MAN IN THE MIDDLE

“The opinions of Guerrier, the half-breed, were eagerly sought for and generally deferred to,” Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer wrote in his autobiography My Life on the Plains of the leadup to the November 1868 Battle of the Washita. “His wife, a full-blooded Cheyenne, was a resident of [Black Kettle’s] village. This with him was an additional reason for wishing a peaceful termination of our efforts.”

Custer got it mostly right. Edmund Guerrier was an interpreter on the government payroll who served Custer in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, and at one point he confirmed that some of the Cheyennes in Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita River in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) had raided white settlements, thus justifying Custer’s imminent military response. But Guerrier’s mission, as he saw it, was to save as many human lives—Indian and white—as possible. That said, he was committed to seeing that any whites who committed atrocities against Indians were denounced, and even Custer had derided the earlier 1864 attack against Black Kettle’s camp at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory as a massacre.

Ironically, the peace-minded interpreter’s surname, Guerrier, means “warrior.” Edmund’s father, William, an American of French ancestry, hailed from St. Louis. As a concession to those unable to pronounce his French name, he also answered to Bill Geary. William was working with trader Seth Ward, 9 miles above Fort Laramie (in future Kansas Territory), when son Edmund was born on Jan. 16, 1840, in a Cheyenne camp on the Smoky Hill River, to mother Tah-tah-tois-neh (Walks in Sight). By 1844 William was working for trader William Bent, a fellow St. Louisan who had also married a Cheyenne, Owl Woman. Bent tapped Guerrier as an interpreter during attempts to smooth out the complex relations among the United States and the Cheyennes and Arapahos, the United States and the Kiowas and