By the time Scott received his orders to join the remnants of Custer’s regiment at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Dakota Territory, the initial frenzy of rumor, purported eyewitness accounts, and attributions of blame that followed the rout on the Little Bighorn had mostly subsided—only to be stirred up again later that year by the publication of Frederick Whittacker’s provocative book The Complete Life of George A. Custer.47
Scott’s journey to take up his commission in Dakota Territory traced in reverse the route the news of the disaster had traveled. It also traversed several earlier frontiers of the expanding empire, each of which, by 1876, had been successively incorporated into the republic of progress and Anglo-American civilization celebrated by the ongoing exposition in the City of Brotherly Love he had left behind.
Scott traveled by rail, taking with him a saber, two shotguns and a Henry rifle, a trunk, a roll of bedding, and two hunting dogs—a pointer and a setter given to him by friends. His first stop on his journey west was Pittsburgh where he visited his older brother Charles and his new wife. A century earlier, Pittsburgh had stood in the same relation to the Indian Country of the Ohio valley as Bismarck and Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Missouri to which he was bound now occupied in relation to the disputed Indian Country of the plains. During the period of rivalry between the French and British empires over control of territory and influence with the Indians of the Great Lakes and interior of the continent, the strategic location on the forks of the Allegheny and Monongahela, which later gave rise to Pittsburgh, had been the site of a contested outpost. A succession of forts at “the forks” changed hands four times within two decades of intense frontier imperial rivalries and shifting alliances with native groups. The object of several unsuccessful attempts by British forces to capture it during the French and Indian War—twice involving a young George Washington—Fort Duquesne was finally blown up by its erstwhile defenders as they fled in the face of an imminent attack by British colonial forces in November of 1758.
European struggles over strategic frontier locations such as Fort Duquesne/ Fort Pitt unfolded in the context of complex political, economic, and cultural relations with the Indians of the interior of the continent. The French referred to the vast lands beyond the skeletal outposts of European settlement in the Great Lakes region as the Pays d’en Haut. What developed in these areas of contested sovereignty was a complex and dynamic relationship among civilizations that Richard White has productively analyzed as a “Middle Ground” between European and Native peoples, a shifting zone in which an array of nations, tribes, villages, and empires not only encountered one another, but became “cocreators of a world in the making.”48 Contested sovereignty was the sine qua non of the Middle Ground, which was maintained by both diplomacy and accommodation among a shifting set of factional alliances.
But while the Old World empires adapted to the evolving give-and-take required by the Middle Ground, the colonists themselves chafed at being restricted to the eastern side of the crest of the Appalachian mountains, the 1763 “Line of Proclamation,” decreed by a victorious Britain at the end of the war with her longtime rival France. Divergence over Indian policy for the Ohio valley between colonial officials and the backcountry settlers of western Pennsylvania and Virginia contributed significantly to the ruptures that became more pronounced following the French and Indian War. One expression of indigenous attempts to drive settlers out of the Ohio valley and to reclaim the earlier terms of relations with the European powers was the widespread Indian war known as Pontiac’s Rebellion, in which the Ottawa chief united Shawnee, Delaware, and Ojibwe tribes in attacking British installations such as Fort Pitt.
Independence from Britain worsened Indian-white relations since no centralized authority remained to continue the Crown’s interest in preserving its commitments to the Indians of the Ohio valley. On the contrary, removal of the royal interest in policing the volatile line between Euro-American settlement and Indian Country launched an expansion into the Ohio valley of settlers, squatters, land speculators, and veterans of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution who had been promised land in the West. The response of the Native nations to this betrayal of promises made by the former imperial powers was a determined defense of their sovereignty claims.
Scott’s next stop on his journey west was Chicago, the largest metropolis in the continent’s interior, and gateway to the Great West beyond.49 Chicago was also the command center for the headquarters of the Department of the Missouri, commanded by Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan. From here, since the previous winter, Sheridan had plotted “total war” against the hunting bands who resisted the government’s insistence that they “come in” to the Indian agencies and submit to military authority on the reservations.50
With a population that had recently surpassed 350,000, Chicago was a very different place from the small collection of huts around Fort Dearborn at the mouth of the Chicago River where Scott’s uncle David Hunter had been stationed with the Fifth Infantry in 1828. There, Uncle David had once bor rowed a Potawatomi Indian canoe to paddle across the Chicago River to bring back Jefferson Davis, who had been lost while on an expedition from Fort Winnebago to search for deserters. The canoe was built for one man, so to ferry Davis across, Hunter directed him to lie down on the bottom and then sat on him in order to keep the center of gravity low enough to avoid capsizing the canoe. Hunter and Davis also served together in the first regiment of Dragoons organized to police and intervene in settler-Indian relations in the trans-Mississippi West. They had remained friends until the outbreak of the Civil War.51
Besides the frontier experiences related by his uncle David Hunter, Chicago summoned up more personal memories from Scott’s own past; the city had been his family’s home from the age of six to eight, when his father had been a professor at the Theological Seminary of the Northwest (now McCormick Theological Seminary). It was from here that the young family accompanied him back to Princeton where he died in 1861.
From Chicago Scott continued on to St. Paul, the rough-hewn river capital of Minnesota, where he began to get “the feeling of the proximity of the frontier.” Here, he encountered “blanket” or unassimilated, Indians for the first time: “tall, straight Chippewa [Ojibwe] Indians, wrapped in their blue and scarlet [trade] blankets, striding about in a very dignified way.”52 Shortly before Scott’s arrival, the outlaw Jesse James and the Younger brothers had attempted to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, some forty miles to the south of the capital. Several of the gang had been killed after they shot the cashier and were attempting to flee out of town. The body of one of the dead gang members was exhibited in the window of a store on Third Street close to the hotel where Scott was staying, adding to his sense that he had arrived at civilization’s edge.
Like Pittsburgh, St. Paul had grown up under the aegis of a frontier fort established in Indian Country at the strategic confluence of two rivers. Scott’s Uncle David had preceded his protégé here, too, and the young man’s expectations of what he would find on the Mississippi were shaped in part by the stories he had heard about his uncle’s five years at the frontier post. Half a century earlier, David Hunter had likewise graduated from West Point and made the trek from his home in New Jersey to what was then the most remote and skeletal outpost of American authority in the Northwest, the newly constructed fort at the strategic confluence of the St. Peter (Minnesota) and Mississippi Rivers. Fort Snelling was built into a bluff overlooking the place where two conduits of the still-dominant fur trade connected a vast northern interior with downstream markets. There had been no railroad in 1822 to convey Uncle David to his first army post, nor any roads. It had taken him six months to reach Fort Snelling to take up his commission in the Fifth Infantry; the