Part 10; The Heart of Everything That Is...Colonel Carrington's Circus...Here Be Monsters...The Perfect Fort +

The Heart of Everything That is,The Untold Story of Red Cloud, 

An American Legend

24 

COLONEL CARRINGTON’S CIRCUS 

Still short of manpower, particularly of officers, the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Regiment departed Fort Kearney in late May 1866. Over 1,000 men—700 soldiers, 11 officers, and several hundred civilian teamsters driving more than 200 wagons—followed the well-worn Oregon Trail hugging the Platte along the sage-covered Nebraska plain. Despite their new equestrian skills the infantrymen marched in the van, followed by the wagons, with at least 700 beef cattle herded by mounted officers and dragoons. Someone dubbed the long train “Carrington’s Overland Circus, ” and though it is not recorded who coined the phrase, suspicion naturally fell on the sixty two-year-old iconoclast Jim Bridger, who rode along as chief scout.

This was the first crossing of the endless wrinkled prairie for the majority of the eastern recruits, and it showed. Their boyish enthusiasm at the landscape’s sights and sounds left the seasoned teamsters rolling their eyes. The newcomers gaped at startled pronghorns leaping in reaction to the flashes of heat lightning, and they fired potshots at skulking coyotes raising their yellow muzzles at the scent of jackrabbits the size of small dogs. They passed acres of prairie dog villages as the small rodents popped into and out of their spongy burrows like wind-up toys. And their first glimpse of the dark shape of faraway buffalo herds whose stampedes shook the earth for miles brought to mind—as one soldier noted in his journal—nothing so much as thousands of small schooners a sail on a shimmering sea. 

The caravan struggled through ravines clogged with shifting sands and up into crooked gorges whose rock walls narrowed to the width of a wagon. It passed cool, clear streams filled with thousands of pike, their “hard, white meat” providing a fresh and tasty alternative to the rock-like hardtack and moldy bacon. One can only imagine their thoughts when Chimney Rock rose before them, its strata of clay, volcanic ash, and sandstone erupting from the flats and tapering to a needle point that seemed to puncture the clouds. A few days later came the sight of the Scotts Bluff escarpment on the western horizon. This terraced “Gibraltar of the Plains, ” composed of five contiguous rock formations of crystallized magma, towers 830 feet above the prairie (and nearly half a mile above sea level), and is the highest point in Nebraska. With its rococo parapets and rain carved stone towers it resembles nothing so much as a medieval European castle somehow dropped onto the Plains

The troopers could hardly ignore the Indians watching them from every butte and mesa. As Lieutenant Bisbee noted, “We had no occasion to scout for Indians, they were always nearby.” At first, Bridger assured the soldiers that they were friendly. But when the column approached a ramshackle Army post known as Camp Cottonwood midway between Fort Kearney and Julesburg, the old trapper’s demeanor changed. He rose each morning before the reveille bugle, downed a few bites of pemmican, and brewed a pot of bitter coffee over a smoldering pile of buffalo chips—bois de vache, or “wood of cow” in the polite terminology of the Victorian era. He would then confer in Carrington’s tent before disappearing into the vastness. No one would see him again until dusk, when he’d return to give the colonel a report.

One morning a Brule Head Man rode into camp. Carrington greeted him with military courtesy, and with one of Bridger’s scouts interpreting the two parleyed over coffee and a pipe. The Brule told the colonel that many Lakota bands were camped near Fort Laramie, led by chiefs who were willing to listen to the white negotiators. With his Bozeman Trail “map” in mind, Carrington probed the Indian for geographic information on the Powder River Country. The Brule ignored the question and said, “Fighting men in that country. . . . They will not give you the road unless you whip them.” Thereafter the “Circus” wagons were drawn into tight, interlocking squares each night, and Carrington issued orders reining in mounted officers who had fallen into the habit of lighting out at the sight of game.

Two weeks out of Fort Kearney the column reached Julesburg and was forced to float its gear on makeshift ferries across the mile-wide Platte running high with snowmelt. It then veered northwest, following the north fork of the river. A week later, with the temperature above 100 degrees and a rising wind ripping the canvas covers from his freight wagons, Colonel Carrington crested a cactus-studded ridge overlooking the gates of Fort Laramie. The searing heat had turned most of the prairie brown, and across the ocher flats were camped more than 2,000 Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho “in assorted sizes, sexes, and conditions; dressed, half-dressed, and undressed.” Carrington scanned the “menagerie” through his field glasses and was taken aback by the lax security. There were no sentries posted, and Indians and soldiers inside the stockade mingled freely. He decided to bivouac his raw troops some distance away in order to avoid accidental misunderstandings. They had, after all, been sent west to kill Indians.

That evening Carrington splashed across the shallow Laramie and entered the fort. He introduced himself to its commander, Colonel Henry Maynadier, who was serving as a member of the government’s peace commission. He met the civilian negotiators, including a superintendent of the Office of Indian Affairs who was to chair the next day’s treaty ceremonies. The colonel was also introduced to several Lakota Head Men. They had already learned of his mission from the Brules who had visited him, and they were cold toward the “Little White Chief.” The terms of the treaty to allow Americans passage through the Powder River Country had not even been laid out or discussed, much less signed by the Indians—and already the white soldiers presumed to ride north and build forts? Carrington understood that it would be hard to dispute this point, but he intended to try nonetheless.

The following morning, while Margaret Carrington and a few other women availed themselves of the sutler’s meager stock of rice, sugar, and coffee, the superintendent from the Office of Indian Affairs pulled Colonel Carrington aside and assured him that nearly all of the Brule, Miniconjou, and Oglala chiefs in attendance were ready to sign the treaty. Only a few from the Upper Powder were holding out and still needed to be convinced. But they were already in camp, and the superintendent had no doubt that they would come around. Carrington asked who these holdouts were. The superintendent rattled off a few names: Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses, Spotted Tail, Red Cloud. The latter two, Colonel Carrington was told, “rule the Lakota nation.” This information was half right. By now the name Red Cloud was familiar to every soldier west of the Missouri. Although he was technically outranked in the Oglala hierarchy by Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses in time of peace, this was not such a time. According to an account by Colonel Maynadier, the Indian agents had made great efforts to secure the Bad Face war chief’s attendance by showing more deference to him than to any other Indian. They were unaware that Red Cloud had planned to be there all along in order to take the measure of his antagonists.

