Dee Brown's authoritative history of Fort Phil Kearney and the notorious Fetterman Massacre
This dark, unflinching, and fascinating book is Dee Brown's riveting account of events leading up to the Battle of the Hundred Slain--the devastating 1866 conflict that pitted Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne warriors, including Oglala chief Red Cloud, against the United States cavalry under the command of Captain William Fetterman. Providing a vivid backdrop to the battle, Brown offers a portrait of Wyoming's Ft. Phil Kearney and the remarkable men who built and defended it. Based on a wealth of historical sources and sparked by Brown's narrative genius, "The Fetterman Massacre" is an essential look at one of the frontier's defining conflicts.

In 1866, Colonel Henry B. Carrington was sent to the Dakota Territory to build Fort Phil Kearny which was to protect settlers and traveler moving on the Montana Road in the Big Horn Mountains. Immediately his force became under attack from Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians but with limited men, supplies and weapons he managed to build the fort.

The Indians constantly attacked his wood collecting crews whether they were cutting fire wood or lumber for the fort. They also stole his herds of beef cattle, cavalry mounts and wagon mules by constantly making quick surprise raids that caught working soldiers off guard.

Once witnessing the danger of chasing an Indian raiding party which led a group of soldiers into a trap, Carrington warned his glory seeking young officers to be careful not to be led into a trap. On December 21, 1866, Sioux Chief Red Cloud had a smal group of warriors attack a wood cutting crew. Carrington warned the officer he sent out with 79 men to protect the cutters to not go beyond the ridge and out of sight. William Fetterman was an officer who did not believe savages could stand up to a US Army force of 80 men so he chased the Indians as Red Cloud figured he would. In a little more than15 minutes, Fetterman and his men were all dead. Until Custer's equally foolish mistake ten years later, the Fetterman Massacre was the low point for the US Army in the West.

While the focus of the book is the Fetterman Massacre, it is full of details about how the army in the west moved its men and supplies. Building a fort in 8 months would be a major enterprise at any time but Carrington did while under constant harassment from Indians. This is a very entertaining and readable volume. ( )

Picked up on a recent trip to the Black Hills. Before Custer, Brevet Colonel William Fetterman had the misfortune to be on the short end of the most disastrous encounter between the United States Army and Native Americans. Colonel Henry Carrington, Fetterman’s commander, had been given the difficult task and building a fort on the Bozeman Trail and “pacifying” the local tribes. The US had treaties with the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, promising no more activity in their hunting grounds, but gold was discovered in western Montana/eastern Idaho, and the army couldn’t keep prospectors out. Carrington was a strange choice for the job; although he’d spent the Civil War as a Regular Army colonel, he’d never actually seen combat, instead doing recruiting and garrison work. (Although author Dee Brown doesn’t suggest it, it’s just possible that Carrington was chosen just because he had no Civil War experience and therefore no preconceived notions on how to fight. I hesitate to give the US Army that much perspicacity, but they do get it right sometimes).


At any rate, Carrington marched out of Fort Kearney, Nebraska (named after Stephen Kearny, a Mexican War general; the Army tried to drop the extraneous “e” but could never get it done) in May 1866 with a train of troops (including a regimental band) wives, children, cattle, extra horses, wagons, ambulances, furniture, window glass, nails, rations, tools, and everything else necessary to build a fort, including an ox-drawn steam-powered sawmill. The assemblage was dubbed “Carrington’s Overland Circus” by the skeptics. However, after dropping off some garrisons here and there, Carrington found a site for Fort Phil Kearny (a Civil War general; no relation; he also gets an extra “e” now and then) on July 14, 1866, and began building his fort. His reputation as an organizer seems justified; he got his sawmill working, found a handy grove of trees nearby, and built a stockade, some lookout towers, and set up a flag pole. There was later some criticism of the fort’s location; Carrington had to send out woodcutters out to cut timber and haying teams out to cut grass, but there wouldn’t have been any way to have it all. At any rate, it was all complete by October 31st.


