Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866

by Terry C. Johnston

  “I see you still wear my chevrons, ‘old’ friend,” the dark man replied across the grave-still trading post.

  Tapping a finger at one of his yellow patches, the sergeant grinned. “When you gave ’em up—the army had to find a man who still had some fight left in him. You’d carried the stripes around long enough, far as most was concerned.”

  “Only way you’d get my stripes,” the dark man answered, “I got busted down … or they signed peace at Appomattox.”

  “Gents!” the blond sergeant announced, raising his mug. “To the Grand Army of the Potomac. And Phil Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah!”

  The spectators raised their cups and drank with him before the sergeant turned back to the man seated in the corner. “How you been, Seamus Donegan?”

  “I’ve been better,” the Irishman replied. “Quietly enjoying my whiskey amongst me friends. Till the first sergeant of C Company, Second Cavalry strolls in—and Kinney’s whiskey don’t taste good any longer.”

  “What about me, Donegan? We was friends once. How ’bout you drinking with me?” He dragged his wool coat from the bar and was three steps across the floor when Donegan stood.

  “On a time, Eli Garrett was my friend.” Donegan nodded to Jack Stead and Sam Marr. They rose from their table, edging for the door. “That friendship died in the Shenandoah … along with too many good men.”

  Garrett pursed his lips, drawing his mouth into a thin line of unconcealed hatred. “Funny that you should mention the Shenandoah, Seamus. Where so many of us finally found you didn’t have the stomach for war.”

  Donegan turned his back, slowly. He pulled his thick mackinaw coat over his shoulders. Only then did he turn around. And wasn’t surprised to find Garrett at arm’s length.

  The Irishman casually shoved buttons through their holes. “You always was one to sneak up on a man, Eli Garrett.”

  “Ain’t sneaking up on you now, Seamus.” Flinging his coat onto a chair, he spread his arms wide. “Just wanted to get a wee bit closer when your back was turned … see if it’s really true what they said about you in the Shenandoah. Front Royal. Had to see for myself that broad stripe of yellow down your back——”

  Before any man in the room realized it, Donegan had slammed his fist into Garrett’s jaw. The sergeant stumbled backward three steps, crashing into the pine-plank bar. Shaking his head, he dabbed the trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth.

  “Good punch, Seamus.” He grinned and jiggled his jaw. “But nowhere near as good as you had during the war. But then, you always was just a big, stupid youngster. Only one thing I hated about you more than you being my sergeant—you was a mick!”

  Every bit as fast as Seamus had connected, Garrett pushed off the bar, diving into the Irishman, swinging both fists like pistons and jabbing a shoulder into Donegan’s belly. Back into a small table and a handful of chairs they tumbled. Seamus clawed at the back of Garrett’s blue tunic, trying to pull free so he could swing again. In the next heartbeat the soldier had wrenched Donegan to his feet and flung him against a second table. Garrett swept a clay mug off a table and held it in the air, ready to swing it into a dazed and very foggy Irishman’s head——

  The shotgun roar filled the little cabin with its startling racket.

  Garrett wheeled, scowling. Watching trader Kinney lower the double-barreled fowler and point it at his belly.

  “Right barrel I keep loaded with buckshot,” the judge announced as the cabin fell to silence. “The buckshot went into the ceiling.”

  Kinney watched Garrett glance up at the roof. “This other barrel, you’re asking? Loaded with buckshot and salt. Makes for a painful, oozy wound, you see. Now.” He pointed with the muzzle of the shotgun. “I want you both out of here. One at a time. And should I find need of replacing tables or chairs, I know where I’ll come to find the funds, gentlemen. Sergeant Eli Garrett, right?”

  The soldier glared at the judge, finally nodding once as he raked some of the strawberry curls from his eyes.

  “Good,” Kinney replied to the unspoken answer. “I’ll talk with your Lieutenant Bingham should I need replacements, Sergeant. Grab your coat and be gone.”

  No one moved as Eli Garrett yanked his coat about his shoulders, then stomped to the bar and swallowed the mug of whiskey without wincing.

  “Good whiskey, trader,” he growled. “I drink lots of good whiskey. I’ll be back.”

  “You’ll be welcome,” Kinney pointed the muzzle to the door, “when you learn manners. Got all the whiskey you can drink, and then some. But when you come to Kinney’s, you’re on my ground and you play by my rules. Good night, Sergeant.”

