The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend

by Drury, Bob

  Then, suddenly, as if by magic, the Indians were gone. Patches of crusty snow up and down Lodge Trail Ridge were smeared with blood, which grew thicker at the site where Bingham and Bowers had fallen, but the Indians had carried off their dead. Carrington ordered a search for the Americans’ bodies. Within the hour they found Sergeant Bowers, his skull split in half but, astonishingly, still alive. However, he died moments later. Not far away Lieutenant Bingham was impaled on a tree stump in a clump of brush, his body bristling with over fifty arrow shafts. By mid-afternoon the troop was back at the post, where Carrington tried to make sense of the blunder-filled fight.

  The cowardice of the inexperienced recruits was at least explicable, if still disgraceful. But Lieutenant Grummond had disobeyed a direct order and, for whatever reason, Lieutenant Bingham had abandoned his men to ride off recklessly to his death—and now the cavalry had no officers. Even Fetterman was at a loss to explain the actions of Bingham, a decorated Civil War commander. “I cannot account for the movement of such an officer of such unquestionable gallantry,” he wrote in his report. Nor had Carrington covered himself with glory when he had outpaced his own squad and led them into an ambush. Given all that had gone wrong, it was a near miracle that Bingham and Bowers were the only men killed. Another sergeant and four privates had been wounded, and five horses had been so badly injured that they needed to be put down. More amazingly, Captain Fetterman for once appeared chastened. “This Indian War has become a hand-to-hand fight,” he told Carrington when he delivered his written report. In his own dispatch the colonel generously estimated that at least 10 Indians out of 300 attackers were killed, one by a bullet from his own Colt, and perhaps twice as many wounded.

  The apprehension that had seized Frances Grummond from the moment she arrived at Fort Phil Kearny “deepened from that hour. No sleep ever came to my weary eyes, except fitfully, for many nights. And even then in my dreams I could see [my husband] riding madly from me with the Indians in pursuit.”

  For President Johnson, beset with the task of piecing together a sundered nation, the skirmish was a minor incident on a treeless prairie so distant it might as well have been the moon.

  For Red Cloud it was a dress rehearsal.

  34

  SOLDIERS IN BOTH HANDS

  Red Cloud was convinced: these foolish soldiers were ready to be slaughtered. He had watched the previous day’s fighting, and even directed some of it from a high tor in Peno Creek valley, marveling at the dull-witted behavior of the Bluecoats. They were like spoiled, ignorant children—dangle a piece of hard molasses in front of them and they would do anything, no matter how stupid, to grab it. Back at the Indian camp on the Tongue, Crazy Horse described in detail the parts of the battle Red Cloud had not personally witnessed. The young warrior told of twice luring officers—first Bingham, then Grummond—away from their troops, as easily as separating an old cow from a buffalo herd. When Red Cloud summoned the Lakota subchief Yellow Eagle, who had led the initial attack on the wood train, he boasted of baiting Fetterman’s and Bingham’s larger relief detail and allowing them to ride past him while he lay in wait for the Little White Chief’s smaller patrol.

  If it had worked once, why not a second time with a larger force? Red Cloud conferred with his allies. The Miniconjou Head Men High Backbone and Black Shield agreed, as did the Cheyenne war chiefs Roman Nose and Medicine Man. Two Arapaho—Little Chief and Sorrel Horse—also said their seventy-five braves were prepared to fight. All told there were over 2,000 warriors. And thus it was decided. On the first auspicious day after the next full moon the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho would ride south. They would again feint toward the soldiers’ wood train, and again work the decoy trick along the ridge. But this time they would lure as many men as possible out of the fort, kill them all, and burn the American outpost.

  Red Cloud had come to the same conclusion as Jim Bridger, who told Carrington morosely after the December 6 fight, “Your men who fought down south are crazy. They don’t know anything about fighting Indians.”

