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Ranald
Slidell (Bad Hand) Mackenzie, army officer, was born on July 27,
1840, in New York City, the son of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a
popular author and naval officer who had taken his mother's family
name of Mackenzie, and Catherine (Robinson) Mackenzie. The elder
Mackenzie's brother, John Slidell, was a United States minister to
Mexico and the Confederate minister to France seized aboard the
British mail packet Trent in 1861. His sister, Jane Slidell,
was the wife of Matthew C. Perry, who opened Japan to the West.
Ranald had two brothers-Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, Jr., a
lieutenant commander in the navy, and Rear Admiral Morris Robinson
Slidell Mackenzie-and a sister, Harriet Slidell Mackenzie. He
received his education at Williams College and at the United States
Military Academy, where he graduated on June 17, 1862, at the head
of his class. He was commissioned a second lieutenant and assigned
to the Army of the Potomac. Within two years he had fought in eight
major battles and been promoted to the rank of colonel. Later, in
the Shenandoah valley, he commanded troops in five battles, and in
the final campaign against Robert E. Lee he was a brevet major
general. At Appomattox he took custody of surrendered Confederate
property and afterward commanded the cavalry in the Department of
Virginia. In three years he had received seven brevets and six
wounds.
In 1867
Mackenzie accepted an appointment as colonel of the Forty-first
Infantry, a newly formed black regiment reorganized two years later
as part of the Twenty-fourth United States Infantry. The unit had
its headquarters at Fort Brown, Fort Clark, and later at Fort
McKavett. On February 25, 1871, he assumed command of the Fourth
United States Cavalry at Fort Concho and a month later moved its
headquarters to Fort Richardson. That summer he began a series of
expeditions into the uncharted Panhandle and Llano Estacado in an
effort to drive renegade Indians back onto their reservations. In
October his troops skirmished with a band of Comanches in Blanco
Canyon, where he was wounded, and on September 29, 1872, they
defeated another near the site of the present town of Lefors. In
1873 Mackenzie was assigned to Fort Clark to put an end to the
plunder of Texas livestock by Indian raiders from Mexico. On May 18,
in an extralegal raid, he burned a Kickapoo village near Remolino,
Coahuila, and returned with forty captives. That and effective
border patrols stopped the raiding.
In July
1874 Lt. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan ordered five commands to converge
on the Indian hideouts along the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado.
Mackenzie, in the most daring and decisive battle of the campaign,
destroyed five Indian villages on September 28 in Palo Duro Canyon
and on November 5 near Tahoka Lake won a minor engagement, his last,
with the Comanches. His destruction of the Indians' horses after the
battle of Palo Duro Canyon, even more than the battle itself,
destroyed the Indians' resistance. In March 1875 Mackenzie assumed
command at Fort Sill and control over the Comanche-Kiowa and
Cheyenne-Arapaho reservations. On June 2 Quanah Parker arrived at
Fort Sill with 407 followers and 1,500 horses. The Red River War was
over.
After Lt.
Col. George A. Custer's troops had been annihilated on the Little
Bighorn River in 1876, Mackenzie was placed in command of the
District of the Black Hills and of Camp Robinson, Nebraska. In
October he forced Sioux Chief Red Cloud, who had won a campaign in
1868 against the United States, to return his band to the
reservation. On November 25 Mackenzie decisively defeated the
Northern Cheyennes. After a short tour of duty in Washington, during
which he commanded troops mustered to keep the peace in the event of
disturbances following the presidential election of 1876, Mackenzie
returned to the Black Hills, then to Fort Sill. In late 1877 Indians
from Mexico were again raiding in South Texas, and by March 1878
Mackenzie was again at Fort Clark. He began patrols and in June led
an expedition into Mexico. His incursion prompted the Mexican
government to act, and by October the raiding had ceased.
In October
1879 Mackenzie was sent to Colorado with six companies of cavalry to
prevent an uprising of the Utes at the Los Pinos agency. The Indian
Bureau eventually negotiated a removal treaty, but the chiefs
refused to leave until Mackenzie informed them that the only
alternative was war. Two days later, the Utes started for Utah. On
September 2, 1881, Mackenzie received orders to move his cavalry to
Arizona, take field command of all troops there, and subdue the
Apaches. After a short and brilliant campaign, despite the
opposition of the department and division commanders, Mackenzie was
assigned on October 30 to command the District of New Mexico, where
the Apaches ignored departmental and international lines and the
Navajos were restless. Within a year the army was in control.
Mackenzie was promoted to the rank of brigadier general, but was
seriously ill. On October 27, 1883, he was reassigned to command the
Department of Texas. He planned to marry and retire soon on land
that he had bought near Boerne, but by December 18 he was suffering
"paralysis of the insane." A few days later he was
escorted to New York City and placed in the Bloomingdale Asylum. On
March 24, 1884, he was retired from the army. In June he went to his
boyhood home in Morristown to live. In 1886 he was moved to New
Brighton, Staten Island, where he died on January 19, 1889. He was
buried in the military cemetery at West Point. |