  Thumping his empty clay mug against the plank bar, Garrett turned on his heels, crossed the room, and yanked open the door. Jack Stead stepped over and grabbed the latch, slowly closing the crude pine door once the tall sergeant had swept into the night.

  “Now you.” Kinney brought the butt of the fowler to rest on his right hip. “Pick up the tables and chairs for me.”

  “And if I don’t?” Donegan replied with a bloody-lipped smile.

  “I suppose I’ll have to impose upon my friend Captain Brown to see that he no longer requires your services for the winter.”

  Seamus nodded. “Lose me job cutting timber, eh? I see the picture you’re painting, trader. You get me fired—I can no longer stay at the fort. Right?”

  “Unlike Sergeant Garrett, I won’t dare accuse you of being stupid, Mr. Donegan.”

  Seamus straightened his mackinaw then bent to set tables and chairs upright. “You’ve three busted chairs. What’s your verdict, Judge?”

  “You’ll pay me for one,” Kinney answered, laying his fowler on the bar. “The other two will be Sergeant Garrett’s to pay. Seems to me he began the fracas.”

  “A fair judgment, Seamus,” Captain Marr replied with a nod.

  “Sound’s fair,” Donegan said as he swiped at the blood oozing from a cut above an eye. “Considering.”

  “I’ll take payment in gold.” Kinney squirmed behind the bar. “Two dollars.”

  “Don’t have gold,” Seamus replied, feeling the hackles spur up on his back. “You’ll settle for the army script what Cap’n Brown pays us that works for him.”

  “No gold?”

  Donegan eyed the trader. “Army script’s good enough when I drink the saddle varnish you call whiskey … it ought’n be good enough to pay for your bleeming chair.”

  “Two dollars in script it is,” Kinney said firmly, slapping a palm on the bar.

  After he paid and left, Donegan stood on the parade with Marr and Stead. His tongue licked at a sore row of teeth while he glanced at the cloudy glitter of stars above.

  “Be a cold one tonight,” Marr muttered, afraid to raise what lay on each man’s mind.

  “Faired off quick, it did,” Stead responded.

  Donegan watched his friends toe the snow and wriggle as nervously as a couple of boys carrying bullfrogs into church. “Whyn’t the two of you get the gumption to ask me?” Seamus whispered to them. “Unless you do, it’ll eat a hole in your belly afore morning.”

  “All right, dammit!” Marr replied. “Tell us what Garrett’s talking about. Claiming you had a yellow stripe down your back.”

  “Not that we believe it, understand,” Stead chimed.

  “No,” Marr agreed. “I know you too long, Seamus. Watched you tackle bushwackers in Missouri to Injuns at the Crazy Woman. No man knows you can say Seamus Donegan’s…”

  “Yellow, Cap’n? Was a time that Seamus Donegan wondered for himself if he was a coward. I’ll tell you while we walk. Not a night for a man to be standing—freezing his bullocks off.”

  Halfway across the parade he began. “Like Garrett tells it, trouble began in the Shenandoah. ’Sixty-four, i’twas. But Eli and me go back to the beginning. Army made us horse soldiers together … to fight the Johnnies. Together. Until the Shenandoah, that is. Was best of friends—drinking and carousing, we were. Watching eac
h other’s backsides in every battle across three long years of blood and bone. I carried him or he carried me. And everytime I had me stripes ripped off me arm, they give ’em to me friend Garrett. He’d grin and say, ‘Seamus, my boy—I’ll wear these stripes for you till you want ’em back. Can’t have no other man getting ’em away from you for good. A friend’d do no less.’ Time was, Eli Garrett was just that sort of friend.”

  Marr cleared his throat. “Sometimes, the best of friends … make the worst of enemies.”

  “Truly said, Cap’n.” He walked in silence for a few moments. “Sheridan had us burning and looting our way down the Shenandoah. Hell, we’d come all the way to Harper’s Ferry in but a month. And then General Devin and Custer both were given the word. Orders from Grant and Sheridan. We were to find Colonel John Mosby’s raiders at all cost … and hang every one.”

  “I heard tell Mosby dogged Sheridan like fleas on a hound,” Marr said.

  “Worse. There was no end to Mosby’s treachery and evil. Grant wanted Mosby bad. So he turned the problem over to Sheridan. And Little Phil turned us loose on those raiders.”

