by Dee Brown
Although Sawyer met with such strong Indian resistance that he was forced to abandon his original course, he finally reached Virginia City by following Bozeman’s route much of the way. His official report, ordered printed by Congress in March 1866, received wide publicity and increased pressure from civilians to make the Montana Road safe for travel.3 Recently discharged Civil War veterans were especially eager to journey west and seek their fortunes in the gold fields, but after surviving four years of war they were reluctant to fight their way there through tribes of hostile Indians.
In an effort to halt attacks upon travelers through the Powder River country, General Patrick E. Connor in the summer of 1865 led a three-pronged expedition northward into the Sioux country. Connor’s orders to his officers were short and to the point: “You will not receive overtures of peace or submission from Indians, but will attack and kill every male Indian over twelve years of age.”4 Two of Connor’s three columns suffered severely from Indian attacks; they lost many of their horses in night raids, and ran out of rations. The commander’s own column managed to destroy one Arapaho village, and established a fort on the Powder that was first known as Fort Connor, later as Fort Reno.
But soon after Connor withdrew from the field, reports from Montana indicated that Indian resistance was more determined than ever along the overland route. “We thought it an impossibility to get through, and had to fight our way through,” one correspondent wrote. “There is no place between Fort Reno and Virginia City where news can be sent. 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.”5
During the autumn of 1865, treaties were signed with several bands of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho. Government representatives guaranteed tribal rights to territory lying between the Black Hills, the Big Horns and the Yellowstone—in exchange for the Indians’ conceding white travelers safe passage through this Powder River country. The commissioners, however, overlooked the fact that almost all the treaty signers were peaceable Indians, chiefs who had already abandoned the warpath and were content to camp around the white man’s forts and live off his handouts. White soldiers and warrior Indians alike referred to them contemptuously as “Laramie Loafers.”
Under leadership of belligerent warriors such as Red Cloud, raids against white invaders of the Powder River country continued as before, and in the spring of 1866 the government sent a second treaty commission to Fort Laramie to offer new terms.
At the same time, in its slow, ponderous way the War Department was responding to pressures to police the Montana Road. The commander of the Department of the Missouri—which included the Powder River country—was Major-General John Pope, one of President Lincoln’s unsuccessful commanders in the East. After disastrous defeat in the second battle of Bull Run, Pope had been sent west, and for three years had been battling Indians with little more success than he had had against Confederates. On March 10, 1866, Pope issued the following order:
The 2nd Battalion, 18th U.S. Infantry, will constitute the garrison of Fort Reno on Powder River, and the two new posts on the route between that place and Virginia City in Montana. … At these posts the battalion will be distributed as follows: Four companies at Fort Reno and two companies at each of the other posts. The Colonel of the Regiment will take post at Fort Reno.6
The “colonel of the regiment” was Henry Beebe Carrington, and this order sealed the doom of the eighty-one men who died nine months later on Peno Creek. No more unlikely commander could have been selected for so dangerous a mission at that time or place than Colonel Carrington. In the spring of 1866, the United States Army was overstaffed to the point of absurdity with both permanent and breveted colonels and generals (literally hundreds of senior officers with three and four years of battle experience), many of them young men with West Point training. Yet Carrington had never heard a shot fired in combat; he had never commanded upon the field of action.
An ardent antislavery man practicing law in Ohio, he had organized the 18th Regiment with smooth efficiency during the first days after Fort Sumter, and was appointed colonel on May 14, 1861. His ability as a recruiter and organizer kept him in Ohio while his regiment moved south, and as the war wore on he was called to Indiana to establish prisoner-of-war camps, to deal with Copperheads and prosecute the leaders of the Northwest Conspiracy. Meanwhile the 18th Regiment, with other men acting in command, was winning an enviable record as a fighting unit. The 2nd Battalion came out of the Battle of Stone’s River with half its officers and men dead or wounded. The junior officers who would serve later under Colonel Carrington at Fort Phil Kearny may have understood the reasons for his absence from the Civil War battlefields, but they never forgot that fact during the Wyoming ordeal of 1866.
