The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  On New Year’s Day Carrington issued his first general order of 1867, offering a solemn memorial to the men who fell in the Fetterman fight. “As a feeble tribute to their memory, their names are published in this order, so that the records of the post shall bear them in remembrance so long as the post shall remain … a copy of this order shall be read before each company and at the first garrison parade …”3

  In addition to the three officers and seventy-six enlisted men killed in Peno Valley, Carrington included the names of Lieutenant Bingham and Sergeant Bowers, killed on December 6. Had he summed up losses from the day of Fort Phil Kearny’s establishment, he would have listed five officers, ninety-one enlisted men, and fifty-eight civilians killed, with many additional wounded. Indians had attacked almost every wagon train and traveler attempting to pass over the Montana Road.

  By January 4 the weather had moderated sufficiently for a mail party to start for Laramie, and Carrington composed a long report for General Cooke in which he claimed the Fetterman disaster confirmed his previous judgment as to the hostility of the Indians. “It vindicates every report from my pen,” he wrote. “It vindicates my administration of the Mountain District. … It vindicates my application so often made for reinforcements … it proves correct my report of 1,500 lodges of hostile Indians on Tongue River.”

  Having thus attempted to justify his position in the disaster of December 21, Carrington added significantly: “My duty will be done when I leave, as ordered to my new regimental headquarters, Fort Casper.”4

  This transfer order, which he must have dreaded, came with the arrival of his replacement, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry W. Wessells, on January 16. First to sight this long-awaited relief column from Laramie and Reno was the picket on Pilot Hill, who immediately signaled the lookout on Carrington’s headquarters tower. “The bugle call and the long roll were never more gladly echoed in hearts,” wrote Frances Grummond. “Our spontaneous cry was ‘Open wide the gates, and admit our deliverers!’ We hardly had patience to don protective outer-garments because of the flow of our quickened blood, and our common outbreak of joy was simply, ‘At last! At last! We are saved! We are saved! Phillips was saved, saved for us!’ … The band was on hand with its preparations for a share in that welcome and an escort was hastened from the gates to facilitate their arrival. As for myself, I felt that I could have hugged every half-frozen man as he entered, and I still feel that their story as it unfolded would have justified the impulse, if not the action.”5

  The relief column’s story had begun unfolding on December 26 a few minutes after General Cooke in Omaha received the first authentic telegraph report of the Fetterman disaster. Without waiting for Carrington’s full report, Cooke dispatched a curt order to Laramie:

  Brevet Brigadier General I. N. Palmer, commanding Fort Laramie will send from the garrison of that post two companies of the second cavalry and four companies of the eighteenth infantry, to report to Brevet Brigadier General Wessells at Fort Reno.

  Brevet Brigadier General Wessells will proceed with the re-enforcements and assume command of Fort Philip Kearny, and will also have authority to order such movements of the troops at Forts Reno and C. F. Smith as he may find necessary. The commanding officers at Forts Reno and C. F. Smith will obey all orders they may receive from Brevet Brigadier General Wessells.

  Colonel H. B. Carrington, 18th United States Infantry, will be relieved from the command of Fort Philip Kearny by Brevet Brigadier General Wessells, and will proceed immediately to Fort Casper, to which post the headquarters of the new 18th Regiment have been heretofore ordered, and assume command of the post and that regiment.6

  When General Palmer received this message, Laramie was experiencing its worst weather of the winter. He waited hopefully for the blizzard to pass, then replied on the 27th: “The most violent blinding storm now raging; there would be nothing gained by moving in such a snow storm; meantime all preparations which can be made in-doors are going on.”7

  Cooke meanwhile continued to counter any possible criticism of his own responsibility in the Fetterman affair by directing blame toward Carrington. “Colonel Carrington is very plausible,” he wrote General Grant on the 27th, “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.”8

  Not until New Year’s Day were the first relief units able to leave Fort Laramie—four companies of the 18th Infantry’s 1st Battalion under Major James Van Voast. Forty-eight hours later, two companies of the 2nd Cavalry under Lieutenant Gordon moved out, and overtook the infantry January 5.

