Frontier Regulars
Page 14
No one expected the Bozeman Trail assignment to involve combat. Peace commissioners were already at Fort Laramie persuading the Powder River chiefs to put their marks on a treaty similar to those concluded the previous autumn on the Missouri. At Sherman’s suggestion, some of the officers had even brought their wives and children along; Sherman, visiting Fort Kearny on May 16, urged the ladies to record their experiences in a diary.8 For his part, the regimental commander, Col. Henry B. Carrington, expected to overcome any opposition from the Sioux and Cheyennes by “patience, forebearance, and common sense.”9
Carrington managed his regiment by the same principles. Well educated in the humanities, self-educated in all branches of military science, he was an organizer and planner of proven merit. He was also a political appointee to the Regular Army and a veteran of five years of desk duty. Only extraordinary qualities of leadership could have bridged the gulf that the colonel’s comfortable wartime billet opened between him and the battle-hardened officers of his regiment. But as a leader Carrington proved inept, tolerant of insubordination, lenient toward offenders against discipline, hesitant when opposed, excitable under pressure, and defensive about his lack of command and combat experience.10
At Fort Laramie the peace commissioners had succeeded in gathering an authoritative representation of chiefs, including even the Oglala and Miniconjou Sioux leaders who had successfully fought off General Connor’s columns in 1865 and who still expressed the temper of the warriors in the Powder River country. That Man-Afraid-of-His-Horse, Red Cloud, and others had come in at all was viewed as a favorable omen. That their people had passed a winter of near starvation was another, convincing the commissioners that presents and the promise of $70,000 a year in annuity issues would win assent to any agreement. On these rewards the chief negotiator, Indian Superintendent E. B. Taylor, dwelled at length while deliberately obscuring the quid pro quo— acquiescence in the Bozeman Trail and military stations to guard it.11
Approaching Fort Laramie on June 16, Colonel Carrington got a more accurate reading of peace prospects from Chief Standing Elk of the Brulé Sioux. When informed of Carrington’s mission, he replied: “The fighting men in that country have not come to Laramie, and you will have to fight them.”12 And so it proved. Bound for the Powder River country, Carrington’s arrival at Fort Laramie exposed Superintendent Taylor’s deceit. “The Great Father sends us presents and wants us to sell him the road,” stormed Red Cloud in council, “but White Chief goes with soldiers to steal the road before Indians say Yes or No.”13 Wrathfully the Powder River chiefs broke off the talks and led their people northward, vowing to fight any whites who tried to use the route. But other chiefs, whose game resources were not imperiled by the road, had no compunctions about giving it away, and they signed.14 “Satisfactory treaty concluded with the Sioux and Cheyennes,” Taylor wired the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. “Most cordial feeling prevails.”15
Guided by the mountain-wise old frontiersman Jim Bridger, the Second Battalion, Eighteenth Infantry, marched out of Fort Laramie on June 17. At the forks of Powder River, 169 miles from Laramie, Carrington dropped off one of his eight companies to garrison Fort Reno, a relic of General Connor’s campaign the previous summer.16 From the sterile, wind-swept valley of the Powder, the Bozeman Trail climbed to the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. On July 13, sixty-seven miles northwest of Reno, the command camped at the forks of Piney Creek in a pleasant glade shadowed by snow-capped Cloud Peak. Here Carrington marked the site of his headquarters post, Fort Phil Kearny. On August 3, his stockade already taking shape, the colonel detached two companies under Capt. Nathaniel C. Kinney to follow the Bozeman Trail along the base of the mountains to the Bighorn River and there, ninety-one miles from Fort Phil Kearny, plant the third post. On August 12 Kinney founded Fort C. F. Smith.