Over the next few days Carrington observed the usual council formalities— introductions of tribal luminaries; a pantomime buffalo hunt followed by a grand feast; the presentation to the Indians of gifts of coffee, navy tobacco, bright bolts of calico, and sacks of brown sugar. When not monitoring the ceremonies the colonel busied himself composing ever-more beseeching dispatches to General Cooke in Omaha. Cooke had promised him fresh horses at Fort Laramie. There were none. The wagon loads of pilot bread and hardtack he expected to take possession of would last no more than four days, and the sacks of flour marked for his commissary were caked, musty, and brown with dry rot. Worse, he had requisitioned 100,000 rounds of .58-caliber ammunition for his troop’s ancient rifles. The post commander could not even spare 1,000. On the outskirts of the fort he had seen Indian ponies with gunpowder kegs lashed to their saddles. No one, not even Jim Bridger, seemed to know how the Indians had come into possession of the ammunition while Carrington could not even secure shot for his men.

He was scheduled to depart in two days, and the government negotiators agreed to his request to address the Indians directly. He was certain that his opening statements of peace and amity toward the tribes would win them over, so certain that he asked his wife, Margaret, to attend. The next morning he strode poised and confident onto the parade ground in front of the post headquarters. The commission members and the Lakota Head Men sat around him in a semicircle at rough wooden tables set on a raised platform. Behind them hundreds of warriors, braves, and squaws stood or squatted under the blazing June sun. The Indian Affairs superintendent introduced Carrington, but the translator had not even completed his name before there were murmurs across the parade ground. The Indians already knew who Carrington was, and where he was going. They grew restless, squirming on the benches, and a few made guttural clucking sounds from deep in their throats.

The nervous translator suggested to Carrington that perhaps it would be prudent to allow the chiefs to speak first. The colonel nodded, and the floodgates opened. Lakota after Lakota rose to condemn and harangue the impertinent white men for daring to treat them as if they were as stupid as Pawnee children. Their way of life had been destroyed and degraded enough. The whites and their livestock had driven away the buffalo and denuded the prairie. The Indians had been crowded into smaller and smaller pockets of land to live in crude squalor until they faced starvation. And now the Americans wanted even that land? They had been invited to listen to the terms of yet another treaty that the white soldiers already considered a fait accompli. The presence of Carrington and his column was proof of this deceit. Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses locked eyes with the colonel and warned him that if he dared venture into the Powder River Country, “In two moons the command would not have a hoof left.” The threat was followed by loud grunts and an approving chorus of hun huns. Then Red Cloud rose.

The Lakota war chief stood tall, jutted his chin, and pulled his buffalo robe tight about his massive shoulders. “The Great Father sends us presents and wants a new road, ” he said, his voice rising to a shout. “But the White Chief already goes with soldiers to steal the road before the Indian says yes or no. I will talk with you no more. I will go now, and I will fight you. As long as I live I will fight you for the last hunting grounds.” His final sentences were nearly drowned out in a welter of hoots and ululations. Carrington tried to answer, shouting over the noise that he indeed intended to build forts along the Bozeman Trail, but only for use as travelers’ way stations. His words were lost in the din. The Indian Affairs superintendent banged his gavel to regain control of the meeting. Only the whites were paying attention.

As Colonel Carrington walked from the parade ground toward his horse Margaret Carrington spotted Red Cloud and another Indian breaking from the crowd. They seemed to be shadowing her husband, and gradually gaining ground. Red Cloud’s right hand was at his side, his fingers gripping the hilt of a large knife. Even taking into account his not negligible temper, it is highly unlikely that a man as savvy as Red Cloud would have chosen this public moment, inside Fort Laramie, to assassinate a U.S. Army officer. Margaret Carrington’s account, although no doubt accurate in its basics, must be read with caution: she was a newcomer to Indian country, and she was familiar with the era’s rather feverish (and often accurate) accounts of “savage” maliciousness.

On seeing the big, angry Indian fondling his knife, Margaret shouted a warning to the colonel. Red Cloud was nearly upon him. Carrington slowed and looked sidewise at the Oglala chief, not precisely challenging him, but hitching his holster closer to his hip and resting his palm on the revolver’s handle. His hand remained on his gun as Red Cloud walked past him, as if he were invisible, and continued through the post’s front gates.

Later that day the commanding officer at Fort Laramie advised the Carringtons to pay no attention to Red Cloud’s “tantrum,” as such things were as common among Indians as with spoiled children. He even intimated that Red Cloud was not as influential a Head Man as some of the others present, including Spotted Tail. Red Cloud, he said, was no more than the leader “of the young men who they called ‘Bad Faces, ’ always fighting other tribes and stealing their horses.” Probably he would be back the next day with the rest, begging for presents. Yet when Carrington and Bridger rode back to their camp that night they noticed that Red Cloud’s lodge had been struck, and that the ponies laden with the gunpowder kegs were gone. Red Cloud, observed Margaret Carrington, “in a very few days quite decidedly developed his hate and his schemes of mischief.”

25 

HERE BE MONSTERS 

The 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment pushed off from Fort Laramie on June 17, 1866, the day before the peace conference formally ended. The conference was “a disgusting farce and disgraceful swindle, ” according to J. B. Weston, an attorney who witnessed the ceremony. Weston’s prescient analysis contradicted the official report of the Indian Affairs superintendent, who wrote to Washington, “Satisfactory treaty concluded with the Sioux. Most cordial feeling prevails.” In reality Red Cloud’s explosion left a bitter taste all around. Some Head Men, weary of constant war, had touched the pen; these included most of the southern Lakota from the Republican River corridor. So too had Spotted Tail, who had ridden down from his territory on the White River. But none of the bolder chiefs would do so, and many braves from bands whose leaders did agree to the pact rode north from Fort Laramie with Red Cloud.

This was what now faced Carrington and his battalion as they set out across the vast hinterland. It was 150 miles to Fort Reno on the Powder, and beyond that the world as the white soldiers knew it would end. The journey through this brink of the American empire would provide Carrington and his men with a greater understanding of just what they were to face in the months ahead.

The trail to Fort Reno, thick with prickly pear and saltbush, was punctuated by but a few lonely trading posts and ferry crossings, and the troop was watched the entire length of the march by Lakota blending into the willows in shady hollows or, concealed beneath wolf skins, lying on high rimrock. Bridger, who picked up Indian signs each day, reported to Carrington, “They follow ye always. They’ve seen ye, every day. And when you don’t see any of them about, is just the time to look for their devilment.”

