by Dee Brown
Reaching the end of Lodge Trail Ridge, the colonel saw that he must bring his men down at full speed if he hoped to intercept the Indians being driven by Fetterman. At the same time he warned his men not to scatter as they guided their horses down the rough terrain. During the descent, Lieutenant Grummond’s eagerness overcame his caution. He galloped so far ahead that Carrington sent an orderly after him, with an order to “keep with me and obey orders or return to the post.” The orderly, Private D. Harman, failed to overtake the lieutenant.
“Upon descending the ridge,” Carrington later reported, “I found to my surprise fifteen cavalry, dismounted and without an officer. I passed through them, ordering them to mount and follow upon the gallop.” Before the colonel could slow his horse to a walk, the trail jogged sharply, and he found himself suddenly blocked by a band of yelling Indians spread along a low hill. He swung in his saddle. Only six men were still with him, one of them being Bugler Adolf Metzger of Bingham’s cavalry.
“Where’s Lieutenant Bingham?” Carrington demanded.
Metzger replied that Bingham had gone down the road around a hill to the left, and Carrington realized then that the cavalry leader must have dashed ahead, the Indians deliberately allowing him to pass through into a trap. He ordered Metzger to sound recall, the bugle notes echoing back from the hills in the cold air.
Meanwhile several mounted infantrymen strung out behind Carrington had come up, and he was ordering them to spread out in skirmish formation just as the first wave of Indians swarmed from the base of the hill and began attacking. Private James McGuire, one of Bingham’s troopers, was thrown from his wounded mount. A warrior dashed forward, intent upon counting coup with a raised war club. Carrington swung over toward McGuire, dismounted, and drove the Indian away. At least one hundred warriors were circling and yelling, but the soldiers had dismounted and formed a defensive front. Firing was steady, the carbines crackling, the rifle fire slower spaced, ramrods glistening in the pale sunlight. Along the ridges to right and left, Indian lookouts were flashing mirror signals and waving white flags. There was still no sign of Bingham or Grummond.
For twenty minutes Carrington was engaged in what would be the only real military action of his entire career. “One saddle,” he reported afterward, “was emptied by a single shot fired by myself.”6 At the end of the twenty minutes, Captain Fetterman’s slow-moving squad arrived, and the attackers immediately vanished over the hill.
Conferring briefly with Fetterman, Carrington informed him that Bingham and Grummond and probably several men were missing somewhere off to the right, and he ordered an immediate movement in that direction. A few minutes later a drumming of hoofs sounded on their front, and Lieutenant Grummond and three men dashed suddenly into view, closely pursued by seven Indians, who veered away, shaking their lances, as they sighted the oncoming relief force.
Exactly what words Carrington and Grummond exchanged as they brought their sweated horses together are unrecorded, but if one may believe hearsay accounts, the young lieutenant was more angry than frightened, and “very hotly asked the colonel if he was a fool or a coward to allow his men to be cut to pieces without offering help.”7 If Grummond did say this, Carrington never made public record of it, possibly out of deference to the lieutenant’s widow, who in after years became the colonel’s second wife. At that moment on the field of action, Carrington was more interested in finding Lieutenant Bingham who undoubtedly was in trouble. Grummond told Carrington that as he was descending Lodge Trail Ridge he had sighted Bingham and hurried forward to join him, assuming that Bingham’s cavalry company was close behind.
Bingham’s cavalrymen, however, had fallen back “in the most unaccountable manner,” as Fetterman put it in his report. “I, assisted by Captain Brown and Lieutenant Wands,” the captain added, “used every exertion to check [the retreat]. The Indians, corralling and closing around us, it was plain the retreat, if continued, would be a rout and massacre.” Instead of staying with his men, Bingham chose to dash forward. “I cannot account for this movement on the part of an officer of such unquestionable gallantry,” Fetterman declared, somewhat with the same puzzlement that his surviving fellow officers would ponder his own fatal actions two weeks later.8
Of this same incident, Lieutenant Wands said that he and Captain Brown, “leveling their guns” at the cavalrymen, warned them they would shoot if the retreat was not halted. At the same time, according to Wands, Bingham called back, “Come on,” beckoned, and went ahead with some of his men in the direction of Carrington’s squad which could be seen a half mile away descending Lodge Trail Ridge.9
While it was never possible to determine why Bingham acted as he did, the reason could be blamed upon his lack of experience in Indian warfare. The same excuse could be given for the actions of his men, most of whom were green recruits, some untrained even in horsemanship. They had made several escort journeys with the mail, but this was their first close encounter with armed hostiles. Like most newcomers to the frontier, they attributed almost superhuman powers to the Indians and dreaded close fighting with them.