Within less than a week after Carrington’s arrival on Piney Creek, Red Cloud struck. From swelling camps in the Tongue River Valley some fifty miles to the north, Oglalas, Miniconjous, Sans Arcs, Brulés, and even Cheyennes and Arapahoes sought to throw back the soldiers and close the road to Montana. Nearly every train, military and civilian, lost stock to the raiders, and many had to fight off attackers as well. The warriors also closed in on Fort Phil Kearny, harassing trains bringing logs from the nearby “pinery” for construction of the post, running off stock, and killing anyone who strayed from the fort without proper precautions.17
Carrington had come to the Powder River country equipped for one task and had found himself confronted by quite another. He had the men, arms, and supplies to build and garrison forts but not to contest an active enemy. Almost all his resources went into the construction of Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith; the former, nearing completion by December, stood as a monument to his engineering and organizing skills. Beyond an elaborate set of rules for travelers, therefore, he provided little protection to the trains between the three forts. Although western newspapers proclaimed Powder River in the grip of full-scale war, in official circles the spirit of Superintendent Taylor’s “most cordial feeling” continued to prevail, lulling travelers with a sense of security that prompted them to string out in small, inadequately armed groups and to neglect elementary security precautions.
Carrington’s most urgent task was to whip his command into fighting shape—two-thirds of the men were untrained recruits. Instead, he employed them all in building a more elaborate and formidable fort than the nature of Indian warfare required. He scheduled no drill or training for six months. Under the strain of continued Sioux harassment, the race to finish the fort before winter, and the tension among the officers, discipline and morale deteriorated.
So did relations between Carrington and the officer corps. The more hostile officers—Capt. Frederick H. Brown, Adj. William H. Bisbee, Lt. George W. Grummond—scarcely concealed their contempt and often violated the spirit, if not the letter, of Carrington’s policies. Unable to enforce his will on the rebels, he reacted with tolerance and took more and more of their responsibilities on himself.18
The most serious contention centered on strategy. Carrington thought almost exclusively in defensive terms, a frame of mind symbolized by his stockaded and bastioned fort. His subordinates, humiliated by Sioux aggressions and no more versed in Indian warfare than he, bitterly resented his refusal to let them use part of the troops for offensive operations. The Indian forays in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny, mostly against grazing stock herds, afforded the officers the opportunities they craved. They responded with erratic, unorganized, and often unauthorized pursuits.19
Carrington achieved scarcely greater rapport with the department commander, General Cooke. Reports of his inspector general following a visit to Fort Phil Kearny in August and private letters reaching his headquarters from some of Carrington’s disaffected subordinates reinforced Cooke’s natural suspicion of a politically appointed officer.20 Moreover, reflecting the growing stress of his situation, Carrington’s reports displayed a confusing inconsistency, at times bristling with alarm, at other times soothing with assurance. Cooke probably despaired of satisfactory military performance as long as Carrington commanded and simply procrastinated until time produced another commander. This could be expected by the end of the year, when the reorganization of the Eighteenth Infantry was to take effect. The Second Battalion, at Fort Phil Kearny, was to become the Twenty-seventh Regiment, and Carrington had already asked to stay with the Eighteenth, whose headquarters would be at Fort Casper. So his appeals for more officers and men, for cavalry, for breech-loading rifles, and for greater ammunition reserves stirred only routine activity in department headquarters. In return Carrington earned fussy reprimands for the irregularity of his reports (delayed by the hazards of the trail) and pointed suggestions that more aggressive action against the Indians might be in order.21
During November Carrington finally received some reinforcements—forty-five infantrymen and a troop of sixty men of the Second Cavalry. All were straight from the recruiting r
endezvous. The cavalrymen, armed with muzzle-loading muskets and Starr carbines, could scarcely mount their horses without help.22 This paltry addition of manpower brought the garrison of Fort Phil Kearny to 10 officers, 3 surgeons, and 389 enlisted men.23 At this same time Fort Laramie, remote from the hostile zone, boasted a complement of 12 companies, more than 700 men.24
