On December 21, 1866, with the temperature far below zero and snow knee-deep, Captain Tenodor Ten Eyck and forty-seven men reached the top of Lodge Trail Ridge in the Wyoming Territory. Below them, the valley was filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of horsemen, shouting and waving, inviting the soldiers to come down. Ten Eyck held his position for half an hour. Then the horsemen withdrew and the valley fell silent.
What the soldiers found next would become known as the greatest disaster the American army had suffered on the plains up to that time. In a narrow space of about forty meters, naked bodies lay in red-stained snow. Their uniforms, boots, and weapons had been stripped away. Most of the bodies were unrecognizable.
Arms and legs had been cut off. Skulls had been crushed. The head of a lieutenant was never found. More than a hundred arrows were counted in one man’s body.
When the soldiers loaded the dead into wagons, they could not determine which part belonged to which man. Some could not be identified at all. Eighty-one men had left the fort that morning. All eighty-one remained on that hill.
Not one returned. Not one escaped. Not one was taken prisoner. Years later, when a Lakota warrior who took part in the battle was asked how long the fight lasted, he did not speak of hours or minutes.
He said only this: as long as it takes a hungry man to finish his meal. The event became known as the Fetterman Massacre. It happened ten years before Little Bighorn and, at the time, shocked the army far more. This was not an accident.
It was a trap. The story began with gold. In 1862, gold was discovered in Montana, first at Grasshopper Creek, then at Alder Gulch, then at Last Chance Gulch. While the eastern United States tore itself apart in civil war, people in the West rushed for riches.
Reaching the Montana gold fields, however, took months. Then John Bozeman found a shortcut that broke off from the North Platte River and climbed north along the eastern foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. It shortened the journey by weeks and offered water, grass, and game. It also had an owner.
The Bozeman Trail cut straight through the Powder River Basin, at that time the finest remaining bison territory in North America. For the Lakota, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Arapaho, this land was not merely territory. It was life itself. The winter camps, the winter hunt, and the sacred places were all here.
Under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, the land belonged to the Lakota by law. The trail meant wagon trains, gunfire, and disruption of the bison herds. The Lakota had seen this before on the Oregon Trail and in the Platte Valley. This time, they decided, they would not allow it.
In June 1866, the government called a peace conference at Fort Laramie to gain Lakota approval for safe passage along the Bozeman Trail. Hundreds of Lakota came, including Red Cloud, one of the most influential war leaders of the Oglala Lakota. While negotiations were still underway, a dust cloud appeared on the horizon. More than seven hundred soldiers under Colonel Henry B.
Carrington arrived with wagons, timber, nails, saws, and artillery. Carrington had not come to wait for the treaty’s outcome. He carried orders, written before the conference even began, to build forts along the trail. According to accounts, Red Cloud stood up and told the commissioners that the man had come to steal his people’s land, that the white man spoke to them like children, and that they would fight.
Then he walked out of the tent with hundreds of warriors behind him. The conflict that followed became known as Red Cloud’s War, one of the rare wars between the United States and an Indian nation. It was a war the United States lost. Carrington advanced north and in July 1866 began building a fort on a plateau between the Little Piney and Big Piney creeks, naming it Fort Phil Kearny.
Understanding Carrington is essential to understanding what happened next. He had spent four years in the Civil War without entering a single battle. He was an administrator, an engineer, a regimental organizer. He had recruited soldiers in Ohio, trained troops, and managed logistics, all without ever having been under enemy fire.
Now he was building a stockade in the middle of enemy territory. The fort itself was a masterpiece, with a palisade of sharpened logs about three meters high and watchtowers at the corners. Inside stood barracks, stables, a hospital, a warehouse, and a carpentry shop. The problem was that building a fort perfectly did not mean knowing how to defend it.
Timber had to come from a pine forest about ten kilometers away, meaning a wood train left the fort every day. And the Lakota were there every time. From August to December 1866, more than fifty attacks were recorded around Fort Phil Kearny. They attacked the wood trains, stole horses, and ambushed riders.
They never besieged the fort because there was no need. They targeted every man who stepped outside, turning the fort into a prison. More than a hundred soldiers and civilians were killed during those five months. Morale collapsed, rations dwindled, and most of the enlisted men carried muzzle-loading rifles, capable of only two or three shots per minute.
