A Long March: The Lives of Frank and Alice Baldwin 9780292761773

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A Long March

The Lives of Frank and Alice Baldwin

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In January 1867, Baldwin, then in the Thirty-seventh Infantry of the regular army, marrie< Alice Blackwood in Northville, Michigan. This photo was taken at about the time of their wedding. Courtesy, The Bancroft Library.

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A LONG MARCH The Lives of Frank and Alice Baldwin Robert H. Steinbach

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN

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Copyright © 1989 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition, 1989 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Steinbach, Robert H. (Robert Hugh), 1940A long march: the lives of Frank and Alice Baldwin / by Robert H. Steinbach. — 1st ed. p. cm. Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-292-74659-8 (alk. paper) 1. Baldwin, Frank Dwight. 2. Baldwin, Alice Blackwood, ca. 1845-1930. 3. Soldiers—West (U. S.)—Biography. 4. Officers' wives—West (U.S.)—Biography. 5. Indians of North America— Wars—1866-1895. 6. Frontier and pioneer life—West (U. S.) 7. West (U.S.)—History—1848-1950. I. Title. F594.S823 1989 978'.02'0922—dc20 [B] 89-16437 CIP

ISBN 978-0-292-76177-3 (library e-book) ISBN 978-0-292-76178-0 (individual e-book)

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This book is dedicated with affection to my wife, Elaine Thielke Steinbach, and to my daughters, Rebecca Helen and Katherine Ann

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Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin of the Nineteenth Michigan Volunteer Infantry. This photo was taken on October 5, 1863, when Baldwin was twenty-two years old, six months after having been released from Libby Prison. Courtesy, The Bancroft Library.

Juanita Baldwin was born in Trinidad, Colorado, on October 2, 1867, while the Baldwin family marched with the regiment from Fort Harker, Kansas, to Fort Wingate, New Mexico. This photo was taken in 1874 when Nita was seven years old. Courtesy, The Bancroft Library.

In the late 1880's this was the last remaining hut constructed at the 1876 Cantonment on Tongue River. The two prisoners here are on fatigue duty, dismantling the hut; the guard is a Tenth Cavalry trooper. The Baldwins lived in a hut like this for a few months before moving into officers' quarters at Fort Keogh, Montana Territory. Photo by Charles Barthelmess. Courtesy, Range Rider Museum, Miles City, Montana.

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Contents Preface Prologue 1. Beginnings 2. "Mud and Romance" 3. Return to the Plains 4. The Red River War 5. The Montana War 6. Hard Service 7. The Close of the Frontier 8. The Philippine Insurrection 9. Retirement Notes Bibliography Index

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Interior of the Baldwins' quarters at Fort Davis, Texas, about 1890. Captain Frank Baldwin is sitting to the right; the other figures are not identifiable. In late November or early December 1890, Baldwin was leading troops on training exercises in the Big Bend country of Texas when Miles summoned him to serve on his staff in Chicago, Illinois. Courtesy, Custer Battlefield National Monument.

Sitting Bull, Sioux chief. Sitting Bull was present during the Battle at the Little Bighorn and led his Hunkpapas during the post-Custer period. He faced Miles near Clear Creek in October 1876 and Baldwin at Little Porcupine Creek and at Redwater River in December. He left the United States for Canada in 1877. Courtesy, National Archives.

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Preface I BEGAN MY research into the lives of Frank and Alice Baldwin in the Mount Prospect, Illinois, Library and from it my reach extended across the nation through the Interlibrary Loan System. Whenever I needed a popular book that the Mount Prospect Library did not possess, I usually could find it at the nearby Arlington Heights Library. More specialized works than these often were provided by the main library in Chicago. I spent many days working in Chicago's Newberry Library, a research institution that holds highly specialized books, rare manuscripts, and microfilm. Late in the writing stage of the manuscript, I had access to the Firestone Library on the campus of Princeton University in New Jersey. The Manuscripts Department of the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka provided access to the papers of George Baird, and the Colorado Historical Society in Denver allowed me to examine its collection of Frank D. Baldwin Papers. The University of Colorado's Norlin Library in Boulder made available the papers of William Cary Brown. The library at the Custer Battlefield National Monument provided access to the diary of Simon Snyder. In San Marino, California, the staff of the Huntington Library allowed me to examine its collection of Frank Dwight Baldwin Papers. I visited several museums and the sites of many army posts during my research, including the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the Panhandle-Plains Museum in Canyon, Texas, the museums at Forts Monroe, Harker, Hays, and Larned as well as the sites of Forts Davis, Wingate I and II, Dodge, Keogh, and Custer. I also visited several battlefield sites—Peachtree Creek in Georgia, Palo Duro Canyon I and II, the Lyman site, the Buffalo Wallow, McClellan Creek, the Little Bighorn, the Rosebud, Wolf Mountain, Lame Deer, and the

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Redwater. Many of these sites are on privately held land and access to them was cheerfully granted by landowners. During the course of my research, I visited the towns of Constantine, Albion, Hillsdale, Manchester, Northville, and Monroe, all of which are located in the Baldwins' home state of Michigan. The libraries of Constantine and Northville provided especially detailed and helpful information about the history of their towns. I am especially thankful to all of the librarians, curators, park rangers, and landowners with whom I worked. Without exception, they extended cordial cooperation when I spoke with them on the telephone, corresponded with them, or arrived (sometimes quite unexpectedly) on their doorsteps. In addition, I thank Frankie W. Westbook, humanities editor of the University of Texas Press, who recognized my goals and appreciated my efforts from her first reading of the manuscript; she saw me through the maze of obstacles that stand between an author and the decision to publish. I also owe a profound debt of gratitude to members of my family and to friends who encouraged me during many months of research and writing: my wife and daughters, to whom this book is dedicated; my brothers Hank and Paul Steinbach and their families, whose moral support continues to be uplifting; my friends Martha and Fred Smith, who read parts of the manuscript and responded with valuable advice and encouragement. Robert H. Steinbach

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Prologue IN THE LATE 1960s, historian Henry Franklin Graff interviewed General Earle Wheeler, chief-of-staff of the United States Armed Forces, about the war in Southeast Asia. Graff wrote, "I turned the talk to a subject that historians may one day ponder: The war in Vietnam was the first American war that did not seem to generate public heroes. . . . He [Wheeler] said with a smile: There were no heroes in the Indian Wars either—only one in reverse: General Custer.'"1 The American people have short memories regarding their public military heroes. Today such nineteenth-century Indian fighters as George Crook, Eugene Carr, George Forsyth, Wesley Merritt, Ranald Mackenzie, and Nelson Miles are forgotten by the general public. These men, along with George Custer and others, led the field forces of the army against the Indians of the trans-Mississippi West and, in their own day, earned the praise of most of their military colleagues and that of politicians, newspaper writers, and the public at large. If the names and deeds of such high-ranking heroes as Crook, Carr, Forsyth, and the rest seem to have faded from the collective memory of the nation in the twentieth century, the identities and accomplishments of Indian-fighting officers below the rank of lieutenant colonel, and those of soldiers who possessed no commission at all, seem totally absent from the American popular consciousness. But heroes there were, and plenty of them: Howard Cushing, John Bourke, Charles King, Emmett Crawford, Charles Gatewood, Albert Barnitz, and James Bradley, to name a few. These men—most of them lieutenants during the late 1860s and 1870s—led company-sized units into battle against Indian forces and repeatedly risked their lives. Some of them, Barnitz and King, for example, were wounded for their efforts; others, like Cushing, Bradley, and Crawford, gave their lives. All of them,

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Camp Vicars • •

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Ganassi •

SOUTHWEST LAKE LANAO REGION

Commander of the Army Nelson A. Miles. This photo was taken in the late 1890s; note Miles's Medal of Honor, awarded for action at Chancellorsville during the Civil War. Miles may have been the most complex commanding general in the history of the U.S. Army. Respected by friends and hated by enemies, he was capable of lying to superiors, presidents, and the entire nation. The public loved him; Theodore Roosevelt called him "a perfect curse." Allie Baldwin never shared her husband's enthusiasm for Miles. Courtesy, National Archives.

William Schmalsle, army scout during the Red River War, 1874-75. Schmalsle, being of slight build and speaking with a German accent, didn't look or sound like a western hero, but he distinguished himself in the First Battle of Palo Duro Canyon and during Baldwin's Ride; he risked his life on behalf of the men of Lyman's Wagon Train and was with Baldwin during the Gray Beard fight. Courtesy, Western Historical Collections, University of Colorado, Boulder.

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A Long March

The Lives of Frank and Alice Baldwin

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Lieutenant Colonel Frank D. Baldwin in the year 1900. Baldwin was about to leave the states for his first tour of duty in the Philippine Islands. Note Baldwin's two Medals of Honor. Only one other officer in the regular army—Tom Custer—was awarded the medal twice. Courtesy, National Archives.

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Beginnings ALICE BLACKWOOD WAS born in 1845 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Jane and Thomas Blackwood. Her parents—of Scottish, English, and Irish extraction—had migrated from New York to Michigan, where Thomas practiced medicine for a living and dabbled at literary pursuits. Blackwood's inclination to write was a family trait. Throughout the nineteenth century, readers knew the Blackwood name well, since the Scottish branch of the family had established a literary journal called Blackwood's Magazine. Devout Presbyterians, the Blackwoods belonged to a sect called Covenanters, who advocated stern faith. They set aside the twentyfour hours from Saturday evening to Sunday night as Sabbath Day and enforced an unyielding way of life and worship.1 Young Allie must have tested the Blackwoods' faith, for she grew to be an independent, moody woman, disagreeing quickly, taking offense easily, and forgiving with difficulty. Jane, Allie's mother, possessed a delicate constitution, and the harsh Michigan winters threatened her health. Therefore, in 1854, when Allie was but nine years old, Thomas Blackwood packed up his family—wife Jane, daughters Allie and Mary, and Jane's black maid—and departed for California. The family traveled by train from Detroit to Chicago, then from Chicago to St. Louis. In St. Louis the five took passage on the Missouri steamer Creole Belle, bound for Council Bluffs, Iowa, a point of departure on the Oregon Trail. There the Blackwoods disembarked and made final preparations for their journey across the plains and over the mountain ranges to California. Thomas purchased wagons and, in one of them, rigged a bed for his ailing wife, suspending it from straps fitted to the bowed ribs of the canopy. On the other wagons, Blackwood stored baggage, provisions, tools, and cooking

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utensils. He purchased several teams of oxen, some cattle, and a few horses and hired drivers to take the wagons west. At Council Bluffs the Blackwoods joined other travelers to form a wagon train that crossed the Missouri River and headed west toward the Platte, following the Oregon Trail on the south bank. Almost 175 miles from the start of the trail, the train entered the Fort Kearny Military Reservation. To prevent attacks by the Sioux, troops from Fort Kearny provided the train with an armed escort until the wagons reached Wyoming. At that point soldiers from Fort Laramie took over the job. Each evening the wagon master ordered the travelers to circle their wagons and set out sentries to patrol the perimeter of the camp all night. At dinnertime most families gathered with their food, cooked in dutch ovens, and sat around a bonfire, swapping stories, worrying about the next day's dangers, and singing to the accompaniment of a violin, guitar, or accordion. With the coming of darkness, parents sent the children off to bed in their wagons. Allie often fell asleep to the songs of the adults and the howls of coyotes beyond the dark edge of the camp circle. The train moved west through vast herds of buffalo and prairie dog towns, past Independence and Chimney rocks, and near Devil's Gate and Soda Springs. The migrants also visited civilization's outposts, Forts Laramie, Bridger, and Hall, going through Rocky Mountain passes, and entering the Great Basin where the master led them down the California Trail. After six months the party reached its destination: San Jose, California. Dr. Blackwood set up a practice for a time in San Jose, but the climate did not suit his weakening wife. The family went to Sacramento, and once again the doctor established himself, this time trying to supplement his professional income by engaging in mining enterprises, but without success. Jane Blackwood died in 1856, just two years after leaving for California. Thomas decided he could not rear two young girls on his own, so he arranged for a clergyman and his wife to take the youngsters back home to the States. Allie and Mary embarked on the ship Golden Age in San Francisco Bay, bound for the Isthmus of Darien. The girls spent weeks at sea, their ship hugging the North American West Coast. When the Golden Age reached the isthmus, natives carried the girls on their backs overland to the port of Darien on the Gulf of Mexico. The girls reembarked for another ocean voyage, this one all the way to New York City. From there the clergyman and his wife placed

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Allie and her sister on a train that chugged west to Detroit. Soon they were in Northville, Michigan, at the home of their uncle and aunt, Robert and Rebecca Blackwood. Within one year of Allie's return to Michigan, word came that her father had died. Aunt Becky and Uncle Robert did their best to rear the two girls as Thomas would have wished. Teenaged Allie entered the Young Ladies Seminary at Albion, Michigan, where she was trained to be the proper wife of a middle-class husband. This amounted to appropriating—as much as was possible in American society—the manners of the Victorian lady of Great Britain who selflessly served her spouse, produced and nurtured offspring, and refined her artistic gifts for display, but only in the private sphere as ornaments for her husband's life. In Allied case her talents were considerable: she could write with some facility and also played the piano, sang, and painted. At school Allie made two acquaintances, girls named Gertrude and Rowena. In 1863 the two sisters' brother Frank Baldwin visited them. Baldwin was a lieutenant in the Nineteenth Michigan Volunteer Infantry and had just endured a two-month confinement in Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. Paroled in a prisoner exchange, Baldwin had returned home to rest while his regiment reorganized. First, he visited friends and relatives in Constantine, Michigan, and then he traveled to Albion to see his sisters at the Young Ladies' Seminary. Frank also hoped to meet a few young ladies who might be susceptible to the charms of a twenty-two-year-old infantry lieutenant home from the front. He achieved his goal, for years later Allie wrote, "I was wonderfully impressed with the gallant warrior in his uniform and glittering braid, his fine appearance further enhanced by his military cape and the jingling spurs on his boots. He confessed to me afterward that he had put them on to impress the young ladies."2 Like the Blackwoods, the Baldwins originated in the British Isles. Unlike the Blackwoods, however, the first of Frank's ancestors arrived in America at an early date, Joseph Baldwin having come to Milford, Connecticut, in 1639 from Cholesburg, County Bucks, England.3 By the midnineteenth century, Joseph's progeny had fought the Indians, the French, and the British twice. Some Baldwins broke new ground, moving from the Atlantic seaboard into New York's Adirondacks, then to the Old Northwest, working their way through Ohio and Indiana. In 1834 one of these offspring of Joseph Baldwin, a widower named

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Leonard, with his twenty-one-year-old son, Francis, entered southern Michigan to settle in Manchester, a village twenty miles southwest of Ann Arbor. There Leonard and Francis built a log cabin and farmed among the wooded hills and blue lakes of the region. Soon Francis met and married Betsy Ann Richards of Manchester, and the two farmed a section of land four miles west of town.4 On February 28, 1842, Francis died, leaving his pregnant wife with a farm barely begun. Francis Leonard Dwight Baldwin was born on Sunday, June 26, 1842, nine months after his parents had married and four months after his father had died. Betsy Ann remarried, and she, a new husband, and her son moved west again, this time to Constantine in southwest Michigan, about thirty miles south of Kalamazoo. In Constantine, Betsy Ann gave birth to two girls, Gertrude and Rowena. Meanwhile, young Frank Dwight (he had changed his given name to Frank and had dropped his middle name, Leonard) spent his boyhood years helping on the farm, going to school, learning to ride and hunt, and developing a gregarious, funloving personality. Despite a severe case of whooping cough during his boyhood, Frank became robust.5 In school he did well enough to encourage his mother to plan to send him off to college. Betsy Ann provided a benign religious upbringing for Frank. The family practiced the liberal Free-Will Baptist faith which, in southern Michigan, promoted a degree of feminism, freedom for blacks, and education for all.6 Frank was not a devout person, but he accepted his mother's efforts to save his soul, taking from her religion what he felt he needed, especially the democratic attitudes of the Free-Will Baptists. Constantine, Michigan, mixed small-town isolation with vigorous nineteenth-century growth. The village—first settled in the mid18208—hugged the south bank of the St. Joseph River and provided a stopover for the river traffic that plied the St. Joe between the interior of Michigan and Indiana and its mouth on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Constantine's first settler, J. A. Barr, opened a general store on the south flat of the St. Joe and later, because the river flooded in springtime, moved his business up on the heights above the flat. From the 1830s to the 1850s, the town flourished as merchants and craftsmen arrived. Soon Constantine boasted of hardware, grocery, and book stores. It had a coach maker, a boot and shoe maker, a furniture manufacturer, a saddle and harness maker, a livery stable owner, and a monument and headstone firm. Thomas Mitchell ran the town's main industry, the Mitchell Foundry. Constantine had three attorneys

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and three physicians as well as several churches, a school, a hotel, and a spur of the railroad that crossed southern Michigan, connecting Detroit with Chicago. Prior to the Civil War, the people of Constantine supported Northern opposition to the extension of slavery into the western territories by joining thousands of Michiganders to elect Zachariah Chandler, a Republican, to the United States Senate. At the time Fort Sumter was fired on, most citizens of Constantine had given little thought to the social issue of slavery. The siege of the fort, however, awakened in them, and in eighteen-year-old Frank Baldwin, fears that the Union would crumble. This issue mobilized Frank's patriotic fervor, and he made three futile attempts to enlist in the Union army before he was successful. In April 1861 Baldwin and a schoolmate named Dan Harvey tried to join a three-month volunteer company from southwest Michigan. The company's captain, a man named John Lawson, unable to foresee that the war would ultimately claim youngsters many years younger than these two, rejected the boys and sent them home.7 Early in May, Lawson's company prepared to leave Constantine for Detroit, and from there they would move to the front. Frank and Dan begged Willard Straight, the schoolmaster, to dismiss class early so that the students could see the company off from the railroad depot, but the teacher refused permission. Frank and Dan stood before the class, called the man a traitor, and led the students out of the school to the station. Straight sat alone for a while in his empty room, taking stock of his situation. He decided that he had lost control of his students, so he closed the school and gave the children of Constantine an early summer recess. To Frank and Dan the early closing of school was a boon, for they had another curriculum in mind between May and September. They made a second attempt to join the Union army by organizing the boys of the town into a company that they hoped the army would accept for service at the front. On many a night, at midnight, the youngsters gathered in back lots or under bridges, built camp fires, and roasted snacks of chicken and potatoes. They drank pop beer and plotted their futures as army men. The boys decided to form a mounted battery called the Constantine Flying Artillery. Confiscating an old iron cannon from the Mitchell Foundry, they improvised one wagon into a gun carriage and another into a caisson. A team of six horses drew the cannon, an empty ammunition box, and eight of the boys; a second team of four drew the

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caisson on which rode the remaining lads. The youngsters met all through May and June and at last decided to show themselves to the townspeople. One day they rolled into town across the wooden bridge that spanned the St. Joe onto Washington Street and watched the startled reaction of the citizens of Constantine. Frank wrote to Dan years later, "We thought we was it!"8 The boys of the Flying Artillery had no powder with which to make a noise and no honest means of earning the money to buy the explosive. They nevertheless found a way to get their parents and other townspeople to finance the purchase. Late one night the company deployed; the boys stole twenty-eight cows and one goose before daylight, impounded them in a town lot for stray farm animals, and collected twenty-nine dollars in fines which the owners of the animals had to pay to get their livestock back. The youngsters bought their powder, paraded before the townspeople on July 4,1861, and shot off their cannon with great pomp, smoke, and noise. The Fourth of July bravado of the Constantine Flying Artillery foreshadowed events on a larger, more dreadful scale than that played out in Michigan. Less than two weeks later, on Tuesday, July 16, 1861, Abraham Lincoln sent his army from Washington, D.C., to Manassas Junction, some twenty-five miles from the Federal capital. At Bull Run near Manassas, a Confederate force of about thirty thousand routed the Union army and chased it from the field. Like Frank Baldwin's futile blast on July 4, the Federal army had vainly fired its first shots of the war. The leaders of the Union now knew that the war would be long and bloody, with plenty of fighting for youngsters like Frank in the years to come. In September 1861, while still living at home and after learning that a group of young men was forming a cavalry company, Frank made his third attempt to enter the army. The volunteers called the new outfit the Chandler Horse Guards, after Senator Zachariah Chandler. Now nineteen years old, Baldwin applied for a spot, and the company accepted him on Thursday, September 19, 1861. He convinced several other young men to join the Horse Guards with him, and his recruits rewarded him by electing him second lieutenant of the unit, but the company never went to war. The Horse Guards disbanded because the boys were too young; the officers, too inexperienced; and the parents, too unwilling to send their sons to war.9

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Baldwin reluctantly enrolled at Hillsdale College, a coeducational Free-Will Baptist school about forty miles northeast of Constantine and forty miles southwest of Ann Arbor. Even if he had wanted to, Frank could not forget the war. Only a few more than three hundred students attended the college, but of those, more than sixty men volunteered to join the Federal armies in 1861. By the end of the war, 183 students, over half the student body, had left the college to join the Union forces. From the late fall of 1861 to the summer of 1862, however, Frank remained at school, the army accepting others to fight its battles.10 While a student at Hillsdale College, Frank Baldwin heard of yet another opportunity to volunteer his services in a Michigan outfit. In mid-1862 the governor called up a regiment of volunteers to which Frank quickly offered his services. As he had for the Horse Guards, he went to work immediately, urging friends, acquaintances, and classmates to join the army with him. At last the Union army accepted young Baldwin, just past his twentieth birthday. For Frank's recruiting efforts, his fellows elected him first lieutenant of Company D, Nineteenth Michigan Infantry. He left home by rail for Camp Chase, located just west of Columbus, Ohio.11 There, the men of the Nineteenth Michigan—commanded by Colonel A. C. Gilbert—spent less than a week receiving an issue of clothing, kit, blankets, musket, and for an officer, a revolver. Recruitment officers drilled them in standing at attention, marching on the trail, forming a line of battle, and responding to commands. At Camp Chase, Frank took on the trappings of a soldier. His body— of medium height—seemed slim, even clothed in his baggy uniform. He wore the regulation, loosely fitted dark blouse buttoned at his neck and wrists and light blue trousers tucked into riding boots. Leather straps crisscrossed his chest from his shoulders to his hips. He attached a canteen to his belt at the left, a saber dangling next to it. A cartridge box hung at the rear of the belt, while a holstered revolver hugged his right hip. He wore a mustache that extended almost to his sideburns, and a forage cap perched on the full head of dark hair that topped his thin face.12 On September 11, 1862, bunched tightly together on flatcars, the Nineteenth Michigan Infantry quit Camp Chase for Cincinnati; Baldwin was headed toward his first contact with the enemy—an anticlimactic encounter. For one month the outfit drilled, practiced at living in a military camp, and watched in vain for Confederate invaders

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along the Ohio River. Then in mid-October the regiment returned to Cincinnati and moved across the river on a pontoon bridge. Here Baldwin's company reconnoitered daily, probing the Kentucky countryside in search of Confederate forces. Failing to locate the rebel army near Cincinnati, the regiment marched toward Lexington, Kentucky. The unusually hot Kentucky weather took its toll of the Michigan soldiers. Then the October weather turned cold and rainy, and some of the men became ill with pneumonia. Among the sick was the captain, who had to return to the rear, leaving Baldwin in command of the unit. In Lexington the men of the entire brigade learned that they had a new commander, Colonel John C. Coburn, who recently had led the Thirty-third Indiana Infantry. Near the end of January, Baldwin and his fellows marched eighty-five miles northeast to Louisville, where they boarded a steamer on Monday, February 2,1863. The boat paddled down the Ohio toward the mouth of the Cumberland River. Through freezing rain and snow, Baldwin and his regiment steamed up the Cumberland to Fort Donelson, where elements of Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry had attacked just the day before. This crack Confederate unit had bedeviled Union detachments along the Federal lines of communication throughout western Kentucky and Tennessee. The Nineteenth Michigan then pushed up the Cumberland to Nashville, Tennessee, arriving there on Sunday, February 8. During the following days, they marched south, toward Columbia, where Union commanders suspected the presence of Forrest's Confederate cavalry. Along the march Colonel Coburn ordered Baldwin's company to remain at a stockade while the rest of the brigade probed farther south. Soon after the main column departed, he heard the sounds of musketry and cannon fire. After so many months of preparation, Baldwin's regiment had entered a major battle, but without him. The Battle of Thompson's Station, as the conflict has come to be known, occurred March 4 and 5, 1863. On the battle's second day, word of a disaster filtered back to the stockade held by Baldwin and his men. Soon a large number of Federal troops returned at a run to the safety of the stronghold. As the days passed, retreating officers who outranked Baldwin appeared at the stockade and relieved him of command. On Wednesday, March 25, Forrest's command approached the Federal fortification, and Baldwin readied his troops for battle, ordering them to lie in rifle pits to await the attack. He anxiously anticipated the first test of his valor in a great battle. Then an orderly passed a message to the young lieutenant, "Under no circumstances will your men fire a shot" at the enemy.13

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After a single blast from a Confederate twelve-pound cannon roared over the heads of the men lying in the pits, the ranking officer at the stockade raised a white flag, surrendering the entire outfit to Forrest and his Confederates. Forrest's cavalry forced Frank Baldwin and more than one thousand other Federal prisoners to march to Farmington, Tennessee, where the Confederates herded their captives into boxcars and shipped them southeast. In Chattanooga, on Friday, April 3, 1863, the prisoners detrained, and officers were separated from enlisted men. Baldwin and his fellow commanders then traveled by train for six days to Richmond, Virginia, and Libby Prison. Libby Prison occupied a building on the bank of the James River where the ship chandler firm of Libby and Sons had had its warehouse in the years before the Civil War. Only officers occupied this prison, and the Confederate jailers divided them among eight large, highceilinged rooms. More than 1,000 officers occupied the prison, about 100 to 120 packed into each barracks. Baldwin shared a barracks with 112 other lieutenants and captains. During the daylight hours, the men milled about or sat in small groups talking quietly. A few nursed the sick; some took their turns washing at a water trough; others mended torn and worn clothes and blankets. Many played games or read old newspapers. Occasionally, an especially religious prisoner took the floor to preach an impromptu sermon to his fellows, urging them to keep up their spirits and never lose hope in God's deliverance.14 Baldwin joined the mess of a dozen or so men who shared time at the single cookstove in the room. The men of the same group took their turns working to keep the room as clean as possible. Within days Baldwin accustomed himself to the routine of prison life at Libby. The day began about 6:00 A.M., when a black janitor began cleaning the room. About 7:00 A.M. a guard assembled the men for the first roll call of the day, and about an hour later the prisoners received their daily allotment of food: eight ounces of bread, four to six ounces of meat, and a small amount of rice or beans. The mess groups took turns cooking at the stove, and by late morning the prisoners had consumed the single meal of the day.15 The hardships of prison life failed to squash Baldwin's mischievous nature. Outside and beneath the windows of the prison barracks, boys—students from a nearby military school—served as sentinels.