Also in November, Carrington received several fresh officers to replace some who had been reassigned. The new arrivals raised the quotient of disaffection in the officer corps. The most troublesome were Capts. William J. Fetterman and James Powell. Fetterman, a superb combat officer and veteran of the regiment’s Georgia campaigns, promptly joined with Captain Brown and Lieutenant Grummond in promoting an expedition to clean out the Sioux villages on Tongue River. Powell, a steady old Regular with thirteen years’ enlisted service in the West before the war, had a better sense of reality but nonetheless became one of Carrington’s most outspoken critics. Of his senior officers, Carrington could count as properly loyal only Capt. Tenodor Ten Eyck, and he was an alcohol-numbed mediocrity.25
By early December, with most of the work on the fort completed, Carrington had been brought to a commitment to some form of offensive operation. On November 12, displaying an abysmal ignorance of conditions in the Powder River country, General Cooke had given explicit instructions to strike the Indians in their winter camps, and two weeks later Carrington had promised “to make the winter one of active operations in different directions, as best affords chance of punishment.”26
A “chance of punishment” seemed to present itself on December 6, when Indians attacked the wood train on the road to the pinery west of the fort. Carrington sent Captain Fetterman with about thirty horsemen under Lt. Horatio S. Bingham to lift the siege and drive off the assailants, pressing them along their usual withdrawal route around the west end of the Sullivant Hills, across Big Piney, and over Lodge Trail Ridge to Peno Creek (see map). Carrington would lead twenty-five mounted infantrymen under Lieutenant Grummond up the Bozeman Trail and drop into Peno Valley behind the Indians. Fetterman got to Peno Creek before Carrington. The warriors, about one hundred in number, turned on their pursuers. The green cavalrymen panicked and stampeded. Trying to rally them, Lieutenant Bingham got cut off and shot with arrows. Carrington tarried on Lodge Trail Ridge, then became engaged separately from Fetterman. Only the fortunes of conflict spared the command from greater loss than Bingham and a sergeant killed and five men wounded.27
The Sioux doubtless drew their own lessons from the fight. Since early autumn they had been plotting “two big fights with the whites, one at Pine Woods [Fort Phil Kearny] and one at Big Horn [Fort C. F. Smith].”28 To accomplish this, they looked to the timeworn decoy tactic, which rarely worked because it required a discipline and coordination foreign to Indian character. The action of December 6 may have been such an attempt, and almost surely it convinced the Indians that a decoy could be made to succeed against the soldiers. They tried again on December 19 but failed because Captain Powell, commanding the relief detachment, declined to pursue.
On the morning of December 21 the Indians once more set the stage. Between 1,500 and 2,000 warriors gathered at the scene of the fight of December 6 and concealed themselves in the ravines on both sides of a long narrow ridge, covered with snow and ice, by which the Bozeman Trail descended from Lodge Trail Ridge. High-Back-Bone of the Miniconjous organized the operation, and a young Oglala named Crazy Horse led the decoy party. Whether Red Cloud took part is a matter of dispute.29
When the wood train came under attack, Carrington again selected Captain Powell to head the relief column. Pleading seniority, however, Captain Fetterman demanded the assignment, and the colonel yielded. (Fetterman was a brevet lieutenant colonel, Powell a brevet major.) Carrington gave Fetterman the same explicit and emphatic orders he had given Powell two days earlier: relieve the wood train and under no circumstances pursue the Indians beyond Lodge Trail Ridge. The near-disaster of December 6 had shown Carrington the perils of the broken terrain on the other side of the precipitous elevation that divided Big Piney from Peno Creek. Fetterman assembled a picked force of forty-nine infantrymen and marched out of the stockade. Lieutenant Grummond and twenty-seven cavalrymen, armed with the band’s Spencer carbines, followed as soon as their horses had been saddled. Captain Brown, who never missed a fight, went along, as did two civilians, James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher, who carried Henry repeating rifles. In all, the relief force numbered three officers, seventy-six soldiers, and two civilians.
