The Heart of Everything That Is
Page 36
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1. Or so reported the civilian from Colonel Carrington’s burial detail who claimed to have recovered Metzger’s corpse. Not long afterward, Crow Indians related a similar story to a fur trader, but with a different ending. According to the Crows, for his bravery Metzger was indeed accorded the highest honor his enemies could bestow—by being carried off alive and tortured to death back at the hostiles’ camp. Years later Northern Cheyenne warriors gave Metzger’s misshapen bugle to a Buffalo, Wyoming, store owner. It remains on display at the store.
37
“LIKE HOGS BROUGHT TO MARKET”
On the southern slope of Lodge Trail Ridge the firing from the other side grew louder. But instead of following Captain Fetterman’s path directly up the Bozeman Trail, Captain Ten Eyck ordered his troops east and then north, aiming for the ridgeline’s highest point. He wanted to be certain he controlled the high ground for whatever he would face on the other side of the ridgeline. The route added fifteen to twenty minutes to his mission.
At 12:45 Ten Eyck’s lead skirmishers were just topping the crest some 200 yards east of the battlefield when all gunshots from the Peno Creek valley ceased. One of the civilians riding just ahead of Ten Eyck’s troop thought he heard groans and screams. Within minutes the entire column had reached the summit. The Peno Creek valley stretching before them was aswarm with thousands of painted warriors, more than any man in the garrison had ever seen. Many seemed to be concentrated on either side of the High Backbone. When the Indians spotted the relief detail they jeered, shrieked, and waved their weapons toward the sky, daring the Americans to come down and fight. Others were running down saddled American horses and recovering some of the 40,000 arrows that had been shot, 1,000 for every minute of the fight. Still others were loading their dead onto makeshift travois or tending to the wounded.1 And a group of about 100 were clustered around a pile of boulders half a mile or so to the west along the crest of the ridgeline. A dog darted out from the scrub, and some of the soldiers recognized it as one of the hounds from the fort. An Indian put an arrow through its brain.
Ten Eyck was confused. Where was Fetterman? Where was Grummond’s cavalry? He dispatched his only mounted messenger back to the fort and continued to stare at the vista before him, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Meanwhile the wagons arrived, and the Indians slowly withdrew from the little valley. Suddenly, a trooper cried, “There’s the men down there, all dead.” From a distance the naked white bodies could have been mistaken for patches of snow.
• • •
Back at the fort Colonel Carrington paced his small lookout tower, watching as Captain Ten Eyck’s relief party topped the ridge. Below him, on the front porch, Mrs. Wheatley and the wives of officers and enlisted men gathered with Margaret Carrington. The women stared wordlessly at the heights across the Big Piney. “The silence,” wrote Frances Grummond, who was five months’ pregnant, “was dreadful.” At a little past one o’clock they spotted a lone horseman riding furiously down the slope. Within moments he had galloped through the main gate and skidded to a halt before the colonel’s headquarters. “Captain Ten Eyck says he can see or hear nothing of Captain Fetterman,” the courier reported. “The Indians are on the road challenging him to come down.”
There were Indians as far as the eye could see, he said, and Ten Eyck had requested reinforcements and a mountain howitzer. Then the messenger lowered his voice. “The Captain is afraid Fetterman’s party is all gone up, sir.” There were no more fit horses to replace the messenger’s exhausted mount, and Carrington ordered one of his personal horses, a big sturdy gray, retrieved from the stable. He scrawled a message on a piece of paper, informing Ten Eyck that reinforcements and ammunition were on their way. He was unaware that these had already reached him. And as if doubting either the captain or his messenger, he also ordered Ten Eyck to find Fetterman, unite with him, collect the wood train, and return to the post. Perhaps he also anticipated the public outcry should the courier’s aside be true, for before handing the message over he jotted a sentence reprimanding Ten Eyck for his roundabout route up the slope. “You could have saved two miles toward the scene of action if you had taken Lodge Trail Ridge.” If it was the lawyer-turned-colonel’s purpose to plant the first seed of blame elsewhere for whatever had happened on the other side of that ridge, it was a move well played.
