The Heart of Everything That is,The Untold Story of Red Cloud,
An American Legend
PART 5
THE
MASSACRE
Never interrupt your enemy
when he is making a mistake.
—Napoléon Bonaparte
32
FETTERMAN
It was the incessant cannon
reports that attracted the
Indians. Crazy Horse was
already in the surrounding
hills probing for raiding
opportunities when the
soldiers ran up their flag and
lit off their big guns. He sent
messengers to the Tongue
with word of this strange
behavior, and Red Cloud
joined the large, curious
group riding south to see
what the commotion was
about. It was pure chance that
so many Indians arrived on
the bluffs overlooking Fort
Phil Kearny hours before the
last emigrant train of the
season pulled into the post.Red Cloud had not sent any war parties south to Reno Station for weeks, supposing the whites were done traveling for the season. For precisely this reason the train had rolled up the Bozeman Trail unscathed, and its security measures were lax. That night, after the wagon master conferred with Colonel Carrington, the emigrants dutifully circled their prairie schooners on the little plain 100 yards from the fort—where, earlier in the day, the garrison had been inspected—cinching them wheel to wheel with hemp ropes and enclosing the stock within. But the travelers’ guard was down. A few of the miners lit campfires and sat around the flames playing cards as a party of Strong Hearts crept close and let loose a volley. One man was killed instantly by an arrow; two more were wounded. The Lakota vanished by the time the panicked emigrants began firing blindly into the darkness. It was good to kill the white trespassers, but the attack so close to the fort also served another purpose. Afterward the Indians lit their own bonfires on the hills overlooking the post and danced furiously, brazenly flitting into and out of shadows cast by the flames. It was a reminder to the soldiers of whose territory they dared occupy. It was also a mistake. The Bluecoats hauled out their guns that shoot twice and bombarded the dancers with grapeshot. Several Indians were killed or wounded.
After the shelling, angry warriors argued that now was the time to strike the Americans in force, to wipe out the post and all within it. The autumn buffalo hunt was completed. The Upper Powder tribes were strong and united. What was Red Cloud waiting for? The blota hunka ataya asked for patience. Not yet, he said. But soon enough. There were, his scouts had informed him, more white soldiers on the way.
Captain William Judd Fetterman crested Pilot Knob at the head of Lieutenant Horatio Bingham’s company of the 2nd Cavalry on the morning of November 3, 1866. It was two days after the attack on the last civilian wagon train bound for Montana and, in Margaret Carrington’s words, his return to his old battalion had been “looked for with glad anticipation.” The snowbound ravines and coulees the party had just traversed were nearly impassable, and Fetterman may have been puzzled as to why the outpost spread before him at the foot of the Bighorns was merely dusted with snow, and why even less was accumulated on the surrounding hilltops and ridgelines. Actually, just four miles to the west of Fort Phil Kearny four feet of powder covered the lower slopes of the mountains. Despite his unfamiliarity with the frontier, however, he surely admired what he saw. Inside the stout pine walls dozens of buildings had been completed or were nearing completion, and from the top of Pilot Knob the post gave the impression of a good redoubt from which to conduct his hunt for Red Cloud.
Once through the main gate Fetterman, Bingham, and the sixty-three horsemen were greeted with sighs of relief. The incessant Indian attacks over the previous months had left the post’s inhabitants on edge, and the mounted reinforcements led by one of the regiment’s most decorated officers were a welcome sight. Before Fetterman even dismounted he was hailed warmly by his Civil War comrades Fred Brown and Bill Bisbee, his old quartermaster and adjutant from the Atlanta campaign. He had also become close to Captain James Powell on the journey from Omaha, and soon the feisty lieutenant George Grummond fell into his orbit. Together with scores of enlisted men who had followed him through some of the war’s bloodiest battles they would form a clique. These men felt they could clear the hostiles from the territory in a snap if only the ineffectual garrison commander would unleash them.
It did not take Fetterman long to identify the obstacles. Like all the officers deployed to the Powder River Country, Captain Brown and Lieutenant Bisbee could recite the disturbing statistics from memory and were anxious to do so for their old commander. Since the Army’s arrival in July there had been fifty-one attacks on the post and its environs. One hundred fifty-four soldiers and civilians had been killed, and at least three times that number had been wounded. Not a single wagon train had reached Montana without violent loss of life. Over 800 head of Army livestock had been stolen, in addition to an untold number of emigrants’ horses, mules, cattle, and oxen. And though it was not yet winter, the government had already ordered the Bozeman Trail closed for the following summer, as too unsafe for civilian traffic. In that time Colonel Carrington had not undertaken one offensive operation against the hostiles. This inaction was embarrassing to the junior officers at Fort Phil Kearny; worse, to the sensibility of the nineteenth-century U.S. Army, it reflected dishonorably on the post and the garrison.
Accompanying Captain Fetterman and Lieutenant Bingham had been two additional officers. Captain Powell, an infantry company commander, was a veteran of the 18th who still carried two musket balls in his body from the Battle of Jonesboro. Major Henry Almstedt was the regiment’s paymaster. Almstedt had come west carrying a satchel of greenbacks, the battalion’s back pay, and James Wheatley’s little restaurant saw an immediate increase in customers. All told, the influx of new men raised the strength of the garrison to some 400 effective troops; but despite the almost 200 additional armed civilian teamsters, hay mowers, and pinery workers, this was a modest number of able bodies, and it surely struck Fetterman as too few to police the vast territory he had just crossed.
Meanwhile the Crows, through the old “chief” Jim Beckwourth, had again offered the Americans their services—250 mounted warriors to join the war against their old enemies the Lakota. These braves knew the countryside intimately; it had once been theirs. They were also wise to the ways of Red Cloud. Colonel Carrington declined. It was not merely a question of expense, although the Crow Head Men would undoubtedly want a hefty fee for their services. Carrington had received no word from General Cooke in Omaha about his request for the return of the Winnebagos, but he still hoped. He reasoned that fifty Winnebagos with rifles trumped five times as many Crows with bows and arrows. The logic seemed sound given the era’s military ethos. If only to a white easterner.
Captain Fetterman outranked Captain Ten Eyck by several months’ service, and immediately replaced him as Carrington’s principal tactical officer. As part of this role Fetterman conducted his own troop inspection shortly after his arrival, and he was appalled at the condition of the garrison, particularly the inadequate weaponry. Bingham’s cavalry company had been issued a mixture of passable Starr carbines— single-shot, but at least breech-loading—and obsolete Enfield rifles. Though the majority of Carrington’s infantry were equipped with the ancient Springfields, the musicians in his band had managed to hold on to their Spencer rifles until now, when the colonel ordered them turned over to Bingham’s command. This meant at least two-thirds of the horsemen now had proper arms, which lifted their spirits considerably. It was a needed boost, for the trek from Omaha had worn out Company C’s mounts, and by the time they reached the post they were not much more serviceable than the weary remuda in Quartermaster Brown’s corral. Corn and oats were already strictly rationed, and there was nothing that could be done about it.
