In the winter of 1874, a Texas legislator stood up to propose a bill. On its surface, it was a simple measure designed to protect the southern buffalo herd from a hunting industry that was killing animals faster than nature could replace them. Millions of buffalo had roamed the Great Plains for thousands of years, but within just a few years, hunters were slaughtering them by the hundreds of thousands, stripping their hides for East Coast markets and leaving the carcasses to rot where they fell. The bill never passed.
It did not fail for lack of votes. It failed largely because a general in the United States Army intervened personally to stop it and told the men debating it exactly why. “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular Army has done in the last forty years,” he told them. “They are destroying the Indians’ commissary.
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That general was Philip Sheridan. Nine years earlier, he had led Union cavalry in some of the final decisive campaigns of the Civil War. He was a man Ulysses Grant trusted completely, and his aggression on the battlefield helped bring the war to an end. This is the story of what that same aggression looked like when it was deliberately and systematically directed against the peoples of the Great Plains.
It is not a story with a sudden ending. It is a story of what total war looks like when there is no opposing army left to surrender. To understand what Sheridan did on the plains, one must first understand what he did in Virginia. In the fall of 1864, Sheridan led Union forces through the Shenandoah Valley, a fertile region that had fed Confederate armies for three years of war.
Grant’s orders to him were explicit: make the valley so barren that a crow flying over it would have to carry its own provisions. Sheridan carried out that order with complete dedication. His troops burned barns, mills, and crops across a hundred miles of farmland in an operation Confederate civilians called “The Burning. ” It was not primarily aimed at soldiers.
It targeted the material foundation that allowed soldiers to keep fighting: food, livestock, and the entire infrastructure of the region’s ability to support an army in the field. It worked. The Shenandoah campaign broke the Confederacy’s ability to supply itself from that region, not by defeating Confederate soldiers in open battle, but by making it impossible for any army to survive there at all. Sheridan ended the Civil War with a reputation as one of the Union’s most effective and most ruthless commanders.
He viewed war, in his own words, as a force unrestrained by constitution or covenant, and believed the shortest road to victory ran through destroying the enemy’s ability to sustain itself, not merely defeating its soldiers. In 1867, the United States government sent that same man west to take command of the Division of the Missouri, a vast military district covering the central and southern Great Plains. He was sent there specifically because his predecessors had failed. General Winfield Scott Hancock’s earlier campaign that year against the Cheyenne had accomplished little, and had deepened the conflict after his troops destroyed a deserted Cheyenne village, convincing groups that had been ready to negotiate that negotiation was pointless.
Sheridan arrived with a different plan, and it was essentially the same plan he had executed in the Shenandoah Valley, adapted for a different enemy, different terrain, and a war of an entirely different character. The Plains tribes had no capital to occupy, no army to defeat in open battle, and no government to force into signing a surrender document. What they had was a way of life built on mobility, horses, and the buffalo herds that provided them with food, clothing, shelter, and the material basis of nearly everything. Sheridan correctly understood that this way of life itself was the real target, not the warriors, but the entire system that allowed Plains societies to exist independently of United States control.
His strategy, throughout the following sixteen years of his command, rested on three interconnected pillars. First, winter campaigns, when villages were most vulnerable to surprise attack and least able to move or resist. Second, the destruction of horses and stored provisions during those campaigns, so that survivors faced starvation. And finally, the deliberate encouragement of commercial buffalo hunting on a massive scale to eliminate the herds the Plains tribes depended on entirely.
The first of those three pillars was put into devastating practice within a year of his arrival, on the banks of a river in what is now Oklahoma. At dawn on November 27, 1868, amid a heavy winter snowstorm, about 700 men of the U. S. 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, attacked a Cheyenne village on the banks of the Washita River.
Sheridan’s orders to Custer before the campaign began were specific and unambiguous. Custer’s troops were to move toward the Washita, which had been identified as a winter camp of hostile tribes, and there, in the literal wording of the order: “Destroy their village and horses, kill or hang all warriors, and bring in all women and children as captives. ”
The village Custer’s men found and attacked belonged to Black Kettle, a Cheyenne peace chief who had spent years trying to negotiate coexistence with the United States government. Four years earlier, in 1864, Black Kettle’s people had survived a nearly identical surprise attack at Sand Creek in Colorado, an attack so brutal that other U.
S. Army officers condemned it at the time. Black Kettle had rebuilt his life and moved elsewhere, continuing to pursue peace. He was flying the American flag over his lodge at the Washita, along with a white flag, when Custer’s men attacked.
