by Dee Brown
As soon as the last of the Indians had forded Peno crossing and vanished beyond the ridges, Ten Eyck ordered his men to march, foot soldiers advancing cautiously toward the road, mounted soldiers and civilians riding flanks. The boulders where the infantrymen had died were surrounded by dead Indian ponies and army horses, the latter with their heads pointing toward the fort. Many broken arrows, some with points deep in the earth, littered the ground. All Indian casualties had been removed, numerous bloodstains marking the grass where they had lain. The dead soldiers lay in a space no more than forty feet in diameter, most of the bodies stripped naked and mutilated, and beginning to freeze in the bitter air. “The greater number,” Surgeon Hines noted, “were in one heap.”37 Most of them had been killed by arrows. Several unexpended cartridge shells were scattered near the rocks.
Private Murphy told of finding a man of his company “scalped, stripped and mutilated. … It looked as though they had first stripped him and then filled his body with arrows, as they were sticking out of him all over like porcupine quills … all of the bodies were stripped, scalped and mutilated with the exception of two who were not scalped, but the Indians had drawn a buffalo bag over their heads.”38
In Colonel Carrington’s official report, suppressed and unpublished until twenty years after the event, no details were spared in describing the mutilations: “Eyes torn out and laid on rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers, brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out from sockets; private parts severed and indecently placed on the person; eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spear-heads, sticks, and arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knives; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown, muscles of calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms, and cheek taken out. Punctures upon every sensitive part of the body, even to the soles of the feet and palms of the hand.”39
Captains Fetterman and Brown had suffered similar treatment, the latter’s body, according to Private John Guthrie, “hacked up and a lot of arrows in him (he had a little tuft of hair back of the ears and was nicknamed by the Indians ‘Bald Head Eagle’) and scalped.”40 The two officers were found together, each shot through the left temple, with powder burned into the skin and flesh about the wounds. They had carried out their often expressed declaration that they would never be taken alive by Indians.
Only one living being was found on that field of death—a gray mount named Dapple Dave, belonging to the 2nd Cavalry. The horse lay near the boulders, blood oozing from a dozen arrow wounds. Ten Eyck ordered a soldier to put the animal out of its misery, and then signaled the ambulance and wagons down from the ridge. The December afternoon was waning and the sun would be gone before other vehicles could be brought from the fort. The dead would have to be packed aboard like butchered animals. “We brought in about fifty in wagons,” wrote Surgeon Hines, “like you see hogs brought to market.”41
7.
In the fort, after Ten Eyck’s relief forces departed, the anxieties of those left inside soon deepened to an awful apprehension of what must have happened beyond Lodge Trail Ridge. Carrington was acutely aware of how small his remaining force was; almost three-fourths of his combatant strength was in the field, divided between the pinery, Fetterman’s detachment, and Ten Eyck’s relief column.
He placed the entire garrison under arms, including all civilians and several prisoners released from the guardhouse. He suspended all activities of a nonmilitary nature, and ordered arms stacked before quarters.
“This occupied not a very few minutes,” he later reported, “and I joined Lieutenant Wands upon the house to watch indications of the position of the parties out. There had been a short lull in the firing (namely, only scattered shots here and there), succeeded by a very brisk firing, apparently by file at first, and quite regular, and an occasional volley, followed by indiscriminate firing, gradually dying out in a few scattered shots. Being satisfied that the affair was occurring beyond the range of Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Fetterman’s instructions, I became apprehensive of disaster, and directed Brevet Captain Arnold, post adjutant, to determine and report to me at once the number of men remaining at the post—soldiers and civilians—who were armed, to determine whether I had any force to spare for further operations outside. He reported the number at 119, including guard. …”42
An observer of these grave developments was Frances Grummond, whose earlier concern for her husband had turned to bitter anguish. “I shall never forget the face of Colonel Carrington as he descended from the lookout when the firing ceased. The howitzers were put in position and loaded with grape, or case-shot, and all things were in readiness for whatever might betide. He seemed to try to impress us with the assurance that no apprehension could be entertained for the safety of the fort itself, but encouraged all to wait patiently and be ready for the return of the troops. How different was the reality, soon to be realized!”43
To increase his defensive force, Carrington next sent couriers to the pinery, ordering all men there to return immediately to the fort. The woods detail had been completely unaware of the Fetterman fight, being too far away to hear the rifle fire. They came in well before twilight, with most of their wagons empty, and took up positions around the banquette.