Examples of such devilment were numerous. The column paused at one trading post owned by a Missouri Frenchman, Louis Gazzous, whom Bridger introduced to Carrington as “French Pete.” French Pete, who was married to a Sioux woman, warned the colonel that there was already loud talk in the territory of the scalps and horseflesh of which his column would soon be relieved. At Bridger’s old ferry station, now operated by a man named Mills, the colonel learned that a raiding party had emptied Mills’s corrals just twenty-four hours earlier. Mills, who was also married to an Indian—an Oglala woman—was agitated. Given his wife’s tribal status, he said, he had always been immune to such theft. He considered the action significant, a harbinger of a new kind of bitterness on the High Plains. When Carrington asked Mills if he had any idea who was responsible, he answered immediately: “Red Cloud.” Carrington again ordered security tightened, with particular emphasis on hobbling the stock at night, and pushed on.

After the experience of Forts Kearney and Laramie, the first glimpse of Fort Reno was sobering. Set on a small rise blanketed with thistle and greasewood hard by the Powder’s north bank, it overlooked a maze of arroyos and low washes, their cracked-mud beds ideal for concealing Indian raiding parties. The outpost itself was a rotting, weatherworn log structure caulked with mud; a dilapidated corral abutted a string of warehouses built into low red-shale hills. Few men or officers from the battalion had ever seen a frontier post constructed to repel a full-frontal Indian attack. This one was dominated by two defensive bastions holding two of the post’s six mountain howitzers, and rifle loopholes had been bored through the adobe walls to accommodate enfilading fire. The place struck the soldiers more as a prison than a military installation. This was apt.

The previous summer General Connor had left the fort manned by a unit of Winnebago scouts and the two volunteer companies of “galvanized Yankees” that had accompanied the road- building train. The Indian scouts had only recently been ordered back to Illinois as a precaution against further inciting their ancient enemies, the Sioux. The hard winter had combined with a poor diet to leave many of the former Confederates near death from dysentery, pneumonia, and scurvy so severe that their teeth were falling out. They had the emaciated, scraggly look of shipwreck survivors. In a sense, this is what they were.

The historian Stephen E. Ambrose notes that Indian fighting on the High Plains was more akin to naval warfare than to any other type of battle. The U.S. Army “was lumbering around with battleships and cruisers, chasing pirates in sleek, fast vessels, ” and the forts and camps were like home ports to which large ships must return often for supplies. The Indians lived off the land much as the pirates lived off the ocean, and the soldiers deployed to the frontier had no more comprehension of their surroundings than the crews of Columbus or Magellan reading blank charts marked with the warning “Here be monsters.”

Colonel Carrington, well aware of this, had originally planned to demolish Fort Reno and transport any salvageable food and construction supplies to a site closer to the Black Hills with better access to wood, water, and pasturage. But eleven hard days on the road had changed his mind. Both soldiers and emigrant travelers would need a secure post where they could lay over, and even if the unimpressive pile of wood 150 miles from Fort Laramie did not deserve the appellation “fort, ” it would certainly serve as a way station. Thus was “Reno Station” born as a midway stopover for resting weary stock and repairing broken wagons between the Oregon Trail and the new posts Carrington intended to build farther north. He carried with him orders mustering out the irritable “galvanized Yankees”—they immediately disappeared like ghosts in the night—and selected a company of sixty to seventy men from the battalion to permanently garrison the station. Then he and his officers set out to reconnoiter their new possession.

The warehouses—made of eight-foot cottonwood logs roofed and chinked with mud daub—had been inundated by the winter’s terrible snows, and the thick slabs of bacon stocked within were so rotten that gobs of the greenish, slimy fat were sloughing off the lean meat. An infestation of mice had burrowed a network of tunnels through the flour sacks, whose contents had caked around the droppings and dead rodents. The men improvised a large sieve out of burlap sacks to separate the dead mice and the larger pieces of excrement. What remained of this unappetizing mess was dutifully repackaged and loaded onto wagons.

Carrington was further astonished to learn that three emigrant trains bound for Montana were camped a few hundred yards away over a nearby ridge, awaiting a military escort up the Bozeman Trail. A fourth train, he was told, had already departed. When he rode out to meet the travelers the following morning, he was appalled. A blinding summer hailstorm—the stones as large as pullet eggs, one trooper recorded in his journal—had transformed the camps into mud sties, and none of the expeditions’ leaders had taken any precaution against Indian raids. The wagons were spread haphazardly across a gorgeous valley flecked with wild rose and pink wintergreen, and the mules and horses roamed free of hobbles or pickets. When Carrington gently chided one wagon master for his lax security, the man scoffed at him: “We’ll never see an Indian unless they come to beg for sugar, flour, or tobacco.”

On the ride back to Reno Station, Carrington was already formulating a set of regulations to be issued to all civilian trains passing up the Bozeman Trail. Paramount in his mind was instilling a sense of discipline in these wild, independent-minded emigrants. No trains with less than thirty armed men, he decided, would be allowed to move forward. (The number would soon be revised upward, to forty.) And each passenger on any train that did meet this quota would have to sign in at every fort along the route. If a traveler was signed in at one post but failed to appear with the train at the next, the train could not go on until the laggard caught up. This, Carrington hoped, would not only end the “constant separation and scattering of trains pretending to act in concert, ” but also eliminate the Indians’ most tempting targets—the stragglers.

That same afternoon Carrington dropped by the sutler’s rude store just north of Reno Station. It was owned and operated by A. C. Leighton, a trader who had secured a government contract to supply all the forts erected by the 18th Regiment. Before dismounting, the colonel noticed Leighton’s unguarded remuda grazing in a pocket ravine on the other side of the river. Inside the store the trader, a longtime frontiersman, assured him that the animals were in no peril; he and the Lakota had always been on good terms. The words were barely out of his mouth before one of Carrington’s escorts burst in, shouting, “Indians.” The group rushed to the door to watch the last of Leighton’s animals being stampeded over a rise by a Lakota raiding party.

