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

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

An American Legend

24 

COLONEL CARRINGTON’S CIRCUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 

HERE BE MONSTERS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

26 

THE PERFECT FORT 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

27 

“MERCIFULLY KILL 

ALL THE WOUNDED” 

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

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

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

⚖   ⚖   ⚖ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • • 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am a friend.” 

“State your name.” 

“Jim Bridger.” 

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

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

Not long afterward a detachment from Reno Station appeared on the trail, led by the chaplain and the enlisted man who had ridden for help. More excited huzzahs filled the air, although the Reno Station men seemed a bit disappointed at having been second on the scene. While they bade their fellows adios and turned back south, the bodies of Daniels and the sergeant were rolled into tarps and loaded onto a wagon next to the dead corporal from Bridger’s unit. Three days later, with Colonel Carrington standing at the front gate in greeting, the ragged band rode into Fort Phil Kearny.
1655s

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Part 9: The Heart of Everything That Is...Burn The Bodies,Eat the Horses...War is Peace & Big Bellies & Shirt Wearers

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

An American Legend

By Bob Drury & Tom Clavin

21 

BURN THE BODIES 

EAT THE HORSES 

Sitting Bull was angry. A month earlier, about when Red Cloud fell on Bridge Station, Sitting Bull’s Hunk papas had tried to pick a fight with the garrison stationed at Fort Rice in North Dakota. The timing was serendipitous. The Indians had not planned the simultaneous raids; it was merely the season. But Sitting Bull had even less success than Red Cloud. Geography was his downfall.

A year earlier, in the wake of his victory on the Upper Knife, General Sully had ordered his engineers to construct the fort on a steep plateau overlooking the west bank of the Missouri. The plain surrounding the outpost was sketched with low, sageen crusted bluffs broken only by dark ravines running to the horizon. As Sully had planned, the soldiers on the parapets could see for miles in every direction, and when Sitting Bull’s decoys appeared before their gates the lookouts had no trouble making out the main body of 400 to 500 Hunk papas and Dakotas trying to conceal themselves behind the distant buttes. The post commander formed a defensive skirmish line along the riverbank that furled around the stockade’s cottonwood walls, but refused to allow his men to go any farther. The Sioux made one frantic charge, loosing a storm of arrows and musket balls, but fell back under an American artillery bombardment. At this post, unlike Bridge Station, there was no wagon train in need of rescue. The soldiers held their position, and their howitzers kept the Sioux well out of arrow and musket range. Sitting Bull led a sullen retreat.

When a month later his outriders spied the billowing dust clouds of Colonel Cole’s force meandering not far from where the Powder empties into the Yellowstone, Sitting Bull and his frustrated Hunkpapas jumped them like angry badgers. 

Cole’s force outnumbered the attackers by four to one, but his men and their horses were all debilitated after marching for weeks through the low, flat heat of a baking drought that left their skin cracked and their lips, tongues, and eyeballs coated with a thin pall of fine yellow loess soil. At the first sign of Indians, Cole ordered his troop to assume a defensive position, corralling up near a grove of leafy scrub oak. Through four days and nights the Sioux probed, running off a few horses and wagon mules, with Sitting Bull personally capturing one officer’s majestic black stallion. But the Indians could neither penetrate the makeshift battlements nor lure out its defenders.

It was weather that finally forced Cole’s hand. On the first day of September the temperature dropped seventy degrees and a freak blizzard swept down from the north, killing over 200 of the Americans’ weakened horses. After burning his extraneous wagons, harnesses, and saddles, Cole had no choice but to march his men up the Powder. Sitting Bull had sent out messengers to Red Cloud’s camp, and his Hunk papas and Dakotas were now reinforced by small parties of Oglalas as well as some Miniconjous and Sans Arcs. These Sioux kept up a steady harassment of the slow-moving Americans, albeit to little end. The farther southeast the troop drove, the more concerned Sitting Bull became over straying too far from his defenseless village back on the Little Missouri. His scouts informed him that General Sully had pulled back across the Missouri, but one never knew. The Hunk papas harassed the column for two more days, and then fell off to ride home. It was now Red Cloud’s turn.

On September 5, the Bad Face chief finally reacted to Colonel Cole’s intrusion by assembling 2,000 braves to meet the beleaguered American force. He chose as his battleground a bend in the Powder marked by tall, sheer sandstone bluffs broken by winding ravines. It was an ideal site for an ambush. No one knows why Red Cloud did not ride with the war party that day; some historians contend that after days of fasting and vision quests the Cheyenne chief Roman Nose begged for the honor of leading the combined Sioux-Cheyenne contingent. Red Cloud apparently did grant Roman Nose that honor, and in his own stead sent Crazy Horse and Young-Man-Afraid-Of His-Horses.

Without the Oglala Head Man present, however, the Indians reverted to their age old battle tactics. Instead of ambushing the troopers from the rocky ridges, or even surprising them head-on, warriors broke into small groups according to their soldier societies, intent on stealing horses and counting coup. Some had wonderful luck. A flight of Cheyenne led by Roman Nose chased a feckless company of cavalry into a spinney of cottonwoods banking the north side of the Powder. The Indians dismounted, and using the thick leafy spurge as cover, crept in after them. Near the riverbank they broke into a clearing, where they found eighty saddled mounts tied to the bushes. Across the river the cavalrymen were emerging, dripping wet. None had fired a shot.

