The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  Snow fell that night, light and powdery, the sun rising in a clear sky at dawn upon a glittering-white world. The air was bracing, and Carrington decided to ride out to the pinery with the wood train. “On the morning of the 20th, very early,” he later told the court of inquiry, “I had both saw-mills at work upon 3-inch plank, and at 9 o’clock, with sixty infantry and twenty cavalry, and the ordinary train guard, I went myself to the woods to test the animus and force of the Indians, and to build a bridge across Piney Creek, to facilitate the passage of the wagons off Pine Island. … Trees were felled for stringers; the bridge, forty-five feet long and sixteen feet wide, was built; the wagons were loaded, and the train reached the fort at 6 P.M. without casualty. I saw no Indians, and no fresh trail upon the snow which had fallen the night before.”21

  That evening Captains Fetterman and Brown called unexpectedly upon the colonel in his headquarters. Brown was in a genial mood. He had slung his spurs carelessly in the buttonholes of his greatcoat, and wore a pair of revolvers at his waist. Acting as spokesman, he told Carrington that he and Fetterman had secured the promises of fifty civilian employees to join an equal number of mounted soldiers in an expedition to Tongue River to clear out the Indians. Both men were convinced that if the hostile villages were destroyed, the fort could settle down to a peaceful winter.

  Carrington listened politely, then picked up his morning report for that day and handed it to Brown. If he let fifty seasoned men go to the Tongue, the colonel pointed out, he could not keep the mails moving, or maintain adequate picket and guard assignments. Fifty veterans were the core of his strength; most of those left behind to defend the fort would be untried recruits. Also, he added soberly, only forty-two horses had been reported serviceable that morning, and if he let them go, he would have none left at the fort.

  Fred Brown was disappointed. He had almost completed his quartermaster records, and expected to be leaving for Laramie after Christmas to report for his new assignment. He wanted one more good fight, a smashing victory such as the one he had led against the Arapaho back in September.

  Fetterman had little to say during this interview, and when it was clear that Carrington had no intention of authorizing a Tongue River expedition, he rose to go. As he and Brown left, the latter admitted that “he knew it was impossible, but that he just felt he could kill a dozen himself.”22 Scarcely twelve hours later, Captain Brown would know—too late—just how impossible it was.

  On the eve of the massacre which would bear Fetterman’s name, the weather was remarkably fine, almost temperate, the sky faintly hazed but casting enough light to outline the sturdy stockade and buildings. All warehouses were completed; the last barracks was habitable; one more load of logs from the pinery should finish up the hospital. Military strength was slightly above four hundred, but many men carried faulty arms, and ammunition was in short supply.

  In the rarefied atmosphere of that high country, sounds carried for long distances, and when there was no sound the stillness was almost overpowering. The Pineys were frozen across, their waters moving quietly below the ice. Except for the occasional howl of a wolf, the night was broken only by monotonous calls from the sentry posts: “All’s well!”

  3.

  From early autumn into December, Red Cloud and other hostile chiefs had been assembling recruits along the headwaters of the Tongue, not more than fifty miles north of Fort Phil Kearny. Visiting Crows, who had been welcomed in the lodges and invited to join the hostiles, reported tepees spread out over a stretch of forty miles, and the number of warriors gathered there in mid-December probably totaled almost four thousand.

  Although his military opponents considered Red Cloud the commanding general of all hostile operations in the Powder River country, certainly by December such was not the case. Opposition inspired during the summer by this relentless Oglala leader had grown to such proportions by late autumn that it was beyond control of one tribal chief. Roman Nose and Medicine Man of the Cheyennes, and Little Chief and Sorrel Horse of the Arapaho had joined Red Cloud’s camp along the Tongue as allies, not as subordinates. Nor did the six hereditary chiefs of the Miniconjous, including Black Shield, yield any authority to Red Cloud.

  In the days following the fight of December 6, however, the chiefs came to a general agreement; they would combine to lay a great ambush of many warriors, then send out a few young men on fast ponies to lure the soldiers from the hated fort on the Pineys into their trap.

