by Dee Brown
A moment later it seemed that every clump of yellow grass on the Peno flats had been transformed into a hostile Indian, the mass swarming up on foot like a gale-blown prairie fire toward the road. Beyond them other warriors on horseback also sprang from concealment, their hoofbeats like sudden thunder. And from the left came the Cheyennes, most of them mounted. The Indians’ concentrated yelling drowned out commands from Fetterman and the other officers.
At the first assault Grummond managed to halt the cavalry, Fetterman quickly closing the gap with his foot soldiers. The civilians, Wheatley and Fisher, and four or five mounted infantrymen, all seasoned Civil War veterans who were riding the point, dismounted quickly. These men formed a defensive ring and delivered such concentrated fire that the first wave of attack was blunted. In that first minute of confusion a lone mounted Miniconjou, impelled by some mystical dream of glory, charged down the Bozeman Road from the rear, racing right into the infantrymen until he was slain. A moment later another Sioux on foot performed a similar act of reckless courage, and also died.
The air was now filled with arrows, warriors on foot closing in, pony riders circling, their war whoops reverberating in the cold damp wind. Yet Fetterman somehow managed to start his infantrymen back upslope to the nearest cover, a collection of flat boulders.
Whether Lieutenant Grummond ordered the cavalry to cover the infantry is not certain; the horsemen may have broken formations in terror. They swung up the hill to the left, all except Wheatley, Fisher, and the handful of men who had dismounted and formed a circle of defense. Nor can anyone be certain when or how Grummond died, but it is probable that he was killed early in the fighting, either in a vain effort to keep the cavalry with the infantry, or in a gallant rear-guard covering action. Long afterward some of the Indians who were there said a pony-soldier chief was killed on the road and that his men then gave way and fled up the ridge. Others told of a soldier chief on a white horse who fought a brave delaying action, cutting off an Indian’s head with a single stroke of his saber. All that is known for certain is that Grummond’s body was found on the road beside that of Sergeant Augustus Lang of Company A, somewhere between the infantry’s position and the defensive ring of Wheatley and Fisher.
In any case, cavalry and infantry were separated in the first fury of attack, the men on foot facing a thousand warriors so close it was possible to see the color of their war paint and the metal ornaments and brass studs of their shields. Feathered arrows streamed like flights of bright speeding birds, and the trapped soldiers felt the pains of sharp heads wrapped in sinew, driving deep into flesh, drawing warm blood to trickle along the grooves of shafts until it froze in the bitter air. Neither Sioux nor Cheyennes carried many rifles that day, but their quivers were filled with arrows which they had learned from boyhood to drive with accuracy into the thickest buffalo hides.
How the eighty-one trapped men died, the order of their dying, can only be reconstructed from the positions of the dead, the record of cartridge shells, the bloodstains of the enemy, and later accounts of Indian survivors. As soon as the retreating infantry reached the rock formation, they flung themselves down and began firing. Fetterman then formed a thin skirmish line facing the Oglalas and Cheyennes to north and east, the Miniconjous to south and west, and ordered his men to fire at will. For several minutes fighting was intense, the infantry firing volleys from their muzzle-loaders while the cavalry floundered about without an officer, a hundred yards above on the hillside, their Spencer carbines scarcely used.
Farther down the road, Wheatley and Fisher, supported by the Springfields of five or six soldiers who had joined them, kept up a rattling fire with their Henrys. They knocked down several Indian ponies whose riders tried to rush them, and then used the animals’ bodies as cover. Dead and wounded Indians were ringed around them.
For fifteen or twenty minutes, the rock-sheltered infantrymen were able to hold the attackers off. Then their ammunition began to run short. Men bunched together, and the Indians sensing their growing panic moved in closer, Miniconjous on one side, Oglalas on the other—so close that Miniconjous were killing Oglalas, and Oglalas were killing Miniconjous, with their own arrows. The Sioux leaped over the rocks, using lances and war clubs, and some of the infantrymen broke away and started running up the hill toward the cavalry position. Indians pursued them. One warrior running with a raised bow to count coup came within two steps of a soldier before one of the man’s comrades shot the Indian down.
