More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  If anyone slept that night it would have been from exhaustion. Toward dawn, a favorite time for Indian attacks, everyone was manning the stockade walls. They watched and waited. No attack came.

  With the benefit of what we now know of their collective personality, one can reasonably say that the idea of a follow-up immediately after their victory probably never occurred to most of the Sioux. But one wonders about Red Cloud. Maybe it was another example of their inability to plan more than one move ahead. Either that or it was just too cold. Nor did they set another ambush in the area of those dead who were still unrecovered. Carrington had every right to assume that they would set such a trap around the remaining dead. Surely it would be unwise to venture out; but not to go might be equally unwise, for it would tell the enemy very clearly just how weak and frightened the garrison had become.

  So, with 80 infantry and a few cavalry, Carrington himself went out. It was a brave thing to do. The bodies were frozen hard. Lifting them into the wagons must have been like stacking logs. The butchery was terrible. “We walked on top of their internals and did not know it. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldier they belonged to. So, the cavalry man got an infantry man’s gutts and an infantry man got a cavalry man’s gutts.” That was a cavalryman’s account. The Colonel’s more detailed description was suppressed for 20 years.

  Slowly the wagons hauled their cargoes back to the fort. That night the blizzard, which had been threatening for the past two days, finally swept down from the mountains. By dawn the snowdrifts were, in places, almost up to the level of the stockade. The Sioux would not even have had to climb over; with snow-shoes they could have walked in. For the next two days, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the storm blew and made burial impossible. Everyone in the fort knew that somewhere out there Phillips and Dixon would be struggling - if they were still alive.

  Strangely, we know nothing more of Dixon. But Phillips made it. Moving mostly at night, in temperatures that were always far below freezing, hiding along the creek bottoms by day, taking care to travel where his horse’s tracks would be quickly obliterated by the drifting snow, he rode nearly 200 miles in three days. He arrived at Horseshoe Telegraph Station early on Christmas Day. The operator tapped out a shortened version of the dispatch to Fort Laramie and beyond to General Cooke in Omaha. But Phillips, though exhausted, must have been conscientious to a fault; he called for a fresh horse and, in temperatures that had fallen to 500F below freezing, battled on a further 40 miles to Fort Laramie. It was as well he did, for the earlier telegraphed message was so garbled that, at Fort Laramie, they had not believed it. Legend has Phillips staggering in on the officers’ Christmas dance. What is more certain is that he now delivered the papers to the garrison commander and was then helped to the post hospital where he spent the next few days recovering from exhaustion and frostbite. Afterwards it was said that he always walked with a limp. In 1899, after 33 years, his widow was awarded $5,000 dollars in belated recognition of one of the great rides of the west.

  In distant Omaha, General Cooke reacted immediately to the message which eventually came down the wire. He relieved Colonel Carrington of his command and ordered Fort Laramie to send four companies of infantry and two of cavalry to Fort Kearny as soon as the weather allowed. He then sent an edited version of Carrington’s dispatch to the War Department in Washington, together with a covering signal of his own. “Colonel Carrington is plausable (sic), an energetic, industrious man in garrison. But it is evident that he has not maintained discipline and that his officers have lost confidence in him.” Obviously, Cooke was not going to defend his subordinate. But, for all that, his comment was not too unfair.

  On the plains the blizzard blew on. It was not until New Year’s Day that the relief column was able to set out. It arrived at Fort Kearny 16 days later. En route it had not been attacked once; it was too cold for even the Sioux. At the fort, they found Captain Wessels in command. It must have galled Carrington to be replaced by an officer who was markedly his junior. He would have brooded on the injustice of it all. If only Fetterman had obeyed orders. If only he himself had gone out to relieve the wood train. If only General Cooke had given him even half the help he had asked for. But now that he had to go, he wanted to be away from the place as quickly as possible.

