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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 brought her three young sons back home to join the lively household of her father and stepmother in Princeton.

At any given time, Dr. Hodge’s gracious home near the Princeton campus provided a hospitable haven for friends and relatives, whether they were visiting or studying at Princeton. Some members of the extended family had rooms in the seminary or college, but took their meals at the house. Graduation and other ceremonial occasions brought throngs of students, alumni, and friends to the house to renew acquaintances and pay their respects to “the Presbyterian Pope,” as Scott’s grandfather was called—sometimes in admiration and sometimes in derision—for his unwavering defense of Calvinism.³

Young Hugh, who was known to his family as Len, had been named for his great-uncle, Dr. Hugh Lenox Scott, a physician and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Besides connections to Presbyterian Church circles, family ties such as these provided the young Scott with a number of advantageous connections to people of influence in government, academia, and the military, and generally equipped him with an entrée into good society that was to serve him well throughout his life. Len’s grandmother Sarah Bache was the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin. She was also a niece of Caspar Wistar, an anatomist and paleontologist who served for many years as president of the American Philosophical Society. His grandfather’s second wife came from one of New Jersey’s leading families, the Stocktons, and was a cousin of Commodore Robert F. Stockton. The Stockton family home, known since colonial times as Morven, was one of the area’s most distinguished old houses. When Lord Cornwallis’s troops occupied Princeton, the general took it as his headquarters.⁴

Most significant for Scott’s career, however, was the patronage of his step-grandmother’s brother, Major General David Hunter, a friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. It was at his grandmother’s instigation that Uncle David secured an appointment for Hugh Lenox Scott to West Point from President Grant.⁵

Uncle David accompanied Len Scott when he went up to West Point in the spring of 1871, introducing him to the superintendent and commandant of cadets as well as his many other acquaintances at the academy from which he himself had graduated a half-century earlier. Finally, he entrusted the young man to two sons of old army friends, one of whom was President Grant’s son Fred.⁶

Hugh Lenox Scott’s army career—both in the West in the 1880s and 1890s and later in Cuba and the Philippines—was notable for the ethnographic work he carried out among the various peoples the U.S. Army sent him to police and superintend, to pacify and subjugate, and to recruit to aid the army in its work: Indians, Moros, and Cubans. The work had a clear military purpose and application, but it was also furthered by a dogged scholarly inclination. On the strength of his interest and proficiency in native languages and seeming affinity for “Indian ways,” seasoned frontier campaigners, including Generals Sheridan, Miles, Merritt, and Ruger, sought his advice and allowed him a degree of autonomy he relished—all while he was still a lieutenant of cavalry. When he was seconded to the Bureau of Ethnology to write a book on sign language, even Colonel John Wesley Powell deferred to his expertise in the subject. The work in military ethnography he undertook as a commander of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche scouts in the 1880s and 1890s also provided the basis for the kind of diplomacy he pursued with other farther-flung “primitive peoples” on behalf of the United States.

As a student at West Point in the early 1870s, however, Scott showed few signs of the scholar he would become. Perhaps it was more the case that the curriculum offered a limited scope for the development of his particular scholarly potential. In Scott’s day, the West Point curriculum concentrated on engineering, law, ordnance, and gunnery. To this was added some instruction in drawing, mathematics, chemistry, and language studies (Spanish, French, and German). The predominant method of instruction was recitation. After their first year, cadets were ranked in classes according to their performance on the previous year’s exams, and attended recitations in the various subjects throughout the week.⁷ In the winter, after recitations were over, the cadets practiced boxing, fencing, and dancing with one another to improve their technique; in the summers they spent the time in outdoor drill and swimming in the river at night. Scott was a strong swimmer who once saved a classmate from drowning on a return swim across the Hudson.⁸

In his second year, Scott was caught hazing a first-year plebe and was suspended for it and ordered to join the next lower class. Although forbidden at West Point, the practice of hazing was a time-honored and well-entrenched tradition. Scott was sanctioned for ordering a new man to walk with his palms facing forward with pinky fingers on the crease of his pantaloons in compliance with the drill regulations, and then catching his wrist to enforce his oral orders in the matter. Although such hazing (and worse) was common at the academy, Scott became the only member of his class to be “sent down” for it.⁹

In late January of his fifth and final year, Scott wrote to his mother apologizing for having missed his customary weekly letter, noting that he had been “more pressed for time” than he had expected as a result of his examinations. The rest of the letter gave a run-down on exams and resulting rankings in various subjects. He reported poor performance in his law exam in which he had been confronted with a question on “General Orders No. 100,” which he had neglected to study, as he told his mother, because he had understood it would not be included on the exam. “Consequently, I didn’t do very well,” he wrote. The letter went on to detail his class standing in other exams: in Ordnance he had come thirty-seventh and had “lost about 9 files in Engineering.”¹⁰

One implication of his exam results, as Scott saw it, was that he was unlikely to attain a commission in a white regiment. Scott preferred a white regiment over a black, but above all he had his heart set on the cavalry. There were thirty five vacancies in white regiments, as he explained to his mother when she wrote to him in May expressing her concerns about his hopes for joining the Tenth Cavalry, one of the four African American regiments (two cavalry, two infantry) that had been organized following the Civil War. In apparent response to some strategies she had suggested—probably involving Uncle David—for securing a desirable place in a white regiment, he wrote, “The rest of your letter was just so much energy wasted. I shall come out 39 or 40 (of 48). So I must either take Nigger horse or Nig. foot & I infinitely prefer the horse.”¹¹ While echoing the prejudice that prevailed among his classmates against serving with a black regiment, Scott tried to reassure his mother by telling her that he had spoken with several officers including Colonel Beaumont and Lieutenant Morton Stretch, one of his tactical officers, both of whom had served at posts with the black cavalry units, and that both had told him that “they [were] as good as any in the service.”¹²