• • •
Captain Ten Eyck waited until the entire huge war party had departed over a string of distant buttes before he advanced cautiously down the north slope of Lodge Trail Ridge. He reached Peno Creek and turned west, following the wagon ruts of the Bozeman Trail. The knoll with the flat-topped rock pile loomed before him. Bodies covered the stones. The corpses formed a ring about forty feet in diameter. The harsh wind had scattered much paper—maps, unsent letters, journal pages—a common sight in the aftermath of frontier warfare. Some soldiers recognized fellow infantrymen from scraps of uniforms that the Indians had not shredded or stolen.
It was difficult to identify individuals, although “Bald Head Eagle” Brown, with a powder burn on his temple and a bullet in his brain, was recognizable. The Indians had “scalped” his tonsure. He was the only trooper killed by a gunshot. Dead Indian ponies and American horses littered the blood-soaked ground, the snouts of the Army animals pointing toward the fort. In the cuts and draws below, on the rises above, and in the scrub and among the trees they found more men—scalped, mutilated, the blood frozen in their wounds. Some soldiers who fanned out to search through the tall yellow saw grass recoiled when they realized that the greasy material they were slipping on was the organs and entrails of their comrades. They had yet to discover Grummond’s troops on the ridge.
Though a mule is far less likely to spook than a horse, it was well known throughout the West that mules shied more from the smell of blood, and now they brayed and reared at the scent of so much of it. The temperature was falling, the corpses were rapidly stiffening, and Ten Eyck ordered as many loaded into the four wagons as could fit. It was rough, slow work, and they did not reach the gates of Fort Phil Kearny until dusk. In the gloaming the dove-gray sky had the macabre formality of a steel engraving. “We brought in about fifty in wagons,” wrote the post surgeon, “like you see hogs brought to market.”
• • •
As night fell the temperature dropped below zero, the wind picked up, and Fort Phil Kearny was locked down and braced for the next attack. Nearly a third of its garrison had abruptly vanished—closer to half, taking into account the armed soldiers and teamsters on Piney Island. Colonel Carrington certainly did, and he sent for them immediately. He also ordered all civilians brought into the fort, released every prisoner from the guardhouse, and placed the entire post under arms, such as they were. The howitzers and mounds of grapeshot and case shot were pulled to the battlements, rifles were stacked across the parade ground, and orders were passed to bar every door and window. Three troopers were assigned to each of the stockade’s firing loopholes, but most of the Spencers had been captured in the fight and Springfield ammunition was so short that each man was issued only five rounds. The balls jangled in their haversacks like marbles. Every man understood that the fort could not hold out long against a full-bore assault. Survivors recalled that the men assumed their posts without expression in their eyes, as if coming from no past and having no future.
• • •
When the wagons arrived from the pinery Colonel Carrington had the beds removed and upended to form three concentric circles girding the post’s underground magazine. As he studied the Indian signal fires on the hills and ridges ringing the fort, his wife knocked on Frances Grummond’s door along Officers’ Row to break the news that her husband was still missing. Given the “horrible and sickening” condition of the forty-nine bodies carried back to the post—these were being sorted through and identified in the emptied guardhouse—neither woman held much hope that he was still alive. Margaret Carrington insisted that the lieutenant’s wife move i
nto her quarters—tellingly, no similar offer was made to the innkeeper James Wheatley’s wife and children—and as Frances gathered a few belongings, another knock sounded on her door. She pulled it open to find a dark, wiry civilian with a pointy black beard and “bright, piercing eyes” filling her small door frame.
Mrs. Grummond knew this man’s name although they had never before spoken to each other. He was John “Portugee” Phillips, the mining partner of Isaac Fisher. Phillips had been born in the Azores to Portuguese parents, and in a lilting accent he told her that he had been out hauling water when Fisher and Wheatley joined her husband’s troop, or else he would have surely ridden with them. Now, he said, Colonel Carrington had called for volunteers to ride to Fort Laramie for help, and he had stepped forward. He had come, he said, to say good-bye. Frances Grummond was flustered. She barely knew the man.
