Washita Battlefield NHS, Cheyenne, Oklahoma

As with the post on the Sand Creek Massacre, this history contains accounts of graphic violence. Do not read any further if this will upset you.

The 7th Cavalry attacking Black Kettle's camp on the Washita River
(From the exhibit at the Washita Battlefield NHS)

On November 26, 1868, the Peace Chief Black Kettle had just returned to his Washita River camp from a strenuous 100 mile mission through the snow to request permission to move his camp closer to Arapaho, Kiowa, and other Cheyenne tribes downriver. Permission was denied. His wife, Medicine Woman Later, uneasy with the rumors of U.S. troops in the area, wanted to move that night. She had good reason to feel uneasy. In 1864, at Sand Creek in Colorado, U.S. troops had attacked their peaceful camp, killed 125, and shot her nine times. She survived, but now at their winter camp, she had a premonition. The council of elders decided to wait until the next morning to move.

The Army was indeed nearby. The Osage and Lenape scouts had found tracks through the snow, possibly Black Kettle’s party returning to camp. The Army decided it led to a hostile encampment. That next morning, as dawn broke, Lt. Col. George Custer and some 700 soldiers of the 7^th U.S. Cavalry stormed into the campsite and shot the Indians as they struggled out of their teepees. Warriors desperately fought to cover the retreat of the elderly, women, and children. Medicine Woman Later and Black Kettle hopped on a horse and then were killed as they crossed the Washita River.

Map of Battle (From Washita Battlefield NHS web site)

Looking at the hills to the northwest over which Custer and his troops rode to attack the camp among the trees in the middle of the picture (Photo by Hunner)

At one point, Ben Clark, Custer’s Chief of Scouts, rushed in and told him that soldiers were killing women and children “without mercy.” Custer ordered his soldiers to stop shooting and instead take prisoners. The attack lasted only thirty minutes with estimates of forty to a hundred men, women, and children killed. Twenty-two soldiers lost their lives, seventeen of them from Major Joel Elliot’s attempt to chase down those trying to escape. He and his men ran into warriors from the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps downriver riding to the sound of battle. Custer had attacked the weakest camp, and now several thousand warriors started to surround the 7^th Cavalry.

Some Cheyenne hid in the tall grass to escape the soldiers (Photo by Hunner)

The soldiers had orders to destroy the camp – burn the lodges and all the blankets, food, and supplies in them to deprive the Cheyenne of sustenance at the beginning of winter. Custer also ordered his troops to kill the Cheyenne horse herd so they sliced the throats and then when that proved too difficult, shot over 800 animals. Warriors from the other camps watched in horror from the nearby hills, afraid to attack since the soldiers had taken some fifty elders, women, and children captive.

Place where horses and mules were slaughtered (Photo by Hunner)

With ammunition running low and a growing force of enraged warriors nearby, Custer feinted a move to go downriver which sent the warriors retreating to protect their own camps. Relieved of a possible counterattack, the 7^th Cavalry and their prisoners stole away into the fading light.

This is the second act in the tragedy of the southern plains Indian War. As Ranger Joel Shockley recounted, the first act happened at Sand Creek. When Col. Chivington and his soldiers attacked Black Kettle’s camp of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864 at Sand Creek, a Plains War erupted that lasted for years, culminating in the Battle at Little Big Horn (Joel’s third act). In response of the Sand Creek Massacre, warriors from the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers rampaged across the southern Plains to avenge their fallen comrades and family members. Peace treaties came and went, and Black Kettle signed some of them, but he had little control over the attacks by the warriors.

Francis Gibson, a lieutenant in the 7^th Cavalry, later estimated that between August and November in 1868, 117 people were killed in the southern plains by the Dog Soldiers, with others scalped or captured, and almost 1,000 horses and mules stolen. As Western historian Paul Hutton said in the movie at the Washita visitors’ center: “The Army was humiliated. This was the Army that had defeated Robert E. Lee.” Something had to be done.

