The Heart of Everything That is,The Untold Story of Red Cloud,
An American Legend
37
“LIKE
HOGS
BROUGHT
TO
MARKET”
On the southern slope of
Lodge Trail Ridge the firing
from the other side grew
louder. But instead of
following Captain
Fetterman’s path directly up
the Bozeman Trail, Captain
Ten Eyck ordered his troops
east and then north, aiming
for the ridge line’s highest
point. He wanted to be certain
he controlled the high ground
for whatever he would face
on the other side of the
ridgeline. The route added
fifteen to twenty minutes to
his mission.
At 12:45 Ten Eyck’s lead skirmishers were just topping the crest some 200 yards east of the battlefield when all gunshots from the Peno Creek valley ceased. One of the civilians riding just ahead of Ten Eyck’s troop thought he heard groans and screams. Within minutes the entire column had reached the summit. The Peno Creek valley stretching before them was aswarm with thousands of painted warriors, more than any man in the garrison had ever seen. Many seemed to be concentrated on either side of the High Backbone. When the Indians spotted the relief detail they jeered, shrieked, and waved their weapons toward the sky, daring the Americans to come down and fight. Others were running down saddled American horses and recovering some of the 40,000 arrows that had been shot, 1,000 for every minute of the fight. Still others were loading their dead onto makeshift travois or tending to the wounded. 1 And a group of about 100 were clustered around a pile of boulders half a mile or so to the west along the crest of the ridgeline. A dog darted out from the scrub, and some of the soldiers recognized it as one of the hounds from the fort. An Indian put an arrow through its brain.
Ten Eyck was confused. Where was Fetterman? Where was Grummond’s cavalry? He dispatched his only mounted messenger back to the fort and continued to stare at the vista before him, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Meanwhile the wagons arrived, and the Indians slowly withdrew from the little valley. Suddenly, a trooper cried, “There’s the men down there, all dead.” From a distance the naked white bodies could have been mistaken for patches of snow.
Back at the fort Colonel Carrington paced his small lookout tower, watching as Captain Ten Eyck’s relief party topped the ridge. Below him, on the front porch, Mrs. Wheatley and the wives of officers and enlisted men gathered with Margaret Carrington. The women stared wordlessly at the heights across the Big Piney. “The silence, ” wrote Frances Grummond, who was five months’ pregnant, “was dreadful.” At a little past one o’clock they spotted a lone horseman riding furiously down the slope. Within moments he had galloped through the main gate and skidded to a halt before the colonel’s headquarters. “Captain Ten Eyck says he can see or hear nothing of Captain Fetterman, ” the courier reported. “The Indians are on the road challenging him to come down.”
There were Indians as far as the eye could see, he said, and Ten Eyck had requested reinforcements and a mountain howitzer. Then the messenger lowered his voice. “The Captain is afraid Fetterman’s party is all gone up, sir.” There were no more fit horses to replace the messenger’s exhausted mount, and Carrington ordered one of his personal horses, a big sturdy gray, retrieved from the stable. He scrawled a message on a piece of paper, informing Ten Eyck that reinforcements and ammunition were on their way. He was unaware that these had already reached him. And as if doubting either the captain or his messenger, he also ordered Ten Eyck to find Fetterman, unite with him, collect the wood train, and return to the post. Perhaps he also anticipated the public outcry should the courier’s aside be true, for before handing the message over he jotted a sentence reprimanding Ten Eyck for his roundabout route up the slope. “You could have saved two miles toward the scene of action if you had taken Lodge Trail Ridge.” If it was the lawyer-turned-colonel’s purpose to plant the first seed of blame elsewhere for whatever had happened on the other side of that ridge, it was a move well played.
Captain Ten Eyck waited until the entire huge war party had departed over a string of distant buttes before he advanced cautiously down the north slope of Lodge Trail Ridge. He reached Peno Creek and turned west, following the wagon ruts of the Bozeman Trail. The knoll with the flat-topped rock pile loomed before him. Bodies covered the stones. The corpses formed a ring about forty feet in diameter. The harsh wind had scattered much paper—maps, unsent letters, journal pages—a common sight in the aftermath of frontier warfare. Some soldiers recognized fellow infantrymen from scraps of uniforms that the Indians had not shredded or stolen.
It was difficult to identify individuals, although “Bald Head Eagle” Brown, with a powder burn on his temple and a bullet in his brain, was recognizable. The Indians had “scalped” his tonsure. He was the only trooper killed by a gunshot. Dead Indian ponies and American horses littered the blood-soaked ground, the snouts of the Army animals pointing toward the fort. In the cuts and draws below, on the rises above, and in the scrub and among the trees they found more men— scalped, mutilated, the blood frozen in their wounds. Some soldiers who fanned out to search through the tall yellow saw grass recoiled when they realized that the greasy material they were slipping on was the organs and entrails of their comrades. They had yet to discover Grummond’s troops on the ridge.
Though a mule is far less likely to spook than a horse, it was well known throughout the West that mules shied more from the smell of blood, and now they brayed and reared at the scent of so much of it. The temperature was falling, the corpses were rapidly stiffening, and Ten Eyck ordered as many loaded into the four wagons as could fit. It was rough, slow work, and they did not reach the gates of Fort Phil Kearny until dusk. In the gloaming the dove-gray sky had the macabre formality of a steel engraving. “We brought in about fifty in wagons, ” wrote the post surgeon, “like you see hogs brought to market.”
• • •
As night fell the temperature dropped below zero, the wind picked up, and Fort Phil Kearny was locked down and braced for the next attack. Nearly a third of its garrison had abruptly vanished— closer to half, taking into account the armed soldiers and teamsters on Piney Island. Colonel Carrington certainly did, and he sent for them immediately. He also ordered all civilians brought into the fort, released every prisoner from the guardhouse, and placed the entire post under arms, such as they were. The howitzers and mounds of grapeshot and case shot were pulled to the battlements, rifles were stacked across the parade ground, and orders were passed to bar every door and window. Three troopers were assigned to each of the stockade’s firing loopholes, but most of the Spencers had been captured in the fight and Springfield ammunition was so short that each man was issued only five rounds. The balls jangled in their haversacks like marbles. Every man understood that the fort could not hold out long against a full-bore assault. Survivors recalled that the men assumed their posts without expression in their eyes, as if coming from no past and having no future.
When the wagons arrived from the pinery Colonel Carrington had the beds removed and upended to form three concentric circles girding the post’s underground magazine. As he studied the Indian signal fires on the hills and ridges ringing the fort, his wife knocked on Frances Grummond’s door along Officers’ Row to break the news that her husband was still missing. Given the “horrible and sickening” condition of the forty-nine bodies carried back to the post—these were being sorted through and identified in the emptied guardhouse—neither woman held much hope that he was still alive. Margaret Carrington insisted that the lieutenant’s wife move into her quarters—tellingly, no similar offer was made to the innkeeper James Wheatley’s wife and children—and as Frances gathered a few belongings, another knock sounded on her door. She pulled it open to find a dark, wiry civilian with a pointy black beard and “bright, piercing eyes” filling her small door frame.
Mrs. Grummond knew this man’s name although they had never before spoken to each other. He was John “Portugee” Phillips, the mining partner of Isaac Fisher. Phillips had been born in the Azores to Portuguese parents, and in a lilting accent he told her that he had been out hauling water when Fisher and Wheatley joined her husband’s troop, or else he would have surely ridden with them. Now, he said, Colonel Carrington had called for volunteers to ride to Fort Laramie for help, and he had stepped forward. He had come, he said, to say goodbye. Frances Grummond was flustered. She barely knew the man.
Phillips glanced at Grummond’s distended stomach. “I will go if it costs me my life, ” he said with tears in his eyes. And though still in shock and taken somewhat aback by the stranger’s familiarity, she finally understood his words to mean that Phillips was following his own Code of the West, whereby the safety of a pregnant woman in danger was paramount. Phillips removed the wolfskin robe from his shoulders and handed it to her before departing. “I brought it for you to keep and remember me by if you never see me again, ” he said. Then he turned and left.
Throughout all this—the preparations for an attack, the identification of the bodies stacked in the guardhouse, the mourning, the fear and confusion—memories of Captain Fetterman and his eighty dead hovered over the little outpost like ghosts. No one slept well that night.
Colonel Carrington hunched over his lamplit writing desk and scratched out two messages: one for General Cooke in Omaha and one for General Grant in Washington. They were nearly identical. He described what little he knew of the day’s battle—“a fight unexampled in Indian warfare”—and informed his superiors that though only forty-nine bodies had been recovered, he suspected that the missing thirty-one troopers and their officer Lieutenant Grummond were also dead. Without immediate reinforcements armed with Spencer rifles, he wrote, a retaliatory “expedition now with my force is impossible.” He assured both generals that he was prepared to defend Fort Phil Kearny to the last man, and concluded with perhaps his first realistic assessment of his position since arriving in the Powder River Country in July. “The Indians are desperate; I spare none, and they spare none.”
As with his note to Ten Eyck, it must surely have occurred to the savvy citizen soldier that the Army, indeed the nation, would soon be looking for scapegoats. It was likely with this in mind that he added a personal comment to General Grant’s dispatch:
I send a copy of dispatch to General Cooke simply as a case when in uncertain communication, I think you should know the facts at once. I want all my officers. I want men. Depend upon it, as I wrote in July, no treaty but hard fighting is to assure this line. I have no reason to think otherwise. I will operate all winter, whatever the season, if supported; but to redeem my pledge to open and guarantee this line, I must have reinforcements and the best arms up to my full estimate.
Carrington had his adjutant make two copies of both letters. In addition to “Portugee” Phillips, he had recruited two more couriers— a miner named William Bailey and the wagon master George Dillon—to ride separately for Horseshoe Station, the closest telegraph office, 196 miles away. But the Horseshoe Station line was frequently down, so he asked all three to continue on to Fort Laramie, another forty miles south. It was Phillips in whom he had the most confidence.
It was nearing midnight on December 21 when Colonel Carrington met Phillips in the quartermaster’s stables. He led Phillips to his own stalls, where the miner selected one of the colonel’s personal mounts, a white Kentucky thoroughbred. Phillips crammed his saddlebags with hardtack and tied a quarter sack of oats to his pommel. The thermometer read eighteen degrees below zero, and the air smelled of a gathering storm. Phillips cinched his buffalo-hair coat, wrapped tight the wool leggings beneath his thigh- high buffalo boots, pulled his beaver hat low over his ears, and jammed his hands into sheepskin mittens that stretched to his elbows. He then led the horse to the southeast water gate of the quartermaster’s yard, Carrington walking beside him. The first threatening bits of swirling sleet and snow pricked the men’s faces.
The three enlisted men posted at the gate were jumpy. At the sound of boots crunching on the frozen ground a private called out a challenge. Carrington moved close enough to be recognized and the sergeant of the guard shouted, “Attention!”
“Never mind, sergeant, ” Carrington said. “Open the gate.
Two soldiers pushed open the heavy log sally port and stood silent. Carrington gave Phillips brief final instructions before reaching out to shake his hand. “May God help you, ” he said, and the horseman led his charger out, mounted, wheeled, and trotted away.
Carrington and the three guardsmen stood wordless for half a minute, the colonel’s head cocked as if he was listening for the hiss of an arrow. Then the hoofbeats went silent. “Good, ” he said. “He has taken softer ground at the side of the trail.” The snow began falling harder.