Buoyed by this small victory, Roman Nose attempted to rally his attackers into a coherent battle group. But by this time the main body of Cole’s troops had once again formed its wagons into a hollow square, its rear against the high hills. As Roman Nose policed the Indians into a loose skirmish line between the Powder and the bluffs, Crazy Horse approached with a request. He wanted to draw out the Americans with a dare ride. This had been his signature tactic throughout the Crow wars of the late 1850s, a feat so stunningly brave that it would inspire his fellow fighters. Roman Nose of course knew all about Crazy Horse’s famous dare rides, and assented. Three times a nearly naked Crazy Horse galloped the length of Cole’s defensive lines, a slim, ghostly figure hunched low over his war pony’s lithe neck. His sudden, darting runs resembled the lightning quick swoops of his animal spirit, the red-tailed hawk. He taunted the soldiers to come and fight. None would, although bullets whistled past him and made tracks in the earth at his horse’s hooves. Crazy Horse finally quit—his horse for once unscathed. 

Not to be outshone, Roman Nose spurred his white pony across the dusty no-man’s-land with its clumps of sedge and needle grass. His eagle war bonnet trailed the ground as he too raced from one end of the American position to the other, screaming insults and bellowing challenges. Again the soldiers stayed put. The Cheyenne managed three rushes before his horse was shot and killed. At this the combined tribal force charged the corral en masse. They were repelled by whistling grapeshot and the crackling reports of hundreds of Spencer carbines. As a smoky dusk fell over the battlefield the Indians predictably grew tired of the standoff. The Cheyenne were the first to depart, riding off to strike camp and move east toward the Black Hills in preparation for the fall buffalo hunt. Cole took advantage of this to set his column on the move. He drove southwest as a few Sioux continued to trail him, intent mainly on stealing horses. But the opportunity for a showdown had passed.

Three days later another arose when Cole’s Pawnee scouts, trailed by a platoon of cavalry, topped a ridgeline and nearly blundered into the eastern edge of Red Cloud’s huge camp on the Tongue. A band of twenty-seven Cheyenne, one of the last to depart for winter camp in the east, were the first to notice them. But the Pawnee scouts were so distant that the Cheyenne merely assumed they were either Lakota or Arapaho returning from the fight with the soldiers, and paid them no heed. The Pawnee scouts retreated and hid on top of a steep cut bank, allowing the now-moving Cheyenne to pass. Then they ambushed the Cheyenne and killed every one. When a messenger reported the situation to Cole, for once the colonel understood that he had the element of surprise. He took the offensive, organizing his troop into a European-style full frontal charge. Even the Kansas malcontents, sensing a do-or die moment, recovered their esprit de corps.

Red Cloud, meanwhile, was unprepared for the surprise attack. With his force depleted by the departure of the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, he organized a frantic holding action. Women and girls raced to dismantle lodges as teenage herders rounded up ponies from the surrounding grasslands. The scene at the center of the Indian camp resembled a rodeo, with armed braves lassoing and mounting any horse available. It would not be enough. Cole had the strategic and tactical advantage. Then, suddenly, as if summoned by the Wakan Tanka itself, the weather again intervened. The sky to the west darkened nearly to black as a succession of billowing thunderheads growled down from the Bighorns. A driving sleet pounded the prairie for the next thirty-six hours, ending the fight and turning the loamy earth into a quagmire. The Indians slipped away in the dim light, and Cole lost another 400 horses and mules to the bitter cold.

When the storm broke on September 9 the dazed Americans again set to burning the last of their expendable supplies, including their wagons. Cole’s remaining animals were too weak and his men too exhausted to continue carrying the dead, and he ordered the corpses thrown onto the fires to spare them mutilation. He then led what remained of his ragtag troop southwest up the Powder River Valley. The high ridges on either side of the column teemed with hundreds of mounted Indians. But unlike Sitting Bull’s Hunk papas, or even the Southern Cheyenne —tribes whose years of warfare against the whites had resulted in the acquisition of some modern weapons— Red Cloud’s Oglalas and Brules for the most part relied on bows and arrows, useless at such a distance. One of Cole’s officers estimated that only one in a hundred Powder River warriors owned a good gun, and it was likely to be only a single-shot muzzleloader. Had even a quarter of Red Cloud’s braves possessed anything resembling the Army’s rapid-firing Spencers and Colts, Cole’s column would have been doomed. It was a lesson Red Cloud was to take to heart—bravery meant nothing in the face of repeating rifles and cannons.

For two days the Sioux flanked the line of troopers, most of whom were now on foot and weak with scurvy. They had passed nearly a month without hearing from General Connor, and appeared so pale and gaunt that daylight alone might kill them. The Lakota sensed their best opportunity to rub them out as they watched the exhausted, footsore soldiers begin to slaughter their dwindling supply of bony horses and mules and eat them raw. Unbeknownst to the Indians, the soldiers were also low on ammunition, and there was talk among them of forming a final corral and making a last stand. Such was their condition when Connor’s scouts, led by Jim Bridger, found their camp.

Bridger had proved something of a curiosity to Connor on the march north. The forty-five-year-old general was not quite as awed by the veteran scout as his younger officers were, and his skin was thin enough that he took it as a challenge to his rank and reputation when Bridger warned him before the expedition that the hangings at Fort Laramie “would lead to dreadful consequences later on the trails.” Now that Connor had ridden with Bridger for over a month, his negative perception of the old mountain man had hardened, and he found himself wondering if Bridger, who was sixty-one, had lost his frontier edge. The fissures and fault lines crosshatching his face could be read as a map of distress, and at times he seemed to have difficulty recalling the locations of river fords that could accommodate the column’s heavy freight wagons. Further, the general found Bridger’s disdain toward what he called “these damn paper-collar soldiers” far from endearing. And his guide’s failure—intentional or not—to inform him that the Indians he had clashed with on the Tongue were Arapaho, not Sioux or Cheyenne, sat like a burr under Connor’s saddle. Even so, no one was happier to gaze upon “Old Gabe’s” leathery visage that cold, dreary day in September 1865 than Colonel Cole and his starving troop.

