Dee Brown - The Fetterman Massacre: Fort Phil Kearny and the Battle of the Hundred Slain

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The Fetterman Massacre

Dee Brown

For L. L. B.

I. April:
MOON WHEN THE GEESE LAY EGGS

My name is Henry B. Carrington: forty-three years of age, colonel Eighteenth U.S. Infantry, and now commanding post Fort McPherson, Nebraska, late commanding post Philip Kearny, Dakota Territory, and previously thereto commanding Mountain District, Department of the Platte, which command embraced the route from Fort Reno westward to Virginia City via the Big Horn and Yellowstone Rivers, and being the new route I occupied during the summer of 1866.

SO BEGAN, ON A spring day in 1867, Colonel Carringtons testimony before a commission convened at Fort McPherson to investigate the Fetterman Massacre of December 21, 1866. For several days Carrington defended his past actions, offering letters, records and reports relating to his command at Fort Phil Kearny, narrating a relentless procession of events which led to the violent deaths of three officers, seventy-six enlisted men and two civilians.

The Fetterman Massacre was the second battle in American history from which came no survivors, and was a nationally debated incident for ten yearsuntil overshadowed by the Custer Massacre of 1876. Acting under orders from Colonel Carrington, Brevet-Colonel William Judd Fetterman led eighty men out of the gates of Fort Phil Kearny at 11:15 A.M. of that dark December day. Carringtons orders were explicit: relieve the wood train from Indian attack, but do not pursue the enemy beyond Lodge Trail Ridge.

At 11:45 A.M. Fettermans command of forty-nine infantrymen and twenty-seven cavalrymen halted on the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge, with skirmishers out. The sky was bitter gray, thickening for snow, temperature dropping rapidly. A few minutes later Fettermans rear guard disappeared from view of the fort, passing over the ridge, moving north. At 12 noon, almost as the bugler was sounding dinner call in the fort, sentinels at the gate heard firing from beyond Lodge Trail Ridge. Colonel Carrington was notified immediately. By the time the colonel had mounted the lookout tower above his headquarters, firing was continuous and rapid. Without further delay, Carrington ordered Captain Tenodor Ten Eyck to move out to Fettermans relief. At 12:45 P.M., Ten Eyck and seventy-six men reached the summit of a ridge overlooking Peno Creek. The valley was swarming with Indians, at least two thousand of them, probably more. One or two scattered shots rang out from the hill beyond; then there was no more firing, only the jubilant cries of Indians racing their ponies, some shouting derisively at Ten Eycks troops, beckoning them to come down into the valley.

For several minutes Captain Ten Eyck could see no sign of Fettermans command, neither the mounted nor dismounted men. Then as the Indians began withdrawing from the valley, an enlisted man cried: Therere the men down there, all dead!

Maintaining his position on high ground until the Indian forces had vanished northward, Ten Eyck then cautiously advanced toward the battlefield. Near the Bozeman Road, dead men lay naked and mutilated, blood frozen in their wounds, in a circle about forty feet in diameter. They were mostly infantrymen. After loading the dead into his two ammunition wagons, Ten Eyck began a slow withdrawal to the fort, not reaching the gates until darkness was falling. The following morning, against the advice of his staff, Carrington led a second party out to the scene of battle and recovered the remaining bodies, mostly cavalrymen.

The full story of what happened in that brief hour of bloody carnage at high noon under the wintry sky of December 21, 1866, will never be known. During the years which followed, various Indian participantsSioux, Cheyenne and Arapahotold conflicting accounts of the battle. Yet the mystery is not so much what happened as why it happened. Why did Fetterman disobey Carringtons orders? Why did the cavalrymen leave the infantrymen to meet the full force of attack, and retire to high ground only to die a few minutes later as they had watched the infantrymen die? Why did the Indians retire from the field instead of attempting to annihilate Captain Ten Eycks seventy-six men, a move which if successful would have left the fort vulnerable to immediate capture?

In the first place, why were Fetterman and his men there in that lonely, uncharted wilderness, 236 miles north of Fort Laramie, in a country which only one year earlier had been ceded by treaty to the tribes as inviolable Indian territory?

The commission investigating the Fetterman Massacre examined some of these questions directly, dwelling upon the necessity for three forts along the Bozeman Trail, debating whether or not the strength of Carringtons military force was sufficient, yet never more than hinting at reasons for opening this road through the Plains Indians last unspoiled hunting ground.

The motivating factor of course was gold, which had been discovered in Montana in 1862, creating a rush to Virginia City through 1863 and 1864. During the Civil War, thousands of miners traveled to the diggings by two routeseither up the Missouri River by way of Fort Benton, or overland along the Platte Trail to Fort Hall and then doubling back into Montana Territory. These were roundabout routes, requiring weeks for passage. Public demand for a more direct route led two explorers in 1864 to mark out trails northward from Fort Laramie. Jim Bridger, aware of the Indians determination to keep the white man out of their sacred Powder River country, avoided that area and led his party of trail blazers west of the Big Horn Mountains. John Bozeman, seeking an even more direct route, ran his wagons east of the Big Horns, straight through the heart of the hunting grounds.

Except for Indian resistance, Bozemans route was by far the easier to travel, and by 1865 several parties of brave or foolhardy gold seekers risked their lives to make the crossing of what soon became known as the Montana Road.

In 1865, the Federal Government also became vitally interested in a direct route to the gold fields. After four years of Civil War, the United States Treasury was virtually bankrupt; gold was urgently needed to liquidate the accruing interest of the national debt. In hopes of encouraging more prospectors to make the journey to Montana, the government financed a survey for a direct route from Sioux City by way of the Niobrara River. Leader of this expedition of about one hundred men and 250 wagons was Colonel James A. Sawyer. The party included engineers and gold prospectors, and was escorted by two companies of former Confederate soldiers, who had sworn oaths of allegiance in exchange for release from military prisons.

Although Sawyer met with such strong Indian resistance that he was forced to abandon his original course, he finally reached Virginia City by following Bozemans route much of the way. His official report, ordered printed by Congress in March 1866, received wide publicity and increased pressure from civilians to make the Montana Road safe for travel. Recently discharged Civil War veterans were especially eager to journey west and seek their fortunes in the gold fields, but after surviving four years of war they were reluctant to fight their way there through tribes of hostile Indians.

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