Carrington’s squad galloped to Reno Station, where the colonel ordered Captain Haymond to form up a party of ninety men. They were mounted and riding within thirty minutes. By midnight the patrol had not returned, and Carrington paced the battlements until, about an hour later, he spotted the exhausted detail straggling back over a dusty butte. He counted no empty saddles, but neither had the troopers recaptured any of Leighton’s stock. Haymond reported that they had ridden fifty miles before losing the Indians; the only animal they could catch was a half-lame Indian pony abandoned during the chase. Carrington and his officers gathered round as Haymond emptied a bulging elk-skin sack tied to the pony’s saddle. It was stuffed with bags of brown sugar and coffee, pouches of navy tobacco, and a folded length of bright calico—gifts from the treaty council.

The colonel spent nearly two weeks securing Reno Station and making ready for the next stage of his journey. There were only two incidents of note. The first was the disciplining of an infantryman for public drunkenness on Independence Day. The private, who had purchased the whiskey from the sutler Leighton, was staked to the ground, spreadeagle, for six hours as swarms of flies lapped up the alcohol oozing from his pores. The second was the departure of the civilian trains. Their impatient wagon masters decided not to wait for a military escort and formed one large train that rolled north a few days after the battalion’s arrival. 

Eight days later, in the predawn hours of July 16— the hottest day on record across the High Plains in the summer of 1866, with the temperature approaching 111 degrees—seven companies of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th U.S. Infantry bade farewell to the small Reno Station garrison and marched northwest. For all its heat, filth, and squalor, the soldiers would soon enough come to recall the station fondly as their last, tenuous link to civilization. The territory beyond, between the little godforsaken post on the north bank of the Powder and the gold camps of Montana, was as mysterious and terrifying as any uncharted sea. 

26 

THE PERFECT FORT 

The transition, wrote Margaret Carrington, “was like the quick turn of a kaleidoscope.” One day the flat, brown prairie had been hot enough to crack leather boots, swell mules’ tongues out of their mouths, and turn the incessant grasshoppers that blanketed the earth into tiny kindling. Twenty-four hours later chilly mountain breezes forced the women to don shawls, prickly pear was replaced by luxuriant groves of leafy willow and cedar, and the cool water from mountain streams was so clear that the soldiers could count individual fish. 

It took the column four days to reach the long, slim plateau that rises athwart the Bozeman Trail some forty miles south of the present-day Montana border. The grass covered bench land—5,790 feet above sea level by Colonel Carrington’s calculation—juts from a magnificent valley formed by two parallel creeks called the Little Piney and Big Piney in the shadow of the east face of the snow-crusted Bighorns. John Bozeman’s maps had, of course, not done the site justice. The plentiful fresh water streaming out of the mountains had turned the surrounding acres of lush pasturage that rolled north to Goose Creek into a swaying shamrock sheen too tall and thick for a horse to canter through, and the site was only six miles from slopes covered with forests of pine, hemlock, balsam, fir, and spruce. “At last we had the prospect of finding a home, ” wrote Margaret Carrington. Everyone seemed satisfied except Jim Bridger.

The march from Reno Station to what was to become Fort Phil Kearny 1 had been tense. Trouble started a mere twelve hours out, along a nearly dry alkaline creek bed called Crazy Woman Fork. By that point nearly half the column’s wagons were in need of repair, their wooden wheels so irreparably shrunk by the heat that the metal rims wobbled and finally fell off. Axles and spokes were also in poor shape, and Colonel Carrington called a halt while his wheelwrights stoked charcoal bonfires to forge new rims. When the task dragged on longer than expected the colonel marched on, leaving several companies behind under Captain Haymond to complete the work. 
1. The War Department had initially ordered the post to be named Fort Philip Kearny after the one-armed martyr of 1862’s Battle of Chantilly, who was also the nephew of the Mexican War hero Stephen Kearny. To veterans of the Army of the Republic, however, General Kearny was “Fighting Phil,” and this popular usage prevailed.
There were two legends regarding the naming of Crazy Woman Fork. According to the more benign story, an old, demented Indian woman had once constructed a semipermanent brush-and-grass tepee, called a wickiup, on the creek and made the site her home. The second, more gruesome, story was that an emigrant family had been ambushed there while watering stock. The husband and children were killed and mutilated before the wife’s eyes, and she had been raped and had gone insane. The Indians, afraid of calling bad medicine down on themselves for killing a madwoman, allowed her to wander off, and it was said she still haunted the vicinity. The soldiers stoking the charcoal pits preferred to believe the former legend. 

Not far past Crazy Woman Fork the trail descended into a long, tight ravine, and before the soldiers even reached it Jim Bridger came racing back to the main column. He and Carrington rode ahead to a spot where Bridger pointed at two small shards of a wooden cracker box, their jagged ends jammed into the dirt at the side of the road. Scrawled across the wood were messages from the consolidated emigrant train reporting that here they had beaten off an attack by Indians but lost some of their horses and oxen. Carrington ordered his pickets doubled that night, but there was no sign of Indians. The next day the column reached the two Piney creeks. 

Though the broken wagons and the eerie warnings had put nerves on edge, the beautiful country at the confluence of Big Piney Creek and Little Piney Creek changed everyone’s mood. And by the time his horse had climbed the small plateau between the two rushing streams, Colonel Carrington was already planning. He envisioned three of his companies garrisoning this post while, the sooner the better, his four remaining companies would continue to strike north by northwest to establish two more permanent camps: one on the Bighorn and, beyond that, another on the upper Yellowstone. Jim Bridger appeared to be the only person unhappy with the arrangement.

Bridger noted that despite the plateau’s proximity to forest, clean water, and rich pasturage, the site was overlooked on three sides by even taller ridges and hills, heights from which Indians could study the soldiers with impunity. Due west, a long set of foothills—Carrington named them the Sullivant Hills, after his wife’s family —rolled up into the Bighorns. A separate escarpment called Lodge Trail Ridge bent around the plateau north by northeast no more than a mile and a half away. Both were excellent observation points, and Bridger urged Carrington to keep moving north to find a more suitable site somewhere on the Tongue, some fifty miles away. As Carrington led a patrol on a seventy-mile circuit to scout that area, he almost took Bridger’s point. The country between Goose Creek and the Tongue teemed with game, and wild cherries, strawberries, plums, gooseberries, and currants grew in abundance. But the colonel feared that it was too remote from the forested Bighorns to haul wood for construction and winter fires. 