Before his departure from Omaha Fetterman had been informed that the Frontier Army was planning yet another reorganization, scheduled for January 1, 1867. On that date the 2nd Battalion would become the nucleus for the new 27th Regiment and, General Cooke hinted strongly, Fetterman would replace Carrington as the battalion’s commanding officer. Fetterman was a hungry soldier, eager for advancement, and not a man to allow his cordial prewar relationship with his superior to stand in the way of his own ambition. To that end he moved quickly to make his presence known, both to Red Cloud and to the War Department. He got his chance on his third day at the fort.
That evening Fetterman approached Carrington after dinner with a plan to turn the Indians’ own tactics against them. He proposed to hobble a string of mules to serve as decoys near a thicket of cottonwoods along the Big Piney about a mile from the post. He and a company of infantry would conceal themselves in the nearby trees and fall on any Indians who took the bait. He said he had talked over the idea with Brown and Grummond, who wanted to join the ambush. Carrington granted him permission. Fetterman, Brown, Grummond, Bisbee, and about fifty enlisted men settled into the cottonwood stand shortly after dusk. Their rifles were primed and cocked, but the only movements they saw all night were meteors creasing the sky. Near dawn, as they were getting ready to return to the post, they heard shots from the opposite side of the stockade. A mile away from their position Indian raiders, aware of the ruse from the outset, had stampeded a small herd of cattle belonging to Wheatley. It was Fetterman’s first such lesson, and last such effort. A few days later fifty of Bingham’s cavalry departed, ten men escorting a mail rider to Fort Laramie and forty riding with the paymaster to Fort C. F. Smith, where they would remain. With their departure Carrington deemed his troop too stretched for any more ambush schemes. Fetterman seethed.
Despite the failed trap, in hindsight it is apparent that Fetterman’s arrival had the War Department’s intended effect on Carrington. Two days later, in a dispatch to General Cooke, Carrington described Red Cloud’s increasing strength and concluded, “I hope to be yet able to soon strike a blow.” He had never expressed such a desire before. Meanwhile, as Fetterman acclimated to life at the fort his disdain for Carrington’s passivity intensified into nearly open contempt, and he wrote to his old friend Dr. Charles Sully, “We are afflicted with an incompetent commanding officer.” Yet despite his and the others’ “disgust” with the colonel, the era’s code of conduct, both military and social, prevented open insubordination. One officer noted that “the feeling was not harmonious” between Carrington and the Young Turks, “but there was no open rupture.” At least for the moment.
◈◈◈◈◈◈◈
Following the attack on the emigrant train camped on the Big Piney, Red Cloud intensified his harassment of the post itself, turning loose Crazy Horse and the Strong Hearts to darken the snow covered ground with American blood. A beef contractor driving a herd up the Bozeman Trail was attacked, and the raids on the wood trains to and from Piney Island escalated. Red Cloud had taught his young warriors that the best time to strike at the whites was either early in the morning, when their minds were still hazy with sleep, or late in the afternoon, when they were exhausted from a day of chopping wood or ice. Crazy Horse followed through with a series of ambushes and hit and-run forays, which left the fort’s contract surgeons running perilously low on zinc sulfate and roller bandages.
Red Cloud was satisfied with the physical damage he was inflicting, though he was probably not aware of the psychological toll his guerrilla tactics were taking on the isolated garrison. With every dead or wounded trooper, with every stolen horse or mule, with every whistle of an arrow and crack of a Hawken, the tension at the fort heightened. Bickering among soldiers has gone on since man invented war. But this was different. The troop at Fort Phil Kearny was disintegrating under the weight of petty feuds and traded insults. Even relatively mundane annoyances—the paltry pay, the dearth of promotions, the usurious cost of full uniforms ($100) and new boots ($17)—could set off a quarrel or fistfight. The underlying problem stemmed from Carrington’s refusal to take the fight to the Indians. When the colonel appeared to ignore a direct order 1 from General Cooke to do just that, the grumbling increased and the post was further split. Indian attacks continued as the snow piled high; and as the diversion of emigrant trains ceased and the arrival of couriers with news of the outside world grew rare, the remote stillness of Fort Phil Kearny—interrupted only by shrieking war cries—began to fray men’s nerves.
1. “You are hereby instructed that as soon as the troops and stores are covered from the weather, to turn your earnest attention to the possibility of striking the hostile band of Indians by surprise in their winter camps,” Cooke wrote to Carrington. “An extraordinary effort in winter when the Indian horses are unserviceable, it is believed, should be followed by more success than can be accomplished by very large expeditions in the summer.”
The soldiers could not know that after five months of raids and ambushes the Indians were nearly as weary of Red Cloud’s slow, fitful campaign. By this time of year the three tribes should have been ensconced in comfortable winter camps, the Sioux and Cheyenne in sheltered wooded hollows near the Black Hills, the Arapaho off toward the Rockies. There men would sleep late after trading stories well into the night around warming fires and pass the dreary afternoons fashioning new bows and arrows in a fug of pipe smoke while boys collected firewood and women and girls attempted to augment the winter larders by adding rose berries, acorns, and even old horsemeat to the buffalo and dog stews. Instead, the warriors now spent their days greasing their limbs against the bitter cold in preparation for creeping around the open prairie or forested hills wrapped in stinking wolf skins and inverted buffalo robes, their high-topped buffalo-fur moccasins soaked through and freezing—all in the hope of running across a straggling Bluecoat and putting an arrow through his throat.
Ironically, it was now the formerly quiet Crazy Horse whose voice was loudest at the council fires. He exhorted the war chiefs to attack in force, to strike a single, final blow against the soldiers. But Red Cloud was hesitant. He knew exactly how much food and winter fodder the garrison had stored, and he planned to starve and weaken it to a point of impotence that would make its inhabitants as easy to kill as newborns. On the other hand, he recognized that it might not be wise to ignore the words of his best fighter. He had always respected Crazy Horse’s tactics; perhaps it was time to heed his young lieutenant’s strategy as well. Perhaps it was time to test the Americans where they lived.
33
DRESS
REHEARSAL
On December 3, 1866, an
elegant horse-drawn carriage
arrived at the White House to
carry President Andrew
Johnson through the marbled
canyons of Washington, D.C.,
to the Capitol, where he
would deliver his second
State of the Union address.
