by Drury, Bob
Even Carrington’s most hardened veterans, their steel forged in the carnage of the Civil War, were literally sickened by what newspapers from New York to San Francisco euphemistically referred to as Indian “atrocities” and, in the case of women, “depredations.” Captured whites were scalped, skinned, and roasted alive over their own campfires, shrieking in agony as Indians yelped and danced about them like the bloody-eyed Achilles celebrating over the fallen Hector. Men’s penises were hacked off and shoved down their throats and women were flogged with deer-hide quirts while being gang-raped. Afterward their breasts, vaginas, and even pregnant wombs were sliced away and laid out on the buffalo grass. Carrington’s patrols rode often to the rescue, but almost always too late, finding victims whose eyeballs had been gouged out and left perched on rocks, or the burned carcasses of men and women bound together by their own steaming entrails ripped from their insides while they were still conscious. The Indians, inured to this torture ethos, naturally fought one another to their last breath. The whites were at first astonished by this persistence, and most of the soldiers of the 18th Infantry had long since made unofficial pacts never to be taken alive.
Captain Fetterman, the relentless and adaptive Civil War hero, was charged with ending this Hobbesian dystopia. The Army’s general staff considered Fetterman a new breed of Indian fighter, and as such he carried orders to Fort Phil Kearny installing him as second in command to Carrington, his old regimental commander. The final instructions he received before his departure from Omaha had been terse: “Indian warfare in the Powder River Country can be successfully ended once and for all by engaging in open battle with the Indians during the winter.” These orders underlined the War Department’s undisguised position that previous campaigns against Red Cloud, if indeed they could be called such, had stalled owing to a combination of incompetence and the American field commanders’ aversion to cold-weather combat. In truth, even newcomers to the frontier such as Carrington soon learned that giving chase with horses, infantry, and supply trains consistently bogged down in deep snow was fruitless. But the eastern generals, who had conducted the majority of their Civil War marches in the South, were ignorant of Plains weather, and Washington expected the Army to drain this blood-soaked western swamp.
In the summer of 1866 the new commander of the Military Division of the Missouri, General William Tecumseh Sherman, undertook two long inspection tours of his vast western defenses. On the trail he became even more convinced that his troops’ failure to apprehend or kill Red Cloud stemmed from reluctance to meet savagery with savagery. The craggy forty-six-year-old Sherman was already an expert on human misery, and he held no illusions that peace between the white and red races could be achieved. In his typical brusque view, all Indians should be either killed outright or confined to reservations of the Army’s choosing. He had an eye toward the transcontinental railroad—whose tracks already extended 100 miles west of Omaha—and his genocidal judgments were succinct. “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop progress,” he wrote to his old commander General Grant. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination—men, women and children.”
Sherman recognized that the piecemeal destruction of the eastern tribes had been a centuries-long process, and was still continuing to some extent. He also understood that this slow, systematic eradication would not work in a West bursting with natural resources the United States needed immediately. The raw frontier he was charged with taming was too vast, and on his circuitous inspection tours he spent long, gritty days in the saddle, traveling (it seemed to him) to Creation and back. Wherever he rode he had been made to feel like a visitor, or worse, an interloper, by warriors who shadowed his every move, just out of rifle range, over hills, through ravines, and along alkaline creek beds. Finally, during a brief two-day stopover at Nebraska’s Fort Kearney,3 Carrington informed him, with no apparent attempt at irony, “Where you have been, General, is only a fraction of Red Cloud’s country.”
This caught Sherman’s attention. Red Cloud’s country? Over the past four years so many good men, in President Lincoln’s words, gave the last full measure of devotion to preserve the Union. And a heathen considered this land his country? Carrington’s choice of words was just another manifestation of the white-red cultural divide, however. Red Cloud no more considered the Powder River territory “his country,” in the American sense of the phrase, than he would claim ownership of the moon and the stars. At best he was fighting to preserve a country that the Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, had provided for Indians’ use. That Washington had deigned to cede to his tribe the right to occupy it in a succession of treaties and “friendship pacts” dating to 1825 only proved how confused these whites were about the grand scheme of the universe. Unlike the conciliatory Indian headmen who a year earlier were willing to cease hostilities in exchange for “protection” and “trade rights,” Red Cloud was making war to halt the increasing intrusion of whites into Sioux hunting grounds—no more, no less.
The simplicity of this oft-stated purpose eluded Sherman. The general was a manic-depressive whose mental illness had forced him to temporarily relieve himself of command in the early stages of the Civil War—this relief, when discovered by the wire services, had prompted the headline “General William T. Sherman Insane.” Now his inner demons were made terrifyingly manifest by a scalping, torturing tribe of “savages” his troops could not even find, much less kill. It came as a further blow to his fragile ego when, during a stopover at Fort Laramie, an officer produced a primitive map that displayed all the territory Red Cloud and the Western Sioux had secured over the past two decades. This largely uncharted expanse of primeval forests, undulating prairie, sun-baked tableland, cloud-shrouded peaks, and ice-blue kettle lakes encompassed 740,000 square miles, extending south from the Canadian border into Colorado and Nebraska, and west from the Minnesota frontier to the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It was bisected by over a dozen major rivers and numberless creeks and streams flowing out of the Rockies and Black Hills, and was home to an abundance of tribes that the Sioux had either conquered or reduced to vassal status.