  “How’d they come to call you yellow?”

  He glanced at Marr. “Came about when we caught a batch of them raiders in the first drag. They fought us like hellions. Brave they were—let no man mistake that. Captured six. But when Custer dropped a rope from a tree limb at Front Royal, fixing to hang their leader … that’s where I drew the line.”

  “Found yourself alone on the wrong side of that line?” Stead asked.

  He nodded. “Custer had his hanging—a sick, sad affair. Had the rest tied to a tree and shot. Pinned notes on the bodies … telling Mosby he’d be caught soon enough. That very day Custer saw to it Brigadier General Thomas C. Devin busted me back to the ranks for refusing to hang or shoot a one of those bushwackers.”

  “Insubordination?”

  “Aye, Cap’n. And waiting for court-martial, if Custer’d had his way. That blue-eyed sonuvabitch’s a man you don’t want to rile … or find yourself on the bad side of.”

  Stead sighed. “Seamus, care to tell your friends why you didn’t want to see those men hung … even shot. It was war, was it not?”

  “Aye, Jack. I’t’was. But to Seamus Donegan, war never gave no man the right to excuse what’s a crime committed on any other field.” He wagged his head. “Mosby’s men was sojurs. Plain and simple. Doing what any sojur would do to harass our march down the Shenandoah.”

  “And you wanted no part in killing them.”

  “No Cap’n—I wanted no part in murder,” Donegan replied.

  “So Garrett got the chevrons ripped from your arms,” Marr continued.

  “Custer saw to that.”

  “Why Eli Garrett?”

  Donegan sighed. “’Twas my old friend who threw that rope over the tree at Front Royal for Custer himself. Then handpicked the firing squad to shoot the rest while the leader swung.”

  “What became of friend Garrett wearing your stripes to keep ’em safe from others?” Stead asked.

  “This was different, Jack. From that very moment, in that grove of oak and shadow at Front Royal, Eli Garrett wanted my stripes for himself. We was no longer the friends we’d been. I was no longer a sergeant in Company C, Second Cavalry.”

  “Had wondered why a union sergeant wouldn’t stay on in the regular army after the war,” Marr commented. “You wasn’t a sergeant come Appomattox, eh?”

  “From the summer of ’sixty-four till it was over—just a sojur. Fighting Johnnies, and watching over my shoulder. Wondering when Sergeant Garrett was next to come rubbing on me. Giving me all the dirtiest details. Sending me off on the wild missions he figured I’d not return from.”

  “But you came back,” Marr said as he slapped Donegan on the back.

  “No,” the Irishman whispered. “You see a different Seamus Donegan than rode into the Shenandoah Valley in ’sixty-four. Ever since Front Royal, I ain’t been the same. Neither has Eli Garrett.”

  They walked for several minutes in silence, nearing the fires of the civilian camp by the Little Piney.

  Donegan stopped by a large ring of coals. “Time’ll come, Cap’n. Time that Eli Garrett will want to finish what he started two long years ago in the Shenandoah.”

  * * *

  Two days later, on the eighth of November, Carrington relented.

  Fetterman had made himself a thorn in the colonel’s side from the moment he had arrived at Fort Phil Kearny. Back in the arms of his Civil War comrades, Captain Brown and Lieutenant Bisbee, Fetterman devised a plan that he practically affixed to Carrington’s desk. For five days he doggedly argued the merits of that plan before the district commander he loathed as nothing more than a desk-pounder.

  Through the window Adolph Metzger watched the stars fleshing out a crooked strip of sky. Silently nursing his ration of whiskey in a tin cup, the German-born Metzger gazed over the sutler’s cabin. Civilian and soldier alike huddled around tables and sheet-iron stoves, gabbing and waiting for Fetterman’s trap to spring and catch the unwary Sioux. Metzger shivered in the corner, wondering how fared his old friends out there in the dark. Down in the cottonwood and willow along the Big Piney. Waiting for the Sioux to show.

  Surely, the Indians will come, he thought in his painstaking English. The bugler sipped at his whiskey, enjoying the warmth each gulp spread through him. The Sioux cannot pass up the mules.

  Three days ago Metzger had ridden with Fetterman, Bisbee and Brown into the surrounding hills. Sweeping across Pine Island, the Sullivant Hills and up atop Lodge Trail Ridge, Bisbee and Brown had thirsted to show the country to their wartime comrade—Brevet Lt. Col. William Judd Fetterman.

