Where Native scouts used efficiently?

[Beth]

Where Native American scouts used efficiently?  Which commander made the best use of them?

[deadwoodgultch]

Aug 6, 2015 20:02:21 GMT Beth said:

Where Native American scouts used efficiently?  Which commander made the best use of them?

Crook and Miles were probably considered the best. I am not sure how much of their (scouts) feedback was considered and used in real time planning. Custer, after all was warned and his scouts were basically called cowards. 

[Beth]

I have always gotten the impression -right or wrong- that Custer viewed his scouts as ornaments to his image, not a tools in his campaign. He seems to have loved to pose with them and sort of BS with them but he never uses them to scout in any way that he could have just assigned the newest recruit to do.

[quincannon]

I would agree with Tom about Crook and Miles, particularly Crook.

My impression of how Custer used his scouts is the same as if he were on a hunting trip. Of course there are some similarities, but for military operations there is a point where hunting stops and the collection of militarily relevant information starts. The scouts job is to build a picture piece by piece. To do so you must first know what the pieces are likely to look like (what is important - what not so much). That takes some measure of organization and training (beyond native field craft).

Crook spent a great deal of time in preparation. Custer did not.

A little off topic, but still relevant on a slight tangent. Can anyone point to any time in his career where Custer was a trainer of troops. I can't.

[deadwoodgultch]

Chuck, interesting you should ask, just read recently that upon his arrival in D.C. Custer was offered a choice of remaining in the Capital and training recruits or joining the 2nd cavalry. He chose the 2nd Cavalry. This was immediately after graduation

Regards,
Tom

[deadwoodgultch]

Chuck, interesting you should ask, just read recently that upon his arrival in D.C. Custer was offered a choice of remaining in the Capital and training recruits or joining the 2nd cavalry. He chose the 2nd Cavalry. This was immediately after graduation

Regards,
Tom

[Beth]

Perhaps he had enough with teaching before he got to WP.

Beth

[quincannon]

Tom: Never was clear if that 2nd Cavalry was the 2nd Dragoons which were redesignated in 1861 as the 2nd Cavalry, or the original 2nd Cavalry raised in 1855, and redesignated in 1861 as the 5th Cavalry. Do you happen to know?

Beth: An officer spends more time teaching than any other pursuit. If he was tired of teaching, being commissioned should have taken him then from the frying pan into the fire. Once again we see how the complete lack of company level experience did not bode well for the future.

[Beth]

Custer was a person who was able to short change the usual process up the command change because of the CW. I suspect that if he had been cadet during peacetime he would have had a totally different career.

Surely though he wasn't the only cadet that was rushed from the classroom to the battlefield. I wonder what their careers were like.

[dave]

Speaking of Custer's scouts, was Bloody Knife not his favorite? As a mixed Sioux/Arikara who left his father's band in his teenage years and moved to live with mother's tribe, would he be that familiar with the area around the Little Bighorn river? I do not understand Custer's relationship with his Indian scouts during 1876 expedition.
Why would he not use their expertise and knowledge of the area? He sent Bloody Knife with Reno and split the Crows from the Arikaras who accompanied Reno. Why did Custer not keep Bloody Knife or the Crows with himself and avail himself of their knowledge? Is there an answer to my questions? or I am just rambling?
Any help or insight into this subject would be greatly appreciated.
Regards
Dave

[quincannon]

I am going a little beyond reality here, but I don't believe any of these hirelings were there for anything more then they could get out of it.

My ideal scout would be a person that would feel quite at home, and move freely between both camps, and be accepted in each of the two different worlds. That person would likely be one of mixed parentage, be multilingual and have the basic field craft of the American Indian regardless of tribal affiliation. The problem is while many of these people were in the region, none, or practically none, would meet the requirement of acceptance due to the tenor of the times. The foremost asset of the scout is that he and what he reports must be completely trusted, and Custer, and a bunch of others I'd wager did not place the amount of trust required in any of them.

Beth I suspect had Custer been commissioned ten years before the ACW, or ten years after, he would have left the Army as soon as any obligation he incurred was up. He really did not have the personality, or for that matter the dedication to craft, that peacetime service requires. You see a certain resentment manifest itself in him after 1865.

[yanmacca]

Reno had the pick of the scouts in both Hare and Varnum, both two cavalry officers who led a scout group which led the left flank of Reno’s advance down the valley, he also had a large group of Indians whose main desire was to get their hands on the Sioux pony herd.

Which brings me to why Custer didn’t keep Varnum and Hare with him, in my view Reno had no need for a scout detachment, his orders were basically to advance down the valley and attack the village, so who needs a scout detachment for that, Custer on the other hand could have made more use of this detail of two officers and their orderlies on his trek to get beyond the village.

Yan.

[Beth]

Wasn't there some sort of miscommunication and almost all the scouts went with Reno when some were expected to go with Custer? Charlie Reynolds was also with Reno AFAIR.

Beth

[deadwoodgultch]

Beth,
Interesting tidbit, less than 6 months turning themselves in and just over a year after crushing the 7th Cavalry at the LBH, Cheyenne scouts joined Miles to bring the Nez Perce war to an end.

Regards,
Tom

[Beth]

Aug 8, 2015 14:55:32 GMT deadwoodgultch said:

Beth,
Interesting tidbit, less than 6 months turning themselves in and just over a year after crushing the 7th Cavalry at the LBH, Cheyenne scouts joined Miles to bring the Nez Perce war to an end.

Regards,
Tom

Sort of proves that old adage, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

I found this to be a very interesting read


The 7th Cavalry in the Nez Perce Wars