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Some of the prisoners devised a plan to harass the youngsters. Every day the prisoner cleaning brigades killed thousands of cockroaches and swept them away. Baldwin led a movement to capture a bucketful of the insects, and when he had enough of them, he opened the window and tossed the bucket onto the head of one of the guards. The insects squirmed over the boy's body, causing him to howl with disgust. He fired his musket wildly at one of the windows above, but by this time, Baldwin and the rest of the culprits had disappeared behind the closed window. In a short time, Confederate jailers stormed into the huge room, ordered all prisoners to form ranks, and began to question the Yankees about the cockroach incident. The guards searched the barracks and ordered the prisoners to produce all the buckets in the room. After counting them and finding that one of the containers was missing, the jailers determined that someone from Baldwin's room was indeed the culprit. When no one broke ranks to confess, the jailers threatened to punish all the prisoners, so Baldwin admitted his crime. The guards hauled him off, blindfolded, capless, and shoeless, to Castle Thunder, a high-security solitary confinement building. There they pushed him into a cell where, in the darkness, he could feel the earthen floor under his feet. He felt about but found no cot, only a few blankets on the floor. In a moment Baldwin felt thousands of cockroaches racing about his body. Tearing off pieces of his shirt and stuffing them into his nostrils and ears, he covered his mouth with a rag and settled down to endure the torments of solitary confinement. After forty-eight hours, the guards fetched Baldwin from his cell and returned him to the prison barracks. Back among his fellow prisoners, he sold a rubber blanket to a guard for ten Confederate dollars and bought a few eggs. At the cookstove he cracked open the first egg and found it rotten; the second contained a dead chick. Baldwin opened the remaining eggs one by one and found each was as useless as the first two. In a rage Frank dumped the mess out the window. Once again, howls rose from below, and once again, he marched to Castle Thunder, this time for a stay of twenty-four hours. Early on the morning of Wednesday, May 6,1863, almost two months after he had arrived at Libby, the guards hustled Baldwin and his barracks mates out of the prison into boxcars. Rumors spread. Some speculated that the Federal armies had broken through Lee's lines and were menacing Richmond, making it necessary to move the prisoners to a location south of the city. Through cracks in the boxcar walls, the men saw the docks along the banks of the James River. The guards herded the men out of the boxcars into the light of day and onto a

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Union steamboat. Only then did the men realize that the opposing armies had conducted a prisoner exchange and that they were free. The rescued men were fed, paid, reclothed, and transported back to Union territory, getting to Annapolis, Maryland, on May 7, 1863. On May 11 they started home. Baldwin went to Constantine, understanding that when notified, he would collect his company and return to Camp Chase. In the meantime, however, he had social matters on his mind; before he returned to the war, he visited the Young Ladies' Seminary at Albion, where his sisters attended school. He hoped to meet a lady or two and enjoy their company. Among the women he met was Allie Blackwood.

In early June 1863, Frank Baldwin returned to Camp Chase and from there his reconstructed unit traveled by rail south from Columbus and Cincinnati through Louisville, Bowling Green, and Nashville to Fort Rosecrans outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. For several months Baldwin's company performed routine duties near the fort. Then in early October, the fifty men of Company D of the Nineteenth Michigan Infantry and their lieutenant received new orders. They were instructed to man a stockade a few miles from the fort. The fortification commanded the approaches to a crucial wooden trestle bridge on which the Louisville, Nashville, and Chattanooga Railroad tracks crossed Stones River. The stockade was a twenty-five-foot-square log structure with walls eight feet high. On both inside and outside walls of the stockade, a thick, three-foot-high earthen embankment made the fortification appear, at first glance, well protected. Loopholes in the walls permitted the defenders to direct musket fire at their enemy from safety. Around the stockade, a clearing extended for a distance of about one hundred yards in a semicircle; the structure itself nestled near the riverbank. For several days all was quiet at the stockade. Traffic along the tracks proceeded as usual, and the entire area seemed peaceful. On Monday, October 5, however, pickets dashed in from their stations, shouting warnings of mounted enemy approaching from the south along the embankment of the railroad tracks.16 Within a few minutes one of the men directed Baldwin's attention to a white flag at the edge of the woods, and he knew that the rebels wanted to parley. Taking an enlisted man with him, he stepped across the clearing to a point midway between the woods and the stockade where he met a Confederate officer who introduced himself as General Joseph Wheeler's adjutant.

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The Confederate told the Yankee of Wheeler's division of cavalry and his two artillery batteries; he hoped to convince the young lieutenant to give up his position within the stockade without a fight. Baldwin refused the proposal, and after exchanging salutes, the Confederates wheeled their horses and urged them toward the woods. Baldwin and his man hurried back to the stronghold, where he ordered a Private Carpenter to steal out of the stockade and make for Fort Rosecrans to inform its commander of the situation at the stockade. Then Baldwin prepared his men for the battle to come. Within minutes a Confederate skirmish line pressed forward from the woods. The Federals opened fire upon command and thinned the ranks of the skirmishers, who retreated to the safety of the forest. For a moment all was silent. Then the stronghold exploded under a Confederate bombardment. A hail of wood splinters and metal fragments pounded down from above. Men screamed and shouted as the objects pierced their bodies, every man except one injured. A fragment smashed into Baldwin's left wrist. The Yankee defenders stopped firing at their enemy and hugged the earth within the stronghold, hoping the shelling would soon end. Above them the last of the logs exploded from its place in the wall and exposed the center of the stockade. Then the artillery blasts ceased. Confederate troopers scrambled up the earthen embankment. Those Federals who could—Frank Baldwin among them—stood and raised their hands in surrender. Joseph Wheeler urged his mount forward from the woods and up the embankment. Wheeler, short and wiry, wearing a black plumed hat and crimson sash on his gray uniform, surveyed the damage and said to Baldwin, "I am sorry you did not surrender and save this destruction of life. . . . You have done more than your duty." Wheeler then ordered his troopers to tend to the wounded men of Company D and to destroy the bridge over Stones River. The Confederate general provided a mount for Baldwin, and the troopers with their prisoners marched south. Once again a captive, Frank Baldwin may have contemplated the futility of his career as a soldier since 1861. Three times he had tried to enter the service; three times he had been rejected. When he finally got his chance at soldiering, his record was abominable. He spent almost a year trying to get into a fight, and in two opportunities to make a name for himself, the enemy had captured him. He also might have felt expendable. Although more than nine thousand troops occupied Fort Rosecrans at the time Joseph Wheeler's cavalry stormed the stockade on Stones River, the commandant of the post dispatched not

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a single squad to relieve Baldwin's company. Now he expected a second imprisonment in a Confederate jail, and this one promised to be a lengthy stay, since Federal generals had decided on a new policy which prohibited prisoner exchanges and paroles. While the men of Company D marched, a Confederate officer approached Baldwin and asked whether he and the men of his company would accept a parole. Baldwin informed the officer of Federal policy and continued his march. The officer then went among the men of Company D to make the same proposal. Baldwin watched with concern, but each man declined the offer. Wheeler's column moved south another ten miles, and the Confederate officer returned. He informed Baldwin that he and his men were free to go, even without a formal parole, and that Wheeler would furnish the Federals with a document providing protection from Confederate attack. Chivalry may not have been on Wheeler's mind; fifty wounded prisoners would slow him enough to risk the capture of his own division. The men of Company D moved to the side of the line of march and watched the Confederate cavalry file past them. About 4:00 P.M. the rebel column disappeared down the road, and the Federals marched north to Fort Rosecrans. Back at Fort Rosecrans, Baldwin reported to an apologetic Colonel Gilbert, who informed the lieutenant that he had pleaded in vain with his superiors to order the company back to the safety of the fort or at least to send a relief column to the stockade.17 The post commander, however, refused to take any action at all. Gilbert recommended that Baldwin receive a Medal of Honor for his stubborn resistance at the stockade, and many of the lieutenant's own men supported their regiment's commander, but the recommendation failed. Gilbert—whose support was vital for such an award—was killed within a year's time as he led a charge against Confederate positions at Resaca, Georgia. After the incident at the Stones River stockade, Baldwin and his company set up a winter camp near McMinnville, Tennessee, where they healed their wounds and enjoyed soft details in a pleasant countryside. In addition, on February 25,1864, he learned of his promotion to captain in the volunteer army. In fact, because of his youth, leadership abilities, and determination under fire (even though his experience was limited), Baldwin's commanders arranged for the army to make a place for him at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He considered the offer and declined it, believing that he could learn more about soldiering on the battlefield than in a classroom.

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In the spring of 1864, the Nineteenth Michigan Infantry regiment received orders to join the Army of the Cumberland at Chattanooga. On April 21, therefore, Baldwin and his company broke their winter camp and headed south for what they knew would be a Federal assault on Atlanta. At Chattanooga the regiment became part of the Second Brigade of the Third Division in the XX Corps with "Fighting Joe" Hooker—until recently leader of the entire Army of the Potomac— commanding the corps. By April 1864, Lincoln had summoned Ulysses S. Grant to the East and made him General-in-Chief of the Armies of the United States. Grant, in turn, gave command in the western theater of the war to William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman commanded 100,000 combat soldiers divided among three armies: James McPherson's Army of the Tennessee, George Thomas's Army of the Cumberland (to which Hooker's forces were attached), and John Schofield's Army of the Ohio. Against these Union armies, the Confederacy sent the Army of Tennessee, commanded by Joseph Johnston. In May, Sherman's armies marched out of Chattanooga through the fields on which they had fought the Battle of Chickamauga the previous year. Baldwin and his men had not taken part in the Chickamauga struggle, but now as they crossed the field of battle, they imagined the horrors of the struggle. Craters dug by artillery blasts pocked the land, and the bones of the Confederate dead littered the field, the victors lacking the manpower to bury them.18 Sherman's blows against Johnston began immediately after his armies crossed the Tennessee-Georgia border. At Ringgold, Georgia, on Friday, May 6, Baldwin heard the first artillery fire of the campaign. On the next day, he and his company helped construct earthworks but did not come into contact with the enemy. Finally, on Saturday and Sunday, May 14-15, the regiment participated in the Battle of Resaca. During this fight, on the second day of battle, Gilbert led Baldwin and the rest of the regiment in a charge against a Southern battery. The colonel ran ahead of his men. Leaping on the works that protected the Confederate artillery, he looked back to urge the companies behind him to follow. When Gilbert turned again toward the enemy, he found the muzzles of their guns leveled against him. The cannon blasted, and Gilbert fell mortally wounded. The rest of the regiment swarmed across the works on which their colonel had been wounded, seizing the Confederate guns.19 Joseph Johnston removed his forces from Resaca and headed for the Dallas Hills to establish another defensive position. The Federals pur-

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sued their enemies through the streets of Cassville, Georgia, on May 19. On Monday, May 23, the regiment moved across the Etowah River and two days later came into contact with the Confederate defenders in the Battle of Dallas Hills. Once again, hundreds of officers and men fell before Baldwin's eyes as they attacked the Confederate works. Johnston withdrew once more and set up new defenses on Kennesaw Mountain. The first days of June found Baldwin's company as a reserve, then on the front line as skirmishers, then joining the rest of the brigade for the Battle of Golgotha. At Golgotha the brigade advanced beyond its support to the earthworks and cannon of the enemy where Baldwin felt the "flame of the guns come right into . . . [my] . . . face."20 The brigade's officers ordered their men to withdraw to positions where the rest of the division could lend support. Back in line Baldwin lay on the ground directing his company's long-range musket fire against the enemy when a shell fell on the man lying next to him. One moment the man existed, the next, he was blown apart with only a great hole in the ground as evidence that he had been there. Baldwin leaped into the hole for safety and continued to fire. The blows of Sherman's attack continued: Wednesday, June 22, the Battle of Culp's Farm, where Baldwin's brigade "made a fine charge, driving everything from our front"; Thursday, June 23, the Union army slipped between the Confederates and Atlanta; Monday, July 4, the brigade occupied the abandoned enemy lines on Kennesaw Mountain, the Confederates quickly crossing the Chattahoochee River and taking up new defensive positions on the south bank. After a brief interval of calm, the Federals crossed the Chattahoochee in a flanking movement, and the Confederate forces fell back, harried by Union skirmishers. Finally, on Tuesday, July 19, Baldwin reached a thick wood north of Peachtree Creek, only three miles from the city of Atlanta. Jefferson Davis grew impatient with Johnston's defensive tactics. On July 17 he replaced Johnston with John Bell Hood. In battles at Gettysburg and Chickamauga, the new Confederate commander had had his left arm crippled and his right leg completely destroyed. These losses failed to hinder Hood's aggressive style of warfare. Win or lose, under Hood the Confederates attacked; Atlanta would not fall without a fight. Sherman sent two of his three armies—McPherson's and Schofield's—on a wide swing around Atlanta to the east where they turned southwest and drove toward the city. Sherman's third force, Thomas's

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army, crossed Peachtree Creek the morning of Wednesday, July 20, on pontoon bridges and arrayed themselves along the hills that sloped toward the creek. From left to right (or east to west) Thomas's line consisted of John Newton's IV Corps, John Geary's Second Division, XX Corps, with William Ward's Third Division, XX Corps—Baldwin's— between Newton's and Geary's but slightly to the rear. To the right of Geary's division stood Alpheus Williams's First Division, XX Corps, and to his right was Anson McCook's First Division, XIV Corps. Hood's Confederate Army of Tennessee consisted of the corps of William Hardee and Alexander Stewart.21 About 3:30 P.M. the Battle of Peachtree Creek began. From his position in Ward's division, Baldwin could see little of the flow of the battle or the relative positions of the opposing troops, but he did see Confederate skirmish lines moving obliquely from the southwest to the northeast toward Newton's division. Soon after the skirmish lines came a division of Hardee's Corps that smashed into Newton's. Shortly thereafter a second Confederate division doubled Newton's trials, and a third division to the right of these forces aimed at the apparent gap between Newton's and Geary's lines. Thomas ordered Ward to move his division forward to fill the gap, thereby protecting Newton's right flank. Coburn's brigade, with Baldwin and his company on its extreme left flank, pushed forward to meet the threat at the weakest point in the Federal line. Because the Confederate division overlapped the left flank of Ward's force, it thrust deep into the Federal line between Newton and Ward, at the spot where Baldwin and his men anchored the newly arrived division. Quickly Baldwin and a Captain Cahill—the officer of the company to Baldwin's right —reformed their units to deflect this flanking movement and hoped that a brigade from Newton's IV Corps would notice what had occurred and come to their rescue. Confederate and Union troops fought hand to hand, the men using their bayonets, and officers firing their revolvers and wielding sabers. The brigade commander on Newton's right saw what was happening to Baldwin's and Cahill's companies and came to their aid, and the Confederates, now out-numbered, retreated, some of them leaping into crevices on the hillsides and behind clumps of bushes, seeking protection from the heat of battle. Meanwhile, Baldwin and Cahill reformed their companies into the original line and awaited a second attack. When the Confederate charge commenced, Baldwin was caught up in the excitement and, waving his saber overhead, urged his men on,

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crying, "Forward! Advance!" Suddenly, about thirty yards ahead, two Confederate officers, having hidden behind a bush at the end of their first attack, sprang up and dashed toward the safety of their lines. Baldwin saw them (one of whom carried his unit's guidon) and dashed after them. With saber in hand, he caught the Confederates, slapped each on the backside with his weapon, and ordered them to lie face down with their hands on the backs of their heads. He then scrambled around to face them and menaced them with his saber, telling them to remain on the ground until the firing ebbed. The fire fight seemed interminable, and the three officers saw the absurdity of their position between the lines, endangered by shots from both sides. They repeated a popular joke making the rounds in both armies in 1864: they wished they were babies back at home—and girl babies at that! ** The fire abated, and from the direction of the Federal lines, Baldwin saw Private Eli Atland of Company D approach, looking for his commander. The two Federals returned to the Union lines with their captives, Baldwin carrying his saber in one hand and the captured guidon in the other. He took the two to the tent he shared with Cahill and ordered their cook to prepare a meal. The four officers ate a fine dinner, laughing, and swapping war stories. The social gathering broke up when a staff officer arrived to inquire about a rumor that two enemy officers had been captured and, if the rumor were true, why they had not been turned over to headquarters for interrogation. During the questioning the Confederates confirmed Baldwin's story, and John Coburn, his brigade commander, decided to recommend that the twenty-two-year-old captain receive the Medal of Honor. Many years passed, but finally, in 1891, Baldwin received the medal. He always treasured the award, but he tended to minimize the event itself. Late in life he told an interviewer, "It was a mere boyish prank and hardly worth talking about. Anyone might have done it."23 The siege of Atlanta began in July and lasted until early September 1864. Sherman moved huge guns to the front by rail from Chattanooga and pounded the city to rubble. In the end—on September 1—Hood abandoned the city, taking his battered troops west and then north of the city, hoping to interdict Sherman's supply lines. On the morning of Friday, September 2, the men of Coburn's brigade received their orders. They were to advance toward Atlanta to locate and engage the enemy. Baldwin's regiment, with him in temporary command, led the probe. Inexplicably, the thrust developed no defensive fire that morning, and soon the unit crossed Atlanta's defensive works. Baldwin

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wrote years later, "The first thing we knew we were on Peachtree Street in the heart of the city of Atlanta, and as I saw it, the city was surrendered to ColonelJohn Coburn."24 In mid-November, Baldwin's regiment participated in the destruction of Atlanta. He ordered the firing of buildings and oversaw the destruction of railroad tracks and engines. He wrote later, "Everything that would afford shelter or aid the enemy in the least was in ruins by the fifteenth." By now Sherman had completed his plans for the coming months. He reorganized the three armies that he had led to Atlanta, sending George Thomas with part of the Army of the Cumberland north to defend Tennessee and Kentucky from Hood's retribution for the destruction of Atlanta. Sherman combined the remaining portion of the Army of the Cumberland—including Baldwin's regiment—with the Army of the Ohio and created a new force called the Federal Army of Georgia, commanded by Henry Slocum. A second force was the Army of the Tennessee now led by the one-armed General Oliver Otis Howard. On Tuesday, November 15, Sherman ordered the destruction of the military stores remaining in Atlanta and set out on the March to the Sea. Slocum's army marched on the left (the north) wing, and Howard's army occupied the right wing. Sherman intended to demonstrate to Southern politicians and civilians that Confederate armies were powerless to protect them from the might of the Union; he aimed to disrupt Southern society and destroy its economy rather than to defeat its armies. As he put it, he wanted "to make Georgia howl." Sherman ordered his commissary officers to load twenty days' rations in each brigade's train. When the armies had consumed these supplies, he intended for them to live off the land. He ordered each brigade commander to organize a foraging party, "under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather near the route traveled . . . whatever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten days' provisions for his command, and three days' forage."25 Baldwin's colonel chose him to lead a foraging party, and he commanded a detachment of one hundred men who, every second or third day, delivered food and forage to brigade headquarters. If the wagons were filled on their first day on the trail, the men could spend their time as they wished until due at headquarters again in two or three days. Baldwin also received permission to take riding horses from local

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farms to mount his command. Within two days all one hundred men in the detachment had mounts. He wrote, "I was authorized to send [any man who proved unsatisfactory to me] back to his command to be replaced by another man, hence the command [of foragers] was composed of the best lot of men I ever saw."26 Baldwin maintained that "Sherman's Bummers" rather than foragers committed most crimes during the march. Bummers—most often Federal soldiers, but sometimes Confederate deserters and emancipated slaves—wandered about the fringes of Sherman's March to the Sea, pillaging the countryside without official authorization. Baldwin described the bummers as "natural shirks and booters with no honorable intention other than to escape duty and fill their own stomachs with food, remaining away from their commands until captured by the enemy or run in by our own foraging parties."27 Baldwin, in spite of his protests, went beyond his orders on occasion. On Monday, November 21, his unit rode ahead of Sherman's armies into Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia. From the state's treasury, Baldwin and his men stole hundreds of thousands of Confederate bills left behind by fleeing civilian employees of the state. The captain ordered his men to "pay for what we got in the currency of the country instead of receipts." On one plantation he used the currency to pay for what his men took: $100 for each meal, $10 for each chicken, $50 for each ham, $1 per pound of grain, $1,000 per horse, $10,000 for each of a few fine horses, $100,000 for an especially fine horse, $100,000 for a black man named Ed.28 Later Baldwin's party came to the plantation of a Dr. Jones. There at the "big house," the Federals found several women gathered for mutual protection. The women had not eaten for twenty-four hours because the blacks, considering themselves emancipated, would do no work. Baldwin ordered the former slaves to prepare a meal and serve it to the officers and women on china retrieved from hiding places around the property. The women watched the Union soldiers enjoy themselves until midnight, when the officers left the mansion for their camp. One of the women said, "You Yankees are not half as bad as we supposed. You will come again after the cruel war is over and we have our independence."29 In a little over a month, Sherman's armies approached Savannah. A full-scale battle for possession of the city proved unnecessary, since the Confederate garrison there withdrew and joined Joseph Johnston's command, which moved ahead of Sherman's armies, hoping for a miracle that would save the Confederacy. Shortly before Christmas 1864, Baldwin and the rest of Sherman's Federals entered Savannah, and on

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December 25 they ate a Christmas dinner that "consisted] of fresh oysters gathered at low tide on the beach at [the] mouth of [the Savannah] river."30 After leaving Savannah on January 1, 1865, Baldwin's commanding officer relieved him of his duties as leader of a foraging party. Baldwin returned to his company and joined the Federal effort to destroy South Carolina. He had no sympathy for the first state to secede from the Union; he wanted to leave "their territory as barren as the African Desert."31 The trek of Slocum's wing through South Carolina bore little resemblance to the picnic atmosphere of the March to the Sea. Baldwin and his men slogged through swamps and rice bogs that had been flooded by retreating Confederates. To make matters worse, the January rains swelled rivers and swamps and made even high ground a sea of mud. Men sometimes camped in two feet of water and mud, picketed in canoes, and emerged "like hippopotami from the depths of ooze" when they awakened in the morning.32 In mid-February, Baldwin entered Columbia, South Carolina, with Slocum's army. He wrote years later that the Confederates had already set the city afire when the Federal troops arrived. He blamed the holocaust on Wheeler's retreating troops. Most observers have concluded, however, that the initial fires—the ones Baldwin must have seen—were only a few bales of burning cotton piled on the main street of Columbia.33 The destruction of the city proper occurred later and was the work of drunken Federal troops.34 The Federals entered North Carolina in early March. They tramped through the rain, past burning tar factories, heading toward Fayetteville. Everyone knew that the war was near its end, only a few battles remaining. On Thursday, March 16, Baldwin's brigade fought in the Battle of Averasboro, one of the last attempts by Johnston and his dwindling army to forestall the inevitable: the joining of Sherman's armies with Grant's before Richmond. Baldwin's company fought as skirmishers on the front line at Averasboro and distinguished itself by taking a Confederate battery of one gun and a caisson. The Confederates moved out of their defensive position during the night after the battle. Slocum's army again met Johnston's at Bentonville, North Carolina. By now the Confederate force consisted of a mere twenty-one thousand combatants. On March 20 the armies prepared for afinalstruggle. Sherman supplemented Slocum's force with several corps from Howard's wing. On the morning of Tuesday, March 21, Sherman's and Johnston's armies clashed for the last time, each holding its own position. In

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the dark of night, however, Johnston's soldiers had no choice but to leave the field again. By mid-April, Sherman's armies were unopposed. They entered Goldsboro, North Carolina, and rested. Sherman planned to join Grant at Richmond for the fall of the Confederate capital, but events moved too quickly. On Wednesday, April 12, news arrived in Goldsboro that Lee had surrendered. Rumor had it that Johnston would surrender on the sixteenth. On the seventeenth the Federal armies heard the shocking news of Lincoln's death. On Thursday, April 27, Baldwin and his company learned that Johnston, leader of the last significant Confederate force still in the field, had surrendered. Frank Baldwin thoroughly enjoyed the final days of his Civil War service. He and his company marched with Sherman and his troops to Richmond, where he and a friend went sight-seeing. They visited Libby Prison and saw Major Turner, the man who had commanded the prison garrison while Baldwin was a prisoner there. Baldwin commented, "We were as polite to him as our recollections of the past would admit of."35 Then, on May 23 and 24, 1865, 140,000 Federal soldiers—including Frank Baldwin—marched on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in the Grand Review before their commanding generals and President Johnson. Two and a half weeks later, late in the day on Saturday, June 10, Baldwin boarded a railroad car bound from Washington to Michigan. When the train arrived in Detroit, a local celebration began. During the festivities he received his promotion to lieutenant colonel of volunteers. Then the war truly ended for Baldwin; on June 26—the date of his birth—the army discharged him. Frank Baldwin was now a twenty-three-year-old civilian.

