General William T. Sherman and the Indian Wars

 

General William TecumsehSherman stands as one of the most polarizing figures in American military history. Celebrated for his ruthless “March to the Sea” during the Civil War, which helped break the Confederacy’s will to fight, Sherman turned his attention westward after 1865. As commanding general of the U.S. Army from 1869 to 1883, he directed the military campaigns that subdued the Plains Indian tribes and opened the American West to railroads, settlers, and mining interests. His application of total-war tactics—destroying an enemy’s resources and capacity to resist—proved as effective against Native Americans as it had against the South. By the time he retired, the once-dominant buffalo-hunting cultures of the Great Plains had been shattered, and thousands of Indigenous people were confined to reservations.

Born in 1820 in Ohio and named after the Shawnee leader Tecumseh—an ironic detail given his later career—Sherman graduated from West Point in 1840. He served in the Mexican-American War, left the army for civilian life, and rejoined at the outbreak of the Civil War. His friendship with Ulysses S. Grant propelled him to prominence. When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as commanding general, overseeing a vast territory between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. With fewer than 25,000 troops scattered across frontier posts, his primary mission was to protect the transcontinental railroad and wagon trails while facilitating white settlement.

Initially, Sherman supported diplomatic efforts. As a member of the Indian Peace Commission, he helped negotiate the Medicine Lodge Treaty (1867) and the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which established reservations for southern Plains tribes and the Sioux. He also arranged the return of Navajo people from the Bosque Redondo reservation to their homelands in New Mexico. Yet Sherman viewed treaties as temporary measures. When the Medicine Lodge agreements collapsed in 1868 and raids continued, he authorized his subordinate, Major General Philip Sheridan, to launch a winter campaign against the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa. The resulting Battle of the Washita River in November 1868 destroyed a Cheyenne village and set the tone for future operations. Sherman’s strategy was clear: strike when tribes were vulnerable, in winter, when food and mobility were limited.

Sherman’s private correspondence revealed a harsh worldview. After the 1866 Fetterman Massacre, in which 81 soldiers died in an ambush by Sioux warriors, he telegraphed Grant urging “vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” In 1867 he told Grant that the nation would not allow “a few thieving, ragged Indians” to halt railroad progress. He believed Native resistance obstructed civilization and that military force, not negotiation alone, would decide the West’s future. Yet he also criticized corrupt Indian agents and speculators who exploited reservation tribes.

The cornerstone of Sherman’s campaign was economic warfare. He recognized that the buffalo—source of food, clothing, shelter, and spiritual life for Plains Indians—was the foundation of their independence. Rather than ordering soldiers to slaughter herds directly, Sherman encouraged civilian hunters. In an 1868 letter to Sheridan, he suggested inviting “all the sportsmen of England and America” for a “Grand Buffalo hunt” to sweep the herds away. Professional hunters like William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and hide merchants responded enthusiastically. By 1873, vast stretches of the Plains were littered with rotting carcasses. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge described the scene: where “myriads of buffalo” had roamed the year before, now only “a dead, solitary, putrid desert” remained. Congress attempted to protect the herds in 1874, but Sherman helped convince President Grant to pocket-veto the bill. Within a decade, the buffalo were nearly extinct in the wild—fewer than 325 remained by the early 20th century. Without their primary food source, tribes faced starvation or surrender.

Sherman’s oversight extended to major conflicts of the 1870s. He reorganized frontier forts and supported operations during the Modoc War in California and Oregon, the Great Sioux War of 1876 (which included the Battle of the Little Bighorn), and the Nez Perce War. In 1871, after narrowly escaping the Warren Wagon Train raid by Kiowa and Comanche warriors in Texas, he insisted that captured chiefs Satanta and Big Tree be tried for murder in a civilian court—the first such trial of Native leaders in U.S. history. These campaigns, though often led by subordinates like George Custer, Ranald Mackenzie, and Nelson Miles, bore Sherman’s strategic imprint: relentless pursuit, destruction of villages and supplies, and winter attacks that exploited Native vulnerability.

By the late 1870s, the free-roaming warrior societies of the Plains had been broken. The once-mighty Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa were confined to reservations where they depended on government rations. Historian David D. Smits noted that, with their economic base destroyed, Indigenous people had “no choice but to accept a servile fate on a reservation.” Sioux leader Sitting Bull later reflected that “a cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell—a death-wind for my people.” Sherman retired on February 8, 1884, at the mandatory age of 64, having achieved the nation’s goal of securing the West for railroads and settlement.

Sherman’s legacy in the Indian Wars remains contentious. To many 19th-century Americans, he was a pragmatic hero who tamed a “savage” frontier and enabled national expansion. To Native Americans, his policies amounted to cultural destruction. He never uttered the infamous line “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”—that phrase is usually attributed to Sheridan—but his writings and actions reflected a willingness to use extreme measures when resistance persisted. His middle name, drawn from a Shawnee chief who once united tribes against American encroachment, underscored the irony of his career.

In the end, Sherman’s western campaigns completed the work begun in Georgia: the application of total war to achieve political ends. The railroads he protected crisscrossed the Plains, towns sprang up beside them, and the buffalo were gone. The Indian Wars under his command marked the closing chapter of armed Indigenous resistance on the continent and the triumph of industrial America over the nomadic cultures that had thrived there for centuries. Sherman died in 1891, remembered primarily for the Civil War, yet his quieter, more methodical conquest of the West reshaped the nation just as profoundly.

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