The hour-long speech was
lofty, oratory as gilded as the
president’s coach, extolling
and thanking “an all-wise and
merciful Providence” for
restoring “peace, order,
tranquility, and civil
authority” to the war-ravaged
nation. Johnson managed to
spare 38 of his 7,134 words
for the frontier, in remarks
wedged between his report on
payments to Army pensioners
and his listing of the number
of patents issued the previous
year “for useful inventions
and designs.” He assured the
political luminaries in
attendance,
“Treaties have
been concluded with the
Indians, who, enticed into
armed opposition to our
Government at the outbreak
of the rebellion, have
unconditionally submitted to
our authority and manifested
an earnest desire for a
renewal of friendly relations.” Three days later, on the morning of December 6, Red Cloud mounted his finest war pony and left his camp on the Tongue at the head of several hundred angry warriors. The temperature was below freezing, creeks flowed beneath thick ice, and wispy gray clouds scudded down from the Bighorns on a biting wind that scoured the prairie. When the Indians reached the small, flat valley carved by Peno Creek on the far side of Lodge Trail Ridge from Fort Phil Kearny, about 100 braves broke west, circled behind the edge of the ridge, and descended into the timber around Piney Island. With ferocious screams and shrieking whistles they immediately fell on a wood train and its escort returning from the pinery. A messenger made the dangerous four-mile ride back to the post to alert Colonel Carrington, who ordered every serviceable horse saddled. If General Cooke wanted offensive action, Carrington would give it to him. What occurred next was a farrago of bravery, recklessness, confusion, cowardice, and stupidity— timeless elements that compose the fog of war.
Colonel Carrington directed Captain Fetterman and Lieutenant Bingham to lead the cavalry and a squad of mounted infantry, just over fifty men, due west up the wood road to relieve the train and drive the attackers back across the creek. In the meantime he and Lieutenant Grummond, at the head of another squad of twenty-four horsemen, would ride north up Lodge Trail Ridge to intercept the retreating Indians, trapping them in the Peno Creek valley. As Carrington galloped up the south bank of Big Piney Creek he saw Indians above him lining the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge to his right. He signaled his squad to cross Big Piney, but his own mount slipped and floundered on the ice sheet and threw him from the saddle. He remounted and made the crossing, and he and Grummond led the troopers up the steep slope.
They were greeted at the crest by four Indians, their ponies straddling the wagon ruts of the Bozeman Trail several hundred yards away. More were trying to conceal themselves in thick stands of chokecherry and scrub oak, but Carrington had reached the ridgeline sooner than they expected and he spotted them, counting at least thirty-two. Instead of attacking, he concentrated on the wood road below him to his left, where at this moment he saw another fifty or so hostiles galloping out of the timber. Fetterman’s and Bingham’s detail was in hot pursuit. The colonel drove off the four taunting braves with a volley and pointed downslope. After many frustrating months, it was time to spring his own trap.
Carrington cautioned his inexperienced riders against scattering, and ordered them to pick their way slowly down the face of the serrated ridge that descended into the Peno Creek valley. As if to prove the military proverb that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy, Lieutenant Grummond ignored him and spurred his mount to a gallop. Events deteriorated from there. Grummond put so much distance between himself and Carrington’s squad that the fuming colonel sent his best rider to overtake him with orders to either halt “or return to the post.” The messenger could not catch Grummond, who disappeared into the valley’s tangle of ravines and draws. The colonel’s anger increased when he reached the bottom of the incline and came across fifteen dismounted cavalrymen from Bingham’s command looking thoroughly confounded. He ordered them folded into his squad and took off at a trot without bothering to look back and see if they had actually saddled up.
They had not. A quarter mile later he reached a small hill, the only way around it being a thin trail. He expected to find Grummond and Bingham somewhere on the other side. Instead, when he rounded the rise his path was blocked by several dozen Indians on horseback. He turned to give skirmish orders. Only six of his inexperienced riders were still with him. One of them was Bingham’s bugler, a German immigrant named Adolph Metzger. Carrington sputtered to the little bugler, “Where is Lieutenant Bingham?” Metzger, whose command of English was limited, pointed past the Indians. Carrington immediately surmised that the hostiles had doubled back, hidden in the folds of the hill, and allowed Fetterman’s and Bingham’s larger party to ride on in order to confront him. The trap had been turned.
The Indians whooped and charged, and at the same moment a few straggling soldiers caught up to Carrington. One trooper’s mount was shot out from under him. The man lay trapped beneath the horse as an Indian rushed at him with a raised war club. Carrington swung his horse toward the scene and got off several shots with his Colt. The Indian either fell or turned away; the colonel could not tell which. Indian ponies enveloped his small group, and he ordered the soldiers to dismount and form into a circular defense. Gun barrels and ramrods glistened in the pale December light as Carrington directed a steady stream of bullets and balls into his attackers. He made certain that the men staggered their fire, allowing every other trooper time to reload. Though they rarely appeared to hit either Indians or ponies, the hostiles could not break through. Carrington finally turned to the bugler Metzger. The language barrier was not too great for the little German to understand Carrington’s frantic demand to sound recall. Metzger pursed his lips and blew for his life. The cracked notes carried on the cold wind and echoed off the hills and ridges, and the Indians inexplicably quit. Carrington turned to see his stragglers riding to his rescue. Moments later Captain Fetterman appeared from out of the timber with his fourteen mounted infantrymen.
The colonel hurriedly briefed Fetterman, informing him that Lieutenants Grummond and Bingham were missing. He guessed that they might be off near Peno Creek, and led the combined troop in that direction. They heard the drumming of hoofbeats before they saw the riders. Grummond and three enlisted men broke through a spinney of scrub oak, galloping straight for them. Seven screaming Indians were a few yards behind them. The Indians veered off, shaking their lances and war clubs as they vanished into a cutbank. Grummond, gulping air, reined in his frothing horse beside the colonel’s and the two seemed to shout at each other. What they said is not known, although Lieutenant Bisbee testified later that Grummond told him he had demanded to know if Carrington was a “coward or a fool” to allow his command to be cut to pieces.
They were still short an officer. Lieutenant Bingham was undoubtedly in trouble. When Grummond regained his composure he told a troubling tale. He and Bingham were following the raiding party into the valley when hundreds of Indians streamed out of gullies and surrounded them. Grummond said he watched Bingham turn in his saddle, shout, “Come on, ” and gallop ahead with four men. But most of his raw, frightened troopers froze in their tracks in the face of the Indian onslaught. A few had begun to turn their mounts to make a run for the fort when Grummond, Captain Brown, and another officer leveled their guns to check the retreat. By the time they re-formed and scattered the Indians, Lieutenant Bingham had disappeared down a narrow, twisting trail that led to the flats along the frozen Peno Creek. Grummond rode after him alone. He caught him and his small patrol two miles away, stalking a single warrior. Then, he told Carrington, he joined the hunt.
What occurred next encapsulated everything that went wrong for the U.S. Army during Red Cloud’s War.