Bridger told Cole that General Connor’s column was only sixty miles away. A short distance beyond Connor, he said, was a new fort stocked with abundant supplies. It was enough to give a jaunty step to Cole’s men, who reached the rectangular log structure in late September. Why Connor had stalled his march to build the small stockade—which he dubbed Camp Connor— virtually strangling his three pronged offensive in its cradle, he never made clear. His tussle with the Kansas mutineers may have affected his plans, as might the realization after the fight with the Arapaho that the hostiles were not the helpless savages he imagined. Moreover, while Cole’s men had been marching in circles in late August, Connor had raced to rescue a road grading team that had set out from Sioux City to expand John Bozeman’s trail. Eighty-two freight wagons had been pinned down for thirteen days by hundreds of Lakota led by Red Cloud himself at the Tongue River crossing near the Wyoming-Montana border. The Indians melted away at Connor’s approach. But despite the relief column’s apparent success the incident effectively ended any hope of opening a shorter route through the Upper Powder to the gold fields.

All told, the summer campaign had been a disaster. The United States Army spent the fighting season scouring the High Plains for hostiles and came away with nothing to show for it besides a record of bad judgment, poor discipline, and failure. The miscarried campaign to crush Red Cloud left General Connor too disgusted to even request written reports from his subordinates, and he worded his own dispatch as vaguely as possible. He minimized the number of Army casualties—between twenty and fifty—and inflated Indian losses to nearly absurd proportions, estimating between 200 and 500 killed or wounded. Meanwhile one of his own junior officers admitted, “I cannot say as we killed one.” Connor made no mention of the large herds of Army mules and big American horses now mingling with Indian ponies in winter camps, nor of the surly volunteers who finally staggered back into Fort Laramie in October—their uniforms so tattered that they reminded one officer of a line of “tramps.” And the general certainly did not dwell on helping to turn the neutral northern Arapaho into belligerents.

Dodge’s report to General Pope, on the other hand, described the expedition as a wild success. He wrote that with Camp Connor now garrisoned by a skeleton company, the United States had finally established a foothold in the heart of the Powder River Country. He described Connor’s fight with Black Bear’s Arapaho as a punishment to the Indians “seldom before equaled and never excelled.” He was forced to make one concession, suggesting that the Union Pacific’s proposed approach to the Rockies might be better laid nearer to the South Platte than to Red Cloud’s domain. Ironically, this was along roughly the same path Bridger had outlined for Captain Stansbury fifteen years earlier. Other than this, Dodge concluded, all that was needed to grind down the belligerent northern tribes once and for all and to open the Bozeman Trail was more time, funds, and matériel.

But Washington had lost its faith. One suspects that a scholarly member of Andrew Johnson’s staff reminded the president of King Pyrrhus ancient lamentation —“Another such victory and we are lost.” Dodge’s incessant requests for more troops and supplies was costing the government $24 million annually—$3.2 billion in today’s currency— and this money might better be spent on Reconstruction. The government saw no recourse but to fall back on a tried-and-true stratagem to deal with the prairie. The United States, Congress decided, would offer the High Plains Indians a new treaty. In this matter the politicians did not consult the generals, who had other ideas.

Part IV 

THE WAR 

Memory is like riding a trail at night with a lighted torch. The torch casts its light only so far, and beyond that is darkness. 

—Ancient Lakota saying

22 

WAR IS PEACE 

The pending treaty between the United States and the Sioux Indians at Fort Laramie renders it the duty of every soldier to treat all Indians with kindness. "Every Indian who is wronged will visit his vengeance upon any white man he may meet.” 

So wrote Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington on June 13, 1866, as he rode west at the head of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th U.S. Infantry Regiment. As he was still in eastern Nebraska, Colonel Carrington had yet to meet a hostile Indian, so he could not possibly have known how right he was. He was about to find out—and, for the moment, without his second in command, Captain William Judd Fetterman.

Following the end of the Civil War both Carrington and Fetterman had decided to make the Army their career. Though Carrington was only nine years older than Fetterman, they personified the fault line between the old school military and a new breed of soldier steeped in total war. Carrington, the well-schooled attorney fond of reading his Bible verses each morning in Greek and Hebrew, had spent the conflict overseeing the Union Army’s Midwestern recruiting efforts with enough efficiency to have been credited with bringing 200,000 volunteers into the service. He had also maintained prisoner-of-war camps, and he prosecuted the rebel Copperheads who fomented the “Great Northwest Conspiracy.”1 He never saw action, but these accomplishments were enough to earn him a temporary and largely ceremonial brevet promotion to brigadier general. Fetterman, on the other hand, had tactical and strategic battlefield expertise. He had also gained administrative experience in the latter stages of Sherman’s Georgia campaign, including service as acting assistant adjutant general to the 14th Corps, a position in which he was responsible for more than 10,000 men. His familiarity both with field conditions and with the military procedures and protocols of every type of command made him a more attractive candidate for the postwar officer corps. Both he and Carrington lost their volunteer brevet rankings and reapplied to the Regular Army’s 18th Infantry Regiment in Columbus, Ohio. Fetterman reverted to captain from colonel, and Carrington to colonel from general—a perceived slight that he felt for the rest of his life.
1. This was a bizarre attempt by a small group of rebels led by the Confederate spy Thomas Henry Hines to sneak into the United States via Canada, free southern prisoners of war near Chicago, and start an insurrection. Carrington returned to Columbus in part to mourn the death of his infant son— the fourth of his six children to die before the age of three. He also began to lobby for a choice assignment on what he saw as the Army’s next great national stage, the Frontier. At war’s end, the service had been bloated with thousands of brevet colonels and generals, and Carrington—a small, gaunt, tubercular administrator—did not seem to stand much of a chance. But he was determined to will his heroic interior fictions into reality, and he had many powerful friends. He began writing letters not only to old acquaintances from the days when, as a young man, he had served as Washington Irving’s secretary, but also to more recent connections such as Salmon Chase, by now chief justice of the United States. He also reached out to his former law partner William Dennison, who had been the governor of Ohio and was now the postmaster general. His contacts came through.