When Grummond overtook Bingham on that narrow twisting trail beyond Lodge Trail Ridge, the cavalry officer and the few men still with him were pursuing a single dismounted Indian. This Indian was performing the oldest trick of frontier warfare, the decoy trap, and as the soldiers galloped down Peno Valley, dozens of warriors began springing from concealment in their rear. One of the men in the trap who lived to tell the tale was Private John Guthrie of Bingham’s C Company. Bingham, said Guthrie, was the first to be hit. “He fell off his horse, shot in the head. This was a bad place to be, as we could not use our arms very well on the Indians. The red skins tried to save our horses for their own use. This move is what saved our lives, they tried to lasso us from the horses.”10
In the confusion of hand-to-hand fighting, Grummond and three men broke out of the surround, the lieutenant using his saber, the men swinging their rifles as clubs. They were in pell-mell flight from seven Indians armed with lances when they met Carrington’s search party.
The search for Bingham now continued, and within an hour they found his body “in the brush … shot with over fifty arrows, lying over an old stump.” 11 Nearby was Sergeant G. R. Bowers, E Company, an experienced Civil War veteran. He had slain three Indians with his revolver, but his skull was split with a hatchet, and he died before an ambulance could arrive from the fort.
It was midafternoon, only two hours having passed since the two mounted forces left the fort, but the cold was intensifying, the low December sun hidden by hills, a gray cloud scud covering the sky. Not an Indian was in view anywhere. Carrington called off the pursuit, asking for a casualty count. Bingham and Bowers were dead, one sergeant and four privates wounded. Eight horses were out of action, three so badly wounded they had to be destroyed.
As for the hostiles, no one could be sure of their losses, as all casualties had been carried from the field. Carrington estimated ten enemy killed, several wounded. But not an officer or man in the field that day could take any pride in his accomplishments. Blunders, disobedience of orders, misunderstandings, recklessness, cowardice, had almost brought disaster to the fort’s defenders. Bingham had left his confused company of green recruits to ride to his death; Grummond had disobeyed Carrington and almost met the same fate as Bingham. Lieutenant Wands, who had been ordered to ride with Carrington’s party, had instead joined Fetterman. (He claimed afterward he misunderstood Carrington’s order.) When Carrington dispatched a written order to Fort Phil Kearny for reinforcements and an ambulance, he specifically asked for Captain Powell to head the relief. But Powell remained in his quarters, ordering Lieutenant Wilbur Arnold to go in his place. Carrington himself was not blameless. When he came off Lodge Trail Ridge, he outrode his own men, galloped through Bingham’s disorganized cavalry, and almost ran headlong without support into an Indian ambush. Not every one of this succession of military discords could be laid to the wide cleavage between Car
rington and his officers, but most of them could be. The pattern for disaster on December 21was laid on that afternoon of December 6.
