by Drury, Bob
The company commander at Reno Station was initially reluctant to allow Lieutenant Templeton’s small party to continue up the trail. But each of the five officers as well as several of the enlisted men had experienced major combat during the Civil War, and they persuaded him to let them ride north. The party had only four saddle horses, and the officers rotated shifts between mounts and wagons. The day before reaching Crazy Woman Fork they had discovered the almost naked body of a scalped, mutilated white man, shot through with arrows. The tatters of a gray woolen blouse covering parts of his shoulders indicated that he was a soldier, probably a courier, but no one could guess from what command. Burying the bloody mess had spooked one of the lieutenants, an Indiana native named Napoleon Daniels. Unable to sleep that night, Daniels had joined Private Sam Peters on picket duty. “He said that he had a presentiment that something was going to happen to him very soon,” Peters wrote not long afterward. “All efforts to discourage him from entertaining the gloomy phantasy were unavailing.”
The next morning as the small caravan neared Crazy Woman Fork the forlorn Lieutenant Daniels lifted his field glasses and spotted a herd of buffalo meandering across a gentle slope about five miles distant. The party needed the fresh meat, and Daniels and Lieutenant Templeton rode ahead to turn the drove toward the trail so that by the time the wagons reached the alkaline creek they would have the animals in a cross fire. The two officers disappeared behind a belt of cottonwoods as the rough road dropped into a dry arroyo leading to the fork. Here the going was slow, the wagon wheels sinking deep into sand, and the teamsters whipped the mules bloody. Their braying nearly drowned out the first Indian war cries, which were followed by a dense volley of arrows.
Westerners found it difficult to convey the inchoate dread they felt toward the Plains Indians. Their Euro-American forebears were no strangers to atrocity, and in fights against tribes from the Mohawk to the Seminoles had both lost and taken scalps—and sometimes tanned scalps for public viewing, as in the Dakota Little Crow’s case. Old mountain men and retired soldiers may have even remembered the Army’s killing and skinning of the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh. But these were exceptions, and few whites were prepared for the torture almost casually meted out by tribes like the Sioux, Comanche, and Cheyenne. These western “red devils” were considered nearly an alien race, duplicitous and capable of inflicting suffering beyond the conception of nineteenth-century American religious and cultural sensibilities. Even the Civil War veterans—who had no doubt heard of, if not witnessed, bloodthirsty atrocities on battlefields from the border states to Georgia (a fact downplayed by both sides)—were terrified of these others who took such pleasure in exacting pain. Thus one can only imagine the throat-closing fear the frontier newcomers in Lieutenant Templeton’s party felt as the rain of arrows was followed by the shriek of eagle-bone whistles and war cries as a formation of screaming Lakota braves on war-striped ponies charged from the timber.
The soldiers, their rifles at the ready for the buffalo hunt, returned fire, and the Indians fell back as the teamsters swung the wagons out of the dry, sandy creek bed and made for the top of the bank, where they formed up a loose corral. The war party made another rush; again rifle fire drove them back. But a trooper and a teamster were wounded. A moment later Lieutenant Daniels’s riderless horse, arrows protruding from its neck and flank and its saddle twisted below its belly, galloped from the brush. It was followed by Lieutenant Templeton, slumped over his saddle pommel. An arrow was buried deep in his back and his horse, too, had wooden shafts protruding from its withers. It reached the little enclave before falling over. The surgeon hunched over Templeton and removed the arrow, but could not tarry to dress the wound. His gun was needed to repel yet another Indian charge.
The Lakota held the timbered high ground, and the remaining three officers recognized that they were in an untenable position. If they stayed where they were they would be picked off one by one. They made a decision to form up a column and make a run for a high, treeless knoll half a mile away. Twelve men covered the flanks on foot, seven more formed a rear guard, and the teamsters whipped their mules into a gallop. The Lakota recognized the maneuver, and a small party also made for the knoll in an attempt to cut them off. The Indians were too late.
The wagons barely beat the frenzied braves to the top of the rise, where again the soldiers and teamsters formed them into a square. Two more men were seriously wounded during the scramble. The little group of survivors dug rifle pits and waited for night, an interminable eight hours away. Individual Lakota warriors—one wearing Lieutenant Daniels’s bloody uniform—made occasional dare rides, circling the knoll within firing range while shielding themselves behind the bodies of their ponies. One seemed particularly reckless, coming closer than the rest, close enough for the whites to notice his pale skin and long, wavy black hair. And twice more the Indians charged en masse only to fall back under rifle fire. Amazingly, during one of these forays the photographer Glover stood to set up his tripod. One of the officers knocked him down and handed him a rifle.
The situation had settled into a standoff when, seemingly from nowhere, another shower of arrows fell onto the hilltop, wounding three more men. A second volley followed before the soldiers realized that the Indians had infiltrated a skinny ravine that cut up the back face of the knoll from the creek. An enlisted man and the chaplain volunteered to clear out the ditch. Armed with rifles and an old pepperbox seven-shot pistol, they charged down the trench firing and screaming their own war cries. An arrow grazed the chaplain, but they drove the Indians off. The two dug in at the top of the cut to keep it clear.