  • • •

  Three days later they buried Lieutenant Bingham and Sergeant Bowers. Little imagination is required to place yourself in the cracked, toe-numbing split-leather boots of the reinforcements newly arrived at Fort Phil Kearny as they watched the tin-lined pine coffins being lowered into the frozen earth. It was Sunday, December 9, and none of the forty-three infantrymen had been involved in the fight. Nor had their commanding officer, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Wilbur Arnold. Colonel Carrington had deemed the newcomers too raw, and while the rest of the 2nd Battalion chased Indians up and down the rambling trails across Lodge Trail Ridge and into the Peno Creek valley, Lieutenant Arnold and his men had been busy constructing their own housing along the post’s barracks row. Arnold had come closest to the action when he led an ambulance detail to retrieve the bodies of Bingham and Bowers. Even this tangential task was cause for concern. Carrington had expressly directed Captain Powell to bring the ambulance to the site. But Powell had disobeyed the written order, remained at the post, and sent the green Arnold instead.

  As the new men looked around they would have noticed the fresh graves dotting the little cemetery beneath Pilot Knob. It was filling rapidly, and not one death could be attributed to natural causes. They doffed their caps when Lieutenant Grummond and six other members of the Masonic lodge accorded their brother Bingham the Masons’ final honors; they remained bareheaded in the biting wind while the post chaplain prayed over the site. Before the caskets were closed they watched Captain Brown pin his treasured Army of the Cumberland badge to the sergeant’s uniform breast. Brown had fought with Bowers from Stones River to Atlanta. At the conclusion of the rite the newcomers helped cover the graves with mounds of frozen dirt and piled small boulders on top of them to keep the wolves out.

  The same afternoon the troop also bade farewell to Lieutenant Bisbee, who had been transferred to Omaha. With Colonel Carrington’s permission, Bisbee had refitted a coach with double boards to transport his wife and young son. The temperature had fallen below zero, but the canvas-topped wagon was equipped with a small sheet-iron camp stove whose pipe protruded through a hole in the roof. Bisbee, who would ride beside it, was nearly unrecognizable beneath layers of woolen and buffalo-hair shirts and pants, gloves, and a hat. He also wore “buffalo-lined hip boots over two pairs of woolen socks.” Seven cavalrymen were selected to escort the Bisbees as far as Fort Laramie, and before the detail departed Captain Fetterman handed Bisbee a package to be delivered to Lieutenant Bingham’s sister, Stella, in St. Charles, Minnesota. It contained his unsent letters, sword, sash, and epauletes. His other effects, as was the Army custom, were sold at auction, with the proceeds sent to the adjutant general to be placed in the War Department’s general fund. “Your brother was much esteemed by all who knew him,” Fetterman wrote to Stella Bingham, “and his death is severely felt by all.”

  Not least by Colonel Carrington, who was down to six officers to maintain control of an edgy garrison. He decided to start from square one. Captain Fetterman and Captain Powell, who replaced Lieutenant Bingham as cavalry commander, were ordered to drill the entire battalion each morning and evening in military basics such as mounting and dismounting, loading and firing weapons on command, and forming columns of twos and fours. It was fortunate for the drillmasters that the Indians also appeared to be regrouping. In the two weeks following the December 6 fight not a single hostile incident was recorded, although the Lakota scouts remained ever-present on distant hills, signaling with mirrors, smoke, and flags. Carrington also used the lull to lay in as much winter wood as possible, as well as to personally oversee the construction of a forty-five-foot wagon bridge spanning Big Piney Creek from Piney Island to the wood train road. The fact that remedial military courses were necessary in hostile territory was disturbing, although Captain Fetterman and Captain Brown apparently did not think so.

  After supper on the evening of December 19 the two called on Colonel Carringto
n in his private quarters. Quartermaster Brown, who sported two Colt revolvers on his hips, had ostentatiously hung his spurs from the buttonholes of his greatcoat. He did the talking. The Indians had broken the thirteen-day quiescence that morning, again raiding the wood train, but were driven off by Captain Powell’s relief detail. Before Powell left, Carrington had explicitly directed him to “heed the lessons of the Sixth. Do not pursue Indians across Lodge Trail Ridge.” This time Powell obeyed his orders, and neither side had inflicted or sustained any casualties. This, Brown said now, was a perfect example of the sort of pinprick hostilities that were demoralizing the men. But there was a solution.

