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In June 1865 General Sheridan was ordered to form an army and occupy Texas. His mission was to round up Confederate forces that had not yet surrendered and to provide a military force opposite Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. Sheridan chose Custer to form and command a cavalry division in Louisiana and move it to Texas. By summer the threat of war with Mexico abated and the men in the division resented being kept in service while others were disbanded to return to civilian life. Discontent, disobedience and desertion plagued the division. Custer responded harshly, but to no avail. It was the first time in his career that he had tried to lead men who did not like him. In February 1866 his unit was disbanded and he was mustered out of volunteer service. He explored the possibility of a position in the financial world of New York but eventually decided to remain in the regular army with the rank of captain assigned to the Fifth Cavalry Division. In September 1866 Custer joined President Andrew Johnson on a political trip designed to generate support for the President's moderate policies toward the South. Republicans castigated Johnson and branded Custer a turncoat "Copperhead" in search of higher rank in the army.
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In 1866, at General Sheridan's insistence, Custer was promoted to lieutenant colonel and given command of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. That same year, again at Sheridan's behest, he was given the brevet rank of Major General in the regular army. The army of 1866 had three missions: protection of the coast, reconstruction of the southern states, and protection of the settlers moving into the western part of the nation. An estimated 270,000 Native Americans occupied the west and about 100,000 of them were considered to be hostile to Anglo-European settlement of their lands. Among this later group were the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Nez Pierce, Ute, Bannock, Paiute, Modoc, Navajo and Apache. Custer's immediate commander was Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, Commander of the Department of the Missouri, headquartered at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Hancock's commander was General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, with headquarters at St. Louis, Missouri. Custer joined his regiment at the end of February 1867 and found it staffed with weak leadership and inadequately manned with poorly motivated troops.
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In March 1867 he commanded eight companies of the Seventh as part of a show of force against the Southern Sioux and Cheyenne led by General Hancock. The Cheyenne remembered the massacre at Sand Creek by Colonel John M. Chivington's Colorado militia two years earlier and worried that Hancock's force would attempt to destroy them. There were a couple of councils between Hancock and the Cheyenne Chiefs in mid-April, but in the end they abandoned their village and fled from him. Custer was ordered to follow them, but they dispersed before him and he was unsuccessful. During the chase he found stage stations burned, settlers killed, and livestock run off along the Smokey Hill Road in eastern Kansas. On receiving word of this Hancock ordered the Cheyenne village burned. In the ensuing campaign Custer was plagued with bad weather and was not able to catch up with any of the Cheyenne. Meanwhile Indians began killing settlers in Nebraska along the line of the expanding Union Pacific Railroad. Custer was ordered north to sweep the area clear. Near Fort McPherson he met with Pawnee Killer, a Sioux Chief, who informed him that he sought peace. Custer believed him, even though it was later learned that Pawnee Killer's band of Sioux had been responsible for the Smokey Hill Road hostilities. A series of clashes between Indians and Custer's units followed during which neither he nor his troopers distinguished themselves. At one point he and a small escort rode across Kansas so that he could be reunited with his wife at Fort Riley. General Hancock saw this as a dereliction of duty.
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On October 11, 1867, a court martial convicted Custer of being absent without leave and conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. He was sentenced to suspension from rank and command and forfeiture of pay for one year. During this period President Johnson relieved General Sheridan of his reconstruction duties in New Orleans and assigned him to command the Department of the Missouri in place of General Hancock. Sheridan felt that Custer had been made the scapegoat for the failure of Hancock's campaign and he made his feelings clear to one and all. That winter he took leave in the East and let the Custers use his quarters in Fort Leavenworth. In the summer of 1868 the Custers moved back to Monroe, Michigan, where in September they received a telegram from General Sheridan inviting Custer to return to his unit. Custer's suspension from active duty still had a couple of months to run, but Sheridan wanted him back to participate in a winter campaign of "total war" that he and Sherman had devised. Custer was delighted and resumed command of the Seventh on October 11, 1868.
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Sheridan's plan entailed three columns that would converge on Indians thought to be located on the Canadian and Washita Rivers. The first column was led by Major Eugene A. Carr, the second by Major Andrew W. Evans, and the third by Brigadier General Alfred Sully, Commander of the District of the Upper Arkansas. Sheridan was to accompany Sully's column and Custer was to exercise field command of it. The first two columns were to press the Indians into the third which was the strongest. Their objective was to thoroughly defeat the Indians and "teach them a lesson." Early on in the campaign Generals Sully and Custer argued and Sheridan resolved the issue by sending Sully back to his headquarters. A few days later Custer surprised a village of Cheyenne Indians on the Washita River. Other Indians encamped nearby managed to drive him off, but not before he had killed a goodly number and completely destroyed the village and their pony herd. That winter's campaign went a long way toward defeating the Southern Cheyenne once and for all and driving them onto the reservation. It also demonstrated to one and all that the US Army could operate effectively in winter. Custer emerged from it once more a hero and a preeminent Indian Fighter in the Western press. Within the frontier army, however, many, including Sheridan himself, criticized Custer over the loss of one of his officers during the Washita fight. In the East he was severely criticized for attacking a "peace chief" and killing women and children. For Generals Sheridan and Sherman, Custer was still their best weapon in dealing with hostile Indians and they gave him their full support.
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