  Because he was taking several women (widows) and children with him, he waited for the weather to improve. But, after a week, he could delay no longer. For three days his convoy of wagons and its mounted escort crept south through the snowdrifts to Fort Reno. On arrival, two of his men had to have frostbitten fingers amputated by the post surgeon. Then on they went. Somewhere along the way he was redirected to another post further east. It became obvious to the poor man that he had been made the scapegoat for the Fetterman disaster. It was a comfortless zigzag journey that, in a sense, he was to take for the rest of his life.

  The press, then as now, love to create a villain. Carrington, it was said, had looked on from the walls of his fort while his men were chopped up in front of him. He had ordered his rival to his death. He had even given away arms to the Sioux. Some of the more imaginative reports were by “eye witnesses”. There followed army courts of inquiry, Senate investigations and unofficial tribunals in every officers’ mess in the land. All the loud-mouthed politicians who had ever seen a red-skin, and a good many who had not, had a theory.

  Rather surprisingly, Carrington was eventually cleared of all blame by both the Army and by the Senate - partly on the testimony of old Jim Bridger, the scout who had spent nearly 50 years on the frontier. But the official reports were given very little publicity, and Carrington’s military career was finished. He became an academic. He had been neither hero nor villain. He had been ordered to protect the Bozeman Trail without, if possible, provoking the Sioux. At the same time, and in contradiction, he was ordered to bring them to heel, but was denied enough trained men to do so. In short, lacking adequate men and supplies he was ordered to fight a limited war - which even at the best of times is one of the more difficult military assignments.

  And Captain Fetterman? Had he lived, he would have faced a court martial. He might have pointed out that he felt compelled to go to the aid of the impetuous Grummond and his cavalry. And anyway, he had not pursued over that ridge; he had pursued over the rising ground at the far end of it. A hair-splitting alibi? Maybe. But he might have persuaded a court that the interpretation of the order, on which depended either his career or Carrington’s, was capable of more than a single meaning.

  Interestingly, even today, opinion is still divided about the relative culpability of the main players in what the nation quickly called the Fetterman Massacre. Fetterman, in the judgment of some historians (a judgment undoubtedly triggered by that alleged “Give me 80 men” outburst), was an over-confident boaster who, despite a total lack of relevant experience, held a catastrophically low opinion of the Hostiles. If those historians are right, Fetterman’s assessment of the enemy was only echoing that of many in the Army’s high command, particularly Generals Cooke and Sherman. That Fetterman also held a low opinion of his commanding officer is something we know with some certainty from at least one private letter he wrote at the time. So he may have thought that he could (should?) disregard that order not to chase off beyond that ridge. Well, his critics sniff, he surely got his come-uppance, and then some. Pity he took so many good men with him! To other commentators, Fetterman was a disciplined officer who became concerned, sometimes even exasperated, at what he (and some others) saw as their Colonel’s fixation on the detail of fort building, at the expense of going after the Sioux.

  The problem, as is almost always the case following a debacle, was that everyone quickly began playing what today we call the Blame Game: personal reputations are best protected by pointing at someone else, preferably someone else lower down the chain. Right at the top, the President asked difficult questions of General Grant, the head of the army
. Grant demanded answers from General Sherman; Sherman quietly disowned General Cooke; Cooke impugned Carrington. In support of Cooke’s contention that the fort was not, as Carrington complained, ill-supported with supplies and soldiers, Cooke was able to quote an optimistic dispatch that Carrington had sent him only two days before the massacre: “Indians appeared today and fired on the wood train but were repulsed. They accomplished nothing, while I am perfecting all details of the post and preparing for active movements.”

  In the years that followed, the Colonel’s wife, Margaret, had much to do with her husband’s rehabilitation. With its interestingly female perspective, her book, Absaraka, the Experience of an Officer’s Wife on the Plains, sold widely. Shrewdly, she dedicated it to General Sherman. In her text, she was also careful not to denigrate the dead hero, Fetterman. Indeed, she paints him as a man of integrity and character who was, nevertheless, compelled to “reach for laurels that were beyond his reach”. Then, by emphasizing the clarity of her husband’s order about crossing that ridge, she subtly implies Fetterman’s ultimate disobedience. One suspects that she had some help from her husband.