It made no difference. The surprise was complete. Custer’s cavalry charged the village from multiple directions at once, catching most of its inhabitants still inside their lodges. Black Kettle and his wife were shot and killed as they tried to cross the river to escape.
When the fighting ended about two hours later, between 30 and 103 Cheyenne had died. The higher figures come from Custer’s own official report, a report historians have long treated with suspicion given his documented motives for inflating the scale of his victory. What is undisputed in every account is that the dead included a significant number of women and children who fell in the chaos of an attack on an entire village rather than a fortified military position. Custer’s men seized the village’s horse and mule herd, totaling 875 animals.
Following Sheridan’s strategic doctrine to the letter, Custer’s forces kept about 225 animals and then systematically killed the rest. The act had a specific and deliberate purpose: to prevent any surviving Cheyenne from mounting horses again and continuing to fight, or simply from continuing to live the way they always had. The village lodges were burned to the ground, along with winter food supplies and clothing for the entire community. Fifty-three women and children were taken captive to Camp Supply.
This is what total war looked like when applied to a Plains village instead of a Confederate farming valley. It was not a battle between armies, but the complete destruction of a community’s ability to survive the winter that had just begun. Sheridan received word of the attack, and when criticism began to arrive from Washington and from the Bureau of Indian Affairs over the killing of women and children, he defended Custer’s actions publicly and without reservation. The strategy had worked exactly as designed, and Sheridan intended to keep using it.
He did. Similar winter campaigns followed against other Plains groups over the next several years, each built on the same core logic: strike in winter when movement is hardest and supplies are lowest, destroy horses and food stores, and make survival without surrender extremely difficult. But villages could still be rebuilt. Horses could still be recovered or obtained through trade, and food stores, however devastating their loss, could be replaced if the primary resource remained.
There was, however, one resource whose loss could never be replaced. And in the years following the Battle of the Washita, Sheridan turned his attention directly to that resource. For the Plains tribes of the central and southern Great Plains, the buffalo was not merely one resource among many. It was, literally, the material foundation of an entire way of life.
It provided food and shelter through the hides used for tipis and clothing, tools made from bone and horn, and the primary basis of trade among tribes, and later with white traders as well. A Plains society without buffalo was not a diminished version of itself. It was functionally unable to exist in the way it had lived for centuries. Sheridan understood this with total clarity, and he stated it explicitly in his private correspondence.
In a letter to General William Tecumseh Sherman, his wartime chief and close associate, Sheridan laid out his reasoning without embellishment. He wrote that the best course for the government was to impoverish the tribes through the destruction of their cattle, horses, and buffalo, then settle them on the lands the government had allocated to them. This was not a policy improvised by overly zealous subordinates in the field. It came from the top of the military command structure, was formulated as a deliberate strategy by the man in charge of the region, and found an unexpected and exceptionally effective ally in an industry that arose entirely independently of military planning: the commercial buffalo hide hunting industry.
Beginning in the early 1870s, advances in tanning technology made buffalo hides commercially valuable on a large scale for the first time, and hunters poured onto the southern plains herds in numbers that became overwhelming. Individual hunters using powerful long-range rifles could kill dozens or even hundreds of animals at a single site, dropping buffalo faster than the herd could perceive the danger and flee. One hunter, Orlando Brown, is said to have killed nearly 6,000 buffalo in his career, firing so continuously that he lost hearing in one ear from the repeated recoil. The scale of the slaughter was staggering even by the standards of an era not known for environmental conservation instincts.
The herds that had numbered in the tens of millions across the Great Plains at the beginning of the nineteenth century shrank within about a decade and a half to isolated groups of only a few thousand. The carcasses were left to rot across the prairie by the tens of thousands, stripped only of their hides, with the meat completely wasted. The U. S.
Army did not merely tolerate this. Under Sheridan’s command, military forces actively facilitated it, protecting hunting parties operating in contested territory, and in several documented cases, worked to drive buffalo herds away from areas dependent on them by the Plains tribes, denying access even in places where the animals themselves survived. When the Texas legislature moved to protect the herds from what, by any reasonable measure, was imminent extinction, Sheridan’s intervention killed the bill. His reasoning, presented directly to the Texas legislators, treated the destruction of the buffalo not as an unfortunate side effect of commercial hunting, but as a military objective in its own right, a weapon more effective in his stated view than four decades of direct military campaigns had managed to produce.
