Savages: American Indian Warfare on the High Plains

Thomas Goodrich
Daily Stormer
August 16, 2015

Like most war movies in general, if one watched only the Hollywood version of the American Indian wars on the High Plains they might be left with the impression that the red man in battle comported himself somewhat similar to his blue-coated counter-poise, the US cavalryman. True, both sides in such films are a little rough around the edges, commit a few bloody barbarities here and there, but for the most part once the battle has been won or lost each side returns to his respective camp and that is pretty much where the film goes dark.

Curiously, it is only in some of the older American films of the 1930’s and 40’s where one even gets a whiff of how such contests really played out. Though he was released when Calamity Jane (played by Jean Arthur) broke down and tearfully revealed the route the soldiers were taking, Wild Bill Hickok (played by Gary Cooper) nearly got himself barbecued in the movie The Plainsman when the Sioux strung him up and stoked a fire around his legs. A few other movies at the time mentioned in passing Indian torture but for the most part, this grisly business was left to one’s imagination. It’s just as well.

In no movie of the past, and certainly in no movie of the politically correct present, have I ever seen an accurate depiction of Indian warfare and especially, of Indian torture, as it really occurred in the Nineteenth-Century.

The following is from my book, Scalp Dance—Indian Warfare on the High Plains, 1865-1879.

***

As we got farther into the Indian country, I found that the enthusiasm for the wilds of the West I had gained from Beadle’s dime novels gradually left me. The zeal to be at the front to help my comrades subdue the savage Indians . . . also was greatly reduced. My courage had largely oozed out while I listened to the blood-curdling tales the old-timers recited. But I was not alone in this feeling. When we got into the country where Indian attacks were likely to happen any moment, I found that every other person in the outfit, including our seasoned scouts, was exercising all the wit and caution possible to avoid contact with the noble red man. Instead of looking for trouble and a chance to punish the ravaging Indians, the whole command was trying to get through without a fight.

So wrote Alson Ostrander, expressing a fear felt by many a novice new to the prairie. Romantic and adventuresome as it might have seemed back in Rochester and Middlebury in the safety of their own homes, once a young “greenhorn” like Ostrander reached the frontier, reality soon set in. Suddenly, fighting with his comrades to “subdue the savage Indian” lost all of its charm. For good reason might the young private and his fellow troopers have cause to pause and reconsider.

Although unacknowledged as such by the US Congress, from 1865 to 1879 a war in all but name was waged on that great wide swath of America known as the Great Plains. Here, on a largely treeless, wind-swept wilderness of sage and cactus, of buffalo and hawk, the ill-prepared US Army was up against some of the best natural fighters and expert horsemen the world has ever known. Indeed, far from dealing effectively with the warring Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapahoe, Comanche, and other plains tribes, the average American trooper on his large grain-fed mount was utterly out-classed by his red counterpart on his fleet war pony.

According to one soldier who had faced Indians many times in battle, George Armstrong Custer:

The Indian warrior is capable of assuming position on his pony . . . at full speed, which no one but an Indian could maintain for a single moment without being thrown to the ground. The pony . . . is perfectly trained, and seems possessed of the spirit of his rider. . . .

Once a warrior was seen to dash out from the rest in the peculiar act of “circling” which was to dash along front of the line of troopers, receiving their fire and firing in return. Suddenly his pony while at full speed was seen to fall to the ground. . . . The warrior was thrown over and beyond the pony’s head and his capture by the cavalry seemed a sure and easy matter. . . . The troop advanced rapidly, but the comrades of the fallen Indian had also witnessed his mishap and were rushing to his rescue. He was on his feet in a moment, and . . . another warrior mounted on the fleetest of ponies was at his side, and with one leap the dismounted warrior placed himself astride the pony of his companion; and thus doubly burdened the gallant little steed, with his no less gallant riders, galloped lightly away, with about eighty cavalrymen, mounted on strong domestic horses, in full cry after them.

There is no doubt but that by all the laws of chance the cavalry should have been able to soon overhaul and capture the Indians in so unequal a race; but . . . the pony, doubly weighted as he was, distanced his pursuers and landed his burden in a place of safety. Although chagrined at the failure of the pursuing party to accomplish the capture of the Indians I could not wholly suppress a feeling of satisfaction, if not gladness, that for once the Indian had eluded the white man.

Small, unsightly, ill-mannered, the Indian pony was also incredibly swift, resilient and could seemingly run all day on little more that a mouthful of buffalo grass and stagnant water. In virtually every contest with the much larger “American” horse of the US cavalry, the pony not only out-maneuvered but also out-performed and out-distanced his foe with seeming ease. Naturally, as a people devoted to war and violence, warriors placed much value in their animals. Again, George Custer:

Indians are extremely fond of bartering. . . . They will sign treaties relinquishing their lands and agree to forsake the burial ground of their fore-fathers; they will part . . . with their bow and arrows and their . . . lodges even may be purchased . . . and it is not an unusual thing for a chief or warrior to offer to exchange his wife or daughter for some article which may have taken his fancy. . . . [B]ut no Indian of the Plains has ever been known to trade, sell, or barter away his favorite war pony. . . . Neither love nor money can induce him to part with it.