In all, this cruel and mysterious territory of far horizons accounted for one-fifth of what would one day become the contiguous United States. No one tribe had ever before or would ever again reign over so much open country. It was not long after seeing the map that Sherman ordered his subordinates in Omaha to put this house in order. They, in turn, summoned Captain Fetterman. It was an obvious selection.
• • •
While Colonel Carrington had been the nominal commander of Ohio’s 18th Regiment during the war, it was the robust Fetterman who had earned the unit’s battle honors and field promotions. He was an enigmatic man whose wild, dark muttonchops and smoldering glare belied a graceful and refined sociability, and there was no questioning Fetterman’s bravery. He had been cited for his leadership during the storming of Corinth, at “Hell’s Half Acre” at Stones River, and at the fiery siege of Atlanta, and he was an officer who inspired lifelong loyalty in his troops. Carrington, on the other hand, was an administrator at heart, and not unaware of the snide comparisons with Fetterman whispered by both his superiors and his hot-blooded junior officers. “Few came [to Fort Phil Kearny] from Omaha or Laramie without prejudice, believing I was not doing enough fighting,” he was to testify before a congressional commission investigating the failures of Red Cloud’s War. Yet as confident as Sherman and his generals were that Fetterman would bring the fight to the enemy, Carrington believed that he had learned all too well in his six months among the Sioux that the strategies and tactics of Manassas and Bull Run would not apply to the far West.
The Indians were too clever for that. Despite the Army’s overwhelming numbers, massed formations and set-piece engagements were simply foreign to the tribal mind-set of raid, feint, and parry. In Fetterman, Carrington sensed an officer too enamored of what one longtime frontier scout dismissed as “these d
amn paper-collar soldiers.” Given the eventual outcome (and a mighty public relations campaign), Carrington’s discretion was considered the more sound policy well into the twentieth century, while Grant’s, Sherman’s, and particularly Fetterman’s strategy was judged as lacking. Despite his gleaming Civil War record, Fetterman was soon enough to be vilified as too clever by half: the wrong man at the wrong place in the wrong job. He was, it would be said in hindsight, a soldier who understood little about Red Cloud and less about Indian warfare, and a conventional wisdom developed that attributed his spectacular downfall to his hubris.
This counterfactual locomotive would be stoked by the memoirs of Carrington’s successive wives, each of whom exalted and exonerated her husband at the expense of Fetterman. Carrington himself, who lived long enough into the Gilded Age to attend memorial anniversaries of Red Cloud’s War, was also so keen to rehabilitate his public image that he must shoulder blame for the vilification of his subordinate. But if, as is said, survivors write history, it was primarily the Carrington women—aided and abetted by a lingering Victorian reluctance to call a lady a liar—who painted Fetterman as “an arrogant fool blindly leading his men to their deaths.”
As it was, in that first week of November 1866, on the same night that Captain Fetterman and Company C of the 2nd Battalion bedded down in a snowbound gulch one day’s ride from Fort Phil Kearny, eighty miles to the north thousands of hostiles from over 1,800 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho lodges had come together for a war council. There, on the sandy banks of Goose Creek where it flowed into the icy Tongue, Red Cloud gathered his warrior societies about him to finalize his plans to drive the white man from the Powder River Country and defeat the mighty United States in the only war the nation would ever lose to an Indian army. The great chief summoned the spirits of his dead forefathers to weave a tale of Indian survival, of Indian hope, of Indian victory. He insisted that the red man had been granted this land by the Great Spirit, as a birthright that had been theirs forever and would be theirs forevermore, in this life or the next. When he finished his speech more Indians spoke, and the campfires were banked before the pipe was passed and the war dance begun. And then, through billows of blue tobacco haze, Red Cloud retired to a warrior lodge erected in a copse of cedars along the river’s edge. There he laid out for his battle commanders his strategy for the final destruction of the white interlopers and their forts in the Powder River Country.
So it occurred that preconceived history was bent, that the United States would lose a war, and that the fate of Captain Fetterman and the Bluecoats of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army was sealed.
* * *
1. The word “buffalo,” a bastardization, was applied to the immense herds of “boeufs” first encountered by French trappers on the North American Plains, around 1635. In 1774 the animals were officially classified as “American bison” in order to taxonomically distinguish them from African and Asian buffalo species. Because across the prairies of the old West American bison were referred to as buffalo, that is the designation we have chosen for this book.
2. On April 21, 1607, Captain Christopher Newport led about twenty of the first permanent English settlers ashore near what was to become Virginia’s Jamestown colony. They explored for nearly eight hours without seeing another human being. On their way back to the boat that had taken them ashore they were ambushed, with two men wounded by arrows. The incident is described on page 135 of a book edited by Colonel Matthew Moten, Between War and Peace.
3. Fort Kearney, in south-central Nebraska, was named for the Mexican War hero General Stephen W. Kearny. Its name was misspelled with an extra “e” in so many official government documents that this became recognized as the standard spelling. Fort Phil Kearny along the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming was named after the Civil War general Philip Kearny, Stephen Kearny’s nephew.