◪◪◪◪◪◪◪
It may have struck Crazy
Horse as too easy. Had these
naive American officers
never fought an Indian
before? Red Cloud had taught
his warriors to differentiate
officers from enlisted men by
the strange symbols they
wore on the shoulders and
sleeves and the long knives
the officers carried at their
sides. These two had simply
taken his bait as if they were
trout. Crazy Horse
dismounted and pretended to
examine his pony’s hind leg,
acting as if he were digging a
stone from its hoof. On either
side he could see the puffs of
vapor expelled from the
mouths of the Strong Hearts
concealed in the shallow
draws. A soldier fired at him. Crazy Horse did not move. He allowed the little group of Bluecoats, six in all, to come close enough for one of them to draw his saber and charge. He leaped on his pony and rode hard. They followed. And then the Strong Hearts jumped from their hiding places and surrounded them. A gunshot sounded, shattering the face of the officer with the drawn saber. There was supposed to be no shooting.
◪◪◪◪◪◪◪
Lieutenant Bingham slumped
over his pommel and was
yanked from the saddle. An
Indian scalped him; another
grabbed his horse. There were
no more arrows or gunshots.
They wanted the horses. That
was what saved the rest. Except one. The Indians surrounded the little group and tried to lasso the soldiers and pull them off their mounts. Sergeant Gideon Bowers, a grizzled Civil War veteran, shot three dead with his Colt before they pulled him to the ground. Warriors swarmed him and hacked repeatedly with tomahawks and knives. In the fighting at close quarters the Indians attempted to loop their bowstrings over the remaining four soldiers’ heads. The enlisted men used the butt ends of their rifles as clubs, and Grummond slashed with his saber. He could hear a repulsive click with every skull he cleaved. Finally, he jammed the sword into his horse’s withers. The animal reared up and kicked its forelegs, creating an opening. Grummond broke from the surround and galloped back toward the ridge, the three enlisted men following him. Half a dozen Indians jumped onto their ponies and raced, screaming, after them. They quit the chase, however, at the sight of Carrington’s and Fetterman’s column.
Then, suddenly, as if by magic, the Indians were gone. Patches of crusty snow up and down Lodge Trail Ridge were smeared with blood, which grew thicker at the site where Bingham and Bowers had fallen, but the Indians had carried off their dead. Carrington ordered a search for the Americans’ bodies. Within the hour they found Sergeant Bowers, his skull split in half but, astonishingly, still alive. However, he died moments later. Not far away Lieutenant Bingham was impaled on a tree stump in a clump of brush, his body bristling with over fifty arrow shafts. By mid-afternoon the troop was back at the post, where Carrington tried to make sense of the blunder-filled fight.
The cowardice of the inexperienced recruits was at least explicable, if still disgraceful. But Lieutenant Grummond had disobeyed a direct order and, for whatever reason, Lieutenant Bingham had abandoned his men to ride off recklessly to his death —and now the cavalry had no officers. Even Fetterman was at a loss to explain the actions of Bingham, a decorated Civil War commander. “I cannot account for the movement of such an officer of such unquestionable gallantry, ” he wrote in his report. Nor had Carrington covered himself with glory when he had outpaced his own squad and led them into an ambush. Given all that had gone wrong, it was a near miracle that Bingham and Bowers were the only men killed. Another sergeant and four privates had been wounded, and five horses had been so badly injured that they needed to be put down. More amazingly, Captain Fetterman for once appeared chastened. “This Indian War has become a hand-to-hand fight, ” he told Carrington when he delivered his written report. In his own dispatch the colonel generously estimated that at least 10 Indians out of 300 attackers were killed, one by a bullet from his own Colt, and perhaps twice as many wounded.
The apprehension that had seized Frances Grummond from the moment she arrived at Fort Phil Kearny “deepened from that hour. No sleep ever came to my weary eyes, except fitfully, for many nights. And even then in my dreams I could see [my husband] riding madly from me with the Indians in pursuit.”
For President Johnson, beset with the task of piecing together a sundered nation, the skirmish was a minor incident on a treeless prairie so distant it might as well have been the moon.
For Red Cloud it was a dress rehearsal.
34
SOLDIERS
IN BOTH
HANDS
Red Cloud was convinced:
these foolish soldiers were
ready to be slaughtered. He
had watched the previous
day’s fighting, and even
directed some of it from a
high tor in Peno Creek valley,
marveling at the dull-witted
behavior of the Bluecoats.
They were like spoiled,
ignorant children—dangle a
piece of hard molasses in
front of them and they would
do anything, no matter how
stupid, to grab it. Back at the
Indian camp on the Tongue,
Crazy Horse described in
detail the parts of the battle
Red Cloud had not personally
witnessed. The young warrior
told of twice luring officers—
first Bingham, then
Grummond—away from their
troops, as easily as separating
an old cow from a buffalo
herd. When Red Cloud
summoned the Lakota
sub-chief Yellow Eagle, who
had led the initial attack on
the wood train, he boasted of
baiting Fetterman’s and
Bingham’s larger relief detail
and allowing them to ride
past him while he lay in wait
for the Little White Chief’s
smaller patrol.If it had worked once, why not a second time with a larger force? Red Cloud conferred with his allies. The Miniconjou Head Men High Backbone and Black Shield agreed, as did the Cheyenne war chiefs Roman Nose and Medicine Man. Two Arapaho —Little Chief and Sorrel Horse—also said their seventy-five braves were prepared to fight. All told there were over 2,000 warriors. And thus it was decided. On the first auspicious day after the next full moon the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho would ride south. They would again feint toward the soldiers’ wood train, and again work the decoy trick along the ridge. But this time they would lure as many men as possible out of the fort, kill them all, and burn the American outpost.
Red Cloud had come to the same conclusion as Jim Bridger, who told Carrington morosely after the December 6 fight, “Your men who fought down south are crazy. They don’t know anything about fighting Indians.”
Three days later they buried Lieutenant Bingham and Sergeant Bowers. Little imagination is required to place yourself in the cracked, toe-numbing split-leather boots of the reinforcements newly arrived at Fort Phil Kearny as they watched the tin-lined pine coffins being lowered into the frozen earth. It was Sunday, December 9, and none of the forty-three infantrymen had been involved in the fight. Nor had their commanding officer, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Wilbur Arnold. Colonel Carrington had deemed the newcomers too raw, and while the rest of the 2nd Battalion chased Indians up and down the rambling trails across Lodge Trail Ridge and into the Peno Creek valley, Lieutenant Arnold and his men had been busy constructing their own housing along the post’s barracks row. Arnold had come closest to the action when he led an ambulance detail to retrieve the bodies of Bingham and Bowers. Even this tangential task was cause for concern. Carrington had expressly directed Captain Powell to bring the ambulance to the site. But Powell had disobeyed the written order, remained at the post, and sent the green Arnold instead.
