments and national guard companies as well as a Centennial Legion composed of detachments from the thirteen original states of the Union. All were under the command of the governor of Pennsylvania; they marched through Philadelphia’s streets and were reviewed by General William Tecumseh Sherman in front of Independence Hall. The parade was followed by the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah as well as odes, orations, and songs composed in honor of the anniversary of American independence. At night the city was illuminated again and a fireworks display over the exposition grounds brought the festivities to a close.41
The following day, unsettling news began to spread through the exposition. Far to the west, in Montana Territory, troops of the Seventh Cavalry, led precipitously into battle by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, had been routed by a larger force of Lakotas and Cheyennes. Scott heard the news from a friend he encountered on the street. At first he did not believe it. A newspaper soon convinced him of the truth of his friend’s report. Among the dead were two of Scott’s friends who had graduated the previous year, John Crittenden and James Sturgis.42
Shocking though the news was, the death of Custer’s entire command also opened up certain opportunities for the recent graduate. Scott hurried back to Princeton to consult his uncle Sam Stockton about how to proceed.43 Stockton, who had been a captain in the Fourth Cavalry, brushed aside Scott’s scruples about “jumping for the shoes of those killed in the Little Big Horn before they were cold.” Stockton counseled him to write immediately to his uncle David Hunter “who knew everybody in the War Department.” Uncle David received Scott’s application for the Seventh Cavalry at breakfast the next day and carried it to the War Department where they were making the transfers to the regiment, and made sure that Scott’s name was added to the list. Scott’s new commission as second lieutenant in the Seventh Cavalry was dated June 26, 1876, the day after the Little Bighorn battle, an event Scott referred to for the rest of his life as “the Custer disaster.”44
It had taken ten days for the alarming news of Custer’s defeat on the Little Bighorn River to travel from Indian Country to the fairgoing crowds in Philadelphia. The few details and rumors transmitted by telegram to newspaper offices in the East from remote places like Salt Lake City and Helena in time for the July 5 papers were supplemented the following day by a fuller account and the first official confirmation of the fight by the commander of the Yellowstone campaign, General Alfred Terry. Terry sent his official report on the events of June 25 from his field camp on the Lone Horn River on June 28 by way of a scout who arrived with the dispatch at Fort Ellis near Bozeman on July 3. From Bozeman the news was telegraphed through General Sheridan’s headquarters of the Department of the Missouri in Chicago; from there it was transmitted to Philadelphia. Both General Sheridan and General Sherman were away from their headquarters, both having traveled to Philadelphia for the centennial events.45 Other reports reached the press as eyewitnesses to the battle straggled into Salt Lake City and Bismarck.46 The time required for the news to travel from the battlefield to the nation’s hubs of political and military power testified to the vast distance, both spatial and psychological, separating Indian Country from the eastern centers of population and political power in the 1870s. The reality of the nation’s relations with its Indian wards was very different from those suggested by the assortment of relics arrayed for visitors to the Centennial Exposition.
By the time Scott received his orders to join the remnants of Custer’s regiment at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory, the initial frenzy of rumor, purported eyewitness accounts, and attributions of blame that followed the rout on the Little Bighorn had mostly subsided—only to be stirred up again later that year by the publication of Frederick Whittacker’s provocative book The Complete Life of George A. Custer.47
Scott’s journey to take up his commission in Dakota Territory traced in reverse the route the news of the disaster had traveled. It also traversed several earlier frontiers of the expanding empire, each of which, by 1876, had been successively incorporated into the republic of progress and Anglo-American civilization celebrated by the ongoing exposition in the City of Brotherly Love he had left behind.
Scott traveled by rail, taking with him a saber, two shotguns and a Henry rifle, a trunk, a roll of bedding, and two hunting dogs—a pointer and a setter given to him by friends. His first stop on his journey west was Pittsburgh where he visited his older brother Charles and his new wife. A century earlier, Pittsburgh had stood in the same relation to the Indian Country of the Ohio valley as Bismarck and Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri to which he was bound now occupied in relation to the disputed Indian Country of the plains. During the period of rivalry between the French and British empires over control of territory and influence with the Indians of the Great Lakes and interior of the continent, the strategic location on the forks of the Allegheny and Monongahela, which later gave rise to Pittsburgh, had been the site of a contested outpost. A succession of forts at “the forks” changed hands four times within two decades of intense frontier imperial rivalries and shifting alliances with native groups. The object of several unsuccessful attempts by British forces to capture it during the French and Indian War—twice involving a young George Washington—Fort Duquesne was finally blown up by its erstwhile defenders as they fled in the face of an imminent attack by British colonial forces in November of 1758.
European struggles over strategic frontier locations such as Fort Duquesne/ Fort Pitt unfolded in the context of complex political, economic, and cultural relations with the Indians of the interior of the continent. The French referred to the vast lands beyond the skeletal outposts of European settlement in the Great Lakes region as the Pays d’en Haut. What developed in these areas of contested sovereignty was a complex and dynamic relationship among civilizations that Richard White has productively analyzed as a “Middle Ground” between European and Native peoples, a shifting zone in which an array of nations, tribes, villages, and empires not only encountered one another, but became “cocreators of a world in the making.”48 Contested sovereignty was the sine qua non of the Middle Ground, which was maintained by both diplomacy and accommodation among a shifting set of factional alliances.
But while the Old World empires adapted to the evolving give-and-take required by the Middle Ground, the colonists themselves chafed at being restricted to the eastern side of the crest of the Appalachian mountains, the 1763 “Line of Proclamation,” decreed by a victorious Britain at the end of the war with her longtime rival France. Divergence over Indian policy for the Ohio valley between colonial officials and the backcountry settlers of western Pennsylvania and Virginia contributed significantly to the ruptures that became more pronounced following the French and Indian War. One expression of indigenous attempts to drive settlers out of the Ohio valley and to reclaim the earlier terms of relations with the European powers was the widespread Indian war known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, in which the Ottawa chief united Shawnee, Delaware, and Ojibwe tribes in attacking British installations such as Fort Pitt.
Independence from Britain worsened Indian-white relations since no centralized authority remained to continue the Crown’s interest in preserving its commitments to the Indians of the Ohio valley. On the contrary, removal of the royal interest in policing the volatile line between Euro-American settlement and Indian Country launched an expansion into the Ohio valley of settlers, squatters, land speculators, and veterans of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution who had been promised land in the West. The response of the Native nations to this betrayal of promises made by the former imperial powers was a determined defense of their sovereignty claims.
Scott’s next stop on his journey west was Chicago, the largest metropolis in the continent’s interior, and gateway to the Great West beyond.49 Chicago was also the command center for the headquarters of the Department of the Missouri, commanded by Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan. From here, since the previous winter, Sheridan had plotted “total war” against the hunting bands who resisted