Part I
THE PRAIRIE
East of the Mississippi civilization stood on three legs—land, water and timber. West of the Mississippi not one but two of those legs were withdrawn—water and timber. Civilization was left on one leg—land. It is a small wonder that it toppled over in temporary failure.
—Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains
1
FIRST CONTACT
It was a pageant unlike anything seen before in the West.
In the first week of September 1851, the largest gathering of Indians ever assembled descended on the lush grasslands on the outskirts of Fort Laramie in present-day southeastern Wyoming. They arrived from every compass point: Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne from the North Platte and South Platte corridors; Arikara, Assiniboin, Mandan, and Minnitarees riding southwest from the far reaches of the Upper Missouri; Blackfeet and Shoshones from deep in the Rockies, the latter escorted down onto the flatlands under a white flag of truce held aloft by the mountain man Jim Bridger; and finally the stately Crows, completing an 800-mile trek from the buckling Yellowstone bluffs. All together more than 10,000 men, women, and children from more than a dozen sovereign tribes were represented—allies, vassals, mortal enemies. Clad in their most ornamental buckskins and blankets, riding their finest warhorses, ribbons and feathers flying, they had arrived to hear representatives from the Great Father in Washington make the case for peace—peace not only between the red man and the encroaching whites, but among the Indians themselves.
The environs of the weathered stockade on the eastern slope of the Rockies were a natural setting for such a powwow, a council that the United States deemed crucial to its westward expansion. Fort Laramie, established seventeen years earlier as a lonely vanguard post in the center of the vast wilderness, bisected what was to become known as the Oregon Trail. Over those years it had evolved from an isolated trading post into a lively marketplace that attracted fur traders and whiskey peddlers from St. Louis; Indians from across the Plains hawking buffalo robes; and horse traders like the legendary Kit Carson, who drove herds of New Mexican ponies up from the Arkansas River to sell at auction. Two years earlier, in 1849, the Army had purchased the dilapidated fort from the American Fur Company for $4,000, renamed and refurbished it, and installed within its log and adobe walls a small company of mounted riflemen—between 20 and 100 men, depending on the season and the whim of the general staff—as a way of regulating and protecting the increased flow of miners, homesteaders, and entrepreneurs westering through the Powder River Country.
The trails opened by the first frontier explorers in the 1820s and 1830s had initially drawn scientists, missionaries, and even wealthy sportsmen to the pristine territory on the far side of the Missouri River. On their return to the East these men spun beautiful, if fabulous, tales about the glories of the new Eden beyond the Big Muddy. Their stories were lapped up by newspapermen. In 1846 one New York City penny paper, noting the arrival in Manhattan of two British aristocrats recently returned from an “extended buffalo hunting tour in Oregon and the Wild West,” used the terms “wonders,” “agreeable,” “grand,” “glowing,” and “magnificent” in one paragraph alone to describe the wild country. “The fisheries are spoken of as the best in the country,” the article concluded, “and only equaled by the rare facilities for agriculture.” This sort of breathless advertising naturally roiled the imagination of thousands of small farmers and urban dwellers who were eager to begin life anew in paradise—provided a family or its extended clan could scrape together the $400 needed to outfit a wagon with stock and provisions. Many could. The general course of the Oregon Trail, a new wagon road branching off from the older, more established Santa Fe Trail in Kansas, had been mapped and described by the explorer John Frémont in 1842. The rutted route worked its way northwest over the Rockies at the South Pass, and it soon surpassed the Santa Fe Trail as a symbol of the nation’s expansion.
Emigrant traffic was unobtrusive at first. For most of the 1840s the High Plains tribes remained too busy warring against one another to bother to molest the small caravans of prairie schoo
ners that snaked across the Plains making twenty miles a day. These wagons, much smaller and lighter than those depicted in Hollywood films, had hickory bows positioned across hardwood frames that supported their cloth canopies. And, again, unlike the wagons in movies, they were pulled not by horses, but by stronger, sturdier oxen—and by mules, the more sure-footed, though sterile, offspring of a jackass and a horse mare. On the occasions when the wagons did arouse Indians’ curiosity, their owners could usually pass freely after paying a small tariff of coffee or refined sugar, which the Indians considered a particular delicacy.
Still, to the Sioux in particular, the white travelers were an odd lot, “totally out of their element; bewildered and amazed, like a troop of schoolboys lost in the woods,” wrote Francis Parkman, the explorer who traveled west from New England in the 1840s to live among the tribes. Not all were as naive, or unlucky, as the ill-fated Donner Party, destined to be trapped in the killing snowdrifts of the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47. Yet in his later years Red Cloud recalled watching in befuddlement as the hapless pioneers—blithely overconfident if under-outfitted and pathetically unprepared for the harsh, treeless prairie—burned expensive steamer trunks, chiffoniers, and even an occasional pipe organ for cook fires and littered the wheatgrass and fox sedge with goose-feather mattresses, grandfather clocks, and portable sawmills, in belated attempts to lighten the load on axles made from young, green wood that too often snapped hauling such extravagances.