There had been some minor skirmishes with the natives – not minor to the soldiers and Indians killed, of course. Carrington did seem to have some problems with discipline; once a band of friendly Cheyenne showed up to camp near the fort shortly after one of these skirmishes that resulted in the death and scalping of a soldier. The Cheyenne claimed they had no knowledge of the event; many of the soldiers thought otherwise and headed out of the fort that night to demonstrate their suspicions on the Cheyenne camp. They had to be stopped at gunpoint by Carrington himself and Captain Tenodor Ten Eyck. This led to widespread grumbling that Carrington was afraid to attack Indians.


On November 3, 1866, some replacements from Fort Laramie showed up. These included Captain William Fetterman. Fetterman was a genuine Civil War hero, unlike his commanding officer; he’d seen action at Stone’s River, Resaca, Kennesaw Mountain, Peach Tree Creek, Jonesboro and Atlanta, and had been mentioned in dispatches several times. He was also openly contemptuous of the natives, having bragged “Give me 80 men and I can ride through the whole Sioux nation”. And he ranked Captain Ten Eyck.


Carrington had to send out parties for woodcutting; from time to time Indians would show up and try to cut off a woodcutter – now and then successfully. Carrington’s response was to send out units of 80-100 infantry and cavalry, with explicit orders to only go far enough to support to woodcutting parties and not to pursue Indians beyond a local ridge called “Lodge Trail Hill”. On December 21, firing was heard from the woodcutting area; Carrington was about to send out a party in charge of Ten Eyck when Fetterman pointed out that he ranked Ten Eyck and hadn’t seen much action. Carrington acquiesced, with his usual instructions not to go beyond “Lodge Trail Hill”; he sent a second messenger to repeat these instructions as Fetterman was exiting the gate. Fetterman took his 81 men out. Some time later a lot of rapid firing was heard back in the fort; then it died out. Carrington sent out Ten Eyck with another 75 men and instructions to support Fetterman if possible and/or cover his retreat. Advancing cautiously, Ten Eyck found that Fetterman had disobeyed orders and pursued Indian decoys beyond Lodge Trail Hill, where about 2000 natives were waiting. Everybody was dead; Fetterman and his second-in-command, Brown, were supposedly found side-by-side with empty revolvers and powder burns around bullet holes in their temples (but another story is Fetterman was killed by American Horse with a war club; to further confuse matters there was more than one American Horse and it isn’t clear that either of them were at the Fetterman fight). The bodies were mutilated and froze before they were recovered (A possible exception to the mutilation, and a minor mystery, was the bugler, Adolph Metzger. Some sources say Metzger fought to the end using his bugle as a weapon, and his bravery was so respected that his body was left unmutilated and covered with a buffalo robe. Others say no such body was found. There’s a grave marked “Adolph Metzger” at the Little Bighorn National Cemetery (all the Fetterman fight victims were disinterred and moved there) but there’s no guarantee that Metzger is in it; Custer isn’t in his.) There’s also some discrepancy in the number of Native Americans killed; the Indians removed all the bodies. Estimates vary from 10 to 100. The Indians did report that some of their casualties were due to “friendly fire”; the last stand was surrounded by Indians and some arrows and bullets hit Indians on the other side of the soldiers.


Carrington was relieved from command. Ten Eyck was accused of cowardice for not rushing to Fetterman’s aid; he took to the bottle and eventually resigned from the Army after several disciplinary actions for drunkenness on duty. Since the gold strikes had played out, the Army abandoned the posts along the Bozeman trail and the natives burned them. Of course, a decade later the Army would be back only to have Custer learn his lesson too.


Author Dee Brown specializes in Indian and Civil War history; his book on the Grierson Raid was reviewed previously. This one was originally titled Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga but apparently the publisher thought “Massacre” in the title would make it sell better. (“Dee” is a he, despite the fact that his given name was Dorris). His writing is straightforward and easy to read, but well researched and referenced. Photographs include the participants and a contemporary drawing of the fort; a pretty good map in the end papers, although it could use a little more text describing the movements of Fetterman and the Indians. ( )

-In digging around - I located this I wrote a few years back.

