Empire of the Summer Moon

Ranald Slidell Mackenzie came from a well-to-do family from New York. He attended and graduated from West Point. One of his contemporaries at West Point was George Custer, and they were competitors, wanting to outdo the other. During the war, Mackenzie was wounded several times, and the artillery shell that removed two of his fingers led to his nickname among the Comanches, Bad Hand. After stellar service during the Civil War, in 1871 Mackenzie was given command of the Fourth Cavalry, which was stationed on the Texas frontier. His appointment “was a direct consequence of President Grant’s increasing impatience with the ‘peace policy’” (238). Mackenzie was a man President Grant knew would be able to defeat the Indians, though it wasn’t going to be an easy job.

The frontier, as pointed out in earlier chapters, was chaotic and extremely bloody, and the “peace policy” that President Grant disliked was failing due to incompetence and outright corruption at the highest levels of the Office of Indian Affairs. The policy’s “most basic problem was that [it] rewarded aggression and punished good conduct” (241). The Indians quickly learned that the treaties were worthless, and that if they wanted to get goods the best way of doing so was to raid and kill, because inevitably the government would come to them with “gifts” to get them to stop raiding.