The New American Digest

December 21, 1866: Second only to Custer’s misadventure 10 years later

Background

The Bozeman Trail was an offshoot of the Oregon Trail, leading from just west of Fort Laramie, crossing the North Platte River, heading north through central Wyoming, east of the Bighorn Mountains, to the gold diggings at Virginia City, Montana. Four military forts were established along the route, the first three in Wyoming, the fourth in Montana: Forts Reno, Phil Kearney, and CF Smith on the Wyoming/Montana border, and Fort Ellis near Bozeman Pass just east of today’s city of Bozeman. I-25 from Casper north roughly follows the old trail. The trail was rough; travel took about 2 months from Fort Laramie to Virginia City, MT. Passage with a wagon train cost about $5 but the route was primarily a freight road.

The trail saw heavy use in the mid-1860s and travelled through Indian lands.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 gave the US the right to establish roads and forts in the territory; it also designated the region as Crow territory. Even though the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe accepted the treaty, they began to ignore it and the Crow, whose land this was by treaty, were pushed west and the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe took control of these hunting grounds. Although the land by treaty (also agreed to by the Sioux) was Crow land, the Sioux claimed the land east of the Powder River but attacked the route and forts which were west of the river. The Crow tended to side with the whites in conflicts with other tribes; it was their land they fought for and the whites tended to defend the treaty.

The Sioux were recent newcomers to the land, having been pushed out of the northern Great Lakes country, pushed west into Minnesota, then into the Dakotas in the 1850s. They obtained horses in the 1700s and by the mid-1800s, had become the most powerful tribe of the Plains. The name “Sioux” is derived (by the French) from the Ojibwa from a term meaning “enemy” or “little snakes”. They eventually moved to the Black Hills in the late 1700s, pushing the resident Cheyenne to the Powder River country of Wyoming by 1860.

The most dangerous section of the trail was the roughly 250 miles between Fort Laramie and the crossing of the BigHorn River where the trail started to head west.

In the summer of 1866, Colonel Carrington established the three Wyoming forts with Fort Phil Kearney as his headquarters. All three were nominally on Crow territory but the Sioux and allies fought the Crow to take over the fine hunting grounds of the region. The whites ended up in the middle of an inter-Indian war. In total, there were about 700 soldiers and 300 civilians spread among the three with Fort Kearney having about 400 soldiers and almost all civilians stationed there. About 3500 whites used the trail in the few years it was open

The forts were under frequent Indian attack during construction with groups of 50 or more Indians in each attack. By November, a company of cavalry arrived along with two Civil War veteran captains, Bingham and Fetterman.

Although respected for his Civil War service, he was not familiar with Indian tactics. Fetterman continuously criticized his commanding officer’s defense strategy and bragged that with 80 men he would ride through the Sioux nation.

He would get his chance.

To The Battle

In mid November, Carrington gave Fetterman permission to conduct an ambush but the Indians didn’t fall for the ruse. Later, Fetterman was commanding an escort for a timber gathering party. An Indian appeared nearby, enticing Fetterman to pursue. The more experienced officer commanding the wood gathering group took cover behind the wagons instead, avoiding the mass of Indians out of sight beyond the hill where the individual first appeared.

Carrington’s superior, Gen Cooke, told Carrington to take the offensive. On Dec 6, reports came back that a wood party about 6 miles west of the fort was under attack. Fetterman was ordered to move west to assist the wood party; Carrington led a detachment north to circle around the Indians. The Indians retreated when the two forces joined up. Carrington was guided by Jim Bridger who commented: “The soldiers don’t know anything about fighting Indians”.

On Dec 20, Captains Fetterman and Brown were denied a request to attack a Sioux village about 50 miles away.

Red Cloud decided to attack Fort Kearney in a major operation before heavy snows caused the tribes to disperse for the winter. With about 1000 warriors, they laid a trap on either side of Lodge Trail Ridge, a few miles north of the fort but out of sight. The Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe split their forces on either side of the ridge and a group of Indians under Crazy Horse were chosen as the bait.