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'Mud and Romance SOME SOLDIERS HAVE difficulty adjusting to peacetime; Frank Baldwin was one of these. Military idealism may have caused his difficulties with civilian life. For three years he delighted in camaraderie, command, violence, and peril. His loyalties and obligations—his duty— were directed toward men whom he commanded and who commanded him as much as toward the government or personal relationships outside the service. In the summer of 1865, however, military idealism was out of fashion in America. The war had ended, and while most soldiers returned to their homes and families, eager to resume their former lives, men like Baldwin were at loose ends. Baldwin returned home to Constantine in search of a new career. In July 1865 he purchased land, a pair of horses, and some sheep and other livestock and tried to become a farmer. Within a month his horses died, and wild dogs attacked and destroyed two-thirds of his sheep. He lost more than $1,000.l In September, Baldwin abandoned his farm and reentered Hillsdale College, where he joined almost two dozen students who were Civil War veterans and who had more in common with each other than they did with the other students. He soon found the discipline of the school irksome and his social life discouraging. Within weeks the veterans and the school's administrators were at odds, especially over the issue of the former soldiers' relations with the women students. Hillsdale administrators forbade the veterans to speak to the women except by permission and then only in the presence of a third person.2 Baldwin soon saw that he was neither a farmer nor a college student, so he enthusiastically read the contents of a December letter he had received from a Judge Smith of Centerville, Michigan. The judge inquired whether Baldwin wanted a position as lieutenant in the post-

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war regular army. If so, he must write immediately to the Michigan delegation in the United States Senate, informing the politicians of his interest. He now realized how much he valued the life-style of the army officer. In addition to the military life he had found so delightful during the Civil War, the army could offer him the honors and privileges of a gentleman, even though he was not a wealthy man. In the military an officer could combine idealism with ambition to produce a career. On December 14, 1865, therefore, Baldwin sent off his letter, and within a week, a clerk wrote back, "Your letter of the 14th has been received and in reply will say that I have qualified your application and recommended you for the appointment in the regular army."3 Near the end of February 1866, the full Senate approved Baldwin's commission. He also determined to marry. He had courted more than one girl, mentioning the names Nellie Smith and AUie Blackwood to his aunt who lived in Coldwater, Michigan.4 He settled on AUie, whom he visited enough over the months of his civilian life to draw the conclusion that she would make a gentleman-officer a fine wife—schooled in the ladylike virtues as she was. Frank's courtship succeeded: he proposed to AUie, and she accepted his offer. AUie may have been as impressed with Frank's looks as she was with his other qualities. The young veteran wore his dark hair short and sported a mustache and chin whiskers. The lines of his nose were straight, and his chin, hidden under the whiskers, had a shallow cleft. His eyes had a confident look about them. Though a short man—about five feet, eight inches—Frank's body was trim and muscular. Allie remembered from their first meeting that he looked dashing in uniform. With his engagement as settled as his future career, Baldwin left Michigan for Newport Barracks, Kentucky, arriving there on May 10. After a few weeks he joined his regiment, the Nineteenth United States Infantry, stationed at Jacksonport, Arkansas. The army went through a reorganization before he had time to become familiar with the Arkansas countryside. The staff in Washington reassigned his company to the Thirty-seventh United States Infantry and ordered it to Kansas. By September 1866 Baldwin and his company marched west from Leavenworth to Fort Ellsworth, Kansas. In 1864 the army had situated Fort Ellsworth on the left bank of the Smoky Hill River in central Kansas, at the spot where the Santa Fe stage route forked away in a southwesterly direction from the Smoky Hill Road which continued west, paralleling the river through Kansas into Colorado.5 When Baldwin arrived at the post, it was commanded

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by Colonel Dangerfield Parker of the Thirty-seventh Infantry and had a complement of officers and their wives that included Mrs. Parker, Major and Mrs. William Bell (commissary officer), Lieutenant and Mrs. Wells Willard (quartermaster), and a Dr. Chase (army surgeon) and his young bride.6 The army made Fort Ellsworth the home base of the company, but, in fact, he and his men spent little time there. Instead, Baldwin placed his troops in groups of four or five at stations along the Smoky Hill Road and the Santa Fe stage road. The presence of these soldiers was meant to discourage Indian attacks against migrants and wagon traffic along the trails. Baldwin's men also escorted every stagecoach leaving Fort Ellsworth for the West. A single overland coach rarely ventured out on the roads. A wagon with a few soldiers of the Thirty-seventh United States Infantry left the fort with each stage. If a wagon was unavailable, the guards sat on the roof of the coach. Years later Baldwin described one of his first trips west from Ellsworth. He had escorted a stage packed with frontiersmen whom he had made sure were well armed. A few soldiers mounted the roof of the stage while others under his command rode in a trailing wagon. His orders called for them to remain with the coach as far as the border between Kansas and Colorado. As the soldiers neared the end of their journey, a band of a dozen or so warriors—perhaps Sioux, perhaps Cheyenne—attacked. In those days few Indians on the high plains possessed firearms: they used bows, arrows, lances, and clubs. The warriors rode close to the wagons, dipping to the sides of their mounts and shooting their arrows from under their ponies' necks. At Baldwin's order the travelers held their fire until the attackers came within a few yards and then let go a barrage that killed two warriors and wounded several others. The Indians drew up their mounts while the coach and wagon proceeded to the next station where he counted a dozen arrows stuck in the sides of the vehicles.7 In addition to the Sioux and Cheyenne, he faced other perils. On Christmas Night 1866, almost four months after he had arrived at Fort Ellsworth, the lieutenant rode toward his post after having made a year-end inspection tour of stations along the Santa Fe stage route.8 Six inches of snow covered the prairie. He had no rifle with him at the time, but a revolver rested in a holster at his hip. In addition to the cartridges in his weapon, he had nearly fifty shells in a leather case attached to his belt. As Baldwin's mount struggled through the snow, still five miles from Smoky Hill River and the fort, a wolf pack attacked

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him. He drew his revolver and, without stopping his mount, fired at the nearest animal. The wounded wolf stumbled to the ground, and the other animals stopped to consume it. Baldwin urged his mount forward, gaining about a mile on his pursuers, who soon resumed the chase. Within minutes the wolves again drew near. Baldwin shot repeatedly, each bullet causing the pack to interrupt its chase. Finally, he sighted the lights of Fort Ellsworth. After a few last shots at the pack behind, the soldier coaxed his laboring mount toward the river's edge where the animal collapsed and died. He leaped into the halffrozen river and scrambled to safety up the north bank. In his dugout Baldwin counted his cartridges; less than ten remained. After making a report to the post adjutant, he returned to his quarters to pack his bags. The next morning he planned to travel east to Junction City, Kansas, and from there via rail to St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit. In Detroit, Allie Blackwood waited for Frank to arrive to marry her. Late in the 1870s, a correspondent for a Chicago newspaper wrote an article on life on the western military frontier, calling it "a compound of mud and romance."9 Years later, Martha Summerhayes, an army wife who wrote of her experiences on the frontier, called the lot of military dependents "glittering misery."10 In January 1867, Allie Blackwood anticipated the romance and glitter of marriage to a military man, but she foresaw little of the frontier's mud and misery, so, when Frank Baldwin arrived in Detroit on Saturday, January 5, he found Allie eager to begin a new life out West. The next morning the young couple left Detroit for Northville, where, at the home of Rebecca and Robert Blackwood, a few relatives had already gathered for the coming marriage ceremony. Allie—though suffering from a cold— conducted herself with such grace that Frank wrote in his diary late that night, "The more I see [her], the more I admire and love her. She seems perfectly contented to go away with me. How much ought I try to make such a worthy lady happy. Nothing shall be left undone that will add to her happiness."11 In her twenty-second year, Allie Blackwood looked and carried herself like a lady. She was slim but well formed and of average height. Her pretty face was framed by long dark hair which, in preparation for her wedding to Frank, she had arranged in a row of curls fifteen strong, from ear to ear. Above her dark eyes were perfectly formed brows.

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Allie tried to keep her mouth closed much of the time because her teeth had decayed badly, and she hated the way they ruined her smile and fouled her breath.12 Between January 6 and 10, Frank and Allie passed their time visiting and talking with friends and relatives. Frank spoke to Allie's uncle, Robert Blackwood about his desire to provide well for Allie, and Blackwood approved of Allie's plan to go west with her husband. Allie's cold worsened, and she developed chills and a fever. Her weakened state released her fears about the future. She cried gloomily at times, prompting Frank to write in his diary, "I can see that Allie does hate to leave her friends a little. She has been crying some today."13 The wedding day, Thursday, January 10, 1867, was pleasant and warm. Frank's attire at the ceremony appealed to Allie's romantic nature. He wore his dress uniform, with braid and cape; a saber gleamed at his side and spurs jingled at his heels. After the 11:00 A.M. ceremony, the bride and groom received guests in a drawing room. One of the guests was Jimmie Sheridan, the Blackwood family coachman who had known Allie for years. Jimmie said what some guests at the wedding may have been thinking: "There they go! Pull, Dick, pull, Devil; you need halter breaking, Alice, you sure do!"14 Soon after receiving the wedding guests, the Baldwins left their friends and relatives. Rebecca Blackwood, no longer a romantic if ever she was one, offered them advice: "Bear and forebear."15 The young couple traveled to Detroit, and from there they went to Coldwater, Hillsdale, and Constantine. Allie continued to suffer from chills and fever, and Frank also became ill. On Thursday, January 17, the Baldwins boarded a train for Chicago. Various delays caused the couple to miss connections to St. Louis, and so they stayed at a hotel in Chicago, hoping their fevers would pass, until the following Monday, when they resumed their journey in spite of their illness. Frank's twenty-day leave had already expired. Frank and Allie arrived in St. Louis at 10:00 A.M. on Tuesday, January 22, 1867, and had a quick dinner at the Planters House. After dinner they left by rail for Junction City and from there went by ambulance to Fort Riley—on the army frontier the ambulance served as transportation for the sick and wounded and also for army families. At Fort Riley they stayed two nights, detained because of a blizzard, and then spent their first night on the trail at a roadhouse called Hogan's. Allie sat brooding while a group of frontiersmen drank and sang until late into the night. Mrs. Hogan sent the men out of the house to allow

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Allie a moment's privacy to change into her bedclothes. After changing, she nestled into an army cot, but the men returned and resumed their revelry. The next morning the men descended from their sleeping quarters in a loft and offered to turn their backs to Allie as she dressed, but Frank urged the fellows to leave his bride alone for a moment. Clothed and breakfasted, Allie climbed into the ambulance as Frank urged her, "Be brave. Remember, you are a soldier's wife now."16 At 4:00 P.M. on January 28, the ambulance reached Fort Ellsworth and rocked to a halt before Frank's quarters. The dugout's squalor dimmed Allie's romantic view of what life would be like with Frank on the frontier. About two years before, soldiers had constructed the dwelling by cutting a notch in the side of a rise near the bank of the Smoky Hill River. They placed cottonwood logs on end as walls and crossed these with a log and sod roof. Through a hole in the roof, they pushed a pipe for the stove. Inside, sheets of canvas covered the walls and most of the ceiling. Because a sheet did not entirely cover the ceiling overhead, a few of the roof's ribs and the sod covering were exposed. One dirty, four-paned window allowed a hint of light. The dugout had two parts: a "drawing room," as Frank called it, and a kitchen. The drawing room had a board floor, unplaned and full of slivers. Gray army blankets partitioned the drawing room into two parts, a living room and a bedroom. The kitchen had a dirt floor, a rusted box stove (with a hill of ashes and chewed-out quids next to it), a camp chair, a few empty candle boxes, and a large packing box used as a kitchen table. As Allie looked at her new home for the first time, she heard rustling and scratching overhead; the sheet ceiling trembled, and at the edge of the canvas, several sets of eyes peeped down at the young woman. Pack rats and prairie mice had found a winter home between the roof and the canvas and had perched themselves there to get a look at Allie.17 On their first evening at Fort Ellsworth, the Baldwins took dinner at the officers' mess. Mrs. Kelly, wife of the commissary sergeant, tried to comfort the young bride, but Allie would not be consoled; she broke down and wept. An embarrassed Frank Baldwin quickly led his wife back to their quarters. Not until February 12 could Frank write, "Allie is very cheerful and very happy today."18 Frank tried to relieve Allie's anxieties about life at Fort Ellsworth. He repeatedly assured her that soon she would have friends. Several of

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the officers at Ellsworth had their wives with them: Mrs. Parker, Mrs. Chase, Mrs. Willard, Mrs. Bell. For his part Frank could stay near home during the winter months. In the winter military activity along the Smoky Hill Road came to a standstill, since the Indians of the region, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa, remained in their winter camps, posing no threat to anyone until spring. Frank informed Allie that she would have help cleaning the dugout and that she would live in these quarters for only a short time. The army had supplied the Baldwins with Private Joe Bowers as a striker, an enlisted man who served as an all-purpose helper and handyman. They also would have a cook, a Dutchman named John Lick.19 Allie could supervise these men as they did the worst of the cleaning tasks in the dugout. Then, as soon as possible, Frank took Allie on a hike about a mile to the north of the riverbank encampment, onto the high ground away from the Smoky Hill where the enlisted men of the post were building a new fort, complete with stone buildings, log quarters for enlisted men, and semiprivate houses for officers. Allie's dismay eased as she counted the days until spring when she could move to the site of the new post, which also had been designated by a new name, Fort Harker. As the winter wore on, the ladies of the fort arranged a ball in honor of the newlyweds.20 The women chose one of the unfinished buildings at the new site to serve as a ballroom. Enlisted men hauled two box stoves up the hill from the old fort, and the women covered the roughhewn walls and ceiling with canvas and blankets. Then they painted signs for the walls: "On with the Dance," "Let Joy be Unconfined," "There Will be No More Weeping and Sorrow Here." The wives sought out soldiers who played instruments and arranged for them to begin practicing. Then each woman created her ensemble by rummaging through her trunk. Those who had been on the frontier the longest suffered most, since they lacked the latest fashions, but they made do by borrowing sashes, brooches, and hair pins. On the evening of the dance, the couples of the fort arrived at the ballroom, the men in full dress uniform and the women in the ensembles. They spent the evening dancing to the "Virginia Reel," the "Money Musk," and other traditional melodies. During the rest of the winter, the other couples of the post entertained the Baldwins. The Parkers asked them to their temporary quarters. The Willards, Bells, and Chases—each in their turn—invited the Baldwins to their dugout homes. Allied romanticism about life on the military frontier rebounded with the hope of new quarters and an ac-

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tive social life; she formed a friendship with Mrs. Chase, the post surgeon's wife who expected a child sometime the next summer. (30°) Allie compared the Baldwin quarters with those of other officers and resolved to climb the army's ladder of preference. She saw how a soldier's material well-being improved as his rank increased. She also noticed how the women of Fort Ellsworth acknowledged Colonel Parker's wife as their leader. Frank tried to put the matter of promotion into perspective for Allie. He told her how the Civil War had created a volunteer force of hundreds of thousands, with officers numbering in the tens of thousands. The prewar regular army virtually disappeared among the volunteer regiments which, because of the war, offered lowly lieutenants quick promotions to the level of colonel. Prewar regular army captains, majors, and colonels found themselves commanders of volunteer brigades, divisions, and corps. At war's end, however, the process reversed itself. In mid-1866 the army had 30,000 men; by the end of the year, it grew to about 50,000; in the following year, it reached its postwar peak of about 56,800. The new army had one commanding general, Grant; one lieutenant general, Sherman; five major generals; and ten brigadiers of the line. The army line had ten cavalry, forty-five infantry, and five artillery regiments, each commanded by a colonel with a lieutenant colonel as his foremost aide. The cavalry regiments had twelve companies each (as did the artillery); every infantry unit had ten companies. Cavalry regiments rated three majors each, allowing the formation of three battalions in every mounted unit. The smaller infantry units had only one major. Captains usually commanded companies with the assistance of a first and second lieutenant.21 The cavalry provided opportunities for an ambitious army first lieutenant such as Frank Baldwin. In a mounted unit an officer could rise to captain and then to major more quickly than in the infantry simply because the cavalry was allowed more captains and majors than the foot service. In addition, since the army expected the cavalry to be the primary striking force on the frontier, openings for new captains and majors came frequently because of the expected casualties in the striking units. In spite of the danger involved—or perhaps because of it— during his first eight years of service on the frontier, Frank Baldwin hoped to transfer to the cavalry. The youth of most officers also discouraged quick advancement. Al-

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most every commander—down to the lowest first lieutenant—had served in the Civil War. Men nearly the same age as Frank—George Custer, Nelson Miles, Ranald Mackenzie, to name three—served as major generals during the war. In the new regular army, the men each held the rank of colonel or lieutenant colonel. Wartime lieutenant colonels and captains found themselves first lieutenants. The manner in which the army administered the seniority system discouraged soldiers from performing extraordinarily. Through captain, advancement occurred according to seniority in the regiment and through colonel according to seniority in the branch (cavalry, infantry, artillery). The president awarded general's stars. In some regiments, therefore, young officers remained in place for decades, leaving no openings for promotion, no matter how deserving the junior officers. In other outfits civilian life might coincidentally lure away several captains within a short time. So, in one regiment, a worthy lieutenant might languish at his rank for a decade; in another, a mediocrity might rise to captain within a few months. Skill or bravery in the face of the enemy played no role in advancement; strict seniority made the system run. In the spring Quartermaster Wells Willard informed Frank and Allie that they could move from their dugout quarters to a new, semiprivate house on the heights above the Smoky Hill River. The house contained two large rooms separated by a hall. The Baldwins occupied one of the rooms; across the hall lived Major William Bell with his wife and baby. In spite of their size, neither apartment included a kitchen. The Baldwins and the Bells, therefore, rigged up a common kitchen behind the building and enclosed it in a tent. The move to new quarters came at an appropriate time, for Allie was pregnant. Spring also brought renewed military activity. The army sent Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, commander of the Department of the Missouri (comprising Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico) into Central Kansas to demonstrate the government's strength to the Indians of the region: the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa. Having served in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, Hancock had seen action in the Peninsular Campaign and at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. He was one of fifteen officers who had received the "Thanks of Congress" for distinguished service during the war. Hancock's expedition against the Indians of the southern plains

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originated at Fort Riley and passed through Forts Harker, Zarah, and Larned. Among the units under Hancock that camped on the river bottoms west of Harker on April 1,1867, was George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Cavalry.22 The two thousand soldiers of Hancock's command stayed only briefly near Fort Harker, for the column's objective lay closer to Fort Larned than to Harker. Hancock had developed an imperious manner during the war, and at Fort Larned, he confronted a few Cheyenne and demanded that they submit to a white man's peace. The insulted Indians reluctantly agreed to lead Hancock and his troops to an encampment on Pawnee Fork, but warned him to negotiate with the chiefs there rather than decree his will. Other warriors suspected that the general's manner would ultimately win out over diplomacy. These Indians stole away from the expedition and warned the Cheyenne camping on Pawnee Fork. Hearing of the approach of white soldiers, the Indians fled their camp, leaving everything behind but the things they could carry. Hancock sent Custer and his troops on a vain chase after the scattering Indians, but the Seventh Cavalry accomplished nothing. The horsemen jaded their animals and had to camp for months near Fort Hays while their mounts ate their fill of grass (no other forage was available at Hays at this time of year) and renewed their strength. Hearing of the Indians' ferocity against civilians who crossed their path, Hancock burned the village he held at Pawnee Fork. This act infuriated the tribes of Kansas and ensured a dangerous summer and fall in 1867. Baldwin saw some of the results of the increased Indian hostility as he moved along the Smoky Hill Trail while escorting overland coaches and inspecting the detachments of his men at stations along the road. For Allie, however, the dangers seemed distant and abstract until one night in late spring. As Allie described the incident years later, the couple was sitting before their hearth when Lieutenant Gustav A. Hesselberger of the Third Infantry—a German-born volunteer during the Civil War—came to their door and explained that two young women who had been rescued from Indians were outside in a wagon. Hesselberger was taking them to the railroad where they would board an eastbound train. The lieutenant begged the Baldwins to house the two for the night. Seeing the two women was a demoralizing experience for Allie. The Indians had repeatedly raped, beaten, and starved the two, and the older woman, about twenty years of age, had become deranged. The younger of the two had kept her senses and could describe for Allie in hushed tones the horrors of their weeks in captivity. The elder of the two women begged the Baldwins to kill her and became

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calm only when Doctor Chase administered sedatives. Allie sat up all night comforting the women as best she could. After two days of this, Hesselberger put the two in his wagon and, escorted by a strong detachment, set out for tracks' end, now at Salina, Kansas.23 After having aroused the Indians of Kansas, Hancock decided to leave the field and tour some of the forts in his department. In early June, Hancock's staff ordered Baldwin to prepare his company to escort the party to Denver. The assignment would take him away for about two months. With Frank gone Allie sank into a lonely, boring routine. In late June, however, Allie's boredom ended abruptly when Asiatic cholera struck the Colorado and Kansas frontier. Those who contracted the disease experienced vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration. Their kidneys failed, and they suffered a high fever. Those who lived recovered after suffering three to five days. In Hays City and at Fort Hays, almost two hundred people died. At Fort Harker and the nearby town of Ellsworth, the epidemic took a similar toll.24 At the post the first to die was Allie's best friend, Mrs. Chase. The disease caused her to go into labor, and she lost her child before her own death. Quickly, Major Bell shipped his wife and baby east on the railroad. Then Bridget, the post surgeon's cook, died.25 Allie desperately wished that Frank would return to Fort Harker, and she prayed that the baby she carried would survive. Meanwhile, the soldiers piled each day's victims on the parade ground for burial in the post graveyard. A sergeant and his wife, who had left behind four children, were among the dead. The Roman Catholic church at Leavenworth sent several Sisters of Mercy and two priests to Fort Harker and Ellsworth, where they nursed the afflicted, risking their own lives as they worked. One of them, a Father Martyn, made a daily trip from the fort to the town to tend the sick. One day, a soldier found the priest dead along the road, a victim of cholera. The scourge passed, and those who survived returned to their normal routines, that is, fighting off the Cheyenne who continued to repay the white population for Hancock's actions at Pawnee Fork. Soldiers on solitary missions escaped into the safety of the fort after Indians had pursued them for miles. During the evenings the glow of burning ranches illuminated the sky around the post.26 On Friday, July 12, Baldwin and his company returned from the trip west. The lieutenant enthusiastically related what he had seen in Colo-

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rado, speaking happily about riding over a divide at Cherry Creek, just east of Denver, and seeing the town nestled on the high plain against the Front Range of the Rockies. He vowed to Allie that someday they would live there.27 Allie, however, was satisfied enough simply to have her husband with her again. For about a month—from midJuly to mid-August, 1867—Allie and Frank Baldwin enjoyed a peaceful interlude. Allie's pregnancy became apparent, and she went into the nineteenth-century army outpost's version of seclusion. The interlude ended when Frank learned that the army planned to transfer him and his company, along with three others from the Thirty-seventh Infantry, to Fort Wingate in New Mexico Territory. Fort Wingate was located near the western edge of the territory, near Arizona, far from the preferred spots in New Mexico (Fort Union in the northeastern part of the region or Fort Marcy in Santa Fe). Frank purchased a wagon for the journey and assured Allie that he would do everything for her comfort—not an easy promise to fulfill, since his wife was now seven months' pregnant. On Tuesday, September 3, 1867, soon after reveille, wagons drawn by six mules each lumbered in front of the officers' quarters and the quartermaster's buildings.28 The women of the expedition boarded their private wagons; enlisted men loaded last-minute cargoes on government vehicles; and soldiers formed ranks with full packs and waited for the order to march. Major Hugh B. Fleming, a West Pointer from Pennsylvania in temporary command of the column, passed the order along to begin the journey. Fleming remained in charge for two days until Lieutenant Colonel John R. Brooke, another veteran of the Army of the Potomac, arrived to take command. During the journey, the column marched fifteen to twenty miles each day. The expedition traveled down the military road that ended at Fort Larned, then along the Santa Fe Trail to Forts Dodge, Lyon, Union, and Marcy. It would visit Albuquerque and dozens of Mexican American settlements before reaching Fort Wingate. On some days the temperature reached the nineties, and several marchers suffered from heat stroke. On other days the rains came, and the column slogged through half a foot of mud. At Fort Larned, on Sunday, September 8, the travelers rested on the plain outside the post. Larned served both as an army base and as an Indian reservation. Every fall large numbers of Cheyenne, Arap-

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aho, and Kiowa camped on the prairie near the post and waited for the agent, Colonel Edward Wyncoop, to dispense annuities. The Indians held their councils there, conducted religious ceremonies, and renewed acquaintances. On the evening the expedition arrived, Allie, Frank, and several others witnessed a meeting between Colonel Wyncoop and some of the leaders of the Indians of the Southern Plains, including Tall Bull, Black Kettle, Little Raven, and Yellow Bear. The agent invited the chiefs to a council in about one month along the Medicine Lodge River southeast of Larned. The expedition passed through Fort Dodge on September 12 and began climbing to the high plains. It crossed prairie dog towns a mile wide, endured a cloud of grasshoppers, and observed the herds of buffalo that still roamed the region west of Dodge. Eight days after leaving Dodge, they came to Fort Lyon in Colorado Territory and quickly made for Trinidad. Moving up the banks of the Purgatoire River, they reached the town on Friday, October 4. By now Allie Baldwin's time had come. Frank explained the situation to Brooke. The commander arranged for the expedition's contract doctor to remain in Trinidad with the Baldwins. He also ordered two drivers and Frank's orderly to remain with the couple. The next morning, the column of more than six hundred left Trinidad while Frank made Allie comfortable in the home of a Mrs. Kinnear, the only woman in town from the States. Within a few days, Allie began a difficult period of labor. No documents exist describing Allie's difficulties, but three years later, she wrote to her husband, discussing the possibility of having a second child, "I feel so frightened when I think of it. I am afraid to risk my life. I am afraid I will die."29 In spite of Allie's distress, on October 12, at 5:15 P.M., she gave birth to a baby girl whom they named Juanita. For nine days Allie rested while Mrs. Kinnear cared for the baby. Allie recovered slowly. On Monday, October 21, the party set out for Fort Union aboard the Baldwin wagon. Soon Allie knew that she had made a mistake in attempting to continue the journey. She begged Frank to send one of the drivers to find a spot where she could rest. The man returned with the news that the Wooten ranch, whose owner was known thereabouts as "Uncle Dick," lay nearby. By nightfall the travelers arrived at Wooten's ranch. In the morning Frank left for Fort Union to find temporary quarters for his ailing wife. He returned to Uncle Dick's ranch on Friday, November 1, with the news that he had secured quarters at the fort. The couple could remain there as long as

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it took for Allie to recover. The post had a hospital and several surgeons in case Allie needed them. On Saturday the party moved on and for three days climbed to the site of Fort Union, where they remained for almost two months. Two days before Christmas, the Baldwins were on the trail again, Juanita swinging from a hammock suspended from the ceiling of the wagon. The Baldwins spent a few days at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe, guests of Lieutenant James W. Pope, a recent graduate of West Point who served as post quartermaster. They left Santa Fe on December 29 and arrived at Fort Wingate on Sunday, January 5, 1868, four months after leaving Fort Harker. The travails of the Baldwins continued when they arrived at Fort Wingate. In his words, "Every officer at the fort was drunk" when he and his wife arrived.30 Colonel Verling K. Hart hastily made a room available, but there was no furniture in it, not even a hospital cot. Frank and Allie stretched out on a dirt floor which they covered with army blankets and sheepskins, little Juanita tucked between them. No one in the family slept well that night, however, due to what Allie called in later years, "the pestilence that walketh by night."31 In 1868 Fort Wingate occupied a spot on the desert at the eastern foot of the Zuni Mountains and on the western edge of one of New Mexico's badlands known as the Malpais. The foothills of the Zuni Mountains produced cacti, sagebrush, and gama grass, a rich forage for all kinds of stock. Pine trees grew high in the Zuni Mountains, where springs and creeks created an occasional lake. The water for the fort came from a spring at El Gallo. The fort had been constructed during the Civil War as a base for the troops of Colonel Kit Carson, who campaigned against the Navajo in 1863. Carson's troops swept through the region in a scorched-landscape campaign, burning crops useless to themselves, torching the Navajo hogans, and butchering their horses and sheep. In 1864, after having captured thousands of Indians and having penned them up at Fort Defiance near the Arizona-New Mexico border, Carson's volunteers cornered hundreds of Navajo warriors in their last stronghold at Canyon de Chelly. Scores of Indians died on the floor of the canyon, but most joined their fellows in captivity. In March 1864 the army forced almost two thousand five hundred Navajo—warriors, women, children, the old—on a three hundred mile march, called the "Long Walk"

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by the Indians. The Navajo trekked through the New Mexican desert to Bosque Redondo, a region to the east watered by the alkaline Pecos River. When the Baldwins arrived at their new post, both the Indians at Bosque Redondo and the soldiers at Fort Wingate had fared badly. The Navajo failed to make a living on their alkaline land and died at alarming rates, while the soldiers at Wingate maintained only a hint of professionalism, quarreling among themselves, drinking alcohol beyond the limits of endurance, and deserting in monumental numbers. Soon after her arrival, Allie met other post women: Mrs. Verling K. Hart, wife of the post commander, Mrs. Captain Kemble, and Mrs. Lieutenant Wells Willard, who had been at Fort Harker with Allie. The hardships at Fort Wingate caused the women to develop flinty relationships among themselves. Mrs. Hart, for example, passed judgment on the domestic skills of the wives of junior officers, including Allie Baldwin. Once on a trip to Albuquerque, the colonel's wife whispered to Mrs. Kemble, "Mrs. Baldwin likes dirt by the looks of her house and with her red petticoats in points and buttons off her balmoral shoes."32 The officers also quarreled with each other. Captain Kemble, in particular, found himself in trouble with Colonel Hart, once being placed in close arrest. Allie wrote to Frank (away from the post at the time): "Captain Kemble is in close arrest, was put in yesterday. He doesn't know what for. . . . The Captain cried and swore he never in his life done anything wrong—officially. . . . Blames his wife for all his trouble. . . . I think Captain K. is as unreasonable a man as I ever saw. . . . He has got too good a wife for such a one as he."33 Since the women barely spoke to one another, the monotony of life at the post intensified. They refused to organize balls as had the wives at Fort Harker. The men, including Frank, tended to while away their hours gambling and drinking. Only rarely were the soldiers called on for duty beyond the routine, as when rogue Indian bands who lived in remote mountain camps raided the Mexican Americans of hamlets like San Rafael, Cubero, or Seboyeta. At least once during the Baldwins' stay, the warriors even attacked the post cattle and horse herd that grazed near the fort. Allie had tucked Juanita in her candle-box cradle and had gotten into bed while Frank struggled to remove his boots. In the corner of the kitchen, the enlisted man cook of the Baldwin household had also lay down on his bunk. Suddenly, a drum roll warned of danger to the post. Frank and the cook scrambled to dress, and in a moment they dashed out the

