Clark, who was married to a Cheyenne woman, had been working as a scout and interpreter for the army for more than a decade when Scott met him in the late 1870s. Scott developed great respect for Clark, who he thought was unequaled among white scouts for his mastery of Plains Sign Language.12 Such scouts also possessed knowledge of Indian social organization and customs that was of strategic value. At the same time, their role as intermediaries between cultures sometimes made them suspect to whites in the army and larger society, who found their transgressions of racial boundaries unsettling and even threatening.13 “Scouts’ intimacy with Indians and the frontier was thus a double-edged sword. It provided the army with keys to white conquest of the savage wilderness, but simultaneously, it implied the danger of race decline, in which the savagery of the frontier essentially conquered the race, turning white men against civilization.”14 A few white men, untainted by mixed-race marriage or ancestry, also served as scouts for the plains army in the 1860s, notably Frank North of Nebraska, who had become fluent in Pawnee while working as a clerk on the reservation and who organized three battalions of Pawnee scouts to fight alongside the army against the Cheyennes and Sioux.15 In the Southwest, Charles B. Gatewood and John Bourke also fit this mold. Without question, the most famous white scout of this period was “Buffalo Bill” Cody. William F. Cody was a Civil War veteran who worked as a civilian scout for the army before launching his successful career as a showman. Cody’s Wild West show presented an epic drama of the conquest of Indian country for audiences in the East—and even in Europe—who were eager consumers of mythic depictions of conquering Indians and settling the frontier.
Legendary figures such as Buffalo Bill notwithstanding, a majority of the scouts who fought with the army in its Indian Wars were other Indians. For the first two hundred years of their involvement in the wars and frontier skirmishes of the Anglo-Americans, native auxiliaries had remained outside the army’s formal organization. By the 1850s a number of men in the army were advocating a more systematic organization of Indian auxiliaries. In 1852 Captain Randolph B. Marcy recommended attaching Delaware scouts and guides to each company of troops on the frontier. Captain George B. McClellan of the First Cavalry went a step further. Sent to Europe in 1855 to report on the Crimean War, he was so impressed by the Cossacks that he endorsed the potential use of “tribes of frontier Indians,” who would serve as “partisan troops fully equal to the Cossacks in both Indian and ‘civilized’ warfare.”16 In 1866 Congress authorized the formal enlistment of scouts. Though it limited Indian service to “the Territories and Indian country,” the Army Reorganization Act incorporated Indians into the structure of the army for the first time. Scouts could enlist for periods ranging from three months to one year. They received the pay and allowance of cavalry soldiers and their duties were determined by the military district commander. The highest rank available to Indians was that of sergeant.17 The same legislation also organized six all-black regiments for deployment in the West, including the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, more famously known as “Buffalo Soldiers.” Both African American and Indian troops were to be commanded by white officers.18
Indians rendered service to the military as scouts for a number of reasons. Some sought alliances with the expanding power. In return for acting as guides and interpreters and sometimes for fighting, scouts obtained guns and other goods. Their relationship to the army offered opportunities for taking booty from enemies they helped the Americans fight. Horses and other livestock provided a particularly desirable form of compensation for Plains Indians who accompanied the bluecoats into battle. No less importantly, Native people were motivated to join forces with the Americans for diplomatic reasons, in an attempt to stave off destructive wars or otherwise influence the destinies of their people and the other tribes around them. Until the Civil War, however, scouts were attached to, but did not form an integral part of the army. This was generally true of white scouts also, such as William Cody, who always scouted for the army as a civilian.
Besides the possibilities for professional advancement, Scott also relished the autonomy and scope for personal initiative that working with Indians in the army afforded a junior officer. He later compared being a commander of Indian Scouts in the frontier army to being an aviator in the Twenties and Thirties; “one could always be ahead of the command, away from the routine that was irksome, and sure to have a part in all the excitement,” he wrote.19
In his early days with the Seventh Cavalry, Scott chafed at any assignment that threatened to tie him down in camp or involved responsibility for the transportation of heavy equipment or supplies. As he saw it, he had not “undergone five years of toil at West Point to come out to the Plains to be a wagon soldier.” He had “come west to be a flying cavalryman … [not to] travel at a walk behind the column.”20
In the beginning, Scott applied himself to learning the language of the Lakota Sioux, on whose reservation Fort Lincoln was located. He reasoned that since the Lakota were the dominant group on the northern plains, their language would function as a kind of “court language,” like Latin or French. This assumption was reinforced by the fact that the Arikara scouts attached to the regiment all spoke it. He thus began to study the language under their tutelage. He quickly discovered that while the Lakota’s language did not function in this way and was of limited use to him in communicating with other groups, there did exist a lingua franca on the plains: sign language. Scott continued his study of sign language throughout his time on the plains. By the time of his assignment to the Bureau of Ethnology in 1897, he was acknowledged as the white man—in or out of the army—with the most knowledge and expertise in signing.21
On his first expedition away from the fort, Scott was given an assignment to form a battery out of some muzzle-loading guns and some cavalry horses that were no longer fit to ride. His task was to train the horses and men in his troop to move and handle the battery. Scott chafed at this onerous assignment and instead arranged with his friend Lieutenant Luther Hare to take command of the battery along with his own troop while Scott took every opportunity to travel with the Arikira scouts, who broke camp before daylight and rode out in advance of the soldiers, “covering the country far in front as carefully as pointer-dogs in search of quail.”22 Scouting also gave him the opportunity to hunt, which he loved. He attributed his commanders’ continued acquiescence in his absence from the column in part to their appreciation of the loads of prairie chicken, snipe, and ducks he brought back to camp. “The procurement of game made [the Colonel] more willing to let me go ahead with the scouts … and it soon became a matter of course for me to leave the battery with Hare, my superior, in command, and go off with the scouts before daylight every day.”23 He spent as much time as he could in the company of scouts, either riding with them and learning from observation how they operated or pursuing his study of language in their villages and scout camps.
In the spring of 1877, two battalions of the Seventh Cavalry were sent west to join the army’s renewed campaigns against the Sioux and Cheyenne in Yellowstone Country. Miles’s Fifth Infantry had been campaigning in this remote country all winter. Following the rout of the Seventh Cavalry that June, General Philip Sheridan had planned “total war” against the Sioux from his headquarters in Chicago. Colonel Miles, in particular, did not intend to “hibernate” for the winter by holing up in a fort or cantonment. Instead, he believed that “a winter campaign could be successfully made against those Northern Indians, even in that extreme cold climate.”24 With troops augmented by civilian “Custer Avengers” and the full support of a Congress and nation prepared to pay any price “to end Sioux troubles for all time,” Miles led the Fifth Infantry in pursuit of hunting bands into the winter hunting grounds of Montana’s forbidding terrain.25 Following the hostilities of the summer, the matter uppermost in the minds of tribes as they dispersed along rivers to the east of the battleground was hunting to secure food and buffalo hides for the winter.26 They viewed the return of soldiers to the region with alarm and some puzzlement. It was not the accustomed season for war. In October, Sitting Bull left a note in the path of a wagon train carrying supplies intended for Miles’s winter garrison on the Tongue River that read:
I want to know what you are doing traveling on this