Instead of following the wood road, Fetterman at once turned north toward the Bozeman Trail and disappeared beyond the shoulder of the Sullivant Hills. This was not necessarily cause for alarm; by marching up Big Piney north of the Sullivant Hills he might take the Indians in the rear. But he did not do this. He forded Big Piney on the ice and followed the Bozeman Trail up Lodge Trail Ridge. The command was briefly seen from the fort ascending the slope in skirmish formation, exchanging desultory fire with a scattering of Indians. Then it vanished. The sound of heavy firing from beyond Lodge Trail Ridge moved Carrington to dispatch Captain Ten Eyck and forty infantry and dismounted cavalry to Fetterman’s support. They reached the summit of the ridge, three miles from the fort, in time to see hundreds of warriors swarming on the slopes and withdrawing to the north. Scattered along the narrow ridge that carried the road down to Peno Valley, the troops discovered the bodies of Fetterman and his men, stripped of clothing and barbarously mutilated.30
Since no man of Fetterman’s command escaped, how the battle had progressed can only be surmised. It seems likely that, after the decoy party had drawn the troops to the Lodge Trail crest, Grummond’s cavalry charged ahead of the infantry down the long narrow slope, since known as Massacre Ridge. They had almost reached Peno Valley when the warriors burst from concealment on either side of the ridge. A handful of troopers and the two civilians dismounted and took cover among some rocks, but most of the cavalry retreated part way back toward the infantry and dismounted to fight on a rise of ground. Farther up the ridge Fetterman and the infantry made their stand at the site of the present monument. Some of the cavalry succeeded in getting back to the infantry, as did Captain Brown. Thus, in three separate groups, none within support or view of the others, Fetterman’s troops were wiped out in less than an hour. Estimates of Indian casualties range from a mere handful up to a hundred in killed and wounded.31
The next day, after the last of the bodies had been brought in by a detachment under Carrington himself, a fierce blizzard swept in, piling snow to the height of the stockade and deepening the fear of an assault on the fort itself. Already, on the night of the twenty-first, Carrington had launched John “Portugee” Phillips on an epic four-day ride through bitter cold and drifting snow to take the news of the disaster and an appeal for help to the outside world. This first dispatch reached General Cooke on the day after Christmas. Carrington’s official report, an almost incoherent self-justification betraying a state of mind bordering on panic, arrived early in the new year.
No long search was required to find a scapegoat. General Cooke left no doubt of his choice for the distinction. “Colonel Carrington is very plausible,” he advised army headquarters, “an energetic, industrious man in garrison; but it is too evident that he has not maintained discipline, and that his officers have no confidence in him.”32 Also, Cooke’s orders for a relief column enjoined its commander, Lt. Col. Henry W. Wessels, to replace Carrington in command of Fort Phil Kearny, a move long planned as part of the regimental reorganization but by its timing broadcasting the department commander’s assessment of culpability.33 General Sherman shared Cooke’s view. “I know enough of Carrington to believe that he is better qualified for a safe place than one of danger,” he wrote privately to a colleague.34 For his part, General Grant was not inclined to place the blame solely on Carrington. Without even consulting Sherman, he caused orders to be issued on January g, 1867, replacing Cooke with Bvt. Maj. Gen. Christopher C. Augur.35<
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Two official investigations were promptly launched, one an army court of inquiry, the other part of the mission of a presidentially appointed peace commission reporting to the Secretary of the Interior. Both took voluminous testimony. The army inquiry came to nothing, despite General Grant’s opinion that the evidence warranted formal charges against Carrington.36 The Interior Department’s commissioners never subscribed to a joint report, but the conclusions of its spokesman, John B. Sanborn, exonerated Carrington: “The difficulty ‘in a nutshell’ was, that the commanding officer of the district was furnished no more troops or supplies for this state of war than had been provided and furnished him for a state of profound peace.”37
This was indeed a large difficulty. But there was another large difficulty, clearly revealed by the testimony taken by both investigating bodies: the army had selected a suitable commanding officer for a state of profound peace but a most unsuitable one for a state of war. This view prevailed in the close-knit army community, and Carrington contended with it for only three years.38 Suffering from a hip injury, he left the service in 1870 and devoted the remaining forty-two years of his life to vindicating his management of the Bozeman Trail defenses. With his contemporaries he achieved indifferent success. With historians of later generations he largely succeeded, for it is his version that until recent years has colored most accounts of the events culminating on Massacre Ridge on December 21,1 See.39