Fettetterman Massacre Research Paper

The Fetterman Massacre The Fetterman Massacre, also known as the Fetterman Fight, the Battle of the Hundred Slain, and the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, was a battle on December 21, 1866 between Indians from the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and soldiers of the United States Army during Red Cloud’s War. This battle was at the time the worst military disaster to have ever been suffered by the by the U.S. on the Great Plains and is known as a massacre because all 81 men, under the control of Captain William J. Fetterman, were slain by the Indians. Only the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, commonly referred to as Custer’s Last Stand, stands as a worse defeat for the U.S. Army and a greater victory for the Plains Indians.
The Indians of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Northern Arapaho tribes had claimed the Powder River country as hunting grounds for many years when a Colonel out of Fort Laramie, Henry B. Carrington, advanced the 700 soldiers and 300 civilians under his command into the land to protect emigrants traveling the Bozeman Trail. Along the trail Col Carrington established three forts, including his headquarters at Fort Phil Kearny near what today is known as Buffalo, Wyoming. Col Carrington also stationed around 400 of his soldiers and the majority of his civilian personnel at Fort Phil Kearny. Because of the placement of the forts in the hunting grounds, the Indians began to attack Fort Kearny during its construction which killed several dozen soldiers and civilians. Because of the small numbers in the Indian harassment parties, Carrington began to be pressured by his junior officers to take the offense against the Indians. On November 3 a cavalry company containing 63 soldiers arrived to the fort as reinforcements, and being about 3 times as large as the average Indian raiding party, caused the junior officers to pressure Carrington even more about going on the offensive. Among the officers that arrived with the cavalry was Infantry Captain William J. Fetterman, a Civil War veteran with a distinguished war record but no experience fighting Indians. Despite having a lack of knowledge and experience fighting Indians, Fetterman was immediately critical of Carrington’s defensive posture. Fetterman was also known to be very disrespectful of the Indians in the area, and was said to have boasted “Give me 80 men and I can ride through the Sioux nation.” Shortly after arriving, Fetterman began to catch the ears of other junior officers, and was soon given permission by Carrington to stage a night ambush. However, the Indians saw the ambush coming and caused a herd of cattle to stampede opposite of where Fetterman had laid his trap. On November 22 the Indians set their own ambush in which Fetterman himself was almost lured into while escorting a wagon train with lumber supplies bound for Fort Kearny. A single Indian attempted to get the soldiers to chase him into the woods, but instead of chasing him the commander of the wagon train, Lieutenant Bisbee, wised up to the ambush and took cover. On November 25, 1866, General Philip St. George Cooke from his post in Fort Laramie ordered Carrington to launch an offensive drive on the Indians in retaliation to their many attacks. On December 6 Carrington was given his first opportunity to attack the Indians when he was alerted of an Indian attack on a lumber train four miles to the west of Fort Kearny. Carrington ordered Fetterman to head west with the cavalry as well as mounted infantry to fend off the attack. Fetterman took a mounted squad north of the lumber train in an attempt to cut off the Indian’s line of attack. During this movement, Lieutenants Grummond and Bingham along with several of their men became separated from Carrington, who had found himself surrounded by over 100 Indians. Luckily for Carrington, Fetterman arrived to save him just a few minutes later and the Indians retreated. LT Grummond appeared later with seven Indians chasing him and barely made it to safety with Carrington and Fetterman. Several hours later the bodies of LT Bingham and a sergeant were discovered. Bingham had been led into a trap set by an Indian decoy pretending to be fleeing from them. Carrington and Fetterman were both sobered by the lack of discipline and organization in their soldiers. Fetterman was quoted saying “This Indian war has become a hand-to-hand fight requiring the utmost caution.” Jim Bridger, an old mountain man serving as Carrington’s guide, was much blunter about the soldiers, saying they “don’t know anything about fighting Indians.” Based on these failures, Carrington revamped the training for his officers and soldiers. He ordered that the fifty horses that they still possessed, having lost most in the Indian raids, shall be saddled and ready to ride from dawn to dark as well as ordering that the number of guards protecting the wagon trains be doubled. The Indians attacked another lumber train on December 19 and Carrington sent his most trusted officer, Captain Powell, to help repel the Indian assault with a cavalry company and mounted infantry with specific orders not to pursue the Indians beyond Lodge Trail Ridge, which was two miles north of Fort Kearny. Powell followed Carrington’s orders perfectly and emerged with an accomplished mission and no casualties. Based on this success, Carrington reemphasized to his soldiers the use of caution until reinforcements, horses, and supplies arrive from Fort Laramie. Fetterman and Captain Brown proposed a raid on a Sioux village with 50 civilians on the Tongue River, about 50 miles from Fort Kearny, which Carrington promptly denied. Invigorated by success, Red Cloud and the other Indian leaders chose to launch a large military operation against Fort Kearny before the winter snows forced them to disband the village they had on the Tongue River. The decoy trick they employed on December 6 had worked with great success, so they decided to use it again. However, this time they would use a much larger force so that they could destroy any amount of soldiers that were sent to chase them. Some sources say that there were over one thousand Indian warriors gathered ten miles north of Fort Kearny. After a successful reconnaissance the warriors decided to lay their trap along the Bozeman trail north of Lodge Trail ridge about four miles from Fort Kearny. The Lakota Indians took position on the east side of the trail while the Cheyenne and Lakota Indians lay in wait on the west side. There was also a decoy element, which included a young Oglala Indian warrior named Crazy Horse. At around 1000 on December 21, 1866 Carrington dispatched a wagon train with almost 90 soldier guards about five miles northwest to the nearest source of timber and firewood for Fort Kearny. Less than an hour later, Carrington was notified that the wagon train was under attack. Carrington put together a detail of 49 infantrymen from the 18th Infantry and 27 mounted troopers from the 2nd Cavalry, under the command of Captain Powell, to help relieve the wagon train. Fetterman pulled seniority on Powell and was given command of the relief party by Carrington while Powell remained behind. Another vocal critic of Carrington, Lieutenant George Grummond took command of the cavalry. Yet another of Carrington’s critics, Captain Frederick Brown, who was the post’s quartermaster, and two civilians joined Fetterman which brought the total number of the relief part to eighty one. The infantry marched out without the cavalry; the cavalry would have to retrieve its horses and then follow and catch up to the infantry. Carrington later stated that his orders to the officers were very clear: “Under no circumstances was the relief party to pursue over the ridge, that is Lodge Trail Ridge.” In her memoirs, Lt Grummond’s wife confirmed Carrington’s statement when she wrote that the instructions were given twice, the second time by Carrington after ordering the soldiers to stop as they left the front gate of the fort.