When they were small boys growing up in Kentucky, Mary Hodge Scott had told her sons frightening stories of the slave uprisings of the previous century in Haiti and Santo Domingo. These cautionary tales communicated a widespread fear among whites that they were vulnerable to the same fate at the hands of their slaves unless they kept them in check. Mrs. Scott retained this antipathy toward blacks and was opposed to the idea of her son’s association with a colored regiment. Scott responded to her concerns by pointing out that he would not “have near as much to do with them personally as you would with a black cook.”¹³ In fact, the Hodge family’s servants tended to be mostly Irish, black servants in Princeton being “not quite the thing” among their social set.¹⁴

In his determination to have nothing to do personally with black troops, Scott was typical of his generation of white army officers. This attitude was reinforced by army policy and traditions at the academy. The post–Civil War army was thoroughly racially segregated and remained so until 1948. Men of African descent—both enslaved and free—had fought in all the nation’s wars, of course, but they had been accepted by the white officer corps and the country’s leaders only reluctantly and never fully integrated into the overall structure of the army. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, blacks responded to the call for volunteers in large numbers, rushing to recruiting stations. Initially, the idea of black troops was rejected by both the civilian and military leadership. It took two years of petitioning Congress, the president, and municipal governments as well as—and perhaps more significantly—the government’s realization of its need for more manpower, to reverse the idea, even in the North, that the war should be prosecuted by whites only. The change in policy was motivated not by idealism, “but rather by the dictates of a grueling war,” according to one historian.¹⁵ In the absence of black soldiers, many more white Union soldiers would die. “Since the Confederates were going to kill a great many more Union soldiers before the war was over, a good many white men would escape death if a considerable percentage of those soldiers were colored.”¹⁶

Even when the decision to incorporate black troops into the war effort was reached, special permission was required from the War Department or Congress for those states that wished to organize volunteer Negro regiments. Instead of being inducted through established channels, a special Bureau for Colored Troops was set up to organize separate United States Colored Troops. In contrast to the Revolutionary War, when blacks had been scattered throughout the ranks, very few African Americans served in mixed units in the Union army. Instead, 178,985 men—mostly infantry—served in separate regiments, and they were paid less than white soldiers.¹⁷

In spite of their marginalization, the contributions of black soldiers in the Civil War were important in furthering claims for fuller civil and political rights. In the reorganization of the army that followed the war, Negro regiments were established by Congress for the first time in the nation’s history. Initially, there were six all-black units—the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-First Infantry. These were consolidated a year or so later into two infantry and two cavalry regiments.¹⁸ Confined to the West and segregated in the regiments in which they served following the Civil War, black soldiers whose remains were sent back east were also buried in segregated sections on the fringes of Arlington National Cemetery.¹⁹

During the 1870s, several young African Americans won appointments to West Point. Scott’s time at the military academy overlapped with three of them: James Smith, Johnson Whittacker, and Henry O. Flipper. Henry Flipper graduated the year after Scott, becoming the first African American to graduate. Upon graduation he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Tenth Cavalry “Buffalo Soldiers,” the same regiment Scott had written to his mother about joining during his final year.

The presence of black cadets at the country’s foremost military academy challenged the “fortified embattlement of officer and color caste” that West Point represented.²⁰ One of the more sensitive issues posed by the training of black officers at West Point was the likelihood it created for their possible command of and promotion over white officers. According to army doctrine of the time, which remained in force for another half century, blacks should not command white troops. Even the opportunities for blacks to command all-black regiments were limited and controversial. The orthodoxy was that Negroes had neither the initiative nor the savvy to make effective commanders and that they would perform well as soldiers only if commanded by whites. While conceding that “the colored race are a valuable military asset,” James Parker, a white officer who fought in various Indian campaigns on the U.S.-Mexico border and was often garrisoned with black troops, expressed the common opinion that such “regiments must be officered by whites else they are of no account.”²¹

Whites resented the very idea of submitting to the authority of blacks, whom they considered their racial inferiors. The wife of a white lieutenant expressed a common prejudice when she wrote letters to relatives from Camp Supply in 1873 in which she decried the spectacle of black sergeants at the post with authority over white privates. In her opinion, such an inversion of the natural order constituted a “good cause for desertion.”²² Unwritten policy thus imposed a ceiling on the promotion of African American officers above the rank of captain.²³ When the rare officer of color attained a higher rank, as in the case of Charles Young—who graduated from West Point in 1889 and achieved the rank of colonel during the Pershing Punitive Expedition in Mexico—an assignment was found that might evade such potentially awkward situations. In Young’s case, he was assigned first to develop the military science program at Wilberforce University, and later appointed military attaché to Haiti and Liberia.

The professional implications for command and promotion of black officers at West Point was one thing. The thought of social fraternization across racial lines was quite another. If there were black officers, they would reasonably be expected to socialize with others of their rank at the places they were stationed. “The presence of Black officers also raised the possibility of an integrated officers’ mess.” Especially at the frontier posts where officers and their wives were already hard-pressed to uphold the social conventions appropriate to their status as officers and gentlemen (and ladies), the idea of living and socializing together was opposed by the white officer corps.²⁴

Major General John Schofield, superintendent of West Point during the time Scott and Flipper were there, expressed his doubts about the ability of Negroes to succeed at the academy, basing his views on the widespread notion that they were backward and not fit to compete with whites. He acknowledged that qualified black nominees could not be denied admission to the national school, but he was doubtful about their prospects for success and did not see it as part of the institution’s mission to work for that success. In his report for 1870, the superintendent wrote: “To send to West Point for four years competition a young man who was born in slavery is to assume that half a generation has been sufficient to raise a colored man to the social, moral, and intellectual level which the average white man has reached in several hundred years. As well might the common farm horse be entered in a four mile race against the best blood inherited from a line of English racers.”²⁵ Schofield’s racism was consistent with the prevailing ethnological thinking of the day, which held that the world’s peoples passed through stages of evolution, from savagery to barbarism, and finally, civilization, before attaining the highest stage of development, epitomized by the Anglo-Saxons (the “English racers”), who were naturally assumed to occupy the top echelon.²⁶

