Valor Friday

It’s been a while since I talked about some folks who had exceptionally long military careers. A year and a half ago, I spoke about some here. I’ve come across a few more since then, so let’s take a look.

Benjamin Bonneville was born in 1796 in Paris just after the French Revolution. When he was seven, his family emigrated to the US, with their passage paid for by famous Founding Father Thomas Paine. In 1813 he secured appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point, and graduated the military engineering school in just two years.

Commissioned as a light artillery officer, Bonneville saw service in New England, Mississippi, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory (what later became Oklahoma). On an official trip to France in the 1820s he was the guest of the famous American Revolutionary War general Marquis de Lafayette.

Having steadily rose the ranks, Bonneville petitioned for an 18 month leave of absence from the Army to lead an expedition exploring the American West. In 1832 he set out with more than 100 men to find an overland route to California. He succeeded, mapping both Walker Pass across the Sierra Nevada and one along the Humboldt River. The former became better known as the California Trail (similar to the Oregon Trail to that territory), which was the primary route taken by those participating in the California Gold Rush.

The expedition had been funded by John Jacob Astor, whom Bonneville stayed with upon returning to the east. There he became acquainted with author Washington Irving. Irving would later take Bonneville’s maps and journals from his trip west and wrote The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, published in 1837.

In 1836, Bonneville resumed his commissioned service in the Army. He held frontier posts in the Nebraska and New Mexico Territories, commanded the 3rd Infantry Regiment, and served under General Winfield Scott in the Veracruz Campaign of the Mexican-American War. He twice commanded the New Mexico Department and was a colonel when he retired in 1861.

He was almost immediately recalled to active duty for the Civil War, during which he served in Missouri. He retired again in 1866, and was given a brevet promotion to brigadier general in recognition of his many years of service. He spend 47 years in the Army.

Dozens of places and locations have been named in his honor. Among the most famous is the Bonneville Salt Flats (known as the location of many land speed records) in Utah. In 1957 Pontiac Motors came out with their Bonneville model at the apex of their product line (and with a price tag to rival the Cadillacs of the day). The car was named after the salt flats, so it too is named in turn after General Bonneville.

Lewis B. Harned was born in 1924. His long service would start during the Second World War, but not in the American military. When he graduated high school in 1942, he attempted to enlist in the Army, as most men of his generation were at the time. His eyesight was deemed too poor, so he was barred from service. Instead he joined the American Field Service, a paramilitary air organization similar to the Red Cross, that deployed members to the war in Europe. He served with the British Eighth Army as an ambulance driver. He saw significant action in support of combat operations in North Africa, and Italy, including Sicily and Salerno.

With the end of the war, he returned to his native Wisconsin and went to college. He participated in Army ROTC, but after graduating, he was again deemed unfit for service. He continued his education and went to medical school, graduating in 1951.

With another war forcing the Army to bulk up their numbers, and needing doctors with increasing urgency, this was Harned’s chance. He was selected this time, and received a commission as a warrant officer in the Army. While going through military medical training at Fort Sam Houston, he was part of a group of Army doctors asked to switch branches, as the other services were short on doctors and the Army had a sudden glut. With that, Harned became an officer in the US Air Force instead.

He served throughout the war at a field hospital in Ogden, Utah (not far from those Bonneville Salt Flats I mention above) and left the service in 1955 as a captain. His days in uniform over, he embarked on a long and distinguished career as an orthopedic surgeon.

In 1985, the Wisconsin Army National Guard had need for an orthopedic surgeon, so Harned (at 61 years old) donned the uniform of his nation once more. He was commissioned a lieutenant colonel.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Harned’s 13th Evacuation Hospital (which he’d took command of in 1988) was deployed. Harned commanded the unit, as the oldest commanding officer of the war, at the age of 65. During the short 100-hour Gulf War his hospital treated more than 3,500 casualties and performed more than 100 surgeries.

Upon his return to the states, Harned was promoted to brigadier general and forced to retire (because of his age). His awards and decorations include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal (3), National Defense Service Medal with Bronze Service Star, Southwest Asia Service Medal with three Bronze Service Stars, Army Reserve Components Achievement Medal, and the Army Service Ribbon. In addition, he also received three foreign service medals – the Italy Star, the British Wars Medal (1939-1945), and the British Campaign Star (1939-1945).

