The United States Army's Evolution of Mobile
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ADAPTING ON THE PLAINS: THE UNITED STATES ARMY’S EVOLUTION OF MOBILE WARFARE IN TEXAS, 1848-1859 Mark B. Buchy, B.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2013 APPROVED: Richard B. McCaslin, Major Professor and Chair of the Department of History Randolph B. Campbell, Committee Member Richard G. Lowe, Committee Member Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Buchy, Mark B. Adapting on the Plains: The United States Army’s Evolution of Mobile Warfare in Texas, 1848-1859. Master of Arts (History), May 2013,121 pp., references, 99 titles. The Army, despite having been vexed for a century on how to effectively fight the Plains Indians, ultimately defeated them only a decade after the Civil War. This thesis will bring to the forefront those individuals who adapted fighting techniques and ultimately achieved victories on the Texas frontier before the Civil War. The majority of these victories came as a result of mounted warfare under the direction of lower ranking officers in control of smaller forces. The tactic of fighting Indians from horseback was shown to be effective by the Rangers and later emulated by the Army. Copyright 2013 by Mark B. Buchy ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapters 1. PROLOGUE .............................................................................................. 1 2. CHARACTERISTICS of PLAINS FIGHTING .......................................... 10 3. OLD STUBBORN ARMY IN TEXAS ........................................................ 28 4 INDIVIDUALS ADAPT ............................................................................. 44 5 FEDERAL RANGERS IN TEXAS ............................................................ 66 6 FIND THEM, FIX THEM, FIGHT THEM, FINISH THEM .......................... 91 7. EPILOGUE ............................................................................................ 112 WORKS CITIED .......................................................................................................... 114 iii CHAPTER 1 PROLOGUE Col. Ranald S. MacKenzie dealt a fatal blow to the Comanche when he attacked a series of their camps at the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon on September 28, 1874. Similarly, Brevet Maj. Gen. George Crook and Brevet Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles are credited with finally defeating the Sioux and Cheyenne with mounted, highly mobile, highly lethal campaigns on the plains. Each of these men received their marching orders from Lt. Gen. William P. Sherman, whose path of destruction through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War provided a compelling example of total war’s effects. Therefore it seems logical that the Army’s mobile campaigns against the Plains Indians grew from that experience. However, this is not the case. The Army, despite having been vexed for a century on how to effectively fight the Plains Indians, ultimately defeated them only a decade after the Civil War. It is interesting to find such a quick resolution to the issue, considering that frontier defense garnered little attention from 1861 to 1865. Most celebrated works on the Army fail to explain this metamorphosis. Renowned historian Russell F. Weigley characterizes the return to frontier warfare as period involving a strategy of annihilation, born out of a gruesome war and refocused on the Plains Indians. He touches on the subject by stating that prior to the Civil War Army confined itself to passive patrolling, but after the war, a new policy dictated that the Army would be on the offensive. Weigley justifies his theory by suggesting that Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan developed an “innovative strategy” by waging winter campaigns, reflecting his and Sherman’s experience in carrying war to the enemy's resources and people. The “new” mounted campaigns destroyed fixed 1 Indian camps by taking advantage of surprise and exploiting their malnourished herds. These tactics, which share similarities with other campaigns during that time, proved to be successful.1 The views of historians Alan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski’ resemble Weigley’s. They wrote that to achieve success, the Army had to fight a ruthless winter-oriented total war, targeting the Indians’ fixed camps. Interestingly, they also state, “the factors that shaped colonial Indian wars still prevailed [in the West].” This assertion shows that these two historians did not consider the tactical changes espoused by the Army after the Civil War to be significant. But how did the Army suddenly arrive at a solution that ended decades of conflict? The key to understanding this answer comes from within Texas, during the decade prior to the Civil War. The ultimate conflict between the Comanche, arguably the best cavalry the Army ever faced, and the Texas Rangers who adapted Comanche tactics, provided the Army with the answer. Antebellum Texas provided a training field for the Army’s ultimate adaption. 