expansion by European powers in Africa and Asia. Such civilian and hobby scouting reflected ideals of manhood in an industrializing America as well as the politics of race and empire. The real key to the appeal of scouting, however, lay in its ability to furnish models for bridging that other gap alluded to in the story, the gap between civilized and savage, the very gap that preoccupied so many of the scientists, moralists, and colonial administrators of the day. In particular, organizations that emerged to promote Indian scouting for boys were interested in harnessing the inborn natural longing for the salutary primitive pursuits, identified by Bullard, to channel them for the good of the young scouts as well as in the service of empire. Less recognized is the way native scouting developed as an embodiment of colonial policy and racial relations within the military itself. Finally, army officers in command of Indian Scouts, including Hugh Lenox Scott, served as frontline ethnologists. In this way, military scouting reinforced and informed late nineteenth-century theories about the very nature of the categories civilization and savagery themselves.41
In another sense, the logic of empire rendered all colonized people scouts. After the first American troops landed on Cuban shores in June 1898, U.S. General William Shafter offended some Cubans, who had been fighting for their independence from Spain for thirty years, by suggesting that their role should now be to serve as scouts for the newly arrived American troops, who were unfamiliar with the country and in need of orientation.42 In the context of their most recent experience of pacifying the West, the arrangement made sense to the Americans. According to this view, the role of the invading force was to take over command and apply superior force of arms to impose order. The expected role for the natives in this scenario was to provide local knowledge and act in a supporting role.
As the theater of resistance to U.S. expansion shifted from the Great Plains and the desert Southwest to a new island empire in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, the ethnographic knowledge and experience of dealing with primitives imputed to military men like Scott became valorized as an asset for colonial service. Similarly, officers like Bullard and Pershing who had commanded African American troops, were regarded as particularly suited for roles in the pacification and administration of colonial peoples overseas. That experience of “commanding men of other than [his] own race and color,” as Pershing put it, was variously acquired by white officers in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments (the famed Buffalo Soldiers) or through association with one of the immune regiments, like the Third Alabama Colored Volunteers organized by Bullard, who were specifically recruited for war in the tropics because of their supposed innate resistance to diseases such as yellow fever and malaria.
Our analysis begins by revisiting some key events that have played a significant role in the national epic of westward expansion. Throughout these episodes in which American sovereignty claims were contested on the ground—from the northern Great Plains, to the Sierra Madre, to southern Luzon—a focus on the thoughts, actions, and reactions of three army officers, Scott, Pershing, and Bullard, allows us to trace continuities in the process of extending territorial and overseas empire. Contextualization of the lives and careers of these frontier soldiers, including an examination of their family, regional, and political affiliations also sheds light on the deep interconnections between overseas colonialism and the racial dimensions of political and social life at home—in peace and war.
Part I
Indian Country
I began then an intensive study of every phase of the Indian and his customs, particularly as to how he might best be approached and influenced, a knowledge that has stood me in good stead many times, has doubtless saved my life again and again, and has also been used to the national benefit by different Presidents of the United States, by secretaries of war and of the interior.
—Hugh Lenox Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier
Map 2. Great Plains and borderlands. During the last third of the nineteenth century, American state efforts to consolidate control over the trans-Mississippi West were met with resistance. The map shows the areas of conflict that defined Indian Country for the post-Civil War generation of U.S. army officers like John J. Pershing, Robert Lee Bullard, and Hugh Lenox Scott.
Chapter 1
Coming to Indian Country
When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, Captain Hugh Lenox Scott had just moved to Washington and was settling his family into a new life far from the western plains he had grown to love. After two decades in Indian Country, Scott had reluctantly decided that he should return east so that his children would have educational opportunities not available to them at Fort Sill, where Scott had been posted for the last nine years. From 1891 until its disbandment in 1897, Scott had commanded Troop L, an all-Indian unit of the Seventh Cavalry made up of Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache enlisted men. It was the last such Indian Scout troop to be mustered out of service. At Fort Sill, Scott continued the study of Indian life and customs he had begun on the northern plains in the 1870s. As he had throughout his career in the West, Scott had also used his time at Fort Sill to further his studies of Indian languages and to collect a wide range of artifacts along with folk stories and other ethnographic information. By the time he was assigned to Fort Sill in 1891, Scott was recognized as an expert in the Sign Language of the Plains, an intertribal language used for communication from Saskatchewan to Chihuahua. He had used it as a tool during his first year there for gaining information about the Ghost Dance, which was alarming white settlers and certain elements in the civilian Indian Service. Besides its military and diplomatic utility, Scott was deeply interested in the potential for gathering ethnographic information through the medium of sign language. Working with a Kiowa soldier named Iseeo, Scott used it to record linguistic information, such as myths, stories, and his informants’ accounts and explanations of the language itself.1
Just months before the USS Maine was blown apart in Havana’s harbor, Scott had obtained an appointment to the Bureau of Ethnology to work under the direction of John Wesley Powell. When the war came, he had just begun his research in the Library of Congress and Geological Survey for a book on the sign language of the Plains Indians. The war put an end to the book project. Scott abandoned his research to join the scrum of ambitious officers vying for command in the first foreign war to have come their way in more than a generation. He was never to return to the plains he loved so well. However, in the eyes of his army superiors, many of whom shared frontier experience, Scott’s work with Indian scouts, his experience dealing with several hundred Apache prisoners sent to Fort Sill after the surrender and exile of Geronimo, as well as his reputation for understanding so-called primitives, all suited him for duty on the new frontiers of empire broached by the war, in Cuba and the Philippines. Following colonial service in the Philippines and Cuba, Scott was appointed superintendent of West Point from 1906 to 1910. He also served as army chief of staff under Woodrow Wilson, an old family friend to whom Scott once sent, from Cuba, a set of Spanish stocks used for punishing slaves.2
Like Wilson, Scott was the son of a Presbyterian minister who also happened to share the president’s strong ties to Princeton University. Scott’s grandfather was Dr. Charles Hodge, a prominent theologian and long-time head of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, where he taught for over half a century. It was as a student at the seminary that Scott’s father, William McKendry Scott, had met and married Dr. Hodge’s eldest daughter, Mary. The second of their three sons, Hugh Lenox Scott was born in 1853 in Danville, Kentucky, where his father served as a Presbyterian pastor and English professor at Centre College until his early death from tuberculosis in 1861. As a widow, Mary Hodge Scott