At the end of the war Fetterman also rode north to Columbus. His stay was shorter. Though his dossier bulged with honors and citations, he did not have Carrington’s political clout. In the fall of 1865 Fetterman was assigned to recruiting duties in Cleveland just as Carrington with his wife, Margaret, and their two sons —six-year-old Jimmy and the younger Harry—departed for the West with 220 men of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th. The troop was undermanned by almost 700 soldiers, and the party reached Fort Leavenworth in Kansas by railroad and riverboat in early November in the midst of one of the most brutal Plains winters on record. It was the Carrington family’s first time away from urban comforts, and the shock of roughing it was registered by Margaret Carrington, who noted in her journal that the mercury in her thermometer had apparently frozen at twelve degrees below zero (a physical impossibility) and “two feet of snow had to be shoveled aside before a tent could be pitched.”

While the Carringtons and the 18th acclimated to this new reality, a war-weary nation was recoiling at the notion of further conflict, particularly with Indians. And vocal religious organizations, such as the Quakers, turned their attention from emancipation to the justice and wisdom of America’s treatment of the western tribes. Every pulpit represented numerous voters, and eastern politicians took notice. Moreover, the preachers’ public campaigns provided humanitarian cover for the new peace policy of the “Radical Republicans” taking power in Washington. The real reason for a shift in Indian policy was, of course, budgetary. Politicians in both parties were pressured by taxpayers weary of supporting the professional, and expensive, Frontier Army when the costly task of Reconstruction was only beginning. Throwing more money into another Indian campaign while paying to clean up the detritus of the last was anathema. With the western volunteer militias melting away and the Army drawing down its total number of troops from more than one million to just under 60,000—most of whom were needed to police the South— any number of congressional investigative commissions were formed to study the “Indian problem.” The members of these committees tended to be both self-serving and naive, and grandstanding senators and congressmen began to personally conduct “fact-finding” missions to the West. Sand Creek was a favorite stopover for datelines and photo opportunities.

The easterners, however, were in for a surprise, for the westerners—whose population was still sparse— had no sympathy for the “savages.” Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, an ardent proponent of peace, was one example. In a speech at the Denver Opera House, he asked what he considered a rhetorical question: Should the Indians be placed on reservations and civilized, or exterminated? He did not receive the answer he expected, because the rest of his speech was drowned out as the audience shouted, “Exterminate them! Exterminate them!” Not long before, a similar audience at the opera house had greeted Colonel Chivington as a conquering hero. Despite such omens, Washington remained determined to reach some sort of compromise with the High Plains tribes— a clean, simple solution to avoid further bloodshed and expense. As another senator wrote to the secretary of the interior after meeting with western Indian agents, “It is time that the authorities at Washington realize the magnitude of these wars which some general gets up on his own hook, which may cost hundreds and thousands of lives, and millions upon millions of dollars.” 

To that end, in the fall of 1865 Indian agents approached bands of Hunk papas, Yankton Ais, Blackfeet Sioux, Yanktons, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Brules living near the Missouri River with a blunt message: the raids on emigrants and settlers must cease, and a war against the United States would be unwise. But America was not heartless, the agents added, and in exchange for acceptance of Washington’s latest peace offer they promised the Indians acreage, farm tools and seed, and protection against any tribes who took exception to these new agricultural pursuits.

The Sioux were naturally resistant. Living in houses, tilling fields, sending their children to school—these were white man’s values and principles. But the agents were aware that the Upper Missouri tribes had to this point suffered the most from the alarming thinning of the buffalo herds, and they reminded the Indians that the fifteen-year annuity payments from the Horse Creek Treaty were about to expire, and offered a solution—a new, twenty-year deal at increased rates. All they asked in return was that the bands move permanently away from the trails and roads leading west, and vow not to molest the whites defiling their old lands with mechanical reapers, threshing machines, and barbed wire. It was a stunning demonstration of the Indians’ desperation that by October enough pliable sub chiefs representing over 2,000 Sioux agreed to the treaty in a ceremony at Fort Sully, located at the mouth of the Cheyenne River. 

The national conscience, troubled since Sand Creek, was assuaged, and newspaper headlines declared peace with the Sioux while eastern reporters and editors, unaware that “the Sioux” came in many variations, wrote that the Bozeman Trail was now safe for travel. The government was apparently equally delusional in its belief that a similar pact could be signed with Red Cloud and his followers. Indian agents sent runners into the Powder River Country to announce that come spring the United States was willing to offer even better terms in the form of exclusive rights to the game-laden territory lying between the Black Hills, the Bighorns, and the Yellowstone in exchange for the mere right of passage along the Bozeman Trail. There was no mention of farming. The message from Washington was clear: avoid war at all costs.