1. Reliable estimates of Indian casualties at the Fetterman fight are difficult to come by. The figures for deaths range from 11 to 60. The wounded are said to have numbered between 60 and 300, of whom an estimated 100 died soon thereafter. All the figures were recounted many years later by various old Indians who claimed to have taken part in the battle. In any case, most historians concur that the Indians’ heaviest losses came from their own arrows
Carrington was surprised that the Indians had not followed up the massacre with a sunrise attack. When the bugle blew reveille and the report of the morning gun echoed back from the hills, he had expected the sound to be met with howls, eagle whistles, and arrows. But as the pale sun rose farther over Pilot Knob not an Indian was visible on the ridges and hills. This, Carrington knew, did not mean the Indians were not there. It was, however, unlike them to refrain from ostentatiously exhibiting their joy at the outcome of yesterday’s fight. Perhaps the reason was the blizzard that everyone sensed was coming.
While his troop assembled he had whispered to Mrs. Grummond a promise to retrieve her husband’s body. Then he’d handed Captain Powell two written orders. Captain Ten Eyck would be accompanying him over the ridgeline, and Powell was left in charge of the post. The first order concerned communications. On his departure, Carrington wrote, Powell was to run a white lamp up the flagstaff; if Indians appeared, he was to fire the twelve-pounder three times and substitute a red lantern for the white one. The second directive was more confidential, and Carrington pulled Powell aside to issue it orally as well: “If in my absence, Indians in overwhelming numbers attack, put the women and children in the magazine with supplies of water, bread, crackers, and other supplies that seem best, and, in the event of a last desperate struggle, destroy all together, rather than have any captured alive.”
To remove any doubt Carrington himself strode through the circular wagon fortification, pulled open the magazine door, cut open a sphere of case shot, and laid a train of black powder that would ignite at the touch of a match.
Jim Bridger’s failing eyesight and the biting cold may have made him less of an asset to the battalion—the old mountain man’s arthritis barely allowed him to walk, much less mount a horse and ride for any length of time. But he had been proved correct in one observation: these “paper-collar” soldiers did not know anything about fighting Indians. Bridger had pulled himself out of bed that morning and limped out into the day. Despite the intense pain in his joints he volunteered to ride as a scout. He, too, expected an attack at any moment, and he’d decided that when it occurred it would be as fine an occasion as any to end his career and his life. Once through the main gate, Bridger set about directing skirmishers to key sites on the column’s flanks and positioned pairs of infantry pickets on successive outcrops and ridges, creating a chain that reached all the way back to the fort. He made certain that each set of the guards standing higher and higher along the route would never be out of sight of the men below.
The temperature remained around zero, and darker storm clouds blotted out the sun as the detail trod silently past the rock pile and reached the high ground strewn with boulders. The rocky earth along the ridgeline was streaked with frozen pools of blood, and the bodies were so stiff that one civilian likened the task of loading them onto the wagons to stacking cordwood. The mules again huffed and kicked at the smell of blood and offal, and soldiers were assigned to hold their heads and reins to keep them from bolting. One team of mules threw off the flailing handlers and dumped a half-filled wagon. Corpses frozen into grotesque contortions tumbled across the slope. “It was, ” wrote a witness, “a terrible sight and a horrible job.”
The men on the ridge, like Fetterman’s soldiers, had been butchered, but cavalrymen in the detail recognized infantry insignia mixed among the dead. One horseman, John Guthrie, noted, “Some had crosses cut on their breasts, faces to the sky, some crosses on the back, faces to the ground. . . . We walked on top of internals and did not know it in the high grass. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldier they belonged to, so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man’s guts and an infantry man got a cavalry man’s guts.”
From the ridgeline the wagons rolled slowly down to Peno Creek, where Lieutenant Grummond and Sergeant Augustus Lang were discovered. Grummond’s head had been severed and his body had suffered the usual mutilations. Not far away from him lay the frozen hulk of Jimmy Carrington’s pony, Calico. The horse, too, had been scalped. Someone remarked that such was the Indians’ contempt for the quartermaster Captain Brown that they had even scalped his horse. A few hundred yards down the creek bed lay the bodies of James Wheatley, Isaac Fisher, “and four or five of the old long-tried and experienced soldiers.” Piles of spent Henry rifle cartridges littered the little ring created by their slain horses and an additional ten dead ponies. Outside the defensive circle a soldier counted sixty-five smudges of dark, clotted blood, perhaps indicating where an Indian had fallen.
It was dark before the column moved back over the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge. Excited word was passed from front to back that the white lantern still swung from the top of the flagstaff. Back inside the fort Colonel Carrington handed Frances Grummond a sealed envelope containing a lock of her husband’s hair. Not long afterward, the blizzard that had threatened all day began. The temperature dropped to twenty below and by daylight on December 23 snowdrifts had crested so high against the west wall of the stockade that guards could walk over it. Bridger assured Colonel Carrington that not even Red Cloud was bold or crazy enough to attack in such weather. Even so, all through the day before Christmas Fort Phil Kearny was tense. A triple guard remained at every loophole.
If any scintilla of holiday spirit still breathed it was smothered by the steady whine of handsaws and a clanging of hammers on nails as carpenters worked around the clock constructing pine coffins—two men to a coffin except for the dead officers. Captain Fetterman, Lieutenant Grummond, and Captain Brown had separate caskets. The coffins were numbered to identify each occupant, and Colonel Carrington dispatched a grave-digging detail to break the frozen earth beneath Pilot Knob. He hoped for a solemn Christmas Day service. But even continuous half-hour work shifts could not accomplish that. The snow was too high, the ground was too hard, and the threat of another attack was too overwhelming to spare enough men. So a day late, on December 26, forty-two pine boxes were hurriedly interred in a shallow fifty-foot-long trench. No words were spoken over the graves.
Following the somber ceremony there was nothing to do but batten down Fort Phil Kearny and wait. For what, only God and Red Cloud knew.
The blizzard gave the Indians time to mourn. For three days the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters in the great village on the Tongue made their way to the bluffs to cut their fingers and arms and chop their hair in memory of the dead. Snowdrifts five and six feet deep ran with blood. And then, on the fourth day, the victory dances commenced to celebrate the fight the Indians would call— referring to the half-man’s augury—the “Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands.”
Paeans were composed to Yellow Eagle for leading the raids on the wood road, and decoys such as Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses and American Horse, Fetterman’s slayer, were feted at feasts. A wan Crazy Horse was dragged into the firelight and for once not allowed to back away. To him were rendered honors for his deft disciplining of the decoy party, and old men sang of the fearlessness he had shown while standing unflinching against the American guns. It was a turning point in Crazy Horse’s life. Never again would he be able to remain silently aloof in the shadows of the council fires, a lone wolf warrior-hunter responsible to no one but himself. Like his friend Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His- Horses, he would now be groomed for tribal leadership, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho as well as the Lakota would look to, and depend on, his wisdom in both war and peace. Given their familiarity with the ways of the whites, however, there were few on the Tongue in the last week of December 1866 who believed that peace had been achieved.
And then there was Red Cloud. To him went “all the honor” for the stunning victory. His strategic planning, so often questioned, had proved a masterstroke— everything he had foreseen, from the victory at Bridge Station to the warnings that accompanied his verbal explosion at Fort Laramie, had indeed occurred. He had held together his Indian coalition while balancing older, more experienced voices urging accommodation with the whites against young warriors too eager to strike too soon. His forward thinking and his keen military judgment in choosing lieutenants such as Crazy Horse had inspired the disparate tribes with a sense of unity. He had told his people that their cause, his cause, was just, and that “The Heart of Everything That Is” was worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for. Best of all, in the end it was the Bluecoats who had done the dying.
At the grand celebrations that followed the Peno Creek fight Red Cloud’s political rivals, Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses in particular, deferred to him. He graciously returned their praise while modestly accepting the accolades. If he seemed subdued, there was good reason. He fretted that his warriors had failed to destroy the despised fort between the Pineys. And he knew that this war was far from over. The Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands had been a fine start, perhaps even a signal to the Americans that they should leave the Powder River Country and never return. It was what he hoped, but Red Cloud could hardly have believed it. He knew his enemy. The Americans would be back, and he would fight them again—and only on his terms. But he also understood the ways of his own people and the allied tribes. Despite the victory, it would be difficult to rally them again so soon. His braves needed time to fill their bellies over warm winter fires while the war ponies recovered their strength. It would be a short cold season, and when the new grass sprouted from the prairie he would reveal his next step.
To that end he had decided that the Lakota bands would forgo their annual trek east to stake individual winter camps near the Black Hills. Instead they would move west en masse into the old Crow lands in the valley of the Little Bighorn to prepare for a spring offensive. He was certain that warriors from other bands would seek him out to swell his fighting force. He would use these numbers wisely; the Americans would not know what hit them. Already the details were forming in his mind, like a set of tumblers clicking into place. First he would simultaneously attack the two most northern garrisons, Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith, and kill everyone in them. That would leave Reno Station isolated, and either the Army would abandon it or he would burn it. This was an audacious plan, but Red Cloud was certain it would work.
What to do about Fort Laramie, Red Cloud was not certain. By then the Americans might well have left the territory forever. Of this eventual outcome he was certain. Then, after it was all over, after the Indians had won his war, he would find rest in his lodge.
Portugee Phillips was half dead, and his mount was in even worse shape. He rode by night and hid by day through one of the most vicious northers ever recorded on the High Plains. He rationed his hardtack and supplemented his horse feed with the odd tuft of prairie grass dug out from under thigh-deep snow. He reached the Horseshoe Station telegraph office late Christmas morning. Somewhere along the trail he had met up with William Bailey and George Dillon, and the three arrived together, exhausted, hungry, and freezing, Bailey and Dillon too spent to go on.
John Friend, the telegraph operator, tapped out a synopsis of Colonel Carrington’s dispatches. But he told the three that he had received no messages that day, and he feared that either the storm or the Indians had cut the line. Without saying a word Phillips began rebinding his legs with burlap sacks. Bailey and Dillon, collapsed in a heap by the fire, begged Phillips not to risk it. He ignored them, threw on his buffalo coat and beaver cap, saddled his horse, and rode. By noon the blizzard had blown north, behind him, and he traveled all afternoon across a landscape so white that by dusk he was snowblind. Sunset brought relief but also the arrival of another storm. He rode by feel, always tracking south, the new sheets of snow thicker with his mount’s every footfall.
The temperature was twenty-five degrees below zero when Phillips reeled through the main gate of Fort Laramie late on Christmas night, his mount drawn as a moth to flame by the lighted and gaily decorated windows of the main officers’ quarters. A full-dress garrison ball was in progress, and the strains of the band wafted over his head as he slumped in his saddle and fell from his horse. Snow and ice matted his pointy black beard. Icicles hung from his coat and hat. The officer of the guard, a young lieutenant, rushed from his sentry box and helped him to his feet. Phillips was too weak to walk by himself, and his vocal cords were so frozen that his voice was a tinny croak when he said he needed to see the post’s commanding officer.
