On 21 December 1866, near Fort Phil Kearny in what is now northern Wyoming, Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors lured Captain William J. Fetterman's detachment of about 80 soldiers over Lodge Trail Ridge into a trap and killed every man. Until the Little Bighorn ten years later, it was the Army's heaviest loss to a Native force.
Fetterman Fight
21 December 1866 · 159 years ago
Forts on the Bozeman Trail
The Bozeman Trail ran to the Montana gold fields through hunting grounds that the Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies were determined to keep. In 1866 the Army sent Colonel Henry B. Carrington with the 18th Infantry to guard the trail, and that summer his men built Fort Phil Kearny at the eastern foot of the Bighorn Mountains. Red Cloud and other leaders who would not accept the road made war on it, and the fort was soon under almost constant attack. Smith counts nearly 70 soldiers and civilians killed in more than 50 skirmishes by mid-December; the National Park Service gives 154 killed in 51 actions in the last five months of 1866, the Fetterman Fight included.1
Over Lodge Trail Ridge
On the morning of 21 December the wood train bringing timber to the fort was attacked, and Fetterman, a Civil War veteran, claimed command of the relief party by seniority. With his infantry went Lieutenant George Grummond with the cavalry, Captain Frederick Brown and two civilians, James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher. Carrington ordered Fetterman to relieve the wood train and under no circumstances to pursue the warriors over Lodge Trail Ridge. Instead the soldiers followed a small decoy party over the ridge, out of sight of the fort, where a much larger force was waiting. The Army's reports of the time put the warriors at 1,500 to 3,000.2
Heavy firing was heard from beyond the ridge, and Carrington sent Captain Tenodor Ten Eyck with a relief party, but it came too late: when it reached the heights the shooting had stopped. Every man of Fetterman's command was dead. Ten Eyck brought 49 bodies back that evening, and the rest were recovered the next day. The dead had been stripped and mutilated; Smith links this to the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho families at Sand Creek two years earlier. The Native losses are not known, because the warriors carried away their dead and wounded.3
The total killed is usually given as 81, Fetterman and 80 others, and the Wyoming state historic site at the fort speaks of the 81 men the garrison had to bury. Smith counts exactly 80. The Lakota call the fight the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand.4
Who was to blame
The old version of the story blames a reckless Fetterman who had boasted that with 80 men he could ride through the whole Sioux nation, and who disobeyed his orders. Smith argues that the evidence does not support that portrait. She points out that Carrington's own report said Fetterman was moving wisely, that the cavalry under the rash Grummond raced ahead of the infantry, and that Fetterman probably crossed the ridge to support them. Smith writes that the Army needed a scapegoat, and within days Carrington was relieved of command of the fort.5
The forts are abandoned
The Wyoming state historic site calls the fight a huge victory for the allied tribes and the greatest loss of life the Army had suffered at the hands of a Native force up to that date; Smith calls it the Army's worst disaster of the Indian Wars apart from Custer's defeat. Red Cloud's war went on. In 1868 the Treaty of Fort Laramie closed the Bozeman Trail, the Army abandoned its forts, and the warriors burned them, Fort Phil Kearny among them. The larger defeat of the same wars came a decade later, in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.6
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