foray west had taken him through the frontier posts of New York and Pennsylvania where he sought the historical detail, but above all, the authentic atmosphere of wild America with which to color his early works, such as Conspiracy of Pontiac.3
As he waited on the banks of the Missouri for the ferry to carry him across the river so that he could take up his post at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Parkman’s prose had predisposed Scott to see in the landscape before him the primitive America he sought. With Parkman as his literary guide, he had in fact been prepared to arrive at the threshold of wild America with “a spirit attuned to understand it and to rejoice in becoming a part of its life.”4 For Parkman, and no less for Scott, the destinies of this “savage scenery” and the “savage men” who lived there were intertwined, one and the same. And both were doomed. “The Indian is a true child of the forest and the desert,” wrote Parkman, “The wastes and solitude of Nature are his congenial home, his haughty mind is imbued with the spirit of the wilderness, and civilization sits upon him with a blighting power. His unruly mind and untamed spirit are in harmony with the lonely mountains and cataracts, among which he dwells, and primitive America, with her savage men and savage scenery, present to the imagination a boundless world, unmatched in wild sublimity.”5 Besides equipping the younger man with a romantic reading of Indian Country and an epic historical context in which to frame his own experience for the part he would play in its conquest, Parkman served as a kind of guide for Scott in two other important respects as well. His work served as an example of ethnological writing as a way of making sense of the world that mattered to literate men of the East. In addition to conducting his research among the documents he found in French and British archives and even traveling to defeated Richmond in 1865 to take possession of Confederate documents for the Boston Athenaeum, Parkman wrote in a way that conflated the natural historical writing of explorers like Henry Schoolcraft with the literary appeal of writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Fenimore Cooper. At the same time, Parkman was perceptive enough to recognize that politics, not just savage nature, played a role in Indian actions, something that was overlooked in most contemporary accounts of Indian life and warfare.
More importantly than the impact of Parkman’s prose on the young man’s imagination, Parkman suggested the rudiments of an ethnographic method that the young Scott admired and could emulate. In his preface to Conspiracy of Pontiac, Parkman explained his methodology (and personal predilection) for obtaining knowledge of “primitive life” through what would later come to be regularized by various ethnographically oriented sciences as participant-observation, in which “knowledge of a more practical kind has been supplied by the indulgence of a strong natural taste, which at various intervals, led me to the wild regions of the north and west. Here, by the camp-fire, or in the canoe, I gained acquaintance with the men and scenery of the wilderness. In 1846 I visited various primitive tribes of the Rocky Mountains, and was, for a time, domesticated in a village of the western Dhcotahh, on the high plains between Mount Laramie and the range of the Medicine Bow.”6 Entering the region whose scenery had been so romantically rendered by Parkman thirty years earlier, Scott, too, sought out opportunities to visit and “domesticate” himself in Indian villages and scout camps as a way of pursuing an interest in the language and customs of the various tribes among whom he lived and campaigned for the next quarter century. The habits of observation he developed on the plains he later employed as military governor of Sulu and also in Cuba and on the border with Mexico. His own observations of native Americans led him to modify Parkman’s essentialist constructions of primitive men to a degree. Scott’s intimacy with Native Americans complicated the proposition that Indians were fundamentally different from white men. From his close contact and dependence on scouts in the field, as well as from his interest in the language and culture of the people of the plains, Scott gradually learned to relate to the Arikaras, Crows, Cheyennes, and others with whom he worked and fought as men, not merely as Indians. With at least one of them, Kiowa Indian Scout Sergeant Iseeo at Fort Sill, Scott formed a friendship as deep, mutual, and enduring as any he made with a white man.7 Throughout a lifetime of interaction with Indians and involvement in Indian affairs, first in the army and later as a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners, however, Scott never changed his belief that Indian cultures represented an earlier stage of civilization and that progress and the Indians’ own best interests required that they change and adopt white ways. Scott applied such an evolutionary schema to assessing stages of development in Cuba and the Philippines as well.8
Crossing the Missouri River downriver from Bismarck, Scott reported to Fort Abraham Lincoln, the headquarters for the Seventh Cavalry, in September 1876. He found his new regiment in the midst of a major reorganization. Survivors of the Bighorn battle had only recently returned to the post. When he reached Fort Lincoln, Second Lieutenant Scott, along with eight other newly arrived junior officers, bedded down on the drawing-room floor of the house that had just been vacated by Elizabeth Custer. Within a short time, five hundred enlisted men and five hundred horses arrived at the post. Many of the new recruits turned out to be “Custer Avengers,” men from the cities who were motivated to sign up by what Scott called the “stress of excitement of the Custer fight.” As a young officer, he struggled with the indiscipline of this “rough lot,” many of whom ended up deserting or being court-martialed.9
Besides preparing for a renewed campaign against the Lakota (Sioux) and Cheyenne in Montana, the soldiers also policed the Great Sioux Reservation on which the Seventh Cavalry was located, sixty miles upriver from the Standing Rock Agency. Their role was to chase and discipline Indians who “broke out” and to prevent them from joining the forces of open resistance to U.S. authority over the country. This work employed the same strategies that became central to the army’s work of pacification in the Philippines and Cuba: concentration and surveillance of populations, strategic alliances to obtain intelligence and allies in war, and an emphasis on disarming those under their jurisdiction and taking away their horses. Some of Scott’s first assignments away from the post were to enforce efforts by the army to confiscate weapons from Indians on the reservation. Fort Abraham Lincoln continued as the base for campaigns after hostile Indians in the West. The army defined as hostile Indians who defied the government’s directive to report to an agency, renounce resistance, and adopt white ways, like farming, on the reservations.
Soon after arriving at Fort Lincoln, Scott determined that his best chance for advancement in the frontier army lay in becoming a commander of Indian scouts. Indian auxiliaries were just as important to the current campaign to contain and disarm Indian resistance to the encroachment of white civilization onto the prairies and mountainous West as they had been in earlier wars of imperial expansion in North America. As in George Washington’s day, the success of American soldiers depended on maintaining strategic alliances with tribes with shared or complementary objectives. Indian scouts provided crucial information that was essential to the success of any campaign in the West: deep cultural knowledge, geographical knowledge, and highly developed observation skills.
The role of scouts in the military changed and gained new prominence following the Civil War, as the army shouldered the mission of policing areas of the trans-Mississippi West and the formerly Mexican domains of the Southwest, where incursions of white settlers threatened not just the vestiges of native self-determination, but Indian survival as well. As the army tried to negotiate the unfamiliar and forbidding terrain and climate of the plains and desert Southwest, as well as the complicated military and diplomatic challenges posed by their frontier missions, they turned for assistance to earlier arrivals in the West, men familiar with the physical and cultural landscape in which they now had to operate. As historian Louis Warren put it, the army needed indigenous scouts because “the soldiers who came to fight the Plains Indians so easily got lost in the strange grasslands.”10
Army officers also needed scouts to serve as intermediaries between the military and Indians—both adversaries and allies. Not surprisingly, some of the most valuable scouts were “half-breeds,” men whose joint European and Indian kinship gave them an advantage in moving between different cultures. Then there were the “squaw men,” white men who had come to the plains as fur traders and hunters and who had married native women. Men such as