Grummond’s wife wrote that the orders were clearly heard by everyone present. Despite the many warnings given by Carrington, Fetterman did not take the trail northwest toward the pinery where the wagon train was, but instead took the Lodge Ridge Trail northward. Shortly after leaving, Carrington received word that the wagon train was no longer under attack. A group of about fifty Indians appeared near Fort Kearny, but Carrington quickly dispersed them with a few cannon shots. Those Indians, now joined by more, harassed Fetterman as he headed down Lodge Trail Ridge and went out of sight of the
fort. Sometime around noon Carrington and his men began to hear heavy firing from the north. Carrington quickly gathered about 75 men, under the command of Captain Ten Eyck, and ordered them to set out on a foot search for Fetterman and his men. Upon reaching the top of Long Trail Ridge at about 1245, Eyck and his men saw a very large force of Indians in Peno Creek Valley below them. Indian warriors rode up to Eyck’s men and began harassing them. In response, Carrington sent 42 more soldiers to join Eyck, and the Indians in the valley began to leave. Eyck advanced carefully and his soldiers found the bodies of Fetterman and all of his men in the valley. The soldiers had been mutilated and stripped naked. As there were no white survivors of the battle, so the truth of the battle may be lost to history. Many Indian tribes gave different accounts of the event, and the death tolls for the Indians vary greatly ranging from 14 to 160 dead. The only thing that can be surmised is that Fetterman’s men were completely wiped out. After the Fetterman Massacre, Carrington’s casualties rose to 96 soldiers and 58 civilians dead, and he still maintained a force of over 300 soldiers inside Fort Kearny. Carrington feared an attack on Fort Kearny that night after the massacre and ordered all his men to stand watch. He put all the fort’s extra explosives and ammunition into a central spot and ordered that if the Fort was attacked, all the women and children were to retreat into this spot. If the soldiers feared that the Fort was about to be overrun, they were told to also retreat to the hiding spot, and then Carrington himself would blow up the magazine to ensure that no whites were alive to be captured or killed by the Indians. That same evening a civilian by the name of John “Portugee” Philips volunteered himself to ride to Fort Laramie with a distress message from Carrington.
The letter, addressed to General Cooke, detailed the Fetterman Massacre and requested immediate reinforcements as well as more rifles, specifically the repeating Spencer carbine. Phillips was sent out that evening with another messenger, Philip Bailey, on the Fort’s best remaining horses. Portugee rode the 236 miles to Fort Laramie in four days. On December 22, a night after the two messengers had left, a blizzard began and Portugee rode through a foot of snow and below zero temperatures. Luckily, he reported that he had not seen a single Indian the entire ride. On the evening of December 25 during a Christmas ball, Portugee stumbled into a hall at Fort Laramie, exhausted from his ride, to deliver his message to
Cooke. Upon receiving Carrington’s distress message, Cookie ordered that Carrington be relieved of command and replaced by Brigadier General Henry Wessels. Wessels took control of Fort Kearny on January 16, and Carrington left with his wife, family, and the other women and children including the pregnant wife of the now deceased Lt Grummond.
In 1868, Fort Phil Kearny was abandoned. In November of that same year Red Cloud signed a peace agreement with the United States. This peace agreement was the first time in United States history that the government negotiated a peace in which they agreed to everything demanded by the enemy while taking nothing in return. Despite the great win for the Great Plains Indians, their sovereignty over the Powder River country would only endure for eight more years.
References
Price, W. (n.d.). Fetterman Battle. Friends of the Little Bighorn, home of Custer 's Last Stand. Retrieved September 23, 2013, from http://www.friendslittlebighorn.com/Fetterman- Battle.htm
Calitri, S. (2004, Aug. - Sep.). "Give me Eighty Men": Shattering the Myth of the Fetterman Massacre. Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 54, 46. Retrieved September 23, 2013, from the Montana 's Official State Website database.
Brown, D. (1962). The Fetterman Massacre. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
The Fetterman Fight. (n.d.). Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site. Retrieved September 23, 2013, from www.philkearny.vcn.com/fettermanfight.htm