  When the moon was at the full in the third week of December, detachments of Oglalas, Miniconjous and Cheyennes began moving south out of the lodges along the Tongue. How many warriors made this journey is not certain, estimates ranging from fifteen hundred to two thousand, the latter figure being more often mentioned by the few white men who saw them and survived.

  Black Shield led the Miniconjous, Crazy Horse the first war party of young Oglalas. The weather was very cold and the warriors wore buffalo robes with the hair turned in, leggings of dark woolen cloth, high-topped buffalo-fur moccasins, and carried red Hudson’s Bay blankets strapped to their saddles. Most of them rode pack horses, leading their fast-footed war ponies by lariats. Some had rifles, but most were armed with bows and arrows, knives and lances. They carried enough pemmican to last several days, and when an opportunity offered, small groups would turn off the trail, kill buffalo or deer, and take as much meat as could be carried on their saddles.

  When they were about ten miles northwest of Fort Phil Kearny, the first detachments made camp and waited for the others to come down and join them. As more warriors arrived, the camp spread out in three circles of Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapaho. While the chiefs held council, scouts moved out along the high ridges to watch the soldiers in the fort. It was decided that the best place to lay an ambush was in the forks of Peno Creek, about halfway between camp and the fort.*

  On the morning of the 19th, they made their first decoy attack, but that was the day Captain Powell obeyed Carrington’s strict orders and refused to follow the warriors. Snow fell during the night, and the Indians stayed in their camp on the 20th, warming themselves by fires inside saddle-blanket windbreaks. Much of the powdery snow melted except along shadowed slopes, and by the morning of the 21st, the chiefs again decided to send decoys out against the soldiers’ wood train.

  This time the most daring of the young braves were chosen to tantalize the soldiers into pursuit. The medicine men were certain that this time the soldiers would come running into the trap, and while the decoys rode off toward the fort a great ambush was laid on each side of the Bozeman Road where it ran along a narrow ridge and descended to Peno Creek. The Cheyennes and Arapaho took the west side. Some of the Sioux hid in a grassy flat on the opposite side; others remained mounted and concealed themselves behind two rocky ridges. By midmorning almost two thousand warriors were waiting there for Captain Fetterman and his eighty men.

  4.

  When Colonel Carrington stepped out of his quarters early on the morning of the 21st, he found the day bright and clear, the air cold and dry. Most of the snow was gone from the ground around the fort, but it lay on the ridges, ice-sheeted in places where the previous day’s sun had partially melted it. Big Piney was still frozen from bank to bank. The snow, he knew, would still be deep in the pine woods, and he notified Lieutenant Wands to delay departure of the wood train until there was some indication the good weather would hold through the day.

  About ten o’clock Carrington ordered the train to move out. As though he had some premonition of danger, he attached an extra guard from E Company under Corporal Legrow so that soldiers and civilian teamsters together formed an armed force of almost ninety men. Less than an hour later, as the post guard was changing, pickets on Pilot Hill began wigwagging the signal for many Indians attacking the train. Companies were bugled out immediately, and as the men hurried to assigned positions, two Indians appeared on the slope across Big Piney. They dismounted beyond rifle range, wrapped themselves in red blankets, and sat down near a t
ree to watch the action inside the fort. The time was now almost eleven o’clock.

  At the first alarm, Carrington ordered Captain Powell to take command of the relief party. The colonel had been satisfied with the efficient yet cautious manner in which Powell had handled the Indians on the 19th, and saw no reason to use another officer now. When Captain Fetterman reported in front of headquarters with Company A, however, he reminded Carrington that he outranked Powell and demanded firmly that he be given the relief command.

  With some misgivings Carrington acquiesced, and told Fetterman to move out with his own company, A, and a detachment of C Company. Lieutenant Grummond would follow with the cavalry in time to overtake the infantry before they reached the besieged wood train. “Support the wood train,” Carrington ordered. “Relieve it and report to me. Do not engage or pursue Indians at its expense. Under no circumstances pursue over the ridge, that is, Lodge Trail Ridge.”23

  Fetterman saluted and turned back to the assembled infantrymen. Sergeants began barking orders, and Companies A and C moved out on the double for the south gate. Carrington turned to his acting adjutant, Lieutenant Wands, and asked him to hurry after Fetterman’s troops, halt them at the gate, and repeat the orders. The time was now 11:15.