The lieutenant slung Phillips’s arm over his shoulders and half-carried him to the ballroom, where the officers were about to select partners for the next dance. People gasped when he staggered through the door. The band fell silent and Lieutenant Colonel Innis Palmer, Fort Laramie’s commanding officer, rushed to his side. Earlier that afternoon Palmer had received a telegram from Horseshoe Station reporting an Indian massacre. But the communication was so garbled and incomplete—it did not say who had been massacred, or where the incident had occurred—that he took it as just another of the many rumors that flew across the High Plains.
Now Phillips reached under his buffalo coat and woolen shirts and pulled out Colonel Carrington’s dispatches. Lieutenant Colonel Palmer’s face whitened as he read them. He looked at Phillips, who had just ridden 236 miles in four days through raging blizzards —a feat that would become equal in western lore to Paul Revere’s famous ride. Palmer turned back to the cold papers in his hands. He was wearing white kid gloves. He handed the messages to an aide, who ran to the post’s telegraph office, and directed two soldiers to carry Phillips to the post infirmary. On the way they passed Colonel Carrington’s white Kentucky thoroughbred charger, lying dead on the parade ground.
The Fort Laramie telegraph operator relayed the dispatches word for word to both General Cooke in Omaha and General Grant in Washington. It was 3:15 p.m. on December 26, 1866, when Grant and the War Department received the first news about what would soon be known nationwide as the “Fetterman Massacre.”
The next morning the New York Times provided brief details of the “horrid massacre” in the distant Dakota Territory, noting that it accounted for 8 percent of all Army deaths in half a century of Indian fighting west of the Mississippi. And though what would later be referred to as “Red Cloud’s War” was far from over, this was the moment when Grant came to the realization that the United States had been defeated for the first time by an Indian opponent.
Red Cloud never spoke to any whites of his great victory, so we are left to imagine his thoughts as the Bad Faces led the Lakota push west into the Bighorn Valley. Perhaps he recalled his orphaned childhood, or his first lethal coup against the Pawnees, or even the suicide of the tragic Pine Leaf. What we do know is that the boy shunned by so many and the man feared by all had accomplished what no other Indian ever had before.
The son of an alcoholic Brule had taught himself to lead, to suppress his snarl and his personal rage and remain still when he wanted to strike out. He had developed a steely self-discipline, and it had enabled him to become the first warrior chief to transfigure an Indian military culture that had stood for centuries, if not millennia. He had not only united the fractious Lakota, enticing Oglalas, Brules, Miniconjous, and Sans Arcs to fight as one, but had also drawn to his banner the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Nez Percé, and Shoshones. It was the only way, he knew from the beginning, to defeat the Americans, to humble a people so strong, so numerous, so intent on taking his land when they already had so much of their own. And he had shown the United States; he had achieved, in a sense, what more exalted generals such as Cornwallis and Lee had been unable to do.
The irony, of course, lay in the fact that Red Cloud did not even know who those men were.
On July 4, 1903, the eighty-two-year-old Red Cloud, nearly blind, made his final public address to a gathering of Lakota. “My sun is set, ” he said. “My day is done. Darkness is stealing over me. Before I lie down to rise no more, I will speak to my people. Hear me, my friends, for it is not the time for me to tell you a lie. The Great Spirit made us, the Indians, and gave us this land we live in. He gave us the buffalo, the antelope, and the deer for food and clothing. We moved our hunting grounds from the Minnesota to the Platte and from the Mississippi to the great mountains. No one put bounds on us. We were free as the winds, and like the eagle, heard no man’s commands.”
The white men had changed all that. They were too numerous and too powerful, and their arrival marked the passing of an era as surely as the disappearance of the buffalo. “Shadows are long and dark before me, ” Red Cloud concluded. “I shall soon lie down to rise no more. While my spirit is with my body the smoke of my breath shall be towards the Sun, for he knows all things and knows that I am still true to him.”
On December 10, 1909, Red Cloud died peacefully in his sleep at the age of eighty eight. His death prompted headlines around the country. In a lengthy appreciation, the New York Times noted, “When Red Cloud fought the whites he did so to the best of his ability. But when he signed the first peace paper he buried his tomahawk and this peace pact was never broken.” It was, of course, broken many times—by the U.S. government.
Red Cloud’s grave is in a cemetery atop a hill on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a short walk from the Red Cloud Heritage Center. From there, on a clear day, you can almost see the sacred Paha Sapa.
A frontier fort was named after William Judd Fetterman. There was no such honor for Henry Beebee Carrington, yet he persevered. In July 1908, for the first time since the Battle of the Hundred-in-theHands forty-two years earlier, Carrington returned to the site of the outpost he had painstakingly constructed on the desolate plateau in northwest Wyoming. Only the outline of its foundation remained. The few men and women still living who had occupied Fort Phil Kearny had been invited to mark the Independence Day weekend by visiting the rocky knoll in the Peno Creek Valley where Fetterman had fallen and where a monument was to be erected consecrating the battle. Today the stone marker rises from the yellow sweet clover and the purple Canada thistle only a few yards from a short section of the Bozeman Trail still rutted from wagon wheels; most of the rest of the old trail has been paved over for highways and county roads, plowed under by dryland farmers, or set aside as open grazing land.
On that day in 1908, Carrington, who was eighty four, wore his blue colonel’s uniform and was accompanied by his wife, the former Frances Grummond. Margaret Carrington had died, probably from tuberculosis, in 1870. Her husband was out of uniform by then, having accepted a position as a professor of military science at Wabash College in Indiana. Meanwhile Frances Grummond had returned to her hometown, Franklin, Tennessee, where she buried her husband, George. When she tried to collect her husband’s military death benefits she discovered for the first time that George Grummond had another wife. When Frances learned of Margaret’s death, she wrote a note of condolence to Henry. The two continued to exchange letters, a romance bloomed, and they were married in 1871.
With Frances at his side Carrington continued to vigorously reject contentions that he bore responsibility for the Fetterman Massacre. His efforts included revisions of the ensuing six editions of Margaret’s memoir, Absaraka: Home of the Crows, which was published in 1868. When Frances’s own book was published in 1910, Fetterman’s reputation was further sullied. (Fetterman’s good friend William Bisbee, who retired in 1903 as a brigadier general, was one of the few who defended him, in his own book.) Those attending the 1908 reunion were surprised by the vigor of the old soldier as he delivered an extemporaneous, hourlong speech that once more defended his actions of half a lifetime ago. Like Red Cloud’s final public utterance, this would be Carrington’s last hurrah. The Carringtons returned east, where Frances died in October 1911 at sixty-four. Henry, defiant to the end, died almost a year to the day later in Boston, like Red Cloud at age eighty-eight.
The military historian Peter Maslowski, attending a guest lecture series at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, was puzzled when a general from the Chinese People’s Army casually mentioned that the United States had fought the longest war in history. America had never fought a Thirty Years’ War, let alone a Hundred Years’ War. What was the visiting general talking about? The answer came with the foreigner’s next breath. He explained that he was referring to America’s nearly 300-year war against its Indians. Much of the world beyond North America considered it to have begun in the early seventeenth century and to have lasted until the late nineteenth.
“From the perspective of military historians this was a dubious assertion, ” Maslowski writes in an essay he contributed to the book Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars. “Few of them viewed the Euro-Americans’ struggle against the indigenous peoples as a single, continuous war of subjugation.”
After Maslowski digested the idea, however, what he had at first found “implausible” struck him as more and more valid. “And yet the general had a point: Euro-Americans did wage a protracted war to conquer Indian nations in order to acquire their land and its resources.” The proof lies in the figures. In 1866, at the height of Red Cloud’s War, fewer than 2 million whites populated the West; twenty five years later, with a grid of iron rails crisscrossing the prairie, the number had risen to 8.5 million. Today it is 86 million. Yet whether this was one war or many, the fact remains: the great warrior chief Red Cloud was the only Indian ever able to claim victory over the United States.
In the end, despite his proximity to the new settlers and his many journeys across America, Red Cloud may never really have come to comprehend these whites— their motives, their greed, their insatiable desires. If he could read he might have had his answer, although it is still doubtful that he would have understood. Years later, William H. Bisbee attempted to come to grips with an overriding rhetorical question of that bygone era—for what purpose did the United States fight Red Cloud?
“My only answer could be, ” General Bisbee wrote, “we did it for Civilization.”
At 12:45 Ten Eyck’s lead skirmishers were just topping the crest some 200 yards east of the battlefield when all gunshots from the Peno Creek valley ceased. One of the civilians riding just ahead of Ten Eyck’s troop thought he heard groans and screams. Within minutes the entire column had reached the summit. The Peno Creek valley stretching before them was aswarm with thousands of painted warriors, more than any man in the garrison had ever seen. Many seemed to be concentrated on either side of the High Backbone. When the Indians spotted the relief detail they jeered, shrieked, and waved their weapons toward the sky, daring the Americans to come down and fight. Others were running down saddled American horses and recovering some of the 40,000 arrows that had been shot, 1,000 for every minute of the fight. Still others were loading their dead onto makeshift travois or tending to the wounded. 1 And a group of about 100 were clustered around a pile of boulders half a mile or so to the west along the crest of the ridgeline. A dog darted out from the scrub, and some of the soldiers recognized it as one of the hounds from the fort. An Indian put an arrow through its brain.
Ten Eyck was confused. Where was Fetterman? Where was Grummond’s cavalry? He dispatched his only mounted messenger back to the fort and continued to stare at the vista before him, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Meanwhile the wagons arrived, and the Indians slowly withdrew from the little valley. Suddenly, a trooper cried, “There’s the men down there, all dead.” From a distance the naked white bodies could have been mistaken for patches of snow.
• • •
Back at the fort Colonel Carrington paced his small lookout tower, watching as Captain Ten Eyck’s relief party topped the ridge. Below him, on the front porch, Mrs. Wheatley and the wives of officers and enlisted men gathered with Margaret Carrington. The women stared wordlessly at the heights across the Big Piney. “The silence, ” wrote Frances Grummond, who was five months’ pregnant, “was dreadful.” At a little past one o’clock they spotted a lone horseman riding furiously down the slope. Within moments he had galloped through the main gate and skidded to a halt before the colonel’s headquarters. “Captain Ten Eyck says he can see or hear nothing of Captain Fetterman, ” the courier reported. “The Indians are on the road challenging him to come down.”
There were Indians as far as the eye could see, he said, and Ten Eyck had requested reinforcements and a mountain howitzer. Then the messenger lowered his voice. “The Captain is afraid Fetterman’s party is all gone up, sir.” There were no more fit horses to replace the messenger’s exhausted mount, and Carrington ordered one of his personal horses, a big sturdy gray, retrieved from the stable. He scrawled a message on a piece of paper, informing Ten Eyck that reinforcements and ammunition were on their way. He was unaware that these had already reached him. And as if doubting either the captain or his messenger, he also ordered Ten Eyck to find Fetterman, unite with him, collect the wood train, and return to the post. Perhaps he also anticipated the public outcry should the courier’s aside be true, for before handing the message over he jotted a sentence reprimanding Ten Eyck for his roundabout route up the slope. “You could have saved two miles toward the scene of action if you had taken Lodge Trail Ridge.” If it was the lawyer-turned-colonel’s purpose to plant the first seed of blame elsewhere for whatever had happened on the other side of that ridge, it was a move well played.
