Soldier in the Southwest: the career of General A. V. Kautz, 1869-1886 Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Wallace, Andrew Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 11/10/2021 12:35:25 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/552260 7?/ /96> ? zyz /, / {LOjO. >2y SOLDIER IN THE SOUTHWEST: THE CAREER OF GENERAL A. V. KAUTZ, 1869-1886 by ANDREW WALLACE Volume I A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In The Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1968 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Andrew W h-U r c p __________________________________ entitled _________ Soldier in the Southwest:______________ The Career of General A. V. Kautz, 1869-1886 be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy_________________________ Dissertation Director Date After inspection of the final copy of the dissertation, the following members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance:* This approval and acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED! COPYRIGHTED BY ANDREW WALLACE 1967 ill PREFACE Shortly after the disaster on the Little Big Horn River of Montana, In the summer of 1876, the personal effects of Lieutenant Colonel George A« Custer were gathered and returned to his widow. Among them was a small book, only three by five Inches, bound In pebble-grained brown cloth that bore a gold eagle and shield device, all faded and worn from much handling. The spine was stamped: "Customs of Service for Officers of the ARMY." Had Elizabeth Custer looked beyond her husband1s ink inscrip­ tion on the end paper, she would have noticed that the volume was written by an officer whom her husband had known but slightly, but whose modest handbook was widely read in the army of the latter nineteenth century. Brevet Major General August V. Kautz. The author's advice to cavalry commanders such as Custer was to watch over his men and horses, "so that they may be in the best possible con­ dition for the moment of action. When that moment arrives, he should receive it confidently, and should 'go in' with a method akin to rashness, counting only on success, and regardless of the cost." In a later paragraph, Kautz had written: "... pure Cavalry cannot hold positions on the defensive— it must either fight to win or run away," and Custer had underscored the last six words. iv V The present work is in part an effort to explain what sort of man wrote the manual that luckless Custer read with such attention, and to place him in proper relation­ ship with his contemporaries. For although it will be seen that August Valentine Kautz was a soldier of some­ thing less than Napoleonic achievements, his forty-six years of service were more fruitful than Custer's meteoric nineteen. Specifically, this is a narrative of the post- Clvll War career of Kautz, his life and times from 1869 through 1886. In that period he commanded Fort Stanton, New Mexico, for twenty-six months; served in Arizona twice as commanding officer of the 8th U.S. Infantry; and com­ manded the Military Department of Arizona for three years. In the period that Kautz was in the Southwest, there were ten military departments in the United States. Seven comprised the Western states and territories and were divided between the Military Divisions of the Pacific and the Missouri. By any test, the Division of the Missouri, commanded by Major General Philip H. Sheridan, was the most important and contained four departments: the Missouri, the Platte, Dakota, and Texas. Most of the Far West, however, fell within the Division of the Pacific which embraced the Departments of California, of the Columbia, and of Arizona. The western military departments were usually commanded by brigadier generals, or by brevet major generals vl who served temporarily in their brevet rank as Kautz did in Arizona. These commanding generals were simultaneously administrative and tactical directors of invariably large geographic areas, each of which Included many posts and camps and might have subordinate territorial commands called districts. Each department was garrisoned by sev­ eral regiments whose colonels were always junior to the general. If the department had a subordinate district, a regimental colonel would command it. According to the 65th Article of War, a department commander had the same author­ ity as a general commanding a field army in wartime. The Army Regulations gave him powers second only to those of the War Department itself. The work of the soldiers in the frontier depart­ ments involved very little combat and less glamor. The cavalrymen, usually a regiment in each department, bore the lion's share of routine patrols, Indian chases, and police duty on the reservations. The infantry, with less mobility, had usually to be employed locally about the posts, but department commanders did not hesitate to use them for mounted service when horses, wagons or mules were available. While popular writers have made out the cavalry to have been the "Indian: fighters," it is mote- worthy that nearly all departments were commanded by generals who formerly were infantry officers. vli At any rate, to characterize the post-Civll War history of the military frontier as one of continual Indian warfare is a distortion of the army’s role in the settlement of the West. Here and there the army had first to pacify a tribe or to punish renegades from a reserva­ tion. The most serious troubles arose on the Plains where the proud horse-and-buffalo Indians constituted a real barrier to white settlement. Elsewhere, as in the South­ west, the primary function of the army was to watch the Mexican border, discourage outlaws; police the reservations, and improve communications. In Arizona and New Mexico the army was as important for economic reasons as for military contingencies. 3y 1874, when Kautz arrived in Arizona Territory, the army there had become purely a corps of laborers and a constabulary. They were engaged in building camps and roads; stringing telegraph lines and escorting mail wagons; and keeping order on the Indian reservations where the civilian agents of the Interior Department were unfitted to their jobs, hampered by red tape, or absent, and sometimes all three. The duty, nevertheless, was strenuous. No legionnaire of France has soldiered so hard as the men in dusty blue who kept the peace in the Southwest. Then as now, peacetime soldiering drew little applause from civilians who imagined themselves alone to be making commonwealths in the wilderness. A good many soldiers. vlli in fact, took their discharges in Arizona and became miners or stockmen or merchants* Not a few deserted to find a more lucrative occupation after the Quartermaster paid their freight to the land of sun and thorn. The Department of Arizona, for its part, was far less important than most others, and most others had command­ ing generals at one time or another far abler and better known today than Kautz. Why, then, a study of him? In the first place, he was one commander of whom we have remaining an adequate record for a biography. His papers in the Library of Congress reveal something more of the man beneath the shoulder straps than we shall ever know of, say, John Pope or Alfred Howe Terry. The voluminous writings of Kautz— official and private, published and unpublished- reveal his military thought and relationships in positive terms. In the second place, his length of service exceeds some others and spans the era between the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War. As a youth, Kautz marched off to Mexico with a muzzle-loading, black-powder musket; and in the last years of his active duty he was president of a board that considered adoption of the army*s first m o d e m repeating rifle. Moreover, analysis of Kautz* performance in Arizona provides instructive comparison with the similar career of George Crook whom he succeeded and who was perhaps the ablest commander of any in the Western depart­ ments. lx Aside from didactic considerations, the life of Kautz is worth knowing because the nineteenth century military scene is incomplete without him* If his accom­ plishments were not great, he was at any rate a prominent fixture on the contemporary stage of events. Every officer of the wartime army knew of him, many of the most noted leaders from General Grant downward had served with him* Many younger officers of the postwar years served under Kautz and never forgot him* He was the querulous gadfly of bumptious superiors and the representative of an old- fashioned class that has disappeared from the modern army.