In The Face of Battle, John Keegan notes that the combat phenomena of military violence referred to as a "battle" belongs to "finite moments in history, to the societies which raise the armies which fight them, to the economies and technologies which these societies sustain. Battle is a historical subject, whose nature and trend of development can only be understood down a long historical perspective." Battle accounts reported and studied in a manner separate from this same "long historical perspective" are more prone to chronicle rather than to interpret historical events. The battles fought for control of the American Great Plains, between the Sioux/Cheyenne Nations and the United States Army, are no different. The "nature and trend of development" in those battles also represented, and inexorably altered the cultures that produced them. In this study I intend to analyze the mutual evolution of the war-fighting methods for the US Army and American Plains Indians from 1866 to 1877. My goal and purpose is to provide a case study in mutual military acculturation and a develop a tactical model showing how both sides entered the conflict with one culturally reflective military system, and ended with another.

I will limit my analysis to the Great Plains Wars beginning with Chief Red Cloud's War in 1866, climaxing with the Little Bighorn Campaign of 1876, and culminating with the pursuit and surrender of most of the key war chiefs including Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse in May of 1877. Of all American Indian Wars, those of the late 19th Century for the American Great Plains are by far the most prevalent in historical accounts. This is attributable to an Industrial Age explosion of printed literature, an international fascination for the American "Wild West," and because of American cultural myths about the Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Great Sioux War of 1876. I am adding to that massive collection, not to increase the volume of information, but to fill a gap that is essential in comprehending the Military History of that era.

In the century since the Great Sioux War of 1876, accounts of warfare on the Great Plains have been continually misrepresented in military historical and popular accounts which label the Sioux and Cheyenne as "uncivilized" and "without a military system," and portray the US Army as an institution without autonomy or flexibility. Many accounts fall short of providing an accurate battlefield manifestation of the cultural clash between the Sioux and the US Army. Other accounts show an accurate comprehension for the tactical war-fighting of the period, but fail to give both belligerents credit for adapting, evolving, and improving their methods. For many historians of this era, the battlefield methods of the US Army and the Sioux are of one "cookie cutter" mold for the entire duration of the wars for the Great Plains. This is not only inaccurate, it leads to some very skewed conclusions about the methods, motives and consequences of these same wars. While some very popular and well received accounts portray both sides fighting their battles in methods they did not use, others only hint at the evolution that took place.

Army historian Robert E. Morris gives one of the more typical and simplistic assessments of Indian adaptation or war-fighting when he claimed: "[T]hey simply were not civilized enough to stay put in an artillery barrage, or charge up the slopes ... " and further asserted that the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne were "... an enemy who had shown no previous sense of organization, discipline, determination or psychological propensity for close combat with modern firearms." Quite the opposite was true. The Sioux and Cheyenne inherited very adaptive and responsive military traditions. Along with their religion and society, their tactical methods and practices of warfare continually changed as they fully exploited the use of horses, aggressively acquired more (and more lethal) firearms, and migrated westward onto the Great Plains. These warriors had developed a culturally unique military tradition and a mature military system that was almost nothing but "organization, discipline, determination and psychological propensity for close combat." By the Great Sioux war of 1876, they had also fully adapted "close combat with modern firearms" into their lethal repertoire of tactical methods.

This common misrepresentation is due in part to the absence of accurate tactical models reflecting the mutual acculturation of the Hostile North American Plains Indian's and their U. S. Army opponents. Consequently, the goal of this project is to develop a model of tactical acculturation. (For the purposes of this study, I will define tactical acculturation as changes in methods and motives of warfare resulting directly from an influential clash of diverse cultures.) Accurately applying a Tactical acculturation Model is essential to understanding the Indian wars on the Great Plains, American Western expansion, and hopefully helpful in understanding the nature of warfare in general.

Both the US Army and the North American Plains Indians significantly changed their purpose and methods of warfare between 1866 and 1877. The Army changed as a result of political and economic stimuli and the failure of previous strategies. The Sioux and Cheyenne changed because of the intensified threat and mode of white encroachment, increased technological availability, and deterioration of the essential staple of their culture and economy, the buffalo. My goal is to identify and analyze the battlefield methods that reflect these cultural changes in both the aboriginal-American and European-American ways of waging war.

Strategic, technological, and tactical explanations alone, however, do not suffice to explain the evolution in the conduct of battles that took place between 1862 and 1877. Again as Keegan describes the nature of a battle: "It is not something 'strategic,' nor 'tactical,' nor material, nor technical.... what battles have in common is human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them." Keegan's paradigm contends that battle is "...essentially a moral conflict. It requires, if it is to take place, a mutual and sustained act of will by two contending parties, and if it is to result in a decision, the moral collapse of one of them."