There is no record of any interaction between Hugh Lenox Scott and any of the black cadets who attended West Point with him. Nor did Scott mention any of his black classmates in his letters home, although he did refer derisively in one letter to his mother to the “moke fever” in Congress, by which he meant the supposed political preference for establishing and preserving black army units even as others might be reduced in an expected peace-time reduction of troops. While he was critical of legislative support for the all-black regiments, Scott was attuned—as were Robert Lee Bullard and John J. Pershing after him—to the politics of race in the military and to the possible advantages he might work from it. Part of his calculation about getting a commission in a black regiment, unpopular as it was among his fellow West Pointers, was his belief that it could provide a better chance of promotion and professional advancement for him than joining a white regiment. He made the same calculation about service with Indian scouts soon after arriving in Dakota Territory. In his closing words of justification for his decision to pursue a commission in a Buffalo Soldier regiment such as the Tenth, Scott confided to his mother, “most of the men here will hoot me [for it], but I don’t care so long as I see it is to my advantage.”²⁷ John J. Pershing—whose nickname Black Jack derived from his service with the Tenth Cavalry—shared a similar analysis with his Nebraska friend Assistant Secretary of War George D. Meiklejohn in 1898. Contemplating the best avenues for advancement from the vantage point of eastern Cuba following the war with Spain, Pershing concluded that they lay with command of one of the immune regiments he believed would be organized as an “imperial guard” for America’s new tropical colonies following the war.²⁸

Besides its presumed better prospects for promotion, the Tenth Cavalry had another attraction in its favor, as far as Scott was concerned. Its regimental headquarters were in Texas, and Texas, he had heard, was a “sportsman’s paradise.” There, he could “shoot all year around instead of being cooped up all winter in a little log hut snowed under in Wyoming Territory or else out on a scout 150 miles from home thermometer 15 degrees below zero—I hear accounts of it now and then that sets my teeth on edge.”²⁹ Scott was an avid hunter. From an early age—rather to the consternation of his bookish family—he had spent all his available time outdoors, in the woods, chasing foxes or squirrels or other quarry. Since his mother would not allow him to use a gun until his fifteenth birthday, he hunted with a bow and arrow he had made for himself, with which he accounted himself “extremely skilful.” Besides handling a gun, his passion for hunting helped him develop other “arts of the field” such as swimming, handling a boat, and riding a horse.³⁰

Like the rest of his class, Scott admitted to being “mad for the cavalry.” Capping off his arguments in favor of his preference for a commission in the Tenth Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, Scott noted that cavalry officers were paid a hundred dollars more a year than infantry. They also got keep for two horses.³¹ His greatest regret about leaving West Point was having to bid farewell to “his” horse. Cadets drew lots to determine an order for picking a mount for riding drill. Two weeks before graduation, Scott wrote regretfully to his mother that he had only two more rides left with his West Point horse. “I’m going to miss my horse very much—& he will me I guess. Whenever I come out he is looking for me & rubs his nose on my cheek & it is soft as velvet too. If I don’t get out his sugar right away he pushes me till I do. I’m awfully sorry to leave him.”³² By all accounts, Scott was an excellent horseman. He was more sentimental about horses than he was about most people. He could remember and relate details of the appearance and temperament of horses he had owned or ridden half a century earlier. In the frontier army, Scott also became adept at handling mule teams, which were essential for transport, communication, and the provisioning of troops in the field.

Scott graduated from West Point on June 14, 1876. General William Tecumseh Sherman presented the diplomas to his class. At graduation Scott stood thirty-sixth in a class of forty-eight. He was assigned to the Ninth Cavalry, the other Buffalo Soldier regiment. He paid little attention to the commencement orations of the day, little suspecting that he would return many times to take part in commencement exercises in later years as a speaker himself, includ ing during his tenure as superintendent of the academy from 1906 to 1910. Instead, newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Scott was intent on getting home to Princeton to make the most of the leave granted to him before reporting to the Arizona border when his orders came.³³

Besides visiting friends and family in Princeton, Scott had been looking forward to attending the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. With his brother William, then a student at Princeton, Scott traveled to the nation’s first capital to witness the celebration of its first hundred years of independence. Out of a population of some forty-two million, an estimated eight million attended the Exposition between May and October of 1876.

The exposition covered 285 acres of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. It boasted five massive exhibition buildings as well as a number of state and foreign buildings, many restaurants, beer gardens, cigar pavilions, and a thirty-six-foot-tall ice water fountain erected by the Grand Division of Sons of Temperance of the State of Pennsylvania, which dispensed free ice water from twenty-seven self-acting spigots. The predominating theme of the exposition was Progress and the leading role of the United States in driving the innovations and achievements of the age. The president of the Centennial Exposition voiced the hope that people would come to the exposition “to study the evidence of our resources, to measure the progress of a hundred years, and to examine to our profit the wonderful products of other lands.”³⁴ A visit to Machinery Hall, bragged one contemporary account, “must convince all that the world contains no fingers more cunning, no minds more inventive, nor tastes more refined, than are found on our shores.³⁵

In the Government Building, exhibitions were intended to “illustrate the functions and administrative facilities of the Government in times of peace and its resources as a war power.” Accordingly, the War Department awed fairgoers with a dynamic display of some of its most powerful and modern weaponry. All the machinery and skilled operatives needed to demonstrate the manufacture of the Springfield breech-loading rifle were assembled in the Government Building; fascinated fairgoers watched as “handsome weapons of death” were fashioned out of round bars of steel and blocks of black walnut before their eyes. The process of grinding a bayonet on a steam-powered grindstone as well as the manufacture of bullets and cartridges were also on view, as well as an array of cannons, Gatling guns, and mountain howitzers with carriages and ammunition, positioned realistically on pack saddles, just as they would be carried into battle on the backs of mules.³⁶

Weapons also made up a significant portion of the American Indian artifacts exhibited in the same building, but these were presented in an entirely different way. Stone axes, clubs, spears, bows and arrows, and knives were piled together in museum cases or “huddled under tables.” Without interpretation, these “savage weapons” were displayed as relics, thus supporting the prevalent idea about the backwardness of the men who had made them. As the author of an article describing the weapons concluded: “The Centennial Exhibition was mainly of the means and results of modern industry and art, and the primitive objects were comparatively but strays and occasionals.”³⁷

