On 21 December 1866, in the Powder River country of what is now northern Wyoming, a party of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors drew a detachment of U.S. soldiers out of Fort Phil Kearny, over Lodge Trail Ridge and into a trap. Captain William J. Fetterman and every man with him were killed. The Lakota remember it as the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand. It was the Army's heaviest loss to a Native force until the Little Bighorn ten years later, and it helped persuade the government to give up the forts on the Bozeman Trail.
Forts on the Bozeman Trail
The Bozeman Trail ran from the Platte road toward 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 a battalion of the 18th Infantry to guard the trail, and in July they began to build Fort Phil Kearny, at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. Red Cloud and other leaders who would not accept the road made war on it. The wood trains that brought timber from the mountains to the fort were attacked again and again, and Shannon Smith writes that by mid-December nearly 70 soldiers and civilians had been killed in more than 50 skirmishes near the post.1
Over Lodge Trail Ridge
On the morning of 21 December a wood train was attacked, and Fetterman, a Civil War veteran, took command of the relief force. With the infantry went Lieutenant George Grummond and 27 cavalrymen, Captain Frederick Brown and two civilians, James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher, about 80 men in all. A small party of decoys, among them the young Lakota warrior Crazy Horse, drew the soldiers toward Lodge Trail Ridge. On the far side, out of sight of the fort, a much larger force was waiting. Estimates of its size run as high as 2,000 warriors.2
The soldiers crossed the ridge and were overwhelmed. HistoryNet's account says the fight lasted about 40 minutes. The soldiers broke into separate groups, and the infantry, armed with old muzzle-loading rifles, made a last stand among the rocks near the top of the slope. All of them died. Wheatley and Fisher had repeating rifles and fought on with a few troopers until they too were killed. The dead were stripped and mutilated, and Smith links this to the massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho families at Sand Creek two years earlier. A relief party under Captain Tenodor Ten Eyck reached the ridge after the shooting had stopped. The Native losses are not known; HistoryNet suggests at least 60 warriors may have died.3
The total killed is usually given as 81, and the Wyoming state historic site at the fort speaks of the 81 men the garrison had to bury. Smith counts Fetterman and 79 others.4
Who was to blame
Carrington said he had ordered Fetterman not to pursue beyond Lodge Trail Ridge, and the old version of the story, spread by Carrington's two wives in their books, blames a reckless Fetterman who had boasted that with 80 men he could ride through the whole Sioux nation. 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. The Army blamed Carrington at the time and relieved him of command.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. Red Cloud sent word that the war would end when the Army left the forts and closed the road. In the summer of 1868 the Army abandoned them, and Red Cloud's warriors burned Fort C. F. Smith and Fort Phil Kearny, before he signed the Fort Laramie Treaty that November. The larger defeat of the same wars came a decade later, in the Battle of the Little Bighorn.6
Also on this day
- 1832: Battle of Konya. An Egyptian army under Ibrahim Pasha met the Ottoman army of Reşid Mehmed Pasha just outside Konya in the First Turko-Egyptian War.
