Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

to such evils as placing Indians under demoralizing
restraint and punishing them bodily if
they defied those strictures. Nor did he dwell on
the moral complexities of his own position as
a conqueror. Good might have come from the
offense he caused by abducting Manuela had
she and their child survived and his ties to her
family lengthened and deepened, making him a
bridge between the old regime here and the new.
But the tragic consequences of that elopement
prevented him from remaining long in Monterey
as a guest of Angustias de la Guerra—who kept
Manuela’s room just as it was before she married—and
sent him into exile. He ended up on
the Great Plains, that vast field of toil and strife
east of Eden, where he served long and hard as a
tenacious Indian fighter.
intruSion and aCCoMModation
Sully spent almost his entire career in the West.
His one notable tour of duty in the East occurred
in 1862, when he campaigned as a colonel in the
Union Army during General George McClellan’s
unsuccessful bid to seize the Confederate capital,
Richmond. By then he had met the woman who
would become his second wife, Sophia Webster,
a resident of Richmond with whom he corresponded
during the war. According to Langdon
Sully, Alfred Sully’s grandson and biographer,
“Sophia was a Southern sympathizer. When
Alfred sent a note to her through the lines that
he could ‘see the lights of Richmond,’ she sent
a reply that he might see the lights but that he
would never reach them.” 17 Before wedding her,
In 1863–65, Sully commanded two far-ranging expeditions against hostile Sioux in the Dakota Territory. This photo-
graph of an encampment Sully established during his campaigns suggests its isolation and primitive conditions.
Of Sully’s leadership, Colonel M. T. Thomas of the Minnesota brigade wrote: “His perceptions were remarkably
clear, and he appeared to know intuitively just where the Indians were and what they would do. These instinctive
qualifications . . . rendered him fully competent for the duty to which he had been assigned, and, added to these, a
genial temperament made him an agreeable commander.”
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
15