On November 3, 1866, Captain William Judd Fetterman arrived. He was a thirty-two-year-old officer with a serious Civil War record. He had fought at Stones River and taken part in the Atlanta campaign. He had received brevet promotions for bravery, holding the honorary rank of lieutenant colonel.
His men liked him, and he was known to be cool-headed in battle, leading from the front. He was not an idiot and not a coward. He was a man who had won battles against Confederate armies for four years, and he carried the logic of that war with him. In the Civil War, enemies formed lines and endured fire.
None of those rules applied in the Powder River Basin. Fetterman was shocked to find a colonel holed up inside his fort, constantly on the defensive. To him, it looked less like strategy than cowardice. Legend holds that Fetterman said, Give me eighty men and I will ride through the whole Sioux nation.
Historians seriously debate whether he actually said this. The first written record came after the event from people around Carrington, all of whom had reason to portray Fetterman as an arrogant fool and Carrington as an innocent victim. Fetterman’s own letters show a different man, one who obeyed orders during his time at the fort. But the mindset behind the legend was real, and it was shared by most of the young officers inside the fort.
Lieutenant George Washington Grummond, a brave but reckless Civil War veteran, was among them. He was living at the fort with his pregnant wife, Francis, whose later memoirs would become a valuable firsthand account. On December 6, 1866, the wood train was attacked as usual. Carrington planned a pincer movement in which Fetterman would distract the attackers while Carrington cut them off from behind.
The plan failed. The warriors scattered, the soldiers chased them, and Grummond dashed forward uncontrollably with his cavalry. He found himself surrounded with eleven men. Two soldiers were killed, and Grummond barely escaped with his life.
That night Carrington learned that his men would break formation when they chased an enemy in hot blood. The Lakota learned something far more important. The soldiers would take the bait. If a small group of warriors appeared and retreated, the soldiers would break formation and follow.
And when they followed, they became scattered. A tactic was born. Over the following two weeks, warriors gathered from the winter camps. Oglala, Miniconjou, Sans Arc Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho came together.
This was not a standard raiding party. Different nations had united around a single plan. Most serious estimates place the gathering between one thousand and two thousand warriors. Among them was a young Oglala warrior around twenty-six years old named Crazy Horse, who would become famous ten years later at Little Bighorn.
Also present were High Back Bone, American Horse, and on the Cheyenne side, Little Wolf and Two Moons. Whether Red Cloud was personally there is debated, but the political will behind the plan was indisputably his. Before the attack, according to the narrative, the warriors consulted a winkte, a person holding a special, sacred position in Lakota culture believed to possess the power of foresight. The winkte covered the head with a blanket, mounted a horse, rode toward the hill, and returned, opening the hand and saying, I have ten in my hand.
The warriors said it was not enough twice more. The fourth time, the winkte jumped off the horse, slapped the hands to the ground, and said, I have a hundred or more in my hand. I can’t count them all. The warriors shouted that it was enough.
In Lakota memory, the event is remembered by a different name: the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, or the Hundred Slain. Two days before the main attack, another rehearsal took place. On December 19, the wood train was attacked. Carrington sent Captain James Powell to relieve it with clear orders not to cross the ridge.
Powell obeyed exactly. Two days later, the same order would be given to a different man. December 21, 1866, morning. The weather was clear and freezing.
Toward noon, the lookout signaled that the wood train was under attack west of the fort. Carrington prepared a relief party. He considered giving Powell command again, but Fetterman stepped forward and demanded it. He outranked Powell, and under army rules, the command was his right.
Carrington agreed. The order, repeated three times at the fort, was clear: relieve the wood train, drive back the attackers, and under no circumstances pursue them beyond Lodge Trail Ridge. Three repetitions meant Carrington feared the order would be disobeyed. The detachment was assembled.
With Fetterman went forty-nine infantrymen from different companies of the 18th Infantry Regiment, men who did not know each other and carried muzzle-loading rifles. Grummond joined with twenty-seven cavalrymen of the 2nd Cavalry, armed with seven-shot Spencer carbines. Captain Frederick Brown, the fort’s quartermaster, joined on his own accord, having repeatedly said he wanted to kill an Indian before leaving. Two civilians, James Wheatley and Isaac Fisher, went along with new Henry repeating rifles, the best weapons on the hill that day.
Including Fetterman, the total number was eighty-one. Francis Grummond begged her husband not to dash forward as he had last time. He promised he would not. Then came the first oddity.