Once the patrol returned, Carrington politely but firmly informed Bridger that construction would begin tomorrow. He noted that the gently sloped, 900-by-600- foot plateau between the Piney creeks was a natural defensive position—“an engineer would hardly make a more perfect grade for the sweep of fire.” As for the Sullivant Hills and Lodge Trail Ridge, he intended to post daylight pickets on the tallest butte in the area, the nearly mile-high Pilot Knob, a mile due south across Little Piney Creek. Lookouts there would negate any Indian advantage. Bridger had stated his piece and had been overruled. He was not a man to repeat himself.

Like General Connor during the previous summer’s campaign, Colonel Carrington was having a difficult time deciding what to make of Bridger. It was quite evident that the old mountain man’s rough and ready life was finally catching up to him. He was hobbled by painful bouts of arthritis, particularly where the arrowhead had been removed from his spine, and on some mornings he looked as if he might have to be helped onto his old gray nag. Yet his instincts—and eyesight—seemed as sharp as ever. During the passage from Reno Station he had often shaded his brow with a flat hand before pointing to what he said were small groups of Indians watching their every move, although Carrington had difficulty spotting them even with his field glasses. On the day before they reached Crazy Woman Fork a small party of Lakota had met the column on the trail and, on standing orders, Bridger and his scouts had reluctantly escorted them to the colonel’s tent. The Indians professed amity, telling Carrington they were going to fight Snakes “over the mountains, ” and the colonel rewarded them with the usual gifts of coffee and tobacco. Carrington was pleased to have made what he considered a good first impression until Bridger tactfully informed him that he had just handed over presents to a Lakota scouting party whose sole mission was to ascertain, up close, his unit’s strength.

But despite Carrington’s nagging doubts about Bridger, he was smart enough to recognize that he needed the old trapper at his side. This was never more evident than when he returned from his scouting mission to the Tongue to discover the first instance of what would become a persistent difficulty. Seven of his enlisted men, singly and in small groups, had deserted for the Montana gold fields. The battalion had suffered scattered desertions since Kansas, but Carrington assumed that once they had reached hostile territory no man would be so foolish as to strike out. He had not taken into his calculations the lure of what the Indians called the yellow metal that drove white men crazy, and in the coming months it was not unusual for visitors to Fort Phil Kearny to see captured AWOLs encumbered with balls and chains or wearing barrels with signs stating their offenses. 

On this occasion the quartermaster Captain Brown, with Lieutenant Bisbee at his side, had pursued the deserters up the Bozeman Trail, but was stopped seven miles out by a large band of Cheyenne camped near a mobile trading post operated by “French Pete” Gazzous and his partner. Exemplifying the convoluted social and political mores of the prairie, the Cheyenne professed to be peaceable and treated Gazzous as a friend, yet warned the soldiers they would kill them if they ventured farther north. A signal from French Pete confirmed their intent, and the soldiers turned back without the deserters but with a message from a Cheyenne Head Man named Black Horse. He wanted to parley with the Little White Chief. 

What followed was the same North American pas de deux between the white and red cultures that had been taking place since the Mayflower landing. By the time Black Horse and a small coterie of his sub-chiefs and warriors arrived at the future site of Fort Phil Kearny under white flag two days later, Carrington’s surveying and engineering skills had transformed the empty grass plateau into a rectangular seventeen-acre tent city. Black Horse, seemingly impressed, told the colonel through an interpreter that his followers wanted no more war with the whites, but that other members of their tribe, allied with the Lakota and Arapaho, were determined not only to wipe out the interlopers, but to fight any Indian bands who would not join them. Throughout the daylong meeting Carrington did not need his translator to recognize the one name that was mentioned repeatedly —Makhpiya-luta, Red Cloud. 

Red Cloud was now a Big Belly, Black Horse said, and explained what that meant. Moreover, according to the Cheyenne, Red Cloud had hundreds if not thousands of warriors riding with him. His plan was to cut off the body of the trespassing white snake between here and Reno Station, and eventually all the way south to Fort Laramie. He would then crush the weakened serpent’s head beneath his moccasin heel. Carrington and his troop at Fort Phil Kearny were that head. The memory of Fort Laramie, of the daggers in Red Cloud’s eyes, and of the big knife in his hand, was fresh in Carrington’s mind. The colonel finally realized that Bridger had not been unrealistic with his constant warnings of being watched and studied by Red Cloud from the day they had departed Fort Laramie.

Black Horse told the soldiers that the Bad Faces knew exactly how many soldiers and horses Carrington had detached to garrison Reno Station. They had counted the precise number of troopers dispatched in the attempt to retrieve the trader Leighton’s stolen remuda—which, by the way, was now in the possession of the Lakota. They knew the number of men in the smaller party still repairing wagons at Crazy Woman Fork. And Red Cloud and his braves had shadowed Carrington’s patrol two days earlier when they had scouted the Tongue for alternative sites for the post. All this intelligence, Black Horse said, was in service to Red Cloud’s desire for a greater understanding of the white soldiers’ habits. Finally, Black Horse mentioned that many of Red Cloud’s warriors were at present undergoing a Sun Dance high up on the Tongue, but there were those who had ridden south toward the Powder to begin the process of killing the white snake’s body. Among the latter was Crazy Horse. 

Carrington, Bridger, and the officers present remained stone-faced and seemingly unimpressed during the course of the meeting. But despite himself the colonel found the Bad Face war chief’s isolate-and-destroy strategy admirably cool and calculating, a course of action worthy of Stonewall Jackson or Jeb Stuart. While they palavered Captain Haymond and the wagon repair party arrived from Crazy Woman Fork—one less worry for Carrington—but when the colonel bade good-bye to Black Horse and his party late that night he was unaware that his Cheyenne visitors were not traveling far. In fact they halted just a few miles up the Bozeman Trail to camp and trade with French Pete Gazzous.

The Cheyenne were in the process of exchanging pelts for, among other items, cheap whiskey when Red Cloud and a large party of Lakota rode in on them. Red Cloud quizzed the Cheyenne Black Horse as to the Little White Chief’s intentions. Black Horse told the truth—the soldiers not only would erect a permanent fort between the Little Piney and Big Piney but also planned to build more posts farther up the trail. Then Red Cloud eyed the whiskey jugs and demanded to know why Black Horse and his Cheyenne would bother with these whites. Could the loyalty of the mighty and regal Cheyenne truly be purchased with tobacco, paltry trinkets, and the poisonous mini wakan? Where was their pride? “The White Man lies and steals, ” he said. “My lodges were many, but now they are few. The White Man wants all. The White Man must fight, and the Indian will die where his fathers died.” 