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door. As he left Frank ordered Allie to stay put, douse the fire in the hearth, and be quiet. Listening to the sounds outside, Allie quickly dressed. She refused to put out the fire as Frank had ordered because she feared the dark. After the Indians ran off, Frank and the cook returned to the Baldwin quarters. Allie then sobbed. Only when Dr. Vicery, the post surgeon, tended to her did she sleep.34 The Navajo of Bosque Redondo signed a treaty with the Washington politicians which allowed the Indians to occupy a reservation carved out of the northwestern and northeastern corners of New Mexico and Arizona, respectively. The government promised to provide herds of sheep for the Indians in hope that soon the Navajo would regain the ability to support themselves. The army would supervise the treaty with its forces located at Fort Wingate. Fort Wingate, however, occupied a site too far east to supervise the new Navajo reservation. For this reason orders arrived commanding the garrison to move to the abandoned site of Fort Fauntleroy, some fifty miles west of Fort Wingate. Therefore, in early June, Colonel Hart ordered Baldwin to take his company to the site of Fauntleroy and build a new garrison. Frank and his company marched out of the post, leaving Allie and the rest of the garrison behind until the construction party had completed its work. The men headed north and west of Fort Wingate, along the northern foothills of the Zuni Mountains, toward the headwaters of the Rio Puerco of the West and the crumbled buildings of Fort Fauntleroy. The remains of the post occupied a spot opposite the open end of a horseshoe-shaped valley, nestled against the hills to the south. Cacti and sagebrush covered the valley floor while clumps of gama grass dotted the hills. Across the headwaters of the Rio Puerco to the north loomed the cliffs of another set of highlands. Baldwin ordered his men to build one-story adobe structures roofed with poles and brush for a post of several hundred soldiers. From the day of Frank's departure, Allie's spirits sank. She wrote to him on June 3, "Oh, Frank, you don't know how lonely I am here. There hasn't been a soul in the house since you went away, excepting the doctor to get his meals and Mrs. Kemble and Katie [the Kembles' daughter] very seldom. What a set of inhabitants this fort has got."35 By Friday, July 3, however, Frank's men finished their work and sent word of the completion of the new post to Fort Wingate. Colonel Hart passed the message to the Bosque Redondo, from which four troops of the Third United States Cavalry set out, escorting the first contingent of Navajo to northeastern New Mexico. Near the end of July, the garrison from Fort Wingate, along with the families of the post, as well as

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the first contingent of five hundred Navajo and the detachment of the Third Cavalry came to the new fort, which by now the army called New Fort Wingate. The colonel reorganized the command of the new post and gave Baldwin a crucial job: quartermaster and commissary officer. In this role he supervised all the labor and building that went on at the fort. He ordered, received, stored, and distributed all the goods that came to Wingate: grain from the Rio Grande valley, buffalo meat from Texas, flour and other subsistence from Colorado and Kansas. Baldwin worked closely with the Navajo who camped about the valley waiting for the government to deliver their herds of sheep. The lieutenant arranged for the Navajo to collect gama grass in the nearby hills to be used as forage for the post's stock, promising to pay them one cent per pound of grass. The Navajo warriors refused to do such work, but their women and children agreed to participate. They scoured the hills, chopping down clumps of grass. On the first day, the Navajo delivered 500 pounds of forage to the quartermaster: on the second day, 1,000 pounds. By the end of the season, the Indians had brought in more than 600,000 pounds of gama grass.36 This was Baldwin's first experience in dealing closely with Indians, and from it he developed strong opinions about treating them fairly but firmly. He believed that the government provided too little subsistence to help the reservation Indians make a living. He felt that it usually appointed ignorant and dishonest agents who, when they did not mismanage their charges, often cheated them out of their treaty rights. When the Indians rebelled, the government ordered the army to subdue the enraged tribes or chase them down in the wilderness at great expense in dollars and lives.37 While Frank pursued his career as quartermaster and commissary officer, Allie accommodated herself to her new quarters.38 The Baldwin home had two rooms: a kitchen and a large living, eating, and sleeping area. Both rooms had dirt floors covered with straw that was overlaid with blankets and sheepskins. Frank jokingly called the living and eating area next to the kitchen the "dining and banquet hall." The bedroom, the end of the living room farthest from the kitchen, was partitioned from the rest of the area by army blankets and was furnished with a bed, Juanita's cradle, a chair, and a stand near the window. New Mexico receives little rain, but when the wet season arrived, it troubled the inhabitants of Fort Wingate all the more, since they failed to prepare for it. The soldiers who first constructed the fort under Baldwin's directions lacked the skill to create water-resistant adobe. Fur-

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thermore, the ceilings they constructed of poles and brush were not watertight, so when heavy rains came, the flood almost destroyed entire buildings. On one occasion Allie positioned basins, pails, tubs, cups, and pans all about the house. She kept the baby dry by hanging an umbrella over her cradle, but Allie lay in a soggy bed surrounded by water pails. The next morning Allie, Frank, and a few enlisted men moved the furniture and carpeting outdoors in the sun to dry. The couple needed a break and wandered away from the building, only to experience another cloudburst and a flash flood. Frank and one of the Navajo nearby locked their hands into a seat for Allie, waded through the flooded low ground, and carried her back to her quarters. Life continued at the new fort much as it had at the old. A military pony express system delivered month-old mail; Mexican American traders came to the post to sell scarce vegetables and caged hens; Navajo women barged into Allie's home to watch her primp her hair. The women begged her to style theirs also, which she gladly did. For her trouble the Navajo women accepted Allie as a friend. Frank spent his spare time drinking and gambling with his fellow officers, especially those from the newly arrived Third Cavalry whom Baldwin knew from earlier days and whose ranks Frank longed to join. Frank liked to hunt and fish, so he and Allie sometimes joined other officers as they traveled about northwestern New Mexico.39 On one occasion Allie accompanied a hunting party that traveled in a southeastern direction toward Old Fort Wingate. The hunters wound their way up over the northern foothills of the Zuni Mountains, into the backwoods where the remote Bluewater Lake was located. The presence of the lake surprised the travelers. Rushing mountain streams cut through rocks high above the desert floor and watered a pine forest before tumbling into the basin that created Bluewater Lake. The streams and lake attracted bear, deer, and small animals, and in the lake there were trout. On another such trip, the Baldwins traveled to the Navajo lands near Fort Defiance and Canyon de Chelly. Fort Defiance, abandoned and desolate, reminded the visitors of the horrors of Kit Carson's campaign against the Indians eight years before. Allie wrote years later, We did not linger long around the ruins of Old Fort Defiance. We had seen enough of its desolation, and the history of the old post was so replete with disaster and death that its memory was full of sadness. . . . I was glad to reach my own squalid adobe quarters at Fort Wingate, with its lack of conveniences, its dirt

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floor covered over with hay, and the ingrain carpet stretched over all; with a bright fire, the crowing baby, and the ever faithful striker in the kitchen broiling a steak. It seemed like Paradise to me after what we had just beheld. It was HOME, after all, and no tragedy or disaster had as yet happened within its walls. My soldier and I were young—and we were living!A0 The Baldwins celebrated Thanksgiving 1868 at New Fort Wingate. AUie put together a feast of turkey, mashed potatoes, and mince pie made from wormy dried fruit and whiskey. While AUie and the striker worked in the kitchen, Frank, Lieutenant Willard, and Colonel Hart went hunting. Then on a cold, windy night the Baldwins and their guests sat down to the traditional feast by the light of coal oil lamps in their quarters at New Fort Wingate.

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Return to the Plains IN THE SAME month of 1867 that Allie Baldwin gave birth to Juanita, the United States government initiated a new policy toward the Indians of the southern plains. Washington officials grew weary of sending military expeditions against the Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Arapaho. The soldiers had little success in bringing their enemies to battle; in fact, their activities often increased rather than lessened tensions on the frontier. Matters came to a critical stage in Texas, where the ferocity of the Indian attacks actually reversed the westward trend of the frontier. The politicians decided to make peace with the Indians. Officials from Washington came to the Medicine Lodge River in southcentral Kansas and explained their plans for peace to the chiefs gathered there, among them Black Kettle of the Cheyenne, Satanta of the Kiowa, and Ten Bears of the Comanche. The white men proposed that the Indians relinquish their lands in Kansas, Colorado, Texas, and eastern New Mexico and live on reservations in the western part of the Indian Territory. To ease their transition from a buffalo-hunting lifestyle to that of an agricultural society, the Indians would be permitted to enter the Texas Panhandle to hunt. The whites promised to build houses and hospitals on the reservations for the Indians, supply them with cattle, sheep, farming implements, and annual gifts of food and trinkets. Many Indians at the council liked what they heard and decided to try reservation life, but others had no illusions about the ramifications of the proposals and opposed the treaties. After the speeches ended, a few Indians made their marks on the documents known as the Medicine Lodge Treaties. Most of the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche, however, took a wait-and-see approach to the agreements. The Medicine Lodge Treaties had little chance of success. According

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to their customs, individual Indian warriors had no obligation to follow the dictates of the headmen who signed the treaty documents. Warriors, especially the young ones, felt a need to prove themselves to their societies by stealing horses, taking scalps, and killing traditional enemies. Some white people also ignored the Medicine Lodge Treaties, stealing animals from Indians, poaching on their lands, and indiscriminately killing them. On the frontier the behavior of white renegades was seldom punished, but Indians who refused to conform with the treaties were condemned by white citizens and their representatives in Washington. Within a year after the council at the Medicine Lodge River, the exasperated white officials in Washington handed over to the army the problem of pacifying the southern plains. General Philip Sheridan believed the Indians were at fault for the breakdown of peace, so he designed a winter campaign into the previously protected reservation lands of the Indian Territory to discipline nonconformists. He used as his principal striking force the Seventh United States Cavalry, commanded in the field by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. On the same evening that the Baldwins entertained their Thanksgiving guests at Fort Wingate, Custer, after having followed the trail of a band of Indian raiders, first spied the Cheyenne encampment of Chief Black Kettle on the banks of the Washita River in the Indian Territory. Within twenty-four hours, Custer attacked the camp and reportedly killed over a hundred Indians, captured fifty-three women and children, and butchered more than eight hundred Indian ponies. The victory was costly: twenty-one officers and men of the Seventh Cavalry were killed, and fourteen were wounded. In March 1869 Sheridan and Custer ended their winter campaign. The lieutenant colonel marched his unit and captives north to Fort Dodge and from there to Fort Hays, where he planned to go into camp for the summer. The climax of Custer's expedition came when he and the Seventh Cavalry neared Fort Hays. In the distance, from the direction of the fort, Custer saw the band of the newly organized Fifth United States Infantry marching toward him playing "Garry Owen," his unit's battle tune. At the head of the band rode the colonel of the Fifth, Nelson Appleton Miles. Nelson Miles arrived at Fort Hays a few days before Custer rode into the post. Miles brought with him a distinguished Civil War record, unlimited ambition and energy, and a pregnant wife. The newspaper men of the Civil War era branded Miles, along with George Custer and Ranald Mackenzie, a "boy general." Miles entered the volunteer army

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as a first lieutenant in 1861 at the age of twenty-two and by war's end had become a brigadier general of volunteers and a brevet major general. He fought in every major campaign of the Army of the Potomac except Gettysburg, was wounded four times, and served at various times under Oliver Otis Howard, Winfield Scott Hancock, and Ulysses Grant. He had been recommended for the Medal of Honor for his gallantry at Chancellorsville. After Appomattox, Miles's Civil War fame turned to infamy. Federal forces captured Jefferson Davis and sent the leader of the Confederacy to Fort Monroe, Virginia, to await trial for his part in the insurrection. Secretary of War Stanton wanted someone to command Fort Monroe and serve as jailer for Davis, whom Stanton and President Andrew Johnson believed had participated in the assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln. The secretary asked Grant to recommend such a man, and the general named Nelson Miles.1 Miles followed orders with precision and satisfaction. At times he placed Davis in irons, denied him even a moment's privacy, cut off his communication with the outside world, refused to provide reading or writing material, and only reluctantly allowed Davis to take fresh air each day. During the year after the Civil War, however, the anger of the Northern populace against Davis waned. Scores of newspapers, Northern as well as Southern, objected to the measures ordered by Stanton and carried out by Miles. The papers blamed Davis's stern treatment on Miles and called for his dismissal from the service. In September 1866, therefore, Secretary Stanton relieved Miles of his command at Fort Monroe but rewarded him for his cooperation with a commission in the regular army as a colonel. The army then sent Miles to administer the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina. In North Carolina, Miles, who functioned more as a politician than as a soldier, hated the assignment. He took every opportunity to leave the state, and on a visit to Washington, D.C., Miles met Mary Sherman of Cleveland, Ohio, the niece of Senator John Sherman and of General William Tecumseh Sherman. After a short courtship, the two married in 1868. Eight months after his marriage, Miles received orders to proceed west, to Fort Hays where a newly organized regiment, the Fifth United States Infantry, awaited his command. At Fort Hays, George Custer and Nelson Miles, in spite of the fact that they were competitors for preferment, allowed their professional relationship to develop into a personal friendship. Miles spent his mornings organizing the garrison and his regiment and his afternoons on the open prairie with Custer, hunting buffalo with highly placed

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visitors drawn west by the herds and a chance to socialize with two of the Civil War's "boy generals."2 At Fort Wingate things went badly for both the Thirty-seventh Infantry and for the Baldwin family. Early in 1869 they learned that Congress had decreed another reorganization of the army which cut the number of infantry regiments from forty-five to twenty-five and the total army enlistment from about 54,000 to a few more than 37,000. Because of this and subsequent reductions, the officer corps had nine hundred more commanders than units for them. The army, therefore, established committees of inquiry to identify unfit officers and to retire them from service. Baldwin had survived inquiries like these, but the Thirty-seventh Infantry was slated for extinction. Baldwin's own company was assigned to a new regiment, Nelson Miles's Fifth United States Infantry. Professionally and personally in 1869, the Baldwins entered a period of self-doubt and examination. Frank wondered whether he could live out his notions of military idealism in the infantry, a branch of the service that top officials seemed to believe was fit only for garrison duty. Baldwin contemplated requesting a transfer from the foot service to the cavalry and asked Allie to give the matter some thought. Allie, however, had other issues on her mind. Her romantic view of the military frontier had changed dramatically. She wondered whether army life held any rewards at all for her or her husband. She had endured much over the past two years and doubted whether life would improve in the years to come. As for Frank, she had come to realize that promotion and preferment came slowly in the postwar army. Perhaps the Baldwins might make a good living outside the military service. Life at Fort Wingate had become melancholy. New officers and their families arrived at the post and old ones departed almost daily. Baldwin's own company had been ordered to Fort Garland in Colorado, but he himself had been held back at Wingate to complete his duties as quartermaster and commissary officer of the post. Frank decided Allie should take Juanita back to Northville, Michigan, where she could wait out the turmoil of reassignment. In February, Frank placed Allie and Juanita on an army ambulance for their trip east. The wagon left Fort Wingate and journeyed to Santa Fe. Frank felt confident that Allie and Juanita were safe because a Mr. Waters, a partner of the post sutler at Wingate, promised to accompany them as far as Fort Leavenworth.3 At Santa Fe the travelers

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would transfer from the army ambulance to a Concord stagecoach that made the journey of about eight hundred miles to Sheridan, Kansas, the end of track of the Kansas and Pacific Railroad. The first leg of the journey went well enough. From La Fonda Inn in Santa Fe, Allie wrote a quick note to Frank, "Tomorrow morning we will start for the states. How glad I shall be when the stage part of my journey is over with. . . . I think of you every hour and shall while I am gone. I hear good reports of you here. Thank God you will be found yet in some good position."4 The following morning, Allie discovered that the second leg of the trip would be more difficult than the first. Carrying her baby, Allie boarded the twelve-passenger Concord and found Mr. Waters drunk and surly. The coach driver noticed Waters's condition and reassured Allie of her safety, but just to make sure, he slipped the trader's revolver from its holster and put it in a safe place. In time the coach reached Bent's Fort in Colorado, where the passengers spent the night. Here the travelers learned that the Cheyenne and Kiowa had taken to the warpath during the winter months. The commander of the nearest army post sent a guard detachment of five enlisted men to ride on top of the coach to Sheridan. Mounting the roof of the Concord, a sergeant said to his men, "Keep your eyes peeled and be ready to give them Injuns hell if they show up. I reckon that the lady will yell like hell if we're attacked."5 At a Sheridan hotel, Allie spent the night in a second-floor corner room that contained only a cot and a mattress. A snow storm struck Sheridan overnight, and flakes slipped through the cracks in the wall and piled in mounds on the window sill. The snow fluttered through the slat roof into the unheated room, onto Allie and Juanita, both of them bundled in army blankets.6 The train left Sheridan the next morning and proceeded to Hays City, where Allie and her child detrained again for the night. Allie took a room in a hotel where the walls reached only half way to the ceiling, and in one of the partitions a knot hole allowed neighbors to peek in on Allie and the baby. A black man, a veteran of the Tenth United States Cavalry—the Buffalo Soldiers—carried the travelers' bags to their room, and taking pity on Allie, he promised to stand watch outside her door all night. Next door to Allie's room, an all-night card game developed. Allie feared that the frontiersmen might peek at her through the knot hole, so she draped her shawl over the opening. The men could not resist looking at a woman in bed next door; a finger slipped through the hole

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and poked the shawl aside. Allie saw the finger and hurled a shoe at it. First, there was silence in the other room; then Allie heard scuffling and a door open and close. Allie described what happened next, "Out broke a racket in the hallway. Presently came the roar of guns, loud yells and much scuffling. Suddenly my door crashed in, carrying with it the huge negro porter, who fell dead on the floor of my room." The baby slept through the ordeal, but Allie dressed and sat in a chair until dawn. At daylight the mother and daughter boarded a Kansas and Pacific Railroad train and continued their journey to Michigan. On Wednesday, April 7, 1869, Allie returned to her former home in North ville for the first time since her marriage. She described her emotions in a letter to her husband the next day, Oh, Frank, you don't know [what] my feelings were when I came home and passed up the walk to the house a wife and mother and the last time I passed over it was hanging on your arm and a bride. How things have changed. . . . In the room where I sit, the room upstairs where you and I stayed before we went downstairs to speak the words that made us husband and wife, is very pleasant and nice new carpet on the floor and paper on the walls and a very handsome chamber set—with dressing bureau and glass handsome washstand that closes up and a hightopped nice bed. And, oh, don't I wish I had you here to . . . [Here a well-meaning reader, perhaps a relative, scratched out six lines].1 Allie was lonely during her visit in Northville; almost every letter to Frank described her yearning: "Oh, my own darling, I do love you with all my heart—since I have been here it brings back so forcibly the times when I was engaged to you and I feel as if I had a lover yet—to come and marry me. How I hope you can come home soon. . . . I am proud of you my noble husband and whenever the thought enters my mind that perhaps there will something happen that you and I may never see each other again, my heart feels like lead."8 Allie worried about Frank's well-being while she was absent. She was particularly concerned about his drinking habits. Rather than preach to him, she took a constructive approach to the problem, telling him, "Aunt Becky . . . asked me if I didn't feel afraid that you would get to drinking now that I was away from you. I told her no, that I reposed full confidence in you. My darling, I never will have any fears for your honor now."9

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Allie examined her feelings about army life. Her first years as an army wife had been difficult; she had suffered illness, lived in hovels, bore up under separations, witnessed death, and endured unfriendly post people. In spite of her misgivings about the service, Allie knew Frank would not prosper emotionally or professionally outside the army, so she placed her doubts aside and wrote her husband, "You will admit yourself my entrance and past of army life was under the most inauspicious circumstances: poor posts, disagreeable people to associate with, and worse of all miserable health, but I am rid of them all now and I have made up my mind to get along just as well as I possibly can with post people."10 The topic of Frank's transfer from the infantry to the cavalry troubled Allie. She wrote: Now I suppose you have been wondering when I am going to say anything about your transferring in the cavalry. You know, my darling Frank, I do not want to stand in your way of promotion or other good advantages, but I am afraid if you get into the cavalry, you will get killed quicker than in the infantry and if you should by my advising you to get into the cavalry, I should feel like a murderer all my life. But after all, you may live a great deal longer and get promoted a great deal sooner and more pay also which are great considerations. You are so anxious to get into that branch of the service, I want you to be satisfied. . . . If you can work it out and want to transfer, I will consent, but I hate to after all. I want to do what is for your interests. Who is Col. of the 7th Cav. and where is that Regt. stationed now? u Finally, Frank telegraphed the news to his wife that his tour of duty at Fort Wingate had ended. Allie gathered together her baggage and her baby and set out for Fort Hays in Kansas, where the Baldwin family was reunited in late August 1869. The bliss lasted only a few hours, however. Almost immediately Frank received an order to appear in Santa Fe on September 10 to serve on a court-martial board. The couple had little time for despair; they had to find a place for Allie and the baby to stay. They could find no quarters at Fort Hays, or at any army post nearby. Allie refused to return to Michigan, so the Baldwins decided she and the baby would take a room at a boardinghouse in Lawrence, Kansas, for the duration of Frank's absence. The family

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went to Lawrence by train, and there Lieutenant Baldwin rented a room for his wife and child. He then began his long trip back to New Mexico. The stress of the separation almost overcame Allie. In her first letter to her husband, she wrote, "Frank, you can't imagine how lonely I am, too desolate to shed tears. My heart feels so sad and longing for you. Oh, for a home of my own with you and our baby." ** Allie had to finance her stay in Lawrence out of Frank's army pay, about $1,500 per year in 1869. The pay came slowly, dependent as it was on the disbursements of an army paymaster in Santa Fe and Frank's ability to wire money to a bank in Lawrence, from which Allie could draw funds to pay her own expenses. The couple had struggled with money problems before and had decided to speculate in Kansas land. They had asked Uncle Robert Blackwood to lend them $1,000 to finance their scheme, and he sent the money soon after Frank left for Santa Fe. With this money in the bank, Allie felt secure.13 Allie worried about Frank and other women, and yet she took a positive approach to the problem. She wrote him, "You don't know how gratifying it is for me to know if you are honorable in all your demeanor and hold yourself aloof from the general crime of keeping a slut. Such conduct can't but help being respected and honored. I am not afraid but what you will keep yourself from any such crime. I expect it is a great temptation. But remember there is a faithful little wife waiting for you in Lawrence."14 Allie reminded Frank that she longed for him when she wrote, "I dreamed of you both last night and this afternoon after dinner today. I was so sleepy, the first time in ever so long that I have slept in the daytime. Well, I took little Nita and I went to sleep and dreamed of my darling—dreamed we went to bed—and then I awoke."15 For awhile Allie thought she might have conceived during her brief reunion with Frank, but with relief she wrote her husband, "I was and am unwell, and it has made me sick. . . . Don't you pity me? Yet I should feel bad enough not to see it come once a month."16 Frank fretted about Allie's deportment every bit as much as she did about his. After Allie wrote her husband that she had accepted an invitation to sing at a service of the local Episcopal church, Frank informed his wife about his displeasure. Allie, therefore, wrote Frank that she had turned down the engagement. Nevertheless, she took the opportunity to let her husband know of her disappointment: "Sometimes I feel bad to think, with the voice I possess, it can never have a higher sphere, a wider scope, than in singing always at home. It was a dear project of mine when I was a girl to make something of myself in vocal music, and I was so encouraged to do so and was succeeding so

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well in my efforts, and now it is all given up and all gone and my voice impaired with my disappointment."17 In October, Allie's decayed teeth began to trouble her, so she arranged to have all of them pulled and dentures fitted. By the seventeenth of the month, a dentist had pulled her teeth. In her pain, Allie found some cheer, "Ain't you glad they are out, Frank, so now you won't smell my awful breath any more?"18 Months had passed when Allie heard from Frank that another case had been added to the docket. Nita caught a cold that her mother feared might develop into pneumonia. Then Allie learned that a case of scarlet fever had appeared in the boardinghouse. She wrote to Frank, "Oh, this hateful life I am living. When will it end, for Lord's sake."19 Allie took matters in her own hands. She got a friend to find her new lodgings. She and Juanita moved to a large, pleasant room with a private fireplace, fuel, and lights, with board for herself and the baby, all for just ten dollars per month. Best of all, the landlord had a piano in the living room, and he said that Allie could play it whenever she wished.20 The new living arrangements resurrected Allie's spirits, but only temporarily. Within ten days her dejection returned; this time it concerned Nita and her well-being as well as Frank's long-held hopes for a baby boy: "Mercy sakes what will I do if I have to stay here any longer without you and it is too bad little Nita is without her papa. I want her to know you and learn to love you. And, Frank, I hope you love her as much as if she was a little boy. I know you. . . . have always been greatly disappointed because she was not a boy, but she is an unusually smart and precocious child, at least people say so. . . . She is as fat as butter, a perfect little dumpling."21

In November the Baldwins' separation ended. Frank returned to Lawrence with the news that the family could now move to Fort Hays, where he would command Company E, Fifth Infantry. By now Nelson Miles had left the post for Fort Harker and eventually Leavenworth, but Custer's Seventh Cavalry remained camped on the prairie nearby. Baldwin got to know the officers of the Seventh: Reno, Benteen, French, Weir, and many others. The living arrangements at Fort Hays were among the finest on the army frontier. It was a four-company post, meaning it had four barracks, each of which could house from forty to sixty enlisted men. These enlisted men's quarters faced a parade ground's west, north,

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and east sides. To the south seven houses for officers completed the square. The home of the post commander occupied the center position in the row, flanked on each side by three buildings for lesser officers.22 These houses had two separate quarters, divided by a center hall. On the first floor, each officer's family had a sitting room; the bedrooms were upstairs. In the rear of the house, on the first floor, one kitchen served both families. The Baldwins were assigned one of the compartments on officers' row in which they set up housekeeping and lived as a family for the first time in a year. Allie got to know other officers' wives such as Mrs. George W. Baird and Mrs. Marcus Reno. She liked Reno's wife because of her upbeat, affectionate nature, but Baird's wife and Allie often were at odds. This may have been because the two lieutenants vied with each other for military preference (the husbands did not share the women's flinty relationship; they not only served together but liked one another).23 As the months passed, Baldwin performed the routine duties of an officer on the staff of the post quartermaster and commissary officer as well as commander of his own company. In January 1870 he received orders to supervise target practice at the post. In February he took a detachment out along the line of the Kansas and Pacific Railroad to distribute rations and inspect the scattered units of the Fifth Infantry that protected the railroad. In April, Baldwin served as the post quartermaster while the usual officer, Captain Amos S. Kimball, was absent from the fort.24 At home the Baldwins suffered through violent tiffs. Their separations promoted anguish but also self-sufficiency in Allie. Each time he returned home, Frank probably attempted to reestablish his dominance in the relationship, only to be rebuffed by an assertive spouse. Once, during a disagreement, Allie ran upstairs and locked herself in the bedroom. Frank rushed up the stairs and tried to enter the room, but Allie refused to unlock the door, so her husband kicked it down. On another occasion Allie took a swing at Frank and skinned his nose. In shock Baldwin began packing his wife's bags and growled, "Get ready to go home!" Fortunately, tempers cooled, but Allie had shown her husband that she would not automatically agree with him on all issues.25 In September 1870 Allie and Nita once again boarded the Kansas and Pacific train for a journey to Michigan. Allie seems to have suffered from a severe illness (she did not record the name of the sickness or its symptoms).26 Frank remained on duty at Hays, meanwhile requesting a transfer from the infantry to the cavalry.27 Allie's journey