The principal organizer of the Indian exhibit, Spencer F. Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, intended the display of Indian objects to educate Americans on the way of life of American Indians as well as to illustrate “the change from a savage state to one of comparative civilization,” but the overall impression created by the jumble of artifacts tended instead to reinforce common stereotypes of Indians as primitives, whose culture and way of life represented the antithesis of progress.³⁸

Baird had also wanted to include living Indians in the Centennial Exposition. Working with the Indian Office, which shared responsibility for representing Indians at the exposition, plans to bring thirty to forty Indian families to the exhibition were well developed, but ultimately abandoned due to lack of congressional support. The idea was to install members of selected tribes (those already subdued by the government) in a five-acre reservation on the exposition grounds where they could demonstrate their skills at crafts such as weaving blankets, making pottery, and dressing buffalo skins. Unfortunately for Baird, Congress refused to fund the proposal, even when it was pointed out that such an excursion would have the added benefit of providing an object lesson in the power of the United States.³⁹ Instead of living Indians, visitors to the Indian exhibit in the Government Building encountered life-sized effigies, made of papier-mâché modeled on notable Indians who had been photographed on diplomatic visits to Washington. One of the men whose image was rendered in effigy was the Oglala chief Red Cloud, who had led his people’s resistance to incursions into Lakota and Shoshone territories along the Bozeman Trail; by the time of the centennial, Red Cloud had long since accommodated himself to the inevitable and acceded to the government’s insistence that he settle near an agency on the Great Sioux Reservation. Although Red Cloud had been at peace with the United States since 1868, the manikin representing him was dressed to appear warlike, presenting a “repulsive looking image with raised tomahawk and a belt of human scalps.”⁴⁰ Two years after touring the Indian exhibit under Red Cloud’s scowling likeness, Scott would spend several days as an interpreter and guest in Red Cloud’s lodge, where he found him to be “the picture of hospitality.”

Ethnographic limitations notwithstanding, for the recent West Point graduate the exposition was enjoyable for the spectacle it provided and also for the chance to meet friends. Scott spent some of his time at the exposition in the encampment of West Point cadets. He also enjoyed the hospitality of the Seventh New York Regiment, also camped out within the fairgrounds. “Any soldier who got into one of the company streets of the Seventh Regiment was in for a strenuous time,” Scott recalled years later. “Each tent floor had a small cellar under it, filled with ice, champagne, roast chicken, and other delicacies, and a passer-by would be hauled into those tents, one after another, and, with the cellar door opened wide, he would not be allowed to leave until some duty called his hospitable hosts elsewhere.”

Scott was still in Philadelphia for the gala events to mark Independence Day 1876. These began with a torchlight parade to Independence Hall on the evening of July 3. At the stroke of midnight, Philadelphia’s new Liberty Bell pealed thirteen times to thunderous applause. An orchestra was on hand to play “The Star Spangled Banner,” with all the bells and steam whistles in the city joining in. The city’s celebrations continued until two in the morning. The Fourth dawned hot. To avoid the worst heat of the day, the planned military parade of ten thousand troops was scheduled for early in the day. Taking part in the parade were two dozen regiments and national guard companies as well as a Centennial Legion composed of detachments from the thirteen original states of the Union. All were under the command of the governor of Pennsylvania; they marched through Philadelphia’s streets and were reviewed by General William Tecumseh Sherman in front of Independence Hall. The parade was followed by the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah as well as odes, orations, and songs composed in honor of the anniversary of American independence. At night the city was illuminated again and a fireworks display over the exposition grounds brought the festivities to a close.⁴¹

The following day, unsettling news began to spread through the exposition. Far to the west, in Montana Territory, troops of the Seventh Cavalry, led precipitously into battle by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, had been routed by a larger force of Lakotas and Cheyennes. Scott heard the news from a friend he encountered on the street. At first he did not believe it. A newspaper soon convinced him of the truth of his friend’s report. Among the dead were two of Scott’s friends who had graduated the previous year, John Crittenden and James Sturgis.⁴²

Shocking though the news was, the death of Custer’s entire command also opened up certain opportunities for the recent graduate. Scott hurried back to Princeton to consult his uncle Sam Stockton about how to proceed.⁴³ Stockton, who had been a captain in the Fourth Cavalry, brushed aside Scott’s scruples about “jumping for the shoes of those killed in the Little Big Horn before they were cold.” Stockton counseled him to write immediately to his uncle David Hunter “who knew everybody in the War Department.” Uncle David received Scott’s application for the Seventh Cavalry at breakfast the next day and carried it to the War Department where they were making the transfers to the regiment, and made sure that Scott’s name was added to the list. Scott’s new commission as second lieutenant in the Seventh Cavalry was dated June 26, 1876, the day after the Little Bighorn battle, an event Scott referred to for the rest of his life as “the Custer disaster.”⁴⁴

It had taken ten days for the alarming news of Custer’s defeat on the Little Bighorn River to travel from Indian Country to the fairgoing crowds in Philadelphia. The few details and rumors transmitted by telegram to newspaper offices in the East from remote places like Salt Lake City and Helena in time for the July 5 papers were supplemented the following day by a fuller account and the first official confirmation of the fight by the commander of the Yellowstone campaign, General Alfred Terry. Terry sent his official report on the events of June 25 from his field camp on the Lone Horn River on June 28 by way of a scout who arrived with the dispatch at Fort Ellis near Bozeman on July 3. From Bozeman the news was telegraphed through General Sheridan’s headquarters of the Department of the Missouri in Chicago; from there it was transmitted to Philadelphia. Both General Sheridan and General Sherman were away from their headquarters, both having traveled to Philadelphia for the centennial events.⁴⁵ Other reports reached the press as eyewitnesses to the battle straggled into Salt Lake City and Bismarck.⁴⁶ The time required for the news to travel from the battlefield to the nation’s hubs of political and military power testified to the vast distance, both spatial and psychological, separating Indian Country from the eastern centers of population and political power in the 1870s. The reality of the nation’s relations with its Indian wards was very different from those suggested by the assortment of relics arrayed for visitors to the Centennial Exposition.