By late afternoon the survivors were almost out of water beneath a blazing sun, and the wounded men and infants were moaning with thirst. One of the officers gathered several canteens and tapped an enlisted man, and under covering fire the two made a mad dash down the ditch to the creek. They managed to return with enough of the milky brine to ration among the children, the wounded, and the women. As the sun began to sink behind the Bighorns the Lakota made two more mounted charges, killing a sergeant and grievously wounding three more men. Half the Americans, two of them dead, were now out of action. The men’s thoughts turned to the fate of the women and children if—or, as it increasingly appeared, when—they were overrun. “Our condition was now becoming so desperate that a council of war was held,” wrote one enlisted man. “It was solemnly decided that in case it came to the worst that we would mercifully kill all the wounded . . . and then ourselves.”
The sin of suicide and its punishment, eternal damnation, regardless of the circumstances, were too much for the chaplain. Though wounded himself, he volunteered to ride for Reno Station, twenty-six miles away. An enlisted man also stepped up. The sun was disappearing in the west as the two remaining healthy horses were saddled, and each man was handed a six-shot Colt. From the knoll, the desperate party watched as the two riders picked their way through the sandy creek bed unmolested. Then a pack of mounted Lakota burst from the cottonwoods. With a head start of several hundred yards the white men spurred their horses; the galloping Indians followed them. A moment later all were lost from view.
It was nearly dark when the men in the rifle pits noticed a large dust cloud rising from the northwest. More Indians, they were certain. The infantrymen began to loosen their shoelaces. After putting the women, children, and wounded out of their misery each man would tie one end of the shoelace to his big toe, tie the other end to his rifle trigger, and turn the gun on himself. This outcome seemed more certain when they saw a brave climb a great rocky mesa just out of rifle range. He appeared to be waving flags or banners of some sort. The whites surmised that this was a prearranged signal to the arriving Indians.
Yet as suddenly as the attack had begun fourteen hours earlier the curdling war whoops ceased. The Sioux mounted their ponies, but their precise movements were invisible in the dusk. Would they charge? Were they retreating? A rifleman cried out and pointed toward a low ridge in the direct
ion of the dust cloud. A lone mounted silhouette appeared, a moving shadow against the last pinkish hue of the western sky. The figure reached the ravine below, a tall man in a low-crowned slouch hat wearing an old Army overcoat. He was seated on a flea-bitten gray mare. An officer shouted an order to halt. The horseman reined in.
“I am a friend.”
“State your name.”
“Jim Bridger.”
The party on the hill let out a holler as Old Gabe’s pony clambered up the incline. The dust cloud, Bridger said, was being raised by the hooves of two companies of mounted infantry hauling mountain howitzers from Fort Phil Kearny. They were no more than half a mile behind him. He apologized for the delay. The troop had been busy scattering war parties that were attacking military and emigrant trains up and down the Bozeman Trail. One corporal, foolishly riding ahead of the detail, had been killed, but otherwise all were in fair shape. Bridger’s bearing and manner were as slouched and relaxed as his hat, and in his Missouri drawl he recounted riding to the rescue of soldiers and civilians as casually as if he were reeling off a grocery list to a sutler’s clerk.
By the time the relief column arrived the Lakota were long gone, melted into the darkening prairie. The reinforcements put out pickets and the entire party camped across the knoll while the surgeon tended to the wounded throughout the night. The next morning a patrol discovered what was left of Lieutenant Daniels’s naked corpse. His scalp had been taken, as had all ten of his fingers, and a thick cottonwood branch had been driven up his anus. Whether he was dead or alive when it happened, no one could know.
Not long afterward a detachment from Reno Station appeared on the trail, led by the chaplain and the enlisted man who had ridden for help. More excited huzzahs filled the air, although the Reno Station men seemed a bit disappointed at having been second on the scene. While they bade their fellows adios and turned back south, the bodies of Daniels and the sergeant were rolled into tarps and loaded onto a wagon next to the dead corporal from Bridger’s unit. Three days later, with Colonel Carrington standing at the front gate in greeting, the ragged band rode into Fort Phil Kearny.
28
ROUGHING IT
Colonel Carrington’s debriefing of his detail commanders, the newly arrived officers, and the civilian wagon masters gave a sense of urgency to completing the fort. Red Cloud, unlike his Indian predecessors, not only was qualified to plan and carry out multiple and simultaneous engagements, but encouraged his raiding parties to employ different tactics for each. His warriors, for instance, had ambushed the reinforcement train directly, but had attacked the first military freight column by using decoys to lure the flanking soldiers away and then falling on the main body of wagons. The raids on the civilian trains had been a combination of the two strategies. Each wagon master reported having been approached by Indians who either signed peaceful intentions or flew flags indicating as much. The leaders had ridden out to parley with them, even presenting small gifts of tobacco and the like. With the Americans’ guard down, the Indians had opened fire at a signal as painted fighters poured down from stands of timber, up out of hidden gullies, and out from behind rolling buttes.
