There’s a lot of “did he, or didn’t he?” about Philip Sheridan.
He was born in Albany, New York in 1831, although some sources claim he was born on the ship his parents sailed from Ireland. In an age when men were much shorter than they are now, he stood just 5 ft., 5 in., which gave him the nickname, “Little Phil.” He was known for his hot temper, and was nearly kicked out of West Point Military Academy for assaulting a classmate.
He spent his early U.S. Army career in Oregon, where he may or may not have lived with a Native American woman, Sidnayah. In his blog, “Lt. Philip Sheridan…Indian War…Lore…Lovers,” Wayne Kigerl disputes that notion. Sidnayah, he asserts, was a Klickitat girl between the ages of eight and 14 who died in 1847. “Sheridan did not arrive in Oregon until 1856, nine years after Sidnayah’s death from smallpox.” Other stories about Sheridan’s Oregon love life persist, but Kigerl says no evidence has been found to corroborate them.
When the Civil War began, Sheridan quickly made a name for himself as an inspirational leader, jumping on a hot cannon to cheer his soldiers onward, and making a mad dash back to the lines to lead his faltering troops at Shenandoah Creek. (Author Eric Wittenberg contends Sheridan was not following orders, nor where he was supposed to be at the time, hence the dash).
Sheridan also introduced the idea of total war, reasoning the only way to bring the war to a faster conclusion was to torch everything in sight in the Shenandoah Valley. To his way of thinking, this was just punishment for the South’s rebellion. This tactic was adopted by General William T. Sherman during his “March to the Sea” and approved by General Ulysses S. Grant.
After the war, Sheridan was assigned military governor of New Orleans during the Reconstruction period. Although he established strict martial rule, he was equally zealous of protecting the rights of newly-freed Blacks, and oversaw the registration of “tens of thousands of black voters in Louisiana and Texas,” writes historian Joseph Wheeler. “Their freedom had been given them, and it was the plain duty of those in authority to make it secure . . . and to see that they had a fair chance in the battle of life,” Sherman wrote in his 1888 memoir. It was a practical matter, too: Many of the soldiers under his command were Black and he needed to make sure they could move around the city freely. One of his first acts was to integrate the city’s streetcar line.
Sheridan was next assigned to the West, where he was directed to move Native Americans onto reservations. Faced with rounding up numerous nations of people in various locations throughout the West with a relatively small army of 10,000 troops, he reasoned that the fastest way to get the job done was to remove their major food source, the buffalo. If that meant wiping out villages and killing women and children in the dead of winter, it was part of the job.
He received harsh criticism from both sides. “If we allow the defenseless people on the frontier to be scalped and ravished, we are burnt in effigy and execrated as soulless monsters, insensible to the sufferings of humanity. If the Indian is punished to give security to these people, we are the same soulless monsters from the other side,” he wrote.
Years later, Sheridan visited Germany and preached the “scorched earth” technique to Otto von Bismarck. The Germans took the lesson to heart and used it in both World Wars.
Did he really say that?
The saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” has been attributed to Sheridan. Although he and his brother, Brigadier General Michael Sheridan, who fought at his side throughout his career, denied him saying it, was an accusation that dogged him for the rest of his life.
Captain Charles Nordstrom of the Tenth Cavalry claimed to hear Sheridan make the statement in 1869 at Fort Cobb, Oklahoma. He told of how Sheridan was introduced to a Comanche by the name of Toch-a-way, who “striking himself a resounding blow on the breast, he managed to say, ‘Me, Toch-a-way; me good Injun.’ Sheridan replied, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”
Wolfgang Mieder, University of Vermont, did a long and careful study of the saying. Unfortunately, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” has been part of American culture since the American Colonial period, long before Sheridan was born. Mieder proved it was specifically tied to Sheridan in the 1940s. He also found that another famous soldier said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” in 1886—Theodore Roosevelt.
Sheridan, who was a prime mover in the creation of Yellowstone National Park, seemed more sympathetic to Native Americans after his Western campaigns.
“It would have been better if the Indians had been considered as part of the population of the United States, and dealt with generously,” Sheridan wrote in an annual report to his superior officer, General Sherman. “We took away their country, and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this that they made war. Could anyone expect less?”
See “Sheridan name may be erased” to read about our coverage on possible name changes in Northeast.
Sources:
wkigerl.wordpress.com
Mieder, Wolfgang, “The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian: History and Meaning of a Proverbial Stereotype,” University of Vermont, 1993
Wheelan, Joseph, Terrible Swift Sword, The Life of General Philip H. Sheridan, DaCapo Press, 2012
Wittenberg, Eric J., Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, Potomac Books, Inc., 2002