Lieutenant Freeman S. Bowley was fighting for his life in the man-made hellhole that was the Petersburg Crater when he noticed that the former slaves in his company of the 30th United States Colored Troops were not the only men of color wearing Union blue and dodging Confederate Minié balls on the stifling hot morning of July 30, 1864. “Among our troops was a company of Indians, belonging to the 1st Michigan S.S. [Sharpshooters],” recalled Bowley many years later. “They did splendid work, crawling to the very top of the bank, and rising up, they would take a quick and fatal aim, then drop quickly down again.”

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More than 20,000 American Indians fought in the Civil War for both the Union and the Confederacy. Probably the best known were the Cherokee soldiers of General Stand Watie, who sided with the South in the Trans-Mississippi West. But the men Bowley saw were mostly Chippewas and Ottawas from Company K of the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters, the largest unit of American Indians serving with the Union armies east of the Mississippi River.

Why did these men, who were neither citizens nor subject to the draft, leave the primeval pine forests and sparkling lakes where their people had lived for thousands of years to fight and die on the killing fields of Virginia? What motivated a people accustomed to white racism and government duplicity to send its fathers, sons and brothers to fight in a war to free black slaves while they themselves were not completely free? How could men, characterized by Michigan newspapers as “demi-savages” and “a poor, ignorant, and dependent race” resolutely stand their ground on the blood-slicked red clay slopes of the Crater while many other soldiers fled in terror?

The warriors of Company K were in the trenches before Petersburg because, by late 1863, the Union armies desperately needed men. President Abraham Lincoln had imposed a federal draft and assigned numerical quotas to be filled by each state’s governor. Two years earlier, however, the Michigan Legislature had rejected an offer by George Copway, a Chippewa and well-known Methodist minister, to raise a regiment of Great Lakes-area Indians who were, as he put it, “inured to hardships, fleet as deer, shrewd, and cautious.”

But the blood of Michigan boys soaking battlefields from Shiloh to Gettysburg gradually opened the lawmakers’ eyes to the possibility of affording their American Indian population the benefits of citizenship, at least as far as it affected their ability to be soldiers. By late 1862, the supervisors of Oceana County, along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, informed authorities that “thirty-four Indians whom we regard as citizens of said county” had enlisted. The good fathers of Oceana County seemed to have put prejudice aside—and not coincidently spared 34 white males and potential voters from the draft.

While the Michigan lawmakers were congratulating themselves on their newly discovered sense of equality, Colonel Charles V. DeLand, a veteran of the 9th Michigan Infantry, and a troop of energetic recruiters were scouring the Michigan hinterlands looking for men to join a regiment of sharpshooters—men who could move with stealth and kill with a single shot. American Indians, with a reputation for marksmanship and a tradition of living off the land, seemed ideal candidates if they could be convinced to join up.

Laurence Hauptman’s seminal study of Indians in the Civil War, Between Two Fires, argues that extreme economic necessity and the hopes of negotiating a more favorable treaty to protect their traditional homelands from white incursion were the primary reasons driving Michigan Indians into Union uniforms. But Saginaw Chippe­wa Chief Nock-ke-chick-faw-me, in a speech to the young warriors of his tribe gathered at Detroit, used a more sensational form of motivation. “If the South conquers you will be slave dogs,” he warned. “There will be no protection for us; we shall be driven from our homes, our lands, and the graves of our friends.”

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