Not until late in 1865, after all the battles were ended, did Colonel Carrington at last join his command. Determined to remain in military service, he shrewdly foresaw that future opportunities lay on the Indian frontier beyond the Mississippi. It was no mere chance that the 18th Infantry was the first regular regiment to reach the frontier; Carrington had been in a position during the war to make friends with men of considerable political influence in Washington. During the winter of 1865–66, eight companies of the 18th moved across the plains to occupy Fort Kearney,* Nebraska Territory, on the old Oregon Trail. Henry Carrington had finally achieved his dearest ambition, a military command in the field.
He was a small man physically (the Indians called him Little White Chief) with a dark beard and hair worn long, sensitive eyes set deep under a high forehead. Sickly as a youth, he had been unable to enter West Point. He went to Yale instead, where he was in ill health much of the time. Graduating in 1845, he took a position as teacher at Irving Institute, Tarrytown, New York.
The next year Carrington would have liked more than anything else to become a soldier in the war with Mexico, but instead he stayed in Tarrytown, meeting Washington Irving and serving for a time as that author’s secretary. His brief acquaintanceship with Irving no doubt influenced his later ambition to become a writer. In 1847 he was back at Yale, teaching part-time and studying for a law degree.
A year later he made his big move—to Columbus, Ohio, where he began a successful legal career. He was fortunate in the choice of a law partner, William Dennison, who became Ohio’s governor at the time of the Civil War. It was in Columbus that Carrington also met and married Margaret Irvin Sullivant, who would share with him the ordeal of Fort Phil Kearny.
This was the man, then, who largely through his own calculated actions had placed himself in position in the spring of 1866 to be chosen to lead the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry into the heart of the most hostile Indian country of North America. Unfortunately neither he nor scarcely any other man of authority in the United States Government knew the real temper of the Plains Indians at that time.
In the years before 1850 the tribes had permitted settlers and gold seekers to move across their lands with only an occasional raid. But when the invaders from the east built forts and chains of stations for overland stage routes, the Indians began to raid in earnest. To protect its westward-moving citizens, the government in 1851 invited leaders of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, and other tribes to Fort Laramie for a peace conference. Treaties were signed giving the United States rights to maintain roads and forts across the plains, and reserving vast hunting areas for exclusive use of the various tribes.
Pressures upon these Indian lands continued, however, from white buffalo hunters and trappers, from gold seekers and settlers. In 1862 the Sioux in western Minnesota went to war with the settlers; in 1864 conflict in Colorado resulted in the massacre of the Cheyennes at Sand Creek. General Connor’s invasion of the Powder River country followed in 1865. For fifteen years treaties had been made and broken; from south and east the Indians were being pressed continually toward the Rockies. Their hunting grounds grew smaller after every treaty, and now the la
st and best of these reserved areas was being invaded by miners and soldiers. In 1866 many of the Plains Indians’ leaders had finally reached the conclusion that the white man’s treaties were worthless; they were convinced that their way of life could endure only if they made a stand and fought for their lands.
On March 28, in complete disregard of the belligerent temper of the Indians, the Army ordered Carrington “to move immediately” to occupy Fort Reno and open two new forts along the Bozeman Trail. He was promised a year’s supply of tools, rations, quartermaster stores, “the best horses and equipments and transportation in the district,” and a water-power sawmill.7 In late March, however, the 2nd Battalion at Fort Kearney carried only 220 men on its muster rolls, about one-fourth normal strength, and they were armed with obsolete muzzle-loading Springfields in poor condition. Carrington immediately queried his superiors concerning the whereabouts of promised recruits and arms, and asked for a departure delay until their arrival.
On April 13, he received orders establishing the Mountain District, with himself in command. The Mountain District encompassed the Powder River country; he would report directly to General Philip St. George Cooke, commanding the Department of the Platte, a crusty fifty-seven-year-old campaigner with almost forty years of frontier dragoon service behind him.