The Commander in charge of the Department of the Missouri, Major General Philip Sheridan, called for total war against the Indians. His aide-de-camp, Schuyler Crosby wrote: “The General’s policy is to attack and kill all Indians wherever met and to carry war into their own villages so that they will have to withdraw their marauding bands for the protection of their own families.”[1]

Lt. Col George Custer as he looked during the winter campaign at Washita (https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/photogallery/imr/park/waba/)

Total war and winter campaigns were not new. Union troops scoured the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War to remove the Confederates’ source of food. Kit Carson had conquered the Navajo in 1863 with a summer campaign of destroying crops and homes followed up with a winter attack. The massacre at Sand Creek also occurred as winter set in in November 1864. In regards to Washita, Paul Hutton concluded: “This was total warfare at its worst. With the dawn attack, they were the most vulnerable…. Total war against the Cheyenne was absolutely effective and forced them onto the reservation.” But he added that the Cheyenne “would have their revenge on Custer and the 7^th Cavalry at Little Big Horn.”[2]

As I left the film about the massacre, I noticed that the other guy in the room had a t-shirt from Fort Pulaski. I struck up a conversation with Tim Sprano from Lynchburg, Virginia. He is a veteran park goer, having visited 371 of the 412 in the system over the last fifteen years. He teaches mathematics at Liberty University, but his other passion is our national parks. He remarked that every park has its own reason to exist, so take what it gives you. Here at Washita, he commented: “Obviously, we wouldn’t do stuff now that they did 100 years ago. We have different values today than of the past so it’s important to see and hear the whole story.”

After the movie, Park Rangers Joel Shockley and Richard Zahm spent over an hour chatting with me about what happened at Washita. Richard said this was an important site because people truly learn about our past here-- people who just stop by to stamp their NPS passports end up staying here all day. He said: “It’s so much more complicated than just cowboys and Indians…. I thought when I came out here, it would be a lot of black and white and it’s not. There are good guys and bad guys on all sides.”

NPS Ranger Richard Zahm (Photo by Hunner)

Joel agreed: “This is one of the best kept secrets in American history. It is far more complicated. This was like the Oklahoma City bombing for the tribes or like 9/11. There were not just Cheyenne here, there were a lot of Indians involved, and Mexicans too. Half of Custer’s command were immigrants from Ireland and Germany, a way to become citizens. All these cultures came together by happenstance…. This is part of your heritage, whether you have Indian in you, have soldier in you. It’s part of our heritage – all our warts and blemishes.”

After the Indians were forced onto reservations, many of their children were taken to boarding schools to further remove them from their tribe and culture (Photo from exhibit at Washita Battlefield NHS)

The Plains tribes lived on land that was a route to the gold and silver mines in Colorado. The Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, and other tribes had roamed and fought over the Great Plains for thousands of years but then got in the way of Westward Expansion. As they protected their land, their families, and their cultures, they clashed first with the pioneers and miners moving in or through their homelands, and then with the U.S. Army. A Cheyenne Chief, Leg in Water, in 1864 said: “We loved the whites until we found out they lied to us and robbed us of what we had. We have raised the battle axe until death.”[3] After the Civil War, the Army used the tactics and weapons to wage total war to force Indians to move to reservations and kill those who refused to go. This last chapter of the Indian Wars in North America played out over the decade or so right after the Civil War. The legacy of conquest lives with us today, and as Richard, Joel, and Tim note, it is a complicated story viewed from our 21^st century eyes.

Everywhere I have traveled in Driven by History, I have run into the deep heritage of our land, which starts with Native American peoples. They had rich and complex civilizations before Europeans arrived, they lost much of their ancestral lands and their culture, and they are still here.  

The Washita Battlefield became an Oklahoman state park in October 1966 and a National Historic Site on November 12, 1996.

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[1] Mark Gardner, Washita Battlefield National Historic Site (Western National Parks Association: 2002), 8.

[2] “Destiny at Dawn,” documentary film shown at the Washita Battlefield NHS.

[3] From exhibit text at visitors’ center for the Washita Battlefield NHS.