The results proved his calculations correct with brutal efficiency. The Plains tribes that had resisted United States control for generations, through the Civil War and long before it, found themselves facing something no army could have inflicted on them directly: the loss of the very foundation of their independent existence. Without buffalo, resistance was not just harder. For many groups, it became nearly impossible to continue.
Reservation life, which tribe after tribe had rejected as a fundamental loss of autonomy, became the only path to physical survival at all. By 1874, with the southern herds dwindling and many Plains nations facing conditions approaching famine, the last major organized resistance in the southern plains was already collapsing under the weight of the pressure Sheridan had designed. In the summer of 1874, groups of Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, driven by the collapse of the buffalo herds, broken treaty promises, and deteriorating conditions on reservations that failed to deliver the promised support, launched a coordinated uprising across the Texas Panhandle and surrounding territories. It became known as the Red River War, and it was, to a great extent, a direct reaction to the strategy Sheridan had spent years implementing.
Sheridan’s response was comprehensive, executed with the same operational logic that had defined every campaign before it. He organized five separate military columns converging on the region simultaneously from different directions, designed to leave resisting groups no place to retreat and no direction from which relief could come. Thousands of soldiers under commanders including Colonel Ranald Mackenzie and Colonel Nelson Miles systematically pursued and engaged Comanche, Kiowa, and allied groups in more than twenty separate engagements over the following months. The campaign’s decisive moment came in September 1874 in Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle, where Mackenzie’s troops surprised a large camp of Comanche warriors and their allies.
The battle itself produced relatively few casualties compared to the Battle of the Washita eight years earlier. But its actual military significance lay elsewhere. Mackenzie’s troops captured more than 1,400 horses from the encamped groups and, instead of attempting to keep or transport them, ordered nearly all of them shot. This was the same calculation Custer had applied to the horse herd at the Washita, but executed on a far larger scale, depriving resisting groups of the mobility that had made effective resistance possible for generations.
Without horses, without adequate food, and with the buffalo herds they depended on destroyed beyond repair, the remaining resistance collapsed within months. By the spring of 1875, nearly all the southern plains tribes who had participated in the uprising had surrendered and moved to reservations, permanently ending military resistance by the Comanche and Kiowa. Sheridan’s strategy, pursued steadily over sixteen years and multiple campaigns, achieved exactly the result he had described in his letter to Sherman years earlier. The tribes were made materially unable to survive independently, then settled by necessity rather than choice on the lands the government had allocated to them.
The deliberate targeting of food supplies and the material basis of survival of civilian populations, as an explicit strategy to force submission, meets the definitions later classified by international law as war crimes, and in its cumulative impact on Plains societies as a form of cultural destruction that modern scholars increasingly discuss within the framework of genocide studies. This is not a retrospective judgment invented by contemporary sensibilities and unfairly imposed on the past. Some of Sheridan’s own contemporaries, including officials within the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, raised objections at the time to the conduct of campaigns such as the Washita attack. Objections Sheridan personally rejected and overrode.
None of this requires speculation about Sheridan’s internal motives or psychological state, which we have no reliable way to assess and should not pretend to have. What we have instead is his stated reasoning in his own words in surviving correspondence: a clear, comprehensible, and defended strategy by the man who designed it, aimed explicitly at the physical destruction of Plains societies as the fastest available route to ending resistance to American expansion. Sheridan continued after these campaigns to a distinguished career. He was promoted to command the entire United States Army in 1883, a position he held until his death in 1888.
His name today marks a county in Wyoming, a city in Montana, numerous military installations, and a square in New York City, among many other places across the country. His legacy is built almost entirely around his Civil War service, with the plains campaigns treated in popular memory as a secondary epilogue rather than the decisive deliberate strategy that occupied the majority of his actual military career. The buffalo herds he helped destroy never recovered to anything like their former size. Conservation efforts beginning in the early twentieth century saved the species from total extinction, but the tens of millions of animals that defined the Great Plains ecosystem were permanently reduced to a tiny fraction of their former numbers.
The Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples who survived the campaign Sheridan designed continue to exist today on reservations and beyond, carrying with them languages, cultures, and communities that withstood a strategy devised specifically to eliminate the conditions that supported their survival. That survival in the face of such a deliberate and comprehensive strategy is a historical fact worth reflecting on, not as a closing note to soften what came before, but as an honest continuation of a story that did not end the way its architect intended. Sheridan’s name still appears on maps across the country. The buffalo herds he helped destroy have never returned to what they were.
The question worth asking is how much American history is remembered through the legacy of the victor, and how much is ignored because it is uncomfortable.