Black Horse offered no reply, and in a fit of rage Red Cloud and the Lakota grabbed their bows and quirted the Cheyenne across their faces, shoulders, and backs. This was unprecedented. Yes, Black Horse and his braves were outnumbered, but they were also important Cheyenne. It was the first time in their lives that these proud men had ever been treated like disobedient women. That they did not fight back against this humiliation signaled a new day on the prairie, for Red Cloud did little without calculation. This was not only a display of his contempt, but an announcement. There would be no more half measures against the whites, or against anyone who had truck with them. As the Lakota rode off Black Horse and his people immediately packed up and set a course for the mountains. Before leaving they warned French Pete and his partner that they would be wise to do the same, or at least to seek safe harbor in the soldiers’ camp between the Piney creeks.

Meanwhile, several miles to the south, Colonel Carrington was discussing with Captain Haymond a change in orders. The captain had expected to start up the Bozeman Trail the following morning with four companies to scout appropriate sites to build posts. The colonel now had second thoughts about stretching his already reduced battalion so thin. Given what he had gleaned from the Cheyenne, further fragmenting his forces seemed madness, at least until reinforcements arrived. No, Haymond and his men would remain at Fort Phil Kearny, he decided. The extra hands and strong backs would not only facilitate the transformation of the fort from a tent city into a proper, permanent stockade, but also buy time to feel out Red Cloud’s movements. And, with seven well-armed companies present, the Indians would not dare attempt to strike. 

It was as if Red Cloud was reading Carrington’s mind. He attacked the next morning.

27 

“MERCIFULLY KILL 

ALL THE WOUNDED” 

In a move born of misplaced confidence, Captain Haymond did not bed down his four companies in the temporary tent city on the plateau after arriving from Crazy Woman Fork with the repaired wagons. He instead made camp closer to water in a rolling swale midway between Big Piney Creek and Lodge Trail Ridge. He was awakened at 5 a.m. the next day, June 17, when a picket gave a loud shout. A Lakota raiding party had slithered on their bellies down from the ridgeline, and one Indian managed to leap onto the troop’s bell mare. Before Haymond or any of his men could respond, nearly 175 animals, mostly mules, were being stampeded back over the ridgeline. The easterners were to now learn their first lesson in Indian fighting— never give chase to a raiding party without a close-knit and overwhelming force. 

Haymond and an aide were immediately mounted and off, but the rest of the riders had difficulty rounding up and saddling their skittish horses. Haymond was nearly out of sight by the time the troop, in scattered groups of three and four, followed the dust cloud of stolen animals. When the Indians saw the haphazard pursuit, braves began dropping back and circling around in ambush. One trooper took an arrow to his chest; another was blasted out of his saddle by a musket ball. Reinforcements from Fort Phil Kearny eventually caught up to Haymond’s party, engaged by now in a running fight stretching along a fifteen-mile length of the trail. They were too late for the two dead and three seriously wounded men in Haymond’s command. Nor did the Americans manage to retrieve their mules and horses, which had vanished into the prairie. 

On the slow, bitter ride back to the fort the troop trundled past the dead campfires of French Pete’s mobile trading post. Half a mile up the road they found the trader and his partner splayed across the dusty saw grass. They had been scalped, their limbs hacked off, and their genitals stuffed down their throats. A few yards away, among the detritus of the traders’ looted Murphy wagons, the corpses of French Pete’s four teamsters were discovered similarly mutilated. The soldiers had of course heard stories of Indian atrocities, but this was their first personal encounter. One private noted in his journal that “it gave us all a most convincing lesson on what our fate would be should we fall into their hands.” As the troop was burying the bodies a soldier heard whimpering coming from a thick copse of greasewood. He pulled French Pete’s Oglala wife and her five children from their hiding spot. Whether they had been spared out of indifference or tribal loyalty, no one could say. 

⚖   ⚖   ⚖ 

Over the next week Fort Phil Kearny began to rise as if by magic, a testament to Carrington’s engineering skills and the hard work of his men. He dispatched woodcutters into the Bighorn foothills to establish a pinery on a small island between the two deep gorges cut by the parallel creeks. Soon, thanks to a horse-powered sawmill, mule trains were transporting logs and boards from the mountain forests by the ton and the fort’s eight-foot-high walls took shape. Under Carrington the soldiers were temporarily transformed from a fighting troop into a battalion of loggers, blacksmiths, carpenters, teamsters, hay mowers, painters, and shingle makers, and the outlines of rough wooden structures appeared within the rectangle that ran roughly northwest to southeast for just over 1,500 feet.

The walls consisted of more than 4,000 logs, with firing loopholes bored through every fourth one. This stockade would soon enclose enlisted men’s barracks, officers’ quarters, warehouses, administration buildings, a sutler’s store, an infirmary, and an underground magazine. These in turn would surround a mown parade ground complete with a gazebo bandstand from which the regiment’s musicians serenaded the battalion and passing travelers during the morning’s guard-mounting ceremony and again at dress parade at sunset. Such was Carrington’s attention to detail that he issued orders that no one was to walk on the grass. 

At the corners of the fort stood enfilading blockhouses complete with howitzer portholes; aware that the mile-high elevation would distort depths and distances to untrained eyes, the colonel had his artillerymen walk off and mark firing ranges. To the rear of the post proper a 200-by-600-foot quartermaster’s yard extended southeast to Little Piney Creek. This fenced-in enclosure would eventually hold stables, civilian teamsters’ quarters, mechanics’ sheds, and yards for cordwood and baled hay. Big Piney Creek ran along the Bozeman Trail just before the front gate on the north. Pilot Knob, a mile to the south, overlooked the entire complex.

While construction proceeded, Carrington continued to bombard General Cooke with requests for weapons and men. His eight infantry companies— now stretched along the sixty five miles between Reno Station and Fort Phil Kearny —totaled about 700 men, more than 500 of them raw recruits with an average age of twenty-three. When not working or standing picket they required constant training, something that, given the dearth of officers, proved a difficult proposition. Even routine procedures such as target practice were curtailed because of the lack of ammunition. It was said that the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Regiment became the best knife throwers in the Army. Although they had yet to be attacked, the detachments to the pinery could feel eyes watching them from the thick forest, and each night the Indians probed for openings in the American defenses, making off with a horse here, a mule there. To make matters worse, one day a mail courier arrived from Fort Laramie with orders recalling to the States two of Colonel Carrington’s officers, including Captain Haymond. The same dispatch informed the colonel that commissioned replacements were en route. He took little solace. He was not happy to trade two experienced veterans for . . . who, exactly? He had not been sent names.