The nearest source of timber was about 5 miles NW of the fort. About 10AM, Carrington dispatched another wood party along with 90 soldiers to guard them. Shortly after the train left the fort, pickets on a hill nearby signaled the train was under attack. Fetterman was now a brevet Lt Colonel and was given command of the relief party. Two other Carrington critics, Lt Grummond and Captain Brown, along with two civilians joined Fetterman’s command, now totaling 81 men.

His chance had come.

Orders were that “under no circumstances was the relief party to pursue over Lodge Trail Ridge“. The orders were given twice; as the party was organized and when the party passed the fort gates. Grummond’s wife confirmed that the orders were given and heard by everyone present.

Fetterman immediately headed north for Lodge Pole Ridge rather than NW to the wood party under attack. It was assumed that Fetterman intended to circle around and attack the Indians from the rear. However, signals came that the wood party was no longer under attack as Fetterman disappeared out of site over the ridge line of Lodge Trail Ridge, chasing about 10 Indians acting as decoys who apparently mooned him.

Fetterman disobeyed orders; rather than go to the relief of the wood party, he chased the decoys north below the ridge. Mixed troops of cavalry and infantry got separated; the calvary unit leaving the infantry behind as they pursued the decoys. At the time the trap was sprung, the cavalry was about 1 mile ahead of the infantry.

Heavy gunfire to the north was soon heard at the fort. Carrington sent 75 men on foot up the ridge under command of Capt Ten Eyck to see what was happening. Ten Eyck cautiously advanced up the ridge and from the top at about 12:24PM, he saw a large party of Indians in the valley below. Another 42 men were dispatched up the ridge and the taunting Indians slowly retreated.

All 81 men under Fetterman’s command were dead; stripped and mutilated bodies scattered just below the ridge. It had taken the Indians about 20 minutes to kill the infantry and another 20 to finish off the cavalry. Only 6 soldiers were killed by bullets. Fetterman and Brown suposedly committed suicide by shooting each other but some Indian accounts dispute that. Carrington reported: “eyes torn out and laid on rocks, noses and ears cut off, teeth chopped out, brains taken out and placed on rocks, hands and feet cut off, private parts severed.”

The last to die was the bugler who had used his bugle as a weapon until overcome. His was the only body not mutilated.

Estimates of Indian dead varied; as few as 10, perhaps as many as 160. The lower figure is considered more likely. Only the Custer fight 8 years later was more damaging.

Aftermath:

Carrington prepared the fort for a major attack. All excess ammo and explosives were placed in the magazine along with the women and children – to be blown up if the Indians broke through.

One can only imagine the fear permeating the fort’s inhabitants that long cold night …

In one of the more heroic and little known events of the Indian wars, a civilian, Portugee Phillips, took off in a deep winter night to carry a distress message to Fort Laramie, some 250 miles away. It took him 4 days riding through hostile territory through a blizzard. He arrived at Fort Laramie late in the evening on Christmas Day during the fort’s Christmas party

The bodies of those killed were buried in a common grave on December 26. Carrington was relieved of command and left the fort with the women and children on Jan 23 in weather reaching -38 degree to Fort Laramie. Carrington was absolved of blame but the public opinion had been settled. It was noted that Fort Laramie, a region of peace, was manned by 12 companies, while Foprt kearney, in war country, only had five.

The result of the Fetterman fight convinced the government to quit defending the Bozeman Trail and an 1868 treaty conceded the forts and Powder River to the Indians … which only lasted until 1876. The Indians destroyed the forts.

There remain 3 controversial items:
Carrington’s orders
Carrington claimed that Fetterman “was arrogant, insubordinate, and inexperienced in fighting Indians and that he gave Fetterman explicit orders not to venture beyond the summit of Lodge Trail Ridge.” The orders were given and emphasized several times with witnesses present.
Fetterman’s supporters claim Carrington and Fetterman had planned on an offensive movement and such orders were not given. Other than Carrington’s accusations, “there is no evidence indicating that Fetterman was anything but a professional officer and a perfect gentleman with a distinguished combat record.”