• • •
Captain Ten Eyck waited until the entire huge war party had departed over a string of distant buttes before he advanced cautiously down the north slope of Lodge Trail Ridge. He reached Peno Creek and turned west, following the wagon ruts of the Bozeman Trail. The knoll with the flat-topped rock pile loomed before him. Bodies covered the stones. The corpses formed a ring about forty feet in diameter. The harsh wind had scattered much paper—maps, unsent letters, journal pages—a common sight in the aftermath of frontier warfare. Some soldiers recognized fellow infantrymen from scraps of uniforms that the Indians had not shredded or stolen.
It was difficult to identify individuals, although “Bald Head Eagle” Brown, with a powder burn on his temple and a bullet in his brain, was recognizable. The Indians had “scalped” his tonsure. He was the only trooper killed by a gunshot. Dead Indian ponies and American horses littered the blood-soaked ground, the snouts of the Army animals pointing toward the fort. In the cuts and draws below, on the rises above, and in the scrub and among the trees they found more men— scalped, mutilated, the blood frozen in their wounds. Some soldiers who fanned out to search through the tall yellow saw grass recoiled when they realized that the greasy material they were slipping on was the organs and entrails of their comrades. They had yet to discover Grummond’s troops on the ridge.
Though a mule is far less likely to spook than a horse, it was well known throughout the West that mules shied more from the smell of blood, and now they brayed and reared at the scent of so much of it. The temperature was falling, the corpses were rapidly stiffening, and Ten Eyck ordered as many loaded into the four wagons as could fit. It was rough, slow work, and they did not reach the gates of Fort Phil Kearny until dusk. In the gloaming the dove-gray sky had the macabre formality of a steel engraving. “We brought in about fifty in wagons, ” wrote the post surgeon, “like you see hogs brought to market.”
• • •
As night fell the temperature dropped below zero, the wind picked up, and Fort Phil Kearny was locked down and braced for the next attack. Nearly a third of its garrison had abruptly vanished— closer to half, taking into account the armed soldiers and teamsters on Piney Island. Colonel Carrington certainly did, and he sent for them immediately. He also ordered all civilians brought into the fort, released every prisoner from the guardhouse, and placed the entire post under arms, such as they were. The howitzers and mounds of grapeshot and case shot were pulled to the battlements, rifles were stacked across the parade ground, and orders were passed to bar every door and window. Three troopers were assigned to each of the stockade’s firing loopholes, but most of the Spencers had been captured in the fight and Springfield ammunition was so short that each man was issued only five rounds. The balls jangled in their haversacks like marbles. Every man understood that the fort could not hold out long against a full-bore assault. Survivors recalled that the men assumed their posts without expression in their eyes, as if coming from no past and having no future.
• • •
When the wagons arrived from the pinery Colonel Carrington had the beds removed and upended to form three concentric circles girding the post’s underground magazine. As he studied the Indian signal fires on the hills and ridges ringing the fort, his wife knocked on Frances Grummond’s door along Officers’ Row to break the news that her husband was still missing. Given the “horrible and sickening” condition of the forty-nine bodies carried back to the post—these were being sorted through and identified in the emptied guardhouse—neither woman held much hope that he was still alive. Margaret Carrington insisted that the lieutenant’s wife move into her quarters—tellingly, no similar offer was made to the innkeeper James Wheatley’s wife and children—and as Frances gathered a few belongings, another knock sounded on her door. She pulled it open to find a dark, wiry civilian with a pointy black beard and “bright, piercing eyes” filling her small door frame.
Mrs. Grummond knew this man’s name although they had never before spoken to each other. He was John “Portugee” Phillips, the mining partner of Isaac Fisher. Phillips had been born in the Azores to Portuguese parents, and in a lilting accent he told her that he had been out hauling water when Fisher and Wheatley joined her husband’s troop, or else he would have surely ridden with them. Now, he said, Colonel Carrington had called for volunteers to ride to Fort Laramie for help, and he had stepped forward. He had come, he said, to say goodbye. Frances Grummond was flustered. She barely knew the man.
Phillips glanced at Grummond’s distended stomach. “I will go if it costs me my life, ” he said with tears in his eyes. And though still in shock and taken somewhat aback by the stranger’s familiarity, she finally understood his words to mean that Phillips was following his own Code of the West, whereby the safety of a pregnant woman in danger was paramount. Phillips removed the wolfskin robe from his shoulders and handed it to her before departing. “I brought it for you to keep and remember me by if you never see me again, ” he said. Then he turned and left.
Throughout all this—the preparations for an attack, the identification of the bodies stacked in the guardhouse, the mourning, the fear and confusion—memories of Captain Fetterman and his eighty dead hovered over the little outpost like ghosts. No one slept well that night.
• • •
Colonel Carrington hunched over his lamplit writing desk and scratched out two messages: one for General Cooke in Omaha and one for General Grant in Washington. They were nearly identical. He described what little he knew of the day’s battle—“a fight unexampled in Indian warfare”—and informed his superiors that though only forty-nine bodies had been recovered, he suspected that the missing thirty-one troopers and their officer Lieutenant Grummond were also dead. Without immediate reinforcements armed with Spencer rifles, he wrote, a retaliatory “expedition now with my force is impossible.” He assured both generals that he was prepared to defend Fort Phil Kearny to the last man, and concluded with perhaps his first realistic assessment of his position since arriving in the Powder River Country in July. “The Indians are desperate; I spare none, and they spare none.”
As with his note to Ten Eyck, it must surely have occurred to the savvy citizen soldier that the Army, indeed the nation, would soon be looking for scapegoats. It was likely with this in mind that he added a personal comment to General Grant’s dispatch:
I send a copy of dispatch to General Cooke simply as a case when in uncertain communication, I think you should know the facts at once. I want all my officers. I want men. Depend upon it, as I wrote in July, no treaty but hard fighting is to assure this line. I have no reason to think otherwise. I will operate all winter, whatever the season, if supported; but to redeem my pledge to open and guarantee this line, I must have reinforcements and the best arms up to my full estimate.
Carrington had his adjutant make two copies of both letters. In addition to “Portugee” Phillips, he had recruited two more couriers— a miner named William Bailey and the wagon master George Dillon—to ride separately for Horseshoe Station, the closest telegraph office, 196 miles away. But the Horseshoe Station line was frequently down, so he asked all three to continue on to Fort Laramie, another forty miles south. It was Phillips in whom he had the most confidence.
It was nearing midnight on December 21 when Colonel Carrington met Phillips in the quartermaster’s stables. He led Phillips to his own stalls, where the miner selected one of the colonel’s personal mounts, a white Kentucky thoroughbred. Phillips crammed his saddlebags with hardtack and tied a quarter sack of oats to his pommel. The thermometer read eighteen degrees below zero, and the air smelled of a gathering storm. Phillips cinched his buffalo-hair coat, wrapped tight the wool leggings beneath his thigh- high buffalo boots, pulled his beaver hat low over his ears, and jammed his hands into sheepskin mittens that stretched to his elbows. He then led the horse to the southeast water gate of the quartermaster’s yard, Carrington walking beside him. The first threatening bits of swirling sleet and snow pricked the men’s faces.
The three enlisted men posted at the gate were jumpy. At the sound of boots crunching on the frozen ground a private called out a challenge. Carrington moved close enough to be recognized and the sergeant of the guard shouted, “Attention!”
“Never mind, sergeant, ” Carrington said. “Open the gate.
Two soldiers pushed open the heavy log sally port and stood silent. Carrington gave Phillips brief final instructions before reaching out to shake his hand. “May God help you, ” he said, and the horseman led his charger out, mounted, wheeled, and trotted away.
Carrington and the three guardsmen stood wordless for half a minute, the colonel’s head cocked as if he was listening for the hiss of an arrow. Then the hoofbeats went silent. “Good, ” he said. “He has taken softer ground at the side of the trail.” The snow began falling harder.
1. Reliable estimates of Indian casualties at the Fetterman fight are difficult to come by. The figures for deaths range from 11 to 60. The wounded are said to have numbered between 60 and 300, of whom an estimated 100 died soon thereafter. All the figures were recounted many years later by various old Indians who claimed to have taken part in the battle. In any case, most historians concur that the Indians’ heaviest losses came from their own arrows
38
FEAR AND
MOURNING
His wife, the post surgeon,
and his four surviving junior
officers tried to talk him out
of it. They all agreed it was a
terrible idea. Colonel
Carrington insisted. He would
not allow the hostiles to sense
any weakness. But the more
powerful reason was that he
had to see for himself. It was
midday and bitterly cold on
December 22 when he
mounted the sturdy gray he
had lent to Captain Ten
Eyck’s messenger twenty four hours earlier. Eighty-
three soldiers and civilians,
the best he could select,
followed him through the
front gate toward Lodge Trail
Ridge. Storm clouds scudded
down from the north, and
enough spitting snow had
already fallen to muffle the
footfalls of the marchers and
the creaking of the mule drawn wagons.Carrington was surprised that the Indians had not followed up the massacre with a sunrise attack. When the bugle blew reveille and the report of the morning gun echoed back from the hills, he had expected the sound to be met with howls, eagle whistles, and arrows. But as the pale sun rose farther over Pilot Knob not an Indian was visible on the ridges and hills. This, Carrington knew, did not mean the Indians were not there. It was, however, unlike them to refrain from ostentatiously exhibiting their joy at the outcome of yesterday’s fight. Perhaps the reason was the blizzard that everyone sensed was coming.
While his troop assembled he had whispered to Mrs. Grummond a promise to retrieve her husband’s body. Then he’d handed Captain Powell two written orders. Captain Ten Eyck would be accompanying him over the ridgeline, and Powell was left in charge of the post. The first order concerned communications. On his departure, Carrington wrote, Powell was to run a white lamp up the flagstaff; if Indians appeared, he was to fire the twelve-pounder three times and substitute a red lantern for the white one. The second directive was more confidential, and Carrington pulled Powell aside to issue it orally as well: “If in my absence, Indians in overwhelming numbers attack, put the women and children in the magazine with supplies of water, bread, crackers, and other supplies that seem best, and, in the event of a last desperate struggle, destroy all together, rather than have any captured alive.”
To remove any doubt Carrington himself strode through the circular wagon fortification, pulled open the magazine door, cut open a sphere of case shot, and laid a train of black powder that would ignite at the touch of a match.
• • •
Jim Bridger’s failing eyesight and the biting cold may have made him less of an asset to the battalion—the old mountain man’s arthritis barely allowed him to walk, much less mount a horse and ride for any length of time. But he had been proved correct in one observation: these “paper-collar” soldiers did not know anything about fighting Indians. Bridger had pulled himself out of bed that morning and limped out into the day. Despite the intense pain in his joints he volunteered to ride as a scout. He, too, expected an attack at any moment, and he’d decided that when it occurred it would be as fine an occasion as any to end his career and his life. Once through the main gate, Bridger set about directing skirmishers to key sites on the column’s flanks and positioned pairs of infantry pickets on successive outcrops and ridges, creating a chain that reached all the way back to the fort. He made certain that each set of the guards standing higher and higher along the route would never be out of sight of the men below.
The temperature remained around zero, and darker storm clouds blotted out the sun as the detail trod silently past the rock pile and reached the high ground strewn with boulders. The rocky earth along the ridgeline was streaked with frozen pools of blood, and the bodies were so stiff that one civilian likened the task of loading them onto the wagons to stacking cordwood. The mules again huffed and kicked at the smell of blood and offal, and soldiers were assigned to hold their heads and reins to keep them from bolting. One team of mules threw off the flailing handlers and dumped a half-filled wagon. Corpses frozen into grotesque contortions tumbled across the slope. “It was, ” wrote a witness, “a terrible sight and a horrible job.”
