Indian Wars

Albumen photograph (5 x 8 in.; 127 x 203 mm), titled by hand on the verso "Arrapaho & Cheyenne camp on the Canadian river Ind. Try. Sept. 1868," mounted on card stock (9 3/4 x 11 3/4 in.; 248 x 299 mm), lower margin captioned by hand "On the wooded level, in the distance lies the river. Major Alvord's Camp was at the foothills about where this picture stops. The whole valley has been burned over to make fresh grass for the expected herd of buffalo that never came. General Sherman's [sic] deadly order to exterminate the buffalo and thus the Indians. dead Indians who in his opinion were the only good ones"; photograph slightly faded and soiled, marginal foxing and toning to card mount. Matted, double-glazed and framed.

The Indian Wars of the late 1860s and Sheridan's alleged coining of the phrase "The only good Indian is a dead one."  This early photograph of an Arrapaho and Cheyenne camp has been captioned to indicate the location of Major Henry F. Alvord's camp at the bottom; the caption also explains that "The whole valley has been burned over to make fresh grass for the expected herd of buffalo that never  came. General Sherman's [i.e., Philip H. Sheridan] deadly order to exterminate the buffalo and thus the Indians. Dead Indians who in his opinion were the only good ones."

President Johnson, who disapproved of Sheridan's severely repressive measures which he had undertaken in the interest of Reconstruction in the South, had him transferred to the department of the Missouri. In this new sphere of action, he embarked upon military operations against the Cheyennes, Comanches, Arapahoes, and Kiowas, and finally forced these hostile Indians to settle on reservations.

Attribution to Sheridan of the invective "the only good Indian is a dead one" began in Edward Ellis's book The History of Our Country: From the Discovery of America to the Present Time (1895). Entitling a short paragraph "Sheridan's Bon Mot," Ellis relates the following event from an eye-witness account of Captain Charles Nordstrom:

"It was the writer's good fortune to be present when General Sheridan gave utterance to that bon mot which has since become so celebrated. It was in January, 1869, in camp at old Fort Cobb, Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, shortly after Custer's fight with Black-Kettle's band of Cheyennes. Old Toch-a-way (Turtle Dove), a chief of the Comanches, on being presented to Sheridan, desired to impress the General in his favor, and striking himself a resounding blow on the breast, he managed to say: 'Me, Toch-a-way; me good Injun.' A quizzical smile lit up the General's face as he set those standing by in a roar by saying: 'The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.'"

However, it should be remembered that a form of this unfortunate utterance was already in use: James Michael Cavanaugh from Montana had expressed a quite similar sentence already in 1868 in the United States House of Representatives. But it is most likely that the high-profiled general was responsible for catapaulting this frontier motto into popular currency. As Stephen Ambrose puts it so clearly in his account of the parallel lives of the two American warriors Crazy Horse and Custer (1975): "Frontier posts reverberated with tough talk about what would be done to the Indians, once caught, and it became an article of faith among the Army officers that 'you could not trust an Indian.' Sheridan's famous remark, 'The only good Indian I ever saw was dead,' was often and gleefully quoted."