Double Your Money – Part Forty Three
William Belknap and the Indian Ring Scandal, 1876
Supplying troops who are on the front-line is a logistical nightmare for even the most well-oiled military machine. Not unsurprisingly, the focus of the army’s supply strategy will be on goods and equipment which are required to keep the troops in prime fighting condition. For those necessities of life which make bearable, a secondary supply chain developed.
Non-military goods and commodities such as tobacco, coffee, and sugar, were often supplied in the United States were provided by sutlers, a word derived from the Dutch zoetelaar, meaning one who does dirty work, a drudge. During the French and Indian War, the Civil War and the military push to secure the western lands of America for the white man, sutlers would follow the troops, often setting up shop close to or on the front line.
Welcome as these shops were, they came at a price to the soldiers. As the only game in town, the sutlers could charge whatever they liked and often prices were considerably higher than would otherwise have been the case. Even a shortage of official coinage didn’t worry them. Soldiers, during the Civil War, could, during the Civil War, use a token known as a sutler token to purchase their goods. After the Civil War was over, sutlers’ establishments diversified and offered their clientele, military or civilian alike, the opportunity to drink, gamble and whore.
The upshot of all this was that licences to trade as a sutler were much sought after. Up until July 1870, the power to grant licences to these lucrative tradeships vested with the Commanding General of the Army, General Sherman at the time, but the then War Secretary, William Belknap, wanted a piece of the action. Belknap successfully lobbied Congress on July 15, 1870 to give him control. He then decreed that forts and other military establishments which had Belknap-appointed sutlers could only buy supplies from them, creating an even more lucrative monopoly.
That year, Belknap’s wife, Carita, persuaded him to award a New York trader, Caleb Marsh, the licence for the trading post at Fort Sill, in what is now Oklahoma but then was in the heart of the Indian Territory. There was a problem, though. John Evans already had a licence for the Fort. In return for keeping his lucrative position, a deal was cooked up whereby Evans agreed to pay Marsh $12,000 a year from the profits. Marsh, in turn, was required to pay half of his share to Belknap’s wife, Carita.
Despite the death of Carita in 1870 from tuberculosis, Marsh continued to make the payments to Belknap, ostensibly to support his child. The payments continued, however, even after the poor girl’s death in 1871 and Belknap’s subsequent remarriage to Carita’s sister, Amanda. It is likely that this sort of arrangement was replicated at other trading posts across the western frontier.
It was not until 1876 that the fraud was rumbled, partly through the efforts of one General Custer who is thought to have been behind some anonymous articles that appeared in the New York Herald, exposing the corruption involved with trading posts and implicating Belknap. The Congress launched an investigation on February 29, 1876 and in his testimony, Custer suggested that the President’s brother, Orvil Grant, was also involved in the corrupt practices.
Belknap resigned on March 2nd but Congress decided that he should be made an example of and he was impeached. The hearing in the Senate in May of that year failed to secure the necessary two-thirds majority and so Belknap was acquitted, perhaps because many Senators thought that they had no authority to prosecute a private citizen, as Belknap now was.
As for Custer, he had so pissed off President Ulysses Grant that he was stripped of his military command. He did manage to get a gig to sort out the Sioux in South Dakota which ended disastrously, for him at least, at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Ironically, it is highly likely that the Sioux’s superior firepower had been supplied by Belknap-controlled trading posts and that the US Army had provided Custer and his men with defective weapons.
Authority to grant trading licences to sutlers was given to fort commanders by the new War Secretary, Alphonso Taft.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