The men on the ridge, like Fetterman’s soldiers, had been butchered, but cavalrymen in the detail recognized infantry insignia mixed among the dead. One horseman, John Guthrie, noted, “Some had crosses cut on their breasts, faces to the sky, some crosses on the back, faces to the ground. . . . We walked on top of internals and did not know it in the high grass. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldier they belonged to, so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man’s guts and an infantry man got a cavalry man’s guts.”
From the ridgeline the wagons rolled slowly down to Peno Creek, where Lieutenant Grummond and Sergeant Augustus Lang were discovered. Grummond’s head had been severed and his body had suffered the usual mutilations. Not far away from him lay the frozen hulk of Jimmy Carrington’s pony, Calico. The horse, too, had been scalped. Someone remarked that such was the Indians’ contempt for the quartermaster Captain Brown that they had even scalped his horse. A few hundred yards down the creek bed lay the bodies of James Wheatley, Isaac Fisher, “and four or five of the old long-tried and experienced soldiers.” Piles of spent Henry rifle cartridges littered the little ring created by their slain horses and an additional ten dead ponies. Outside the defensive circle a soldier counted sixty-five smudges of dark, clotted blood, perhaps indicating where an Indian had fallen.
It was dark before the column moved back over the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge. Excited word was passed from front to back that the white lantern still swung from the top of the flagstaff. Back inside the fort Colonel Carrington handed Frances Grummond a sealed envelope containing a lock of her husband’s hair. Not long afterward, the blizzard that had threatened all day began. The temperature dropped to twenty below and by daylight on December 23 snowdrifts had crested so high against the west wall of the stockade that guards could walk over it. Bridger assured Colonel Carrington that not even Red Cloud was bold or crazy enough to attack in such weather. Even so, all through the day before Christmas Fort Phil Kearny was tense. A triple guard remained at every loophole.
If any scintilla of holiday spirit still breathed it was smothered by the steady whine of handsaws and a clanging of hammers on nails as carpenters worked around the clock constructing pine coffins—two men to a coffin except for the dead officers. Captain Fetterman, Lieutenant Grummond, and Captain Brown had separate caskets. The coffins were numbered to identify each occupant, and Colonel Carrington dispatched a grave-digging detail to break the frozen earth beneath Pilot Knob. He hoped for a solemn Christmas Day service. But even continuous half-hour work shifts could not accomplish that. The snow was too high, the ground was too hard, and the threat of another attack was too overwhelming to spare enough men. So a day late, on December 26, forty-two pine boxes were hurriedly interred in a shallow fifty-foot-long trench. No words were spoken over the graves.
Following the somber ceremony there was nothing to do but batten down Fort Phil Kearny and wait. For what, only God and Red Cloud knew.
• • •
The blizzard gave the Indians time to mourn. For three days the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters in the great village on the Tongue made their way to the bluffs to cut their fingers and arms and chop their hair in memory of the dead. Snowdrifts five and six feet deep ran with blood. And then, on the fourth day, the victory dances commenced to celebrate the fight the Indians would call— referring to the half-man’s augury—the “Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands.”
Paeans were composed to Yellow Eagle for leading the raids on the wood road, and decoys such as Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses and American Horse, Fetterman’s slayer, were feted at feasts. A wan Crazy Horse was dragged into the firelight and for once not allowed to back away. To him were rendered honors for his deft disciplining of the decoy party, and old men sang of the fearlessness he had shown while standing unflinching against the American guns. It was a turning point in Crazy Horse’s life. Never again would he be able to remain silently aloof in the shadows of the council fires, a lone wolf warrior-hunter responsible to no one but himself. Like his friend Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His- Horses, he would now be groomed for tribal leadership, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho as well as the Lakota would look to, and depend on, his wisdom in both war and peace. Given their familiarity with the ways of the whites, however, there were few on the Tongue in the last week of December 1866 who believed that peace had been achieved.
And then there was Red Cloud. To him went “all the honor” for the stunning victory. His strategic planning, so often questioned, had proved a masterstroke— everything he had foreseen, from the victory at Bridge Station to the warnings that accompanied his verbal explosion at Fort Laramie, had indeed occurred. He had held together his Indian coalition while balancing older, more experienced voices urging accommodation with the whites against young warriors too eager to strike too soon. His forward thinking and his keen military judgment in choosing lieutenants such as Crazy Horse had inspired the disparate tribes with a sense of unity. He had told his people that their cause, his cause, was just, and that “The Heart of Everything That Is” was worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for. Best of all, in the end it was the Bluecoats who had done the dying.
At the grand celebrations that followed the Peno Creek fight Red Cloud’s political rivals, Old-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses in particular, deferred to him. He graciously returned their praise while modestly accepting the accolades. If he seemed subdued, there was good reason. He fretted that his warriors had failed to destroy the despised fort between the Pineys. And he knew that this war was far from over. The Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands had been a fine start, perhaps even a signal to the Americans that they should leave the Powder River Country and never return. It was what he hoped, but Red Cloud could hardly have believed it. He knew his enemy. The Americans would be back, and he would fight them again—and only on his terms. But he also understood the ways of his own people and the allied tribes. Despite the victory, it would be difficult to rally them again so soon. His braves needed time to fill their bellies over warm winter fires while the war ponies recovered their strength. It would be a short cold season, and when the new grass sprouted from the prairie he would reveal his next step.
To that end he had decided that the Lakota bands would forgo their annual trek east to stake individual winter camps near the Black Hills. Instead they would move west en masse into the old Crow lands in the valley of the Little Bighorn to prepare for a spring offensive. He was certain that warriors from other bands would seek him out to swell his fighting force. He would use these numbers wisely; the Americans would not know what hit them. Already the details were forming in his mind, like a set of tumblers clicking into place. First he would simultaneously attack the two most northern garrisons, Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith, and kill everyone in them. That would leave Reno Station isolated, and either the Army would abandon it or he would burn it. This was an audacious plan, but Red Cloud was certain it would work.
What to do about Fort Laramie, Red Cloud was not certain. By then the Americans might well have left the territory forever. Of this eventual outcome he was certain. Then, after it was all over, after the Indians had won his war, he would find rest in his lodge.
• • •
Portugee Phillips was half dead, and his mount was in even worse shape. He rode by night and hid by day through one of the most vicious northers ever recorded on the High Plains. He rationed his hardtack and supplemented his horse feed with the odd tuft of prairie grass dug out from under thigh-deep snow. He reached the Horseshoe Station telegraph office late Christmas morning. Somewhere along the trail he had met up with William Bailey and George Dillon, and the three arrived together, exhausted, hungry, and freezing, Bailey and Dillon too spent to go on.
John Friend, the telegraph operator, tapped out a synopsis of Colonel Carrington’s dispatches. But he told the three that he had received no messages that day, and he feared that either the storm or the Indians had cut the line. Without saying a word Phillips began rebinding his legs with burlap sacks. Bailey and Dillon, collapsed in a heap by the fire, begged Phillips not to risk it. He ignored them, threw on his buffalo coat and beaver cap, saddled his horse, and rode. By noon the blizzard had blown north, behind him, and he traveled all afternoon across a landscape so white that by dusk he was snowblind. Sunset brought relief but also the arrival of another storm. He rode by feel, always tracking south, the new sheets of snow thicker with his mount’s every footfall.
The temperature was twenty-five degrees below zero when Phillips reeled through the main gate of Fort Laramie late on Christmas night, his mount drawn as a moth to flame by the lighted and gaily decorated windows of the main officers’ quarters. A full-dress garrison ball was in progress, and the strains of the band wafted over his head as he slumped in his saddle and fell from his horse. Snow and ice matted his pointy black beard. Icicles hung from his coat and hat. The officer of the guard, a young lieutenant, rushed from his sentry box and helped him to his feet. Phillips was too weak to walk by himself, and his vocal cords were so frozen that his voice was a tinny croak when he said he needed to see the post’s commanding officer.
The lieutenant slung Phillips’s arm over his shoulders and half-carried him to the ballroom, where the officers were about to select partners for the next dance. People gasped when he staggered through the door. The band fell silent and Lieutenant Colonel Innis Palmer, Fort Laramie’s commanding officer, rushed to his side. Earlier that afternoon Palmer had received a telegram from Horseshoe Station reporting an Indian massacre. But the communication was so garbled and incomplete—it did not say who had been massacred, or where the incident had occurred—that he took it as just another of the many rumors that flew across the High Plains.
Now Phillips reached under his buffalo coat and woolen shirts and pulled out Colonel Carrington’s dispatches. Lieutenant Colonel Palmer’s face whitened as he read them. He looked at Phillips, who had just ridden 236 miles in four days through raging blizzards —a feat that would become equal in western lore to Paul Revere’s famous ride. Palmer turned back to the cold papers in his hands. He was wearing white kid gloves. He handed the messages to an aide, who ran to the post’s telegraph office, and directed two soldiers to carry Phillips to the post infirmary. On the way they passed Colonel Carrington’s white Kentucky thoroughbred charger, lying dead on the parade ground.
• • •
The Fort Laramie telegraph operator relayed the dispatches word for word to both General Cooke in Omaha and General Grant in Washington. It was 3:15 p.m. on December 26, 1866, when Grant and the War Department received the first news about what would soon be known nationwide as the “Fetterman Massacre.”
The next morning the New York Times provided brief details of the “horrid massacre” in the distant Dakota Territory, noting that it accounted for 8 percent of all Army deaths in half a century of Indian fighting west of the Mississippi. And though what would later be referred to as “Red Cloud’s War” was far from over, this was the moment when Grant came to the realization that the United States had been defeated for the first time by an Indian opponent.
• • •
Red Cloud never spoke to any whites of his great victory, so we are left to imagine his thoughts as the Bad Faces led the Lakota push west into the Bighorn Valley. Perhaps he recalled his orphaned childhood, or his first lethal coup against the Pawnees, or even the suicide of the tragic Pine Leaf. What we do know is that the boy shunned by so many and the man feared by all had accomplished what no other Indian ever had before.
The son of an alcoholic Brule had taught himself to lead, to suppress his snarl and his personal rage and remain still when he wanted to strike out. He had developed a steely self-discipline, and it had enabled him to become the first warrior chief to transfigure an Indian military culture that had stood for centuries, if not millennia. He had not only united the fractious Lakota, enticing Oglalas, Brules, Miniconjous, and Sans Arcs to fight as one, but had also drawn to his banner the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Nez Percé, and Shoshones. It was the only way, he knew from the beginning, to defeat the Americans, to humble a people so strong, so numerous, so intent on taking his land when they already had so much of their own. And he had shown the United States; he had achieved, in a sense, what more exalted generals such as Cornwallis and Lee had been unable to do.
The irony, of course, lay in the fact that Red Cloud did not even know who those men were.
Epilogue
The white man made me a lot
of promises, and they only
kept one. They promised to
take my land, and they took
it.