By the time Scott received his orders to join the remnants of Custer’s regiment at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory, the initial frenzy of rumor, purported eyewitness accounts, and attributions of blame that followed the rout on the Little Bighorn had mostly subsided—only to be stirred up again later that year by the publication of Frederick Whittacker’s provocative book The Complete Life of George A. Custer.⁴⁷

Scott’s journey to take up his commission in Dakota Territory traced in reverse the route the news of the disaster had traveled. It also traversed several earlier frontiers of the expanding empire, each of which, by 1876, had been successively incorporated into the republic of progress and Anglo-American civilization celebrated by the ongoing exposition in the City of Brotherly Love he had left behind.

Scott traveled by rail, taking with him a saber, two shotguns and a Henry rifle, a trunk, a roll of bedding, and two hunting dogs—a pointer and a setter given to him by friends. His first stop on his journey west was Pittsburgh where he visited his older brother Charles and his new wife. A century earlier, Pittsburgh had stood in the same relation to the Indian Country of the Ohio valley as Bismarck and Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri to which he was bound now occupied in relation to the disputed Indian Country of the plains. During the period of rivalry between the French and British empires over control of territory and influence with the Indians of the Great Lakes and interior of the continent, the strategic location on the forks of the Allegheny and Monongahela, which later gave rise to Pittsburgh, had been the site of a contested outpost. A succession of forts at “the forks” changed hands four times within two decades of intense frontier imperial rivalries and shifting alliances with native groups. The object of several unsuccessful attempts by British forces to capture it during the French and Indian War—twice involving a young George Washington—Fort Duquesne was finally blown up by its erstwhile defenders as they fled in the face of an imminent attack by British colonial forces in November of 1758.

European struggles over strategic frontier locations such as Fort Duquesne/ Fort Pitt unfolded in the context of complex political, economic, and cultural relations with the Indians of the interior of the continent. The French referred to the vast lands beyond the skeletal outposts of European settlement in the Great Lakes region as the Pays d’en Haut. What developed in these areas of contested sovereignty was a complex and dynamic relationship among civilizations that Richard White has productively analyzed as a “Middle Ground” between European and Native peoples, a shifting zone in which an array of nations, tribes, villages, and empires not only encountered one another, but became “cocreators of a world in the making.”⁴⁸ Contested sovereignty was the sine qua non of the Middle Ground, which was maintained by both diplomacy and accommodation among a shifting set of factional alliances.

But while the Old World empires adapted to the evolving give-and-take required by the Middle Ground, the colonists themselves chafed at being restricted to the eastern side of the crest of the Appalachian mountains, the 1763 “Line of Proclamation,” decreed by a victorious Britain at the end of the war with her longtime rival France. Divergence over Indian policy for the Ohio valley between colonial officials and the backcountry settlers of western Pennsylvania and Virginia contributed significantly to the ruptures that became more pronounced following the French and Indian War. One expression of indigenous attempts to drive settlers out of the Ohio valley and to reclaim the earlier terms of relations with the European powers was the widespread Indian war known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, in which the Ottawa chief united Shawnee, Delaware, and Ojibwe tribes in attacking British installations such as Fort Pitt.

Independence from Britain worsened Indian-white relations since no centralized authority remained to continue the Crown’s interest in preserving its commitments to the Indians of the Ohio valley. On the contrary, removal of the royal interest in policing the volatile line between Euro-American settlement and Indian Country launched an expansion into the Ohio valley of settlers, squatters, land speculators, and veterans of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution who had been promised land in the West. The response of the Native nations to this betrayal of promises made by the former imperial powers was a determined defense of their sovereignty claims.

Scott’s next stop on his journey west was Chicago, the largest metropolis in the continent’s interior, and gateway to the Great West beyond.⁴⁹ Chicago was also the command center for the headquarters of the Department of the Missouri, commanded by Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan. From here, since the previous winter, Sheridan had plotted “total war” against the hunting bands who resisted the government’s insistence that they “come in” to the Indian agencies and submit to military authority on the reservations.⁵⁰

With a population that had recently surpassed 350,000, Chicago was a very different place from the small collection of huts around Fort Dearborn at the mouth of the Chicago River where Scott’s uncle David Hunter had been stationed with the Fifth Infantry in 1828. There, Uncle David had once bor rowed a Potawatomi Indian canoe to paddle across the Chicago River to bring back Jefferson Davis, who had been lost while on an expedition from Fort Winnebago to search for deserters. The canoe was built for one man, so to ferry Davis across, Hunter directed him to lie down on the bottom and then sat on him in order to keep the center of gravity low enough to avoid capsizing the canoe. Hunter and Davis also served together in the first regiment of Dragoons organized to police and intervene in settler-Indian relations in the trans-Mississippi West. They had remained friends until the outbreak of the Civil War.⁵¹

Besides the frontier experiences related by his uncle David Hunter, Chicago summoned up more personal memories from Scott’s own past; the city had been his family’s home from the age of six to eight, when his father had been a professor at the Theological Seminary of the Northwest (now McCormick Theological Seminary). It was from here that the young family accompanied him back to Princeton where he died in 1861.

From Chicago Scott continued on to St. Paul, the rough-hewn river capital of Minnesota, where he began to get “the feeling of the proximity of the frontier.” Here, he encountered “blanket” or unassimilated, Indians for the first time: “tall, straight Chippewa [Ojibwe] Indians, wrapped in their blue and scarlet [trade] blankets, striding about in a very dignified way.”⁵² Shortly before Scott’s arrival, the outlaw Jesse James and the Younger brothers had attempted to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, some forty miles to the south of the capital. Several of the gang had been killed after they shot the cashier and were attempting to flee out of town. The body of one of the dead gang members was exhibited in the window of a store on Third Street close to the hotel where Scott was staying, adding to his sense that he had arrived at civilization’s edge.