  Meanwhile Lieutenant Grummond had formed his horsemen for a hurried inspection. Carrington himself walked down the line of dismounted men, inspecting rifles and carbines. A number of the mounted infantry were dismissed from formation because of ammunition shortages or faulty weapons, but all of the twenty-seven cavalrymen reporting for duty passed inspection. Only a few days earlier Carrington had transferred the regimental band’s Spencer carbines to the troopers.

  During the inspection Private Thomas Maddeon, the regimental armorer, stepped forward and asked permission to join the relief party. Maddeon, a favorite of the colonel, had often expressed a desire for action. Carrington glanced at his rifle and told him to join a small detail from H Company. Captain Brown also appeared, eager for “one more chance,” as he expressed it, “to bring in the scalp of Red Cloud myself.”24 He added with a smile that he had arranged to borrow a mount from Jimmy Carrington—the mottled pony, Calico. Two other eager volunteers were James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher, civilian employees, both of whom had been officers during the Civil War. They were armed with new 16-shot Henry rifles, and were the envy of the infantrymen with their obsolete single-shot muzzle-loading Springfields.

  “I was standing in front of my door next to the commanding officer’s headquarters,” Frances Grummond recorded, “and both saw and heard all that transpired. I was filled with dread and horror at the thought that after my husband’s hairbreadth escape scarcely three weeks before he could be so eager to fight the Indians again. …

  “To my husband was given the order, ‘Report to Captain Fetterman, implicitly obey orders, and never leave him.’ Solicitude on my behalf prompted Lieutenant Wands to urge my husband ‘for his family’s sake to be prudent and avoid rash movements, or any pursuit,’ and with these orders ringing in their ears they left the gate. Before they were out of hearing Colonel Carrington sprang upon the banquet inside the stockade (the sentry walk), halted the column, and in clear tones heard by everybody, repeated his orders more minutely, ‘Under no circumstances must you cross Lodge Trail Ridge;’ and the column moved quickly from sight.”25 As Grummond’s mounted men left the gate, the time was nearing 11:30.

  Carrington, watching from the sentry platform, saw that Fetterman was not following the wagon road which led south of Sullivant Hills but had turned into the north trail which ran between the hills and Lodge Trail Ridge. This was the same route which Carrington himself had followed on the 6th when the objective had been to take the Indians in reverse, and the colonel assumed now that Fetterman had a similar plan in mind. Within a minute or so, Grummond was swinging his mounted column into the trail; he overtook Fetterman’s foot soldiers at the crossing of Big Piney just south of Lodge Trail Ridge.

  “I remarked the fact,” Carrington reported later, “that he [Fetterman] had deployed his men as skirmishers, and was evidently moving wisely up the creek and along the southern slope of Lodge Trail Ridge, with good promise of cutting off the Indians as they should withdraw, repulsed at the train, and his position giving him perfect vantage ground to save the train if the Indians pressed the attack. It is true that the usual course was to follow the road directly to the train, but the course adopted was not an error, unless there was then a purpose to disobey orders.”26

  At about this same time Carrington suddenly remembered that no surgeon had been assigned to Fetterman’s command, and he immediately ordered Assistant Surgeon C. M. Hines and two orderlies to mount up and ride directly for the wood train. If a surgeon was not needed there, Hines was to swing around Sullivant Hills and join Fetterman. The surgeon and his escort had scarcely galloped out of the gate when the pickets on Pilot Hill signaled that the wood train was no longer under attack, that the wagons had broken corral, and were proceeding unmolested toward the pinery.

  During the next few minutes, Carrington’s attention was distracted by a party of about twenty Indians which appeared across Big Piney near the Bozeman Road ford. Noting that they were within howitzer range, he ordered the gunners to drop a few case shot among them. At the first explosion, thirty more Indians were flushed out of the brush, one falling from his pony. The party scattered, fleeing toward the valley north of Lodge Trail Ridge.