Red Cloud was enraged from the first thwunck of ax blades gouging the trunks of the ninety-foot pines on what the Americans had dubbed Piney Island. His scouts kept up a constant surveillance of the woodchoppers, though it was hardly necessary. The whine of the sawmill and the crash of falling timber could be heard for miles—a visceral reminder of the defilement of Wakan Tanka. It was time for another lesson. 

In the last week of June, Colonel Carrington detached a company of infantry to return to Reno Station for sacks of foodstuffs he could not haul on the initial trip north. He sent Bridger along as a precaution. Sixteen hours later the colonel’s orderly and a courier covered with dust awakened him at one o’clock in the morning. Not only had his freight train been ambushed near the Clear Fork of the Powder, but three other emigrant trains in the vicinity were also under attack. Carrington was dumbfounded. Red Cloud had orchestrated four simultaneous engagements. It was unheard of. The colonel had no idea that farther south, near Crazy Woman Fork, an even larger party of Lakota had pinned down a relief column that included the battalion’s five replacement officers.

• • • 

The Battle of Crazy Woman Fork, as it came to be known, was notable not only for its ferocity and desperate heroism, but as one of the first recorded instances of American soldiers voting to kill each other rather than be taken by the Sioux. 

The drama began at Reno Station, where on July 20 a reinforcement detachment from the 18th Regiment under the command of Lieutenant George Templeton set out for Fort Phil Kearny. The party consisted of five lieutenants, including Templeton; ten enlisted men; and an Army chaplain and surgeon reporting to Carrington. They were joined by nine teamsters contracted to drive the five freight wagons and two ambulances. One of the officers and one of the enlisted men had brought their wives and infant sons. The final member of the caravan was a dashing adventure seeker named Ridgway Glover, one of the odder characters passing through the pages of the old West.

Glover was a lanky, peripatetic thirty-four-yearold from Philadelphia with a shock of long, thick yellow hair usually tucked under a flat felt hat of the sort in vogue back east. The scion of a prominent Quaker family, he had taken up the fledgling art of photography a few years earlier, and his tintypes of President Lincoln’s funeral procession had caught the eye of the director of the Smithsonian Institution, who suggested he take his talents west. Pushing and pulling an odd little handcart that was stocked with developing chemicals and that also served as his portable darkroom, Glover had crossed the Missouri lugging his slow-speed Roettger pinhole camera, bamboo tripod, brass plates, and ferrotype enamels. He also had a financial grant from the Department of the Interior, and he intended to wander through the Rockies to document the taming of the frontier. Carrington had met the photographer briefly during the treaty council at Fort Laramie, and when Glover learned of the colonel’s mission he asked to accompany the battalion upcountry. Carrington, against Jim Bridger’s advice, had agreed. But Glover wanted more shots of the Indians at the fort, and decided to linger. He told Carrington he would join a future wagon train. Now here he was, in Lieutenant Templeton’s small caravan, entertaining the two Army wives with fantastic tales of convincing his subjects that his magic box was not, in fact, stealing their souls, but merely reflecting an image caught by sunlight and transferred onto his metal plates. 

The company commander at Reno Station was initially reluctant to allow Lieutenant Templeton’s small party to continue up the trail. But each of the five officers as well as several of the enlisted men had experienced major combat during the Civil War, and they persuaded him to let them ride north. The party had only four saddle horses, and the officers rotated shifts between mounts and wagons. The day before reaching Crazy Woman Fork they had discovered the almost naked body of a scalped, mutilated white man, shot through with arrows. The tatters of a gray woolen blouse covering parts of his shoulders indicated that he was a soldier, probably a courier, but no one could guess from what command. Burying the bloody mess had spooked one of the lieutenants, an Indiana native named Napoleon Daniels. Unable to sleep that night, Daniels had joined Private Sam Peters on picket duty. “He said that he had a presentiment that something was going to happen to him very soon, ” Peters wrote not long afterward. “All efforts to discourage him from entertaining the gloomy phantasy were unavailing.” 

The next morning as the small caravan neared Crazy Woman Fork the forlorn Lieutenant Daniels lifted his field glasses and spotted a herd of buffalo meandering across a gentle slope about five miles distant. The party needed the fresh meat, and Daniels and Lieutenant Templeton rode ahead to turn the drove toward the trail so that by the time the wagons reached the alkaline creek they would have the animals in a cross fire. The two officers disappeared behind a belt of cottonwoods as the rough road dropped into a dry arroyo leading to the fork. Here the going was slow, the wagon wheels sinking deep into sand, and the teamsters whipped the mules bloody. Their braying nearly drowned out the first Indian war cries, which were followed by a dense volley of arrows. 

Westerners found it difficult to convey the inchoate dread they felt toward the Plains Indians. Their Euro-American forebears were no strangers to atrocity, and in fights against tribes from the Mohawk to the Seminoles had both lost and taken scalps—and sometimes tanned scalps for public viewing, as in the Dakota Little Crow’s case. Old mountain men and retired soldiers may have even remembered the Army’s killing and skinning of the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh. But these were exceptions, and few whites were prepared for the torture almost casually meted out by tribes like the Sioux, Comanche, and Cheyenne. These western “red devils” were considered nearly an alien race, duplicitous and capable of inflicting suffering beyond the conception of nineteenth-century American religious and cultural sensibilities. Even the Civil War veterans—who had no doubt heard of, if not witnessed, bloodthirsty atrocities on battlefields from the border states to Georgia (a fact downplayed by both sides)—were terrified of these others who took such pleasure in exacting pain. Thus one can only imagine the throat-closing fear the frontier newcomers in Lieutenant Templeton’s party felt as the rain of arrows was followed by the shriek of eagle-bone whistles and war cries as a formation of screaming Lakota braves on war-striped ponies charged from the timber. 