As the new men looked around they would have noticed the fresh graves dotting the little cemetery beneath Pilot Knob. It was filling rapidly, and not one death could be attributed to natural causes. They doffed their caps when Lieutenant Grummond and six other members of the Masonic lodge accorded their brother Bingham the Masons’ final honors; they remained bareheaded in the biting wind while the post chaplain prayed over the site. Before the caskets were closed they watched Captain Brown pin his treasured Army of the Cumberland badge to the sergeant’s uniform breast. Brown had fought with Bowers from Stones River to Atlanta. At the conclusion of the rite the newcomers helped cover the graves with mounds of frozen dirt and piled small boulders on top of them to keep the wolves out.
The same afternoon the troop also bade farewell to Lieutenant Bisbee, who had been transferred to Omaha. With Colonel Carrington’s permission, Bisbee had refitted a coach with double boards to transport his wife and young son. The temperature had fallen below zero, but the canvas-topped wagon was equipped with a small sheet-iron camp stove whose pipe protruded through a hole in the roof. Bisbee, who would ride beside it, was nearly unrecognizable beneath layers of woolen and buffalo-hair shirts and pants, gloves, and a hat. He also wore “buffalo-lined hip boots over two pairs of woolen socks.” Seven cavalrymen were selected to escort the Bisbee's as far as Fort Laramie, and before the detail departed Captain Fetterman handed Bisbee a package to be delivered to Lieutenant Bingham’s sister, Stella, in St. Charles, Minnesota. It contained his unsent letters, sword, sash, and epaulettes. His other effects, as was the Army custom, were sold at auction, with the proceeds sent to the adjutant general to be placed in the War Department’s general fund. “Your brother was much esteemed by all who knew him, ” Fetterman wrote to Stella Bingham, “and his death is severely felt by all.”
Not least by Colonel Carrington, who was down to six officers to maintain control of an edgy garrison. He decided to start from square one. Captain Fetterman and Captain Powell, who replaced Lieutenant Bingham as cavalry commander, were ordered to drill the entire battalion each morning and evening in military basics such as mounting and dismounting, loading and firing weapons on command, and forming columns of twos and fours. It was fortunate for the drillmasters that the Indians also appeared to be regrouping. In the two weeks following the December 6 fight not a single hostile incident was recorded, although the Lakota scouts remained ever-present on distant hills, signaling with mirrors, smoke, and flags. Carrington also used the lull to lay in as much winter wood as possible, as well as to personally oversee the construction of a forty-five foot wagon bridge spanning Big Piney Creek from Piney Island to the wood train road. The fact that remedial military courses were necessary in hostile territory was disturbing, although Captain Fetterman and Captain Brown apparently did not think so.
After supper on the evening of December 19 the two called on Colonel Carrington in his private quarters. Quartermaster Brown, who sported two Colt revolvers on his hips, had ostentatiously hung his spurs from the buttonholes of his greatcoat. He did the talking. The Indians had broken the thirteen-day quiescence that morning, again raiding the wood train, but were driven off by Captain Powell’s relief detail. Before Powell left, Carrington had explicitly directed him to “heed the lessons of the Sixth. Do not pursue Indians across Lodge Trail Ridge.” This time Powell obeyed his orders, and neither side had inflicted or sustained any casualties. This, Brown said now, was a perfect example of the sort of pinprick hostilities that were demoralizing the men. But there was a solution.
He said that he and Fetterman had spoken to the miners, and all forty as well as an additional ten civilians had agreed to join an equal number of the battalion’s most able troopers to ride against the hostiles in their camp on the Tongue. Appealing to the colonel’s proprietary and meticulous engineering mind, Brown added that destroying the Indian village would ensure a peaceful winter during which construction of the fort could be completed without interruption. It would also be likely to augur the reopening of the Bozeman Trail come spring. Brown had stalled his transfer orders all he could and was scheduled to leave for Fort Laramie the day after Christmas. He remembered the thrill of defeating the combined Lakota-Arapaho raiding party presumably led by Captain North back in September, and wanted one more crack at the savages. Fetterman said nothing.
Carrington showed polite interest while hearing out his quartermaster. When Brown was finished the colonel rather nonchalantly ticked off the reasons he could not allow it. Fifty seasoned veterans were the core of his troop. With them gone his pickets and escorts would be stretched to their limits with untested recruits, and the mail riders would have to cease. He handed Brown that morning’s duty report. Only forty-two horses had been deemed serviceable (as Brown well knew). Were his two officers proposing to leave Fort Phil Kearny without mounts? He intended, Carrington said, to continue his defensive policy until more reinforcements arrived. As if to buck up their spirits, he read to the officers the contents of a dispatch he had sent by special courier that day to Fort Laramie to be telegraphed to General Cooke: “Indians appeared today and fired on wood train, but were repulsed. They are accomplishing nothing, while I am perfecting all details of the post and preparing for active movements.”
Their time would come, the colonel implied, if unfortunately not for the departing Brown. The visibly dejected quartermaster said good night. On his way out the door he turned to Carrington and added that, as impossible as it sounded, he felt that he could kill a dozen Indians himself. Fetterman still said nothing.
Had Colonel Carrington agreed to the plan, the chances are excellent that Fetterman’s and Brown’s 100-man troop would have ridden directly into 2,000 warriors camped just over Lodge Trail Ridge.
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They had arrived that morning, a large war party consisting of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. On the ride south from the Tongue they had observed the same formalities as before the attacks on Julesburg and Bridge Station—official Pipe Bearers formed a van ahead of Red Cloud and the other war chiefs leading the column, while Strong Hearts and Cheyenne Crazy Dogs kept discipline on its flanks. They made camp about ten miles north of the American post, and following the brief skirmish with Powell’s force, they dug in for the night. A snowstorm swept in on a bitter north wind. By dawn on December 20 the snow was still falling, a feathery powder that blanketed the prairie, and the Head Men agreed to postpone any more fighting for at least a day while their warriors erected small, mobile tepees in three abutting circles, one for each tribe, and constructed windbreaks out of their red Hudson Bay blankets. They lit warming fires and around midday a few hunting parties returned with fresh deer and buffalo meat, but it was not nearly enough to feed the entire camp, and most of the braves gnawed on hunks of frozen pemmican. Scouts were posted on the hills overlooking the fort. They reported that the weather had also kept most of the soldiers indoors.
Red Cloud and his fellow war leaders decided that the best place to lay their ambush was on the forks of Peno Creek, about halfway between the Indian camp and the American fort. They would trap the Americans on the flats of the little valley carved by the creek, attacking from the breaks and leafless dogwood thickets dense enough to hide a large force. But what if the soldiers again refused to cross the Lodge Trail Ridge en masse and ride down into the valley? The previous feint on the wood train had been to gauge the Bluecoats’ reaction. Young braves on fast ponies, including Crazy Horse, had been planted on the ridgeline to again lure the soldiers on. That Powell’s detachment had ignored the decoys after scattering the raiding party was worrisome. Perhaps the Americans were not as stupid as they looked. The tribes needed an omen.