***

When encounters occurred, it was almost always on the Indians’ terms. Though pitched battles and dramatic charges did occur, especially when the odds favored them, hit-and-run tactics were the warriors’ forte. And, after years of practice, the Indian had become a master of them. Expecting the open and “manly” combat displayed during the American Civil War, many novices to the plains at first laughed at what they construed as cowardly behavior.

“I only wish you could witness the Indian mode of fighting; it really is amusing sometimes!” Albert Barnitz wrote to his wife, Jennie. “The Indians maneuver so much like wolves! They always ride at full speed, whooping, and . . . are no sooner driven from one sand hill, than they pop up on another, always passing around its base, and ascending it from the far side.”

If Barnitz initially found Indian tactics amusing, he and many others soon discovered that they were engaged in deadly serious work. The captain continues:

[They are] always watching for a chance to make a dash, and cut off some straggler, or drive through some thin part of a line! One morning, just as we were breaking camp, a party dashed down suddenly and cut off two men of “F” Troop, and 4 horses and were off like a flash, carrying off the men—whom they had wounded—on their ponies—a vigorous and immediate pursuit forced them to drop one of the men, who although badly wounded will probably recover, but the other could not be rescued, and if he lived long enough they doubtless had a war dance around and tortured him to death.

“[I]n less time than it takes to write this, six Indians dashed up out of that hidden gully, filled Blair with arrows, took his scalp, then tomahawked him right before our eyes.” So wrote Alson Ostrander, sketching a scene he and hundreds of horrified soldiers would witness during their years on the plains. As Ostrander, Barnitz, and others learned firsthand, those who treated Indian tactics lightly, did so at their peril. Moreover, any who at first discounted the warriors’ weapons gained new respect after suddenly facing them. Although hostiles increasingly carried firearms, the bow and arrow remained their weapon of choice. As an officer’s wife, Margaret Carrington, sagely noted:

Popular opinion has regarded the Indian bow and arrow as something primitive . . . and quite useless in a contest with the white man. This idea would be excellent if the Indian warriors would calmly march up in line of battle and risk their masses . . . against others armed with the rifle. . . . At fifty yards, a well-shapen, iron-pointed arrow is dangerous and very sure. A handful drawn from the quiver and discharged successively will make a more rapid fire than that of a revolver, and at very short range will farther penetrate a piece of plank or timber than the ball of an ordinary Colt’s navy pistol.

Added Captain Eugene Ware:

While a revolver could shoot six times quickly . . . it could not be reloaded on horseback on a run with somebody pursuing. But the Indian could shoot six arrows that were as good as six shots from a revolver at close range and then he could shoot twenty-four more in rapid succession. And so, when a soldier had shot out all his cartridges he was a prey to the Indian with a bow and arrow who followed him.

There was another item about which newcomers to the West were soon made aware of. Of all the horrors the plains had to offer, falling into hostile hands alive was the most terrible. “Save the last bullet for yourself” was stock advice uttered in deadly earnest.

“The great real fact,” declared one colonel, “is that these Indians take alive when possible, and slowly torture.”

“You could always tell which casualties had been wounded [first],” one sergeant reminisced, “because the little Indians and the squaws, after removing the clothes, would shoot them full with arrows and chop them in the faces with hatchets. They never mutilated a dead man, just those who had been wounded.”

“A favorite method of torture was to ‘stake out’ the victim,” revealed Colonel Richard Dodge:

He was stripped of his clothing, laid on his back on the ground and his arms and legs, stretched to the utmost, were fastened by thongs to pins driven into the ground. In this state he was not only helpless, but almost motionless. All this time the Indians pleasantly talked to him. It was all kind of a joke. Then a small fire was built near one of his feet. When that was so cooked as to have little sensation, another fire was built near the other foot; then the legs and arms and body until the whole person was crisped. Finally a small fire was built on the naked breast and kept up until life was extinct.

A similar procedure used by the red torturers was to slice with a sharp knife a small inch of skin on the foot then peel it up slowly in long strips until the head was reached. This agonizing procedure was repeated on all sides of the body until the crazed victim eventually “seeped” to death hours, even days, later.

While such sadistic torture was deliberate and drawn out, hideous mutilation might occur in the blink of an eye. Soon after two soldiers left their column to cut hay near Julesburg, Colorado, drummer James Lockwood and his companions watched in disbelief as the men were jumped by Indians. “[I]n less time than it takes to read this,” Lockwood later wrote, “they were stripped of their clothing, mutilated in a manner which would emasculate them, if alive, and their scalps torn from their heads.”

Ghastly mutilation and torture of comrades was terrible enough. When the young soldier had seen the results of an Indian raid on unsuspecting settlers, however, he often became a different sort of man. Captain Henry Palmer:

We found the bodies of three children who had been taken by the heels by the Indians and swung around against the log cabin, beating their heads to a jelly. Found the hired girl some fifteen rods from the ranch staked out on the prairie, tied by her hands and feet, naked, body full of arrows and horribly mangled.