The politicians and Indian agents who promoted and fostered these peace offerings had many agendas, but most were spurred by one obvious and overriding fact—the Army was small and the Plains were enormous. The generals apparently disagreed.

♔ ♟♔♟♔♟♔

The political struggle for control of Indian affairs had been raging, intermittently, since 1849, two years before the Horse Creek Treaty, when tribal oversight was transferred from the War Department to the Office of Indian Affairs. The Army (correctly) considered the politicians dishonest and corrupt; the politicians (equally correctly) deemed the Army bloodthirsty and shortsighted. One proof of the latter belief had been General Connor’s disastrous campaign. By rights, the bureaucrats pointed out, it should have taught the military some basic lessons, the foremost being that for all of America’s industrial might, great winding columns of Bluecoats blundering across the prairie on futile search-and-destroy missions would play into the hands of a mobile, cunning enemy who knew every butte, hollow, creek, and pasture. General Sherman himself admitted that finding hostile Indians “was rather like looking for a flea in a large clover field.” Yet despite his new authority as commanding general of the Army, even Grant could not alter the institutionalized hubris and Indian-hating of the War Department. By the spring of 1866 the department —as was said of the Bourbons on their return to power—had apparently learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

A year before General Grant[L] plucked him out of obscurity, General Pope[R] had published in the influential Army and Navy Gazette an indictment of what he considered America’s accommodationist policy toward the High Plains tribes. This approach to the “Indian Problem” had the matter backward, he wrote. Instead of offering treaties and bribing the Natives with gifts and annuities, Pope advocated placing the burden of peace on the Indians. Were he in command of national Indian policy, he concluded, he would give the tribes a choice, take it or leave it: “an explicit understanding with the Indians that so long as they keep the peace the United States will also keep it. But as soon as they commit hostilities the military forces will attack them, march through their country, and establish military posts in it.

Now Pope was in command of the Department of the Missouri. In March 1866 he issued General Order No. 33,[Take note of his hand above DC] which instituted yet another Army “District, ” the “Mountain District.” It included the route from the old Camp Connor (since renamed Fort Reno), northwest to Virginia City via the Bighorn and Yellowstone Rivers—in other words, the Bozeman Trail. The order also assigned Colonel Carrington’s 18th Infantry Regiment the task of reopening and protecting the route. In order to facilitate this assignment, Carrington would need to construct a string of forts through the heart of the Powder River Country, permanent structures replacing the mule driven supply lines that had failed so miserably in the past. For a striking illustration of the haphazard state of the postwar Army, one need look no further than the fact that on the very day General Pope issued Order No. 33, Generals Grant and Sherman decided to relieve him of command.

Grant had placed Sherman in charge of all western defenses, and he was also close to appointing a fifty six-year-old brigadier general, Philip St. George Cooke, to succeed Pope as head of the Department of the Missouri. Sherman suggested that the role called for a younger, more vigorous general, who might actually get out into the territory to experience personally the difficulties the troops and their officers faced on the frontier. He was afraid General Cooke would be content to lead from behind, in Omaha, and he was correct. But Grant was fond of Cooke, his old Virginia dragoon who had fought so admirably against Black Hawk, against the Mexicans, and against the Mormons. (Grant may have also wanted to reward Cooke for remaining loyal to the Union when his son, his nephew, and his famous son-in-law J. E. B. Stuart went over to the Confederacy.) Grant of course prevailed, and in March Cooke assumed command.

Amid this bureaucratic confusion, Pope’s General Order No. 33 stood. This meant that by virtue of the political and social contacts that had secured him command of the 18th Infantry Regiment, the obscure Colonel Henry Beebee Carrington, with no fighting experience and an attorney’s approach to most military hurdles, remained in charge of the Army’s most ambitious undertaking on the western frontier—the defeat of Red Cloud, the mightiest warrior chief of the mightiest tribe on the Plains. A plan to endow such an officer with the authority to build and maintain outposts throughout the very wilderness that had been ceded time and again to the Lakota by government treaty appeared not only duplicitous but idiotic. It is not known if Colonel Carrington had any idea that he was to be used merely as a placeholder, a competent fort builder who was expected to defend those outposts with untested infantrymen until a real fighter at the head of well-trained troops could complete the extermination of the western tribes. As Sherman wrote to Grant’s chief of staff in the summer of 1866, “All I ask is comparative quiet this year, for by next year we can have the new cavalry enlisted, equipped, and mounted, ready to go and visit these Indians where they live.” Apparently, he assumed that the Sioux would wait.

♞♟♟♔♟♟♞

Judging from his official reports and dispatches, Colonel Carrington may have suspected that his position was tenuous when he and his battalion departed Fort Leavenworth for Nebraska’s Fort Kearney. It must also have crossed his mind that the tasks lying ahead might be easier if he had a fighting cock like Fetterman at his side. Not that the 18th did not contain its share of serious soldiers. The outfit’s quartermaster was a balding, brawling bachelor, Captain Frederick Brown—a hard drinking thirty-five-year-old who during the Civil War had earned a reputation as a place where trouble started. Though both teetotalers, the Carringtons were initially fond of Brown, although it is doubtful that the colonel was aware of Brown’s habit of slipping Fort Kearney’s Pawnee scouts extra rations in exchange for lessons on how to skin a buffalo and scalp a man.