  He said that he and Fetterman had spoken to the miners, and all forty as well as an additional ten civilians had agreed to join an equal number of the battalion’s most able troopers to ride against the hostiles in their camp on the Tongue. Appealing to the colonel’s proprietary and meticulous engineering mind, Brown added that destroying the Indian village would ensure a peaceful winter during which construction of the fort could be completed without interruption. It would also be likely to augur the reopening of the Bozeman Trail come spring. Brown had stalled his transfer orders all he could and was scheduled to leave for Fort Laramie the day after Christmas. He remembered the thrill of defeating the combined Lakota-Arapaho raiding party presumably led by Captain North back in September, and wanted one more crack at the savages. Fetterman said nothing.

  Carrington showed polite interest while hearing out his quartermaster. When Brown was finished the colonel rather nonchalantly ticked off the reasons he could not allow it. Fifty seasoned veterans were the core of his troop. With them gone his pickets and escorts would be stretched to their limits with untested recruits, and the mail riders would have to cease. He handed Brown that morning’s duty report. Only forty-two horses had been deemed serviceable (as Brown well knew). Were his two officers proposing to leave Fort Phil Kearny without mounts? He intended, Carrington said, to continue his defensive policy until more reinforcements arrived. As if to buck up their spirits, he read to the officers the contents of a dispatch he had sent by special courier that day to Fort Laramie to be telegraphed to General Cooke: “Indians appeared today and fired on wood train, but were repulsed. They are accomplishing nothing, while I am perfecting all details of the post and preparing for active movements.”

  Their time would come, the colonel implied, if unfortunately not for the departing Brown. The visibly dejected quartermaster said good night. On his way out the door he turned to Carrington and added that, as impossible as it sounded, he felt that he could kill a dozen Indians himself. Fetterman still said nothing.

  Had Colonel Carrington agreed to the plan, the chances are excellent that Fetterman’s and Brown’s 100-man troop would have ridden directly into 2,000 warriors camped just over Lodge Trail Ridge.

  • • •

  They had arrived that morning, a large war party consisting of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. On the ride south from the Tongue they had observed the same formalities as before the attacks on Julesburg and Bridge Station—official Pipe Bearers formed a van ahead of Red Cloud and the other war chiefs leading the column, while Strong Hearts and Cheyenne Crazy Dogs kept discipline on its flanks. They made camp about ten miles north of the American post, and following the brief skirmish with Powell’s force, they dug in for the night. A snowstorm swept in on a bitter north wind. By dawn on December 20 the snow was still falling, a feathery powder that blanketed the prairie, and the Head Men agreed to postpone any more fighting for at least a day while their warriors erected small, mobile tepees in three abutting circles, one for each tribe, and constructed windbreaks out of their red Hudson Bay blankets. They lit warming fires and around midday a few hunting parties returned with fresh deer and buffalo meat, but it was not nearly enough to feed the entire camp, and most of the braves gnawed on hunks of frozen pemmican. Scouts were posted on the hills overlooking the fort. They reported that the weather had also kept most of the soldiers indoors.

  Red Cloud and his fellow war leaders decided that the best place to lay their ambush was on the forks of Peno Creek, about halfway between the Indian camp and the American fort. They would trap the Americans on the flats of the little valley carved by the creek, attacking from the breaks and leafless dogwood thickets dense enough to hide a large force. But what if the soldiers again refused to cross the Lodge Trail Ridge en masse and ride down into the valley? The previous feint on the wood train had been to gauge the Bluecoats’ reaction. Young braves on fast ponies, including Crazy Horse, had been planted on the ridgeline to again lure the soldiers on. That Powell’s detachment had ignored the decoys after scattering the raiding party was worrisome. Perhaps the Americans were not as stupid as they looked. The tribes needed an omen.