2 Narrowing the focus to Texas, military historians such as Robert M. Utley have produced influential histories of frontier defense relating to the Plains Indians, the Texas Rangers, and the Army. His central theme can be expressed in the idea that the harsh alien environment of the Texas frontier impeded the growth of white civilization for decades. This thesis reflects Utley’s broad idea that the Army failed to adapt conventional means of defense into effective methods of protection against hostile Indians during the antebellum period. On a macro or strategic level, he is not incorrect; 1 Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War; A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 159. 2 Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (New York: Free Press, 1984), 254. 2 Army leaders then, much like today, focused intently on the "next war." However, this broad assertion, which many historians fail to question, obscures individual accomplishments in specific campaigns. Like Utley, some historians mention unconventional means such as federalized Rangers, tactical-sized mounted campaigns, and seek-and-destroy missions. These deserve more attention. In the face of conventional war theory, West Point instruction, limited funds, and official disinterest, captains and colonels in the field adapted and learned new tactics in order to fight and win on their own. In antebellum Texas, some of these individuals adopted unconventional offensive tactics from the Rangers and Indians they encountered. Although little evidence suggests that Army frontier veterans attempted to disseminate the lessons learned from these experiences in any systematic fashion, these earlier pioneers of frontier-style warfare paved the way for others after the Civil War. Walter Prescott Webb, one of the preeminent frontier historians of his era, wrote that the Great Plains stand as a distinct environmental entity, radically different from the woodlands of the east. Webb stated that the plains had three dominant characteristics to which Americans at that time were not accustomed: flat, barren, and dry. The unfamiliarity of this environment impeded population growth and, accordingly, defined the trials the Army would endure subjugating the Plains Indians. This analysis encapsulates the same broad idea that many military historians such as Utley, followed by Thomas T. Smith, and Robert Wooster, mention but do not pursue in depth. Utley later elaborated that this environment was absolutely foreign to the citizens of the United States, who found the plains impossible to cope with for a long period of time. Besides topography, the Army faced new challenges with “Indians [who] differed in 3 many ways from those of the Eastern Woodlands. A new geography and a new enemy decreed that the Army evolve new attitudes and new capabilities.” As a whole, this group concludes that the Army did not evolve during the decade prior to the Civil War. After surveying much of the same information, this author suggests that the Army did evolve on a tactical level and paved the way for success after the Civil War.3 At the end of the Mexican War in 1848, the War Department recalled its troops from Mexico and reorganized the Army on the western frontier. As a result of the war, the geographic frontier expanded by over 1,000,000 square miles, yet Congress reduced the Army to one-half its wartime strength. Its slow rate of growth was noted in 1854, when Secretary of War Jefferson Davis stressed that while the Army had increased by 305 members, the nation's population had grown by 18 million. Furthermore, the country now had to safeguard two seaboard coastlines, a 3,000-mile Indian frontier, and a 2,500-mile border with Mexico. Utley, adept at creating pictures with words, notes that if the Army had three times the number of soldiers with the same proportion stationed in the West, it would still have afforded less than fifty officers and men for each post and no more than one soldier for every forty square miles of territory, every 400 settlers, and every eight hostile Indians.4 Similarly, Smith reveals in The Old Army in Texas that Brevet Maj. Gen. William Jenkins Worth’s 1849 departmental command of Texas was a daunting task. At his disposal were three regiments of infantry, two companies of artillery, and half a regiment of mounted troops, which 3 Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Waltham, Mass.: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1931), 15; Robert M. Utley. Frontiersmen in Blue; the United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 6. 4 Report of the Secretary of War, House Executive Document I, 33rd Cong., 2nd Sess., (1854), 3-6; Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue,.16. 4 amounted to a total of 1,488 soldiers. Statistically, this broke down to one soldier for each 180 square miles of Texas. Simply surviving in the hostile environment consumed a large percentage of the total military effort, which left little energy for patrolling such a vast area or fighting any human enemy.5 Wooster expands on the notion of scant forces by elaborating about 19th century public sentiment regarding the Army. He explains that “Americans were consistent in their desire to restrict the Army’s role in the life of the nation [being] wary of a standing army.