Like Pittsburgh, St. Paul had grown up under the aegis of a frontier fort established in Indian Country at the strategic confluence of two rivers. Scott’s Uncle David had preceded his protégé here, too, and the young man’s expectations of what he would find on the Mississippi were shaped in part by the stories he had heard about his uncle’s five years at the frontier post. Half a century earlier, David Hunter had likewise graduated from West Point and made the trek from his home in New Jersey to what was then the most remote and skeletal outpost of American authority in the Northwest, the newly constructed fort at the strategic confluence of the St. Peter (Minnesota) and Mississippi Rivers. Fort Snelling was built into a bluff overlooking the place where two conduits of the still-dominant fur trade connected a vast northern interior with downstream markets. There had been no railroad in 1822 to convey Uncle David to his first army post, nor any roads. It had taken him six months to reach Fort Snelling to take up his commission in the Fifth Infantry; the last two hundred miles from Prairie du Chien he walked on the ice of the frozen Mississippi River.⁵³

The construction and garrisoning of Fort Snelling in 1820 had been intended to bolster a tenuous American presence in the region. The young republic had done its utmost to assert sovereignty over the Great Lakes region in the War of 1812, but in the remote northern interior of the land that would become Minnesota, the Union Jack continued to wave over the trading posts of the well-established North West Company. While the owners and managers of the company were mostly Scotsmen, their employees who were actively engaged in the fur trade were French-Canadians and men of mixed French and indigenous ancestry. Almost all of them were connected by ties of kinship to the natives who trapped and hunted for furs and traded with the company for guns and ammunition, woolen blankets, iron pots, and other manufactured goods. President Monroe’s 1817 ban on non-Americans trading on U.S. soil was toothless without a military presence to enforce it. Fort Snelling’s purpose had thus been to counteract the still-powerful British influence in the region and to control access to the fur trade interior by regulating the Mississippi route.⁵⁴

When David Hunter arrived at Fort Snelling in 1823, there was hardly a white person in the region who was not related to the Dakotas or Ojibwes—or sometimes both—either through birth or through marriage. By the 1830s, six generations of intermarriage “had produced an intricate web of relationships, with people of mixed ancestry acting as an essential bridge between their white and Indian kin.”⁵⁵ On the Upper Mississippi such intimate and material relationships mattered more than national allegiances. French remained the lingua franca of the region; English was hardly spoken. Like that of the French and British empires before it, the military power that the Americans were able to project in the region was feeble, insufficient to enforce a sovereignty whose assertion on maps was belied by a more complicated reality on the ground. Garrisoned with a few hundred troops, American might was no match for a population of tens of thousands of Indians. Largely though, it was the monopolistic fur trade—not the army—that both kept the peace and provoked conflict.⁵⁶

Well into the middle of the nineteenth century, Minnesota remained aloof from the general east-to-west pressure of white settler expansion to secure Indian “removal.” White settlement was in fact antithetical to the interests of the fur trade companies. For the first half of the nineteenth century, it was the fur-trading monopolies, especially the North West Company, that had proved hostile—more than the region’s native inhabitants—to the few pockets of intrepid (and usually uninformed) white settlers who attempted to establish agricultural colonies in the remote and inhospitable river valleys of the North Country.⁵⁷

At mid-century, even as the new states hewn out of the Northwest Territory to the east and south sought to remove Indians from within their borders, Minnesota fur-traders-turned-politicians sought to relocate more Indians in Minnesota, not to remove them from the territory. Anglo-Minnesotans lobbied Congress to receive the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) from Iowa and Wisconsin and also to have the government purchase a million acres of land from the Objibwes on which to resettle Menominees from Wisconsin. Such territorial maneuvering was motivated not by love of Indians, but rather by the desire to capture the economic benefits of the annuity payments settled on the tribes by the federal government in return for forfeiture of their claims to their ancestral lands.⁵⁸ The Ojibwe, meanwhile, had their own reasons for supporting the resettlement of other tribes in Minnesota. They saw the arrival of other tribes from the east as helpful in creating a buffer zone between themselves and the Dakota.⁵⁹

With the disappearance of the fur trade by mid-century and the advent of the railroad, Fort Snelling’s military focus shifted from the North to the West. Instead of controlling commerce and Indian relations along Minnesota’s waterways, the fort now functioned as a remote command center in the continuing contest over lands further west where plains tribes continued to challenge the claims of the United States to exclusive sovereignty.

Minnesota’s distinctive borderland society, so long in the making and seemingly so enduring, was quickly and violently unmade. As the fur trade entered a period of both local and global decline, Minnesota offered new rich prospects for resource extraction and agricultural development in which Indian presence on the land was seen by speculators and settlers as an obstacle to progress—and to profit—as it had been further east. Wisconsin Winnebagos who had been settled on timberland in the central part of the territory were divested of that lucrative land and relocated to the prairie in the southwestern part of the territory from where, against their will, they would later be removed again to Dakota Territory, and from there to Nebraska.⁶⁰

When Congress recognized the last remaining unorganized part of the Old Northwest as the territory of Minnesota in 1849, pressures intensified on native tribes to cede most of their remaining lands to the federal government in return for payments representing a fraction of their market value. The annuity payments the Indians actually received were further diminished by the liens traders had written into the cession treaties, which guaranteed that the credit they had extended to the tribes would be paid first.

By the time Scott arrived in St. Paul and noted the stately bearing of the Ojibwes he encountered there, Ojibwe claims to land, which in his uncle’s day had encompassed fully half the northern part of the state, had been reluctantly ceded to whites. The remaining six thousand or so tribal members in the state had “relinquished the meadows, forests and wild rice beds of the lake country for the harsh climate, poor soil, and ‘immense swamps’ of new reservations located hundreds of miles from population centers.”⁶¹ In the southern part of the state, the Dakotas, who had actively facilitated the establishment of an American presence at Mendota, the site of Fort Snelling, and along the valleys of the Mississippi’s tributaries, had fared even worse. Their lands and subsistence had been squeezed and encroached on by an influx of land-hungry settlers and speculators and they had been extorted and strong-armed by traders and Indian agents.