Lt Grummond, commanding cavalry
Carrington explicitly told Grummond to stick with Fetterman’s infantry. Grummond was an experienced combat officer but had also been court-martialed for drunkenness and abuse of civilians. he had obviously disobeyed Carrington’s orders; the cavalry unit was found about a mile away from Fetterman’s troops

Captain Ten Eyck
The captain was sent to the relief of Fetterman when large scale gunfire was heard at the fort. Ten Eyck was accused of being slow to Fetterman’s aid, taking a more roundabout path to the fighting. Although his actions were deemed appropriate, he was accused of cowardice and drunkenness and was “allowed” to retire from the army. There is no evidence Ten Eyck could have reached Fetterman in time to provide aid no matter the route and speed taken.

Fetterman, like Custer 8 years later, was considered a valiant hero and opinions to the contrary were not enjoyed. Walking the battleground – still an empty expanse, studying the history of other skirmishes in the area – the “Wagon Box fight”, the “Hayfield Fight”, and other goings on up and down the remnants of the Bozeman Trail, one can come to the conclusion that like Custer, Fetterman was overly impressed with himself, disdainful of his enemy, and willing to obey orders only when he agreed with him. It’s too bad he took so many down with him.

It’s been many a year since I travelled that country. I followed the actual trail where I could. Fort Kearney is now a state historical park and apparently has been somewhat reconstructed since I was last there.

Fort Reno, 1865-1868, built on a bluff above the Powder River, is marked by a monument but has reverted to prairie grassland. It was burned by Cheyenne in 1868, but again used as a supply base for 15 days in 1876. Only a few adobe walls existed of the old fort at that time. Those buried in the fort’s cemetery were disinterred in 1880 and moved to the Custer Battlefield National Cemetery. Debris is scattered around but nothing of significance remains.

Fort CF Smith was built in 1866 and was abandoned in 1868. The fort location is on private land within the Crow Reservation. “Melted” adobe walls remain, sufficient to outline the positions of structures. A monument exists but I’ve not been to the location

That was yesterday (Dec 19) between Cheyenne and Laramie with winds in excess of 144 mph

There’s a place west of Denver where the old Denver & Rio Grande RR (now Union Pacific) heads up into the mountains. Anyone that’s been there knows that “The Mile High City” sits in a valley and the mountains form a north-south wall about 10 miles west of the city.

Just west of Highway 93, midway between Golden and Boulder, is a place on the railroad known as “Big 10 Curve” where trains pass through a tight switchback.

The trains need to gain over 300 feet in elevation in less than 1 mile; trains can’t climb a 10% grade – a 2% grade is considered steep.

The Front Range is a wide, almost uniform wall of grade; winds often exceeding 100+ mph can come roaring down that grade and can easily derail a train – especially if empty or high profile (those winds can disrupt traffic on CO93 as well).

This route was originally constructed in 1902. After a couple of wind-blown incidents, the D&RGW built a track along the curve, placed a string of 2 dozen hopper cars along it, welded the cars in place and loaded them down with concrete and dirt to act as a windbreak.

The hoppers were built in 1952 and used for maintenance service until placed as a windbreak in 1972 after a train derailment in late 1971.

This is the line Amtrak’s California Zephyr uses as well as the Ski Train from Denver to Winter Park. It passes through Moffat Tunnel which is the highest point (9200ft) on Amtrak’s lines.

posted Dec 14, 2021

Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
— T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”

Theirs was the Age of Myth; a world where the night was not dimmed by our world wide web of lights that now obscures the stars. Their nights were lit by flaring torches, dim oil lamps, guttering candles; by the phases of the moon and the broad shimmering river of the Milky Way. As the sun declined and night ascended, life withdrew into shuttered and barred homes. Only the very rich or the very poor were abroad in the dark.