General Cooke’s mood in 1866 certainly could not have inclined him toward friendship for ambitious “civilian” colonels. After graduating high in his class from West Point in 1827, Cooke had seen service in the Black Hawk War, the Mexican War, won distinction in operations against the Apache and Sioux, commanded cavalry in the Utah expedition of 1857–58, and had moved up to the rank of colonel when the Civil War began. Although a Virginian, Cooke announced immediately that he would keep his “solemn oath to bear true allegiance to the United States of America.” His son, his nephew, and his famed son-in-law, J. E. B. Stuart, all went with the Confederacy.8
Because of his long cavalry experience, Cooke’s first Civil War assignment was command of that arm of the service under General George McClellan, even though certain high officials in the War Department seemed to consider his loyalty suspect. During McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign of 1862, Cooke’s cavalry was made to look foolish by his own dashing son-in-law, “Jeb” Stuart, and soon afterward he was relieved of command. He spent the remainder of the war out of combat action, serving on various boards, on recruiting duty, and as a functionary in occupied territory. He came out of the war with only the rank of brigadier-general; consequently when he took over command of the Department of the Platte in 1866 he was an embittered man.
At this time Carrington knew very little about Cooke; he would learn a great deal about him as events unfolded. For the moment he wasted no time in carrying out Cooke’s order. “Immediately on receipt of the order establishing the Mountain District,” Carrington recorded, “I issued General Order No. 1, assuming command, and made requisition for commissary and quartermaster supplies for one year, upon the full basis of eight hundred men, and fifty per cent additional for wastage and contingencies.”9
Carrington’s zeal for his new assignment as well as his cautious stubbornness are revealed in this first general order. He was determined to hold out for full battalion strength, eight hundred men, before marching into the Indian stronghold.
High command decision, and communications transmitting them, moved slowly on the frontier. Carrington waited almost a month at Fort Kearney before he received official sanction on April 26 from General Cooke for delaying action on his “move immediately” order of March 28.
Carrington acknowledged Cooke’s telegram with a long letter in which he proudly recorded all the steps he had taken to ready the battalion for marching. He had obtained two hundred excellent horses, almost enough to mount his entire present force; he had assembled fifty wagon teams, sets of tools for erecting forts, instruments for measuring distances and surveying routes. He had armed his regimental band “with Spencer carbines to make their services valuable every way.” (Carrington must have sensed that he would be criticized for taking a 25-piece band into hostile Indian country, but he loved martial music, the pomp and ceremony of parade reviews, and considered his musicians among the least expendable units.) With his gift for never overlooking the most minute details, Carrington also reported purchase of a quantity of “potatoes and onions for seed and use,” adding that he also had “other seeds, if practicable to use them this season.”
He closed his letter with a suggestion that it would be “of value to my future operations if I reach Laramie in time for the meeting with the Indian tribes in council and thereby form acquaintance of many with whom I will have subsequent relations.”10 Those were the words of a lawyer preparing to meet his opposition; soon enough Carrington would learn to think like a soldier.
* Fort Kearney should not be confused with Fort Phil Kearny. Fort Kearney, Nebraska, established in 1849, was named for General Stephen W. Kearny. The second “e” in the name was used erroneously in so many official records that it became recognized as the standard spelling. Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory (now Wyoming), was named for General Philip Kearny, Civil War hero, and was not established until the time of this narrative, 1866.
II. May:
PLANTING MOON
On the 16th of May Major-General Sherman reached Fort Kearney, Nebraska, and upon full consultation with him I matured my plans for the establishment of the new posts and the occupation of the proposed new line to Montana. Two days later, May 19, 1866, recruits having arrived, I marched, reaching the vicinity of Fort Laramie June 14, in nineteen marching days.1
SPRING WAS BACKWARD ON the Great Plains that year, ice lingering in the swales and fringing the running streams. At Fort Kearney in early May the men arose to curse the monotonous frosty mornings. After a winter spent in barracks of rotting cottonwood logs through which biting prairie winds whistled and made them shiver in their bunks, the men were ready for spring, ready for a change.