The wood train was under attack to the west. Fetterman did not go west. He went north along the Bozeman Trail toward Lodge Trail Ridge, apparently planning to cut off the attackers’ line of retreat. Meanwhile, the attack on the wood train ended on its own.
The warriors withdrew. The train was safe, but its attack had never been about the train. The goal had been to draw a detachment out of the fort. As Fetterman advanced, a small group of about ten warriors appeared ahead, chosen, according to accounts, two from each tribe, with Crazy Horse among them.
What followed was one of the finest decoy operations in military history. The warriors approached, stopped just out of firing range, retreated when the soldiers fired, returned, shouted insults, and made derogatory gestures. Crazy Horse was said to have dismounted, acting as if his horse had lost a shoe, checking its hoof, building a fire, warming his hands, then riding away at the last second. For forty-five minutes, ten men held eighty-one men in their hands, infuriating them, making them impatient, and separating them from each other.
The cavalry sped ahead. The infantry fell behind. Around noon, the detachment reached the top of Lodge Trail Ridge, the limit Carrington had drawn. From the fort, the men could be seen on the ridge.
Then Fetterman crossed it, descending into Peno Creek, and the soldiers were lost from view forever. The terrain made the trap perfect. The northern slope of Lodge Trail Ridge descends as a narrow, long ridge line with steep, brush-filled ravines on both sides. From the top, you cannot see inside those ravines.
The soldiers walked through a blind corridor. That morning, in the subzero cold, between one thousand and two thousand warriors had been lying in those ravines for hours, their horses laid down, waiting without a sound. The soldiers descended about two-thirds of the ridge. Then the signal was given, perhaps a mirror reflection, perhaps the raising of a spear.
From both sides of the valley, thousands of men stood up simultaneously. The first to be hit were those at the front, Grummond’s cavalry. Most of the warriors carried bows, arrows, war clubs, spears, and tomahawks, with only a portion holding old rifles. This was no disadvantage.
A master bowman could shoot ten arrows in fifteen seconds, while a soldier with a muzzle-loader might fire one shot in the same time. Arrows could also be shot upward, meaning warriors never needed to expose themselves. From inside the ravines they fired into the sky, and the arrows rained down on the soldiers, who did not even know where to aim. The battle was fought as three separate, disconnected deaths.
The cavalry was the furthest ahead and most scattered. The first attack came straight down on them. Horses panicked and were brought down. Some cavalrymen tried to flee back toward the infantry and were cut down one by one along the ridge.
Grummond himself died fighting with his sword. When his body was found, his head was missing. The civilians, Wheatley and Fisher, took cover among rocks in the lower section and put up the best defense on the hill that day with their Henry rifles. More than fifty empty casings were counted at the site of their bodies, and the number of arrows found in Wheatley’s body was recorded as over one hundred.
Fetterman, Brown, and the infantry fell back among large rock outcroppings on the ridge, a place now called Massacre Hill. They formed a circle and fought from behind the rocks, perhaps for only a few minutes. Then the circle tightened and the warriors moved in. The fight turned to hand-to-hand combat with clubs, tomahawks, and knives.
How Fetterman died remains controversial. Carrington’s initial report claimed Fetterman and Brown were found side by side with bullet wounds to the temple, and he interpreted this as a suicide pact. The fort surgeon, however, recorded that Fetterman had a large gash across his neck, the cause of death. Years later, a Lakota warrior named American Horse said he had killed Fetterman himself, knocking him from his horse with a war club before slitting his throat.
Most historians now believe Brown may have shot himself, but Fetterman died fighting. One other legend survived. A German immigrant named Adolf Metzger, an elderly cavalry bugler, was said to have run out of ammunition and fought with his bugle as a club. When the bodies were collected, Metzger’s was the only untouched body in the area, with a buffalo robe draped over it as a mark of respect.
The story does not appear in official reports and was likely a local tale that grew in the telling, but it became the single human moment people clung to. At the fort, gunshots were heard around noon. Carrington sent Ten Eyck with forty-seven men. Ten Eyck reached the ridge about an hour later and saw the valley filled with horsemen calling to him.
He wisely refused to go down, a decision that saved the fort. When the warriors withdrew, he descended and found the dead. Forty-nine bodies were loaded into wagons that day; the rest were collected the next day. That night, Carrington calculated only about 119 fighting men remained.