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east proved uneventful by past standards. She did, however, see a man who exposed himself to her while she idly stared out the railroad car window somewhere in Illinois. She wrote to Frank, "I thought he might have saved himself the trouble because I had seen one before."28 In a letter to Frank, Allie once again wrestled with the issue of having another child: Poor fellow, you do want a boy so bad and so do I but, Oh, I dread it so, I don't know what to say hardly. I want to satisfy you and I want your name perpetuated as well as you do and I feel as if there was something wanting yet to our happiness. I do want a son just as bad as you do and I feel a sort of yearning come over me sometimes to feel a pair of baby lips close to me once more and a little pair of soft baby arms and hands groping in my bosom once more. I know I would be happier than I am now if I had already a baby boy. But I feel so frightened when I think of it. I am afraid to risk my life. I am afraid I will die and I am afraid it would be a girl after all. And then I would have nothing to pay me for my long suffering and suspense. But, Oh, dear, I do wish I could have a boy. Would you love me any better, Frank, for being the mother of a son than you do now? I have thought perhaps I would be so sick again as I was the first time. I tell you what I will do, Frank, when Nita gets to befiveyears old, I will consent to have another baby. Sure, Pop. Then we will be out of debt and Nita will be old enough to be a great deal of help to take care of young Mr. Baldwin.29 In December 1870 Allie moved from Northville to Coldwater, Michigan, to spend the winter with Frank's relatives. She talked with Frank's Aunt Mary, who told her of Baldwin's days before their engagement. She then wrote to Frank in mock anger: Aunt Mary was telling me about you and Nellie Smith night before last. . . . You did like her and she did you, and I bet you have been sorry and regretted that you didn't marry her instead of me after some of our quarrels. . . . I don't care, I wish for your sake you had married that old Smith girl. Aunt Mary said you asked her advice about it. You didn't know whether to marry her or me. Mr. Frank D. Baldwin, if I had known you was in such a quandry, I would have settled the matter at once

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by giving you the mitten. I felt real queer and strange when I heard you had half a mind to marry another girl. I thought I held undivided your love. Well, it is too late now. Nellie Smith don't know what she escaped. She would have been killed at one nab of our old long torn!!!30 Allie then made the pledge most husbands of the Victorian era longed to hear. She wrote, "I will forego my opinions and yield to you. You know on certain matters of peculiar importance, you and I differ. If disclaiming any of them will make you more satisfied, I will yield them all and that is a great concession on my part and you are the first man I ever did accede to." If Frank believed this pledge, he dismissed three years of experience with Allie; this, after all, was the woman who had skinned his nose. Frank's hoped-for transfer to the cavalry weighed heavily on Allie's mind: If it wasn't for the faster promotion and increase of pay I should feel very bad indeed to have you in the cavalry for you know unless I could be with you all the time, it could be anything but a happy life for me. I have seen how cavalry officers1 wives have to do and they, none of them, like it any better than I should, unless it was Mrs. Reno. She always seemed to feel in good cheer, but after all their objections, I think of the idea of you always remaining a Lieut, and then I feel as if I would endure all sorts of torments for your promotion, for you know how it galls me to be beneath anybody. You understand me how I feel, for you know that it is rank that "makes a man go" in the army and it is always extended to officers' wives as well as officers.31 Only a few days later, Allie learned from the Chicago Times that Frank's name had not been listed among those transferred in the frontier army.32 The Seventh Cavalry had rejected Frank, perhaps in favor of James Calhoun, husband of Custer's sister, Margaret. Allie's health began to improve in the early days of the new year. By January 20, 1871, she washed and ironed her own clothes for the first time during the visit. Playfully she wrote to her husband and asked, "Now . . . don't you think I have been a good girl to wash and iron? I love to hear you praise me, and you hardly ever do either. Why don't

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you? Now, I think I ought to have a credit mark as long as my nose or else your Take care ladies, hell bite!"'33 In the spring Allie and Nita returned to Fort Hays. The Baldwins reunited once again, but this time some of the joy may have been missing from Frank's pursuit of career advancement. He temporarily commanded Company C, Sixth Cavalry, while its captain, English-born Daniel Madden, left the post for three days; Frank had something different in mind when he requested cavalry duty.34 Then new orders arrived taking Frank and the family to Fort Larned as post quartermaster. No one could criticize his performance, for at Larned as at so many previous posts, he was a demanding but well-liked leader. Still, Frank's concept of military idealism required that he command in the field in the face of danger rather than serve in safety as a post quartermaster. In December 1872 orders arrived detaching Frank from his unit and sending him to Detroit as a recruitment officer.35 In January 1874 he was ordered on a second recruitment assignment, this time to Newport Barracks in Kentucky. Baldwin now had returned to the place where he began his postwar service. By the beginning of June 1874, Frank had not sat in a saddle for any length of time for about a year and a half. His body was no longer lean, and his hair and mustache were flecked with premature gray. He transformed his admiration for the cavalry into jealousy of the entire branch of the service and of George Custer in particular. Reports arrived at Newport from the Indian camps that Custer, in his Battle of the Washita, had actually killed only a dozen or so sleeping Cheyenne, not the over one hundred warriors previously claimed, and Baldwin believed the Indians rather than Custer. While the Baldwins struggled with their professional and personal agonies from 1869 to 1874, the Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche endured national tragedies. The Medicine Lodge Treaties of 1867, signed by only about one-third of the tribal headmen, reduced the vast lands of the Indians of the South Plains to roughly three million acres in western Indian Territory. Government gifts of food and clothing were often inadequate to meet the Indians' needs. To many Indians the free-roaming life-style offered more riches than did reservation life. Instead of considering the reservations as their homes, the free-roaming Indians looked on them as government land and depredated it whenever they wished, often harming peaceful reservation In-

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dians at least as much as they did the whites. When this happened, agents and soldiers often punished the near-at-hand reservation Indians for the troubles caused by the free-roamers. This practice eroded the patience of the peaceful bands, and some of these defected to hostile groups beyond the reach of agents or troopers. In spite of their contempt for them, however, the free-roamers saw a use for the reservations. They liked to raid into Kansas, Colorado, or Texas and then escape punishment by rushing back to Indian Territory to blend with the peaceful villagers there. The whites failed to deal consistently with the Indians of the South Plains. At the end of 1868 and the beginning of 1869, for example, the army made war on them. Then in spring 1869, with the advent of the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, humanitarian groups won the president's favor. Grant allowed religious organizations, most often the Quakers, to implement a peace policy toward the Indians. The Quakers sent Friend Lawrie Tatum west to the Kiowa-Comanche reservation at Fort Sill, Indian Territory. Tatum withdrew military guards from the reservation, sent them back to their barracks at Fort Sill, and replaced them with Indian police picked from the trustworthy friendlies living on the reservation. Many warriors interpreted Tatum's actions as signs of weakness and pressed their advantage. The free-roamers raided reservation herds and bullied the friendlies into compliance with their wishes. They stepped up their raids off the reservations as well, and when chased, retreated to safety in Indian Territory. The Quaker peace policies forbid the more than five hundred soldiers stationed at Fort Sill to act. The officers and men at the post were embarrassed in the late summer of 1870, when Comanche warriors decided to call a halt to their hostility and taunted the army men with the message, "The white people need not sit trembling in their tents, peeping out to see if our warriors are coming. You can now send your horses out to graze, and your men out to chop wood."36 A new season of hostility began in the spring of 1871, when between 100 and 150 Kiowa warriors under Chiefs Satanta, Big Tree, Tsatangya (Satank), and the medicine man Mamanti left the reservation and rode south into Texas. There they struck a wagon train on the road between Jacksboro and Fort Griffin, Texas, killing seven of the eleven teamsters who worked for the Henry Warren Freight Company. The raiders stole almost fifty mules and then raced north to the apparent safety of the reservation. At the reservation, however, soldiers arrested Satanta, Big Tree, and Satank, placing them on wagons for a journey back to Texas,

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where the Indians would be tried for their crimes. Satank, a veteran of many battles on the plains against whites and Indians alike, was killed on the trip while resisting his captivity and refusing to be tried by the whites. Satanta and Big Tree went to Texas, where they were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Governor E. J. Davis of Texas, pressured by humanitarians and Washington politicians, commuted the sentences of Satanta and Big Tree to life in prison. Having saved the lives of Satanta and Big Tree, the reservation Indians and their Indian Department supporters then began a campaign for thenrelease. In a little more than two years, the two were freed from their cells; they rejoined their people in October 1873. The Warren Wagon Train raid had far-reaching results. Because of the raid, army men such as William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan withdrew their support of Ulysses S. Grant's peace policy. The next time Indians caused trouble off the reservation and tried to seek safety within its borders, they would face the full fury of the military. All along the Great Plains frontier, from the Dakotas south through Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas, herds of buffalo, just as much as tribes of American Indians, stood as barriers to the westward trend of AngloAmerican civilization. The hunting of the Indians and of white westerners seemed unlikely to diminish the buffalo's numbers significantly, but in 1871 American industrialists learned from their English counterparts how to make useful leather from buffalo hides. Almost overnight a buffalo-hunting industry sprang up with Dodge City, Kansas, as its center. Merchants in Dodge, such as Charles Rath, sent hunters to the prairies near the town to kill all the buffalo they could, skin the animals, and cart the hides back to town where the merchants would pay top dollar for each one. They then sent the hides east by rail to tanning factories. Hunters hurried to Dodge to get in on the easy money. Among the most reputable of these men were a Vermonter named Josiah Wright Moar and two English brothers, James and Robert Cator. Less reputable than these were Orlando (Brick) Bond, leader of a band of outlaws and cutthroats, and Henry (Dutch Henry) Born, a horsethief of legendary repute. Between these extremes were young adventurers like William (Billy) Dixon and William Barclay (Bat) Masterson, both of whom were good men in a fight and were eager to make a dollar. During the winter of 1872-1873, the hunters scoured the plains about Dodge City and killed about seventy-five thousand buffalo. As a

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result, the herd around Dodge virtually disappeared. J. Wright Moar decided to move his operation into the Texas Panhandle. Moar and a companion rode south to the region of the Canadian River and found thousands of buffalo there. Back in Dodge City, Moar and a friend went to Fort Dodge to discuss the matter with Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, commander of the post. The hunters shared a misconception with many whites and virtually all of the South Plains Indians. They believed that the Medicine Lodge Treaties reserved the Panhandle as hunting grounds for the Indians, and they wanted to know how white hunters such as they could get around the law. Colonel Dodge set Moar straight: the state of Texas owned the land of the Panhandle; the Indians had the right to hunt there, but not exclusively. The hunters drifted into the Panhandle in 1873. By the spring of 1874, the Dodge City merchants Alexander C. Myers and Frederick J. Leonard saw a chance to make money by establishing a trading post in the heart of the new hunting lands. In March, Myers and Leonard set out with more than one hundred wagons loaded with trading goods and building supplies. The wagon train wound its way to the Canadian River in the Panhandle of Texas. There, on a meadow north of the river, they located the adobe ruins of an old Bent-St. Vrain trading post. About two miles north of the river and one beyond the old adobe walls of the trading post that gave the spot its name, Myers and Leonard built a new compound and enclosed it within an eight-foot-tall picket corral. Soon a second wagon train arrived at the Adobe Walls site, this one organized by the Dodge City commercial partnership of Charles Rath, Robert Marr Wright, and James Langton. The new arrivals constructed a second compound near the Myers and Leonard trading post. Then a buffalo hunter named James N. Hanrahan, also a partner of Rath, built a saloon of sod, and Thomas O'Keefe opened a blacksmith shop nearby. By mid-June the trading post was fully operational. At times, between twenty-five and fifty hunters, skinners, and employees occupied the compound. Among the hunters were Billy Dixon, Dutch Henry Born, and Bat Masterson; among the employees were cook Hannah Olds, the only woman at Adobe Walls, and her spouse, William. When not at the compound, the hunters roamed the hills of the region killing buffalo. The Indians of the region watched the white men carefully and became increasingly uneasy as the newcomers established a settlement in their hunting grounds, on lands that they believed the Medicine Lodge Treaties reserved for them. In the late spring of 1874, the frus-

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trations of the Comanche allowed a young Comanche warrior named Isatai (usually translated "Coyote Droppings"), to come to prominence. Isatai claimed to be immune to bullets, to have ascended to heaven and spoken with the Great Spirit, and to have brought back the spirits of the dead.37 He announced that the Comanche could succeed in combat against the white intruders at Adobe Walls if they conducted a tribal Sun Dance, a ritual the Comanche had never practiced before. At the end of May, therefore, a large number of Comanche chiefs and their followers gathered on the Red River, near the boundary of their agency, and began to prepare for the ritual. For four days the Comanche gathered materials and erected a Sun Dance lodge. They placed a freshly killed, stuffed buffalo on the central lodge pole and built a mock enemy camp that Comanche warriors attacked to display their talents. The ceremony went well; the Comanche carried out Isatai's instructions with enthusiasm, earning the approval of Kiowa and Cheyenne visitors at the dance. Isatai was not the only Comanche warrior who wanted war during the spring of 1874. Quanah Parker, a half-breed warrior, passed among the camps of the allied tribes present at the Sun Dance. He offered the war pipe to all who would listen to him, telling them that white Texans had killed his nephew, and he wanted to lead a revenge raid.38 Quanah's plea was powerful among the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche, but the old Kiowa men persuaded the young man to postpone his expedition to the south in favor of Isatai's plan to attack the compound on the Canadian above Antelope Hills. Quanah agreed to the plan when the Kiowa promised to join him in the south after killing the whites at Adobe Walls. The Indians rode to the Canadian and approached the site of the Dodge City trading colony. The five hundred warriors waited until the early hours of the morning, and at first light on June 27, the word came from the war chiefs, "All right. Go ahead!"39 The residents at the Adobe Walls compound restlessly passed the night of Friday, June 26. Word had come to them from half-breed Amos Chapman, a government scout working at Camp Supply and a friend of the reservation Cheyenne, that Indians planned to attack the hunters at Adobe Walls. The whites at the compound took the warning lightly, since the Indians were always a threat and because they did not trust Chapman's Cheyenne roots. Nevertheless, about 2:00 A.M. on Saturday morning, a loud "crack" awakened the sleeping hunters and traders inside Hanrahan's saloon. The thick crust of sod on the roof had

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weighed heavily on the ridgepole and had broken it. Several of the hunters helped Hanrahan prop up the beam. A few of them decided to stay awake and use the remaining morning hours to prepare for an early start for the buffalo hunting grounds. About 4:30 Billy Ogg, an employee of Hanrahan's, and Billy Dixon, still awake and making final preparations to leave Adobe Walls, saw the first Indians drive off the whites' horses from their pasture outside the corral. Dixon fired at the Indians, and the two men ran to the saloon for shelter. The gunfire awakened the rest of the hunters and traders in the buildings who made ready for a long fight. Early in the battle three whites died: two brothers named Scheidler, both of them teamsters who had spent the night in their wagon outside protective walls, and Billy Tyler, another teamster and an employee of Myers and Leonard. Inside the compound the whites defended themselves desperately, shooting from slots cut into the walls. The Indians worked their way close to the buildings, using the protection of the picket corral and the piles of buffalo hides stacked within the enclosure. They reached the doors of several structures. One of the Indians pushed a revolver through a slot in the wall and emptied it of bullets without killing anyone. Other Indians, including Quanah, mounted the roofs of the buildings and poked holes in the sod through which to shoot. The superior weapons and shooting skills of the defenders made the difference in the battle. The Indian allies fell back and tried to conduct the battle from long range. This, however, played into the strength of the sharpshooting buffalo hunters. Legendary "long shots" picked off attackers at distances of up to fifteen hundred yards. Even Quanah Parker took a bullet between his shoulder blade and his neck. The shots came from such a long range that the Indians could not locate their source. Quanah later remarked, "They killed us in sight and out of sight."40 Finally at noon the Indians withdrew to the nearby hills. By that time about thirty warriors had died, and several others received wounds. An enraged Quanah, who had been talked into this battle instead of striking at settlers to the south, approached Isatai, who had observed the battle from a distance. Quanah angrily pointed to the dead Indians on the meadow in front of the compound and reminded Isatai that his medicine should have protected the warriors from the white men's bullets. He sneered, "What's the matter your medicine? You got polecat medicine!"41

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Word of the attack on Adobe Walls soon reached Dodge City, whose residents demanded action by the army. On July 20, 1874, the secretary of war informed General Sherman that the acting secretary of the Interior and commissioner of Indian Affairs had decided that the army should pursue and punish the guilty Indians wherever found, the reservation lines being no barrier in the operations.42

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4

The Red River War FRANK BALDWIN'S ORDERS arrived by telegram on Saturday, July 25, 1874. They were signed by Lieutenant George Baird, a friend from the days in 1870 spent at Fort Hays. Nelson Miles had made Baird his adjutant and had taken him to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, now the headquarters of the Fifth Infantry. The orders commanded Baldwin to come to Leavenworth immediately, no reason given. On the twenty-sixth, however, only a few hours before leaving Newport Barracks, Baldwin received a second telegram from Baird that contained more details than the first. Colonel Miles had chosen Baldwin to be his chief of scouts for an offensive against the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche.1 Baldwin must have wondered how this assignment had come about, for he had met Miles only a few times since 1869. The colonel could not have any personal opinion of the lieutenant; nevertheless, Miles made Baldwin his chief of scouts.2 Perhaps Miles chose Baldwin for the scouting assignment at the suggestion of Adjutant George Baird. The title "chief of scouts" stirred Frank's ambition. Allie's aspirations awakened also; before her husband left for Leavenworth, she urged him to record his experiences during the struggle to come. Perhaps when the campaign ended, she could rework Frank's notes into an adventurous historical record of the war. At first, Frank modestly resisted the effort, but in the end he bowed to Allied wishes and resolved to write home often and, in his letters, to include as much detail of the campaign as he could gather. Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 28, Baldwin reached Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Although exhausted by the trip, he reported promptly to Colonel Miles, who asked Baldwin to dine with him; at that time Miles would explain everything. That evening, at Colonel

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Miles's quarters, two men with much in common dined together. Both Miles and Baldwin had participated in the Civil War, and both received wounds: Miles, four times; Baldwin, once. Both Miles and Baldwin would receive Medals of Honor for their Civil War service. Both had pursued careers in the postwar army without the benefits of graduating from the United States Military Academy, and both had once unsuccessfully requested cavalry assignments. Both were ambitious and energetic. Both married after the war and had wives willing to push for their advancement; both had young daughters. The men, of course, also had differences: Miles was vain, moved in influential circles, had an explosive temper, and could lie to achieve his goals; Baldwin was modest, obscure, stable, and honest. Whatever their similarities and differences, neither of the two men at this dinner meeting had a full appreciation of the other's personality and style. For now they were simply two officers discussing strategy. Miles explained the campaign's strategy to Baldwin, a plan developed by Philip Sheridan himself. Five columns would strike the enemy in the Texas Panhandle and the western part of the Indian Territory. John Davidson, lieutenant colonel of the Tenth Cavalry, would push west from the Indian Territory's Fort Sill into the Texas Panhandle; Colonel George Buell would move northwest from Fort Griffin in Texas with his Eleventh Cavalry; the Fourth Cavalry of Colonel Ranald Mackenzie would come north from Fort Concho in Texas, penetrating the Panhandle farther west than Buell's forces. With several companies of the Eighth Cavalry, Major William Price would march east from Fort Wingate; Miles, with four companies of the Fifth Infantry, eight companies of the Sixth Cavalry, a detachment of artillery, and a force of about fifty scouts would move south from Fort Dodge to Camp Supply and from there into the Panhandle. These separately commanded columns had one goal: to drive the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche onto their reservations from the countryside adjacent to the Canadian River and from the canyons of the forks of the Red River. As Colonel Miles saw it, the columns of Davidson, Buell, Mackenzie, and Price would serve as beaters, driving errant hostiles before them into the poised guns of Miles's force.3 The scheme had flaws. The five columns had separate commanders, independent of each other, so coordination of the thousands of soldiers taking the field depended on the decisions of planners hundreds of miles from the front. The successful outcome of a strategy as complex as this demanded meticulous attention to timing, yet at the very beginning of the war Sheridan urged John Pope, commander of the Depart-

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ment of the Missouri, to send the columns of Colonel Miles and Major Price into battle almost a month before the expeditions originating in Texas and the Indian Territory left their posts.4 Miles saw opportunity in this flaw, however, because he wanted to defeat the hostiles before other commanders took the field. Finally, Sheridan's strategy called for all the columns to operate weeks away from their supply bases. Miles informed Baldwin that the success of his expedition depended largely on the skill, personnel, and leadership of the scouting detachment and that he was placing a great responsibility on Baldwin's shoulders. Then the colonel ordered the lieutenant to go to the Indian Territory reservation of the Delaware Indians who had served Sheridan as scouts in the Cheyenne War of 1868 and enroll a number of Delaware to fight in this campaign also. Accomplishing this, Baldwin should accompany the Delaware to Fort Dodge, where he would also recruit a detachment of white scouts from among the frontiersmen in Dodge City. By 7:00 P.M. on Thursday, July 30, Baldwin arrived at the Eldridge House in Coffeyville, Kansas. The next morning he rode to the reservation and arranged for the employment of twenty Delaware scouts, chief of these being Falling Leaf, a man in his seventies who still loved to fight. After a few days' preparation, the Delaware and Baldwin traveled west by train to Dodge City. On July 17,1874, the first group of hide men returned to Dodge City from Adobe Walls and regaled the townspeople with stories of the June 25 fight in the Panhandle. Shortly thereafter, a party of Dodge citizens set out for Adobe Walls to dismantle the commercial venture, packing thousands of the best buffalo hides onto wagons and heading back to town. On August 5, about the same time that Baldwin and his twenty Delaware scouts arrived at Fort Dodge, the party returned to Dodge City. The rescuers brought back with them other participants in the battle and several hide men who during the fight had been absent from Adobe Walls, slaughtering and skinning buffalo on the prairies.5 J. T. Marshall, a newspaperman for the Kansas Daily Commonwealth, arrived in Dodge City to cover the story and to join the Miles expedition as a civilian scout. In addition to his duties as scout, Marshall planned to file eyewitness accounts of the war for his readers in Topeka. Marshall's letters to the Commonwealth reflect some of the excitement and outrage of the people in Dodge. He wrote about trophies captured from the Indians, among them the scalps of white women. He criticized the advocates of the Indian Department's peace

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policy and praised the entrepreneurs of the Dodge City hide industry as innocent, "go-ahead businessmen."6 The attack on Adobe Walls both frightened and emboldened the westerners in Dodge City. With the Indians on the warpath, no South Plains settler or hunter felt safe, but at the same time the whites also became belligerent, believing that the time for peace policies and controversies between white factions had ended. With satisfaction, they noted the daily arrival of fighting contingents from Grinnell Station on the Kansas and Pacific Railroad, from Fort Lyon in Colorado, from Forts Riley and Leavenworth, and from Coffeyville. Meanwhile, the campaign reunited the men of the Fifth Infantry who were scattered by assignments across the plains as far east as Kentucky. Baldwin renewed acquaintances with several officers he had known at past posts, encountering Lieutenant George Baird almost immediately upon reporting to Colonel Miles and dining with fellow Michigander Captain Henry Bristol and his wife. The captain was assigned to command the battalion of the Fifth Infantry, second only to Miles in field command of the footsoldiers.7 Frank also saw Lieutenant James Pope, who, at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe, had hosted the Baldwins in 1867 during their journey from Fort Harker to Fort Wingate. Miles placed Pope in command of the expedition's artillery, one Parrot tenpounder and two ten-barreled Gatling guns. Pope graduated from the U.S. Military Academy too late for Civil War service, so this campaign was his first. Frank wrote of another meeting to Allie on Sunday, August 9: "Dr. Chase [the husband of Allied best friend at Fort Harker] is here also. . . . I showed him my picture of you and baby. He thought they were so very good and kissed little Nita's. Seeing it reminded him so much of his baby. He feels the loss of [his] wife as much now as ever. Poor man."8 Baldwin now undertook the task of interviewing frontiersmen who wanted to scout for the expedition. Two buffalo hunters who had just returned from the fight at Adobe Walls signed on, Billy Dixon and Bat Masterson. Dodge City rowdies Joe Plummer and Ed (Dirty-Faced Ed) Jones joined the detachment. John Kirly, an aged scout now living in Leavenworth, came to Dodge to volunteer his services as did Thompson McFadden, who had scouted for Carr, Crook, and Sheridan. A. J. (Jack) Martin and Captain J. C. Leach, two Civil War veterans, appeared at the post and requested employment. Baldwin hired Martin and Leach as well as German-born William Schmalsle, whose slight build and short stature hardly suggested that he might become a hero, but he was hired anyway because he could shoot and ride. Baldwin

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signed up J. T. Marshall, the newspaperman who wanted to chronicle the events of the campaign in letters from the front to his paper in Topeka. To provide a propagandist for the expedition, Miles may have exerted pressure in Marshall's behalf.9 The scouting detachment could also count on the services of two men at Camp Supply, Ben Clark and Amos Chapman. The thirty-fiveyear-old Clark campaigned with Sheridan in 1868 as his principal guide. Chapman, about ten years younger than Clark, also scouted for Sheridan. The fact that Chapman was half Cheyenne and had grown up with many of the braves on the warpath in Texas made him especially valuable; he knew the Indians' language and how they thought.10 Soon after the elements of his command convened at Fort Dodge, Miles revealed to his officers his plans for the initial thrust of the campaign. The expedition would start south in three columns. The first two, consisting of Baldwin's scouts and a battalion of the Sixth Cavalry under Major Charles Compton, would leave Dodge on Tuesday, August 11, and sweep southwest toward Adobe Walls. At Beaver Creek the two commands would part company, Compton striking east down the creek for a reunion with Miles's main column at Camp Supply. Baldwin's detachment, consisting of the twenty Delaware and ten white guides along with a few of Compton's troopers, would dash to Adobe Walls. From Adobe Walls, Baldwin and his men would follow the Canadian east to rendezvous with Miles at Antelope Hills south of Camp Supply. These plans, Miles believed, would clear the hostiles from the region at his back before he struck in force toward the canyon country near the forks of the Red River. On the morning of the eleventh, Frank wrote Allie his final letter before beginning the campaign: Now my darling, I am delighted everything is done to give me a chance and General Miles is as kind as can be to me and if I have a chance, I will do something just as sure as can be. My men are picked from the entire command and all of them are brave, tried men. . . . You must not feel uneasy about me. I shall take care of myself. I am not ready to die yet. . . . The thought of my dear wife and baby will not only be an incentive for me to do my duty, but to be careful and not run myself into unnecessary danger. . . . My darling, take good care of yourself and remember to write often and believe me as ever, your devoted husband.11

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Baldwin then organized his scouts for the ride to Dodge City, where the detachment crossed the bridge over the Arkansas River and reported to Major Compton, who had located his camp on the prairie about a mile south of town. The lieutenant quickly resurrected his anticavalry mood at the camp, writing in his diary, "The cavalry officers are not entering into the spirit of the expedition, and it looks to me as though they merely went along because they were ordered and only intend to do as little as possible. Darn such men—they might as well be left at the rear for they only occupy room."12 Reveille sounded at 5:00 A.M. the morning of Wednesday, August 12, and two hundred horsemen awoke, shook out their blankets, and had a trail breakfast before swinging into the saddle. That first day the command battled the heat rather than the Indians. The temperature steadily climbed toward one hundred degrees, and water was scarce, since a three-month-long drought had hit the South Plains. For Baldwin, however, the journey was especially rough. He and his scouts ranged five to ten miles ahead of the rest of the command and were constantly on their guard. In addition, he had not sat in a saddle for any length of time for about two years. The column camped the first night near Crooked Creek at a place called Walker's Timber. Having endured heat, tension, and other discomforts, Baldwin nevertheless was elated over the day's work. On the evening of Friday, August 14, the expedition camped on the north bank of the Cimarron River amid low hills of drifting sand. Cottonwood trees lined the riverbanks and provided abundant wood for fires. The stock grazed on prairie grass. Although the heat of the sun and the south winds bothered Baldwin and his backside ached from the pounding of an army saddle, he felt himself growing stronger. He wrote to Allie that night: "I feel that I can undergo any fatigue as the next two weeks will prove." He also bragged to her about his men. "I have good fighting men with me and they will not run unless ordered to do so."13 Two days later Baldwin, leading his Delaware and civilian scouts (including Billy Dixon, Bat Masterson, Joe Plummer, Dirty-Faced Ed Jones, and A. J. Leach) and accompanied by Second Lieutenant Austin Henely and eighteen troopers, parted from Compton's battalion. The detachment marched in a compact column: a few scouts in advance, then Frank, followed by the white scouts, and then Henely and his