After returning with their casualties to the warmth and security of post quarters, the participants in the day’s blunders spent the remaining hours before taps in recounting and reassessing their experiences. One of the cavalrymen, offering a reason why Bingham left his disorganized command, said that the lieutenant’s horse “ran away with him and he could not restrain him.” Another declared that “Bingham lost one pistol, and after firing the other, so excited did he become that he threw it away.” Private John Donovan, who had been riding in the front of the action, said that Lieutenant Bingham was armed only with a saber, and that both the lieutenant and Sergeant Bowers had been pulled from their horses by Indians. Frank Fessenden’s later account corroborates Donovan’s: “The savages attempted to catch several of our boys by trying to put their strong bows over their necks and drag them off their horses.” Fessenden also reported that Lieutenant Grummond told him “that he shut his eyes and literally slashed his way out, as did many of the others. Grummond said he could hear his saber ‘click’ every time he cleaved an Indian’s skull.”12
In recording the reunion with her husband after the fight, Frances Grummond wrote: “We both sat for a long time in silence, then mingled our tears in gratitude for the wonderful deliverance … he said that he abandoned the use of spurs and jammed his sword into the weary beast to urge him to greater effort, followed by the chief, in full war-dress, with spear at his back so near that but for his good horse he would then and there have met a terrible fate. … A sense of apprehension that I seemed to have been conscious of ever since my arrival at the post, deepened from that hour. No sleep came to my weary eyes, except fitfully, for many nights, and even then in my dreams I could see him riding madly from me with the Indians in pursuit.”13
Even the cocky Captain Fetterman seemed to be sobered by the day’s events. When he handed his official report to Carrington he professed to have learned a lesson. “This Indian war,” he said, “has become a hand-to-hand fight, requiring the utmost caution.”14
Unfortunately, Fetterman forgot this lesson, the last he would learn from the Indians. Jim Bridger, growing more melancholy every day, must have sensed that he would. “Your men who fought down south are crazy,” he told Carrington. “They don’t know anything about fighting Indians.”15
But if Fetterman forgot what he learned, the Indians remembered everything which happened that day. From the high ridges, Red Cloud and other leading chiefs had observed the foolish actions of the soldiers, and later that week in the Sioux lodges along Tongue River, they heard many details of the fighting from a subchief, Yellow Eagle, who had led the main attacks. Years afterward, white men would learn from the Indians that the fight of December 6 convinced the hostiles that they could overpower and destroy any force sent out from the fort to fight them. They decided that on the first auspicious day after the coming of the next full moon they would lay a great trap of more than a thousand warriors, make another feint at the wood train, work the decoy trick, lure as many men out as possible, kill them all, and then burn the fort.
As the gloomy hours of December 6 dragged toward midnight, voices of sentries on the stockade echoed “All’s well!” But the fate of eighty-one men in Fort Phil Kearny was already cast. Doom waited for them only a fortnight away, along the frozen flats of Peno Creek.
2.
They buried Lieutenant Bingham and Sergeant Bowers on Sunday the 9th. As Bingham had been a Mason, he was accorded the honors of that society, Lieutenant Grummond conducting the rites with the assistance of six other members. Chaplain White led the religious services, and when the chaplain came to speak of Sergeant Bowers, Captain Fred Brown stepped forward and placed his long-treasured Army of the Cumberland badge upon the breast of the dead sergeant. Brown, Bisbee, Powell and other veterans of the regiment had soldiered with Sergeant Bowers from Stone’s River to Atlanta and held him in high regard.
In wooden boxes lined with tin, the dead were buried in the little cemetery at the foot of Pilot Hill; their graves were mounded with frozen earth and then covered with stones against the wolves.
Letters had to be written to relatives, and the duty of informing Miss Stella Bingham, St. Charles, Minnesota, of the death of her brother, Horatio, was assigned to Captain Fetterman.
I send you herewith an Inventory of his Effects taken by me by virtue of my position as his Military Administrator. The money has been forwarded to the Adjutant General, U.S. Army, Washington, D. C, by applying to him it can easily be obtained by his heirs … the sword, sash and epaulettes, with private correspondence etc. have been sent to you. His other effects were sold at auction & the proceeds as before stated sent to the Adjt. Gen. … This is the customary manner of disposing of the effects of deceased officers, which it is supposed his heirs will not want, and which cannot be easily sent to them. Your brother was much esteemed by all who knew him, and his death is severely felt by all. He was buried with military and Masonic honors and the whole garrison attended his remains to the grave, all being desirous to pay their last tribute of respect to one whom all esteemed so highly.