Some time during the fighting, Captain Fred Brown released his borrowed pony, Calico, and joined Fetterman among the boulders. The two officers were together at the last, their ammunition exhausted, capture and torture almost inevitable. As they had sworn to do, each man saved one unexpended cartridge. At the end they faced each other—the ambitious, good-natured, balding quartermaster, and the determined and overconfident infantry veteran who had boasted that eighty men could ride through the Sioux nation. With revolvers held against each other’s temple, they counted quickly in unison to three, and squeezed triggers.
About this time, the position held by Wheatley and Fisher and the six infantrymen was overrun. The defenders fought with gunstocks, bayonets and knives until the last man was slain.
The cavalry, knowing that they would be next, had already dismounted and started climbing farther up the ridge, leading their horses. A handful of infantrymen joined them, and two or three surviving noncommissioned officers tried to keep some sort of military order. On the high slope, snow had formed ice sheets which made walking difficult, and when they reached the rocky summit they abandoned any hopes they may have had of descending the south side and racing for the fort. The south slope was alive with Indians coming up from the other fork of the Peno.
There was nothing the survivors could do now but seek cover among the rocks and try to keep alive until help could come from the fort. They turned their horses loose (there was no place for horse holders to go) and moved along the ridge toward a cluster of large boulders. For a few minutes the showers of arrows lessened as the Indians devoted their attention to capturing abandoned cavalry horses. Then the fight was resumed with renewed fury along the ridgetop, a narrow forty-foot shelf swept by icy winds that froze blood in wounds.
As they took cover among the massive boulders, these inexperienced cavalrymen must have felt a momentary revival of hope. They formed into compact units, firing carbine volleys downslope into their besiegers, the rear guard kneeling for accuracy, sometimes half hidden in powder smoke. One of the men fighting this delaying action was running backward, yelling, swinging his carbine in an arc as he fired, reloaded, and fired again. It was told later among the Miniconjous of how White Bull rushed this brave pony-soldier, shooting him through the heart with an arrow, and when he fell on his back White Bull struck him across the head with his lance, knocking his cap off, counting coup.
By this time, Indian scouts watching from hills near Phil Kearny had signaled that reinforcements were coming from the fort, and chiefs passed the word that the pony-soldiers must all be killed as quickly as possible. The leaders knew it would not be easy; the cavalrymen were in a much better position than the infantrymen had been. But enough warriors crawled and darted forward among the rocks until they were in sufficient numbers to charge. Heedless of screaming bullets, they rushed in among the dismounted pony-soldiers, fighting and scuffling hand to hand in the carbine smoke, swinging bludgeons and hatchets, scalping men alive. Years afterward the Sioux showed a knotted war club of bur oak, driven full of nails and spikes, still clotted with dried blood and hair of cavalrymen who died that day on Massacre Hill. But the Indians paid dearly for this quick victory, many more dying among the boulders on the ridge than had lost lives against the infantrymen on the road below.
One of the last soldiers to die was Adolph Metzger, the little German-born bugler, an army veteran since 1855. Metzger beat off his assailants with his bugle until the instrument was a battered, shapeless mass of metal, until his body was bleeding
from a dozen wounds. He fell on the ridge near where a monument now stands to mark the Fetterman Massacre, his dead comrades all about him, their ammunition boxes still half-filled. The fighting was all over. Forty minutes had passed since the Sioux first sprang their trap and surged up out of the grass flats at the forks of Peno Creek.
As the last carbines were fired, a relief party from the fort was reaching high ground east of the scene of fighting. Along the road and down in the valley, hundreds of Indians circled their war ponies and jeered at the cautious bluecoats. Others of the victors stripped uniforms off the dead and began mutilating the bodies according to tribal rituals. Trouser legs were cut off to use for leggings; paper money and coins were shaken from pockets. The coins were kept, the paper money discarded. Soldier overcoats were fastened to saddles or donned as replacements for buffalo robes.