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When a hermaphrodite, or “half-man, ” was born into a Lakota band the child was believed to have special powers of divination. Sioux and Cheyenne warriors put such faith in the ability of a hermaphrodite to predict the future that battles were often postponed on his advice. On this day Red Cloud summoned the most powerful Lakota half-man, a Miniconjou, to the top of a butte overlooking the forks of Peno Creek. The war chief waved his arm across the potential battlefield, and the diviner mounted his sorrel pony, threw a black blanket over his head, and made three wild, zigzagging runs over the cuts and mesas, nearly to Lodge Trail Ridge. Each time when he returned he fell from his mount and rolled in the snow before sitting up and claiming that he had Bluecoats in his convulsing, balled fist: first ten, then twenty, and finally thirty. On each occasion the war chiefs told him that it was not enough. He returned from his frenzied fourth gallop, fell to the frozen earth as if in a trance, and when he came out of it said that he now had American soldiers in both hands. When asked how many, he opened his fists and declared that there were over one hundred. A raucous shout echoed through the hills.
As evening dissolved into night the weather turned again, and a temperate breeze blew up from the Southern Plains to melt most of the snow, although it remained deep in the mountains and shaded gulches. It was decided at the council fire that the next morning would be a good day to fight.
35
THE HALFMAN’S
OMEN
December 21, 1866, dawned
glorious, the winter sun
bursting like a red dahlia over
Pilot Knob. It was the kind of
crisp morning that often
follows a storm in the Powder
River Country, with the air
cold and dry and the wind
still. It was a dramatic turn
from the previous night’s
unseasonable warmth, and a
harbinger of a colder storm
front moving in. Most of the
snow around the post had
melted, but Colonel
Carrington knew that the
powder would still be deep in
the pine forests. He delayed
the wood train’s morning
departure until he was
convinced that the weather
would hold at least for the
day. On the far side of Lodge Trail Ridge Red Cloud was also grateful for the snowmelt. His warriors could now hide themselves in the draws and ravines of the Peno Creek valley without leaving tracks. A mile-long section of the Bozeman Trail followed the creek on a thin saddle connecting two buttes; it was called the High Backbone, and its edges fell off precipitously on either side into wending cutbanks thick with bushes and tall scrub. Red Cloud would position his force in these thickets while Yellow Eagle would again lead a smaller raiding party of perhaps forty warriors toward the pinery; the soldiers might find that number more enticing. When Yellow Eagle departed, the Oglala, Cheyenne, and Arapaho formed up to the southwest of the High Backbone, and the bulk of the Miniconjous and a few scattered Sans Arcs concentrated below the saddle’s bank on the northeast. Red Cloud and his battle chiefs rode about another quarter-mile down the valley and climbed the tallest hill. From here, with his captured field glasses, Red Cloud could see both the ambush site and the wood train road winding toward the new bridge onto Piney Island.
At 10 a.m. Colonel Carrington ordered the woodcutters to set out from the fort, this time with an extra guard attached to the usual mounted escort. All told there were perhaps ninety soldiers and civilians in the detail, about double the usual number. Less than an hour later pickets on Pilot Knob waved their coded flags, signaling that a raiding party was attacking the wood train. Bugles sounded inside the post and two Indians appeared above the fort across Big Piney Creek on the south slope of Lodge Trail Ridge. They dismounted, wrapped their red Hudson Bay blankets tight about them, and sat beneath a lone serviceberry tree watching the activity inside the log walls.
Carrington was later to say that he had sent for Captain Powell to lead the relief detail, because Powell had demonstrated common sense and restraint two days earlier. He was surprised when Fetterman arrived on the steps of his headquarters at the head of a company of infantry and a detachment of Company C’s cavalry, fifty three men in all. Fetterman reminded Carrington that, as with Captain Ten Eyck, he outranked Powell in length of service, and asked to be the one to take out the relief detail. Carrington was in a bind. Men were under attack several miles up the road and he did not have time to waste arguing the finer points of command with his obstreperous number two. He acquiesced, but—he was to testify—not before issuing these orders to Fetterman: “Support the wood train. Relieve it and report to me. Do not engage or pursue Indians at its expense. Under no circumstances pursue over . . . Lodge Trail Ridge.” No one else heard Carrington give these orders.
Before Grummond rode out, the colonel was approached by Captain Brown and a private named Thomas Maddeon, who asked to join the detail. Maddeon had somehow requisitioned the last fit horse in the stables, and a jubilant Brown was leading Jimmy Carrington’s mottled little mount, Calico, the pony the boy had won in the arrowshooting contest at Nebraska’s Fort Kearney—it seemed a lifetime ago. Carrington granted them permission and checked his pocket watch; it was nearly 11:30. Outside the post the innkeeper James Wheatley and a miner, Isaac Fisher, fell in with the mounted detail, bringing it to twenty-seven men. These two civilians were former Union Army officers who apparently had a hankering to kill Indians and had just purchased new sixteen-shot Henry rifles. Although the lever-action Henry was not as effective as a Springfield at long range, it was quite deadly up to 200 yards.
Carrington climbed the post’s sentry walk and watched Fetterman veer off the wood road, cross Big Piney Creek, and turn onto a trail running west along the south slope of Lodge Trail Ridge—the same ascent he himself had taken two weeks earlier. Perplexed and angry, he turned toward the pickets on Pilot Knob. They were signaling that the wood train was no longer engaged, had broken its defensive corral, and was rolling onto the pinery. Carrington knew that Fetterman, perhaps a mile from the post, could also see the flagmen and he calmed down, supposing that Fetterman had decided to reach the high ground in order to fall on the raiding party between the Sullivant Hills and the ridge. By now Grummond’s horsemen had swung in with Fetterman’s foot soldiers, and together they traversed the slope.
Carrington noted with a mixture of unease and anticipation that Fetterman had deployed skirmishers on his flanks “and was moving wisely up the creek and along the southern slope of Lodge Trail Ridge, with good promise of cutting off the Indians as they should withdraw.” He also saw that Fetterman’s position offered “perfect vantage ground” should the raiders turn and attack the wood train again. Simultaneously, Carrington noticed the two Indians huddled beneath the tree across Big Piney Creek. He ordered Captain Powell to direct the artillerymen to lob several spherical case shots toward them. Much to everyone’s surprise the whistling shell fragments flushed from the brushy cuts another thirty Indians. The hostiles fled back up the ridge. One pony was riderless.
It was with a sense of relief that Carrington, “entertaining no further thought of danger, ” climbed down from the bastion. Fetterman and Grummond were apparently obeying his command to engage only the war party that had attacked the wood train, and his big guns had scattered any hostile rear guard. He walked back to his headquarters with his mind, he would later write, already elsewhere. Fort Phil Kearny’s infirmary was nearly complete—only a portion of the roof remained to be laid on—as were the barracks for the reinforcements, and the post’s company was secure enough that well-attended church services were held on the parade ground each Sunday morning. To call Carrington a meticulous builder was to say that the Ancient Mariner just needed a moment of your time. It was the first day of winter, and in a mere six months his architectural exactness had produced a frontier outpost to stand up to any Army bivouac in the nation. Every board, jamb, and shingle had been fashioned with mathematical precision. He was proud of his accomplishments, regardless of the feeling in Omaha.