  “On account of the severity of the weather and deep snow,” said Gordon, “there was no grazing for the animals, a scarcity of wood, and the water in the streams that we crossed was partly frozen to the bottom, except in the deep holes, where we were compelled to chop holes in the ice and water the animals out of buckets. … Our long forage gave out after being on the road ten days and the mules were cold and hungry for hay … they broke their halters, eat at wagon tongues, manes and tails of each other. Had to replace some tongues and ridge poles on wagons.”9

  At Fort Reno, Wessells was informed of Cooke’s order naming him as Carrington’s replacement. He took command of the expedition, which reached Fort Phil Kearny on the 16th, “with but one casualty, a man being frozen to death.”10

  Carrington reacted mildly to the news that one of his subordinates, Lieutenant-Colonel and Brevet Brigadier-General Wessells, was replacing him. He had suffered so many frustrations from department headquarters that one more scarcely mattered, although he was bitter over the way Cooke had deliberately worded the replacement orders to make it appear “that the purpose of changing my post occurred simultaneously with report of the massacre, before receipt of my telegram.”11 He may have taken some satisfaction from the War Department’s abrupt removal of General Cooke himself from command of the Department of the Platte shortly afterward, but thirty years would pass before Carrington could forgive Cooke for the manner in which he handled his transfer from Fort Phil Kearny.

  On the day that General Christopher C. Augur reported as Cooke’s replacement in Omaha, January 23, Carrington was making an emotional departure from the fort he had dreamed all his life of building and commanding. The dream had come to fruition, flourished, and died all within six short months. He later summed up the midwinter change of stations in a single trenchant paragraph: “Upon being relieved I moved to Fort Casper with regimental headquarters, staff and officers’ families, with mercury at 38° below zero (the second day), and having more than half my escort of sixty men frosted the first sixty-five miles, requiring two amputations at Reno.”12

  Margaret Carrington and Frances Grummond both recorded much more detailed accounts of this harrowing march. Frances was in an advanced state of pregnancy by this time, sensitive to every movement of the jolting wagon in which she rode. She had insisted on taking her husband’s body with her to Tennessee, and Carrington had arranged for George Grummond’s pine box to be disinterred and placed in one of the wagons.

  In preparation for the journey, wagon covers were doubled, and carpenters boarded up sides and ends of wagon beds, leaving only a tiny window at each end. They placed a hinged door at the back of each vehicle for entry, and near the door a small sheet-iron stove made from a stovepipe, with a smoke vent through the wagon cover. Pine knots and short blocks of wood for fuel were packed in one corner. Women and children huddled themselves into cloaks, shawls, beaver hoods, buffalo boots, and all the furs they owned or could borrow.

  Snow was falling at 1:30 P.M. on the 23rd when Carrington gave the order to march. The first afternoon and on into the dark night, the column struggled against the storm and the snow-packed road. A pioneer corps was formed and sent in advance to shovel out the deepest drifts. By ten o’clock that night, they had made only six miles. Carrington ordered a corral on a summit for defensive reasons, leaving the party open to fierce gusts of wind which almos
t swept the sentries off their feet.

  At one o’clock in the morning the moon rose, casting a cold blue light across the frozen land. Carrington ordered the bugle sounded, and by three o’clock they were moving again. The sky was clear, the stars brilliant, the aurora borealis dancing weirdly behind them in the north sky. The thermometer in Margaret Carrington’s wagon dropped to thirteen below zero.

  On through the moonlit night the column crawled, wheels creaking, the cold intense. When Frances Grummond looked out her peephole window at dawn, she saw hundreds of buffalo wallowing in the snow. All that day the column was surrounded by buffalo, twenty-five miles of buffalo—a cheering sight, for it indicated lack of Indians in the vicinity.