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troopers. Behind the horsesoldiers rattled a supply wagon which threw dust into the faces of the main body of Delaware scouts. A guard of troopers brought up the rear, while Delaware flankers rode on either side of the column.14 The party rode west along the south bank of Beaver Creek, avoiding the parched high plains between the Beaver and the Canadian. Instead, Baldwin led his command across dozens of dry washes, knowing that if hostiles lurked in this country, they would keep to the broken land of the waterways. About 10:00 A.M. on Monday, August 17, Baldwin and his men struck Palo Duro Creek, a tributary of the Beaver, whose headwaters pointed to the Canadian and Adobe Walls. Pushing through hills of loose sand, Baldwin urged his force on for thirty miles, passing herds of buffalo and increasing signs of Indians. About 6:00 P.M. the detachment went into camp and, after some of the advance guides drove in a small herd of Texas cattle, prepared for a feast. The men butchered one of the animals, and everyone had fresh meat washed down by the alkaline water of Palo Duro Creek. By dark the men bedded down, but a dust storm arose, causing the horses to panic and pull on their stakes. Baldwin mobilized his scouts to settle the animals, but two of the hide men, Joe Plummer and his partner, Dirty-Faced Ed Jones, were reluctant to leave their beds. Baldwin swore to himself that he would discharge the two at the first opportunity. After the horses quieted, the men returned to their bedrolls, but now Baldwin and Henely became ill from the bad water and fresh meat.15 On Tuesday, Baldwin led the command from the banks of Palo Duro Creek across a fifty-mile expanse of prairie, the last leg of the journey to Adobe Walls. The trailers found no water along the route, and the command suffered from the heat throughout the day. Then the flankers brought word to the main party that hostiles followed the expedition. Baldwin alerted everyone against surprise and pressed on toward the north bank of the Canadian. Darkness came, and the column picked its way through sand hills, the horses laboring because of bad footing. About 10:00 P.M. the advance scouts informed Baldwin that the Canadian River lay a few miles ahead. Frank ordered the command into camp along Adobe Creek, where his trailers found decent water and plentiful wood. Without eating a bite—still suffering from the brine he had consumed the night before—Frank crept into his bedroll. Before falling asleep, however, he jotted in his diary that this was "one of the hardest marches today I have ever made with troops, more especially for want of water."16

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The next morning, August 19, Baldwin awoke refreshed, and after a trail breakfast, he organized a party to ride to the Adobe Walls compound—about a mile distant—to assess the circumstances of the hunters and traders still there. Baldwin and four others rode toward the compound at 9:30 A.M. and proceeded about a half mile when they heard the yells of more than seventy-five Cheyenne who were pursuing five men about three miles from the stockade. Two of the white men were mounted on ponies, and three rode in a wagon, all of them having left the compound to hunt for meat. Four of the hide men barely made it to the stockade; the fifth, a man named George Hoffman (or Huffman), took a fatal shot and fell from his horse. The Indians at first failed to see Baldwin's party and ran past it within a few yards. The soldiers opened fire on the Indians, and the enemy withdrew somewhat, but refused to leave the field and began to return the fire of the soldiers. Baldwin and his men raced through a shower of bullets to the stockade where he hoped to rouse some of the hide men to accompany him back to the camp, which he felt surely must be under attack.17 Failing to convince the men of the stockade to join him in a dash back to the scouts' camp, the lieutenant and his party galloped out of the compound. The hard riding had jaded Baldwin's animal, but luckily he crossed trails with a scout from his command who had ridden out to investigate the shooting. After trading mounts with the scout, he dashed ahead to the camp, where he found that Henely and his troopers had ridden away ten minutes before. They were following the Indians who had retreated across the Canadian River and were by now about eight miles into the sand hills south of the river. Before joining Henely, Baldwin ordered Leach, one of his scouts, to strike camp immediately and move the detachment's equipage into the stockade. Then Baldwin rode south with the Delaware scouts on the Cheyenne's trail, overtaking Lieutenant Henely just as he was moving into the hills south of the river. The entire party continued the chase for two and a half hours but lost the enemy in the hills.18 Baldwin and his detachment returned to the stockade and examined the compound where the Red River War had begun. The trading post was much the same as it had been in the days before the June 25 fight, except for the crossbeam of the corral gate. After the Indians withdrew from the battlefield, the buffalo hunters celebrated their victory by lopping off a dozen heads of dead hostile Indians and placing them on the crossbeam. His men now secure inside the stockade's walls, Baldwin spoke to

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the twenty-two occupants of the Adobe Walls compound, urging them to stay put. They had enough food for at least two months and enough men to hold off several hundred hostiles if attacked. Baldwin emphasized that the stockade occupied a strategic position on the Canadian and could be useful to the operations of the campaign. He would leave behind as much ammunition as the hide men thought necessary. The buffalo hunters asked for time to hold a council among themselves; they would tell Baldwin of their wishes in the morning. On Thursday morning, before leaving for Antelope Hills, Frank jotted a quick note to Allie. He spoke of the lively fight and chase of the day before and assured his wife that he was all right and "as well as a buck."19 Then he stuffed the letter in his bag to finish later that night. Soon the hunters came to him with their decision: they wanted to leave the stockade and accompany Baldwin and his force to the Antelope Hills to rendezvous with Miles. From there most of the men hoped to go to Camp Supply and eventually to Dodge City. One hide man, Lemuel Wilson, volunteered, however, to join the scouting party and was hired on the spot.20 By about 9:00 A.M., the column, now numbering about seventy-five men, marched down the north bank of the Canadian for twenty miles before crossing to the south side. In midafternoon when Baldwin became concerned about the lack of good water and asked his scouts whether any of them knew where fresh water could be found, Wilson indicated that he knew of such a place and volunteered to find it.21 The lieutenant sent a couple of two-man parties—one of them consisting of Wilson and Charles Morrow, another hide man from Adobe Walls— ahead to look for the spot. The two rode to a creek that Wilson called the "Guyena" and that fed into the Canadian River. More than fifty years later, Wilson wrote, "When we reached 'Guyena' . . . we found water, also two Indian scouts camped by a small fire with meat roasting on a stick." Wilson described what happened next. One of the Indians "came from behind a stump and we met face to face not over six feet apart, and it had to be him or me, and I beat him to it and I took his scalp."22 The other Indian scrambled through the bushes and disappeared, leaving his pony and equipage behind. After naming the stream Chicken Creek because he had seen a few wild chickens there, Baldwin ordered the detachment to march another six miles before making camp for the night.23 He dispatched scouts McGinty and Masterson with messages for Miles and then wrote his diary entry for the night and finished his note to Allie. He wrote to his wife, "Had another

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fight today. Killed one Indian, lost no men. You can imagine I am feeling well satisfied."24 He had reason to be satisfied; the Indian killed by Baldwin's command on August 20 was the first in the Red River War. While Frank Baldwin and his detachment wound their way down the Canadian from Adobe Walls toward the Antelope Hills and their rendezvous with the main command, Nelson Miles led his forces out of Camp Supply. The men of the main column—especially the infantry— made several severe marches after leaving Fort Dodge, the heat exacting a heavy toll on the footsoldiers. On the first day's march, the troops found little water and had only what they carried in their canteens, which they quickly emptied. On the second day, the marchers suffered greatly. George Baird recorded, "One man endeavored to open a vein to drink his blood and another tried to drink his urine but was prevented."25 Most of the dogs that accompanied the command weakened and within a few days died along the military road, and many of the men dropped to the wayside, suffering from dehydration. In their extremity a few footsoldiers noticed Jack, Nelson Miles's setter, when he showed up with wet jaws. The thirsty infantry men knew at once that Jack had found a pool and urged him to lead them there, which the animal did. Other footsoldiers eased their burdens as best they could by casting off every item of government issue that seemed useless to them.26 Miles and his column had reached Camp Supply on August 19 and the next day pushed south toward Antelope Hills in two groups. The cavalry raced ahead with Miles in the lead. The two battalions of cavalry were now reunited: one was led by Compton; the other, by Major James Biddle. The infantry and the sixty-wagon supply train trailed behind a day's march later. Both elements of the column wound thenway down the Canadian and then crossed the divide separating that river from the Washita and camped near the latter stream to await the scouts, sending up rockets during the night to let Baldwin know the whereabouts of the main command.27 Meanwhile, Baldwin and his men arrived at Antelope Hills on Saturday, August 22, only to find that Miles had moved forward. About 9:00 P.M., while in camp across the dry Canadian from the Antelope Hills, Baldwin saw Miles's flares. The next day the scouts caught up with the lagging supply train, and on the following day Baldwin dis-

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missed four unsatisfactory scouts, finally made contact with Miles, and then hired two Adobe Walls buffalo hunters, Ira Wing and I. J. Robinson. On August 25 the entire command reunited and camped on the south bank of the Washita. Miles and the other officers of the command listened eagerly to Baldwin as he described the details of his adventures at Adobe Walls and Chicken Creek. The satisfied colonel left the group to write a letter to his wife and a long report to headquarters at Fort Leavenworth. In his notes Miles mentioned Baldwin's name prominently. Finally, Frank wrote a letter to Allie: Here I am on the river where Custer had his fight which has made him such a famous Indian fighter but where he lost more men than he killed, women and children included. . . . My light is the flickering candle, etc., etc. You know the accommodations of an officer on a campaign, and Genl. Miles has cut us all down to the lowest amount, himself included. He is treating me with every consideration and was very much pleased when I reported my safe return from my scout and as I had killed the first Indian on the expedition, I of course, was the hero, but the Cav. officers are very much annoyed at it, and I can see that they are jealous as they can be. Not one of them has done anything yet, and I doubt if they will unless they are found [by the Indians], that is I don't intend to say that some of them are not all right, for they are.28 Then Baldwin bedded down with the smell of smoking prairie grass still in his nostrils. Lieutenant Baird mistakenly believed that the flares signaling Baldwin had set the grass ablaze, but in all probability, the Cheyenne lit the ground cover to deprive Miles's stock of forage during the march.29 The next morning the column set out again in search of the Cheyenne. After marching three miles, Baldwin took his detachment on a scout to the southwest of the expedition's line of march. He reached Gageby Creek and slowly moved seven miles upstream. Then he changed directions, crossed a divide, and struck Sweetwater Creek. The Cheyenne, retreating from Baldwin's force, had set the prairie ablaze; twice the grass burned so fiercely that the detachment had to charge through the fire at full gallop. Then, in the evening, the scouts discovered signs of a huge Indian camp, abandoned only a few days before.30 Baldwin spent Thursday much as he had the day before, marching through ravines, striking large Indian trails that split and split

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again, dwindling into nothing. The scouts dispersed in every direction and discovered that the Indians were moving south toward the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red. He wrote in his diary at the end of the day, "Chase getting exciting and expect to overtake the Inds. in a day or two."31 The tactics of the hostiles failed to discourage Nelson Miles. On the afternoon of Friday, August 28, he separated most of his fighting men from the supply train, ordering his men to take only their ammunition and light rations, and moved forward as rapidly as possible. On Saturday, Baldwin's scouts and a troop of cavalry moved up McClellan Creek a dozen miles and found a spot where the hostiles had retreated south, apparently in great haste, since the trackers found much abandoned Indian property. Several times Baldwin and his men discovered dayold Cheyenne campsites. When the lieutenant asked his Delaware scouts how many Cheyenne were before him, they estimated about three thousand people.32 At the end of the day, the scouts rested near the dry bed of the Salt Fork of the Red River. In the evening Miles's main column reunited with the scouts and camped nearby. Assuming that the hostiles would once again head south rather than follow the Salt Fork, Baldwin sent Billy Dixon and Amos Chapman in the dark of night down the riverbed to see where the trail of the Cheyenne left the stream. The two returned Sunday morning with word that the hostiles* trail left the stream six miles to the southeast. Miles rousted his men from their bedrolls early and prepared to resume the chase. He waited until Baldwin and his scouts had a two-mile headstart and then moved out himself. The day was hot again, the temperature heading toward one hundred degrees. Baldwin and his scouts climbed out of the breaks of the Salt Fork onto an open plain about four miles across. Just beyond the southern edge of the plain rose the escarpment known as the Cap Rock; on top of the Cap Rock was the Llano Estacado. Hidden in the crags of the foothills leading to the Llano Estacado, the Cheyenne rear guard—about seventy-five warriors—waited for their enemy. The scouts failed to see their adversaries, and just as they reached the foothills and headed toward a gap leading down to the Prairie Dog Town Fork, the Cheyenne opened fire. The Delaware were in the advance, but the white scouts quickly came to their aid. The hostiles withdrew from their hiding places and regrouped on the next line of hills, preparing to defend themselves once more. Having seen their women and children to safety, the main body of hostile warriors came to the aid of their rear guard. About the same time, Nelson Miles, who

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had heard the rapid firing of Baldwin's scouts, advanced with four hundred troopers. The cavalry dismounted to fight on foot, while the hostiles continued firing on the army line, even though the whites had not advanced. The infantry finally ran up on the double, along with the artillery detachment. Now the line took its form: Baldwin's detachment to the extreme left and Compton's battalion left of center; in the center, Bristol's infantry along with Pope's artillery; on the right of the line, Biddle's battalion; Miles stayed at dead center. Finally, the entire line moved forward, and according to Baldwin's diary, the scouts, lacking the discipline of the soldiers, kept advancing too fast and too far.33 Lem Wilson remembered the action. He wrote, Miles kept moving his troops from one hill to another, keeping it up all day and advanced right along. At one place, when the Indians made a stand in front of Baldwin's command, the 18 scouts, I among them, made a charge on the point against Baldwin's orders. [William] Schmalsle was near Baldwin and he [Baldwin] stopped him [from advancing with the rest of the scouts] saying, Til keep one of you back anyway.' Schmalsle moved away from Baldwin a few feet, and then made a dash up the hill after us. When we got to that point the Indians had gone to another point. But I forgot to stop, and went on to the point where the Indians were. By this time Baldwin's command had come up from the rear and seeing the danger I was in, [he] ordered a charge. By sheer luck they relieved me.34 Action also took place elsewhere on the line. Among the troops under Major Biddle was Company I, Sixth Cavalry, led by Captain Adna Chaffee. Chaffee was the same age as Baldwin and had served during the Civil War in the Sixth Cavalry of the Army of the Potomac. He had entered the outfit as a private and rose through the ranks to wear officers' bars and to be breveted twice, once for action at Gettysburg and again at Dinwiddie Court House. On the plains he had received a third brevet—major—for action in 1868 in Texas. Now in 1874 the captain saw the hostiles gathering to make a stand on the crest of a hill, and he ordered a charge. Waving his pistol overhead, Chaffee cried, "Forward! If any man is killed I will make him a corporal!" In the center of the line, the artillery under James Pope came to bear, blasting at groups of hostiles with the ten-pound Parrot and peppering the hills with the shells of Gatling guns. The fight went on

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for about five hours, the hostiles dropping back from hill to hill with the army close behind. In the afternoon the Indians scampered across the dry red sand of the Prairie Dog Town Fork and up the crags of the bluff that became the Llano Estacado. A few Cheyenne took positions along the edge of the bluff to buy time for their fellows to escape. Even these hostiles were driven off when Captain Tullius Cicero Tupper of G Company, Sixth Cavalry, led his troop up the bluff, clearing the ridge. The battlefield fell silent for the first time since midmorning as the Cheyenne scattered in a generally westward direction on the flats of the Llano Estacado.35 Although the fight—subsequently called the First Battle of Palo Duro Canyon—was spirited, the results were mixed. The army had killed three Cheyenne and captured a few ponies and much equipage. Miles's command suffered two men wounded. The command made camp the night of Sunday, August 30, on the battlefield, but held not a single Cheyenne.36 One hundred sixty miles to the east of the site of the First Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, the Comanche and Kiowa came into conflict with troops stationed at Fort Sill in Indian Territory. The roots of the fight may be found in the Medicine Lodge Treaties of 1867. The outbreak, however, had more immediate causes than these. The Comanche and Kiowa had peaceful and hostile factions as did the whites. Among others, Kiowa leaders Kicking Bird and Striking Eagle and Comanche leaders Horseback and Isa Havey argued for peace. Kiowa leaders Lone Wolf and Mamanti and Comanche commanders Quanah Parker, Wild Horse, and Big Red Meat urged war. Satanta and Big Tree, just released from prison in Texas, had to speak and act carefully lest the authorities seize them and imprison them again. The events at Adobe Walls in June brought the differences between Indian peace and war parties to a head. In late July orders had come from Washington to the military at Fort Sill to enroll all the Indians at the nearby reservation and also at Anadarko on the lower Washita. After Saturday, August 8, the army would regard only enrolled Kiowa and Comanche as peaceful. The peaceful Indians reluctantly enrolled themselves, while the hostiles held the entire process in contempt and at every opportunity taunted the enrollees as cowards. Once the enrollment period ended, the hostiles resumed their depredations against the whites who lived and worked in the region around Fort Sill. They showed up on distribution days and demanded

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annuities just as the peaceful bands did. On one such occasion, on Saturday, August 22, unenrolled hostile bands led by Comanche Chief Big Red Meat arrived at Anadarko and camped among the peaceful Indians. The agent at Anadarko recognized that the situation was volatile and sent for Lieutenant Colonel John Davidson and his troops from Fort Sill to force the hostiles to surrender and turn in their weapons. The troops arrived that afternoon, and soon the warriors of Big Red Meat and some hostile Kiowa exchanged shots with Davidson's Buffalo Soldiers. Early in the firefight, there were no casualties, but some of the Indians began to vandalize the agency store owned by William Shirley. During the chaos Shirley's black servant was mortally wounded, and now the fighting became serious on both sides. By nightfall the Indians withdrew from the scene but not from the vicinity. Runners went out to nearby Indian camps to urge other warriors to help fight the soldiers. Among the Indians contacted were those at Poor Buffalo's camp on Cobb Creek in Indian Territory. Here a seventeen-year-old named Botalye, nephew of Mamanti, heard of the fighting against the troopers and joined the others in riding to the hill above Anadarko. There they exchanged shots with the soldiers, stole some blankets from Shirley's store, saw a few Indians shot, and decided to get away before Davidson sent to Fort Sill for reinforcements. The Kiowa and Comanche rode upstream along the Washita, the Comanche soon going their own way and the Kiowa continuing their flight upriver.37 The Kiowa spent the last days of August and the first of September constantly moving camp. They held frequent councils, debating about where they should hide from Davidson's retribution. Some leaders urged a quick move to the rugged canyon country below the Cap Rock, but scouts brought in word that white soldiers—the troops of Nelson Miles—patrolled that region. Mamanti urged that they go to the headwaters of the Washita, avoiding contact with the soldiers to the south, and then carefully move to the upper Palo Duro Canyon. Swiftly, the Kiowa moved west. They sent scouts ahead to warn the bands if the soldiers in the Panhandle discovered their presence and behind to make sure that Davidson's force would not strike at their rear. On September 7 the Kiowa of Poor Buffalo's band made camp near the head of the Washita. There the Indians found a wagon trail left recently by Miles's southbound supply train. On the day after the First Battle of the Palo Duro Canyon, Frank Baldwin and his scouts searched for Cheyenne on the Llano Estacado

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and in several valleys adjacent to the lower Palo Duro. The Indians, however, had disappeared, leaving nothing behind but abandoned equipage and scattered trails. While Baldwin scouted the region, Miles fretted over dwindling supplies. The colonel feared that a lack of supplies might force him to leave the Red River country, losing the gains he had made against the Cheyenne. His column had left Fort Dodge on August 14 with thirty days' rations, so by August 31 the expedition's food supply would last only another two weeks. On that day, therefore, Miles sent half his wagons back toward Camp Supply, escorted by a company of infantrymen and a few cavalry troopers, the entire detachment commanded by Captain Wyllys Lyman. The wagons headed for the Canadian River, where a similar train from Camp Supply would meet Lyman's unit. After transferring the supplies to his wagons, Lyman would return to the front. For Baldwin the next three days unfolded much as the previous three. He rested in camp one day, scouted a total of seventy-two miles on a second, and on a third rode back to the expedition's headquarters on Mulberry Creek, a dry wash that during the rainy season emptied into the Prairie Dog Town Fork from the north. Baldwin reached headquarters at 2:00 P.M. on September 6. In the colonel's tent, the lieutenant found Miles worrying about the fate of his expedition. He had already sent a messenger to Camp Supply with a telegram to General Pope that begged for "more transportation or that a temporary Camp of Supply be established on the Canadian & Sweetwater." He vowed to Pope that he would "stay with these tribes until they are entirely subjugated unless otherwise directed."38 Miles asked Baldwin whether he could find a few scouts to go to Camp Supply to discover what was holding up the supplies. Baldwin gave the matter some thought and then volunteered himself for the mission along with three of his best scouts: Lem Wilson, Ira Wing, and William Schmalsle. The colonel accepted his offer and ordered him to go on to Fort Leavenworth from Camp Supply, carrying written and verbal pleas for supplies, wagons, and additional troops if possible. While the four men gathered together their kits, Miles had George Baird write four copies of the message. Baldwin and the scouts prepared for the trip by selecting mounts and cleaning their weapons. Each man carried a revolver and a Spencer carbine, except for Wing, who carried a long-range 90-120 Sharp's buffalo gun. Then they loaded a pack animal with a three-day supply of rations for each man and extra clothes and ammunition. The men

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sewed Miles's messages to their underwear. Before the party left camp, Lieutenant Robert McDonald slipped a bottle of whiskey into Baldwin's saddlebag along with a note, "Frank, enjoy this. It is the last drop in camp."39 At 8:30 P.M. Baldwin, Wilson, Wing, and Schmalsle rode out on the wagon trail leading northeast to Camp Supply, intending to travel all night. Before an hour passed, the men detected Indians tracking them. At the beginning of the journey, the four men crossed a wide, level plain leading to the broken land around the Salt Fork of the Red River. Skirting to the west of a hilly region north of the Salt Fork, they tried to follow Miles's wagon trail, but frequently veered west of the road into the foothills close to the plain above, attempting to throw their pursuers off the track. At 4:30 A.M., just before daylight, the party came to the head of White Fish Creek, a distance of about forty miles from the headquarters of the expedition. Tired and hungry, the men rode up a long canyon between steep bluffs and decided that they could rest there during the daylight hours of Monday, September 7. Frank sent Wilson to the ridge above them as a lookout, while the rest of the party unsaddled their mounts and built a small fire to boil coffee. Only half an hour passed when, according to Wilson, "I was so drowsy I could hardly keep my eyes open. . . . I put tobacco spittle in my eyes to keep awake, and it was well I did or I would not have seen that Indian who was looking for us." Wilson turned to the party at the foot of the bluff and whispered as loudly as he could, "They are coming!"40 Baldwin and the two scouts with him grabbed their rifles and clambered up the hill to join Wilson. Within fifteen minutes about twenty-five Indians dashed to within fifty yards, and each man fired his rifle. Three of the enemy fell from their horses, causing the rest of the hostiles to retreat out of sight. Then the Indians surrounded Baldwin and his men, occupying all the bluffs within range.41 During the fight the party's pack mule lumbered away from camp, and the hostiles gunned down the animal. Now Baldwin and his men were deprived of their food and bedrolls. The four men counciled with each other and decided to saddle their horses and to charge through the line of their adversaries, who had dismounted and wormed their way toward the brow of the hill. At the lieutenant's signal, the men drew their pistols and, in a line of four, charged up the steep hill, over the ridge, firing their handguns as they cut through the lines of the stunned Indians. They galloped away from the attackers, but then slowed their mounts to a trot, fearing a faster gait would use up their horses. Meanwhile, the Indians mounted their

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ponies and resumed the chase. After riding about two miles, Baldwin decided the Indians had come too close, so he ordered the men to dismount and fight on foot. The white men drove their enemies back over a mile, but while the Indians retreated at the rear, another party flanked the scouts and appeared at their front. The four men mounted and charged through the Indians, killing two or three with their revolvers. Again Baldwin and his men rode for about two miles before the Indians closed on them. The white men dismounted and made another stand, the last, since the Indians found it too dangerous to come closer to Baldwin's party than fifteen hundred yards.42 The four men pushed about one thousand yards onto the Llano Estacado. By now it was late afternoon, September 7, and Baldwin had little choice but to allow the men to halt to rest. Their horses were jaded, and the men had not slept for over thirty hours. During the rest, Wilson watched his commander take a photograph of Allie and Juanita from his jacket pocket and gaze at it for a while and heard him say, "I never expected to see you again."43 Then the three-month-long drought and heat wave that had bedeviled the South Plains ended with a cloudburst that tapered off to a steady rainfall. The hostiles decided to abandon the chase and let some other braves kill these soldiers. When the Indians left the field, the problems of Baldwin's party diminished only a little. Their supplies, aside from their rifles and ammunition, consisted of six pieces of hard bread which the rain reduced to dough. For two days and nights, the four men had only wild grapes and acorns to eat as they rode through the Panhandle countryside.44 Monday night, after pushing on in the rain as far as they could, the men camped, or as Wilson told it, "Just stopped, for we had lost our entire equipment. . . . We picketed our horses to let them graze, and we laid down on the ground, using our saddles for pillows and saddle blankets for cover, the only protection we had."45 The rain continued on Tuesday morning when Baldwin's party renewed the ride. Even though the Indians failed to reappear, he took no chances and sent Wilson to scout fifty to one hundred yards in advance, while another man guarded the rear. They pushed across the muddy Llano Estacado, planning to cross the headwaters of Sweetwater and Gageby creeks, then the Washita, finally reaching the Canadian, where they hoped to find Wyllys Lyman's wagon train. After two hours Wilson signaled from his advanced position for the rest of the party to halt, since he had discovered a pony in a ravine in front of him. Dismounting, Wilson crawled to the brow of a bluff and saw about a dozen