When a dog belonging to one of the dead soldiers came running and barking out of the rocks, one of the warriors cried: “All are dead but the dog. Let him carry the news to the fort.” But another warrior shot the animal through with an arrow. “No,” he said. “Do not let even a dog get away.”27
The last task of all was recovering arrows from the field of battle. Almost forty thousand had been fired, a thousand for each minute of the fighting, and those which had not found a human target or were not blunted or broken were quickly collected and replaced in quivers.
Among the Indians were many wounded and dead, although exactly how many will be never be known. Estimates of the participants varied from ten to a hundred dead, and from sixty to three hundred wounded. The more reliable informants believed at least sixty were killed on the field, and of about three hundred wounded probably a hundred more died. Many years later, Red Cloud would recall the names of eleven Oglalas killed in the fighting and several others of the tribe who died later of wounds. White Elk, a Cheyenne, often said that more Indians were killed in the Fetterman fight than in the Custer fight ten years later. But whatever the casualties, the victory was not a cheap one for the combined tribes of Tongue River.
6.
After Assistant Surgeon Hines left the fort some minutes before noon, he proceeded rapidly with his escort along the road toward the pinery. Hines’ orders were to join the wood train, and if not needed there to find Fetterman and return with him. The surgeon, of course, discovered that the attack on the train had already ceased; the wagons were moving unmolested toward Piney Island. Requesting two additional escorts from the train guard, Hines hurried on west, expecting to meet Fetterman coming around the end of Sullivant Hills. Instead, as soon as Lodge Trail Ridge came into his view, Hines saw hundreds of Indians swarming in the valley and up the slopes of the ridge. He saw no trace of Fetterman’s detachment, and as there were too many Indians between him and the ridge to move in that direction, he turned back at a fast gallop toward the fort.
A few minutes later Hines was back in the fort reporting to Carrington. Neither the surgeon nor the colonel was especially concerned as yet over the whereabouts of Fetterman, each probably assuming the soldiers were returning along the Bozeman Road or by one of the trails north of Big Piney.
Hines had scarcely left post headquarters, however, when sounds of heavy rifle fire came from the northwest. “Just about dinner call,” Carrington recorded later, “or near twelve noon … my office orderly told me that the sentry at the door reported firing. I went to the top of the house, on which was a lookout, and heard a few shots, apparently in the direction of Peno Creek. With my glass I could see neither Indian nor soldier. I think I counted six scattering shots at first, succeeded by more rapid firing.* I directed the orderly, then in front of the house, to notify the officer of the day; had sentry call the corporal of the guard, and the guard formed immediately. Sent one man who was bringing boards into the unfinished part of the house, to the quartermaster’s office, to have wagons and ambulances hitched, and to immediately go and notify every unarmed man in the quartermaster’s employ to report at once to the magazine for arms.
“Lieutenant Wands, Captain Ten Eyck, and another officer whose name I do not recollect, were in sight from the top of the house.
“I directed Captain Ten Eyck to be prepared to move at once. I called Lieutenant Wands to the top of the house to watch the firing and went in person to hasten and organize the detail that was to move. It moved in a very few minutes. I rejected some men from the detail after it was formed, taking those only who had most ammunition and had reported promptly, not wanting to have any boxes re-supplied.”28
Less than a quarter hour after the first alarm, Ten Eyck marched with seventy-five officers and men, including Lieutenant Winfield Scott Matson and Surgeons Hines and Ould, “being all the men for duty in the fort.”29 Most of these men were on foot, but among those mounted was Carrington’s orderly, Private Archibald Sample, who was to act as messenger. They were under orders to join Fetterman’s troops and return with them to the fort. According to Private Murphy, “they went at a double-quick or as fast as they could, until they came to the crossing of the Piney.” Big Piney was never easy to cross on foot, and with the added hindrance of broken ice, “the men had to remove their shoes and stockings to get across.”30
After fording the creek, Ten Eyck followed the Bozeman Road for a short distance, then turned right, seeking high ground on the north. For taking this less direct route to the scene of the fighting, Ten Eyck would suffer bitter condemnation in years to come. Accused of cowardice, shunned by fellow officers, he turned to alcohol and quit the Army. Yet it is very probable that any responsible officer operating under the same conditions would have made a similar move to higher ground, and it is most likely that had Ten Eyck not done so, his detachment would have met the same fate as Fetterman’s.