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By noon Grummond’s cavalry were slightly outpacing Fetterman’s infantry, providing point and flank support, and had ridden about halfway up the slope of Lodge Trail Ridge. Awaiting Fetterman, Grummond halted his men just below the site where the Bozeman Trail ran northwest through a cut in the ridgeline. The sky had darkened, again thickening for snow, and against the skyline Grummond could make out individual braves, perhaps ten, racing their ponies near the crest. They waved red blankets to try to frighten his horses, and their wolflike yips and howls echoed off the buttes and hills rising from Big Piney Creek. Within moments Captain Fetterman’s force had caught up to Grummond, and with his big coal eyes loaded with thunder the captain ordered a volley fired at the impertinent savages. The Indians quirted their ponies out of rifle range, but before the gun smoke cleared they had danced back and were daring the soldiers to chase them farther up the incline. Among them was Crazy Horse.
Fetterman continued climbing in skirmish formation, but he was hesitant. Below the crest of the ridge he held his position for a good twenty minutes, and the lookouts on Pilot Knob who were tracking his advance signaled to the post that he had halted the troop. Despite Colonel Carrington’s directive, every Civil War officer understood the glory to be gained by seizing opportunities based on rapidly shifting battle scenarios—as long as the risk proved successful. The flamboyant Confederate cavalry commander General Jeb Stuart had won fame raiding Union lines against his superiors’ wishes. But Stuart’s delayed arrival at Gettysburg was also an egregious example of what could happen to a man’s career and reputation if such decisions backfired or, as in his case, were perceived to have failed. Also, this was not the Civil War. Where were the enemy’s rifle pits? His battle lines? His artillery bunkers? Fetterman knew that the wood train he had been sent out to protect was safe. Support the wood train had been the colonel’s primary directive. That had been accomplished. Do not engage or pursue Indians at its expense. With the wood train safe, he could now either turn back toward the post, or teach the redskins a hard lesson about fighting real soldiers. It was Crazy Horse who forced his hand.
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The wispy brave with the wavy hair dashed to and fro before the Bluecoats on his favorite bay racer, distinguished by its white face and stockings. He tried every trick he knew. He taunted the soldiers in English with vile curses. He dismounted within rifle range, again pretending that his horse had pulled up lame. He waved his blanket and stood tall with obvious disdain as bullets pocked the dirt at his feet. He even dismounted and started a small fire, acting as if his horse was so injured that he had given up and was ready to submit to a Black Heart warrior’s suicide. Still Fetterman would not budge. Crazy Horse, clad in only a breechclout and deerskin leggings, with a single hawk’s feather twined in his hair and a lone pebble tied behind his ear, was down to his final ploy. He turned his back toward the soldiers, flipped his breechclout up over his back, pulled down his leggings, and wiggled his naked ass in their faces.
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The pickets on Pilot Knob shifted their field glasses from the taunting Indian to Captain Fetterman, who was pacing before his infantrymen. They saw him unsheathe his saber and appear to shout. The lookouts blinked, and the soldiers were gone.
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In the dogwood defiles the steam of the concealed Strong Hearts’ breath mingled with that of their ponies as they caressed the animals’ snouts to keep them from whinnying. Not far away along frozen Peno Creek, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho braves flexed their bowstrings and tightened their grips on their lances.
36
BROKEN
ARROWS
Captain Fetterman’s
Bluecoats topped the crest of
Lodge Trail Ridge, and for
once no warrior bolted to give
the ambush away. A cold,
damp wind had risen, bracing
the foot soldiers as they
flowed down the north slope
following Crazy Horse and
the yipping decoys. They
reached the butte where the
High Backbone began, the
rise overspread by a jumble
of flat-topped rocks deposited
by an ancient glacier. They
continued about 800 yards
across the land bridge, firing
as they walked. A few
taunting Indians fell, and
Lieutenant Grummond, riding
in front of Fetterman and to
Fetterman’s left, spotted what
appeared to be a small village
with a herd of Indian ponies
milling in a dell perhaps half
a mile to the northwest.
Without consulting Fetterman
he ordered a charge, and the
cavalry spurred into a gallop,
the civilians Wheatley and
Fisher out ahead with five
troopers riding point.At a few minutes past noon Crazy Horse and his decoys skidded their horses across the ice of Peno Creek and out of rifle range, the infantry still marching double-quick after them. Suddenly the Indians halted, formed up into two single files, and streamed back toward the whites. Not far from the creek the two files crossed in a perfect X. It was the end of the beginning, the prearranged signal to the hidden war party.
Two thousand warriors rose as one. A trembling war cry borne by the wind echoed through the hills, a curdling primal scream evoked by half a century of white indignities, lies, and betrayals. The Indians rolled toward the soldiers like a prairie fire. From the left, Cheyenne horsemen charged from clusters of dogwoods and cottonwoods. From the cutbank on the right, Lakota and Arapaho on foot scrambled from the tall grass and shot out from behind ash and box elders. Arrows blackened the sky, killing and wounding both friend and foe. Fetterman’s commands could barely be heard amid the shrieks and shrill whistles.
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The post bugler was about to sound the noon mess call when sentinels on the walls of Fort Phil Kearny heard firing, “continuous and rapid, ” from beyond Lodge Trail Ridge. At the first gunshots Colonel Carrington climbed to a lookout station on top of his quarters and scanned the ridgeline with his field glasses. He saw neither soldiers nor Indians. The colonel had received word from the woodcutters that they had reached the blockhouses on Piney Island with no casualties, but he knew that an Indian raiding party was still lurking somewhere between the fort and the Sullivant Hills. No one at the post was alarmed by either the gunshots or Fetterman’s disappearance. Hostiles would not dare attack so strong a force, “the largest, ” the new arrival Lieutenant Arnold noted, “that had ever been sent out from the garrison.”
Carrington assumed that his officers had decided to clear out the decoys near Peno Creek before coming back over the northernmost crest of the ridge and flanking the war party near the pinery. It was what he would have done; it was what he had attempted to do on December 6. He was slightly concerned that both Fetterman and Grummond had disregarded his orders not to cross the ridge, but even as an administrator who had rarely seen action he understood the necessity of making tactical decisions in the field. As a precaution he directed Captain Ten Eyck to assemble a detail and march for the sound of the rifle reports. Ten Eyck gathered the last forty infantrymen with working weapons and reported to the colonel. Carrington told him that after he had merged with Captain Fetterman’s troop, all soldiers were to return to the post. Ten Eyck’s infantry marched out on the double-quick but slowed while fording Big Piney Creek. The ice had partially melted and had not completely refrozen, and the men removed their socks and boots to wade across. At the creek a handful of mounted civilians fell in with them.