Not surprisingly—and in spite of attempts by officers to stop it—many men were quick to respond in kind.

“We were bewhiskered savages living under canvas,” admitted one soldier.

After a fight with troops near Fort C. F. Smith in 1867, Sioux warriors were forced to retire, leaving one of their slain behind. The whites soon decamped but, according to one witness, “before leaving the ground they scalped the dead Indian in the latest and most artistic style, then beheaded him, placed his head upon a high pole, leaving his carcass to his friends or the wolves.”

At another skirmish along the North Platte River in Wyoming, Lieutenant William Drew describes an incident that was all too common.

In one of the charges the boys shot a Cheyenne chief through the bowels. He threw his arm over the neck of his pony . . . and went into a thicket of brush, where the chief fell off. Two of the boys rode into the thicket and found the chief apparently dead. One man jumped off his horse and stabbed the Indian about the heart. He did not give the least sign of life. Then the trooper commenced to scalp him. As soon as the knife touched his head, the Indian began to beg, when another man shot him through the brain. The Indian’s belief is that if a warrior loses his scalp, he cannot go to the happy hunting ground. Indians will lose their lives without the least sign of fear, but want to save their scalp. . . . About ten days before this, the Indians had captured one of our men, and had tortured and mangled his body in a shocking manner. Our boys swore that if they ever got hold of an Indian they would cut him all to pieces, and they did.

And, as in any army, a small but active minority used war as an excuse to live out their most sadistic fantasies.

“[T]hey were scalped, their brains knocked out,” admitted one soldier after whites captured an Indian village in Colorado. “[T]he men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children. . . .”

“In going over the battleground,” added a comrade from the same camp. . . .

I did not see a body of a man, woman, or child but what was scalped, and in many instances, their bodies were mutilated in a most horrible manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out. . . . I heard one man say that he had cut a woman’s private parts out, and had them for exhibition on a stick. . . . I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut the private parts of females, and stretched them over their saddle bows, and some of them over their hats.

Not surprisingly, because of the ghastly torture and mutilations, few victims survived an Indian massacre. One man who did was Bill Thompson, a section worker on the Union Pacific Railroad. When Thompson’s maintenance crew was ambushed one dark night in central Nebraska while looking for a break in the telegraph wire, the seriously wounded man wisely feigned death until the red raiders moved on. At length, on terribly weakened legs, Thompson stood up, then staggered back down the tracks to the nearest station—shot, stabbed and scalped.

Because Indians commonly dug up bodies and scalped them, when army columns moved out they marched over graves to obliterate all trace. Again, violation of burial sites was a ghoulish game some soldiers were not slow to learn. After discovering an Indian burial ground in Montana, Lieutenant Edward Godfrey recounted with disgust:

A number of their dead, placed upon scaffolds or tied to the branches of trees, were disturbed and robbed of their trinkets. Several persons rode about exhibiting their trinkets with as much gusto as if they were trophies of their valor, and showed no more concern for their desecration than if they had won them at a raffle.

“Ten days later,” Godfrey added with a note of ironic satisfaction, “I saw the bodies of these same persons dead, naked and mutilated.”

Considering the unspeakable fate awaiting them should they fall into hostile hands, it is not surprising that, when facing Indians, many soldiers “skedaddled.” Occasionally, officers too showed the “white feather.” Recalled Captain R. G. Carter:

Once a detail was sent out scouting under Lt. _______ . They were attacked by Indians outnumbering the men two to one. This officer ran—unqualifiedly ran, begging his men to follow and “not fire a shot for fear of angering the Indians.” [Sergeant] Charlton rode beside him and said: “Lt., if we stop and make a stand they will run.”

“No! no! we can do nothing but try to out-run them.” ______ said.

Charlton then took command and also chances of being tried for disobedience of orders, made a stand with the men, who were more experienced in such warfare than this young untried officer, and drove the Indians off. This officer came to him afterwards and asked him not to say anything about this at the post, and Charlton told me that he never did.

For every coward, though, there was a hero. Courage in a gallant, popular conflict was often rewarded with fame, fortune and rapid promotion. In a vicious, forgotten war waged in the wilderness, however, the reward for valor was often nothing more than a painful death, a dusty grave . . . and a simple memory that burned in a man’s soul forever. Lieutenant Charles Springer:

We buried Morris in the morning . . . . No head board, nor marble catafalk marks the spot of a good soldier who died in the noble and generous act of helping a comrade to get out of the hands of the foe; no soldier salute sounded war like over the grave, no muffled drum solemnized the burial, no tears of relations were shed upon the grave. Was buried upon an open ground, the body scented with turpentine, then the whole wagon train drove over his grave to prevent the Indians from finding his grave and scalping him. I read a chapter from the Bible and acted the preacher—James Morris is no more—Requiscat in pace.