The soldiers, their rifles at the ready for the buffalo hunt, returned fire, and the Indians fell back as the teamsters swung the wagons out of the dry, sandy creek bed and made for the top of the bank, where they formed up a loose corral. The war party made another rush; again rifle fire drove them back. But a trooper and a teamster were wounded. A moment later Lieutenant Daniels’s riderless horse, arrows protruding from its neck and flank and its saddle twisted below its belly, galloped from the brush. It was followed by Lieutenant Templeton, slumped over his saddle pommel. An arrow was buried deep in his back and his horse, too, had wooden shafts protruding from its withers. It reached the little enclave before falling over. The surgeon hunched over Templeton and removed the arrow, but could not tarry to dress the wound. His gun was needed to repel yet another Indian charge. 

The Lakota held the timbered high ground, and the remaining three officers recognized that they were in an untenable position. If they stayed where they were they would be picked off one by one. They made a decision to form up a column and make a run for a high, treeless knoll half a mile away. Twelve men covered the flanks on foot, seven more formed a rear guard, and the teamsters whipped their mules into a gallop. The Lakota recognized the maneuver, and a small party also made for the knoll in an attempt to cut them off. The Indians were too late.

The wagons barely beat the frenzied braves to the top of the rise, where again the soldiers and teamsters formed them into a square. Two more men were seriously wounded during the scramble. The little group of survivors dug rifle pits and waited for night, an interminable eight hours away. Individual Lakota warriors—one wearing Lieutenant Daniels’s bloody uniform—made occasional dare rides, circling the knoll within firing range while shielding themselves behind the bodies of their ponies. One seemed particularly reckless, coming closer than the rest, close enough for the whites to notice his pale skin and long, wavy black hair. And twice more the Indians charged en masse only to fall back under rifle fire. 

Amazingly, during one of these forays the photographer Glover stood to set up his tripod. One of the officers knocked him down and handed him a rifle. The situation had settled into a standoff when, seemingly from nowhere, another shower of arrows fell onto the hilltop, wounding three more men. A second volley followed before the soldiers realized that the Indians had infiltrated a skinny ravine that cut up the back face of the knoll from the creek. An enlisted man and the chaplain volunteered to clear out the ditch. Armed with rifles and an old pepperbox seven-shot pistol, they charged down the trench firing and screaming their own war cries. An arrow grazed the chaplain, but they drove the Indians off. The two dug in at the top of the cut to keep it clear.

By late afternoon the survivors were almost out of water beneath a blazing sun, and the wounded men and infants were moaning with thirst. One of the officers gathered several canteens and tapped an enlisted man, and under covering fire the two made a mad dash down the ditch to the creek. They managed to return with enough of the milky brine to ration among the children, the wounded, and the women. As the sun began to sink behind the Bighorns the Lakota made two more mounted charges, killing a sergeant and grievously wounding three more men. Half the Americans, two of them dead, were now out of action. The men’s thoughts turned to the fate of the women and children if—or, as it increasingly appeared, when —they were overrun. “Our condition was now becoming so desperate that a council of war was held, ” wrote one enlisted man. “It was solemnly decided that in case it came to the worst that we would mercifully kill all the wounded . . . and then ourselves.”

The sin of suicide and its punishment, eternal damnation, regardless of the circumstances, were too much for the chaplain. Though wounded himself, he volunteered to ride for Reno Station, twenty-six miles away. An enlisted man also stepped up. The sun was disappearing in the west as the two remaining healthy horses were saddled, and each man was handed a six-shot Colt. From the knoll, the desperate party watched as the two riders picked their way through the sandy creek bed unmolested. Then a pack of mounted Lakota burst from the cottonwoods. With a head start of several hundred yards the white men spurred their horses; the galloping Indians followed them. A moment later all were lost from view. 

It was nearly dark when the men in the rifle pits noticed a large dust cloud rising from the northwest. More Indians, they were certain. The infantrymen began to loosen their shoelaces. After putting the women, children, and wounded out of their misery each man would tie one end of the shoelace to his big toe, tie the other end to his rifle trigger, and turn the gun on himself. This outcome seemed more certain when they saw a brave climb a great rocky mesa just out of rifle range. He appeared to be waving flags or banners of some sort. The whites surmised that this was a prearranged signal to the arriving Indians.

Yet as suddenly as the attack had begun fourteen hours earlier the curdling war whoops ceased. The Sioux mounted their ponies, but their precise movements were invisible in the dusk. Would they charge? Were they retreating? A rifleman cried out and pointed toward a low ridge in the direction of the dust cloud. A lone mounted silhouette appeared, a moving shadow against the last pinkish hue of the western sky. The figure reached the ravine below, a tall man in a low-crowned slouch hat wearing an old Army overcoat. He was seated on a flea-bitten gray mare. An officer shouted an order to halt. The horseman reined in. 

“I am a friend.” 

“State your name.” 

“Jim Bridger.” 

The party on the hill let out a holler as Old Gabe’s pony clambered up the incline. The dust cloud, Bridger said, was being raised by the hooves of two companies of mounted infantry hauling mountain howitzers from Fort Phil Kearny. They were no more than half a mile behind him. He apologized for the delay. The troop had been busy scattering war parties that were attacking military and emigrant trains up and down the Bozeman Trail. One corporal, foolishly riding ahead of the detail, had been killed, but otherwise all were in fair shape. Bridger’s bearing and manner were as slouched and relaxed as his hat, and in his Missouri drawl he recounted riding to the rescue of soldiers and civilians as casually as if he were reeling off a grocery list to a sutler’s clerk. 

By the time the relief column arrived the Lakota were long gone, melted into the darkening prairie. The reinforcements put out pickets and the entire party camped across the knoll while the surgeon tended to the wounded throughout the night. The next morning a patrol discovered what was left of Lieutenant Daniels’s naked corpse. His scalp had been taken, as had all ten of his fingers, and a thick cottonwood branch had been driven up his anus. Whether he was dead or alive when it happened, no one could know. 

Not long afterward a detachment from Reno Station appeared on the trail, led by the chaplain and the enlisted man who had ridden for help. More excited huzzahs filled the air, although the Reno Station men seemed a bit disappointed at having been second on the scene. While they bade their fellows adios and turned back south, the bodies of Daniels and the sergeant were rolled into tarps and loaded onto a wagon next to the dead corporal from Bridger’s unit. Three days later, with Colonel Carrington standing at the front gate in greeting, the ragged band rode into Fort Phil Kearny.
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