Eugene Ware - The Indian War of 1864

Republican River at mouth of Medicine Creek.

As there was nothing to be found going east, we turned back January 25th. There was an island in the river just below the mouth of Medicine Creek, and avoiding the island we went across the Republican River on the ice, up Medicine Creek a little distance on the ice, and then came out on its east bank. We crossed the trains and artillery on the heavy ice. The stream was a very difficult one for us to march along, because its course curved backwards and forwards from bluff to bluff, and rock strata pointed out of the bluffs at several points. That day's march up Medicine Creek was twenty-four miles in a course north of northwest, and we went on bluffs or plateaus most of the way. The guides thought we would find Indians on the east of Medicine Creek.

All this time the wind blew clear and cold from the northwest and the whole command led their horses until from time to time the command was given to mount, and then the horses would be run for a little while to get them warmed up, then the men would dismount and walk. And so we went, running our horses and then running on foot, all day. Riding against the wind was very unpleasant; all of us had our heads muffled up in the capes of our overcoats, and we kept our roadway by peering through openings in the folds of our capes. As we were riding against the wind we would look out through our capes with one eye. In a little while the tears of that eye would be frozen up, and vision entirely obscured; then we would shift our capes to the other eye while we warmed up with our hands and thawed the ice out from the other eye. We thus alternated all day, January 25th, and the result was that almost everyone frosted his eyelids. Mine got into bad condition, and every once in a while an officer would say to me as we rode along, "You will never see Omaha." In fact, whenever we got into any bad place someone was telling me that I would "never see Omaha."

We crossed the Medicine twenty miles from our morning camp, and camped that night farther up in a valley, in a clump of timber which the Indians had been occupying shortly before. It was a most beautiful valley, where we camped, capable of irrigation and cultivation, and a stream came in which we named Mitchell's Creek, after General Mitchell. We made a total march that day of 26 miles, most of it in the face of a freezing wind. The place where the lake was is shown on the accompanying map. On this page I give the map exactly as I drew it that night.

Medicine River forked, and we went up the east fork. The next day, January 26, 1865, we marched up the east fork of Medicine Creek, and made our noon halt within two miles of the head of the stream, a distance of twenty-one miles; thence we went up the stream, thence seven miles over the divide to the head of Cottonwood Canyon, then down Cottonwood Canyon twelve miles, and arrived at Cottonwood Springs at four o'clock p.m. after a day's march of forty-two miles.

The route on Medicine Creek.

It appeared to me that this last march of forty-two miles was the longest march I ever made in my life. The keen northwest wind, the hard riding, the want of sleep, the inability to properly cook our food, and the fact that not a member of the command escaped being frost-bitten, contributed to make it a march long to be remembered.

An incident happened when we were camping on January 20th in the Big Timbers, which I ought not to overlook. We had been out six days on the expedition, and General Mitchell was afraid that he might be snowed up or frozen in somewhere, and thought it safe to have a train loaded with supplies of corn for the horses, and rations for the men, all ready at Fort Kearney so that it could start out for our relief on a moment's notice, on receiving word from a courier: the question was, how to get such a message back to Fort Kearney. There was a little red-mustached Irish sergeant, but from what command I do not know, who volunteered to make the trip if he could have a proper guide, and he would strike right out across the country to Fort Kearney. I think he belonged to one of the Nebraska Militia companies. There were a couple of Pawnees with us as guides, and one of these Pawnees offered to go across with the sergeant, and act as scout, and deliver him safely to Fort Kearney, provided that General Mitchell would give him a horse. The General promised to do this; the Indian had no horse; said he preferred to go on foot anyhow, and that he could keep up with the sergeant's horse all the way in to Fort Kearney. This was a sort of a funny proposition, and I remember looking at the long, gaunt, slim Pawnee, a young buck about twenty-three, and wondering whether he could keep up all day with the cavalry horse or not. Leo Palladie said that the Indian would hold onto the sergeant's stirrup-straps, and run alongside of the horse as fast as the horse could go, for a week. So the commissary issued them each four days' rations of bacon, hard-bread and stuff, and they were ordered to immediately get ready. They proceeded to cook up their rations; when they were cooked the Indian went to work and ate up every vestige of his four days' rations. He bolted down an enormous quantity of raw bacon, and he ate the other stuff as fast as it was cooked. The sergeant took an ordinary white man's dinner, and put the balance in his haversack swung onto his saddle, but as to the Indian, all he did was to buckle up his belt as tightly as he could get it, and start off on a trot alongside of the sergeant's horse and hold of the stirrup-strap. They started out after dark, and they both arrived at Fort Kearney, a distance of over a hundred miles in a straight line, on the afternoon of the second day.

General Mitchell was sorely disappointed that we had not been able to find out where the Indians had gone, and what they intended to do. We had not killed a hostile Indian, and probably not less than fifty soldiers had to be discharged on account of freezings and injuries received on the trip. In addition to that, we had ruined about a hundred horses, and six wagons had been broken down and abandoned. The General, as we rode down Cottonwood Canyon, on the end of the trip, was quite melancholy, and all he could say was: "Well, what more could we do? What more could we do?" and he seemed disconsolate over the fact that there was not an Indian less, and he keenly felt the distress which his men had suffered. He was constantly referring to the "poor fellows," and how bravely they had stood the weather, and how awfully cold it was, and what enormous marches had been made under such suffering conditions. And then the General would get moody; and say that, while the war was going on down South, here he was fighting Indians; that there was no glory in it, and when the war was over all he could pride himself on was his former service down in the Southern Confederacy. That when he would reflect as to what good he had been to his country, he would say that he hadn't been any good while he was out in the Indian country. He said that he would make an application to be sent down to fight where there was some glory, and if he couldn't get it he was going to resign; that he would not have any more Indian-fighting in his military history; that this trip had demonstrated to him that he was no Indian-fighter, and that there was no glory in it, and the Government was wasting money in paying him a salary for trying to look after the Indians. It was really distressing to hear the General talk. I rode with him in his ambulance down Cottonwood Canyon, and as I was his aide-de-camp he talked to me in a very free and kindly way. As I had seen him after he was carried off from the battle-field at Wilson Creek, wounded, and had referred to it, he said that he had lots rather go down South and be shot to death than to stay up North and fight Indians and be frozen to death. And that although his superiors might order him to make another Indian campaign for the purpose of keeping the Indians moving, he was going to have a command farther south or else leave the service. The General soon after sent in his request for a detail farther south in the theatre of the war, or else that his resignation be accepted.