Indian Fighters

IN 1915 THE NOTED ETHNOLOGIST George Bird Grinnell published his The Fighting Cheyennes, maybe the best book ever written about an Indian tribe. Grinnell’s tome partly derived from the work of George E. Hyde of Omaha, Nebraska, a “housebound scholar,” deaf and nearly blind after a childhood attack of scarlet fever, and Hyde’s extensive archive was, in turn, the result of a voluminous ten-year correspondence with George Bent of Colony, Oklahoma.

Bent and Hyde were trying to get published Bent’s memoir, which included the story of the Southern Cheyennes going back through George Bent’s long life. Hyde’s worsening health brought the project to a halt, and at Bent’s urging, the manuscript was handed over to Grinnell with the idea that with his help the book that was Bent and Hyde’s dream would emerge. Instead, Grinnell essentially stole it, adding the rich material to his own researches, and giving Bent and Hyde only passing mention as sources in The Fighting Cheyennes.

Now, in the well-written and detail-rich Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent, David Fridtjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich give a perhaps deserved slap to the underhanded George Bird Grinnell. Bent had a remarkable pedigree. His father William and his uncle Charles were legendary figures in the fur trade era, building “the adobe castle” of Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River in Colorado in 1833, which became the trade center for the tribes of the southern plains. Uncle Charles Bent moved on to Taos, got rich on the wagon freight commerce of the Santa Fe Trail, married into a prominent Mexican family, and became New Mexico’s first U.S. territorial governor (though he did not govern long, as he was killed in the Taos Uprising of 1847).

WILLIAM BENT first made a favorable impression on the Cheyennes when he hid two of them from marauding Comanches intent on revenge for Cheyenne horse thievery. This led to his marriage to Owl Woman, daughter of Chief White Thunder, the keeper of the Cheyenne Sacred Medicine Arrows, thus a man of great influence among the scattered bands of the Cheyennes. The match gave William cachet not only among the Southern Cheyennes, but also their allies the Arapahos, and later–in more peaceful times–the Kiowas and Comanches. The union was a wise business decision, but also a loving one that produced four children: Mary, Robert, George, and Julia. William also had a son, Charley, by Yellow Woman in 1845 (a relative of Owl Woman, and a situation not unusual among the Cheyennes). Owl Woman died giving birth to Julia in 1847.

George Bent (Ho-my-ike, or “Beaver,” was his Cheyenne name) was born on July 7, 1843, in Owl Woman’s lodge, pitched outside the walls of Bent’s Fort. His early life was lived as a Cheyenne boy who learned to hunt buffalo, ride (and steal) horses, practice the arts of war, and study the nuances of Cheyenne society, some of which was closed to him because of his mixed blood. He learned about the political interactions of the Cheyenne warrior societies: the Crooked Lances, the Bowstrings, the Kit Foxes, the Red Shields, and the feared and bellicose Dog Soldiers (or “Dog Men”), the latter playing a role in George’s young manhood. His brother Charley would die a Dog Soldier.

Following the example of other traders, William sent the Bent children to Missouri boarding schools, in George’s case the Christian Brothers Academy and Webster College in St. Louis. From there an educated George rashly enlisted in the Confederate army at the start of the Civil War. He served as an artilleryman, participated in a couple of small engagements, and in August 1862, was captured by Union forces in Mississippi and imprisoned near St. Louis. He was released thanks to his father’s political connections, swore an oath of allegiance to the Union, and drifted back to the familiar world of the Colorado plains, where he eventually attached himself to Chief Black Kettle’s Cheyennes, encamped on Sand Creek in the fall of 1864.

At dawn on November 29, Black Kettle’s village was attacked by Colonel John Chivington’s First Colorado Volunteers, a Union militia that had defeated a force of Confederate Texans at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, in 1862, halting the Rebel advance toward the Colorado goldfields. The First Colorado was also responsible for punishing Indian depredations, and Chivington was bound to make an example of a Cheyenne village following raids along the Arkansas and South Platte Rivers. As it happens, Black Kettle, a well-known “peace chief,” had nothing to do with the raids, and for safety had been advised by government authorities to camp on Sand Creek. An American flag flew outside of his lodge.

SAND CREEK (along with George Custer’s similar attack on Black Kettle on the Washita River in 1868) has been recorded as one of the most gruesome atrocities of the Indian wars. Chivington’s troops rode through the village literally shooting anyone who moved. In gloomy detail, Halfbreed records that 170 Cheyennes were killed, including 110 women and children. Bodies were scalped and mutilated as the soldiers sought grisly trophies that eventually were paraded through the dusty streets of Denver. Chivington had ordered his troops not to discriminate in the extermination, even to kill children: “Kill all–little and big–nits make lice.” Leaving the lodges and personal possessions behind, George, Black Kettle, and four hundred others ran for their lives, and eventually found refuge–many wounded, naked, and starving–in Chief Tall Bull’s Dog Soldier village on the Smoky Hill River.

The mindless carnage of Sand Creek embittered George, causing him and other young men to join the Dog Soldiers in a many months-long reign of terror on the central plains of Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. The sometimes ostracized Dog Soldiers were suddenly seen by many Cheyennes as the tribe’s only hope for survival, and they savagely attacked ranches, railroad camps, telegraph stations, and freight wagon traffic moving along the Santa Fe Trail.

IN JANUARY 1865, they were bold enough to attack the town of Julesburg, Colorado Territory. In a running battle they killed fifteen soldiers from nearby Camp Rankin, along with several civilians, without losing a single warrior. The rest of the troopers shut themselves behind the walls of their stockade while the Indians ransacked a nearby government warehouse and ran off a large herd of horses, mules, and cattle. Amidst the wild looting in the warehouse, George broke open several tins of raw oysters (a delicacy to which he had been introduced in St. Louis) and slurped them down “to the amazement and disgust of his friends.” The Dog Soldiers would not be broken until the Battle of Summit Springs in 1869.

Early in the struggle George saw the wisdom of a kept peace. His youthful adventures of riding with the Dog Soldiers were slowly replaced by actions that reflected the realization that opposition to the white advance was futile. His mastery of the Cheyenne and Arapaho languages made him valuable as a paid interpreter during the endless parleys between the government and the tribes. George was instrumental in the negotiations that resulted in the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, which for the first time assigned reservations, with definite boundaries and promises of rations and other supplies, to the tribes of the southern plains.

In 1874, a clash of Indians and hide hunters at Adobe Walls, Texas, sparked the Red River War, involving the Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches. Massive federal retaliation followed, as five columns numbering three thousand troops converged on the Texas Panhandle and neighboring western Kansas, where the last renegades were subdued, their villages burned, and horse herds shot. Indian resistance on the southern plains ceased in the winter of 1875, as the last starving stragglers returned to the reservations. The same was true on the northern plains following the Custer debacle at the Little Bighorn eighteen months later.

George Bent spent the remainder of his life among his Cheyenne brethren in Oklahoma, for in the end he despised the white world. He went through a period of severe alcoholism as whiskey trading was rampant on the reservation in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and he himself participated in the trade. His periods of extreme drunkenness cost him a number of interpreter jobs and strained relations with his wives and children. And in the end–along with the tragic figure that was George Hyde–he had a great book stolen from him by George Bird Grinnell, a worldly intellectual and confidant of Theodore Roosevelt.

There is a history of America in the fact, about which Bent himself marvelled, that a man born in a buffalo-hide lodge could live to read about aerial combat in newspaper accounts of the Great War in Europe. He died in 1918, and his friends gathered to sing the Cheyenne death song: “Nothing lives forever, only the earth and the mountains.”

Bill Croke is a writer in Cody, Wyoming.