—Red Cloud
If Red Cloud’s fame was not
already established in
America—though it certainly
was among whites on the
frontier—the Battle of the
Hundred-in-the-Hands
secured it. “Red Cloud’s
War” would go on for more
than another year before the
United States would admit it
was beaten and sue for peace
—for the first time on Indian
terms.
Following the Fetterman
fight Red Cloud allowed the
remainder of the winter of
1866–67 to pass uneventfully,
helping to ensure the survival
of those who remained at Fort
Phil Kearny. But his
harassment of the three
American forts in the Powder
River Country began anew as
soon as the first spring grass
of 1867 began to renourish
Indian ponies. In August, the
“Moon of Black Cherries,
”
the powerful Lakota war
chief’s alliance launched its
next full-scale attack. That
battle, on August 2, came to
be known as the Wagon Box
Fight. It would prove to be
significant for both the Oglala
Head Man and the U.S.
government—but for
completely different reasons.
• • •
The first reinforcements
arrived at Fort Phil Kearny on
December 27, 1866, five days
after the victorious Indians
had begun moving west
toward winter camp. The
detail consisted of twenty five men commanded by
Captain George B. Dandy,
who pushed through the snow
after word of the disaster
reached Reno Station. Dandy
and his men marched into a
demoralized and frightened
post that was still waiting for
the next arrows to fall.
As the news of
Fetterman’s defeat spread
east from Wyoming, the U.S.
military and political
bureaucracy was set into
motion. After digesting
Colonel Carrington’s
dispatch, General Cooke
wrote to General Grant that
given “the completeness of
the massacre,
” it was
probable that there had been
3,000 Indians involved.
Cooke also reported that he
was about to relieve Colonel
Carrington of the command
of Fort Phil Kearny and order
him to Fort McPherson in
Nebraska, where the new
18th Regiment was to be
headquartered. He then asked
Grant’s permission to name
Colonel Henry W. Wessells
as the garrison commander at
Fort Phil Kearny. Grant
agreed.
The next day General
Sherman, writing from St.
Louis, reiterated to Grant,
“We must act with vindictive
earnestness against the Sioux,
even to their extermination,
men, women and children.
Nothing less will reach the
root of this case.” For weeks
afterward telegrams and
letters flew among Grant,
Sherman, officials at the
Bureau of Indian Affairs, and
congressional leaders.
General Cooke was quietly
“retired” as Senate hearings
were opened and an Army
commission was formed to
officially investigate the
disaster. Unofficially, the
politicians and the generals
were looking for scapegoats.
Carrington, who in mid-
January 1867 bade farewell to
the tidy fort he had built in
the heart of the Powder River
Country, was naturally called
to testify before both the
Senate hearings and the Army
commission. The Little White
Chief would spend the rest of
his life defending his actions
and, with the aid of his first
and second wives, shifting the
blame for the Fetterman
Massacre to the man whose
name it bore.
When Carrington departed
the post between the Piney
Creeks and retraced the trek
he had taken the previous
spring he was accompanied
by his wife, Margaret, and by
Frances Grummond, who had
agreed to the arduous journey
in a jolting wagon despite her
pregnancy. She traveled with
a pine box containing the
remains of her husband,
exhumed from the trench. It
was not an easy trip.
Snowdrifts and below-zero
temperatures made for slow
going, and several members
of the escort detail suffered
from frostbite that later
necessitated the amputation
of their hands and feet. On
the route between Reno
Station and Fort Laramie,
Carrington’s revolver
misfired, shooting a bullet
into his thigh. When he
arrived at Fort McPherson to
reassume command of the
reconstituted 18th Infantry,
he was in an ambulance.
After picking up details of
the battle from smaller
newspapers throughout
Montana and Nebraska,
reporters and editors from St.
Louis to the Eastern Seaboard
presented to their shocked
readers lurid and often
erroneous reports of the fight
and its aftermath. On March
14, 1867, the Montana Post
reported,
“Eighteen hundred
lodges of Sioux, numbering
three warriors in each lodge,
under the Chiefs Red Cloud,
Iron Plate and White Young
Bull, are encamped on the
Big Horn River, about thirty five miles from Fort Smith.
The Crows, Bloods, Peguins,
Grosentres [sic] and Sioux
have made peace among
themselves in league against
the whites. About 800 lodges
are yet north of the Missouri
River, but will cross over and
camp near Muscle Shell
River as soon as Spring
opens, and after concentrating
their forces the confederation
will wage war against the
whites.”
This, though far from
accurate, got the Army’s
attention. In his annual report
to Grant regarding
“operations within my
command,
” Sherman
lamented that the army had
failed “to follow the savages
and take a just vengeance” for
the Fetterman massacre. He
added that he had personally
“passed over 455 miles of
finished railroad west of
Omaha,
” and that the laying
of track was proceeding
apace. Sherman was slow to
recognize that the progress of
civilization would be more
effective in subduing Indians
than any act of war. In any
event, newspaper readers and
politicians alike remained
confused as the spring thaw
brought no further news of
grand battles with this large
Indian force. Behind the
scenes, however, officials
from the Bureau of Indian
Affairs were already putting
out treaty feelers to Red
Cloud through more
manageable Lakota like
Spotted Tail. They were met
with silence.
As he had planned all
along, Red Cloud returned to
the environs of Fort Phil
Kearny in June 1867 to begin
a series of vicious skirmishes
with Colonel Wessells’s
troops. The post had been
resupplied and there were
fresh herds of cattle and
horses to raid. The attacks
became so intense that by
July, Wessells, fully
comprehending Carrington’s
predicament of a year earlier,
was forced to assign entire
companies to guard the
woodcutters and hay mowers.
All this was a prologue to the
events of the first week of
August.
In late July the war chiefs
from the tribal alliance had
again convened on the
Tongue, and Red Cloud and
the other Big Bellies laid
plans to attack two of the
white man’s forts almost
simultaneously. On the
morning of August 1 a large
war party of Cheyenne led by
Dull Knife and Two Moons
surrounded a civilian haycutting detail protected by
nineteen soldiers about two
miles from Montana’s Fort C.
F. Smith. Two troopers and a
civilian were killed as the
beleaguered Americans,
holed up in a makeshift
corral, withstood a daylong
assault. It was only when
howitzers from the post
arrived near dusk that the
Cheyenne melted away with
the captured Army mounts.
The next morning, August
2, a loaded wood train and its
Army escort set off from
Piney Island for Fort Phil
Kearny, and at about the
same time an empty wood
train consisting of fourteen
wagons left the post for the
pinery. Among the civilians
working in the latter detail
was Portugee Phillips. All of
the soldiers in the field were
under the command of
Captain James Powell, who,
along with Captain Tenedor
Ten Eyck, was a holdover
from Carrington’s command.
Once again Red Cloud,
leading about 1,000 Oglala
and Miniconjou warriors,
climbed a high hill west of
the fort to observe the action.
Once again Crazy Horse and
the Miniconjou warrior High
Backbone were his field
commanders. However, Red
Cloud was unaware that only
a few weeks earlier the
garrison at Fort Phil Kearny
had received a shipment of
700 new Springfield-Allin
conversion rifles with
trapdoor breechloaders, along
with 100,000 rounds of .50-
70-450 Martin bar-anvil,
center-fire primed cartridges.
The guns and ammunition
had been delivered by a
reinforcement company of the
27th Infantry. This time, the
Indians would not be fighting
soldiers who had only
outdated muzzle-loaders.
At 9 a.m., as the two wood
trains were about to converge
three miles from the fort,
troopers spotted the Indians.
Powell immediately ordered
the fourteen empty wagons to
form an oval. This could not
be readily done with the
incoming train, which was
laden with logs and planks,
and the Sioux fell on it and
burned every wagon. They
then regrouped to attack the
oval of empty wagons. In
overwhelming numbers they
charged the makeshift corral
on horseback and on foot; this
was perhaps the only time in
the history of the West that an
Indian offensive involved
sacrificing a large number of
lives in order to take a
position. They absorbed the
volley they were expecting
and assumed they had the
usual thirty seconds to swoop
in while soldiers reloaded.
Instead they were shocked
and repelled by steady fire
from the Springfield-Allins.
For the next five hours
they came in waves, but they
never breached the American
defenses. Six soldiers were
killed, including Captain
Powell’s second in command,
Lieutenant John Jenness.
Jenness had been warned to
keep low behind cover. He
had shouted back,
“I know
how to fight Indians.” Then
he rose to fire and was shot
through the head. Indian
losses were much more
severe, Powell claimed: about
60 dead and over 100
wounded. In this case the
Army estimates do not appear
to be exaggerated. Red Cloud
had seen the future, and it
was shaped by a Springfield Allin.
But the U.S. government
lacked this foresight. To the
Americans the synchronized
incidents on the outskirts of
two forts ninety miles apart
burnished Red Cloud’s
reputation as the leader of a
large hostile force to be
reckoned with. That his
imposing personality had held
together a large intertribal
alliance for over two seasons
of hard fighting was literally
awesome, and his influence
showed no signs of abating.
His overall leadership, his
organizing genius, and his
ability to persuade
contentious tribes to band
together and direct their
hatred against the whites had
enabled perhaps the most
impressive campaign in the
annals of Indian warfare. One
general ominously informed
the War Department that he
would need 20,000 soldiers to
defeat Red Cloud’s forces.
This perceived siege of the
mighty United States of
America was what forced the
country to the negotiating
table.
• • •
The first step took place in
October 1867, when Captain
Dandy, now the
quartermaster at Fort Phil
Kearny, held a meeting
within sight of the post’s
bastions with representatives
from the Lakota, Arapaho,
and Cheyenne. They
conveyed Red Cloud’s
insistence that the Bozeman
Trail be closed forever and
the three forts built along it
abandoned before he would
even consider peace. The
Army was staggered by Red
Cloud’s effrontery. But in
Washington the
Reconstruction of the South
and the protection and
completion of the Union
Pacific were deemed higher
priorities than control of the
Powder River Country.
It was not until April 1868
that another peace
commission arrived at Fort
Laramie. Red Cloud would
not legitimize the council by
his presence and instead sent
a message reiterating his
original message: begone. A
month later the concessions
were agreed to. Major
General Christopher C.
Auger, representing General
Sherman on the commission,
ordered the Bozeman Trail
closed to all emigrants and
miners, and issued a
proclamation to abandon “the
military posts of C. F. Smith,
Phil Kearny and Reno, on
what is known as the Powder
River route.”
Still Red Cloud waited. He
had heard too many white
promises in his lifetime. This
time he intended to see the
results before signing
anything. Thus it was with a
sense of grim finality that the
contents of Fort C. F. Smith
were sold to a Montana
freighting company, and
anything that could be hauled
from the two lower outposts
was loaded onto wagons
bound for Fort Laramie. In
the final weeks of August the
last train rolled out of Reno
Station and Fort Phil Kearny.
Whether the departing troops
felt anger or relief as they
struck the colors from the
latter’s towering flagpole for
the final time is unrecorded.
An eerie silence fell over the
little plateau between the two
Piney Creeks, broken the
following dawn when Red
Cloud led his warriors down
from the hills and burned the
forts to the ground.
On November 6, 1868—
after making the increasingly
nervous white commissioners
and Army officers wait until
the conclusion of the autumn
buffalo hunt—the fortyseven-year-old Bad Face
warrior chief rode into Fort
Laramie and triumphantly
signed the treaty whereby the
United States conceded to
him and his people the
territory from the Bighorns
eastward to the Missouri
River, and from the forty-
sixth parallel south to the
Dakota-Nebraska boundary.