  • • •

  When a hermaphrodite, or “half-man,” was born into a Lakota band the child was believed to have special powers of divination. Sioux and Cheyenne warriors put such faith in the ability of a hermaphrodite to predict the future that battles were often postponed on his advice. On this day Red Cloud summoned the most powerful Lakota half-man, a Miniconjou, to the top of a butte overlooking the forks of Peno Creek. The war chief waved his arm across the potential battlefield, and the diviner mounted his sorrel pony, threw a black blanket over his head, and made three wild, zigzagging runs over the cuts and mesas, nearly to Lodge Trail Ridge. Each time when he returned he fell from his mount and rolled in the snow before sitting up and claiming that he had Bluecoats in his convulsing, balled fist: first ten, then twenty, and finally thirty. On each occasion the war chiefs told him that it was not enough. He returned from his frenzied fourth gallop, fell to the frozen earth as if in a trance, and when he came out of it said that he now had American soldiers in both hands. When asked how many, he opened his fists and declared that there were over one hundred. A raucous shout echoed through the hills.

  As evening dissolved into night the weather turned again, and a temperate breeze blew up from the Southern Plains to melt most of the snow, although it remained deep in the mountains and shaded gulches. It was decided at the council fire that the next morning would be a good day to fight.

  35

  THE HALF-MAN’S OMEN

  December 21, 1866, dawned glorious, the winter sun bursting like a red dahlia over Pilot Knob. It was the kind of crisp morning that often follows a storm in the Powder River Country, with the air cold and dry and the wind still. It was a dramatic turn from the previous night’s unseasonable warmth, and a harbinger of a colder storm front moving in. Most of the snow around the post had melted, but Colonel Carrington knew that the powder would still be deep in the pine forests. He delayed the wood train’s morning departure until he was convinced that the weather would hold at least for the day.

  On the far side of Lodge Trail Ridge Red Cloud was also grateful for the snowmelt. His warriors could now hide themselves in the draws and ravines of the Peno Creek valley without leaving tracks. A mile-long section of the Bozeman Trail followed the creek on a thin saddle connecting two buttes; it was called the High Backbone, and its edges fell off precipitously on either side into wending cutbanks thick with bushes and tall scrub. Red Cloud would position his force in these thickets while Yellow Eagle would again lead a smaller raiding party of perhaps forty warriors toward the pinery; the soldiers might find that number more enticing. When Yellow Eagle departed, the Oglala, Cheyenne, and Arapaho formed up to the southwest of the High Backbone, and the bulk of the Miniconjous and a few scattered Sans Arcs concentrated below the saddle’s bank on the northeast. Red Cloud and his battle chiefs rode about another quarter-mile down the valley and climbed the tallest hill. From here, with his captured field glasses, Red Cloud could see both the ambush site and the wood train road winding toward the new bridge onto Piney Island.

  At 10 a.m. Colonel Carrington ordered the woodcutters to set out from the fort, this time with an extra guard attached to the usual mounted escort. All told there were perhaps nine
ty soldiers and civilians in the detail, about double the usual number. Less than an hour later pickets on Pilot Knob waved their coded flags, signaling that a raiding party was attacking the wood train. Bugles sounded inside the post and two Indians appeared above the fort across Big Piney Creek on the south slope of Lodge Trail Ridge. They dismounted, wrapped their red Hudson Bay blankets tight about them, and sat beneath a lone serviceberry tree watching the activity inside the log walls.

  Carrington was later to say that he had sent for Captain Powell to lead the relief detail, because Powell had demonstrated common sense and restraint two days earlier. He was surprised when Fetterman arrived on the steps of his headquarters at the head of a company of infantry and a detachment of Company C’s cavalry, fifty-three men in all. Fetterman reminded Carrington that, as with Captain Ten Eyck, he outranked Powell in length of service, and asked to be the one to take out the relief detail. Carrington was in a bind. Men were under attack several miles up the road and he did not have time to waste arguing the finer points of command with his obstreperous number two. He acquiesced, but—he was to testify—not before issuing these orders to Fetterman: “Support the wood train. Relieve it and report to me. Do not engage or pursue Indians at its expense. Under no circumstances pursue over . . . Lodge Trail Ridge.” No one else heard Carrington give these orders.