LITMIR.BIZ

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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 Will Comstock, Abner “Sharp” Grover, John Y. Nelson, and Ben Clark all spoke one or more indigenous languages.¹¹ 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

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