The night sky, now so thin and distant, so seldom really seen, was to them as thick and close as a slab of coal studded with diamonds. They could turn it in their mind’s eye even as it turned above them. They reclined on their hillsides, their roofs, or in rooms built for viewing and marking the moon and the stars. They watched it all revolve above them and sang the centuries down. They remembered. They kept records and told tales. They saw beings in the heavens — gods and animals, giants and insects, all sparking the origins of myth — and they knew that in some way all was connected to all; as above, so below, “on Earth as it is in Heaven”. They studied the patterns of it all and from those repeating patterns fashioned our first science, astrology.

And, like all our other celebrated sciences since, they looked to astrology to give them hints about the future, about what they should do, what they should expect, what they should become. They looked to their science then, as many look to their science now, to remove their doubt.

In time stronger, more intricately argued sciences would rise upon the structures of the proto-sciences of astrology and alchemy; sciences that chained demons with data. These new data-based sciences would push the first sciences into the realm of myth, speculation, superstition, and popular fantasy. And, as it is with our advertising, promise, big promise is the soul of our brave new sciences.

The new sciences, you see, are much, much more about “Reality” than the old sciences. They will never be tossed aside like so many playthings of mankind’s youth. The authority of our astronomy, our biology, our physics, our chemistry, and others is, we fervently believe, as certain as the pole star. Unlike astrology and alchemy, they will never be questioned; they will be built upon.

It is a central tenet of our faith in science that the new will encompass the old in one endless and eternal conservation of sense and sensibility. In this cathedral, we worship a database. We can see outward to the edge of what is, and downward into time was to (almost) the moment of Creation. We can see inward into (almost) the mute heart of matter. We have the proven method. We have the hard evidence. We know that nothing is, in time, beyond our knowing. All doubt has been removed. We are the Alpha and Omega. Our science is now as eternal and as deeply grounded in truth as… well, as astrology was in 5 B.C.

Somewhere around 5 B.C. three of the world’s leading astronomers/astrologers noticed something unusual in the sky. It could have been a comet. It could have been a supernova. It could have been a rare conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. Whatever it was, it was strange enough for them to travel towards it. Or so it is said. Or so it is written. Or so it is remembered from the time of myth.

Myth or history? What is the reality of this road trip towards an obscure birth in a wretched town, during a not very pleasant passage in history, over 2,000 years in our past?

We do not know. We cannot know. As it is in so much else that we ignore it is not given to us to know.

We have only shards of pottery and fragments of texts snatched from desert caves or teased out of the soil with tin trowels and brushes. We have only the sifted detritus of history; a global jigsaw puzzle where ninety-nine percent of the pieces have long gone to dust.

Our past is a handful of ashes. It is beyond our gift to ever know the difference between an inspiring folk tale and the eyewitness accounts of something that, even today, would occupy the realm of the miraculous. For today, in the realm of the mysteries, we no longer have any time for the good or the beautiful; we have no time for miracles. We have only time for denigration.

In 2004 Time and Newsweek, endeavored, in their ham-fisted way, to gin up some circulation with articles that purported to “examine” the miracles surrounding the intersection of the divine with a world now buried two millennia deep in the ash of the Earth. We shall probably see the same sort of thing this year. The cheapening of the spirit in this culture,” the expense of reason in a waste of shame,” by those whose lamp of the soul burns low, is now as predictable as the winter solstice.

In the manner of these publications, and the habits of the sodden intellects that grind them out for small silver, a lot of time was spent on the “question” of the Virginity of Mary, the mother of Christ. It’s a scurrilous bit of work. A “hit piece” on Mary, in the jargon of the magazine trade. For all the preening of these publications, the articles were just two chunks of thinly veiled anti-Christian porn, sops to secular hedonists in search of a cheap thrill by imbibing another hit of their favorite pap. These kinds of magazine articles always strike a chord of sadness in me, because I know at last the true cost of creating them. They are a curious kind of self-damnation in life, and, as a result, a waste of life.