It was understood, at least by
the whites, that the Indians
would live in the eastern
section and reserve the
western section, the Powder
River Country, as hunting
grounds open to all tribes and
bands. In the center of this
tract, like a glittering jewel,
lay the Black Hills. Paha
Sapa. The Heart of
Everything That Is.
It was the proudest
moment of Red Cloud’s life.
That sentiment lasted a mere
twelve months. For the
Lakota were not finished
dying.
• • •
In the fall of 1868, from the
far side of the Black Hills,
Sitting Bull sent word to both
Red Cloud and the American
peace commission that he
would have nothing to do
with, nor would he abide by,
any treaty with the United
States. Though the
concessions Red Cloud was
able to wring from the
government were
“unprecedented in the history
of Indian Wars,
” the
Hunk papas and their
dwindling Dakota allies
would continue to wage war.
Even some of the younger,
more militant faction of Red
Cloud’s own Oglalas, most
notably Crazy Horse, would
later ride east to join the fight.
Meanwhile, the man
whom General Sherman
appointed to oversee the High
Plains, the Civil War hero
General Philip Sheridan,
viewed the latest Fort
Laramie peace pact as an
opportunity. One of its
seventeen articles contained a
nebulously worded clause
requiring the disparate tribes
to live, and remain, on
specified pieces of land
anchored by Bureau of Indian
Affairs trading posts. Red
Cloud quite naturally
interpreted this as referring to
the entire Powder River
Country, the Black Hills, and
the western swath of present-
day South Dakota for which
he had just fought, and won, a
war. If the whites wanted to
keep tabs on him, and if the
whites offered guns and
ammunition, he would be
more than happy to resume
trading at Fort Laramie.
General Sheridan saw it
differently, and began to
formulate a long-range plan
that would force the Indians,
particularly the Lakota, onto
reservations well east of the
Powder River Country. This
would serve the dual purpose
of keeping the enemy under
observation as well as
gradually making him more
reliant on government goods
and services. Whereas Red
Cloud was thinking of
weapons, Sheridan was
thinking of plows. As part of
his strategy Sheridan closed
Fort Laramie to Indian
trading. The Lakota were told
that if they wished to trade,
they were free to do business
at Fort Randall on the
Missouri in distant southeast
South Dakota, about as far
from Paha Sapa as one can
travel and still be in the state.
To salt the wound, Sheridan
placed none other than the
retired General Harney, the
presumed “hero” of the fight
at Blue Water Creek, in
charge of the post. Red Cloud
was insulted and said that he
and his people would have
nothing to do with the vicious
old “Mad Bear.”
With their trading post
closed, the Laramie Loafers
had no choice but to relocate
to Fort Randall. But Red
Cloud and his followers
stubbornly resisted all
government efforts to move
them closer to the Missouri.
And though Red Cloud
stopped short of declaring
war, he could not contain his
more militant braves—no
Indian chief could do that.
Skirmishes between Army
units and Sioux and
Cheyenne warriors broke out,
particularly on Sitting Bull’s
Hunkpapa lands on the Upper
Missouri and in the
Republican River basin to the
south of the Oregon Trail.
And though Red Cloud does
not seem to have taken an
active part in the fights, at
one point he sent word to the
whites that if they refused to
reopen Fort Laramie as an
Indian trading post, it should
be closed altogether, just as
the Army had abandoned the
Upper Powder forts. When
the Army ignored this veiled
threat, Red Cloud appeared
unexpectedly one morning in
March 1869 before Fort
Laramie’s gates at the head of
1,000 mounted warriors. It
was a political show. Instead
of attacking, his party slowly
rode off to hunt in the Wind
River country. He did,
however, leave lobbyists
behind in the form of mixed blood traders to argue his
cause.
The generals running the
U.S. Army could be as
headstrong as any Indian
warrior chief. When Red
Cloud, ever the politician,
recognized this, instead of
starting a new war he decided
to take his arguments directly
to the top. In June 1870, he
and Spotted Tail accepted a
long-standing invitation to
visit Washington, D.C., and
traveled east at the head of a
delegation of Oglalas and
Brules. There they were given
tours of the Capitol and Army
and Navy facilities, with
special emphasis on the War
Department’s arsenal, where
huge coastal cannons and
howitzers were lathed and
stored. For the first time Red
Cloud saw the true military
might of the United States.
Ulysses S. Grant, who had
been elected president two
years earlier, gave a reception
for him and the others at the
White House. There and in
subsequent meetings with
government officials the
provisions of the treaty were
debated, with the plainspoken Red Cloud acting as
lead negotiator. “As a
consequence,
” wrote R. Eli
Paul, the editor of Red
Cloud’s memoirs,
“he
became stunningly famous.
The head-warrior-turned statesman and his entourage
took the country by storm.
Newspapers recounted his
every word and deed, and
large crowds of onlookers
gathered at every public
sighting of the celebrated
group.”
The adulation continued in
New York City when the
Indian delegation arrived
there later in the month.
Thousands of people lined
Fifth Avenue to catch a
glimpse of the celebrated
warrior chief who had bested
the U.S. Army, and Red
Cloud was invited to deliver a
speech at the Cooper Institute
in Manhattan. In it he
reiterated his belief that the
treaty he signed protected the
territory he had fought for.
“No one who listened to Red
Cloud’s speech yesterday can
doubt that he is a man of
great talents,
” wrote the
editors of the New York
Times, describing him as “a
man of brains, a good ruler,
an eloquent speaker, an able
general and a fair diplomat.”
This did not mean that those
in power were prepared to
meet his demands.
It was during this journey
that Red Cloud, a quick
learner, ultimately realized
the futility of his aspirations.
Though he managed to
wrangle minor concessions
from the government—a new
trading post forty miles north
of Fort Laramie was
promised, for instance—and
he may have considered
himself the equal of any
white man he encountered on
his trip east, he had finally
recognized the limitations of
the Western Sioux nation as
an entity. As he told
Secretary of the Interior
Joseph P. Cox,
“Now we are
melting like snow on the
hillside, while you are
growing like spring grass.”
Or, as one still militant
Lakota warrior put it on his
return,
“Red Cloud saw too
much.”
The beginning of the end
for Red Cloud’s Lakota, and
all Plains Indians, had
actually arrived one year
earlier, in 1869, when the
Union Pacific Railroad was
completed across southern
Wyoming and northern Utah,
with a spur line running north
to the western Montana
goldfields. Once the final
spike was driven the old
overland trails—the Oregon
and the Mormon, the Santa
Fe and the Bozeman—were
obsolete. And with the
railroad arrived an army of
buffalo hunters, whose deadly
accurate .50-caliber Sharps
rifles would soon wipe the
prairie clean and do what no
battle commander had ever
been able to accomplish—
drive the starving, destitute
Lakota onto the white man’s
reservations.
On his return from the
East, Red Cloud and his Bad
Faces continued to roam the
Powder River Country, but
the end of their lifestyle was
as inevitable as the end of the
buffalo. Using the last of his
dwindling influence, in early
1872 Red Cloud again
traveled to Washington and
persuaded the government to
set aside a rolling swath of
land along the White River in
northwestern Nebraska as a
new “Red Cloud Agency,
”
the first version of which had
briefly been located on the
North Platte. The site was
visually breathtaking, a
partially wooded tract marked
by high bluffs that
overlooked a green, rolling
prairie veined with streams
and creeks. Red Cloud, who
had played his last card,
moved there that same year.
He was fifty-one. From this
new home, he declared,
“I
shall not go to war any more
with whites.”
• • •
In 1874 gold was discovered
in the Black Hills. That Paha
Sapa had been guaranteed to
the tribes was of little
consequence to the whites.
After the financial Panic of
1873, extracting the gold
became a national priority. As
usual, Washington concocted
a rationalization for violating
a treaty and taking Indian
land. The Grant
administration decided that it
would no longer block miners
from entering the Black Hills,
and that the Lakota and
Cheyenne still roaming freely
on both sides of the range
would have to be forced onto
reservations, ostensibly for
their own safety. Runners
were sent out that winter to
inform the Indians of this
decision, made over 1,600
miles away. It was little more
than political cover. Both
sides recognized that no such
directives would or could be
obeyed, and an American
military campaign was
already being planned. This
suited the cantankerous, hard drinking General Sheridan.
“Little Phil, ” who stood barely five feet, five inches, had come out of the Civil War with a reputation for courage, daring, and a propensity to employ the new “scorched earth” battle tactics that were coming into use around the world. To him, and to his equation of good Indians with dead Indians, we owe perhaps our most often quoted line from the decades of Indian wars. Sheridan’s main target was Sitting Bull, who was amassing his own intertribal force to defend the territory. For all his hatred of the red man, however, Sheridan, unlike Carrington and so many officers whose thinking was influenced by racial prejudice, did not hesitate to employ Native allies. The Crows, Shoshones, Rees, Pawnee, and Ute, trampled beneath Sioux hegemony for decades, eagerly signed up to fight for the Americans.
When Sitting Bull’s agitators approached Red Cloud, he stuck to his promise. Like a surgeon who had grown weary of blood, he saw no point in shedding more of it. Taking to the warpath against the United States, he knew, would lead to a grimly waged campaign of attrition that would wear down the Indians day after insufferable day. The white soldiers who saw no evil in exterminating his people regardless of age or gender would never give them rest, and their territory would shrink until they were boxed in and forced to choose annihilation or surrender.
General George Armstrong Custer’s blunder into the large Lakota and Northern Cheyenne camp on the Little Bighorn in June 1876—the Indians called it the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and one that his Crow scouts had warned Custer against—was the Sioux’s last hurrah. The shocking slaughter of Custer’s entire immediate command intensified the national fervor to eradicate the Northern Plains tribes. Ironically, what the Indians lacked was a strategist on the order of Red Cloud to follow up their great tactical victory at the Little Bighorn. America struck back hard, and the Army’s mopping-up operations continued through the spring of 1877, when even Crazy Horse recognized the futility of the fight and turned himself in to soldiers at the Red Cloud Agency. Four months later Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death by a guard at the agency while allegedly trying to escape from so- called protective custody. Controversy still surrounds his death.
With Crazy Horse dead and Sitting Bull a fugitive in Canada, what was left of the hostile tribes became resigned to their fate: on the reservation. Once again, sadly, Red Cloud had been prescient. In 1878 the Red Cloud Agency, Red Cloud along with it, was relocated to southwest South Dakota and renamed the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Few men have the ability to completely deviate from their life’s philosophy, particularly in old age. Red Cloud was one of them. His attitude toward the reservation, once the symbol of a caged life unworthy of living, altered once he was established at Pine Ridge. He would adhere to the white man’s lifestyle, live in a house, wear a white man’s clothes, engage in white people’s commercial activities, and send his children to their schools. He had once been a man of a certain place and time; now he was a man of another place and time. His political gifts were numerous and ingrained, and he wielded them to remain the physical and spiritual leader of the Oglalas. Red Cloud had not changed, but he had adapted, and unlike Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the others who fought on, he had seen his people’s future. He understood that he, and they, had been overcome by historical forces.