  The debate surrounding the events at Fort Kearny is still alive today. Read Dee Brown’s book, The Fetterman Massacre, or General “Slam” Marshal’s Crimsoned Prairie, or any of the several articles by Robert Murray, or (most recent of all) Shannon Smith’s deeply researched Give Me Eighty Men in which she rides to the rescue of Fetterman’s reputation. All have been published more than a century after the events. To quote the old dictum, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

  ***

  It is surprising that Hollywood has never made a film about those five months at Fort Kearny. After all, they have made at least three full-length movies of varying accuracy about Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. But, if ever they do get round to the story of Carrington and Fetterman, the opening shot must surely be a long, slow pan across some of the most beautiful scenery in the West: the eastern slopes of the Big Horn Mountains. No music; just a low wind. Gradually, as the camera pans, it will “find” and then zoom in on a small crowd of people and their buggies. Except for some ranch-hands at the edge of the crowd, the men are formally dressed in the suits and high white collars of the period; the women hold parasols against the July sun. They are clustered near the top of a small craggy hill listening to an old man in a brass-buttoned army uniform. As we get closer, we begin to hear what Professor Henry Carrington is saying.

  “... I did not come here after a journey of 2,500 miles, and at my advanced age, for my gratification. I am here to do justice to the living and the dead... This monument fashioned from the gathered stone nearby is a very poor testament to the valor of those it honors... Yet it is, in its very roughness, an exponent of their struggles for you... Thank God, who gave us such men so loyal... In regions where all was peace, as at Fort Laramie, twelve companies were stationed, while in regions where all was war, as at Fort Kearny, only five companies were allowed... I will tell you how this monument happened to be erected on this hill...”

  And tell them he does, for nearly an hour. He has waited 42 years to put his side of the story. Yet toward the end of his peroration, he makes a simple statement in reference to Captain Fetterman. It is rather remarkable - not quite magnanimous, yet not bitter; it is succinctly to the point: “Life was the forfeit. In the grave,” he said, “I bury disobedience.”

  With his speech finished, the crowd moves to a flagpole. Another old man steps forward. William Daley, back on 31 October 1866, performed the same duty with the biggest flag he or the garrison had ever seen. Then the Colonel and six of his old soldiers lead the crowd in “Nearer my God to Thee”; they end with “Auld Lang Syne”.

  Perhaps, as the flag is raised, the camera should pan and zoom in to settle on the plaque, and tilt slowly down those final words, “There were no survivors”. Now, holding those words full frame, we go might go through a slow dissolve to a far-away line of infantry, cavalry and wagons moving west across a vast, empty horizon. The distant figures shimmer in the heat. A caption is superimposed: “Wyoming Territory 1866”. Now, at last, we might indulge in some appropriate music...

  Hollywood might find this all too drawn out. But one hopes that room would be found somewhere for Red Cloud’s telegraphed regret, sent from a distant reservation. He was sorry, but he was now too old to come to the ceremony. Extraordinary.

  In 1908, Colonel Carrington returned to speak at the dedication of the memorial to the Fetterman massacre – 42 years after the event.

  The Railroad

  We are on one side at the extreme of the world. Build this railroad and we are of the center - with Europe on one side and Asia and Africa on the other.

  A comment by Asa Witney, one of the early lobbyists for the building of a transcontinental railroad

  One of the most marvellous undertakings of modern times.

  A comment by The Times, the London newspaper, on hearing that the transcontinental line had been completed

  ***

  Perhaps it is just a good story, but the railroad buff who passed it on to me thought it better than that. Me too.

  When, in the late 1940s, the western railroads began to replace their steam locomotives - and they had some of the biggest in the world - with diesels and diesel-electrics, westerners soon complained that they missed the wonderful wailing cadences of the old steamers. After all, the call of a distant train had been with them for at least 80 years. They set their clocks by it. It went deep into the western soul.

