by Dee Brown
Red Cloud, however, was not a participant in this first council, and when the recalcitrant Sioux leader was sent a second invitation to come to Laramie in the spring for further talks, he replied disdainfully that he would sign no treaty until the garrisons at all three forts were withdrawn.
In April 1868, a full-fledged peace commission gathered at Laramie, and after lengthy parleys, representatives from the Brûlés, Oglalas, Miniconjous, Yanktonais, and Arapaho signed the new treaty. Again Red Cloud stayed away, and again he sent down word that he would not sign a peace treaty until the forts were abandoned and the road closed through the Powder River country.
On May 19, Major-General Augur issued an order to abandon “the military posts of C. F. Smith, Phil Kearny and Reno, on what is known as the Powder River route. … The public property at Fort C. F. Smith will be sold at public auction, and that at Fort Phil Kearny and Reno—commencing and finishing first with the former—will be transferred to such of the lower posts as the chief quartermaster of the department shall direct.”32 At last after two years of unyielding resistance, the enduring Sioux leader, Red Cloud, had won his war.
Dismantlement of the three forts began in early summer, and in August the last wagon train rolled out of Fort Phil Kearny. Records vary as to the exact date of abandonment—probably August 18 or 20—and there is also disagreement as to whether the soldiers or the Indians burned the fort. Some accounts say the soldiers put torches to the buildings; others say that Little Wolf led a party of warriors down from the hills and burned the fort before the departing wagons were out of sight on the Reno road. It must have been a cruel shock to Colonel Carrington when he learned that his beloved fort was gone. Under his exacting and proprietary eye, every post, board and shingle had been fashioned with mathematical exactness and placed in assigned positions to form his dream of an architecturally perfect fort. Now it was ashes.
By the end of August, the last soldiers had left Fort Reno, and the Montana Road was closed. On November 6, Red Cloud arrived at Fort Laramie, surrounded by a coterie of warriors. He had won everything he had fought for. Now, a conquering hero, he would sign the treaty.
For the first time in its history the United States Government had negotiated a peace which conceded everything demanded by the enemy and which exacted nothing in return. Through another stormy decade the Powder River country would belong to the Indians.
4.
In 1868, the year of the peace, Margaret Carrington published her story of Fort Phil Kearny, Absaraka; Home of the Crows, basing it largely upon the daily journal of experiences which she had kept at the suggestion of General Sherman. Two years later, Colonel Carrington retired from active military service and became a professor of military science at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana. That same year, 1870, Margaret Carrington died.
One of the interested readers of Absaraka was Frances Grummond, who after bidding the Carringtons farewell at Fort Laramie had continued her sad journey home to Franklin, Tennessee, to bury her husband and rejoin her family. In 1868, Frances traveled to Cincinnati to visit her sister, and there obtained a copy of the book, learning for the first time that the Carringtons were living in Indiana. When she later heard of the death of Margaret Carrington, she wrote a letter of condolence to the colonel. Ensuing correspondence between the two led to their marriage in 1871.
During the decade that Carrington spent at Wabash College, he continued his campaign to clear his reputation of all blame for the Fetterman Massacre. Even after Custer’s disaster, which replaced the Fetterman affair in the public’s memory, he persisted in bringing out new editions of his first wife’s book (there were seven in all), revising and adding to the text so as to present his side of the story in minute detail.
In 1887, twenty years after the event, he at last persuaded the United States Senate to make public his official report and the transcript of his remarks before the commission of inquiry at Fort McPherson. After three strong demands from the Senate, these papers were finally dredged out of the cellar files of the Department of the Interior. With their publication, Carrington felt that he had secured at least a belated vindication.
By this late date many of the actors in the tragedy were dead or forgotten. Old military feuds, however, die hard. William Bisbee, for one, never forgave Carrington. Bisbee and Fetterman had been close friends during the Civil War, and Bisbee preferred to believe that Fetterman was blameless, and that Carrington had tried to shift the blame on Fetterman who was dead and could not reply. After leaving Phil Kearny in December 1866, Bisbee moved up in rank rapidly, becoming a brigadier-general in 1901. In later life he devoted considerable effort to defending Fetterman’s reputation, even going so far as to gather statements from witnesses who contradicted Carrington’s charge of disobedience, and placing these papers in the files of the Indian fighters’ organization in Washington, the Order of Indian Wars.
The man who had done most to impugn Carrington’s command abilities, General Philip St. George Cooke, waited until 1890 before admitting that he might have been wrong. “The country was greatly excited, and the government very urgent, so I endorsed the papers for transmission by one of my staff,” Cooke explained to Carrington when the latter visited the general in Detroit. “I can do nothing more now than to express my deep pain at what transpired. My memory recalls nothing of the details, except that it was hurried off to General Sherman, and you must take my regrets as sincere, and my congratulations, that in the end you were fully vindicated.”33
5.
In 1908 all survivors of the Fort Phil Kearny garrison of 1866 were invited to attend a special Independence Day celebration in the town of Sheridan, Wyoming. The Carringtons, well along in years by then, responded with enthusiasm, and at Sheridan they were joined by a small group of former enlisted men, scarcely enough to form a corporal’s guard. Among those present were S. S. Peters, Sam Gibson, William Murphy, and William Daley.