The original title of this work was: “Fort Phil Kearny: an American Saga”. As such it was a much more appropriate title since the book is not so much about the Fetterman Massacre (or Fetterman Fight if you will) as it is about the rise and fall of this frontier fort.

To set the background of the times, it is 1866 and the American Civil War has just ended. The US Government coffers are bare by the high cost of financing the war as well as the rebuilding efforts. Finally gold has been discovered in the Virginia City area of what is now the State of Montana - in the area north but mostly west of what would become Yellowstone National Park.

The original road to these Montana goldfields used a circuitous route to the west of the Bighorn Mountain Range. The area from the east of the Bighorn Range to the Black Hills was a region highly prized by Native Americans (primarily the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho nations) for the rich hunting grounds there. It was also an area awarded by treaty to these nations, in perpetuity. These Indians’ main resource was the North American Bison, and that area had plenty of herds to sustain the local native populations.

Eventually, with the objective of getting to the gold fields more expeditiously, another trail (The Bozeman Trail) was developed. This trail ran from Fort Laramie (in present day South-eastern Wyoming), skirting the Eastern foothills of the Bighorn Range and up to the
gold fields. It was a much better route. It was shorter and easier to traverse; but it had one major problem: The Bozeman Trail ran through the Indians’ treaty-granted hunting grounds.

Col. Henry B. Carrington, a man who held a desk job role during the (American) Civil War, was given command of the military district that encompassed the Bozeman Trail, and was charged with building three forts in order to protect its travelers. This was, however, none too popular with some of the Indians who had gathered at Fort Laramie to hammer out a treaty allowing for the forts' construction. Indeed, a key to the origin of what became known as Red Cloud's War (the frontier war that included the Fetterman Fight) was that Colonel Carrington showed up at Fort Laramie with his command, and made it clear that he intended to proceed with his mission, regardless of the outcome of the treaty negotiations.

Capt. William Fetterman comes off in the book as a rash hotshot, new to the frontier and used to battlefield success in the Civil War. He boasted how his 80 plus men could not only find the Native American villages, but also wipe them out and thereby end the war. Fetterman, however, did not reckon with the fact that Indians' idea of combat was different than Southerners’. This was a mistake that would cost him his life in December 1866.

A commonly taught misconception (in the USA), is that the country has never lost a war before Vietnam. However, in Red Cloud's War, the United States did just that, and lost this war to Native Americans. Their resistance resulted in a peace treaty that not only recognized the legitimacy of the Indians' claim to the land that the Bozeman Trail crossed, but also the land between the Bighorn Range, and all of what is now South Dakota lying to the west of the Missouri River. The three forts (Ft. C. F. Smith, Ft. Phil Kearny, and Ft. Reno) were abandoned and destroyed. It was an ignominious defeat for an overmatched, much smaller post-Civil War army.

The Fetterman Fight, itself, shocked the country. It was hitherto inconceivable that Indians could be so organized in order to kill an entire command. It might also be the way that the fallen troopers were treated - with mutilation being the rule, rather than the exception - that stunned the nation. (The book is fairly graphic in its description of these events, as well as the effect of the command in recovering those men that fell in battle.)

Ultimately what happened to Fetterman was overshadowed by the Battle at Little Bighorn, nearly 10 years later (and not all that far away from where Fetterman's command met its fate).

This book is well worth anyone's time that would want to investigate a little known war and a period of military history that is rarely brought up in schools.

Oct 25, 2005 ( )

A relatively quick read, but I remember wondering how accurate the author's imagination of the battles could be -- nonetheless, despite a bit of unnecessary skepticism, the descriptions are compelling. Probably a bit too focused a topic for the general reader. ( )