If Keegan is to be believed, then we must look at motives, morale and human behavior as well as technology and technique. It is then necessary, if one is to comprehend the nature of armed conflict between the Plains Indians and the US Army, to employ a combination of anthropological, archaeological, and ethnohistorical sources and methods, drawing on them to support, corroborate, or test each other. In the specific case of mutual acculturation during the wars for the Great Plains, not only were the tactical methods of the belligerents a direct result of cultural influences, but then also an explanation of many historical mysteries as these cultural influences are more easily comprehended in light of these tactical methods.

For the purposes of this study I will focus on the Teton Sioux, who, as the U. S. Army's primary opponents during the period, embodied the acculturation process and therefore represent the other Great Plains tribes, who were influenced by and often sought to emulate the Sioux in economic, religious, and military practices during this period. Other groups, such as the Arapaho, Yankton Sioux, and especially the Northern Cheyenne, followed paths which were at times similar to that of the Tetons. The Teton Sioux were the dominant influence in religious and cultural preeminence, population, and most significantly in military power.

James O. Gump, who likens the Sioux unto the regimented military culture of the African Zulu Empire contends that both societies:

...represent two expansive, aggressive preindustrial societies, each of which gained hegemony in their respective regions during much of the nineteenth century. In addition each experienced considerable social transformations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, based on their adaptation to changing ecological, economic, and political conditions. Each also developed highly effective military systems and became widely feared, hated, and respected among other indigenous peoples."

If we accept Gump's conclusion that the Sioux adapted to "...changing ecological, economic, and political conditions" and "developed [a] highly effective military system..." the we must also conclude that their military system adapted and changed along with their culture, and continued to change throughout the Sioux Wars between 1866 and 1876. The Sioux were an aggressive, and exploitative society displacing numerous other Plains Tribes to by sheer military force. In this sense it must be argued that the Sioux were never "a people wishing to be left alone" nor intent on solitary existence in the wilderness or the American Great Plains. Their immediate motives might have included escaping attacks from the US Army, but their geographic and territorial history shows them to be unquestionably expansionist.

There are several applicable and widely accepted models of American aboriginal military acculturation. One critically important model that applies directly to the Sioux and the plains wars is Patrick Malone's The Skulking Way of War. This work provides a detailed case-study of military acculturation in seventeenth century New England between the European Colonists' and the aboriginal military systems. Malone documents the technological changes, evolving tactics, and an Indian transition from limited tribal warfare to the "concepts of European total warfare." Malone's model indicates a noticeable effect of defeat on the evolution of military systems. For the Europeans, their failure at combating the "...'skulking way of war' had shaken the confidence of the colonists and forced them to adopt a new doctrine for forest warfare." The European reaction to military defeat was an increase in resources committed to totally destroying the enemy and adoption of their most effective tactical methods. The New England Indians, who were easily defeated in their early uprisings, "...had been exposed to the merciless concepts of European total warfare and [later] had the improved technology and tactics to inflict heavy losses on the white populace."

Malone asserts that there was a mutual military acculturation stating in his conclusion: "The lessons learned [italics added] from Indian Warriors have been passed down through the history of the American Military, and have had a significant impact on the conduct of all of our wars." Many of Malone's "lessons learned" are indeed traceable to the seventeenth century, and we shall see that the same lessons were again relearned in the nineteenth. The U. S. Army's failure to subscribe to some of the most basic principles of The Skulking Way of War during the Plains Wars will become obvious for that period and perhaps equally applicable for many others.

There are several parallels between the plains wars and Malone's New England mutual military acculturation model. Both of the European military systems were the product of recent enormous wars that were both severe and ideological. In both aboriginal cases the military system was one of small interrelated bands and warrior societies maintaining a constant state of readiness for warfare. Both the New England and Plains were continually in a feuding state of war, but "limited" the lethality and destructive decisiveness of their conflicts as a simple matter of mutual survival. Neither the New England nor Plains Indians were demographically able to participate in European forms of attrition warfare. However, both sought to benefit from war through the seizure of resources and captives which could aid in their own propagation. In both examples the Indians went to war for similar reasons: to gain prestige and power, demonstrate courage and martial skills, resist aggression, dominate weaker neighbors, extort tribute, gain hunting territory, control trade, and to avenge real or imagined wrongs.

Notable differences between the nineteenth century plains wars and Malone's seventeenth century New England model was a higher combat casualty tolerance for the Sioux (possibly attributed to Sioux propagation success.) While the Sioux never fully adopted the "total war" methods of the whites, the Sioux warriors exhibited a much more aggressive and lethal mode of combat prior to their own exposure to European total war. Neither fought their battles as a method of "total" war to effect the complete annihilation of the enemy society Both the New England Indians and the Sioux were (unadmittedly) dependent on their Native American enemies for essential trade, gene pool expansion, and those same "benefits from war" chronicled by Malone. Both warlike cultures relied heavily on rivals for extorted or seized resources, and additional wives. They could not afford the cost nor the consequence of exterminating their enemies.