Meanwhile, Colonel Carrington called for what was left of the Company C cavalry and ordered the teamster wagonmasters to gather all armed civilians still at the post. The detail came to about thirty men, some of whom piled into three mule drawn ammunition wagons and an ambulance in order to catch up to Ten Eyck. There were no more serviceable horses at the fort.
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Fetterman somehow managed to form up his surrounded troops and march them back across the High Backbone through the rain of arrows until they reached the flat topped rock pile. From there they could go no farther. The air palled with powder smoke as Fetterman ordered his men into two loose, outward facing skirmish lines twenty paces apart—a formation ideal in Civil War battles to determine an enemy’s position and provide cover for the maneuvers of larger forces or reinforcements. But there were no reinforcements within striking distance, and these tactics meant little to the marauding Indians.
Far below Fetterman, Lieutenant Grummond realized too late what had happened. As he neared the pony herd he, too, was nearly enveloped by warriors; his stunned cavalrymen reined in their panicked, rearing mounts, awaiting orders that would never come. Grummond and a veteran sergeant were among the first to fall, with dozens of Cheyenne arrows penetrating their bodies. Without an officer the cavalry retreated in terror, ignoring Fetterman’s plight and making for the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge. They also abandoned the civilians Wheatley and Fisher and the little patrol of point riders, who were too far out in front and were quickly cut off. This group dismounted and formed a small circle; the concentrated fire from their Henry's felled so many braves that within moments a great pile of dead Indians and ponies, mixed with their own slain animals, formed a natural barricade. But there were too many hostiles. They kept coming until it was knives and tomahawks against bayonets and swinging rifle butts. No one knows in what order the white men died.
Back at the rock pile Fetterman was also fast losing soldiers. His skirmish lines had devolved into two loosely concentric rings rapidly collapsing in on themselves—a tightening noose with the captain in its center. Their position at the top of the rise bought them some time, but daring Indians burst through the defenses on horse and on foot, first singly, then by twos and threes, and finally a second storm of arrows preceded a wave of thrusting lances and swinging war clubs. Warriors in front were pushed ahead by a surge from behind. The soldiers fired their old Springfields, but the Indians were so close that there was no time to reload.
Captain Brown broke away from the surviving cavalry troops who were scrambling up Lodge Trail Ridge and somehow made it through the mass of bodies at the rock pile. He dismounted beside Captain Fetterman, set loose Jimmy Carrington’s pony, and stood back to back with his old commander, blasting away with his Colts. Brown fought off one charging Indian while another, a Lakota named American Horse, rushed his war pony into the rocks and brained Fetterman with his nail-studded club of solid bur oak. American Horse leaped from his saddle onto Fetterman’s body and slit his throat, nearly severing Fetterman’s head. The dwindling infantry fought hand to hand, some from their knees, swinging the shards of their shattered rifles. When several soldiers broke from the rocks and made a run for the cavalry, howling Indians rode and sprinted after them.
Brown was still standing, surrounded by an orgy of butchery. Eyeballs were gouged and noses and tongues torn from the wounded, screaming men. The Indians severed chins, sliced off fingers at the joints, and forced mouths open to chop out teeth. Skulls were cleaved open and brain matter was scooped out and set on rocks next to severed arms, legs, and feet. Uniform pants were pulled down or cut away and penises were hacked off and shoved into mouths. Brown had one cartridge left in his revolver. He put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.
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Up on the slope of Lodge Trail Ridge the frantic, terrified cavalrymen led their mounts by the reins. The climb across the icy hollows of the boulder-strewn hillside was slow and hard, and some horses skittered and broke away. One horseman walked backward, a lonesome rear guard continuously pumping the lever of his seven-shot Spencer, reloading, and firing again. The few infantrymen who had escaped the rock pile rushed past him up the incline. He covered them until an arrow tore through his heart.
When the first cavalrymen reached the summit, a narrow, slippery forty-foot shelf, they could see Fort Phil Kearny less than four miles away on the plateau beyond Big Piney Creek. They also saw Yellow Eagle’s raiders, reinforced with at least 100 braves, charging up the south slope on snorting war ponies. The troopers’ escape was blocked. They released their horses and dug into a cluster of boulders. There was a lull in the savage howls, and for a moment they dared to hope that reinforcements had overtaken the war party. The Indians had indeed broken off the attack, but only to collect the Army horses. A shower of arrows signaled their return.
Now spotters watching the fort flashed mirror signals to Red Cloud that more soldiers —Captain Ten Eyck’s detail —were crossing Big Piney Creek. This news was at first greeted eagerly, until the scouts signaled that the soldiers were riding in wagons. Red Cloud was certain this meant the guns that shoot twice. He knew that, even hauling heavy howitzers, the soldiers would crest the ridge in less than thirty minutes—was this enough time to kill every last white still caught in the ambush? Red Cloud signaled back from the tall hill, and the warriors surrounding the cavalry crawled as close as they could to the boulders. At a second signal they stood and ran into the teeth of the Bluecoats’ last volley, vanishing in clouds of gun smoke. The attackers suffered heavy casualties as they jabbed their lances and swung their war clubs and tomahawks, scalping soldiers alive. Crazy Horse was said to have been among these fighters, killing with his steel hatchet.
The little German bugler Adolph Metzger was one of the last to die. He found a crevasse between two large rocks, burrowed in backward, and fired his Spencer until its magazine was empty. Then he swung his bugle until it was a shapeless hunk of metal smeared with blood and war paint. For his bravery he was accorded the highest honor his enemies could bestow— he was the only soldier not scalped. His bleeding, battered body, wounded in a dozen places, was covered with a buffalo-robe shroud as a sign of respect.
If true, Metzger was the exception. 1 The official Army report, suppressed for twenty years, noted that many of the soldiers were probably still alive when their “eyes, ears, mouths and arms [were] penetrated with spearheads, sticks, and arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knifes; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arm, and cheek taken out. [There were] punctures upon every sensitive part of the body, even to the soles of the feet and the palms of the hand.” From decoys to depredations, it had taken a mere forty minutes. Eighty one Americans lay dead.
1. Or so reported the civilian from Colonel Carrington’s burial detail who claimed to have recovered Metzger’s corpse. Not long afterward, Crow Indians related a similar story to a fur trader, but with a different ending. According to the Crows, for his bravery Metzger was indeed accorded the highest honor his enemies could bestow —by being carried off alive and tortured to death back at the hostiles’ camp. Years later Northern Cheyenne warriors gave Metzger’s misshapen bugle to a Buffalo, Wyoming, store owner. It remains on display at the store.
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