The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army in the West, 1783-1900

11: Testing the Peace Policy

216 the crisis directly impacted frontier military affairs. faced with falling government revenues, Congress searched for ways to cut spending , and the House Appropriations Committee found the U.S. Army a convenient target. in early January 1874, committee chair William A. Wheeler (R-n.Y.) proposed slashing $4 million from army expenditures, largely by funding only twenty-five thousand enlisted men. in justifying a measure that would reduce the army’s strength by five thousand soldiers , he wondered “how far the government ought to go in protecting adventurous men, who push out beyond the bounds of civilization, often for the very purpose of inciting indian outrages, in order that they may “Get out, gentlemen, get out—the orders are to close our doors!” shouted a midlevel manager to a panicked crowd at Jay Cooke and Co.’s Washington branch office on September 18, 1873. that morning, the firm, having overreached itself in its efforts to finance the northern Pacific Railroad, had been forced to suspend operations when it could not come up with a million dollars to meet the demands of several prominent creditors. Spooked by the failure of one of the nation’s leading investment houses, shareholders immediately attempted to redeem their stocks, bonds, and bank deposits. “everything went down,” explained the New York Times. the nation’s deepest economic depression to date had begun.1 +e l e v e n∂ Testing the Peace Policy testing the peace policy 217 invoke the military arm of the government, and then profit by the attendant pecuniary expenditures. it would startle the American people,” he explained, “if they could mathematically compute the expense of protecting the very small minority of their population residing, for example, in the territories of Washington, Montana, and Dakota.” Commanding general Sherman’s ill-timed quip that he would “knock two regiments of cavalry from our estimates” if Mexico would take back Arizona did the army’s cause little good.2 evincing a growing recognition of the military’s importance to their region, western delegates howled in protest. “You cannot reduce the force of the Army along our western frontier,” asserted Charles W. Kendall (D-nev.), “without endangering the safety of those settlements and the lives of a people who found that vast country a wilderness, and have built up instead prosperous, powerful, and advancing commonwealths .” Arizona’s Richard C. McCormick (Unionist Party) pointed out the army’s special importance to borderlands nation building. Added James nesmith (D-ore.), “i feel that my duty to my constituency requires me to enter my protest against any proposed reduction of the military forces now employed for the protection of the frontier.” the army was “wholly inadequate” to meet the needs of his state, contended nebraska’s Lorenzo Crounse (R).3 Chairman Wheeler struck back angrily: “All gentlemen who speak on that side of the question [assume] that of necessity, we must have indian troubles; that we are bound to have indian wars, requiring additional troops to be sent to the frontier. now, there is no ground whatever for assuming that such a necessity is to arise.” Wheeler and the House leadership thus rammed through the cutbacks. in the Senate, army supporters —including eight of the ten frontier lawmakers who voted on the issue—also failed to delete language capping the number of enlisted men at twenty-five thousand. in June 1874 President Ulysses S. grant signed the measure into law. in the preceding five years, the army had been reduced by half, and War Department spending as a proportion of the total federal budget (now roughly 15 percent) had fallen to levels not seen since thomas Jefferson’s administration. Regulars lamented that they were now scattered about in too many small posts to do anything very effectively. “Local interests everywhere on the frontier require protection ,” groused John Schofield. “Posts established for that purpose can 218 chapter eleven not be abandoned without the most strenuous opposition from citizens in the vicinity . . . and their representatives in Congress.”4 to make matters worse for the army, long-running disputes over the respective powers of the secretary of war and commanding general deprived it of its most prestigious defender, William Sherman. in 1869, grant had selected William W. belknap, formerly a brigade commander in Sherman’s Army of the tennessee, as his war secretary. though Sherman had initially approved of the choice, the relationship quickly soured, belknap infuriating his old chief...