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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.
Arizona Legends and Lore
