Philip H. Sheridan

Biography

Philip Sheridan commanded the Division of the Missouri — the vast military region covering the central and southern Plains — from 1867 to 1869 and again from 1869 to 1883, making him the operational architect of the post-Civil War Indian Wars more than any other individual. His strategy was consistent and brutal: winter campaigns against villages, destruction of food stores and horses, relentless pursuit that allowed no recovery. He authorized Custer's attack at Washita and defended it when others criticized it. He organized the 1874-75 Red River War that crushed the Southern Plains nations, and he oversaw the response to Little Bighorn. Sheridan was the chief proponent of what historians call the 'total war' approach on the Plains: not just defeating warriors in battle, but destroying the entire basis of Plains life — villages, food, horses, and ultimately the buffalo. He supported commercial buffalo hunting as military policy, reportedly telling Texas legislators who considered protecting the herds that the hunters 'have done more in the last two years to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years.' The extermination of the buffalo — from an estimated 30 million animals to near-extinction within two decades — was the single most decisive factor in breaking Native resistance.

Key Battles