The officer who was to become Brown’s sidekick was the battalion adjutant Lieutenant William Bisbee, battle-scarred beyond his twenty-six years. Bisbee was a city boy from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who had enlisted in the Army of the Republic at age twenty-two and was almost immediately commissioned as a lieutenant. He shared a tent and fought side by side with Fetterman from Corinth to Atlanta, and he was devoted to the captain. Like Carrington, Bisbee brought his family—his young wife and infant son— west with him, and at first the two clans became close. But their personal friendship did not last. Carrington was appalled when he observed Bisbee’s abusive behavior and language toward the enlisted men, and threatened several times to discipline him. Bisbee, who would rise through the ranks to general officer, never lost his contempt for his commander, and years later was to have his revenge. 

Carrington’s junior officer corps also included Captains Henry Haymond and Tenedor Ten Eyck, both hard-bitten veterans. Haymond had commanded the 2nd Battalion of the 18th through some of its hardest fighting. The laconic Dutchman Ten Eyck, whose lazy right eye lent him the appearance of a professional gunfighter, was another soldier who liked his whiskey (he would later be cited repeatedly for public intoxication). He was one of the few college-educated officers on Carrington’s staff, and prior to the Civil War he had worked as a surveyor and lumberjack before catching gold fever. He was mining in Denver when the war broke out, and despite being over forty he returned to Wisconsin and enlisted as a private. Within six months he was commissioned as a captain in the 18th, and soon thereafter he was captured at Chickamauga. Tough enough to survive a bout of dysentery during the year he spent in a Confederate prison near Richmond, Ten Eyck was liberated in a prisoner exchange and returned to Wisconsin, where he had left his wife and five children when he joined the Carrington expedition.

Colonel Carrington’s staff officers, well acquainted with Army routine, understood the official reasons for his absence from the front during the war. That did not mean they had to respect those reasons, or even the punctilious man himself—an attitude that the colonel would only gradually come to understand. As it was, for now he was content to spend the winter of 1865–66 at Fort Kearney, a mere 194 miles west of Omaha, and it was from there that he wrote to General Cooke that he had acquired 200 “excellent” horses from Iowa and Nebraska cavalry volunteers mustering out of Civil War service as well as scores of freight wagons with which to haul sacks of seed potatoes and onion bulbs, surveying tools, and the construction equipment for his blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and carpenters. These included hay mowers, brick and shingle-making machines, window sashes, locks, and nails by the barrelful. 

Despite this wealth of fine building materials, Carrington’s unit remained woefully short of modern weaponry. The officers and sergeants had been issued Colt revolvers, but the enlisted men still carried obsolete, muzzle-loading Springfield rifles remaindered from the Civil War. These guns were in such poor condition that many would not even fire. The War Department claimed that the single-shot Springfields cut down on ammunition wasted by soldiers carrying repeating rifles, but this was nonsense. It was an open secret in Washington that kickbacks to politicians by contractors from the Springfield armory kept the guns in circulation well past their effectiveness. Carrington undoubtedly was aware of this—he was, after all, an administrator at heart —but he certainly could not voice such a complaint in his dispatches. The best he could do was hint that his mission was compromised without more men and better guns, and until they arrived he decided to wait the situation out through the harsh Nebraska winter.

From Fort Kearney Carrington also issued his own General Order No. 1, requesting from Cooke’s warehouses “commissary and quartermaster supplies for one year . . . and fifty percent additional for wastage and contingencies.” In spite of his inherent cautiousness, Carrington was nothing if not optimistic, as indicated by his further submission for such delicacies as canned fruit and vegetables, sewing machines, rocking chairs, and butter churns that his wife, Margaret, believed would add “a domestic cast” to their impending journey. Heading into hostile Sioux territory, he was literally trading guns for butter.

23 

BIG BELLIES AND 

SHIRT WEARERS 

In the autumn of 1865, at about the same time that government agents were finalizing their treaty with the more pliant Missouri River tribes, Lakota Head Men and warriors were convening in the foothills seventy miles northwest of Fort Laramie to revive a decades-old system of governance. It had its origins in the turn of the century, when the Western Sioux were just beginning to drive the Pawnee, Kiowa, and Crows from the High Plains. It called for seven veteran chiefs to act as an advisory war council for the tribe, concentrating on battle tactics and strategy. On the banks of an unnamed creek over a feast of buffalo tongue and boiled dog, Red Cloud was selected as the “first among equals” of these Tezi Tanka, or “Big Bellies”—the wise heads who would guide the tribes through what all believed was inevitable war with the whites. Notable by his absence was the belligerent Hunkpapa Sitting Bull. He was waging his own harassment campaign against the Army in eastern Montana, and whether he was envious of Red Cloud’s ascendancy or preoccupied by his own battles against both the Americans and the Flathead tribe, Sitting Bull was never to be a factor in the fights for control of the Powder River Country.

It was at the Big Belly convocation that Red Cloud officially declared the 1865 fighting season over, and the Lakota agreed to reassemble for a war council in the spring. Perhaps they would even accept the white man’s invitation to come to Fort Laramie for treaty talks. After all, Red Cloud reasoned, what better way to size up an enemy than to meet him in person? Before the gathering disbanded, however, he and the six other Big Bellies chose four young men to act as ceremonial “Shirt Wearers” who would keep discipline among the wild braves and lead the war parties into battle. 1 Among these were Young-Man Afraid-Of-His-Horses and Crazy Horse. Red Cloud had begun to take a serious interest in Crazy Horse, the pale young warrior with the indefinable panache. He recognized in the young tribesman all the qualities required of a tactical field general. Even his name swaggered. 