I-See-O was a Kiowa born in modern-day Kansas around 1847. He was a young man when he witnessed General William Tecumseh Sherman sign the historic (and ill-fated) Medicine Lodge Treaty with the three principal Native tribes on the Great Plains (Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache) in 1867.

The treaty resulted in a large number of American settlers pouring into the region, which led to armed conflicts with the Natives. I-See-O, then known as Tahbonemah (or Tah-Bone-Ma) joined the war party of Kiowa Lone Wolf and Comanche Quanah Parker. For seven years they waged a war against the United States on the southern plains. After being defeated at the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, I-See-O was with Lone Wolf when he surrendered himself and his men to the US Army at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. This put an end to the Kiowa resistance in February 1875.

In the 1880s, I-See-O served as a private with the Indian Police of the Indian Territory (soon to be Oklahoma). In 1899, at 40 years old, married, and with three children (two daughters and one son), I-See-O enlisted with the Army’s 7th Cavalry Regiment. The 7th Cavalry is best-known for being the unit George Armstrong Custer was commanding when he led them all to their deaths at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

He served closely with a young lieutenant Hugh Scott, teaching him Indian sign language and Native field craft. In 1890, the 7th Cavalry were the ones who slaughtered hundreds of Natives in the Wounded Knee Massacre, but I cannot find information on if I-See-O was with them at the time. It seems unlikely though, as his service was mostly in the area of Oklahoma.

I-See-O served as an Indian Scout and translator. In this role, during the Ghost Dance phenomenon of the 1890s, that he persuaded Apache and Kiowa tribes not to go to war against the US. This saved untold lives, as the massacre at Wounded Knee was fought over the Ghost Dance movement.

Scott made I-See-O his L Troop’s first sergeant. As positions in the peacetime Army came and went, I-See-O re-enlisted as a private in 1897 and again as a private in 1900. In the former enlistment he served under Nelson Miles (Civil War MoH recipient and future Army Chief of Staff). In the latter, he was promoted again to sergeant soon after re-upping.

In 1913, at the age of 64, I-See-O was forced by age to retire. Much had changed while he was serving. He went to live with family, but having grown up and having spent his whole life in frontier encampments, the complexities of the modern age were too much. He was a man who had lived a nomadic lifestyle without the trappings of city life, suddenly thrust in his old age into the new world of electricity, paved roads, and motor cars. He was soon dejected and living in poverty.

Word of I-See-O’s plight made it to his old friend Hugh Scott. Scott was now a major general and Army Chief of Staff. Scott petitioned the Secretary of War on I-See-O’s behalf, and the men re-enlisted the old Indian Scout at Fort Meyer, Virginia in 1915 as a sergeant. He was operationally assigned to the Fort Sill detachment of Indian Scouts. He was the only Indian Scout in said detachment. His position was without duties or portfolio as it were. He was allowed to retire to the life of a field soldier while receiving active duty pay as a pension.

General Scott, in a letter to the commanding officer at Fort Sill, dated February 1, 1915, said: “I would like to have you let him live on the reservation or out among his people, as he elects, and see that he gets pay, clothing, and rations from your Quartermaster, and that when his time expires he be re-enlisted as a sergeant until he dies. He is old and medieval, his mind is back in the middle ages, and he has simply been stunned by civilization. I do not see how he survived this long. When the government needed him he was supremely loyal, against the wishes of his own people.”

I-See-O, as you can see from the picture above, met the acquaintance of President Coolidge, visiting POTUS with other Kiowa at the White House in 1925. I-See-O was the last living Kiowa Indian Scout of the US Army. He died at Fort Sill in 1927, where he is buried.

I-See-O’s 30 years of active service were capped with an additional 12 years of retired on active duty (I knew some of them in my day, but they didn’t have backing from the Chief of Staff to be retired on duty) are made all the more impressive when you remember he didn’t start that service until he was well into middle age. He was one of only a handful of men to be explicitly placed on active duty until their natural deaths.

Category: Army, Historical, Valor, We Remember