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Plains Indians won a pivotal battle in 1866, in which three Pittsburghers died. Historians now have revised their views on white officers’ roles. Why? Their widows may have lied, writes Michael Hasch.
Michael Hasch revisits an 1866 battle that Plains Indians won and in which three Pittsburghers died.
Margaret Carrington and Frances Grummond were promised a bucolic existence when they accompanied their husbands in the summer of 1866 along the Bozeman Trail to the shadows of the Bighorn Mountains in the Powder River Country of what is now eastern Wyoming.
A few months later, while Christians around the world were making preparations for Christmas, the women faced the prospect of being ordered into Fort Phil Kearny's ammunition magazine, knowing that officers had orders to ignite the explosives should Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors breach the walls. Frances, who was five months pregnant, had been left a widow by fighting outside the fort hours earlier.
But the attack on Phil Kearny never came. Margaret, who was married to the fort's commander, Col. Henry B. Carrington, and Frances, who would marry the colonel later in life herself, survived to write books that some scholars now believe misrepresented the events of that day. At least two scholars believe they did it for love.
Today, the fort and its surrounding battlefields are almost forgotten, despite being located only 2 or 3 miles from a sparsely populated stretch of Interstate 90 between Buffalo and Sheridan. But the engagement was part of the momentous Red Cloud's War, named for the Sioux leader who formed a loose alliance with the other tribes in a temporarily successful effort to stop white encroachment through the last of the bountiful game-filled lands in that part of the country.
Red Cloud’s War ended in 1868 with the army abandoning all of the forts along the Bozeman Trail. The peace would last eight years until the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, which ended with Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne being forced onto reservations.
“This was the beginning of the very end of the traditional tribal lifestyle,” said Misty Stoll, superintendent of Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site.
* In the spring of 1866, wrote historian Shannon D. Smith in an essay for the Wyoming State Historical Society, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman met with Col. Carrington and suggested that he and other officers take their wives and families along as the army built forts in the region, assuring them, as Frances later recalled, “a pleasant garrison life in the newly opened country, where all would be healthful, with pleasant service and absolute peace.”
It was not to be.
“By mid-December, nearly 70 soldiers and civilians had been killed in over 50 skirmishes practically within view” of Fort Phil Kearny, said Ms. Smith, whose book, “Give Me Eighty Men,” tells the story of Margaret, Frances and their roles in mythologizing the bloodiest battle of Red Cloud’s War.
It occurred Dec. 21, 1866, when Capt. William Judd Fetterman led 80 men — Capt. Frederick Brown; Mrs. Grummond's husband, Lt. George Washington Grummond; 76 enlisted men; and two civilians — out to relieve wood cutters who were being attacked by warriors near the fort.
According to the legend that Margaret and Frances helped create, Fetterman — who once reputedly boasted, “With eighty men, I could ride through the whole Sioux nation” — disobeyed orders by riding over Lodge Trail Ridge, straight into an ambush. He and his entire unit were slaughtered within 20 minutes by perhaps a thousand or more Indians. The casualties included at least three soldiers who enlisted in Pittsburgh, Pvts. Martin Kelly and Joseph D. Thomas and Cpl. George Phillip, according to the Sheridan Genealogical Society. Another source also names Sgt. Patrick Rooney, a native of Ireland who enlisted from Pittsburgh.
It’s an apocryphal, albeit fascinating, tale, said Robert C. Wilson, retired Fort Phil Kearny superintendent, pointing to the scholarship by Ms. Smith and John H. Monnett, author of “Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth.”
“The Fetterman Massacre,” as it was called by the whites, or “The Battle of a Hundred Slain,” as it was known to the Indians, was the worst U.S. military defeat up to that time on the Northern Plains and shocked America. The battle remains the Army’s third-worst defeat in any conflict with Indians.
“It certainly opened the eyes of the Eastern public to the fighting ability of the Native Americans,” Mr. Wilson said. “They didn’t think the Indians could put up a fight like that.”
Carrington spent the rest of his life trying to pin the blame on Fetterman, a gallant Civil War soldier who spent at least part of 1863 recruiting soldiers in Pittsburgh, an important duty at the time, Ms. Smith noted, because Confederates were marching into Pennsylvania and morale in the North was low. Carrington’s public-relations machine included his wives.
Two books, “Ab-sa-ra-ka: Home of the Crows,” an account by Margaret that was published in 1868, and “My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearny Massacre,” written by Frances and published in 1910, exonerated Carrington and laid the blame for the defeat squarely at Fetterman’s feet. Margaret died in 1870, and Frances and Carrington married the following year.
The books portray Fetterman as rash.
“A company of regulars could whip a thousand, and a regiment could whip a whole array of hostile tribes,” Margaret’s book quoted Fetterman as saying. Frances used a nearly identical quote in her own book, Mr. Monnett observed. Frances also wrote that she heard Carrington give Fetterman specific orders not to chase the Indians over Lodge Trail Ridge. Ms. Smith doubts that account.
“Perhaps there is a fine line between confidence and foolish arrogance, but Fetterman’s background and demeanor do not support the premise that he crossed the line,” Ms. Smith wrote.
Mr. Wilson and Mr. Monnett agree that the evidence shows that Grummond — a brave but impetuous hothead and bigamist, a fact unknown to his young widow until she applied for his pension after his death — may have led his cavalry into a trap and that Fetterman may have followed with his infantry to try to save him.
“But neither Margaret nor Henry Carrington would ever criticize Grummond for his widow's sake,” Mr. Monnett wrote.
Ms. Smith said it’s possible that Carrington himself ordered Fetterman to take the offensive. Whatever the truth, nobody was going to question the women’s honesty or integrity.
“Women controlled and manipulated the history of the Fetterman fight,” using Fetterman “as a scapegoat,” Ms. Smith wrote.
“To protect their beloved and beleaguered colonel, Carrington’s first and second wives published books that successfully shifted the blame to the dead captain,” Ms. Smith asserted. “These contemporary women were able to control the narrative because they themselves were part of the frontier army history. ... Unfortunately, Fetterman had no devoted woman to protect his honor.”
Ms. Stoll noted that the pair’s books were in the Victorian era, when the female perspective was accepted wholeheartedly.
“Women were the angels of the house,” Ms. Stoll said. “Her word is God’s word.”
Now, some 10,000 people a year visit the partially rebuilt fort with its 8-foothigh stockade and walk along the trails of Massacre Ridge, where Fetterman and his soldiers fell and warriors won honors for courage in battle. It is there that Mr. Wilson and dozens of others gather most years in the often-frigid temperatures on the anniversary of the battle to remember the fallen heroes from both sides who baptized the ground with their blood.