On July 3 these honored guests were taken to the scene of the Fetterman disaster, to a monument which was to be dedicated on the slope where the last troopers of the 2nd Cavalry had died on December 21, 1866. A large crowd assembled there, most of them young men and women from the new towns which had been founded in the area during the four decades since Fort Phil Kearny had blazed into oblivion. They came in the rackety open touring cars of the period, on horseback, and in buggies gaily bedecked with holiday bunting.
The former enlisted men wore plain civilian suits, but Carrington was dressed in his old blue uniform, every brass button of his frock coat freshly burnished. His wide-brimmed campaign hat was set squarely on his head; his white beard was trimmed to a neat military cut. Standing straight as a parade-ground soldier, he launched into a dedicatory address, an hour-long speech which was essentially a spirited defense of his actions at Fort Phil Kearny, embroidered with a few mild attacks upon his ancient critics.
Those few in the audience who had been with him in 1866 listened patiently, but the thoughts of most of them must have gone rushing back to that other time. Surely it all seemed like a strange dream to Frances Grummond Carrington. She sat in the seat of a buggy drawn up near the small stone monument, a sturdy little old lady in a starched white shirtwaist and a dark ruffled skirt. Her hat—a sort of toque with a magnificent plume—was set at a jaunty angle. She listened to the words of the man who was her husband, but he spoke of a time when the love of her life had been George Grummond, long dead, George Grummond who had died bravely on the rocky slope where the crowd—so lighthearted, so free of danger—listened now in the glaring summer sunlight.
Former Private William Murphy remembered the hard days of toil, the hot summer, the cold bitter winter, scanty rations, the constant dread of Indian attack. For Sam Gibson, the scene deepest seared into his memory was the day of the Wagon Box Fight, when he had watched the Indians charge and charge again, and each time they came on with their war cries he had said what he thought was his last prayer on earth. S. S. Peters remembered Crazy Woman’s
Fork, every detail of every minute of that long day-and-night surround which began with the ambush of Lieutenants Daniels and Templeton and ended with Chaplain White’s dash for help. The high moment in William Daley’s memory was the bright October day when he had raised the first flag above Fort Phil Kearny.
They waited respectfully until Carrington closed his speech, his voice showing weariness at the end, his shoulders stooping a little. When a bugler sounded taps and Carrington uncovered, someone stepped forward with a parasol to shield the old man’s head from the sun.
As soon as the dedication formalities ended, the crowd moved to the site of the fort where a staff had been erected on the former parade ground for a flag-raising ceremony. The tall pole stood in the midst of a field of alfalfa growing lush and green from the waters of irrigation ditches. Few traces remained of the stockade, quartermaster yard, officers’ quarters and barracks. It was as if the fort had never existed, had been only a dream common to those who remembered it.
Standing knee-deep in alfalfa, the survivors gathered at the base of the flagstaff, and William Daley—who had raised the first flag—was given the honor of raising this one. Afterward the colonel politely pointed out landmarks for the young spectators; the former enlisted men recalled a few incidents long forgotten. The guests of honor seemed to enjoy their day of glory.
But they knew it was all gone, the old harsh leathery life, the sweet zest of danger, the toil and uncertainty. It was all gone and soon they would be gone, too, with the vanished fort. Only a myth remained, a few dreamlike memories of the saga they had helped to create.
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Notes
CHAPTER I: APRIL
1. U S. Congress. 50th. 1st sess. Senate executive document 33, 1.
2. Murphy, 390.
3. U.S. Congress. 39th. 1st sess. House executive document 58.
4. U.S. War Dept. The War of the Rebellion … Official Records, Ser. I, Vol. 48, Pt. 2, 356.
5. Army and Navy Journal, October 13, 1866, Vol. 4, 125.
6. U.S. Congress. 50th. 1st sess. Senate executive document 33, 51.
7. Ibid., 53.
8. Young, 323-25.
9. U.S. Congress. 50th. 1stsess. Senate executive document 33, 2.
10. Ibid., 2-3.
Other sources used for background material: Birge, 188; Bisbee, “Items,”23; Brady, 213; M. Carrington, 263; Dunn, 479, 483; Grinnell, 208, 230; Hafen and Young, 351; Hebard and Brininstool, Vol. I, 342; Ostrander, 266-67; Palmer, 219, 221.
CHAPTER II: MAY
1. U.S. Congress. 50th. 1st sess. Senate executive document 33, 3.
2. Bisbee, Through Four American Wars, 161.
3. M. Carrington, 42.
4. Ibid., 41.
5. Murphy, 383.
6. M. Carrington, 38.
7. J. Carrington, 70.
8. M. Carrington, 43.
9. Bisbee, 162-63.
10. J. Carrington, 71.
11. Kearney Herald, January 6, 1866.
12. Bisbee, 162.
13. Palmer, 213.
14. Murphy, 383.
15. Bisbee, “Items of Indian Service,” 26.
16. Hebard and Brininstool, II, 89-90.
17. Murphy, 383.