Phillips glanced at Grummond’s distended stomach. “I will go if it costs me my life,” he said with tears in his eyes. And though still in shock and taken somewhat aback by the stranger’s familiarity, she finally understood his words to mean that Phillips was following his own Code of the West, whereby the safety of a pregnant woman in danger was paramount. Phillips removed the wolf-skin robe from his shoulders and handed it to her before departing. “I brought it for you to keep and remember me by if you never see me again,” he said. Then he turned and left.
Throughout all this—the preparations for an attack, the identification of the bodies stacked in the guardhouse, the mourning, the fear and confusion—memories of Captain Fetterman and his eighty dead hovered over the little outpost like ghosts. No one slept well that night.
• • •
Colonel Carrington hunched over his lamplit writing desk and scratched out two messages: one for General Cooke in Omaha and one for General Grant in Washington. They were nearly identical. He described what little he knew of the day’s battle—“a fight unexampled in Indian warfare”—and informed his superiors that though only forty-nine bodies had been recovered, he suspected that the missing thirty-one troopers and their officer Lieutenant Grummond were also dead. Without immediate reinforcements armed with Spencer rifles, he wrote, a retaliatory “expedition now with my force is impossible.” He assured both generals that he was prepared to defend Fort Phil Kearny to the last man, and concluded with perhaps his first realistic assessment of his position since arriving in the Powder River Country in July. “The Indians are desperate; I spare none, and they spare none.”
As with his note to Ten Eyck, it must surely have occurred to the savvy citizen-soldier that the Army, indeed the nation, would soon be looking for scapegoats. It was likely with this in mind that he added a personal comment to General Grant’s dispatch:
I send a copy of dispatch to General Cooke simply as a case when in uncertain communication, I think you should know the facts at once. I want all my officers. I want men. Depend upon it, as I wrote in July, no treaty but hard fighting is to assure this line. I have no reason to think otherwise. I will operate all winter, whatever the season, if supported; but to redeem my pledge to open and guarantee this line, I must have re-enforcements and the best arms up to my full estimate.
Carrington had his adjutant make two copies of both letters. In addition to “Portugee” Phillips, he had recruited two more couriers—a miner named William Bailey and the wagon master George Dillon—to ride separately for Horseshoe Station, the closest telegraph office, 196 miles away. But the Horseshoe Station line was frequently down, so he asked all three to continue on to Fort Laramie, another forty miles south. It was Phillips in whom he had the most confidence.
It was nearing midnight on December 21 when Colonel Carrington met Phillips in the quartermaster’s stables. He led Phillips to his own stalls, where the miner selected one of the colonel’s personal mounts, a white Kentucky thoroughbred. Phillips crammed his saddlebags with hardtack and tied a quarter-sack of oats to his pommel. The thermometer read eighteen degrees below zero, and the air smelled of a gathering storm. Phillips cinched his buffalo-hair coat, wrapped tight the wool leggings beneath his thigh-high buffalo boots, pulled his beaver hat low over his ears, and jammed his hands into sheepskin mittens that stretched to his elbows. He then led the horse to the southeast water gate of the quartermaster’s yard, Carrington walking beside him. The first threatening bits of swirling sleet and snow pricked the men’s faces.
The three enlisted men posted at the gate were jumpy. At the sound of boots crunching on the frozen ground a private called out a challenge. Carrington moved close enough to be recognized and the sergeant of the guard shouted, “Attention!”
“Never mind, sergeant,” Carrington said. “Open the gate.”
Two soldiers pushed open the heavy log sally port and stood silent. Carrington gave Phillips brief final instructions before reaching out to shake his hand. “May God help you,” he said, and the horseman led his charger out, mounted, wheeled, and trotted away.
Carrington and the three guardsmen stood wordless for half a minute, the colonel’s head cocked as if he was listening for the hiss of an arrow. Then the hoofbeats went silent. “Good,” he said. “He has taken softer ground at the side of the trail.” The snow began falling harder.
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1. Reliable estimates of Indian casualties at the Fetterman fight are difficult to come by. The figures for deaths range from 11 to 60. The wounded are said to have numbered between 60 and 300, of whom an estimated 100 died soon thereafter. All the figures were recounted many years later by various old Indians who claimed to have taken part in the battle. In any case, most historians concur that the Indians’ heaviest losses came from their own arrows.
