also exhausted the last of the white man’s patience, and
ruined forever the arguments of the peace advocates and
pro-Indian humanitarians,” Gwynne wrote.
At long last those wishing to either subjugate or
exterminate the Comanches and other warlike tribes had
the “green light,” the go-ahead given by President Ulysses
S. Grant to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Lt. Gen.
Philip H. Sheridan, commander of the Military Division
of the Missouri, where all the trouble was occurring.
Experiments in peaceful assimilation had failed overall to
squelch the violence spreading like a wind-fanned prairie
fire igniting Northern Texas and parts of Indian Territory
and other frontier areas. In short, efforts to make Indians
into white men, to make the nomadic peoples of the
plains settle into sedentary lives where farming and other
useful skills could be taught them, where Indian children
could be taught the way of the whites — “the truth” —
would be harried through four seasons, if necessary.
They would be given no rest, no freedom to hunt. They
would be starved out. Their villages would be found
and burned, their horses taken from them. That this
action was probably two decades late was irrelevant
now. The will was there, and all the editorial opinion in
the land supported it.”
This end-all campaign involved five columns of
U.S. cavalry and infantry with orders to close in on
watercourses east of the Caprock, where the rugged
terrain rose sharply to the Llano Estacado —the
great Staked Plain of the Texas Panhandle. Gywnne
described the tactics employed:
“[Col. Ranald Slidell] Mackenzie commanded
three of them: his own crack Fourth Cavalry was to
march from Fort Concho (present-day San Angelo)
and probe northward from his old supply camp on the
Fresh Water Fork of the Brazos; Black Jack Davidson’s
Tenth Calvary would move due west from Fort Sill;
and George Buell’s Eleventh Infantry would operate
in a northwesterly direction between the two, from
Fort Bascom in New Mexico. Major William Price
would march east with the Eighth Cavalry, while Col.
Nelson A Miles, a Mackenzie rival and a man destined
to become one of the country’s most famous Indian
fighters, came south with the Sixth Cavalry and Fifth
Infantry from Fort Dodge, Kansas… .”
No more half measures. No fear of negative press
JANUARY 2016
PA R K E R C O U N T Y T O D AY
Gen. Phillip Sheridan
were by and large ineffectual. So the military assumed all
authority and was charged with ending the hostilities. The
series of battles would come to be known as the Red River
War (June of 1874 into the spring of 1875).
The Sherman-Sheridan strategy was to quickly register
peaceable Indians at their respective agencies and then
confine them to reservations. This accomplished, troop
columns would close in on the Indians from all sides,
making the box they were in smaller and smaller.
“In August and September [1874] the full might of
the western army was finally summoned forth to hunt,
engage, and destroy what was left of the horse Indians,”
wrote Gywnne. “Sheridan’s idea was that the Indians
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
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