In late November 1868, a small detachment under Major Joel Elliot disappeared into the snowy valley of the Washita River. His commander made no serious attempt to find him. Nineteen days later, searchers found where the officer and the soldiers with him had ended. The scene they uncovered became one of the darkest scenes American military history kept buried for decades.
The bloodshed grew out of a brutal strategy cooked up in the years after the Civil War. White settlers, railroad companies, and gold prospectors were flooding onto the plains that Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Comanche peoples had occupied for generations. Buffalo herds collapsed, winter food stores vanished, treaties, broken, and old treaties broken, then came raids, attacks on settlements and military patrols. The army could not catch warriors who knew the country better than they did.
General Philip Sheridan decided the answer lay in the winter. In winter, the tribes had to camp in river valleys, where they could not move fast and could not feed their horses. He chose Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to run the campaign, a commander badly needing a victory. Young Major Joel Elliot rode under Custer, an ambitious officer trying to make a name big enough for a field promotion.
He had survived the Civil War, had joined the regular army, and was posted to the Seventh Cavalry. In the winter campaign he saw his chance. He wanted to prove himself and step out from Custer’s shadow. On November 27, 1868, Custer attacked Black Kettle’s sleeping southern Cheyenne village on the Washita.
Custer’s men wrapped the horses hooves to muffle the sound; the soldiers lay in the snow under freezing dark conditions and waited for dawn. As the charge broke over the camp, women, children, and the elderly, the old, children bolted into the river, Cheyenne warriors held the line long enough for families to reach the trees. Chief Black Kettle, once a peace chief who had survived Sand Creek and tried to avoid war, was shot dead in the river with his wife. In the thick of the smoke and snow, Elliot spotted fleeing Cheyennes pushing downstream toward a narrowing, broken valley.
He turned with about seventeen or eighteen soldiers and rode for them, calling out “Here goes for a brevet or a coffin. He was chasing what looked easy prey, but the valley was a funnel into the winter camps of the Arapaho and Kiowa and Cheyenne villages, and the warriors there were already on the move, having just watched their families shot down a few hundred yards away. The gunfire Kuster heard downstream was a short, hard fight, and it ended with eighteen soldiers surrounded, outnumbered, off their horses, firing until the ammunition ran dry. That was when the struggle ceased being a battle only in a narrow valley.
Custer did not send help. When officers like Captain Frederick Benteen pushed him to go to Elliot’s aid, he refused. The scouts had warned that thousands of warriors gathered downstream, and Custer feared losing his own command. He pulled back as night fell, leaving Elliot and his men somewhere in the dark.
The survivors in the camp were marched off, the horse herd was shot down by the hundreds, and the grass burned. Kuster reported back to Camp Supply acting less like a commander mourning eighteen men than like a general fresh from a triumph. He called it a great victory, called the engagement a heavy defeat for the Indians, and barely touched the loss of women and children or the missing officer and soldiers. He did not say why he had not looked for them.
Benteen did not stay silent. He wrote an anonymous letter to the St. Louis Democrat accusing Kuster of cowardly abandonment, and when Custer confronted the regiment, Benteen stepped forward and owned the letter. The split in the regiment had opened.
Sheridan ordered a return to the Washita in December, in the blizzards of the brutal cold, a stronger force marched back under Sheridan himself and rode down the valley where Elliot’s detachment had disappeared. The valley carried the smell of the camp, burned lodges, wrecked household goods, and frozen blood, and the horses, several hundred carcasses in giant frozen shapes in the snow under order, and a hill near a bend in the river where the scouts came up short. The search party found shell cases, and then before it found the dead, eighteen naked bodies stripped of their uniforms, weaponry, and boots, under the snow, some ablaze with arrows twenty and thirty in a single body, the heads crushed, jaws and eye sockets flattened, throats cut from ear to ear, chopped hands and feet scattered about the hill, bellies opened and slit open, and scalped and re-scalped. Some of the skulls almost completely stripped of skin.
They could barely identify Elliot, old scars on the torso and hair and build doing the work for faces. The mutilation was not only vengeance. The warriors who did the work conducted it inside their own beliefs, which treated the condition of the dead body into the afterlife, a broken body crippled the soul in the next world, cut-off fingers could not combine, and a warrior could not hold a weapon, and could not be rendered whole and weak. They were enraged at the army in the middle of a peace chief’s camp for the murder of their families, and the mutilation was the treatment the army expected, a message thrown back at the men in blue.
The mutilations also filled the beliefs of the warriors, but they did not read it cold. That message, pierced an officer, meant to send a message to Sheridan and the whole of Washington, the message that they would wipe out what came against them, their bodies and their spirits, and the army brought back the dead and the mutilated, which took a mass grave for the seventeen and took Elliot if he lay and wrapped for Fort Arbuckle for a military burial, and Elliot’s body rode under the command that had let him die. The scene changed what had to be made of the war, and the army’s own battle in the winter and the consequences came fast at both sides. The dead handed the army what it needed, and the newspapers in Washington and New York had room after worse when the papers printed its huge details.
Eastern voices about a massacre at a camp that settled quiet. The public demanded an Indian war without restraint on the army commanders. Sheridan and Sherman, Sherman, had been handed a political weapon. They used the dead to argue the war would not be a war of treaties and reservations, but a war of complete destruction.
The killing of Kuster’s men was convention and proof. The Cheyenne and the Arapaho lost more than the fight. Custer’s men had killed the camp’s horses and burned its winter stores, smoking sacred objects and leaving the horses dead and the pro-peace voice of Black Kettle gone. The death of Black Kettle killed the peace chiefs.
The people had no food, no shelter, and no valley to hide in for the winter. Custer’s death on the Washita had proven the cold was not safe around the army. Sheridan pushed south against the Kiowa and Comanche, burned the camps and shot the horses, and pursued tribes until the resistance starved. The Seventh Cavalry itself fell apart from the inside.
Benteen and his officers lost all trust in Custer, and Custer surrounded himself with loyalists and relatives, and shut off from criticism. He wrote his own books and reports to cast the Washita as a glorious fight, and Elliot and his men a minor, unfortunate byproduct. The breach widened at headquarters and in the tents of the regiment. The fault line would not close.
The reckoning came at the Little Bighorn in June 1876. The plains people united against the reservation policy, and the army moved against them in three columns. Custer commanded the Seventh Cavalry. He refused to wait for reinforcements, divided the regiment, and attacked a massive camp he greatly underestimated.
Gary Owen taken in 1868 at the Washita, the tune that was played at dawn, was played for the assault at Little Bighorn. When Custer was surrounded, he sent a message to Benteen, asking for support. Benteen did not press forward with any haste that would save him. He rejoined Major Reno and stood on the far hill and listened to the gunfire diminish.
Custer and around two hundred and ten men died to the last man, their bodies found naked, mutilated, and stripped, their faces obliterated, and arrows riddled, the fate that had been painted on them in the frozen snow at the Washita replayed on a hot hill eight years later. Major Elliot’s ambitions dragged him into a valley, his commander abandoned him there, and the Cheyenne warriors who found him gave their answer with his broken body in the snow. That body, and the bodies of the men around him, became the justification for the American army’s winter campaign, which became a justification for full destruction, and the argument the army used to silence every peace talk and every reservation promise. The seeds of that freezing morning sprouted into a full harvest at the Little Bighorn.
All that was left behind was the silent, cold, brutal evidence of what human arrogance, vengeance, and betrayal can produce.