As darkness was falling guards sighted the first horsemen of Ten Eyck’s forward scouts on the Bozeman Trail, and in a few minutes they could hear the rumble of wheels on axles. Ten Eyck had recovered forty-nine bodies, filling his wagons, and had started back for the fort in the biting cold of the early December dusk. A few Indians appeared on the ridges, but no fight was offered, and the relief force returned without firing a shot.
Musician Frank Fessenden was among those at the gate when the wagons came in with their gruesome cargo of naked mutilated bodies, “arms and legs in all shapes, divulging the horrible manner in which our brave comrades had died. It was a horrible and a sickening sight, and brought tears to every eye, to see those men, many of whom had served four years in the War of the Rebellion, meeting such an awful death on the western plains. Some of these men had but ten days more to serve, when their enlistment would have expired, and they could have returned to their homes.”44
Young Jimmy Carrington also witnessed the arrival of the wagons. “How many times later,” he wrote as an adult, “I awoke in the dark in terror, to see again the tortured bodies and bloody arrows of that night.”45
For all in the fort the night of that Black Friday was long and terrible—filled with bitter gloom, anxieties and alarms. Indian signal fires ringed the hills, and every enlisted man was assigned to guard watches. Few slept even when off duty, shocked by the loss of their comrades, aware that there was not a single full cartridge box left in the garrison. Carrington and his officers were so certain of an impending direct attack upon the stockade that none of them slept at all.
“We had orders to bar up our windows and doors,” said Frank Fessenden, “but to leave port-holes in the windows to fire through. There was a magazine in one corner of the parade ground, which was a large hole in the ground, well supported with heavy timbers and covered with earth and sodded over. This magazine was well supplied with ammunition of all kinds. Wagons were hauled in; the beds taken off their gears and placed on their sides and surrounded this magazine. Then more wagons were placed in a circle, until we had three circles surrounding the magazine. The soldiers were then placed three in number at every port-hole around the inside of the stockade.
“We had ten women and several children with us. The colonel gave orders that as soon as the Indians made the expected attack, the women and children should enter the magazine, and the men should hold the fort as long as possible. When they could hold it no longer, they were to get behind the wagons that surrounded the magazine, and when the colonel saw that all was lost, he would himself blow up the magazine and take the lives of all, rather than allow the Indians to capture a
ny of the inmates alive.”46
For Frances Grummond the events of the day were only a confirmation of the forebodings which had filled her thoughts since the September day when she and her husband had arrived at Phil Kearny. All through the late afternoon, the officers’ wives had waited in the Wands’ quarters, and soon after the arrival of the wagons, Margaret Carrington came to inform Frances that Lieutenant Grummond had not been found alive. Nor was he among the recovered dead. Certain there was little hope that Frances would ever see her husband alive again, Margaret insisted that she move into the Carringtons’ quarters so that she would not be alone.
Early in the evening Frances received an unexpected caller, a swarthy man in his middle thirties, tough and wiry of frame, with a pointed black beard and bright piercing eyes. He was John (Portugee) Phillips, a mining partner of James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher, all of whom had come to Phil Kearny in August and accepted jobs with the quartermaster. Had he not been engaged in hauling water to fill the post’s water barrels at the time of the Indian alarm, Phillips no doubt would have volunteered and met the same fate as his partners.