Now twenty-five, Crazy Horse had acquired the physical stature and mannerisms that would characterize him for life. He was slender and sinewy even for an Indian, and his lightness of carriage often left the impression than he was slighter than his five feet, nine inches. His ethereal quality was enhanced by his wavy hair, now waist length and usually plaited into two braids that framed his narrow face and his unusually delicate nose, which observers described variously as “straight and thin” and “sharp and aquiline.” Whites who met him over the years were usually struck most by his penetrating hazel eyes. One American newspaperman described them as “exceedingly restless,” and Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun, the half-Brule daughter of the trader James Bordeaux, noted that Crazy Horse was a master of the sidelong glance. She wrote that he “hardly ever looked straight at a man, but didn’t miss much that was going on all the same.” In addition, Crazy Horse also exuded a natural melancholia, as if the humiliations and defeats he’d witnessed as a child—from Horse Creek to Harney’s massacre to the defeat of the Cheyenne on the Solomon River—had scarred his psyche. It was generally assumed that if Crazy Horse could indeed make magic, some of it was black.

Red Cloud may have felt that he needed such magic. Although either unwilling or unable to articulate it, much less understand the reasons for it, he and most of his cohort sensed a subtle change in the land of their youth. Droughts lasted longer, grasslands had become more sparse, and even the hardy wild mustang herds, like the buffalo droves, appeared to be thinning. In fact, the middle of the nineteenth century did mark the end of a 300-year neo-boreal cooling period known as the Little Ice Age, and this was about to have a greater impact on the American West than all the Indian wars combined. 

Starting around 1550, falling temperatures in the northern hemisphere had produced snowstorms in Portugal, flooding in Timbuktu, and had destroyed centuries-old citrus groves in eastern China. Three centuries later, at the end of the Little Ice Age, Mary Mapes Dodge would be inspired to create a fictional character, Hans Brinker, whose silver skates carried him along frozen Dutch canals that would never again ice over. In North America the most severe repercussion from this meteorological anomaly was the desertification of buffalo ranges from the Canadian Plains to Texas. Yet the Powder River basin, because of its location between two mountain ranges and its many bountiful aquifers, escaped the environmental degradation affecting vast tracts of the West. Game proliferated in the area, cool breezes still wafted down from the mountains, and lush sweet grass scented the air. This alone made the country worth fighting for. But arguably it was not this alone for which Red Cloud fought: if he and his people had lived in the Mojave, or on a polar ice cap, and someone had tried to take it away, his reaction would have been the same. “If white men come into my country again, I will punish them again, ” he promised his tribesmen.

All of Red Cloud’s plans were of a single piece—to close down the pathway into his people’s verdant country, forever. He saw the world in primary colors, and if need be, he was willing to paint John Bozeman’s trail blood red.

♔☠☠☠☠☠♔

A trail becomes a Trail when it avoids alkaline flats or impassable ravines on either flank and instead meanders past water holes and through pasturage hardy enough to nourish stock; when it finds a way for wagons to wend through broken buttes and mesas while avoiding cutbanks so steep the bleached bones of buffalo litter the bottom; when it leads to fords in wild rivers where a prairie schooner carrying an entire lifetime of possessions can safely cross. Such was the nation’s last great overland Trail, which John Bozeman and John Jacobs had nearly died blazing in the spring of 1863. 

Before their discovery, thousands of miners had trekked west toward the Montana gold camps via two primary routes. Both were considerably roundabout. The first followed a perilous stretch of the Missouri by way of Fort Benton in northcentral Montana that creased directly through Sitting Bull’s territory. The second passed by Fort Laramie on the Oregon Trail before climbing through the South Pass of the Rockies at the southern end of the Wind River range. There the more traveled route to the West Coast turned southwest toward Salt Lake, forcing the Montana-bound to make a hard trek north across a vast high-country desert dotted with alkaline puddles before doubling back across the Continental Divide over even higher peaks. Game was scarce in this country, but so were Indians, and this was the route for which Jim Bridger would advocate his entire life.

The wagon road blazed by John Bozeman, on the other hand, branched north off the Oregon Trail before even reaching the mountains, and ran up the east face of the Bighorns. It rolled around the north end of the range to follow the Yellowstone corridor upriver in a northwesterly direction to the Big Bend, where it swung due west and wound into Montana’s Beaverhead Valley. The 400 miles it cut from the previous routes saved one month to six weeks in travel time, and lush grasses, clean water, and fresh meat were plentiful. 

In her classic book The Bloody Bozeman, Dorothy Johnson describes the naive, hopeful pilgrim who traversed the Bozeman Trail into the Montana wilderness. “He was a farmer eking out a living somewhere in the Middle West or fleeing the catastrophes of the War of the Rebellion. Or he was a lawyer or a doctor or a storekeeper, doing better than eking but wanting to do better still. He went west to find prosperity. This new man was not a born adventurer, but in his stubborn, sometimes cautious way he was a gambler. He gambled his life to better his condition, but he didn’t really believe that his hair might make fringes for a Sioux or Cheyenne war shirt or that his mutilated body might be clawed out of a shallow grave by wolves. He preferred not to face the fact that, if he should be captured, he might scream prayers for the mercy of death for hours before that mercy came.”

Ironically, were it not for the assistance of friendly Indians, Bozeman and Jacobs would probably have perished on their trailblazing journey. They almost died anyway, arriving at the Deer Creek station on the North Platte without mounts, half-naked, and nearly starved. But now that they knew the general conditions of the route, the two were confident enough to set up shop next to the Deer Creek telegraph station and sell their shortcut, offering their services as guides. The drawling, apple-cheeked Bozeman was a tireless promoter—if not exactly on a first-name basis with the bottom of the deck, he certainly put the confidence in “confidence man”—and outfitted himself in a fringed buckskin shirt and trousers to further impress prospective customers. He and Jacobs also hired a Mexican interpreter who was fluent in Sioux, and they soon attracted emigrants who were afraid of risking their wagons and stock over Bridger’s more arduous road. Bozeman assured the travelers that there were no hostile Indians along his route, and on July 6, 1863, he and Jacobs led the first train out of Deer Creek and into the wild Powder River Country. 