By the outbreak of the Civil War, the once-dominant Dakota had seen their domain reduced to an untenable ribbon of land along the Minnesota River. When the exigencies of war being waged in the East further delayed annuity payments throughout the summer of 1862, frustrated and deeply angry young men launched an attack on white settlers in the Minnesota River valley with tragic consequences. The Dakota attacks on white communities in southern Minnesota left between four hundred and a thousand men, women, and children dead. The killings inflamed the white population of Minnesota against all Indians—not just the fraction of Dakota men who took part in the killing, but also against the majority of the bands who had rebuffed the incitements to war and provided protection for and even taken the side of whites in the conflict.

The Dakota War reshaped ethnic identity in the four-year-old state. The conflict destroyed the vestiges of the mixed-race border culture and sense of shared kinship between whites and natives. It also marked the beginning of a new phase of conflict between indigenous people west of Minnesota and an encroaching white civilization that would last another two decades. It led, in other words, to the war Scott was hastening to join.

For the Dakota, the war was devastating. They lost all but a tiny remnant of their once-extensive lands; Congress passed a bill authorizing the exile of Dakota people from the state, annulling all treaties the United States had made with any of the bands and diverting the remaining Dakota annuities to pay reparations to the white victims of the violence.⁶² In the aftermath of the conflict on the Minnesota, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in a gruesome ritual of state-sanctioned retribution the day after Christmas 1862. Hundreds of others were imprisoned for three years at Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa. Some sixteen hundred women, children, and old men, those explicitly not guilty of involvement in the attacks except by virtue of tribal association, were force-marched from their communities on the Minnesota to a prison camp set up below the walls of Fort Snelling, where close to three hundred died during the winter of 1862–63 as the authorities waited for the ice on the Mississippi to melt enough to permit their deportation out of the state. Those who surrendered, including many Sissetunwan and Wahpetunwan who had not fought against the United States, were deported to Crow Creek, Dakota Territory, or imprisoned. Exiled from Minnesota, hundreds, especially children, died of disease and starvation. Others fled onto the western plains and north into Canada.⁶³ The Minnesota state legislature instituted a bounty on Dakota scalps.⁶⁴

The Dakota had been defeated, but the war for control of Dakota Territory and eastern Montana was just beginning. In the aftermath of the attacks on Minnesota River settlements, the state’s leaders joined with federal forces to mount massive punitive expeditions to chase the renegades who had fled onto the western plains. There, the exiles from Minnesota joined with bands of the Teton Sioux (Hunkpapa and Blackfeet) who were engaged in the crucial summer activity of hunting and drying meat to secure a food supply for the coming winter.

The Dakota (or Santee Sioux) of Minnesota represented the easternmost tribe in a loosely confederated and widely dispersed people who recognized common descent from seven ancestral political units called council fires.⁶⁵ The Lakota in turn were one of seven tribes of the Teton Sioux: the Lakota, Hunk-papa, Brule, Miniconjou, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Sihaspas. In the course of making war on the Dakota who had sought refuge in the lands of their kinsmen, the Lakota, the United States attacked the Lakota indiscriminately as well. Just as significantly, the punitive campaigns into the Dakotas were intrusions into a country where the soldiers had no right to be, according to the Lakota view of the proper relations between their people and the wasichu (whites) who had recently begun encroaching on areas they had long viewed—and fought to defend—as their own.

Like other punitive wars fought for control over territory inhabited by people deemed to be savages by expansive colonial powers, the expeditions to punish the Dakota launched from Minnesota in 1863 and 1864 combined a rhetoric of righteous retribution with the strategic goal of extending sovereignty claims over contested territory. They were also intended to intimidate and serve as a warning to Indians further west, like the Lakota, and discourage their active resistance to white-settler expansion.

While punitive actions are associated with volatile and primal emotions, such as anger and the desire for vengeance, the military rationale for such wars stresses their role in disciplining the adversary; punitive actions are launched not just to punish but also to “teach a lesson.” Not surprisingly, the military literature on the history and theory of punitive wars often discusses them in the context of colonial warfare. The theory behind punitive wars is that “primitive, less organized enemies” cannot be dissuaded from unwanted behaviors by the mere knowledge that their actions may elicit the wrath of a more powerful adversary.⁶⁶

The concept of a military action whose primary objective is to punish implies the arrogation of the moral authority to mete out justice to the other side. Similarly, expeditions are one-sided actions in which the initiative to invade and pursue is claimed by the punitive authority, the one in pursuit. Such inherently asymmetrical language reveals the presumption that the great power possesses a monopoly on moral authority to act in a way that is intended to teach a lesson. Moral right is assumed to lie with the greater power that is in pursuit. This is an unquestioned premise of punitive actions. Indeed, one might say that the rhetorical force of acting with punitive intent is in itself an act that asserts the moral high ground and overwhelms contesting claims of justice and moral authority.

The punitive expeditions of 1863 and 1864 represented the largest forces yet assembled against western Indians as they pursued the remnants of the Dakota fleeing as far as the Missouri River. Led by Henry Hastings Sibley, a fur trader who had become Minnesota’s first governor, and by Alfred Sully, a general redirected from the Civil War to lead the effort, the punitive raids penetrated deep into the Coteau du Missouri country, a land of elevated rolling plains stretching from close to the Canadian border generally east of the Missouri River and south into what is today north-central South Dakota. This was a hot, dry, and inhospitable region, which Sully famously described as “Hell with the fires put out.”⁶⁷