Believing the fort would fall, he placed the women and children in the powder magazine and left instructions that, if the defense collapsed, the magazine should be ignited, meaning the women and children would be blown up rather than taken prisoner. A blizzard began, and temperatures dropped below minus thirty degrees. Help was needed. The nearest telegraph line stood at Fort Laramie, over two hundred kilometers away.
A man named John Phillips, called Portuguese by everyone because he had come from the Azores, volunteered. Carrington gave him his own horse. For four days through the blizzard, Phillips traveled by night and hid by day, covering nearly three hundred eighty kilometers. On Christmas night, December 25, 1866, he reached Fort Laramie, where officers and their wives were holding a Christmas ball.
A man wrapped in buffalo skins, his beard and eyebrows frozen, barely able to stand, walked in, handed over the paper in his hand, and collapsed. At Fort Phil Kearny, the ground was frozen solid. Soldiers toiled with pickaxes for days. Finally they dug a single trench about fifteen meters long and buried all eighty-one men side by side in a mass grave.
Francis Grummond had her husband’s body placed in a coffin and waited at the fort for weeks to take it east. She spent that winter under the same roof as her husband’s coffin in a fort besieged by those who had killed him. When the news reached the East, the country went into shock. The Civil War had just ended, the army was among the most experienced in the world, and an entire detachment had been wiped out in twenty minutes.
A scapegoat was needed. General William Tecumseh Sherman and the army command blamed Carrington. He was relieved of command and sent to Fort Casper, where an accident severely wounded his leg, leaving him with a permanent limp. Two investigations followed, one military and one a government commission.
They found that Carrington had repeatedly asked for reinforcements, modern weapons, and more cavalry, and none had been sent. The commission did not find him responsible, but the army never said so publicly. Carrington spent the remaining forty years of his life defending himself through lectures, books, and letters. A strange footnote followed.
Carrington’s wife Margaret died in 1870, leaving Lieutenant Grummond’s widow Francis alone as well. In 1871, Henry Carrington and Francis Grummond married. The commander of Fort Phil Kearny married the widow of the officer killed at his fort, and Francis later wrote one of the most important testimonies of the war. The real consequence was larger.
After the massacre, the army continued to protect the Bozeman Trail. In the summer of 1867, the Hayfield Fight and the Wagon Box Fight occurred. At Wagon Box, soldiers now carried Springfield breech-loading rifles, and thirty-two men held their position against a much larger force. But tactical successes did not change strategic reality.
The trail was not safe, the forts were barely surviving, and the cost was not paying off. In 1868 the government sat down to negotiate, and Red Cloud demanded the forts and trail be closed and the soldiers leave. He got what he wanted. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie recognized the Powder River Basin as Indian territory and left the Black Hills to the Lakota.
In August 1868, the last soldier marched out of Fort Phil Kearny, and Cheyenne warriors came down from the hills and burned the fort. Two years of construction turned to ash in hours. But this was not the end. In 1874, an expedition commanded by George Armstrong Custer entered the Black Hills, lands protected by treaty, and found gold.
The army tried and failed to stop the miners. The government offered to buy the Black Hills; the Lakota refused. In 1876, the United States abandoned the treaty it had signed. On June 25, 1876, roughly one hundred kilometers from where Fetterman died, another officer rode down into another valley.
His name was George Armstrong Custer. He had around two hundred ten men with him. None returned. Among those waiting at Little Bighorn was the man who had pretended to inspect his horse’s hoof on Lodge Trail Ridge ten years earlier.
Little Bighorn was not a surprise. It was a repeat. In 1866, the army had learned a lesson: underestimating the enemy, advancing scattered, and chasing an unseen enemy across unknown ground gets you killed. Then it forgot.
Ten years later it paid the same price two and a half times over. Today a stone monument stands on the ridge near the town of Story, Wyoming, erected in 1908 in memory of the eighty-one men. Small stones mark where bodies were found. Visitors can walk the line where the cavalry tried to flee, see where Wheatley and Fisher made their stand, and climb the hill where Fetterman formed his final circle.
Most of those men remained nameless, many of them immigrants who survived the Civil War only to die on the plains. Their families often never learned where they were buried. The number of warriors who died that day is disputed, estimates ranging from fourteen to sixty, and their names, too, were mostly unrecorded. Both sides were ultimately fighting for a piece of land and the right to live on it.
One side defended it and won for a decade. The other wanted gold and eventually took it all. The Fetterman Massacre was not the story of how America lost the West, but how it won it, and the price of that victory was paid together.