Who knew what Red Cloud would try next? It was best, Carrington noted, to have a stockade to fight from. Lieutenant Templeton’s detail had carried with it a steam-powered sawmill from Fort Laramie, and Carrington organized all able bodies into dawn-to-dusk work and escort details. No freight wagons left for the pinery blockhouses, the river, or the hayfields in the little valley on the other side of Lodge Trail Ridge without a mounted armed guard. Within a week four log walls completely encased the little compound, and over 600,000 feet of four-inch plank boards and shingles were piled high next to foundations dug for work sheds, living quarters, and warehouses. Two blockhouses with multiple gun portals were also constructed on Piney Island. The new sawmill was equipped with a steam whistle, which the men found useful for sounding alarms. They were needed. The two logging camps came under serial sniping, to the point where no man even relieved himself without an escort.
Indians were not the only threat. Post butchers had begun slaughtering a few beef cattle for meat to be salted for winter, and the discarded offal drew packs of ravenous timber wolves by the score that circled the fort at night, their snarls and howls as frightening as a war cry. At first the sentries shot at the animals, but Colonel Carrington ordered the practice halted to conserve ammunition. His troopers were down to less than sixty rounds per man. The Indians noticed the change in this habit. One night a brave sheathed in a wolf pelt crawled to within a few feet of a lookout pacing a bastion and shot him dead. Soldiers on guard duty resumed firing at pretty much anything that moved in the night.
Despite the perilous environment the photographer Glover acted almost as if he were in an enormous garden laid out to his specifications. During the sweltering days he traversed the ocher buttes and ridgelines that shimmied beneath a blue dome so vast as to seem an illusion, lugging his camera equipment, overwhelmed by the striking vistas. He even ventured into the Rocky Mountains alone for days at a time with no weapon except a large Bowie knife he had picked up along the trail. He returned complaining of his inability to photograph at night, when silver moonlight bathed the snowcaps of 13,000-foot Cloud Peak, the highest of the Bighorns. Colonel Carrington warned him against such recklessness but Glover replied that with his long hair the Indians would surely take him for a Mormon and leave him alone. What effect his appearance would have on a timber wolf or grizzly bear he did not mention. When he was not out in the field he was a constant presence in and around Officers’ Row, joining the post wives in croquet matches on the mown parade ground or regaling them with tales from the salons of Philadelphia’s Main Line.
There is no record of what Carrington thought of the photographer’s antics. In any case, he had more pressing problems. He had finally received a dispatch from General Cooke stating that he could expect no more reinforcements until sometime in the fall. At the same time the War Department remained anxious over the lack of forts farther up the Bozeman Trail. Carrington was in a bind. He had already sent another infantry company south to buttress the garrison at Reno Station. The thought of losing two more of his remaining six to erect a third outpost seemed foolish. His thin blue line would be stretched well over 100 miles before Red Cloud finally snapped it. Carrington’s fear led him to make a risky decision—he bypassed the chain of command and wrote directly to the adjutant general in Washington, outlining his predicament and requesting assistance. Perhaps to soften this breach of military protocol he also wrote a long report to General Cooke, to be carried by the same mail courier. In it he took what he hoped was a more conciliatory tone.
“Character of Indian affairs hostile,” he began. “The treaty does not yet benefit this route.” He then vowed, “The work is my mission here, and I must meet it,” before reiterating the long list of grievances he had been filing since his arrival at Fort Laramie. How could he be expected to build forts and fight Indians and safeguard over 500 miles of the Bozeman Trail with so few resources? His horses were weak from consuming nothing but hay, his weapons were outdated, his ammunition was rationed, his best officers were being recalled, his infantrymen could barely ride, the emigrant trains were led by civilians who refused to heed his decrees, and he was acting not only as his own engineer and construction-gang boss but as a military strategist and tactician against an exceedingly shrewd enemy who picked off his men and his stock in small daily engagements yet refused to come out and fight a proper battle. “I must do all this, however arduous,” he concluded, “and say I have not the men.”
This was all true. The War Department had never developed any formal doctrine for dealing with a guerrilla insurgency, let alone codified it in a written guide for frontier officers. Yet however much Carrington believed he was merely stating the obvious, to the battle-tested generals who read his report he seemed to be whining and unprofessional. Rather than attempt to learn as much about their enemy as p
ossible, Carrington’s superiors, like the long, sad succession of Indian-fighting soldiers before them, were instead content to imagine what they would do if they were Red Cloud. It would be another ten weeks before Captain Fetterman was sent west to straighten out this mess, but by then official ignorance had already doomed Carrington’s command.
• • •
As the troops in the Powder River Country awaited the arrival of the reinforcements accompanying Captain Fetterman, the disturbing dispatches from the frontier that were reaching the War Department in Washington turned from a trickle into a flood. The reports, read today, are all the more disheartening for their terse dispassion. From Captain Ten Eyck’s journal:
July 29: A “citizen train” was attacked by Indians near the South Fork of the Cheyenne and eight men were killed and two injured. One of the injured men later died from his wounds.
August 6: A train captained by an H. Merriam lost two civilians killed by Indians along the 236-mile trail between Forts Laramie and Phil Kearny. Later that night another train traveling the same route lost fifteen killed and five wounded.