Although he was an admirer of Lieutenant Grummond, Phillips had never before so much as spoken to Frances. Perhaps he felt it his duty now to reassure her that she and her unborn child would be protected. He began speaking in his strange soft accent (Phillips was born in the Azores of Portuguese parents), explaining that he had offered his services as a messenger to Laramie for reinforcements. “I will go if it costs me my life. I am going for your sake.”
Writing of this moment in later life, Frances Grummond recalled that Portugee Phillips had tears in his eyes as he handed her a wolf robe in a sort of symbolic gesture. “Here is my wolf robe. I brought it for you to keep and remember me by it if you never see me again.”47
While this interview was in progress, Colonel Carrington was in his adjoining lamplit office, penning dispatches to General Cooke in Omaha and to General Grant in Washington. These messages were almost incoherent, hastily written attempts to report the disaster, combined with desperate pleas for help. “Do send me reinforcements forthwith,” he begged General Cooke. “Expedition now with my force is impossible. I risk everything but the post and its stores. I venture as much as any one can, but I have had today a fight unexampled in Indian warfare.” As yet, he knew only that forty-nine bodies had been recovered, but company roll calls had not yet been taken, and he estimated thirty-five dead still to be brought in, three more than the actual number. He listed Fetterman, Brown, and Grummond among the dead, although the latter’s body had not yet been found. “No such mutilation as that today is on record. Depend upon it that the post will be held so long as a round or a man is left. Promptness is the vital thing. Give me officers and men. Only the new Spencer arms should be sent; the Indians are desperate; I spare none, and they spare none.”
To a copy of this plea, he attached a covering message direct to General Grant:
I send copy of dispatch to General Cooke simply as a case when in uncertain communication, I think you should know the facts at once. I want all my officers. I want men. Depend upon it, as I wrote in July, not treaty but hard fighting is to assure this line. I have had no reason to think otherwise. I will operate all winter, whatever the season, if supported; but to redeem my pledge to open and guarantee this line, I must have re-enforcements and the best of arms up to my full estimate.48
In the folklore of the western frontier, the ride of Portugee Phillips from Phil Kearny to Laramie has achieved a status equal to that of Paul Revere’s ride. And as in the case of the New Englander’s exploit, there also seems to have been more than one rider. A sergeant writing from Phil Kearny on December 28 said that “Colonel Carrington sent citizen couriers to Laramie with dispatches to department headquarters for re-enforcements.”49 John Hunton, a Fort Laramie sutler’s store clerk who knew Phillips well, listed four riders, including a sergeant “and a man named Gregory.”50 John Friend, the telegraph operator at Horseshoe Station, said that when Phillips arrived there on Christmas Day he was accompanied by William Bailey and George Dillon. Colonel Carrington in his testimony before a commission of inquiry in the spring of 1867 stated that he “hired two citizens to take dispatches to Laramie.”51
It appears likely that Carrington selected both Phillips and Bailey for the ride, and it is logical that he would have ordered them to leave the fort separately on the theory that if one did not make it through to Laramie, the other might. Also it is probable that other riders joined one or both of them en route—at Fort Reno or Bridger’s Ferry—which explains the presence of the veteran wagon train captain, George Dillon, when Phillips and Bailey rode into Horseshoe Station.
That Phillips left Phil Kearny alone, that he traveled most of the 236-mile journey alone through raging blizzards, that he rode alone the last forty miles from Horseshoe Station to Laramie—all appear to be facts. It was an almost incredible feat of horsemanship, a heroic four-day ride.
On that cold dark evening of December 21, Phillips stuffed his saddlebag with hardtack, took a quarter of a sack of oats for his mount, and went with Colonel Carrington to the stables. There by lantern light he saddled one of Carrington’s horses, variously described as a “thoroughbred charger,” “a Kentucky saddle horse,” “a white horse.”52 The two men then walked together, Phillips leading the horse, to the water gate at the southeast end of the quartermaster yard.