Over the decades Red Cloud made several more trips east to plead for better conditions for his people, especially the next generation of Lakota. Unlike his military forays, his political aims were destined to fail, though not for lack of effort. In a remarkable address to President Rutherford B. Hayes on September 26, 1877, he complained about the dry, dusty, infertile soil of the Pine Ridge Reservation and declared, “God made this earth for us and everybody; there is good streams, good lands; and I wish you to take me to a good place to raise my children. The place where I am now was selected with the advice of the Great Father. I also want schools to enable my children to read and write so they will be as wise as the white man’s children. I have the same feelings as all the white men have for their families; they love their children, as I do mine, and I would like to raise my children well.”
He was also quick to point out that he had not supported Sitting Bull’s uprising, shrewdly distancing himself from the Custer massacre. But this sop to the Americans did not sit well with the more militant members of his tribe, and accusations persist to this day that he had a hidden hand in the death of his onetime protégé Crazy Horse. Nonetheless as the years passed Red Cloud remained a respected if increasingly distant figure on the Pine Ridge Reservation. His children had children, and his oldest son, Jack, would succeed him as the tribe’s Head Man. (Jack Red Cloud would in turn be succeeded by his son James; his son, Chief Oliver Red Cloud, died at ninety-three on July 4, 2013, 110 years to the day after his great-grandfather stepped down as chief.) Red Cloud and Pretty Owl lived quietly, though from time to time he would still advocate on behalf of the Lakota and protest against intrusions in the Black Hills and conditions on the reservation. His last journey to Washington, D.C., was in 1897.
“Little Phil, ” who stood barely five feet, five inches, had come out of the Civil War with a reputation for courage, daring, and a propensity to employ the new “scorched earth” battle tactics that were coming into use around the world. To him, and to his equation of good Indians with dead Indians, we owe perhaps our most often quoted line from the decades of Indian wars. Sheridan’s main target was Sitting Bull, who was amassing his own intertribal force to defend the territory. For all his hatred of the red man, however, Sheridan, unlike Carrington and so many officers whose thinking was influenced by racial prejudice, did not hesitate to employ Native allies. The Crows, Shoshones, Rees, Pawnee, and Ute, trampled beneath Sioux hegemony for decades, eagerly signed up to fight for the Americans.
When Sitting Bull’s agitators approached Red Cloud, he stuck to his promise. Like a surgeon who had grown weary of blood, he saw no point in shedding more of it. Taking to the warpath against the United States, he knew, would lead to a grimly waged campaign of attrition that would wear down the Indians day after insufferable day. The white soldiers who saw no evil in exterminating his people regardless of age or gender would never give them rest, and their territory would shrink until they were boxed in and forced to choose annihilation or surrender.
General George Armstrong Custer’s blunder into the large Lakota and Northern Cheyenne camp on the Little Bighorn in June 1876—the Indians called it the Battle of the Greasy Grass, and one that his Crow scouts had warned Custer against—was the Sioux’s last hurrah. The shocking slaughter of Custer’s entire immediate command intensified the national fervor to eradicate the Northern Plains tribes. Ironically, what the Indians lacked was a strategist on the order of Red Cloud to follow up their great tactical victory at the Little Bighorn. America struck back hard, and the Army’s mopping-up operations continued through the spring of 1877, when even Crazy Horse recognized the futility of the fight and turned himself in to soldiers at the Red Cloud Agency. Four months later Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death by a guard at the agency while allegedly trying to escape from so- called protective custody. Controversy still surrounds his death.
With Crazy Horse dead and Sitting Bull a fugitive in Canada, what was left of the hostile tribes became resigned to their fate: on the reservation. Once again, sadly, Red Cloud had been prescient. In 1878 the Red Cloud Agency, Red Cloud along with it, was relocated to southwest South Dakota and renamed the Pine Ridge Reservation.
Few men have the ability to completely deviate from their life’s philosophy, particularly in old age. Red Cloud was one of them. His attitude toward the reservation, once the symbol of a caged life unworthy of living, altered once he was established at Pine Ridge. He would adhere to the white man’s lifestyle, live in a house, wear a white man’s clothes, engage in white people’s commercial activities, and send his children to their schools. He had once been a man of a certain place and time; now he was a man of another place and time. His political gifts were numerous and ingrained, and he wielded them to remain the physical and spiritual leader of the Oglalas. Red Cloud had not changed, but he had adapted, and unlike Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the others who fought on, he had seen his people’s future. He understood that he, and they, had been overcome by historical forces.
Over the decades Red Cloud made several more trips east to plead for better conditions for his people, especially the next generation of Lakota. Unlike his military forays, his political aims were destined to fail, though not for lack of effort. In a remarkable address to President Rutherford B. Hayes on September 26, 1877, he complained about the dry, dusty, infertile soil of the Pine Ridge Reservation and declared, “God made this earth for us and everybody; there is good streams, good lands; and I wish you to take me to a good place to raise my children. The place where I am now was selected with the advice of the Great Father. I also want schools to enable my children to read and write so they will be as wise as the white man’s children. I have the same feelings as all the white men have for their families; they love their children, as I do mine, and I would like to raise my children well.”
He was also quick to point out that he had not supported Sitting Bull’s uprising, shrewdly distancing himself from the Custer massacre. But this sop to the Americans did not sit well with the more militant members of his tribe, and accusations persist to this day that he had a hidden hand in the death of his onetime protégé Crazy Horse. Nonetheless as the years passed Red Cloud remained a respected if increasingly distant figure on the Pine Ridge Reservation. His children had children, and his oldest son, Jack, would succeed him as the tribe’s Head Man. (Jack Red Cloud would in turn be succeeded by his son James; his son, Chief Oliver Red Cloud, died at ninety-three on July 4, 2013, 110 years to the day after his great-grandfather stepped down as chief.) Red Cloud and Pretty Owl lived quietly, though from time to time he would still advocate on behalf of the Lakota and protest against intrusions in the Black Hills and conditions on the reservation. His last journey to Washington, D.C., was in 1897.
On July 4, 1903, the eighty-two-year-old Red Cloud, nearly blind, made his final public address to a gathering of Lakota. “My sun is set, ” he said. “My day is done. Darkness is stealing over me. Before I lie down to rise no more, I will speak to my people. Hear me, my friends, for it is not the time for me to tell you a lie. The Great Spirit made us, the Indians, and gave us this land we live in. He gave us the buffalo, the antelope, and the deer for food and clothing. We moved our hunting grounds from the Minnesota to the Platte and from the Mississippi to the great mountains. No one put bounds on us. We were free as the winds, and like the eagle, heard no man’s commands.”
The white men had changed all that. They were too numerous and too powerful, and their arrival marked the passing of an era as surely as the disappearance of the buffalo. “Shadows are long and dark before me, ” Red Cloud concluded. “I shall soon lie down to rise no more. While my spirit is with my body the smoke of my breath shall be towards the Sun, for he knows all things and knows that I am still true to him.”
On December 10, 1909, Red Cloud died peacefully in his sleep at the age of eighty eight. His death prompted headlines around the country. In a lengthy appreciation, the New York Times noted, “When Red Cloud fought the whites he did so to the best of his ability. But when he signed the first peace paper he buried his tomahawk and this peace pact was never broken.” It was, of course, broken many times—by the U.S. government.
Red Cloud’s grave is in a cemetery atop a hill on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a short walk from the Red Cloud Heritage Center. From there, on a clear day, you can almost see the sacred Paha Sapa.
• • •
A frontier fort was named after William Judd Fetterman. There was no such honor for Henry Beebee Carrington, yet he persevered. In July 1908, for the first time since the Battle of the Hundred-in-theHands forty-two years earlier, Carrington returned to the site of the outpost he had painstakingly constructed on the desolate plateau in northwest Wyoming. Only the outline of its foundation remained. The few men and women still living who had occupied Fort Phil Kearny had been invited to mark the Independence Day weekend by visiting the rocky knoll in the Peno Creek Valley where Fetterman had fallen and where a monument was to be erected consecrating the battle. Today the stone marker rises from the yellow sweet clover and the purple Canada thistle only a few yards from a short section of the Bozeman Trail still rutted from wagon wheels; most of the rest of the old trail has been paved over for highways and county roads, plowed under by dryland farmers, or set aside as open grazing land.
On that day in 1908, Carrington, who was eighty four, wore his blue colonel’s uniform and was accompanied by his wife, the former Frances Grummond. Margaret Carrington had died, probably from tuberculosis, in 1870. Her husband was out of uniform by then, having accepted a position as a professor of military science at Wabash College in Indiana. Meanwhile Frances Grummond had returned to her hometown, Franklin, Tennessee, where she buried her husband, George. When she tried to collect her husband’s military death benefits she discovered for the first time that George Grummond had another wife. When Frances learned of Margaret’s death, she wrote a note of condolence to Henry. The two continued to exchange letters, a romance bloomed, and they were married in 1871.
With Frances at his side Carrington continued to vigorously reject contentions that he bore responsibility for the Fetterman Massacre. His efforts included revisions of the ensuing six editions of Margaret’s memoir, Absaraka: Home of the Crows, which was published in 1868. When Frances’s own book was published in 1910, Fetterman’s reputation was further sullied. (Fetterman’s good friend William Bisbee, who retired in 1903 as a brigadier general, was one of the few who defended him, in his own book.) Those attending the 1908 reunion were surprised by the vigor of the old soldier as he delivered an extemporaneous, hourlong speech that once more defended his actions of half a lifetime ago. Like Red Cloud’s final public utterance, this would be Carrington’s last hurrah. The Carringtons returned east, where Frances died in October 1911 at sixty-four. Henry, defiant to the end, died almost a year to the day later in Boston, like Red Cloud at age eighty-eight.
• • •
The military historian Peter Maslowski, attending a guest lecture series at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, was puzzled when a general from the Chinese People’s Army casually mentioned that the United States had fought the longest war in history. America had never fought a Thirty Years’ War, let alone a Hundred Years’ War. What was the visiting general talking about? The answer came with the foreigner’s next breath. He explained that he was referring to America’s nearly 300-year war against its Indians. Much of the world beyond North America considered it to have begun in the early seventeenth century and to have lasted until the late nineteenth.
“From the perspective of military historians this was a dubious assertion, ” Maslowski writes in an essay he contributed to the book Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars. “Few of them viewed the Euro-Americans’ struggle against the indigenous peoples as a single, continuous war of subjugation.”
After Maslowski digested the idea, however, what he had at first found “implausible” struck him as more and more valid. “And yet the general had a point: Euro-Americans did wage a protracted war to conquer Indian nations in order to acquire their land and its resources.” The proof lies in the figures. In 1866, at the height of Red Cloud’s War, fewer than 2 million whites populated the West; twenty five years later, with a grid of iron rails crisscrossing the prairie, the number had risen to 8.5 million. Today it is 86 million. Yet whether this was one war or many, the fact remains: the great warrior chief Red Cloud was the only Indian ever able to claim victory over the United States.
• • •
In the end, despite his proximity to the new settlers and his many journeys across America, Red Cloud may never really have come to comprehend these whites— their motives, their greed, their insatiable desires. If he could read he might have had his answer, although it is still doubtful that he would have understood. Years later, William H. Bisbee attempted to come to grips with an overriding rhetorical question of that bygone era—for what purpose did the United States fight Red Cloud?
“My only answer could be, ” General Bisbee wrote, “we did it for Civilization.”
The End
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