Beneath all the buffed prose and appeals to experts and phoned-in quotes from scholars, the articles rose to little more than the coarse chortling of fraternity boys in the early drunken hours of the morning: “A virgin? Right! Sure. Any wife’d tell her husband that if she suddenly…”

In the offices of Time and Newsweek, there is no room for wonder beyond the fact that, for fewer people every passing year, they are still publishing and still making payroll. So far. Anything else, anything that might have within it the spark of the divine, is fit for nothing except denigration. This belief squats at the cold dead center of their editorial philosophy, a philosophy they share with untold millions of our coarsened fellow citizens. And still they cannot comprehend why year after year, no matter how cheap they price their subscriptions, their circulation continues to decline. In none of their editorial meetings do any of those attending look about them and declare that they have become “an alien people clutching their gods” in a land that finds them more and more dispensable.

We will leave them in their conference rooms high above the Avenue of the Americas, and wish them a “Happy Holiday. Have a good one.” It is far more interesting to ponder, instead, those ancient ancestors who had no doubts that what they had seen in the heavens was unusual enough to travel.

In 5 B.C. “travel” was not something undertaken lightly. It involved, across distances that would seem trivial today, risks of life and death at every turn. It required wealth and endurance. Few traveled for pleasure. To travel at all required a motivation far beyond the ordinary. So, at the very least, while we cannot know what was in the sky in those days, we can be certain it was something very unusual.

In his short story, “The Star,” Arthur C. Clarke’s Jesuit narrator of the far future discovers the remnants of a civilization destroyed by a violent nova so that its light might announce the birth of Christ on Earth. The story has that ironic twist that is popular with authors and pleasing to readers. I remember it as making an impression on me when I was around 12 years old. But the story does not age well because the science of it, like all science, does not age well. The story is just 53 years old.

In 1957, when I was twelve years old, we all lived in a far smaller universe with far fewer stars for God to destroy by way of cosmic birth announcements. Now that the inventory of His stars has increased a billion-fold, I think it is safe to say He could have found one to suit His purpose that didn’t involve destroying a blameless alien race. He could simply pick one deeper in the field and, well, ramp up the volume. That sort of thing is just an afterthought once You’ve got omnipotence. It might even do double duty if You could use a star in an area that might need a few more heavy elements across the next brief one or two billion years of Your plan.

Sages and mystics, Eliot and Clarke, and a host of others have all had their turns with the story of The Star. In the end, it remains what it was when it began, a story. The story of a road trip by three astrologers, kings, wise men. A journey by men who saw something special in the heavens and determined to follow it wherever it led, no matter what the cost.

To see something special. To see something beyond yourself and your imaginings. To follow it wherever it leads. To always remain prepared for miracle. That is the inner music of the story of The Star. Like all stories that survive, it is the music of the heart and not of the head, and like the heart, it will endure.

“Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.”

To have “evidence and no doubt.” That is what those that put themselves forward as our “wise men” seem to propose to us day after day from their sterile rooms high above the avenues. They have the “data” from which we should derive, they insist, doubt about all that for which they have no evidence, no data.

First and foremost in their blinded vision is their iron requirement that we should doubt the original myths that have made us and sustained us as individuals and as a people across the centuries. In their pointless world, they would have us cast off the old myths and embrace their “new and improved myths — complete with evidence;” myths made of purposeless matter “hovering in the dark.”

And seeing what these “wise men” have become, we turn. We turn away.

Instead, every year a bit more it seems, a tide has shifted in the hearts of men and we turn like a lodestone to the deeper myths of the human heart; that place where The Star will always shine — always within and yet always beyond us. In the end, the Mystery is the Gift.

Saw this classic “fin-car” in Grand Junction, Colorado. As a young’un, I rode in the station wagon version.

This was the year the Impala model took over “top-of-the-line” from the Bel Air. The Impala model sold just shy of 500,000 units; this style was considered the second generation Impala, the 1958 was first generation. The fins went away in the 1960 model.