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unsaddled ponies, their trappings scattered about on the ground. The Indians had huddled under a bank to escape the storm. Wilson crawled back and told Baldwin, Wing, and Schmalsle what he had seen. The four men decided to avoid this hostile party and gave it a wide berth. Plodding through mud, water, and drenching rain, the scouts pressed on, the sky becoming so dark that the riders could barely see the horses ahead of them.46 In the afternoon the men dismounted near Gageby Creek and sat back to back with their rifles on their laps, their horses grazing while tethered on the ends of lariats. Baldwin and his men had eaten only berries and nuts for days, so when a herd of buffalo shuffled by, Wing killed one of the beasts, and the men cut out a chunk of the buffalo's hump. They decided against building a fire. Instead, Baldwin poured whiskey over the meat, and the four men ate it raw. On the move again, the men swam their horses across the swollen Gageby Creek and rode to the crest of a ridge near the head of the Washita, where some ten or twelve miles in the distance, they saw the village of Poor Buffalo's Kiowa. The men mistook the conical Indian tepees for similarly shaped army tents and supposed that what they saw was Wyllys Lyman's wagon train.47 The closer the four men came to the encampment, the more they realized they had made a grave error. Baldwin considered and then decided against making a dash through the center of the Indian village. Instead the party traveled down a draw that apparently led away from the encampment. In the late afternoon of Monday, September 7, Botalye had met his cousin, eighteen-year-old Tehan, the foster son of Mamanti, as he walked through the camp of Poor Buffalo's band. Tehan was a redheaded white boy whom the Kiowa had captured in Texas about twelve years before and who had become a thorough-going Indian.48 Mamanti's family had lost three colts at the band's previous campsite, and Tehan's foster mother asked the boy to return there, round up the animals, and bring them home. Botalye warned Tehan not to undertake the trip, but Tehan laughed and said, "I'm a white man. I still understand their language. I can talk my way out of any trouble if they catch me." On Tuesday, the eighth, Tehan rode about fifteen miles down the Washita, where he found the colts and started back to camp. While Tehan herded his colts toward Poor Buffalo's village, Wilson spied the warrior from the crest of a ridge and returned to the party to tell Baldwin what he had seen. Deciding to capture the hostile, the

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four men hid themselves along Tehan's trail, and when the young man passed, Wilson made a dash at him, grabbed him by the neck, and choked him to silence. The two fell from their horses, but Wilson clung to Tehan while Schmalsle and Wing disarmed him. The men tied their captive to his horse and, placing a lariat around his neck, they continued down the draw which twisted and turned until, to the dismay of the white men, it snaked its way directly into Tehan's village. Baldwin concluded that his party must ride through the camp at a trot, emerge from its lower end, and then go into the timber that skirted the riverbank. As the five men rode through the village, they saw only three or four Indian women out in the rain.49 Having ridden through the enemy camp, the men stuck to the banks of the Washita under the cover of the timber that lined the river. They had to swim their horses across the stream several times, causing Wing's horse to flounder, so Baldwin and the others forced Tehan off his pony and gave the animal to Wing. Then they made the young man kill the jaded animal with his hatchet. Now Tehan's fate became a subject of debate. Wing wanted to kill the fellow outright so that the party could move ahead unencumbered, but Baldwin vetoed the suggestion, although he gave it some thought. In an October 9 letter to Allie, he wrote: "I had a great notion to kill him after I captured him but could not, he was my prisoner and to kill a prisoner would be murder, then he pled so hard for his life that my heart was softened and his life spared."50 The white men's hearts were not so soft as to help Tehan as he struggled on foot behind their mounts. They simply tightened the lariat around his neck and yanked him along at their own pace. The party continued down the Washita, crossing the river eleven times and making Tehan swim the stream without any help except by pulling him by the rope around his neck. The men were cruelly amused when Tehan emerged from the water, wiped his face, and cried out, "Me good Comanche, Me good Comanche."51 After riding downstream for fifteen miles, Baldwin's party reached the expedition's wagon trail as it crossed the Washita, and in the darkness, the men moved onto the hills north of the river. They crossed the divide between the Washita and the Canadian, striking the latter river sixteen miles west of Antelope Hills. At 2:30 A.M., Wednesday, September 9, Baldwin and his scouts rode two abreast, pulling Tehan behind them, when they came upon an outpost of Lyman's wagon train, which had just rendezvoused with the train from Camp Supply and had transferred its cargo to their own vehicles. Baldwin delivered his prisoner to Lyman, requesting that Tehan be taken back to Miles for inter-

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rogation. The party then ate a warm meal and slept for a few hours. At dawn Lyman's train left for the front with William Schmalsle serving as guide. Baldwin, Wilson, Wing and two other scouts who had been with Lyman, dug pits in the sand and laid in them until dark when they resumed their ride to Camp Supply, reaching the post at 10:00 A.M. on Thursday. Frank Baldwin left Camp Supply on Friday, September 11, on an army Dougherty Wagon and arrived at Fort Dodge about noon on Saturday. Before going to bed, Frank wrote Allie for the first time since completing his ride. He chose not to tell his wife about his journey to Camp Supply, correctly reasoning that Allie would be horrified at the dangers her husband had faced and would be furious at him for having volunteered for the mission. Instead, Frank concentrated on quelling Allie's general fears, the kind that trouble most military wives during wartime.52 Baldwin traveled by train to Fort Leavenworth, arriving at department headquarters at 3:00 P.M. on Monday. GeneralJohn Pope, the department commander, and the other officers of the fort turned out to greet Baldwin and hear his adventurous tales. The lieutenant handed the general the dispatches he carried and informed him that he had verbal messages from Miles as well. Pope then asked Baldwin to report to his office in the morning. Baldwin welcomed the opportunity to rest and to get away from the limelight for a few hours. He spent the night at the home of Colonel Miles, hosted by Mary Miles, who also had Mrs. George Baird as a houseguest for the duration of the campaign. The next morning Baldwin reported to Pope and described his experiences again. After listening for three hours, the general sent him back to the front with the words, "Baldwin you have done well and I don't want to lose such an officer by his running any unnecessary risks, and you must not attempt to make the return trip to your command without a good escort."53 The officers at Fort Leavenworth rewarded Baldwin for trusting them to write about his exploits; Second Lieutenant Forrest Hathaway, the Fifth Regiment's quartermaster, wrote a description of Baldwin's ride and submitted it to the newspapers. Even before Baldwin began his train ride back to Dodge, Kansans knew of his adventures. On the train civilian passengers pestered the lieutenant with questions and asked him to repeat his story so often that he was glad to be return-

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ing to the front. On September 17 Frankfinallywrote a letter to his wife describing his ride and his experiences at department headquarters.54 In Coldwater, Michigan, at the home of her husband's uncle, still ignorant of his ride, Allie struggled with Frank's absence with a complex combination of love, fear, respect, anxiety, pride, and a touch of envy. She wrote a letter to him on September 18 that described her yearning for Frank and lamenting her own role as a passive, Victorian-era wife: / have always known you were brave and daring, but never brought to me in so conspicuous manner before. You know I did not know you during the "Rebellion" so whatever you was then affected me not at all. I tell you, Frank, you don't know how I feel about you. It is so easy for you to tell me to not be so discouraged and blue and to not feel uneasy but with you how different from me. You are living a life fraught with peril and excitement. Your mental and physical powers are kept in constant service. You have no time to indulge in longings and sad reflections even if you were so disposed to. And you are living the life you love. That's everything and besides all this you are a man! Now look at me. I am a woman with all the love and anxiety of a wife for the man she loves. I have no stirring scenes to pass through. There are no eventful episodes in my existence. I am not living the life I love. All I have to do are a few paltry . . . duties . . . and that makes up my daily life. My thoughts are woven with memories of the past and hopes for the future. I have nothing to do but watch and wait. Now, Frank, you must give me credit for a little fortitude. I have some if not much and I do try my best to be hopeful. . . . If you are spared all safe and sound, all this will be of great advantage to you and I feel my own inefficience so much for in order to become great and distinguished or even to be held in high favor with your colonel, a man's wife should be accomplished, noted for fine qualities to insure his more positive success.55 Two days later, still without Frank's letters detailing his ride, Allie sat in the parlor of Uncle Charles's home in Coldwater when he dashed into the house waving a copy of the Chicago Times which carried an article describing "Baldwin's Ride." Allie read about the four men and their exploits between White Fish Creek and the banks of the Washita. Then the next morning, in a rage, she wrote her husband:

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Uncle Charles came home last evening and he was reading the ''Chicago Times" and read an account of a fight you and three scouts had killing five and capturing one renegade. How does it happen that you in a country teeming with hostile Indians are sent on a long journey with so small an escort as three scouts? I think it is outrageous and culpable in the highest degree to hazard a valuable life just to convey some darned dispatches. I don't care how important they were. Why don't Miles, I should like to know, select someone else to perform his dangerous errands? Why select you as Chief of Scouts in the first place and then not content with that must jeopardize your life by sending you away to Leavenworth with only an escort of three. . . . The "Times" states after a "desperate fight" you got through. I wish Miles would have something happen to him. What are you going to do with that renegade you captured? He ought to be shot! No doubt but eventually he will be released to resume his villainy. Why didn't you tell me all this when you wrote me? It seems it happened on your way to Leavenworth. You didn't say a word about it. I shall be uneasy now all the time until I hear you returned from Leavenworth all safe. . . . If I could only be assured of your safety all the time while you are gone, then I would not complain.56 On Thursday, September 24, AUie received Frank's letter of September 17, describing his ride and his reception at department headquarters. That evening Allie wrote her husband: When I read the letter, it felt as if it must be some fiction. It was all so wonderful. I was on my way down to Walter's when I got it and when I got down there I read it aloud to a roomful of people amid exclamations of horror, wonder, and astonishment and of a great deal of admiration that was expressed for you. Frank, you are a big lyonfsic] among your friends here and your name is prominently mentioned in the papers and a copy of what you sent me that Hathaway published was put in the "Detroit Post." . . . The article called you "Col." and that you had distinguished yourself during the war in your defense of a stockade, etc., etc. All this is of course very gratifying to me but Oh, Frank, how much anxiety I suffer. . . . I feel as if your experience now could not help but be of great benefit for you in different ways. At least I hope so. Don't for mercy's sake, ever

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run such a risk again as you did when you undertook that journey with only three scouts. It is a duty you owe to yourself and to me. I don't care for all the orders or generals in creation. I am the one to suffer and mourn if you die and not they. . . . Frank, when you thoft there was no escape from those Indians, what did you think of? And if you ever fall in their hands alive and know there can be no escape for you, kill yourself! For you know what they will do to you. I can't live when I think of it. I only exist. Do you wonder?57 If the field performance of his civilian scouts ever concerned Frank Baldwin, the frontiersmen put the lieutenant's fears to rest by their actions during his absence from the front. After leaving Baldwin behind, Wyllys Lyman's wagon train, led south by scout William Schmalsle, headed for trouble as it approached the north bank of the Washita River. The Kiowa brave Botalye had set out in the darkness of Wednesday night, September 8, looking for his foster cousin, Tehan. The morning of the ninth, Botalye peeked over a mesquite bush on a grassy knoll north of the Washita and saw Lyman's wagon train about one and a half miles away. Botalye raced back to the main Kiowa camp to inform Chief Lone Wolf and the medicine man Mamanti of what he had seen. The Kiowa put on their war bonnets and paint, tied up their horses' tails for battle, and dashed out to attack Lyman's train. By the time the main band of Kiowa arrived, other warriors had harassed the train. Lyman ordered the train into a hollow square, positioning his men in lines outside the square, ready for attacks from any direction. The infantrymen wrapped the straps of their rifles around their arms to steady their aims, kneeled on one knee, and fired on their adversaries, who rode around the corralled army men all day. The Indians crippled Lyman's movement by killing or wounding a dozen of his mules. Among the men, a wagoner took a mortal wound; one soldier had died; and a bullet had shattered the knee of Lyman's second in command, First Lieutenant Granville Lewis. Lyman's command was short of water; only a small pool formed by recent cloudbursts served more than 150 animals and about seventyfive men. During the night Lyman ordered a few soldiers to creep out of camp under the cover of darkness to a water hole to fill several canteens. By now Tehan had convinced the soldiers that he had been an unwilling prisoner of the Kiowa and had volunteered to accompany the

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soldiers. Not far from the train, the warrior sneaked away in the darkness and returned to his people. At 3:00 P.M. the next day, Lyman wrote a note to the commanding officer at Camp Supply that began, "Sir, I have the honor to report that I am corralled by Comanches, two miles north of the Washita, on Genl. Miles' trail. . . . I think I may properly ask quick aid, especially for Lieut. Lewis, a most valuable officer."58 Schmalsle volunteered to break through the Indian lines and make a dash to Camp Supply with the message. Lyman accepted his offer and gave him the pick of the mounts at hand. After dark the scout silently rode out of camp over the sand hills northward toward the Canadian. Soon after he left the corralled wagon train, however, the Indians noticed the scout and began to pursue him. During the chase Schmalsle's horse stumbled, and the scout lost his rifle, but he continued riding with the Indians close behind. Fortunately, he came upon a herd of buffalo and lost himself in it, his horse's tracks obliterated by the milling animals. Free of his pursuers, Schmalsle rode seventy-five miles to Camp Supply, where he arrived at 8:30 A.M. on Saturday. Within hours a relief column left the fort to rescue the corralled wagon train. A few days after Baldwin and his companions left expedition headquarters, Nelson Miles, ignorant of the tribulations of the first group, sent off another party of messengers. This group consisted of scouts Billy Dixon and Amos Chapman and four troopers of the Sixth Cavalry, Sergeant Zachariah Woodall and Privates Peter Roth, John Harrington, and George Smith.59 About 6:00 A.M., Saturday, September 12, the six approached the Washita from the south without any idea that, about four miles to the north, Lyman's wagon train was entering its fourth day under siege. As the six men rode toward the Washita, a hundred Kiowa and Comanche warriors caught sight of them and immediately attacked. The white men dismounted, gave the reins of their mounts to Private Smith, and began firing at the Indians. Smith, however, was the first hit, taking a mortal wound through the left lung. When he fell, all the horses dashed off and were seized by the hostiles. Soon the other members of the party were hit, all seriously except for Billy Dixon and Private Roth. After a few hours of trading shots with the hostiles, Dixon noticed a little hollow in the land which, because the water table was only a few inches below the prairie's surface here, the buffalo used as a mud wallow. Four of the men made a dash to

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the wallow, where they dug a pit into the wet ground with their knives. The men left behind Amos Chapman, whose knee cap had been shattered by a bullet and Private Smith, whom they believed to be dead. Billy Dixon dashed to Amos Chapman and carried the wounded man to safety. In midafternoon the group began to run out of ammunition, so Private Roth crawled out of the wallow to retrieve Private Smith's weapons and shells. To everyone's surprise Roth brought back the news that Smith had not yet died. Roth and Dixon, therefore, returned to the high ground and carried the dying man to the wallow. After they poked a silk handkerchief into the bullet hole in Smith's back, they propped him up on the wall of the wallow to make the hostiles think the defenders had more manpower than they actually possessed. The Indians, however, had already lost some of their interest in the white men and passed the time sitting on their ponies, their heads covered with blankets against the rain. When darkness arrived the party determined to send Private Roth for help, but within two hours he crept back into the wallow, explaining that he could not find the trail. Meanwhile, Private Smith begged the others to end his suffering by killing him. The men escaped making a decision about Smith's fate when he died during the night. By morning light the group had decided to make a second attempt to send a man for help, and this time Dixon got the call. The scout crept out of the wallow and hurried over the sand hills looking for the wagon trail. Soon Dixon discovered that the Kiowa and Comanche had left the field of battle. Then in the distance, the scout saw the reason for their absence: a large group of United States Cavalry troopers After riding hundreds of miles through New Mexico and the western Panhandle, Major William Price's four companies of the Eighth Cavalry had met Nelson Miles's column and had moved ahead at the colonel's request to discover what had happened to the Lyman supply train. To the west of the spot where Dixon saw them, near the head of the Washita, Price's horsesoldiers stumbled onto a large contingent of hostiles who fought a rearguard action while their women packed up their camps and fled from the region of the upper Washita. After a lively fight with the troopers, the warriors also left the field. Dixon attracted the attention of the column by firing his .50 caliber buffalo gun, and within minutes he was describing his party's ordeal to Price. The major dispatched two soldiers and a surgeon to aid the wounded men, but the defenders of the wallow, when they saw figures

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approaching, supposed them to be hostiles and fired on their rescuers. One shot hit and killed a soldier's horse. Enraged that the men had shot at him, the doctor made a superficial examination of their wounds and returned to Price's column. The incident also angered Major Price, who ordered his command on its way. The major left no guard with the men, no new firearms, no ammunition, not even a bite to eat. He promised only to advise Miles of the men's situation. A few compassionate troopers left behind some hard tack and dried beef to sustain the wallow's defenders until about midnight, September 14, when a relief party led by Captain Adna Chaffee reached them. At daylight, after having buried Smith, Chaffee took the party to Camp Supply, where Chapman had his leg amputated just above the knee. In spite of Nelson Miles's efforts to keep the hostile Indians to his front, a few bands crossed the Canadian, the Cimarron, and the Arkansas into the settled areas of Kansas and eastern Colorado. Early on Friday, September 11, a party of travelers moved along the Smoky Hill Road on their way from Georgia to Colorado. The travelers were John German and his family: wife, Lydia; son Stephen, aged eighteen; and daughters Rebecca, Catherine, Joanna, Sophia, Julia, and Nancy Adelade (Addie), aged twenty, seventeen, fifteen, thirteen, seven, and five. The Germans toiled slowly toward Fort Wallace when Cheyenne Chief Medicine Water and his band attacked them, killing John, Lydia, Rebecca, and Stephen. Medicine Water's warriors gathered the five remaining girls together and, after examining their hair, killed and scalped blond Joanna. The surviving German sisters were taken as captives. The hostiles divided the girls among themselves and raced south. After four days Medicine Water's band and their captives crossed the Arkansas River and headed for the safety of the canyons of the Panhandle. There the Kansas raiders traded Julia and Addie to warriors in the Cheyenne band of Gray Beard. Then Medicine Water's band raced down the western slopes of the plains into the Pecos River country of New Mexico, while Gray Beard remained on the eastern slopes. The Cheyennes wearied of caring for Julia and Addie and left them on the plains for a week to starve to death. The two girls survived by foraging berries, roots, nuts, even finding a recent army camp where the soldiers had left behind scraps of crackers and hardtack. After about a week, warriors of Gray Beard's band found Julia and Addie

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again and took them back to camp where they were ignored and fed only rarely. Within weeks, the girls were emaciated and nearly dead.

On Wednesday, September 23, Frank Baldwin returned to the front a somewhat different man from the one who rode away on September 6. Because of his journey from the Red River to Camp Supply, Allie respected him anew, even if she objected to his foolhardiness. The people at home in Michigan marveled at his exploits. Newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Topeka carried Baldwin's name in front page articles. The officers who knew him respected and envied him. The day after Baldwin arrived at Miles's camp on the Washita (Miles moved it from the Red River to the north because of the difficulty of supplying the command from such a distance), Frank wrote Allie that everyone seemed happy to see him, especially Colonel Miles and Lieutenant Baird. His ride had elevated Baldwin in the eyes of Miles, who wrote his wife, "Captain Baldwin is one of the good officers and is a valuable assistant to me."60 Baldwin's new perception of himself also included his appearance. He had lost the extra weight that he gained while on detached service and now sported a new look. He wrote to Allie, "I don't think that I ever was so rugged and am gaining in flesh again and what I got now is sound hard sinews and muscles. I am a great deal stronger than when I left Newport and I have got so that I can ride all day and all night too without getting very tired."61 On the other hand, Frank was shocked to see that his hair and beard were graying quickly. The thirty-twoyear-old lieutenant remarked to his wife, "I am getting gray as an old rat if there is such a thing as a gray rat. . . . My hair is cut short as it can be and I have allowed my . . . whiskers to grow and they are now about 2 inches long."62 For all his pride in himself as an Indian fighter and in his reconstructed body, Baldwin suffered a few secret terrors. For at least one month, late at night, within the privacy of his tent, Frank lay awake for hours trying to sleep, startled by the slightest noise, haunted by the fear that his experiences might have robbed him of his courage, that in the next battle he might run away or somehow disgrace himself.63 Politically, Nelson Miles fared less well than Frank Baldwin in late September and early October. Some of the colonel's detractors blamed him for the appearance of the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne at his rear after the First Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. Some believed that

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Miles had failed to whip the Indians at the Red River, that they had doubled back on him and administered a thrashing to the whites. Miles finally had to make a retrograde movement to the Washita and now had to live with the headline, "Gen. Miles whipped and driven back one hundred miles." Word leaked out that Miles and Pope feuded over the lack of transportation, the establishment of a supply depot in the war zone, the assignment of additional troops to Miles's command, and the refusal of Sheridan to appoint the colonel overall commander of the campaign. Rumors of Miles's troubles reached Northville, Michigan, where Allie and Nita were, by mid-October. Allie read in a letter from another army wife that Miles had been severely censured for the way he had conducted the expedition. Allie wrote Frank inquiring about the truth of the matter.64 Frank wrote back immediately, giving his own version of Miles's character: The General has had to fight and overcome not only a wild and large foe but he has a lot of officers around that is connected with the expedition who have seemingly done nothing with a spirit and energy that anyone connected with such a campaign must exhibit to guarantee success and all the successes that have been or may be gained are due almost entirely to Genl. Miles personal energy and hard work. He has received a cordial support from but few of his officers. The balance bring a drag on his movements. . . . I would like you to take pains to contradict all such reports against him. He has always been kind to me. I am not sent off any more under any one but always gives me a picked command and sends me in charge of the outfit, so you see if there is a chance to gain a fight, I will get all the credit and that is what we want.65 By now Baldwin believed that only the colonel of the Fifth Infantry had accomplished anything in the Panhandle. In mid-October, for all Baldwin knew, Miles's force had monopolized the action of the Red River War. Then disturbing news came to the front by way of St. Louis; Ranald Mackenzie had finally reached the Panhandle and, unknown to anyone in Miles's command, had fought a Second Battle of Palo Duro Canyon. Ranald Mackenzie was a high-strung individual whose record gave Miles reason for jealousy. The colonel of the Fourth Cavalry had received seven brevets and six wounds during the Civil War. His postwar assignment placed him along the Rio Grande, where he had ample

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opportunity for combat against the hostiles of the region, causing President Grant to regard him as the most promising young officer in the army. Mackenzie's expert trackers led him onto the Llano Estacado, where he found the trails of the hostiles that Miles had chased onto the plains on August 30. The troopers of the Fourth Cavalry followed the Indians until they found their hiding place in the upper Palo Duro Canyon, and on the morning of Monday, September 28, they made a surprise attack on a village of Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche. The Indians fought vigorously, allowing their women and children to escape to the north rim of the Llano Estacado before them. Mackenzie's men captured almost fifteen hundred Indian ponies and most of the equipage of the hostiles in the canyon. Mackenzie knew from experience that a successful Indian campaign resulted not from large numbers of warriors killed but from a destruction of the Indians' homes and ponies, so he destroyed the village, burning tepees, food, clothing, and utensils. Then he ordered his troopers to shoot more than a thousand Indian ponies. Two weeks later word reached Miles of Mackenzie's Second Battle of Palo Duro Canyon; a shaken Nelson Miles resolved to retake the initiative as the foremost commander in the field of the Red River War. Even before learning about Mackenzie's victory in the upper Palo Duro Canyon, Colonel Miles started to make use of Lieutenant Baldwin's skills and enthusiasm. On Tuesday, October 13, the expedition commander put together a sixty-man force with Baldwin in command. Miles ordered the detachment on an extended scout south of the Washita. The scout was uneventful, but it established a precedent during the expedition that Baldwin was Miles's chief field officer, even though several officers outranked the lieutenant. On the twentieth Baldwin and his force returned to the headquarters camp which Miles had moved from the Washita to Wolf Creek, where he awaited two trains: one, coming from Camp Supply; another from New Mexico. Other commanders joined Mackenzie in seizing victories that Miles considered should be his own. Colonels Buell and Davidson were having substantial success to the east of Miles; almost one hundred warriors and their families with over two thousand head of stock had surrendered to them. Satanta and a few other warriors had given up at Cheyenne Agency in Indian Territory. For all of Miles's activity since August, he had killed or captured few Indians. Miles saw the end of the struggle approaching, and the most he could claim was that he had

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kept the hostiles on the run, unable to hunt in preparation for the coming winter. Miles depended on a new campaign to redeem his reputation. He planned a march to Adobe Walls, from there across the Llano Estacado to the head of Palo Duro Canyon, and then launch a concerted push back northeast. He would leave Major Price with his Eighth Cavalry to scout in the region of the upper Washita. If hostiles occupied the area, Miles would drive them east into Price's hands. If the Indians resisted, they would be crushed. The expedition left Wolf Creek on Monday, October 26, reaching Adobe Walls on the twenty-eighth. On the twenty-ninth the column moved across the Llano Estacado. The new campaign elated Baldwin, who led his detachment of civilian and Delaware scouts and frequently took entire companies of regulars on scouting trips. On October 29, he wrote a note to Allie about rumors of his good fortune: "I have but a moment to write this morning as we are about ready to start out on another short scout of 15 or 20 days. . . . The Genl. certainly is doing everything for me in the way of giving me a chance. Just think of it, I am now to have a Major's command and there is a major (Compton) and a Capt. (Tupper) in camp."66 Since no mail pouch was due to leave for Camp Supply, Frank put his unfinished letter in his bag. On Wednesday, November 4, at 9:00 A.M., Baldwin received his orders. Miles assigned two companies to him: one cavalry (Company D of the Sixth, commanded by Lieutenant Gilbert Overton) and one of infantry (Company D of the Fifth, commanded by Lieutenant Hobart Baily). In addition, he got a howitzer; a party of scouts, foremost of whom was William Schmalsle; and a Virginia-born surgeon named Powell. The entire command totaled well over one hundred men. Baldwin's battalion had two goals as it left Miles's camp on the north rim of the upper Palo Duro Canyon, heading northeast toward the Salt Fork of the Red River. First, the lieutenant must look for the Cheyenne who had been dispersed by Miles two months before and the remnant bands of Kiowa and Comanche who had been run out of their hiding place by Mackenzie at the end of September. Baldwin need not fight any battles if he ran across hostiles. He simply must push them in a northeasterly direction into the hands of Major Price. Second, the battalion must escort a train of twenty-three empty wagons to a rendezvous with elements of Price's command on the North Fork of the Red River. Then Price's troopers would take the wagons to a supply depot on the Washita. For four days, each morning at daybreak, scouts advanced six to

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eight miles ahead to serve as flankers for Baldwin's main column. The soldiers and wagons pushed through broken country as they passed over the Salt Fork on November 5, White Fish Creek on the sixth, and McClellan Creek on the seventh. The cumbersome wagons always held the soldiers back, keeping the main command under Colonel Miles close; Miles usually camped from fifteen to twenty miles behind the advance battalion. On the morning of Sunday, November 8, Baldwin's battalion repeated the routines of previous days: up at first light; scouts ahead and on the flanks of the command at 6:30; main column on the trail at 6:50 on a course nearly due north. The wagons crossed the plain just north of McClellan Creek, escorted by the infantry and cavalry whose mounts had nearly been used up by months of hard riding and carefully restricted forage. After marching about two miles, Baldwin saw Schmalsle returning from his position as advance scout with word that he had seen an Indian camp in a hollow up ahead, a bit more than three miles' distance. Baldwin accompanied the scout to the place where he had seen the village and used his telescope to scan the valley, where he saw Cheyenne tepees—the lodges of perhaps one or two hundred warriors with their families—and in a meadow nearby about seven hundred ponies. Baldwin and Schmalsle returned to the battalion, and the lieutenant ordered the scout to ride as quickly as possible to Miles's camp to tell him that the advance was going into battle. Baldwin ordered his command forward, train and all. The infantry moved at double and quick time, keeping pace with the cavalry whose nearly jaded mounts struggled along as best they could. The battalion crossed country that was rough and broken and in places almost impassable. One mile from the position occupied by the Indians, Baldwin sent ten men of Overton's company forward as skirmishers and directed the scouts to move well out on both flanks. When arriving within about fifteen hundred yards, in view of the position occupied by the Indians, Baldwin ordered Baily to form his company into a line on the right and Overton to place the remainder of his troopers into line on the left. The howitzer was placed in the center near the wagons. This formation advanced to within three hundred yards of the Indians before Baldwin directed the gunners to shell the Indian-held ravines.67 Baldwin saw warriors gather at the edge of their camp to give battle, so he directed a few shells among them, and they scattered immediately up to the plain to the west of the camp. There the hostiles made a new demonstration, but again the cannon blasted, this time sending a charge of canister in the Indians' direction, followed by a

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rush of the entire battalion. Baldwin wrote, "In this charge my train went in and kept right up to the line. . . . The Indians held on well and seemed to be determined to hold their ground, but I had now gotten them on the level plain, and although they outnumbered me, still I had no further idea but that I could whip them."68 Within minutes the infantry charged into the deserted Cheyenne camp and began knocking down lodges in search of hostiles who might have remained behind. Amid the chaos of the destruction of the camp, the soldiers made a shocking discovery. Hidden under buffalo robes, in separate lodges, were two little girls, Julia and Addie German. Too weak to stand, the girls were carried by soldiers, using their rifles as seats, to one of the wagons. When Baldwin learned that the soldiers had found the two girls in the camp, he hurried to them. He wrote in his diary, "Poor little things, they were nearly starved to death and naked, and could hardly talk. They were turned over to me by men of D Co. 5th Inft. and I had them turned over to Dr. Powell, who cared for them in the best manner he could. It was a pitiable sight."69 The rest of the fight near McClellan Creek was anticlimactic to the rescue of Julia and Addie German. The Cheyenne twice attempted to drive off the soldiers, but in vain. Baldwin sent Lieutenant Overton's troopers on a charge which dispersed the Indians again, but the cavalry mounts, used up even before the fight began, could not finish the assignment. Then Baldwin led his foot soldiers against the Indians who refused to stop fighting. He sent a few shells into those gathered near a lake north of the camp and dispersed them again. Once again the infantry charged, driving the Indians north of the lake. By the end of the chase, the troops had kept up a running fight for about twelve miles. Baldwin wished he had a few fresh horses for his cavalrymen, but he did not, and he blamed the Supply Department for this. He wrote in his diary, "It would be but a short run to go right into their [the Indians'] families, for they can be plainly seen not more than 2V2 miles distant, and my success would be most complete, but the cursed crime of neglect to furnish this expedition with grain shows itself. My horses are not even fit to be ridden at all."70 Soon Miles's cavalry, led by Major Compton, arrived on the scene and took up the chase in Baldwin's place. The lieutenant returned to camp, where he found Miles and his adjutant, George Baird, giving their attentions to Julia and Addie German. Baldwin's men dragged themselves back into the Indian camp and, surrounding the girls and the three officers, spontaneously burst into a cheer for their battalion commander.

