punishment the forces applied to the Indian villages they encountered was intended both to demonstrate the army’s ability and determination to inflict damage and to make life and even survival difficult not just by killing them but also by destroying their shelter and especially the meat they were gathering for the winter. Lodges, meat, robes, utensils: the soldiers methodically burned it all. After the battle of Whitestone Hill (September 3, 1863), it took a hundred men two days to gather up and destroy all the provisions and possessions left behind by the Santee, Yanktonai, and Teton Sioux as they fled. This included plunder the Dakota had brought from their attacks on settlements in the Minnesota valley along with three hundred lodges and 400,000–500,000 pounds of buffalo meat (roughly 1,000 butchered buffalo). All of it was burned. Captain Mason, a wagon master for the expedition, remarked that “fat ran in streams from the burning mass of meat.”70
Following the Killdeer fight, Sully’s troops systematically destroyed everything the fleeing Indians had left behind (which they had intended to return to recover). It took a thousand men a whole day to burn forty tons of pemmican (dried buffalo meat packed in buffalo skins), dried berries, tanned buffalo, elk, and antelope hides, brass and copper kettles and mess pans, saddles, travois, and lodge poles. “Even the surrounding woods were set afire.” Soldiers also shot the three thousand dogs left tied to pickets in the village. Two toddlers discovered in one of the abandoned lodges were also killed, their skulls bashed with tomahawks by Winnebago scouts.
The Indians had been severely punished, while their property loss had reduced them to a state of destitution. “Not the least of their losses was the exhaustion very largely of their supply of ammunition,” commented one observer, “for upon this they must depend principally for their subsistence.”71 In a war intended to strike a blow at the Indians’ will to resist and ability to survive through the region’s notoriously hard winters, Sully was quoted as saying: “I would rather destroy their supplies than to kill fifty of their warriors.”72
In the fights at Big Mound, Whiteside Hill, Dead Buffalo Lake, and Kill-deer Mountain as well as in smaller engagements and skirmishes, the superior weapons of the U.S. forces were decisive. Even when some of Sibley and Sully’s forces were confronted by superior numbers, the punitive forces used artillery to kill and disperse the enemy. Forerunners of the howitzers on display in Philadelphia a decade later were decisive in winning engagements. The hunting villages the punitive forces tracked and attacked also had to fight covering actions to protect the retreat of their women and children.
Following the Killdeer Battle, as Sully’s forces pursued the fleeing Sioux across the Missouri and onto the western edge of the Badlands, the two sides again engaged in battle. After several days of skirmishes in the choking dust of the grassless buttes, a thirty-year-old Hunkpapa warrior called Sitting Bull engaged some of the Indian scouts serving with Sully in shouted conversation. Why were they fighting with the whites, Sitting Bull wanted to know. “You have no business with the soldiers,” he told them. “The Indians here have no fight with the whites,” he shouted to them. “Why is it the whites come to fight with the Indians?” In Sitting Bull’s estimation, sovereignty over the country into which the punitive forces had penetrated lay entirely with its native owners. The soldiers were interlopers. If the whites would only recognize this simple truth, there need be no grounds for war. If they would not recognize it, Sitting Bull would resist all their efforts to encroach on the Lakota homeland.73 Sitting Bull had articulated his people’s sovereignty claims over Dakota territory. It was a view of sovereignty that was inimical to the westward pressure of American expansion, but one under which Sitting Bull and others would unite in unyielding and often resourceful resistance to incursions by miners, settlers, and the army itself.
Two summers of campaigning had exacted a high cost in Indian lives. And the forces of Sully and Sibley had inflicted another blow as well. When their columns of blue-clad soldiers withdrew, kicking up the dust of the dry prairies, they left in place companies of soldiers at established forts like Berthold and Union. More ominous yet, from the Lakota perspective, they began building new forts: Forts Sully, Rice, and most hateful of all, Fort Buford, which would become the focus of attacks by Hunkpapas led by Sitting Bull for four years after its construction on the Missouri River opposite the mouth of the Yellowstone in 1866.74 Through punitive war and the establishment of offensive outposts, the frontier had been extended almost to Montana Territory. This was the frontier that Fort Abraham Lincoln—where Scott’s new regiment, the Seventh Cavalry, was headquartered—was intended to secure and defend. The Sully and Sibley punitive campaigns fit into a well-established pattern for empires aiming to project sovereignty claims onto contested territory; they combined the rhetoric of punishment and retribution with the strategic objective of establishing control over territories that had previously been recognized as part of the Sioux domain.
From the Dakota Badlands in 1864 to the Yellowstone country a decade later, Sitting Bull’s position did not waver: the incursion of white civilization with its farmers and railroads destroyed forests and drove away the wild game. It threatened the very existence of his people and it would be resisted, along with the government’s insistence that they cede their lands, live within the reservations established for them, and take up farming in the white fashion. It would take Scott another four decades—and military and diplomatic experiences throughout the continent and on the other side of the world—to gain some perspective on the transformative historical forces at work in the activation of the frontier army in the Great Sioux War he was about to join. For now, Second Lieutenant Scott was attuned to the challenge of his first commission and the thrill of being on the threshold of the wild country that had captivated his imagination for so long.
Chapter 2
Scouting
From St. Paul it took Scott three days to make the trip across Minnesota to Dakota Territory, since the train traveled only during the day. In Fargo he borrowed a boat and spent a couple of days hunting ducks and prairie chickens. From Fargo to Bismarck, where the Great Northern Railroad came to an end, was another day’s journey. Scott found Bismarck, mainly board shanties, to be very crude. He was struck there by the thought that “one might go a thousand miles west or travel north to the Arctic Circle with the probability of not seeing a human being.”1 This was pure fancy on Scott’s part, of course. However remote it might have felt to a young man coming from the East, the region he was entering was not an empty land devoid of people. Quite the contrary, as he was about to discover.
No doubt Scott received some kind of advice and orientation from those he met at each of his stops on his journey west, though there is no record of what this might have been. Perhaps as important as any counsel he received as he journeyed to take up his first army assignment was the influence of a guide who had accompanied him through West Point, and who, even earlier, had interpreted for him the mysteries and majesties of Indian Country. As he would throughout his life, Scott carried with him a favorite work by the man he called “the great historian of the North,” Francis Parkman. For ten thousand miles, wherever he went on the plains he took with him Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac in his pack basket. Even in the Philippines and Cuba, he reread Parkman’s works “with perennial pleasure.” Before he saw the “wild Missouri” with his own eyes, Parkman’s prose had fired his imagination with an image of that mythic river. “Nowhere,” Scott thought, had it been described so fitly and so beautifully as by Francis Parkman.”2 The historian’s descriptions added interest—and meaning—to everything Scott was encountering in the country he had dreamed of since boyhood.
In fact, though born a generation apart, Scott and Parkman had much in common. Both came from genteel East Coast families in which clergymen figured prominently. Boyhood enthusiasm for the strenuous life out of doors led to unusually ambitious hunting expeditions in the remote West. While still young men, both moved in the social circles of leading scholars and scientists
