Our analysis begins by revisiting some key events that have played a significant role in the national epic of westward expansion. Throughout these episodes in which American sovereignty claims were contested on the ground—from the northern Great Plains, to the Sierra Madre, to southern Luzon—a focus on the thoughts, actions, and reactions of three army officers, Scott, Pershing, and Bullard, allows us to trace continuities in the process of extending territorial and overseas empire. Contextualization of the lives and careers of these frontier soldiers, including an examination of their family, regional, and political affiliations also sheds light on the deep interconnections between overseas colonialism and the racial dimensions of political and social life at home—in peace and war.
Part I
Indian Country
I began then an intensive study of every phase of the Indian and his customs, particularly as to how he might best be approached and influenced, a knowledge that has stood me in good stead many times, has doubtless saved my life again and again, and has also been used to the national benefit by different Presidents of the United States, by secretaries of war and of the interior.
—Hugh Lenox Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier
Map 2. Great Plains and borderlands. During the last third of the nineteenth century, American state efforts to consolidate control over the trans-Mississippi West were met with resistance. The map shows the areas of conflict that defined Indian Country for the post-Civil War generation of U.S. army officers like John J. Pershing, Robert Lee Bullard, and Hugh Lenox Scott.
Chapter 1
Coming to Indian Country
When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, Captain Hugh Lenox Scott had just moved to Washington and was settling his family into a new life far from the western plains he had grown to love. After two decades in Indian Country, Scott had reluctantly decided that he should return east so that his children would have educational opportunities not available to them at Fort Sill, where Scott had been posted for the last nine years. From 1891 until its disbandment in 1897, Scott had commanded Troop L, an all-Indian unit of the Seventh Cavalry made up of Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache enlisted men. It was the last such Indian Scout troop to be mustered out of service. At Fort Sill, Scott continued the study of Indian life and customs he had begun on the northern plains in the 1870s. As he had throughout his career in the West, Scott had also used his time at Fort Sill to further his studies of Indian languages and to collect a wide range of artifacts along with folk stories and other ethnographic information. By the time he was assigned to Fort Sill in 1891, Scott was recognized as an expert in the Sign Language of the Plains, an intertribal language used for communication from Saskatchewan to Chihuahua. He had used it as a tool during his first year there for gaining information about the Ghost Dance, which was alarming white settlers and certain elements in the civilian Indian Service. Besides its military and diplomatic utility, Scott was deeply interested in the potential for gathering ethnographic information through the medium of sign language. Working with a Kiowa soldier named Iseeo, Scott used it to record linguistic information, such as myths, stories, and his informants’ accounts and explanations of the language itself.1
Just months before the USS Maine was blown apart in Havana’s harbor, Scott had obtained an appointment to the Bureau of Ethnology to work under the direction of John Wesley Powell. When the war came, he had just begun his research in the Library of Congress and Geological Survey for a book on the sign language of the Plains Indians. The war put an end to the book project. Scott abandoned his research to join the scrum of ambitious officers vying for command in the first foreign war to have come their way in more than a generation. He was never to return to the plains he loved so well. However, in the eyes of his army superiors, many of whom shared frontier experience, Scott’s work with Indian scouts, his experience dealing with several hundred Apache prisoners sent to Fort Sill after the surrender and exile of Geronimo, as well as his reputation for understanding so-called primitives, all suited him for duty on the new frontiers of empire broached by the war, in Cuba and the Philippines. Following colonial service in the Philippines and Cuba, Scott was appointed superintendent of West Point from 1906 to 1910. He also served as army chief of staff under Woodrow Wilson, an old family friend to whom Scott once sent, from Cuba, a set of Spanish stocks used for punishing slaves.2
Like Wilson, Scott was the son of a Presbyterian minister who also happened to share the president’s strong ties to Princeton University. Scott’s grandfather was Dr. Charles Hodge, a prominent theologian and long-time head of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, where he taught for over half a century. It was as a student at the seminary that Scott’s father, William McKendry Scott, had met and married Dr. Hodge’s eldest daughter, Mary. The second of their three sons, Hugh Lenox Scott was born in 1853 in Danville, Kentucky, where his father served as a Presbyterian pastor and English professor at Centre College until his early death from tuberculosis in 1861. As a widow, Mary Hodge Scott brought her three young sons back home to join the lively household of her father and stepmother in Princeton.
At any given time, Dr. Hodge’s gracious home near the Princeton campus provided a hospitable haven for friends and relatives, whether they were visiting or studying at Princeton. Some members of the extended family had rooms in the seminary or college, but took their meals at the house. Graduation and other ceremonial occasions brought throngs of students, alumni, and friends to the house to renew acquaintances and pay their respects to “the Presbyterian Pope,” as Scott’s grandfather was called—sometimes in admiration and sometimes in derision—for his unwavering defense of Calvinism.3
Young Hugh, who was known to his family as Len, had been named for his great-uncle, Dr. Hugh Lenox Scott, a physician and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Besides connections to Presbyterian Church circles, family ties such as these provided the young Scott with a number of advantageous connections to people of influence in government, academia, and the military, and generally equipped him with an entrée into good society that was to serve him well throughout his life. Len’s grandmother Sarah Bache was the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin. She was also a niece of Caspar Wistar, an anatomist and paleontologist who served for many years as president of the American Philosophical Society. His grandfather’s second wife came from one of New Jersey’s leading families, the Stocktons, and was a cousin of Commodore Robert F. Stockton. The Stockton family home, known since colonial times as Morven, was one of the area’s most distinguished old houses. When Lord Cornwallis’s troops occupied Princeton, the general took it as his headquarters.4
Most significant for Scott’s career, however, was the patronage of his step-grandmother’s brother, Major General David Hunter, a friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. It was at his grandmother’s instigation that Uncle David secured an appointment for Hugh Lenox Scott to West Point from President Grant.5
Uncle David accompanied Len Scott when he went up to West Point in the spring of 1871, introducing him to the superintendent and commandant of cadets as well as his many other acquaintances at the academy from which he himself had graduated a half-century earlier. Finally, he entrusted the young man to two sons of old army friends, one of whom