  At duskfall they halted on Crazy Woman’s Fork and formed a corral in a grove beside the stream. Pickets were stationed on an adjoining bluff. The men dug wood out of the snow for night fires; as the wood burned the snow melted, then turned to ice, forming a crystal ring around each fire. They had to use axes to break their bread; coffee taken from the fires turned to frozen slush before it could be swallowed. From each wagon vent, smoke poured in plumes, but Margaret Carrington’s children were crying from the cold. The turkey she had cooked before leaving the fort was frozen so hard she had to chop pieces from it with a hatchet, then soften them over her little stove before they could be eaten.

  Reveille again was at one o’clock in the morning. As the moon rose, the half-frozen men began shoveling snow off the stream, broke through the ice for water to refill the kegs. A cavalryman had to be lifted from the saddle, his legs frozen from toes to knees. To keep other mounted men from suffering a similar fate, Carrington ordered their legs lashed with whips to start the circulation going.

  Inside the wagons, the women wrapped themselves in buffalo skins and beaver hoods and sat with their feet to the tiny red-hot stoves. Margaret Carrington’s thermometer dropped to forty below; then the mercury congealed in the bulb.

  As soon as teams were hitched, the column crossed the creek, moved forward to a sixty-foot bluff and began a slow ascent. Only one wagon could go up at a time, details of men tugging at the wheels, others pulling with ropes.

  “When my turn came,” Frances Grummond said, “I rolled over on my bed, clung for dear life to the sides of the wagon, with eyes shut and jaws clamped, to assist or ignore the situation, both being equally ineffective, for it all depended upon those mules. … Of all rides I ever had taken in army life or out of it, this one in an army wagon without springs, with mules on a gallop over such a road, or no road, exceeded all in utter misery. One learns something from such an experience and I had learned to seize the sideboards of the wagon firmly, half reclining on the mattress with pillows compactly adjusted, and holding my breath abide the result.”13

  Dawn was breaking when the last wagon reached the crest of the bluff. Fort Reno and temporary security still lay twenty miles to the south. By midmorning the sun’s glare was blinding and those who had goggles put them on. All day buffalo herds moved alongside, occasionally coming close as if seeking company, the bulls tearing at the snow to uncover grass. Carrington passed along an order forbidding drivers to crack their whips lest the buffalo become frightened and stampede the train. There was one false alarm of Indians attacking the rear wagons, and an hour was lost in preparing defenses.

  At dusk the first wagon rolled into Fort Reno, ending a sixty-five-mile journey that had required almost three days’ time. They were all thankful to be alive, even the men who must lose fingers, toes and legs by amputation in the post’s hospital.

  After three days’ rest in the warm quarters of Reno, they took the trail again, this time to Fort Casper, a march that was without perilous incident until the final day. As they neared the fort, Frances Grummond noted that her wagon was moving with increasing speed, and looking out her window she discovered the whole train at a trot, in column of six wagons front, moving all in mass. Indians had approached the train, stealing some of the led horses, but they dashed away without a fight.

  At Casper, Carrington learned that the unpredictable higher command back in the States had changed its bureaucratic mind and transferred the 18th Regiment’s headquarters to Fort McPherson. With the weather still formidable, he had to lead his little column back over a long stretch of rough trail already traveled. Near Sage Creek, while he was galloping his horse, his revolver was accidentally discharged, wounding him seriously in the thigh. Luck seemed to have run out for the Little White Chief. The surgeons prepared a sling for him in his wife’s wagon, and thus he was carried on to Fort Laramie. After a two-weeks convalescence, he traveled by ambulance to Fort McPherson, where he reassumed command of the 18th Infantry. And there at McPherson during the early weeks of spring, he faced the ordeal of a special commission formed to fix responsibility for the Fetterman disaster.

  XI:

  AFTERMATH

  1.