Quarters were only half large enough for the eight skeleton companies of the 2nd Battalion. Officers’ families shared cabins designed for bachelors. Lieutenant William H. Bisbee, battalion adjutant, recorded that he, his wife and young son were assigned one room and a small space under a hall stairway. “We cooked, ate, and slept in this one room.”
Bisbee’s fellow tenant, who would play a tragic role in the Fetterman Massacre, was the regimental quartermaster, Lieutenant Frederick H. Brown, a reckless, happy-go-lucky bachelor. Brown’s room, according to Bisbee, “was separated by a thin partition from mine. His chief joy was to pack the room full of Pawnee Indians, fill them with ‘chow,’ in return for which they gave gruesome and noisy exhibitions of scalping, war dances, and buffalo hunts.”2
While the officers waited impatiently for the promised recruits and finals orders to march, they pored over new maps recently arrived from Washington and were surprised at how sparse was official knowledge of the Mountain District which they had been ordered to occupy. The maps told them almost nothings and there were no guidebooks. They passed around tattered copies of Lewis and Clark’s reports, and exchanged newspaper clippings, but they still could not learn whether the region was frigid or temperate, barren or covered with vegetation. All they knew was that it was precious to the Indians, and was the most direct route for emigration to Montana.
Occasionally the monotony of daily duties was relieved by arrival of Volunteer troops reporting from lonely western outposts to receive delayed discharges from Civil War service. Colonel Carrington wasted no time in mustering out these troops, especially if they were cavalrymen. He had been given authority to take over their horses, and every additional company passing through meant an increase in mounts, sorely needed for the march to Powder River.
Meanwhile the entire battalion was engaged in gathering and packing additional supplies. Mowing machines, shingle and brick machines, doors/ window sash, locks, and nails began arriving from Fort Leavenworth. The officers’ wives saw to it that rocking
chairs and sewing chairs, churns and washing machines, and good supplies of canned fruit were posted on requisition lists. “Turkeys and chickens and one brace of swine,” Mrs. Carrington recorded, “added a domestic cast to some of the establishments preparing for the journey.”3
The colonel searched through his ranks for blacksmiths, wheelwrights, painters, harness makers and carpenters, and ordered these men to collect from the Fort Kearney storehouses all tools needed for their specialties. He tried to impress on every member of the expedition that no contingency should be overlooked; as soon as the column moved north of Fort Laramie it would be cut off from the States for several months.
By mid-May the weather had turned fine, and the regimental band under Bandmaster Samuel Curry was out drilling every day with new Spencer carbines, the envy of the regular infantrymen, who were still armed with old muzzle-loading Spring-fields. The Spencer was a breechloader with a seven-shot magazine, and each musician was supplied with an accompanying cartridge box containing tubes of seven cartridges which could be inserted into the carbine in one operation. The men were warned to guard these weapons carefully; any soldier who lost one would be charged thirty dollars, about two months’ pay for a private.
At the same time, the infantrymen were learning how to ride the horses acquired from discharged Volunteer cavalrymen. “The men got upon the horses,” Margaret Carrington noted, “and the majority actually made the first trip to water without being dismounted. Some men were embarrassed when the long Springfield rifle was put on the horse with them, but both man and horse soon learned how it was to be done.” 4
At last, on Sunday May 13, the 3rd Battalion of the 18th came marching in from Fort Leavenworth, with several hundred recruits for the regiment. Two days later, Captain J. L. Proctor arrived with another company of recruits, one of them being Private William Murphy who recalled later that upon arrival he was issued “two days rations, consisting chiefly of hardtack. Each hardtack was about four inches square and three-eighths of an inch thick. … A hungry man could have eaten the entire two rations at one meal and asked for more.” 5 The half-famished arrivals were told simply that the quartermaster had run short.