38
FEAR AND MOURNING
His wife, the post surgeon, and his four surviving junior officers tried to talk him out of it. They all agreed it was a terrible idea. Colonel Carrington insisted. He would not allow the hostiles to sense any weakness. But the more powerful reason was that he had to see for himself. It was midday and bitterly cold on December 22 when he mounted the sturdy gray he had lent to Captain Ten Eyck’s messenger twenty-four hours earlier. Eighty-three soldiers and civilians, the best he could select, followed him through the front gate toward Lodge Trail Ridge. Storm clouds scudded down from the north, and enough spitting snow had already fallen to muffle the footfalls of the marchers and the creaking of the mule-drawn wagons.
Carrington was surprised that the Indians had not followed up the massacre with a sunrise attack. When the bugle blew reveille and the report of the morning gun echoed back from the hills, he had expected the sound to be met with howls, eagle whistles, and arrows. But as the pale sun rose farther over Pilot Knob not an Indian was visible on the ridges and hills. This, Carrington knew, did not mean the Indians were not there. It was, however, unlike them to refrain from ostentatiously exhibiting their joy at the outcome of yesterday’s fight. Perhaps the reason was the blizzard that everyone sensed was coming.
While his troop assembled he had whispered to Mrs. Grummond a promise to retrieve her husband’s body. Then he’d handed Captain Powell two written orders. Captain Ten Eyck would be accompanying him over the ridgeline, and Powell was left in charge of the post. The first order concerned communications. On his departure, Carrington wrote, Powell was to run a white lamp up the flagstaff; if Indians appeared, he was to fire the twelve-pounder three times and substitute a red lantern for the white one. The second directive was more confidential, and Carrington pulled Powell aside to issue it orally as well: “If in my absence, Indians in overwhelming numbers attack, put the women and children in the magazine with supplies of water, bread, crackers, and other supplies that seem best, and, in the event of a last desperate struggle, destroy all together, rather than have any captured alive.”
To remove any doubt Carrington himself strode through the circular wagon fortification, pulled open the magazine door, cut open a sphere of case shot, and laid a train of black powder that would ignite at the touch of a match.
• • •
Jim Bridger’s failing eyesight and the biting cold may have made him less of an asset to the battalion—the old mountain man’s arthritis barely allowed him to walk, much less mount a horse and ride for any length of time. But he had been proved correct in one observation: these “paper-collar” soldiers did not know anything about fighting Indians. Bridger had pulled himself out of bed that morning and limped out into the day. Despite the intense pain in his joints he volunteered to ride as a scout. He, too, expected an attack at any moment, and he’d decided that when it occurred it would be as fine an occasion as any to end his career and his life. Once through the main gate, Bridger set about directing skirmishers to key sites on the column’s flanks and positioned pairs of infantry pickets on successive outcrops and ridges, creating a chain that reached all the way back to the fort. He made certain that each set of the guards standing higher and higher along the route would never be out of sight of the men below.
The temperature remained around zero, and darker storm clouds blotted out the sun as the detail trod silently past the rock pile and reached the high ground strewn with boulders. The rocky earth along the ridgeline was streaked with frozen pools of blood, and the bodies were so stiff that one civilian likened the task of loading them onto the wagons to stacking cordwood. The mules again huffed and kicked at the smell of blood and offal, and soldiers were assigned to hold their heads and reins to keep them from bolting. One team of mules threw off the flailing handlers and dumped a half-filled wagon. Corpses frozen into grotesque contortions tumbled across the slope. “It was,” wrote a witness, “a terrible sight and a horrible job.”
The men on the ridge, like Fetterman’s soldiers, had been butchered, but cavalrymen in the detail recognized infantry insignia mixed among the dead. One horseman, John Guthrie, noted, “Some had crosses cut on their breasts, faces to the sky, some crosses on the back, faces to the ground. . . . We walked on top of internals and did not know it in the high grass. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldier they belonged to, so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man’s gutts [sic] and an infantry man got a cavalry man’s gutts.”