I am madam,
Very Respectfully
Your Obt. Svt.
WILLIAM J. FETTERMAN16
Ironically, only a few days later another appointed military administrator would be writing a similar letter concerning the composer of this one.
As soon as funeral services were ended, a mail escort of one corporal and eight troopers from the cavalry gathered in front of headquarters. Joining this escort were Lieutenant Bisbee and his wife and son, who boarded a canvas-topped army wagon which had been especially prepared for winter travel to Laramie. Floor and sides were double-boarded, and a stove had been placed inside. “My outfit,” wrote Bisbee, “consisted of buffalo skin cap, two woolen shirts under a heavy blanket suit, buffalo-lined hip boots over two pairs of woolen socks, two pairs of gloves. …”17 All of Bisbee’s fellow officers were on hand to wish him luck in his new assignment at department headquarters in Omaha, and Bisbee in turn gave his blessing to the lieutenant succeeding him as post adjutant, Lieutenant Wilbur F. Arnold.
In the mailbag for Omaha were Carrington’s full reports of the “skirmish with a body of Indians, numbering in the aggregate not less than three hundred warriors,” with accounts of the deaths of Bingham and Bowers. “I need mittens for the men,” he added, “and especially do I need every officer I can get. The cavalry has none. There are but six for six companies, including staff. … This is all wrong. There is much at stake; I will take my full share, but two officers to a company is small allowance enough, with mercury at zero and active operations on hand.”18
Beginning the second week of December, Carrington tightened the duties of his “six officers for six companies.” Captain Powell was assigned to drill C Company, 2nd Cavalry, in such basic elements as mounting and dismounting, forming columns of twos and fours, and firing carbines and pistols by command. Daily at retreat, Captain Fetterman drilled the infantry in loading and firing by file and by numbers. Lieutenant Grummond was given full command of the mounted infantry, with orders to keep all serviceable horses—about fifty—saddled and ready for pursuit from dawn to dusk.
During the fortnight following the fight of the 6th, the Indians did not approach the fort or the pinery, yet scarcely a day passed without their scouting parties appearing on distant hills, signaling with mirrors or flags. Carrington doubled the guards assigned to wood trains, and maintained a state of watchful waiting. The weather continued bitter cold, and Surgeon Horton’s hospital records showed a sharp increase in rheumatic complaints and frostbitten ears.
The Indians made their long-planned decoy attack on the 19th, and as soon as the vigilant Carrington saw the picket on Pilot Hill signaling “wood train under attack,” he ordered his most cautious officer, Captain Powell, to command the relief party. Orders were explicit: “Heed the le
ssons of the 6th. Do not pursue Indians across Lodge Trail Ridge.”19 Powell performed his task to the letter, keeping his well-drilled cavalry company and Grummond’s mounted infantry in check and permitting no individual dashes or pursuits. Neither he nor Carrington knew, of course, that the Indians wanted no fight near the pinery; their objective was the same as that of the 6th—to draw the soldiers off, scatter them with decoys, and attack the small parties in force. But Powell did not pursue, and the hostiles withdrew without inflicting or suffering any casualties.
A fight had been avoided, yet as if anticipating criticism from those of his officers who believed in taking the offensive at every opportunity, Carrington explained to his staff that he intended to continue his policy of caution until more reinforcements arrived. The immediate objective, he added, was to continue movement of timber supplies from the pinery to the fort so as to complete winter quarters for such troops as the Department of the Platte might later send him. He also covered his policy of restraint by dispatching a special courier to Laramie with a telegram for transmittal to Omaha: “Indians appeared today and fired on wood train, but were repulsed. They are accomplishing nothing, while I am perfecting all details of the post and preparing for active movements.” (At the time of his appearance before a court of inquiry in the spring of 1867, Carrington told of sending Captain Powell to relieve the train. “He did his work—pressed the Indians toward Lodge Trail Ridge, but having peremptory orders not to cross it, he returned with the train, reporting the Indians in large force, and that if he had crossed the ridge he never would have come back with his command.”)20
