Why Native scouts served with the federal cavalry in the West

The question students always ask, once they learn that Native men served as scouts for the United States Army against other Native people, is why anyone would do that.

It is a fair question and the honest answer is that it dissolves the moment you stop treating Native America as one thing.

The army made it official

Congress authorised the enlistment of Indian Scouts in 1866. They were regular enlisted soldiers, paid, under military discipline, and eligible for the Medal of Honor. A number received it.

The branch existed formally until the middle of the twentieth century, long after the campaigns that created it had ended, which is a detail that surprises people.

Scouts served with cavalry columns across the plains and the southwest. Pawnee, Crow, Arikara, Shoshone, Apache and others, depending on the region and the campaign.

The reasons, plainly

The first and most important is that the plains and the southwest contained many nations with long histories of conflict with one another that had nothing to do with the United States.

The Crow and the Lakota had been fighting over hunting territory for generations before any American soldier appeared. When the army arrived as a new power in that region, Crow leaders made a calculation about which side offered a better chance of keeping their own land. That calculation was rational and it was made by people with full information about their own situation.

Calling that collaboration imports a framework that does not fit. These were sovereign peoples making alliances, which is what sovereign peoples do.

The second reason is more uncomfortable. By the 1870s and 1880s, for men on reservations where the buffalo economy had collapsed and rations were inadequate and late, army pay was one of very few ways to earn money and to continue doing work that carried status.

Scouting was skilled, respected work. A young man who could not hunt or raid could still ride and track.

The third is coercion, which existed and varied. Pressure applied to communities dependent on government rations is not the same as free choice, and I would not pretend otherwise.

What the work was

Mostly not fighting. Tracking, reading ground, finding water, judging how old a trail was and how many people had made it, interpreting, and negotiating.

Army officers were frequently explicit that their columns were close to useless without scouts. Cavalry from the eastern states could not find anybody in country they did not know, and the scouts could.

The Apache campaigns are the clearest case. Apache scouts were central to the pursuit of Apache groups, and army commanders said so at the time.

What they got for it

Less than they were promised, in most cases.

The Crow allied with the United States throughout and their reservation was reduced repeatedly anyway. Apache scouts who served the army through the 1880s were shipped to Florida as prisoners alongside the people they had been pursuing, which is one of the starkest betrayals in the whole record.

Pensions were difficult to obtain. Service records were kept inconsistently, names were transcribed by clerks who did not speak the language, and descendants trying to trace an ancestor run into that wall constantly.

How I taught it

I stopped asking students why they would help the army, because the question has an accusation buried in it.

I asked instead what choices were available to a particular man, in a particular year, with particular obligations to particular people. Once you narrow it that far the behaviour stops looking mysterious.

On sources

The service records exist at the National Archives and they are difficult. Names appear in multiple spellings and sometimes in translation, and the same man can be hard to follow between enlistments.

Be careful with the secondary literature, which includes a lot of confident writing about motivation that is not grounded in anything the men themselves said. Very few of them left a record in their own words, and where oral history exists within descendant communities it deserves more weight than it usually gets.