By the time Ten Eyck was across the Piney, sounds of firing were lessening, and he must have assumed that Fetterman either had beaten off the foe or was beyond retrieval. When he reached the summit of the ridge, about 12:45 P.M., all firing had ceased. According to Surgeon Hines, they were “just in time to see the last man killed.”31Peno Valley was swarming with more Indians than any man in the detachment had ever seen gathered in one place.
As soon as the victorious hostiles sighted this relief force, scores of mounted warriors galloped up the Bozeman Trail to the base of the ridge, daring the soldiers to come down, slapping their buttocks, calling obscenities. Ten Eyck held his position, dispatched a messenger to the fort, and waited.
In the meantime Carrington had already started more reinforcements and ammunition. “I sent immediately after Ten Eyck moved, the remainder of Company C, 2nd U.S. Cavalry, dismounted (nearly thirty men in all), having the new carbine, requiring them to fill their pockets with all the surplus ammunition they could carry.” Convinced that Fetterman’s men had suffered casualties and were in need of ammunition, he also ordered an ambulance and two wagons to join this detachment. “In the first wagon that reported I placed three thousand rounds Springfield and two cases of Spencer, to give this command, and also Fetterman’s, additional ammunition. I sent Williams, master of transportation, in charge of the wagons and ammunition, with forty-two men, they quickly following the details that had already left.”32 Most of the men in this latter group were civilian teamsters from the quartermaster department, some mounted on their own horses, others on broken-down cavalry horses.
By now an hour had passed since the first alarm, and there were no longer any sounds of firing. In the words of Frances Grummond who was anxiously awaiting news of the fate of her husband, “the silence was dreadful.”33 She and other wives in the fort had gathered near the headquarters building, watching the hills to the northwest.
A few minutes past one o’clock, they sighted a lone horseman galloping furiously down the slope beyond Big Piney. As the rider crossed the stream, they recognized him as the colonel’s orderly, Private Sample. Without checking the speed of his horse, Sample swept through the gate and crossed the parade. Carrington was waiting for him in front of headquarters as
he dismounted.
“Captain Ten Eyck says he can see or hear nothing of Captain Fetterman,” Sample reported. “The Indians are on the road challenging him to come down.”
Carrington asked how many Indians there were. Sample replied that the valleys for miles around were filled with them, and added quickly that Captain Ten Eyck requested reinforcements and one of the mountain howitzers. Carrington began scrawling a message on a sheet of paper, and as he wrote, Sample said quietly: “The Captain is afraid Fetterman’s party is all gone up, sir.” The colonel continued writing:
CAPTAIN: Forty well-armed men, with 3,000 rounds, ambulance, etc., left before your courier came in.
You must unite with Fetterman, fire slowly, and keep men in hand; you could have saved two miles toward the scene of action if you had taken Lodge Trail Ridge.
I order the wood train in, which will give 50 more men to spare.
H. B. CARRINGTON
Colonel Commanding34
Afterward Carrington explained that he made no mention of the howitzer because the gun could not be sent. No fit horses were left in the fort, he said, nor did Ten Eyck have any men with him who knew how to cut a fuse or handle the piece. “If he were compelled to fall back I was prepared to support him to better advantage, and I deemed the gun useless to him.”85
Sample started back immediately on a fresh horse—riding Carrington’s favorite mount, Grey Eagle—and reached Ten Eyck’s position about the time the Indians began leaving Peno Valley. While the victors were still streaming westward, an enlisted man called out suddenly, pointing to the Bozeman Road: “There’re the men down there, all dead!”
Private Murphy afterward described the scene: “There was at that time a large stone that had the appearance of having dropped from a great height and thereby split open, leaving a space between the pieces men could pass through, which made a good protection for a small body of men, I should say for about twenty-five or thirty. Around this rock was where the main body of the men lay. There were just a few down on the side of the ridge north of the rock, not more than fifty feet from the main body.”36