  WHILE COLONEL CARRINGTON WAS marching his headquarters complement through the blizzards of Wyoming, recovering from his wound at Fort Laramie, and proceeding to his new headquarters at Fort McPherson, he was also becoming a national figure. In newspapers and illustrated weeklies he was in most cases the target of uninformed journalists who held him solely responsible for the “Fetterman Massacre.” In the War Department he was rapidly assuming the role of scapegoat. The Department of Interior’s Office of Indian Affairs issued statements absolving the “friendly Indians” and placing all blame on Carrington. He was the victim of a public trial of which he was unaware for some weeks, and in which he was given no opportunity to present his side of the affair.

  One correspondent for a New York newspaper described the fight as taking place at the gates of the fort. “When the last band of survivors were driven to the gates of the fort, knocking and screaming in vain for admission; when the last cartridge for revolver, carbine, and rifle was expended; when the sabers and butts of muskets were broken; and when, leaning against the gates, weary and bleeding and all resistance fruitless, all fell in one heap of mangled humanity, unsupported and uncared for.” While all this was occurring, the writer continued, Carrington and two full companies were looking on, afraid to fire or open the gates lest the garrison within be massacred by the attacking Indians. An illustrated weekly carried a report from “the only eye witness of the massacre” who supposedly was cut off by Indians, and watched the fight from a nearby thicket. This survivor vividly described repeated cavalry charges and saw “the last shot discharged by the last survivor through his own brain.”1 Newspapers in New York and Washington also accused Carrington of giving gunpowder to his enemies, and said he permitted officers’ wives to toss packages of sugar and coffee over the stockade to passing squaws.

  Not to be outdone by these lurid stories in the press, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Lewis V. Bogy, issued a statement claiming that the Indians around Fort Phil Kearny had been provoked into attacking Carrington’s forces. “These Indians being in absolute want of guns and ammunition to make their winter hunt,” he said, “were on a friendly visit to the fort, desiring to communicate with the commanding officer … so that they might be enabled to procure their winter supply of buffalo.”2 In a later statement Bogy declared “the whole affair seems incredible … and I find it difficult to account for the tragedy upon any other theory than that heretofore advanced by this office, to wit: that the Indians, almost in a state of starvation, having made repeated attempts at a conference, that they might make peace and obtain supplies for their families … were rendered desperate, and resorted to the stratagem which proved too successful. It seems as if the officer commanding could have avoided the catastrophe; and it seems also that men thus armed could have repelled an attack by all the Indians in Western Dakota.”3

  Commissioner Bogy ridiculed Carrington’s estimate that three thousand Indians could have assembled in one place to attack Fetterman’s detachment. “An enormous exaggeration,” he charged, and then also expressed disbelief that three hundred Indians would have attack
ed the wood train and withdrawn without inflicting casualties. Clearly the Commissioner knew nothing of Indian decoy fighting or very little else about affairs in Dakota Territory.

  His statements, however, precipitated Carrington into the midst of the perennial political struggle between the War Department and the Office of Indian Affairs. This struggle had been raging off and on since 1849 when control of Indian affairs was transferred from the War Department to the Interior Department. It was the viewpoint of the military that the bureau had been corrupted by politicians who were dishonest, inefficient, and working at cross purposes with national policy. It was the viewpoint of the Interior Department that Indian affairs could be better administered by civilians with humanitarian objectives. Each frequently accused the other of endangering lives, and neither overlooked an opportunity to make the other appear blameworthy.

  General Sherman, who had recently completed several months’ inspection of western frontier posts, advised General Grant that “if our troops are to keep open a highway of travel they must be allowed to take their own precautions and make their regulations for the guardianship of the Indians. The Indian Bureau should be transferred to the War Department.”4 On February 1, Grant himself expressed this same view in a letter to Secretary of War Stanton, claiming that events at Fort Phil Kearny “show urgent necessity for an immediate transfer of the Indian Bureau to the War Department.”5 The Army and Navy Journal leaped into the fight with bitter editorials denouncing the Indian Bureau’s practice of issuing arms to Indians, “thus supplying the Indians with the means of repeating indefinitely the scenes of Fort Phil Kearny.”6