The massive expeditions that set forth into the Dakota Territory each included thousands of soldiers and hundreds of Indian scouts drawn from the Winnebagos and also from among the Dakotas. Sully and Sibley ranged up the Missouri River and across the hot arid grasslands in search of Indian encampments to chastise. The brigades were supported by hundreds of wagons and mule teams, as well as herds of cattle brought along to furnish meat for the soldiers.⁶⁸ During the summers of 1863 and 1864, the forces of Sully and Sibley attacked Indian villages camped at Big Mound (northeast of present-day Bismarck) as well as at Whitestone Hill to the south and Killdeer Mountain further west. Made up of different Sioux bands who had come together to hunt, the number of lodges ranged from hundreds to an estimated fifteen hundred at Killdeer. In each of these major engagements, the Indians fought first to cover the retreat of women and children from their encampments. Estimates of the number of casualties in each battle vary widely, but run into the hundreds. At Whitestone alone, it is thought that 150 to 300 Santee, Yanktonai, and Teton Sioux were killed, including women and children. The number of soldiers killed is better known; in the same battle, Sully’s forces lost twenty-two men killed and fifty injured. At Killdeer Mountain, about forty U.S. soldiers died.⁶⁹

The punishment the forces applied to the Indian villages they encountered was intended both to demonstrate the army’s ability and determination to inflict damage and to make life and even survival difficult not just by killing them but also by destroying their shelter and especially the meat they were gathering for the winter. Lodges, meat, robes, utensils: the soldiers methodically burned it all. After the battle of Whitestone Hill (September 3, 1863), it took a hundred men two days to gather up and destroy all the provisions and possessions left behind by the Santee, Yanktonai, and Teton Sioux as they fled. This included plunder the Dakota had brought from their attacks on settlements in the Minnesota valley along with three hundred lodges and 400,000–500,000 pounds of buffalo meat (roughly 1,000 butchered buffalo). All of it was burned. Captain Mason, a wagon master for the expedition, remarked that “fat ran in streams from the burning mass of meat.”⁷⁰

Following the Killdeer fight, Sully’s troops systematically destroyed everything the fleeing Indians had left behind (which they had intended to return to recover). It took a thousand men a whole day to burn forty tons of pemmican (dried buffalo meat packed in buffalo skins), dried berries, tanned buffalo, elk, and antelope hides, brass and copper kettles and mess pans, saddles, travois, and lodge poles. “Even the surrounding woods were set afire.” Soldiers also shot the three thousand dogs left tied to pickets in the village. Two toddlers discovered in one of the abandoned lodges were also killed, their skulls bashed with tomahawks by Winnebago scouts.

The Indians had been severely punished, while their property loss had reduced them to a state of destitution. “Not the least of their losses was the exhaustion very largely of their supply of ammunition,” commented one observer, “for upon this they must depend principally for their subsistence.”⁷¹ In a war intended to strike a blow at the Indians’ will to resist and ability to survive through the region’s notoriously hard winters, Sully was quoted as saying: “I would rather destroy their supplies than to kill fifty of their warriors.”⁷²

In the fights at Big Mound, Whiteside Hill, Dead Buffalo Lake, and Kill-deer Mountain as well as in smaller engagements and skirmishes, the superior weapons of the U.S. forces were decisive. Even when some of Sibley and Sully’s forces were confronted by superior numbers, the punitive forces used artillery to kill and disperse the enemy. Forerunners of the howitzers on display in Philadelphia a decade later were decisive in winning engagements. The hunting villages the punitive forces tracked and attacked also had to fight covering actions to protect the retreat of their women and children.

Following the Killdeer Battle, as Sully’s forces pursued the fleeing Sioux across the Missouri and onto the western edge of the Badlands, the two sides again engaged in battle. After several days of skirmishes in the choking dust of the grassless buttes, a thirty-year-old Hunkpapa warrior called Sitting Bull engaged some of the Indian scouts serving with Sully in shouted conversation. Why were they fighting with the whites, Sitting Bull wanted to know. “You have no business with the soldiers,” he told them. “The Indians here have no fight with the whites,” he shouted to them. “Why is it the whites come to fight with the Indians?” In Sitting Bull’s estimation, sovereignty over the country into which the punitive forces had penetrated lay entirely with its native owners. The soldiers were interlopers. If the whites would only recognize this simple truth, there need be no grounds for war. If they would not recognize it, Sitting Bull would resist all their efforts to encroach on the Lakota homeland.⁷³ Sitting Bull had articulated his people’s sovereignty claims over Dakota territory. It was a view of sovereignty that was inimical to the westward pressure of American expansion, but one under which Sitting Bull and others would unite in unyielding and often resourceful resistance to incursions by miners, settlers, and the army itself.

Two summers of campaigning had exacted a high cost in Indian lives. And the forces of Sully and Sibley had inflicted another blow as well. When their columns of blue-clad soldiers withdrew, kicking up the dust of the dry prairies, they left in place companies of soldiers at established forts like Berthold and Union. More ominous yet, from the Lakota perspective, they began building new forts: Forts Sully, Rice, and most hateful of all, Fort Buford, which would become the focus of attacks by Hunkpapas led by Sitting Bull for four years after its construction on the Missouri River opposite the mouth of the Yellowstone in 1866.⁷⁴ Through punitive war and the establishment of offensive outposts, the frontier had been extended almost to Montana Territory. This was the frontier that Fort Abraham Lincoln—where Scott’s new regiment, the Seventh Cavalry, was headquartered—was intended to secure and defend. The Sully and Sibley punitive campaigns fit into a well-established pattern for empires aiming to project sovereignty claims onto contested territory; they combined the rhetoric of punishment and retribution with the strategic objective of establishing control over territories that had previously been recognized as part of the Sioux domain.

From the Dakota Badlands in 1864 to the Yellowstone country a decade later, Sitting Bull’s position did not waver: the incursion of white civilization with its farmers and railroads destroyed forests and drove away the wild game. It threatened the very existence of his people and it would be resisted, along with the government’s insistence that they cede their lands, live within the reservations established for them, and take up farming in the white fashion. It would take Scott another four decades—and military and diplomatic experiences throughout the continent and on the other side of the world—to gain some perspective on the transformative historical forces at work in the activation of the frontier army in the Great Sioux War he was about to join. For now, Second Lieutenant Scott was attuned to the challenge of his first commission and the thrill of being on the threshold of the wild country that had captivated his imagination for so long.