  Once beyond the tattling ears of the stockade, Fetterman had turned to his friends and confided, “I want you to be the first to know that Carrington’s not long for this command.”

  Bisbee laughed and slapped his thigh, gushing. “I knew it! Tell me more!”

  “Just before I left the East for this assignment, a friend at the War Department informed me of some changes in the wind.”

  “I want to hear all of it!” Brown begged.

  Fetterman grinned. “There’s a reorganization under way … a postwar thing. And, so I’m told, that reorganization will place me as the new commander of Fort Phil Kearny.”

  “What of old yellow britches himself?” Brown growled.

  “Carrington?” Fetterman asked with a smile. “I suppose the army will find something suitable for a man of his talents. A desk job. Recruiting for the new army. While the fighting men of the old army are given new fields to conquer!”

  “Gad, Judd!” Bisbee cheered. “Tell us when.”

  “Soon, is all I know. Back in Washington City they’re burning to have Congress enlarge the frontier army. Plans are to use our Second Battalion of the Eighteenth as the core for building the new Twenty-seventh Infantry!”

  “With Captain Fetterman in command!” Bisbee roared.

  “No, Bill,” he corrected. “Colonel William Judd Fetterman.” He clenched his gloved fist. “Colonel Fetterman, in charge of crushing the Sioux.”

  Brown reined up. For a moment the three officers sat, staring down into the valley of Peno Creek as Metzger had dismounted, letting his horse chew at the winter-dried grass blown free of snow.

  “Such wild, pretty country,” Fetterman admitted at last. “Let’s ride down and take a look.”

  “Can’t,” Brown grumped. “Orders.”

  “Whose?”

  “Carrington’s,” Bisbee answered. “Who else?”

  “Why?”

  “We aren’t to cross this ridge,” Brown answered.

  Fetterman pointed down the north slope. “What lies there?”

  “Sioux!” Brown shouted, flinging his fist into the frosty air. “Twenty-five hundred of them, Judd! Waiting for us.”

  Fetterman grinned with that look of a timber wolf catching its first whiff of prey on the breeze. “Boys, those red bastard
s won’t have long to wait!”

  After dark on the eighth, as Metzger sat drinking his gill of whiskey, Fetterman, Brown, and their eager recruit, Lt. George Grummond, had led a detail of enthusiastic soldiers down to the Big Piney, where they staked out some mules to graze, certain their bait would draw warriors into their trap. In the cold and snow along the creek, Fetterman’s heavily armed troopers waited. And shivered. Wishing they lay warm in their bunks or stood at Kinney’s bar with the rest.

  Those left behind passed the long winter evening rereading worn newspapers from the last mail brought north from Laramie. Others played with soiled, greasy decks of cards. Some gambled next payday’s wages on a race or two of lice across a warm tin plate. Most drank and talked, and waited too. Listening for rifles to crack from the Big Piney.

  When the guns bark, Adolph thought, Fetterman’s caught his Indians.

  Beside a stack of calico and flannel on the bar, Jim Bridger sat, rocking back and forth in his chair, half dozing at times while he listened to others boast of what Fetterman would do to the Sioux once he got his hands on some of the slippery devils.

  “Won’t stand and fight like men!” one old soldier barked.

  “Exactly what the colonel told Fetterman,” Metzger said. “Told the captain he could not figure to fight Indians the way he fought the rebels.”

  “What would Carrington know about fighting Johnnies?” the old veteran growled at the bugler. “Colonel knows even less ’bout fighting Injuns!”

  By midnight most had abandoned the trading post for their bunks and blankets. A pale moon shed milky light along the Big Piney, revealing Fetterman’s inviting bait. Down in the tangle of brush and snow, the eager detail struggled to keep their chattering teeth quiet. A lucky few dozed. But most shuddered in the cold, nursing their first doubts in Fetterman’s scheme to whip the Sioux.

  As the gray of dawn slithered out of the east, Fetterman led his shivering detail back to the fort. The captain crawled beneath his warm blankets just as bugler Metzger blew reveille.

  Chapter 24

  November was eleven days old. The weather continued bright as a polished brass button, the air cold and crisp. Overhead hung a sky as incredibly blue as the water of high-country beaver pond.