This was the train that was intercepted by the Lakota and Cheyenne near the Bighorns and voted to turn back. Undeterred, the following summer Bozeman, this time without Jacobs, led a much larger and more heavily armed caravan from the North Platte to Virginia City without incident—the first emigrants to arrive in Montana along the new trail. A week before Bozeman departed from Deer Creek another train—124 wagons led by the wagon master Allen Hurlburt—had ventured out from the North Platte along the same route. But Hurlburt’s party had, proportionally, even more miners—418 men traveling with 10 women and 10 children—and Bozeman’s caravan passed it when Hurlburt stopped to prospect in the Bighorns. Bozeman was already being feted in Virginia City saloons when Hurlburt finally arrived. It is by virtue of this historical quirk that subsequent overland travelers to the Montana and Idaho gold camps did not roll along the “Hurlburt Trail.”

By 1866, however, word spread that traveling on the Bozeman Trail was too dangerous. This was the first year of the great post–Civil War migration west, and Bozeman’s outfit was nearly out of business. One Army trooper who was part of an expedition that fought its way up the route that summer wrote to the Army and Navy Journal, “We thought it an impossibility to get through. There will be no more travel on that road until the government takes care of the Indians. There is plenty of firewood, water, and game, but the Indians won’t let you use them.” 

This more or less summed up Colonel Carrington’s orders—“Take care of the Indians.” He got off to a rocky start. In March 1866, while he was still wintering at Fort Kearney in Nebraska, Congress ordered the printing of an official Army survey delineating Bozeman’s route. The chart had been pieced together from Bozeman’s own rather opaque notes, geographic reports from General Connor’s expedition, aborted road-making expeditions (including the wagon train halted by Red Cloud and rescued by Connor a year earlier), and scattered newspaper clippings. When copies of this purported map reached Fort Kearney, Carrington and his officers were baffled. It resembled no chart they had ever seen, and was not much more than a squiggly dark line running vaguely northwest from the Oregon Trail through a vast, empty expanse bounded by the Black Hills to the east and the Bighorns to the west. There was no indication of elevation, nothing to differentiate desert flats from pasturage, and no mention of water holes or timbered country; and the few contoured watercourses that were outlined could have been either raging rivers or shallow streams. So spare were the map’s details that someone on Carrington’s staff actually dug up old copies of Lewis and Clark’s reports in hopes of matching descriptions of landmarks from their diaries.

Meanwhile, the battalion’s officers went about overseeing the mundane tasks common to nineteenth- century military expeditions striking out for the wilderness. The infantrymen repaired harnesses, greased axles, reshoed horses and mules, and cleaned weapons, including the unit’s one field howitzer and five snub-nosed mountain howitzers. They also learned to ride carrying their cumbersome Springfields. This by all accounts lent comic relief to an otherwise monotonous deployment, although Margaret Carrington noted that soon enough most of the men were able to saddle up, “and the majority actually made their first trip to water without being dismounted.” By mid-May, however, even this distraction was curtailed when a reinforcement battalion from the 18th consisting of 500 recruits arrived from Fort Leavenworth. Each unit—the one ensconced and the one arriving—assumed the other to be stocking rations, and Fort Kearney underwent a mild famine that left the men too weak to practice their horsemanship. 

At least the food shortages were short-lived. By the spring of 1866 the Union Pacific had laid tracks as far as Fort Kearney, and a week after the arrival of the reinforcements a locomotive arrived hauling boxcars of commissary supplies. There were more recruits aboard as well, and riding along with them was General Sherman, making his first inspection trip to the frontier. (He had traveled as far as Omaha the previous fall.) Sherman, gaunt and hollow-cheeked, was apparently experiencing one of his manic stages. He charmed the officers’ wives, posing for photographs and suggesting to each that she keep a journal of what was certain to be an important chapter in American history. He oversaw bow-and-arrow competitions between the sons of the Pawnee scouts and the American boys, including Jimmy Carrington, who was awarded an Indian pony he named Calico after winning a long-distance shoot. But when Sherman met with Carrington and his officers he exhibited uncharacteristic passivity, suggesting that, “if possible, ” they avoid any contest of arms with the Natives.

If Sherman felt any apprehension over sending an officer who had spent the Civil War sitting behind a desk on such a “vital mission into the most contentious territory in his command, ” he kept it well hidden. Dinners were jovial and at least one makeshift cotillion was arranged, with the entertainment supplied by the 18th Regiment’s thirty-piece band. Carrington, who loved martial music, had insisted on bringing the musicians along, and they were his only troops outfitted with new, lighter Spencer carbines that fired .52-caliber bullets fed from a seven-round tube magazine. 2 After several days of relaxing under the pleasant June sunshine, Sherman bade the colonel godspeed and rode east, while Carrington marched the 18th west.
1. The actual quilled, fringed shirts presented to these braves were woven from bighorn fleece and decorated with hair, each lock representing a coup counted, scalp taken, or brave deed accomplished. Crazy Horse’s shirt had almost 250 locks. 
2. Even posthumously Samuel Colt was changing the face of American warfare. His acolyte Christopher Spencer invented the manually operated, leveraction “Spencer” repeating rifle and carbine.

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COLONEL CARRINGTON’S CIRCUS

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