  So one company, thinking to combine modernity with nostalgia (at no extra cost), planned to replace its diesels’ dismal hooters with the tonal whistles of the past. Instead of steam, the whistles would be powered by compressed air. But the idea did not work. They had forgotten that it was not only the virtuosity of the engineer (he was never called the driver) on the whistle’s lanyard that gave that old peculiar wail. Even more, it was the blast of super-heated steam through the copper whistle, and the consequent rapid expansion of the metal, that did the trick. A chill rush of mere compressed air only produced a single steady note - which was back where the whole plan started. So, no longer do folk out on the prairies and in the mountains hear “that lonesome whistle blow”. They just hear an ear-jangling toot.

  ***

  Priorities change. So, for a moment, let us go back to the shift of military thinking in the summer of 1867. The plain truth was that, up in the Powder River country, Red Cloud and his Sioux had won their war; the soldiers garrisoning Fort Kearny could hardly guarantee their own safety, let alone that of civilian travelers on their way to look for gold in Montana. So the Bozeman Trail was abandoned, and the soldiers were ordered to withdraw in order to fulfill a strategic necessity away to the south: the guarding of the construction crews of the transcontinental railroad who were, by 1867, hammering their way towards the mountains.

  Already that summer some Cheyenne had waylaid a train at a place called Plum Creek. They cut the telegraph line, pulled up a rail and then sat down to see what would happen. A few hours later a handcar came along the line, to repair the broken wire. The Cheyenne killed four of the crew; the fifth, an Englishman called Thompson, was scalped and left for dead. Then they sat down again to await a bigger prize. Presently they were rewarded: a locomotive hauling supplies came clanking along the track; it hit the gap and rolled over, snorting and wheezing like a dying buffalo. The war-party watched in pleased disbelief. Then, after they had killed the crew, they broke into the wagons. Amongst other cargo, they found whiskey, clothing and bolts of cloth. The story goes that they got roaring drunk, put on the clothes and then, having tied the bolts of cloth around their ponies’ necks, they went galloping off with the cloth unwinding chaotically behind them. Incidentally, Thompson survived, though it is said that he chose to wear a woolly cap for the rest of his life.

  The
re were other times when the actual construction crews were molested. Some lives were lost. These disruptions, when reported back east, raised doubts in the nation’s self-esteem. After all, people were being told that this was the biggest engineering project since the building of the pyramids. So it stood to reason that no bunch of savages should be allowed to interfere with the nation’s march towards its Destiny. Which is why the army was called in.

  Five years earlier, in 1862, when President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, there were many who said that the undertaking - building a line nearly 2,000 miles long - was so massive that it would never be completed. Not in that century anyway. Perhaps, when faced with a national ambition that reached far beyond all previous experience, there was nothing unusual in that skepticism. After all, there were similar doubts when, amazingly only 100 years later, President Kennedy had the vision (and the confidence) to promise Americans that they would see at least one of their countrymen walk on the moon by the end of the 1960s. As well as the sheer scale of the two endeavors, there are other parallels. Indeed, it has been calculated that the earlier project would, in the end, consume a greater proportion of the country’s wealth. And its progress would seem to have been just as closely followed by the nation; its eventual completion would be met with the same pride and celebration.

  Both visionaries and pragmatists had been urging a transcontinental railroad since the late 1840s. True, if you were wealthy, determined and in a hurry you could get to California by stagecoach, but it took a punishing five weeks. Starting from St. Louis, the approximately once-a-week service would cost you a colossal $200. During the 2,000-mile journey, down across the deserts of the south-west (this was the “all weather” route) to Los Angeles and then north to San Francisco, you paid extra for your food and accommodation - if there was any. In fact, the passengers were rather an afterthought; it was the carriage of government mail that mattered. The contract had been won by John Butterfield; he ordered 100 specially strengthened stagecoaches and more than 1,000 horses and mules; he established 120 stage-stations along the route. With loans from the banks, it cost him over $1 million. But one day Mr. Butterfield’s company would, via myriad mergers and takeovers, grow to become known to the world as American Express.