Since sundown Private John C. Brough had been posted at the water gate, and as the two men approached, Brough challenged them. A moment later the sergeant of the guard called out: “Attention! It’s the commanding officer.” Carrington spoke up then: “Never mind, sergeant, open the gate.” The sergeant unlocked the padlocks and Carrington and Phillips stepped forward, pulling out the bars and pushing the gate open.
“I recovered arms,” Private Brough recalled afterward, “stepped back and stood at present arms while the two men walked to the gate opening. …They conversed for a minute or two, and finally one of them mounted the horse, which was restive and prancing around. The other man … he was Colonel Carrington … reached up, took the man’s hand, and spoke a few words. I could not hear all he said, but did hear him say, ‘May God help you!’
“The horseman wheeled and started off on a trot. For about thirty seconds we could hear the hoof-beats, and then they ceased. The colonel stood with his head bent on one side, as if listening intently, and then straightening up and speaking to no one in particular, said, ‘Good, he has taken softer ground at the side of the trail!’”
Wind gusts swirled bits of sleet and snow around Carrington’s lantern as he and the sergeant closed the gate and replaced the bars. The colonel turned back toward his headquarters, the sergeant accompanying him. Private Brough slapped at his tingling ears, and continued walking his post in the below-zero temperature.53
8.
Carrington waited impatiently for daylight on the morning of the 22nd. He had not slept, indeed had scarcely rested at all during the night, and having learned the ways of the Indians he expected a dawn attack, perhaps a massive assault against the stockade at the earliest show of light.
In occasional interludes of self-examination during that long night, he had attempted to adopt the viewpoint of the hostiles, tried to reason what he would do if he were an Indian. “I could not but feel that if I had been a red man,” he admitted later, “I would have fought as bitterly, if not as cruelly, for my rights and my home as the red man fought.”54
But when daylight came, pale gray and bitter cold, not an Indian was visible anywhere, in the valley or on the ridges. The sky was heavy with snow, warning white man and red man to seek shelter from a threatening blizzard. The morning gun echoed back from the hills; bugles and drums sounded reveille.
Soon after breakfast, Carrington summoned his four surviving officers for a council. Company roll calls had shown thirty-one enlisted men and Lieutenant Grummond still missing, and as none had come in during the night, they were all assumed t
o be dead. The first order of business, as Carrington saw it, was to recover the bodies of these dead comrades. Ten Eyck, Powell, Wands, and Matson listened respectfully, then each in turn offered his opinion. It would be hazardous for any small party to return to the battlefield while the Indians were still celebrating their victory. If a large party left the stockade, the lives of all left behind would be in peril.
In the room adjoining this meeting, Frances Grummond and Margaret Carrington could hear every word spoken. “I will not let the Indians entertain the conviction that the dead cannot and will not be rescued,” the colonel declared. “If we cannot rescue our dead, as the Indians always do at whatever risk, how can you send details out for any purpose, and that single fact would give them an idea of weakness here, and would only stimulate them to risk an assault.”55 Carrington concluded by announcing that he would lead the expedition himself. He wanted eighty picked men, soldiers and civilians. Ten Eyck, Matson, and Surgeon Ould would accompany him. He dismissed the group and turned immediately to the door of the adjoining room, knocking on the panel.
“Mrs. Carrington was sitting near the window,” Frances Grummond recorded, “deep in thought … I was lying down, equally absorbed by the momentous question at stake. … When the door opened, we sprang trembling to our feet. The Colonel advanced to his wife and quietly announced his decision. …
“Turning to me, he said, ‘Mrs. Grummond, I shall go in person, and will bring back to you the remains of your husband.’”56
While his eighty men were assembling and awaiting inspection, Carrington penciled two separate orders, delivering them in person to Captain Powell, who was officer of the day. The first order concerned communications arrangements between the fort and the expedition while it was in the field. “Fire the usual sunset gun, running a white lamp to mast head on the flag-staff. If the Indians appear, fire three guns from the twelve pounder at minute intervals and later substitute a red lantern for the white.”