  For the first time since the alarm, Carrington relaxed. He stepped down from his position on the banquette and walked across the graveled street before officers’ row and entered the rear of his headquarters. He did not know, of course, that the Indians at that moment were engaged in decoying Fetterman’s men over Lodge Trail Ridge.

  5.

  A few minutes before twelve o’clock, Fetterman’s command was moving up Lodge Trail Ridge, with Grummond’s cavalry out on the flanks and advancing ahead of the infantry. Along the slope, little bands of decoys raced ponies back and forth, the young warriors yipping their wolflike barks, taunting the soldiers, waving blankets to frighten the soldiers’ horses. When Fetterman gave orders to the infantry to fire, the decoys danced their ponies away, but as soon as the firing stopped, the Indians darted back into range, daring the soldiers to follow and shoot again.

  Fetterman had seen no fighting such as this when he soldiered with Sherman in Georgia. He was accustomed to orthodox lines of battle. He knew how to form salients for defense, to storm rifle pits, to handle men under heavy artillery fire. But these Indian warriors, unlike his former Confederate adversaries, refused to follow the rules laid down in military manuals.

  As he urged his infantrymen forward to overtake the cavalrymen on the crest of the ridge, the small party of Indians which had been fired upon by Carrington’s howitzers came galloping along the Bozeman Road just below. These Indians slowed and joined the decoys. For a short while Fetterman held his position, the fort yet in view, his infantrymen still firing by command at an occasional daring Indian who rode within easy rifle range. When the decoys saw that the soldiers were reluctant to pursue, they became more reckless than ever, zigzagging their ponies and screaming insults.

  By this time the warriors who had made the original attack upon the wagon train appeared to the south, some following Peno Creek valley, while many were beginning to ascend the slope of Lodge Trail Ridge in Fetterman’s rear. It is possible that at this moment Fetterman made a hasty decision to drop north off Lodge Trail Ridge, kill as many of the outnumbered decoys as possible, and then swing back east along the Bozeman Road to the fort.

  But if he intended to turn east when he struck the Bozeman Road, he changed his mind and turned west. Perhaps the tantalizing decoys offered too many easy targets to disregard. At high noon Fetterman gave the command to move, the cavalry at a walk so the infantry could keep closed up. They entered the Bozeman Trail where it ran along a narrow ridge sloping to the northwest, and followed this descent past a few large boulders toward t
he flats of Peno Creek. There were eighty-one men, about half of them mounted, the cavalrymen so eager to overtake the decoys that the gap began widening between horsemen and infantry. The firing was fairly regular now and several decoys were wounded, some fatally. Every hoofbeat, every footfall, however, brought these eighty-one men closer to the great ambush—two thousand Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapaho, waiting in concealment in the high grass of the flats and behind the rocky ridges on either side of the trail.

  Among the individual Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who risked their lives to lure the soldiers into the trap were several who during the next decade would become famous chiefs—Crazy Horse, Dull Knife, Black Shield, Big Nose, White Bull. Crazy Horse won a great name for himself that day with his acts of defiance, sometimes dismounting within rifle range and pretending to ignore the presence of the soldiers and the screams of their bullets.

  Years later in his old age Red Cloud claimed to have directed the fighting, but the testimony of several Indian participants indicates that the Oglala leader was not present. On that day, they said, he was either on his way down from Tongue River, or on a recruiting mission to the north. But whether he was there or not, the ambush was the fruition of Red Cloud’s long summer campaign of harassment, put into execution by such leaders as High Back Bone, Red Leaf and Little Wolf.

  A few minutes past noon, the decoys were beginning to ford the broken ice of Peno Creek, with Grummond’s cavalry pressing pursuit. The infantrymen, now well within the silent ambush, were marching rapidly. As soon as all the decoys were across the creek they separated into two parties, riding away from each other, and then turning, came back and crossed files. This crossing of files was the prearranged signal for attack.