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The Battle of Antietam
The Battle of Fredericksburg
The Battle of Chancellorsville
Overland Campaign Wilderness
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In 1874-1875, he was the field commander in the Red River War where his forces emerged victorious over the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho and then shifted his attention north after Custer’s disastrous defeat at the Little Bighorn in the Great Sioux War of 1876.
He chased the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne forcing them to surrender or flee across the northern border into Canada. This completed, Miles then battled the
Nez Perce and accepted the surrender
of their famous leader Chief Joseph on October 5, 1877. In 1886, he was called upon to replaced General George Crook and hunt down the famous Apache
leader Geronimo who had escaped
from Crook’s grasp. Under Miles’s orders, American forces under Captain Henry Lawton and Lieutenant Charles Gatewood chased Geronimo for more than 3,000 miles through brutal terrain and finally compelled his surrender. He officially surrendered to Miles on September
4, 1886. The Bowie knife from the collection appears to have been made to commemorate this victory.
In 1890, the general returned to the Northern Plains. By that point, Miles had nearly three decades of military service under his belt and was promoted to major general. He was again leading troops against the Lakota. This time he was faced not with a large uprising by a powerful
foe but by a desperate people struggling for their survival after being confined to reservations. They had found new hope in a spiritual movement spreading among
the native peoples of the West, and the situation was tense and primed for tragedy. Miles himself wrote of the “cause of Indian dissatisfaction” and noted that the Lakota
were suffering on the reservations and
left in impoverished conditions because the government had not lived up to its promises. “That they had suffered for
want of food, and the evidence of this is beyond question and sufficient to satisfy any unprejudiced intelligent mind,” wrote Miles to the Secretary of War in 1891. The situation understandably led even those who had been willing to work with the U.S. government to be discontent and even hostile.
The Ghost Dance originated from Wovoka of the Paiute who said Jesus would come back and bring about salvation and that native peoples should dance and live in peace. Some believed that the whites would be covered in a landslide and/or swept away by a great flood and that wild game and their ancestors would return
to the land. The Lakota also adopted “ghost shirts” which they believed would be bulletproof in the event of conflict with the U.S. Army. Many white residents and government officials were alarmed by the new movement and feared the dances were the prelude to a war. Miles repositioned his troops to maintain the peace, but this instead caused alarm.
When Indian police were sent to arrest Sitting Bull, his followers resisted leading
to the death of the famous chief as well
as several others further escalating the situation. Around 200 of his followers fled to join the band under Chief Spotted Elk. Many of the combined party then moved on towards the Pine Ridge Reservation to seek protection under Chief Red Cloud. The 7th Cavalry moved to intercept and disarm them under Miles’s orders.