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As darkness passed over the camp, the men prepared to spend the night on the battlefield. Before he rested, Frank took time to write to Allie: / am glad and more than happy to be able to inform you that this morning at 8 o'clock I discovered a band of 600 Indians 200 of them warriors whom I have attacked and after a hard fight lasting I^A hours whipped and completely routed them, capturing large numbers of ponies and any quantities of robes, etc.— and better than all, recaptured two little white girls who they had taken during their raiding in Kansas the past summer. . . . After the fight was over, the men gave their hearty cheers for your proud and very much gratified husband. Genl. Miles came up tonight and is well pleased with my victory. Says it is the most complete yet won during the war. . . . Are you proud of me now?71 Among the camp followers with Miles was a reporter of the New York Herald whom Captain Lyman introduced to Baldwin. The reporter shook Baldwin's hand and said that he was glad to meet a man of whom he had heard so much of late. Baldwin glanced about him while the reporter spoke and saw his fellow officers looking at him with pleasure and envy.72 On Monday, November 9, Baldwin's battalion proceeded to the North Fork of the Red River, where Major Price had made camp with elements of his Eighth Cavalry. After asking a few questions, Baldwin learned that Price had been near the site of yesterday's fight, even within the sound of the battle, but had inexplicably turned his back to the gunfire and gone into camp. Baldwin angrily wrote in his diary that night, "If he had moved up [we] could have annihilated that band of Indians."73 When Miles learned what happened, he put Price under arrest and ordered him to proceed to Camp Supply and await the preferment of formal charges. For Baldwin the celebrations of victory continued twenty-four hours after the battle. Several companies of Davidson's Tenth Cavalry camped with Baldwin's and Price's soldiers, and a Lieutenant Kelly of the Tenth visited Baldwin's tent with a quart of whiskey, the first he had had for a month. After the victory at McClellan Creek, most of the fighting in the Red River War ended. On November 16 the first of the winter's "north-

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ers" visited the Panhandle. The hostiles had lost thousands of buffalo hide lodges in their battles with Miles, Mackenzie, and Baldwin, and additional thousands of ponies had been captured or slaughtered. The army had destroyed a huge portion of the national wealth of its enemies on the South Plains. The hostiles had two choices: they could surrender and return to their reservations, or they and their families could starve or freeze to death during the winter. In late November, John Pope sent to the front a delegation consisting of members of Sheridan's staff and a few of his own aides. General George Forsyth, hero of the Battle of Beecher's Island in 1868, led the party which had orders to inspect the troops and to select a site for a permanent post in the heart of the battle zone. Colonel Miles chose Baldwin to escort the delegation to search for a spot for the proposed fort. From the first of December to the sixth, the party tramped from the North Fork of McClellan Creek to Sweetwater Creek, examining the terrain. The delegation returned east and recommended that a new post be built at the forks of McClellan Creek. Later the post was moved to a new site on Sweetwater Creek and named Fort Elliott, after Major Joel Elliott, who was killed in Custer's Battle of the Washita in 1868. Previously hostile Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche reported to their agencies by the hundreds. All the army units except Miles's, therefore, went to their posts in December to spend the winter. Most of the men in Miles's command also retired to their posts, but the colonel and some of his officers, Baldwin among them, refused to leave the field while the two oldest surviving German girls remained captives. General Pope, however, restricted Miles to making scouts only, refusing to let the colonel conduct major thrusts against the Indians, whom the general believed would continue to return to their agencies if only left alone. Miles, however, found a way to circumvent his orders. At the end of December, he concentrated his remaining forces at Adobe Walls and planned a final scout, repeating his November march but extending his route down the Red River, past the site of his August fight, then leaving the Red and pushing east to Fort Sill in the Indian Territory. Frank Baldwin spent the Christmas season preparing for the scout, but by the twenty-seventh of December, the long hours and the bitter weather caused Frank to become ill with a "billious [sic] attack."74 Miles began his scout with his foremost lieutenant on his back in an army ambulance, suffering from chills, fever, and an upset stomach that lingered until the first of the new year. In addition to his illness,

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Baldwin suffered along with the rest of the column from blizzards and subzero temperatures. Finally, on January 2, the lieutenant could lead a few scouts along the flanks of the main column. On one of them, Baldwin's detachment visited the site of Mackenzie's September battle. Irreverently, he wrote in his diary that night, "Saw where Gen. McKinsie [sic] killed his ponies."75 During the final scout, the soldiers did not battle Indians; they contended with the elements instead. Baldwin filled his diary with entries telling of cold, snow, poor water under frozen ponds, weakened horses and mules, and frostbitten toes. Nelson Miles mostly remembered his men as they passed the time while trekking across the frozen ground by singing "Marching through Georgia."76 Finally, on January 16, after a march of more than five hundred miles, the troops arrived at Fort Sill, where both Miles and Baldwin realized that they would fail to keep their promise to stay in the field until they recaptured the older German girls. The colonel had received a photograph of the two youngest sisters in the mail from his wife; they were now bright and plump after two months' care from Mary Miles. He jotted a note on the back of the picture: "To the Missis Germaine [sic];—Your little sisters are well and in the hands of friends. Do not be discouraged. Every effort is being made for your welfare."77 Miles gave the note to an Indian runner whom he ordered to find the camp of the chief who held the girls and to warn the hostiles of dire consequences if they did not surrender themselves and the girls. The runner completed his mission and slipped the message to Catherine and Sophia. Shortly, Stone Calf, a peace chief of the Cheyenne who had gained possession of the German girls and protected them in the last weeks of captivity, brought them into the reservation and turned them over to the agent who then learned of the ordeal the young women had endured at the hands of Medicine Water's warriors. The agent lined up hundreds of Cheyenne, and the two girls picked out as many of their captors as they could. These and the chiefs and ring leaders of the hostile bands were shipped to prison in Florida. Baldwin performed his final official acts as chief of scouts in the towns where his assignment began. In Dodge City, on February 16, the lieutenant made a farewell speech to his civilian scouts: Gentlemen—In parting with you I desire to express my heartfelt thanks for the cordial and uniform support you have given me throughout this entire campaign. You have, by your actions in the various encounters with the enemy, given fresh illustra-

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tion of those qualities of courage and endurance that are peculiar characteristics of the frontiersman. The recollection of your heroic conduct under circumstances the most trying—always thwarting the well-laid plans of your savage adversary, although outnumbered ten to one—your long, perilous rides through a country infested by hostile Indians who knew no mercy and gave no quarter, will ever be a source of pleasurable meditation to me. Again thanking you for this manifestation of sympathy and regard, I will bid you all an affectionate good-bye.78 From Dodge City, Baldwin rode the railroads to Coffeyville, where he paid and thanked the Delaware scouts for their services. By the month of March, Frank Baldwin was back at Newport Barracks. This time, however, his stay was not permanent; he had orders to clear up unfinished paperwork and report to Fort Leavenworth to serve as an aide to Nelson Miles. Miles had nominated him for a second Medal of Honor, this one for his rescue of the German girls. (Twenty years later, when the logjam of honors broke, and heroes from the Civil War and the Indian wars gathered up their prizes, Baldwin got his second medal.) Then in April, Baldwin received a message from John Pope's adjutant general informing him that Miles had recommended that the lieutenant receive the brevets of captain for his ride and major for his fight against Gray Beard's band.79 The old Frank Baldwin, the obscure recruitment officer, had disappeared, replaced by a new man, a nationally known Indian fighter. Baldwin's military idealism reawakened from its semidormant, pre-Red River War state and found new frontiers on which to exert itself.

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The Montana War ON JUNE 25, 1876, Frank Baldwin rode into Camp Supply, Indian Territory, at the head of E Company, Fifth Infantry. For the past two months, the outfit had escorted a party of surveyors to examine the region near Fort Elliott in the Texas Panhandle, including the headwaters of the Red River and the upper regions of Palo Duro Canyon. During the assignment Baldwin got to see two of his civilian scouts again—Billy Dixon and Lem Wilson—and to revisit the scenes of his triumphs of 1874. He loved the Palo Duro Canyon and was getting to see it under more leisurely circumstances than during his first visit. He had no affection for the Llano Estacado. The topography of the Staked Plains was monotonous, and its plant life consisted mainly of buffalo grass. The buffalo, however, had all but disappeared from the region. Frank wrote Allie, "I don't think we have run across more than 20 buffalo. They are becoming almost entirely extinct and it will be but a short time when to see a buffalo will be a curiosity."1 Allie and Nita had gone to Michigan because of the death of Aunt Rebecca Blackwood. Aunt Becky had raised her nieces through adolescence, and Allie had a difficult time in enduring the loss of the old woman. To make matters worse, Becky Blackwood had left only a verbal will, and her husband, Uncle Robert, experiencing financial difficulties, was slow to carry out the promises made by his dying wife. Baldwin rode out of the Texas wilderness to Camp Supply, eager to return to Fort Leavenworth, where he could send for his wife and daughter; Allie would be just as happy to leave Michigan. In his diary on the evening of Sunday, June 25, Baldwin jotted, "No news of note!"2 A few hours before he wrote, however, George Armstrong Custer made his Last Stand in Montana Territory on the bluffs above the Little Bighorn River. The next Tuesday morning, Alfred

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Terry and John Gibbon marched into the Valley of the Little Bighorn, discovering the carnage on Custer Hill and making contact with the remnants of the Seventh Cavalry. The first reports to white America of the disaster came out of the Montana settlements one week later, on July 4, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation. Then on Wednesday, the fifth, the steamer Far West reached Bismarck and Fort Lincoln, carrying over fifty wounded troopers from Marcus Reno's battalion and bearing the responsibility of confirming the news to the waiting wives of the deceased members of Custer's regiment. Baldwin spent June 26 and 27 traveling by ambulance from Camp Supply to Fort Dodge, ignorant of events in Montana Territory. Late in the day of June 27, however, he and his group reached Fort Dodge and turned in all government property as they prepared for a late night train ride to Fort Leavenworth. The post at Dodge buzzed with unconfirmed reports from Montana. While he traveled east by rail that night, Frank entered the following in his diary: "We reached Ft. Dodge this P.M. . . . Vague rumors are circulating of grave disaster to our troops on the Yellowstone River where Genls. Terry and Crook are operating against the Confederated Tribes of Indians of the North. Of course excitement is great and am anxious and am sure that the 5th Infy. will be sent to that country if reinforcements are called for and I would not mind going."3 At noon on Wednesday, the twenty-eighth, Frank arrived at Fort Leavenworth, expecting to hear confirmation of the rumors, but, of course, this would not arrive until after July 5. Even so, Colonel Nelson Miles, who had also heard the rumors, was preparing his regiment to move in case orders arrived. For more than a month, Alfred Terry had awaited reinforcements on the banks of the Yellowstone, barely dispatching a single scout to learn where the hostiles who had defeated Custer had gone, but believing they had moved their camp to the Bighorn Mountains. Likewise, George Crook had spent weeks in his camp at Goose Creek in Wyoming, believing that the hostiles occupied his front and refusing to move without his own reinforcements. In fact, by the first week in August, the main body of warriors had already slipped between Terry's thousands and Crook's thousands and camped along the lower reaches of the Powder River, 70 miles east of Terry and 150 miles northeast of Crook.

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Shortly after confirmation of disaster in the Yellowstone country reached the East, Nelson Miles and the Fifth Infantry received orders to join Terry's command. At 3:30 P.M. on Wednesday, July 12, they were at the Leavenworth station, boarding railroad cars to the tune of "The Girl I Left Behind Me," played by the regimental band, a unit slated to remain at the post until the entire outfit's future became clear. Baldwin, now a battalion adjutant to Miles, left his wife and child at the station and traveled with the regiment to Yankton, Dakota Territory, where the itinerary called for the unit to board the steamer E. H. Durfee for the journey up the Missouri River, past the Brule Agency and Forts Pierre, Lincoln, and Buford. At Fort Buford the boat would enter the Yellowstone River and churn up to Fort Beans, the unofficial name given by the troops to the earthen fortification established by Terry on the north bank of the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Rosebud. The trip to the front was an emotional one for Baldwin. On Wednesday evening, as the coach rocked along the northbound tracks, Baldwin wrote in his diary, "I dread to leave my family . . . [but] A sense of duty makes me spurn the thought of holding back."4 The train passed through Sioux City and headed for Yankton, pulling into the Missouri River town at 2:00 A.M. on the following Friday. In spite of the regiment's quick mobilization, the men of the Fifth had to spend the rainy morning hours waiting on the crowded train for the steamer Durfee, which had not yet arrived at the landing. All of Saturday and most of Sunday morning, the soldiers sat in railroad cars, taking exercise by turns, waiting for the arrival of the Durfee, which paddled south from Bismarck for a rendezvous with Miles's force. Baldwin and Miles steamed over the delay, the lieutenant writing in his diary that the regiment could just as easily have gone by rail to Bismarck and from there north by boat, or even by rail to Cheyenne and then march through Indian country to Terry. He blamed those "Don't care a damn heads in Chicago," division headquarters, for the delay.5 Finally, at dawn on Monday, the seventeenth, the Durfee, having arrived only shortly before, puffed northward from the landing at Yankton, bearing four hundred of the Fifth Infantry and their equipment. At Brule Agency, Miles and Baldwin learned that two-thirds of the male Indians had left the reservation, probably volunteers in the army of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Baldwin spoke with a man who had recently arrived at the agency from Fort Pierre and learned that

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traders on the reservations had sold over ten tons of ammunition to the Indians within the past six months and that the Indian Department itself had furnished the Indians with large quantities of arms and ammunition for hunting game, but which were now being used against the troops in Montana. Baldwin could not help but blame the government which he considered corrupt, run by "miserable leaches," and he wondered, "How much longer will this great government withstand and bear up under such crime and corruption?" He believed that President Grant was partially responsible for the situation; making traders, agents, and Indian Department bureaucrats of his favorites and retaining them though their guilt was, to Baldwin, "so glaring that the honest people with shame are obliged to succumb to being robbed each day and year."6 The Durfee left Brule Agency in the afternoon on Wednesday, the nineteenth, passing Fort Pierre on the twentieth. On Sunday, the twenty-third, about 8:00 A.M., the steamer stopped at Fort Lincoln, Custer's post and home of the widows of the Seventh Cavalry. Baldwin went to officers' row, where he visited Mrs. George Yates, wife of one of Custer's dead, and sent his card to Elisabeth Custer's residence. He also saw Mrs. Calhoun, wife of Lieutenant James Calhoun, sister of George, Tom, and Boston Custer, aunt of Autie Reed, all of whom fell with her husband at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The irony of seeing Maggie Calhoun, wife of the man who may have been preferred before him by the Seventh in 1870, weighed heavily on Baldwin, for he wrote in his diary that night, "It is a sad sight to see the widows of these brave men. Am quite sick."7 The steamer left Fort Lincoln on the twenty-fourth and spent four days paddling toward Fort Buford at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Near Buford word arrived that a band of Sioux had recently crossed to the north side of the Missouri River. Miles mobilized Baldwin and a detachment to investigate the report; unfortunately for the colonel and his lieutenant, the Sioux turned out to be friendly Yanktonai Sioux who ranged along the Missouri River between Fort Buford and their agency at Fort Peck, farther upstream on the Missouri.8 After spending the night at Fort Buford, the Durfee entered the Yellowstone, steaming upstream for six days. The captain of the Durfee tied his boat to the shore every evening, giving Miles an opportunity to drill the troops in skirmishing and scouting and to conduct officers' classes. When the command was not drilling, he had it exercising.

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On Wednesday, August 2, the Durfee reached Fort Beans on the north bank of the Yellowstone opposite the mouth of Rosebud Creek. Miles, Baldwin, and Lieutenant Hathaway disembarked and visited Terry's headquarters to get their initial orders for the campaign against the Sioux. Terry disappointed them, however, when he ordered the Fifth to disembark on the north side of the Yellowstone instead of the south, thus ensuring several days' delay once campaigning began. Terry expressed his fear for the regiment's safety on the south side of the river, prompting Baldwin to write in his diary that Terry's concern was a "most absurd thing," and then he added, "I find they [the officers on Terry's staff at Fort Beans] are all stampeded and they will keep us together in this miserable sand bank until everybody becomes disgusted. I was very much disappointed in Genl. Terry. I rather expected to find a man full of vim and life, but instead I find a quiet, farmer style man, apparently a man who enjoys his ease and very cautious, so much so that I don't believe we will find any Indians."9 The days passed slowly, making the men of the Fifth restless. The countryside failed to impress the soldiers, and when a dust storm arose on Saturday, August 5, they hated it all the more. Frank described the storm to Allie: "About 4:00 P.M. the wind came up and in a very short time increased so much that it became a regular hurricane and as this is one of the dustiest countries I ever saw, you can imagine how disagreeable and unpleasant it was for us in camp this morning. There was an inch of dust all over everything in my tent and I was really so covered with dirt that I took a brush and swept it off my face before using water."10 Later the same day, Baldwin learned that Terry had ordered the Fifth Infantry across the Yellowstone in preparation for a move against the Indians. The following morning Frank wrote to his wife, "Genl. Terry has at last gotten over and we will probably leave when his Royal Highness has a good [mind to], but this infernal delay is demoralizing to both officers and men and there is not the slightest reason or cause for it."11 Then he wrote, "If they will let us [alone], we will walk through all the Indians in the country. . . . I wish they would let Genl. Miles have the Seventh Cav. and our Regt. and send us out. I will bet that he would whoop things up."12 Baldwin's enthusiasm notwithstanding, plenty of evidence suggested that the Sioux and northern Cheyenne would not be conquered easily and that perhaps the Seventh Cavalry would have difficulty walking through all the Indians in the country. On Monday, August 6,

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Baldwin spent an evening with a few officers of Custer's outfit. Marcus Reno recited once more his perception of events on the Little Bighorn, and as the major spoke, Baldwin may have noticed the contempt Captain Thomas French and Lieutenant Thomas Weir had for their major. The two men hid their disgust for Reno as well as they could and drank immense quantities of whiskey. Frank wrote to Alhe after his evening with his friends from the Seventh: "Col Weir is very much broken from the use of liquor and it will not be strange if he soon goes under. Captain French is also in a very bad fix and unless he soon stops drinking he will go under also."13 (French left the army in 1880 and died two years later; Weir succumbed in December 1876.) Orders arrived detailing the march of the expedition up the Rosebud. Terry designated the infantry a brigade of two columns to be led by John Gibbon: one column of five hundred troops, made up of the Fifth and Sixth Infantries, led by Miles; the other, consisting of companies of the Seventh, Seventeenth, and Twenty-second infantry regiments, under Lieutenant Colonel Elwell Otis. The Second and Seventh cavalries formed a second brigade. The expedition possessed a huge train of over two hundred supply wagons. Frank commented to Allie, "We have organization enough for an army of 20,000 men the way it is now. We have a large head, a small body, and an immense tail in the shape of wagon trains. I don't think there is any use of worrying about our getting into a fight with the Indians, for I don't believe we will see an Indian during the 35 days we are expected to be out."14 The expedition had another reason for missing afightwith the Sioux: the Indians were already one hundred miles east of the Rosebud by now, and Terry's command moved away from them up Rosebud Creek toward the Bighorn Mountains, where the last communications from Crook indicated they had gone. The only excitement for the soldiers of Terry's expedition came on Thursday, August 10, when the Crow scouts rode in from their advance positions screaming warnings that a huge band of Indians was moving down the Rosebud directly at the command. Terry set out the cavalry brigade in skirmish lines only to learn that the Crows had been mistaken. They had actually seen the two thousand men of Crook's command marching down the Rosebud. Baldwin described them as "stripped for the march having nothing but what they wear on their backs."15 Crook bore news that the Indians had abandoned the southern region and suspected that they had slipped to the east between the two commands. Now Nelson Miles lost all hope that the expedition would succeed. Wanting an independent command, Miles played on Terry's

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fears that the Indians might ford the Yellowstone and break into the wilderness between the Missouri and the Yellowstone or retreat to the safety of the Canadian plains, out of reach of United States troops. The colonel, therefore, suggested that the Fifth return to the mouth of the Rosebud, patrol the Yellowstone, scouting from the decks of the steamers that had been contracted as supply boats by the army, and establish temporary observation posts. Terry agreed to the proposal, and within a few hours of forced marching, most of the Fifth Infantry reoccupied Fort Beans. Miles, Baldwin, a handful of soldiers, and a few scouts then examined the banks of the Yellowstone from the deck of a steamboat, looking for signs of the Sioux. Foremost among Miles's civilian scouts serving on this reconnaissance was Buffalo Bill Cody, who had come north with George Crook's column. Throughout August, Alfred Terry marched northeast, never seeing a hostile Indian. On Tuesday, September 5, he pronounced his expedition's conclusion and ordered the various elements of his command to their bases. Captain Simon Snyder of Miles's Fifth Infantry was with Terry that day and recorded in his diary, "In the evening a large party of officers gathered at Genl. Terries [sic] Hdqtrs, and after several hours spent in singing and talk bade each other good bye. The Sioux expedition is 'busted/"16 George Crook led his troops on a starvation march—beginning the journey with only a few days' provisions for about two thousand men. Unlike Terry, Crook went in the direction the Indians had gone, pressing east to the headwaters of the Heart River in Dakota Territory and wheeling south toward the Black Hills. Crook's lack of supplies hindered him, and before the journey ended, his troops were eating mule and horse meat. After marching hundreds of miles, Crook's expedition enjoyed a small victory over American Horse's band of Sioux at Slim Buttes. The Indians themselves saved Crook's starving troops from disaster, for after the fight, the white soldiers found enough buffalo meat in the lodges of the defeated Sioux to satisfy them until they reached the Black Hills mining communities. By Wednesday, September 13, Crook's expedition was as busted as Terry's. Meanwhile, Miles steamed up and down the Yellowstone setting up armed camps at likely fording places and looking for signs of Indians escaping north of the river. On Sunday, August 27, the command learned that it would remain on the Yellowstone all winter. Two additional companies of the Fifth soon arrived from Leavenworth along

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with a boatload of building materials for a cantonment to be established on the Yellowstone at the mouth of the Tongue River. Miles refused to spend a winter on the frontier without the entertainment of his regimental band, so he ordered Baldwin to go to Fort Leavenworth and return to Montana with the musicians. Baldwin and three of his men left the regimental headquarters at Tongue River on Thursday, August 31, at 2:00 A.M. in a small boat. The craft drifted downstream toward the Missouri River and Fort Buford, but not without difficulty. Passing close to the south bank, the lieutenant and his men several times endured attacks by parties of Indians who shot at them from atop the bluffs. Once the hostiles rolled boulders down from the heights in hopes of smashing the boat and drowning the four men.17 After twenty-two hours, the four men reached Fort Buford. Baldwin got passage down the Missouri to Bismarck and rode the train to St. Paul. From there he traveled to Fort Leavenworth and was reunited with his family. The reunion with Allie and Nita proved to be as busted as Terry's expedition. Little Nita suffered from a sore throat, part of a diphtheria epidemic that struck the Kansas post. By the time Frank reached Leavenworth, many adults and almost all the children at the post had the disease—the most ill being little Grace Forbes and Bertie Hathaway.18 Baldwin had to keep his distance from his wife and daughter and spend his days arranging for the band's departure for the new cantonment. Even as the lieutenant left Kansas, Allie and Nita went into a period of quarantine that lasted until the end of October. During her quarantine, Allie worried about her husband's safety at the front, her daughter's health at home, her usual lack of funds, and her fate next spring, for then she would have to move to the new cantonment in Montana. While Frank visited Leavenworth, Allie requested permission to sing at a benefit that Mrs. George Baird was planning on behalf of the German girls. Frank, as he had a few years before, refused to grant permission for a public display of his wife's talents. Instead, he lectured Allie about the proper role of a wife: "Be an ornament to . . . society, which you are fully competent and able to be, although you may not have all the finery that a few others may have, remember that true greatness lays in an honest, true, and upright heart, and feel, my darling, that you can by your interests in me and my welfare do a great

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deal to aid me. . . . You know how much depends on a wife. I believe most fully she can and will cheer her husband in hours of darkness when his prospects are gloomy and improsperous."19 Resisting Frank's efforts to enshrine her, Allie wrote: / do try so hard to get along better than I do and to make the best of what I have and succeed so wretchedly and feel so discontented all the time. . . . My miserable ambitions, proud nature and disposition is the cause of my unhappiness principally, but not all. I would be someone if I had a chance, but with neither money, influence, or beauty, which is everything in a woman, what hope have I but of dragging along in the rut as long as I live. . . . [Everyone names] "Baldwin" as the most experienced and the best one in the Regt. That's all very good to hear and it gratifies me more than I can tell you, but what chance have I? Who ever hears of me? No one. [And when something] offers a small chance to appear in a good light, you object.20 Meanwhile, life at Fort Leavenworth was dismal. Allie and Nita waited impatiently for the period of quarantine to pass, knowing that two of Nita's friends, Bertie Hathaway and Grace Forbes, lay in their graves, victims of diphtheria.21