Besides the possibilities for professional advancement, Scott also relished the autonomy and scope for personal initiative that working with Indians in the army afforded a junior officer. He later compared being a commander of Indian Scouts in the frontier army to being an aviator in the Twenties and Thirties; “one could always be ahead of the command, away from the routine that was irksome, and sure to have a part in all the excitement,” he wrote.19
In his early days with the Seventh Cavalry, Scott chafed at any assignment that threatened to tie him down in camp or involved responsibility for the transportation of heavy equipment or supplies. As he saw it, he had not “undergone five years of toil at West Point to come out to the Plains to be a wagon soldier.” He had “come west to be a flying cavalryman … [not to] travel at a walk behind the column.”20
In the beginning, Scott applied himself to learning the language of the Lakota Sioux, on whose reservation Fort Lincoln was located. He reasoned that since the Lakota were the dominant group on the northern plains, their language would function as a kind of “court language,” like Latin or French. This assumption was reinforced by the fact that the Arikara scouts attached to the regiment all spoke it. He thus began to study the language under their tutelage. He quickly discovered that while the Lakota’s language did not function in this way and was of limited use to him in communicating with other groups, there did exist a lingua franca on the plains: sign language. Scott continued his study of sign language throughout his time on the plains. By the time of his assignment to the Bureau of Ethnology in 1897, he was acknowledged as the white man—in or out of the army—with the most knowledge and expertise in signing.21
On his first expedition away from the fort, Scott was given an assignment to form a battery out of some muzzle-loading guns and some cavalry horses that were no longer fit to ride. His task was to train the horses and men in his troop to move and handle the battery. Scott chafed at this onerous assignment and instead arranged with his friend Lieutenant Luther Hare to take command of the battery along with his own troop while Scott took every opportunity to travel with the Arikira scouts, who broke camp before daylight and rode out in advance of the soldiers, “covering the country far in front as carefully as pointer-dogs in search of quail.”22 Scouting also gave him the opportunity to hunt, which he loved. He attributed his commanders’ continued acquiescence in his absence from the column in part to their appreciation of the loads of prairie chicken, snipe, and ducks he brought back to camp. “The procurement of game made [the Colonel] more willing to let me go ahead with the scouts … and it soon became a matter of course for me to leave the battery with Hare, my superior, in command, and go off with the scouts before daylight every day.”23 He spent as much time as he could in the company of scouts, either riding with them and learning from observation how they operated or pursuing his study of language in their villages and scout camps.
In the spring of 1877, two battalions of the Seventh Cavalry were sent west to join the army’s renewed campaigns against the Sioux and Cheyenne in Yellowstone Country. Miles’s Fifth Infantry had been campaigning in this remote country all winter. Following the rout of the Seventh Cavalry that June, General Philip Sheridan had planned “total war” against the Sioux from his headquarters in Chicago. Colonel Miles, in particular, did not intend to “hibernate” for the winter by holing up in a fort or cantonment. Instead, he believed that “a winter campaign could be successfully made against those Northern Indians, even in that extreme cold climate.”24 With troops augmented by civilian “Custer Avengers” and the full support of a Congress and nation prepared to pay any price “to end Sioux troubles for all time,” Miles led the Fifth Infantry in pursuit of hunting bands into the winter hunting grounds of Montana’s forbidding terrain.25 Following the hostilities of the summer, the matter uppermost in the minds of tribes as they dispersed along rivers to the east of the battleground was hunting to secure food and buffalo hides for the winter.26 They viewed the return of soldiers to the region with alarm and some puzzlement. It was not the accustomed season for war. In October, Sitting Bull left a note in the path of a wagon train carrying supplies intended for Miles’s winter garrison on the Tongue River that read:
I want to know what you are doing traveling on this road. You scare all the buffalos away. I want to hunt in this place. I want you to turn back from here. If you don’t I will fight you again. I want you to leave what you have got here and turn back from here.
I am your friend,
Sitting Bull
I mean all the rations you have got and some powder. Wish you would write as soon as you can.27
About a week later, Colonel Miles with the entire Fifth Infantry overtook Sitting Bull near Cedar Creek, Montana, north of the Yellowstone River. Over the course of two days, Miles met in council with Sitting Bull and other Lakota leaders: Pretty Bear, Bull Eagle, Standing Bear, Gall, and White Bear. Bent on provisioning their people for the winter and alarmed by the incursion of soldiers into their hunting country, the chiefs sought a truce for the winter. Sitting Bull made clear to Miles that their objective in the territory was to hunt buffalo and trade for ammunition. He did not want rations or annuities, but rather to live free and hunt in the open country. In return he offered that their side would not fire on the soldiers if they were left to hunt unmolested. Miles later reported that the Hunkpapa chief had asked him “why the soldiers did not go to winter quarters.” Miles rejected what he termed “an old-fashioned peace for the winter.”28 He informed Sitting Bull and the other principal men who had met in council with him that this offer was not acceptable to the government. Nothing short of his surrender at an agency and submission of his people to U.S. authority could stave off a war through the winter. Miles later expressed his view that “it was amusement for them to raid and make war during summer, but when constant relentless war was made upon them in the severest of winter campaigns it became serious and most destructive.”29
Determined to follow the Indians wherever they went, Miles fitted his men out with improvised winter gear, including leggings and mittens as well as face masks cut from woolen blankets.30 As the winter and the relentless raiding of Indian camps by the soldiers wore on, additional warm clothing was fashioned out of some of the hundreds of buffalo robes that were looted from the sacked encampments of the Lakota. A raid on Sitting Bull’s camp led by Frank D. Baldwin near the Milk River in December captured several hundred buffalo robes, which were fashioned into pants, overcoats, and caps by Cheyenne women who had capitulated. These were worn by Miles’s troops as they launched a January offensive up the Tongue River, where the Lakotas had gone in pursuit of the buffalo. This was the winter they gave Miles the name “Man-with-the-bear-coat.” Since the soldiers had looted or destroyed their lodges, utensils, tons of dried meat, and many horses and mules, they were both in need of fresh sup plies and demoralized by the constant harrying presence of the soldiers.31
In November Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie had also dealt a devastating blow to the Cheyennes, raiding the village of Dull Knife (Morning Star) and Little Wolf, which consisted of about two hundred lodges in a canyon on the Red Fork of the Powder River. Thirty Cheyennes were killed in the raid. Those who survived were left with only what they could carry away. The soldiers burned the village and everything in it: meat, clothing, and all the tribe’s finery and art work. Seven hundred ponies were confiscated by the army. As the survivors fled north to seek refuge with Crazy Horse on the Tongue River, temperatures fell to thirty below zero. Eleven babies froze to death.32
Throughout the winter, the army’s campaigners pursued their quarry through the snow, across the frozen Missouri River. Facing starvation, killing cold, and the perpetual threat of the “long knives” of the U.S. Army wreaking havoc on their villages and threatening their families, many leaders made the decision to surrender to their agencies, where they were forced to give up their guns and thousands of horses. Red Horse explained the pressures that led him to surrender at the Cheyenne River Agency in February 1877. “I am tired of being always on the watch for troops. My desire is to get my family where they can sleep without being continually in the expectation of an attack.”33
By March only about fifteen lodges remained with Sitting Bull. Others had already crossed into Canada