Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866
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Authors: Terry C. Johnston
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Contents
The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston
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for
RICHARD CURTIS
who knew what I really needed most was a friend
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All I ask is comparative quiet this year, for by next year we can have the new cavalry enlisted, equipped, and mounted, ready to go and visit these Indians where they live.
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman from a letter written to his superior, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, in the summer of 1866
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Fort Phil Kearny was established amid hostilities. Fifty-one skirmishes have occurred. No disaster other than the usual incidents to border warfare occurred, until gross disobedience of orders sacrificed nearly eighty of the choice men of my command.⦠Life was the forfeit. In the grave I bury disobedience.
Col. Henry B. Carrington
Commander, Mountain District
Department of the Platte
Map drawn by author, compiled from maps drawn by Colonel Henry B. Carrington, Palacios, and the Fort Phil Kearny/Bozeman Trail Association, Inc.
Map drawn by author, compiled from maps printed in the
Atlas of American History
(under the supervision of historian Jay Monaghan), and the Fort Phil Kearny/Bozeman Trail Association, Inc.
Author's Foreword
I find it important to offer a few words before this story runs its course, as a means not only of explanation, but also to set a mood and a sense of historical place for the reader.
This, above all, is the story of a time and characters largely forgotten, given the pace of our comfortable, untroubled lives. Even many of those who have a speaking acquaintance with the opening of the West know little or nothing of the tragedy of Fort Phil Kearny.
To date there have been but two other battles on the scale of the Fetterman Massacreâonly two other dramas in our brief national history in which no survivors emerged. The Alamo lives on in legend and myth, as well as Custer's last fight at the Little Bighorn. For too long both battles have overshadowed the tragedy that unfolded beneath the Big Horn Mountains, a story with every bit as much pathos, every bit as much human conflict created by the passions of men colliding at destiny's call â¦
I feel the time has come for the story to be told of that bitter December day in 1866.
The writer of historical fiction assumes a perilous task: while he must remain true to history, there are the demands of fiction pressing the writer to pace, dramatize, capsulize, omit. In this case the story lay before me. All I had to do was tell it.
As a work of history, I relied on many sources, seven of which I'll make mention. The first three I called upon most heavily, drawing from them the skeleton of the story. What remained was for the novelist in me to flesh that story out.
Dee Brown's work,
Fort Phil Kearny, an American Saga,
first published in 1962, stands alone as the ideal telling of the story in a historical setting.
For flavor and mood of both time and place, I relied on two firsthand accounts, both written by women married to officers at Fort Phil Kearny during the dramatic months portrayed in the following story. Frances C. Carrington rode into Sioux country the wife of Lt. George Washington Grummond. A spare three months later she rode out of the gates of Fort Phil Kearny a widow (and years after married the man who had commanded the fort and mountain district of Dakota Territory in 1866). Her story,
My Army Life, and the Fort Phil Kearny Massacre,
first published in 1910, lends much of the bitter pall to the aftermath of the massacre. In addition, Margaret I. Carrington accompanied her husband to the foot of the Big Horns where he would build his fort and protect the Montana Road, and left us her
Absaraka: Home of the Crows,
published in 1868. Both recorded their impressions not only of the flora and animal life, but the heart-pounding sequence of events that culminated in that bloody December day on the far side of Lodge Trail Ridge.
While those three provided me with the story itself, four other sources lent muscle and sinew to its telling. In any tale of the Montana Road, one would be remiss failing to mention
The Bloody Bozeman,
the superb work of Dorothy M. Johnson, published in 1971. As much as Jim Bridger was a vital player in this drama, I found myself referring time and again to Stanley Vestal's
Jim Bridger, Mountain Man.
And because Cyrus Townsend Brady utilized many first-person accounts in the writing of his
Indian Fights and Fighters,
I turned to his pages repeatedly.
In writing Indian history (since this story is as much an Indian tale as it is a story of the frontier army), one finds himself relying on Indian information. The most monumental work on the life of Red Cloud and his Oglalla Sioux people,
Red Cloud's Folk, a History of the Oglala Sioux
(first printed in 1937), gave me insights for writing scenes from the perspective of those whose land had been invaded by the white man. And finally, I gleaned countless historical and social threads woven into the fabric of the time from
Fort Laramie and the Pageant of the West
by LeRoy Hafen and Francis Young (1938).
But beyond the mere
retelling
of history, it is left for the historical novelist himself to add something that history alone can't convey to most readersâthat warm, throbbing pulse that truly allows the reader to
relive
history.
The era of the Indian Wars of the Far West is really the story of the conquest of western America. During that quarter century we witness the finish to what had begun when the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock or Sir Walter Raleigh founded his Virginia Colony. By the end of the Civil War, America was ready once more to stretch and grow. For some time the westward-moving tide had pressed beyond the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, driving before it the mighty Sioux and their allies, the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Following Appomattox, the government could now devote resources to the pacification of the West.
So what began in 1866 as Colonel Carrington's 18th Infantry found themselves the first soldiers ordered west to subdue the Indians, would not end until another bloody, cold December day in 1890 along a little-known creek called Wounded Knee.
The fever of that quarter century made the Indian Wars a time unequaled in the annals of man, when a vast frontier was wrenched from its inhabitants, in a struggle as rich in drama and pathos as any.