Malone's focus on the mutually evolving methods rather than exclusively on Indians or Europeans is critically important. The "skulking way of war" was a hybrid of both European and Indian cultural military practice. One experience could not be described independently of the other. In American Western history such an approach would break from some of the more predominant methodology. As John H. Monnett puts it:

In the wake of the Vietnam era...scholars favored and welcomed much-needed interpretations of Indian history that examined topics other than warfare between Indian warriors and white soldiers. In essence "Indian history" and "western military history," for all practical purposes, became two distinct fields of study, with the former having, on balance, a bit more serious interest and respect among scholars.

The mutual study of both subjects is important, not only because of their inseparable impact on each other, but because both cultures are foreign to today's culture and have been the victim of an "ethnocentricity of earlier frontier history." Francis Paul Prucha reminds us "while no one seems to doubt that Indian culture was distinctly different than that of whites...precious few writers have acknowledged that nineteenth-century white culture was significantly different from that of the present. To begin to comprehend the nature of white-Indian relations, it is necessary to understand two quite different cultures from our own." Recent revisionist historians Richard White and William Cronin advocate casting aside traditional and moral judgments and attempting to accurately understand Indian methods, noting "...we have to move beyond these notions of 'noble savages' and....We have to look instead at how they actually lived ."

In examining models of Indian acculturation Daniel K. Richter's work The Ordeal of the Longhouse is also essential. Richter uses anthropological, archaeological, and ethnohistorical sources and methods to analyze the Iroquois' culture and to explain how they adapted to strategic threats and cultural changes wrought by European contact. The Iroquois suffered from an economic dependence on white trade, massive population losses from disease, economic and individual casualties suffered from involvement in wars between Europeans, and conquest of their lands by white expansion. Richter contends that the Iroquois (who thrive even today) survived an eighteenth century onslaught that other tribes did not because of three geographic and three cultural advantages.

Geographically, Iroquois territory straddled major fur-trade routes, lay inland and isolated from initial European occupation, and was strategically located between the European Powers. These factors enabled them to achieve economic and political negotiating advantages. Culturally, the Iroquois instituted a "League of Peace" which unified them against external threats, maintained a balanced agricultural and hunting village economy, and a "limited" war-fighting practice (of using adoption and captive taking to replenish losses). Richter also confirms that the Iroquois' method of warfare was focused more on ambushes, taking captives, and revenge raids (or "morning wars") which promulgated rather than attrited their population.

Richter's model applies to the Sioux in several ways. The Sioux also used captives, including white ones, to replenish population losses, but limited their captives to women and children. The same strategic threats and cultural changes affecting the Iroquois also plagued the Sioux's neighbors and enemies, but the isolated Sioux escaped early and extensive contact with Europeans of any impact until well into the nineteenth Century. This relative seclusion enabled them to flourish while their more exposed rivals withered. Both the Iroquois and the Sioux enjoyed comparatively similar geographic advantages in trade and alliances.

The Sioux comparison to the Iroquois model is a limited analogy. As a nation, the Sioux never achieved a unified political consensus. The successful Iroquois "League of Peace" had no Sioux/Cheyenne counterpart. The Sioux were rarely able to unite, even in times of war. While some "peace chiefs" attempted to negotiate advantageous terms with US Government Officials, their efforts were normally undermined by independent warrior bands, and Government insincerity. The Sioux and Cheyenne were never in a negotiating position between rival European factions--they rarely negotiated but they did cause a bureaucratic struggle between the Army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Sioux did not adopt a hunting-agricultural balance as the Iroquois did, nor did the Teton Sioux, as a nation, survive.

Some historians indicate a recent tendency to devalue the importance of warfare and focus [all too] exclusively on political, economic, religious and biological relations between North American Indians and Europeans. I intend to evaluate plains warfare as an explicit reflection of those same aspects by subscribing to the Keegan's paradigm of battle as a telling product of its warring societies. I contend that since battles are socially intense, culturally cataclysmic, and frequently recorded, they are one of the most revealing forms of human interaction examinable.

More Sioux Wars

Part 1: Introduction: Warfare on the Great Plains
Part 2: Collision Courses: The American and Sioux Empires
Part 3: Strategic and Operational Crisis
Part 4: Military Acculturation and Tactical Evolution
Part 5: The Tactical Acculturation Model: The Evolved Sioux Tactics
Part 6a: The Great Sioux War of 1876
Part 6b: Battle of Little Big Horn
Part 7: Conclusion: Demise of the Plains Warriors
Part 7: Bibliography: Primary, Secondary, and Government Sources