Sioux Dawn, The Fetterman Massacre, 1866 Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Maps

  Author’s Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Teaser

  The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston

  Praise

  Copyright

  for

  RICHARD CURTIS

  who knew what I really needed most was a friend

  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

  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 Massacre—only 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 …

  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 readers—that 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.

  Now add the dream of untold wealth to be found by scraping a pick along the ground or washing some gravel from the bottom of a stream, and you’ll have Sutter’s Mill in California, Cripple Creek in Colorado, and Alder Gulch in Montana, the latest strike to land upon the ears of war-weary soldiers, Union and Confederate alike. To reach the northern goldfields, a man had to march west to Fort Laramie. From there he turned north toward Montana Territory, using John Bozeman’s road, which pierced the heart of prime Sioux hunting ground.

  Any man who laid eyes on that country had to come away understanding why the Indians guarded their land so jealously. The whole of the Big Horn country was laced with clear, cold streams fed of winter snows, feeding the luxuriant valleys teeming with abundant wildlife of all description. At the edge of the eastern plains, in the shadow of the Big Horns, roamed the mighty pte, the Sioux’s buffalo, a nomadic animal, followed season after season by a nomadic people, providing the Indian with everything he required for his survival, century after century.

  Into the heart of this red man’s paradise Henry Carrington was sent to build his fort, to protect the Road. From its establishment in July of 1866 until the time of its abandonment some two years later, Fort Phil Kearny was under a state of seige. So constantly and vigilantly watched by war and scouting parties, those in the fort found little safety outside the timber stockade unless accompanied by a troop of soldiers. Even then, sheer numbers did not guarantee that the Indians would not swoop down to harass, burn, or drive off stock. It is no exaggeration to state that the hostiles surrounded the fort at all times. Not one log was cut for the stockade, nor was any hay mowed for the stock, nor any mail moved, without a heavy guard.

  That enforced isolation and imprisonment brings about its own kind of claustrophobia, aggravating the raw sensitivities of men too long cooped up, under seige, watching comrades whittled away by unseen, unreachable enemies.

  There is no richer story than to peer like voyeurs into the lives of people under the stress of life and death. Wondering, as only a reader in the safety of his easy chair can, if he would have measured up.

  Important, too, is that the reader realize he’s reliving the story of real people. From Col. Henry B. Carrington, the commanding officer at Fort Phil Kearny whose unjust reputation for faint-hearted mismanagement of his command hung over his head until shortly before his death … to Capt. William Judd Fetterman, the 18th Infantry’s hero in General Sherman’s Civil War “march to the sea” across Georgia. So it is that good historical fiction fuses the fortunes, adventures, and destinies of numerous characters. Gold hunters and chaplains, sutlers and cowards, soldiers and those few women who followed, clinging to some man’s dream. All of these individuals you will read about were actual, living souls come to play a part on that crude stage erected by the gods below Cloud Peak of the Big Horns … all actual people, save three. Infantryman/musician Frank Noone and his young wife Abigail.

  And one other …

  Into the midst of this tragic drama I send my fictional character Seamus Donegan, late of the Union Army of the Shenandoah, cavalry sergeant turned soldier-of-fortune, seeking a change of scenery in the West and some relief, if not escape, for his lonely, aching heart. (At this point the reader should be reminded that Seamus is pronounced like “Shamus” … as you would pronounce Sean as “Shawn.”) Over a series of books that will encompass this era of the Indian Wars, you will follow Seamus Donegan as he marches through some of history’s bloodiest hours. Not always doing the right thing, but trying nonetheless, for Donegan was no “plaster saint” nor “larger-than-life” dime-novel icon.

  History has plenty of heroes—every one of them dead. Donegan represents the rest of us. Ordinary in every way, except that at some point we are each called upon by circumstances to do something extraordinary … what most might call heroic.

  Forget the pain, the thirst and hunger. Forget the blood. Each man does what he must in the end.

  That’s the saga of Seamus Donegan which begins with Sioux Dawn. If you listen, you’ll hear the wagonmasters cursing their balking mules, the warcries of Indians, along with the screams of frightened women and the prayers of untried soldiers. Test the air—you’ll smell the stench of gunpowder and blood freezing on a wind that turns your cheeks to rawhide as you wait for the next rattle of gunfire or the hair-raising thunder of Indian pony hoofbeats bearing down on you.

  There is, after all, a sense of something inevitable afoot here. Something of destiny’s impelling course sweeping man up in its headlong rush into the future. So remember—what is written here happened. This story needs no false glamor, no shiny veneer of dash and daring. What has always been the story of man at war—of culture against culture, race against race—needs to be told without special lighting.

  There’s drama enough here for any man.

  A very old tale indeed, my friends. One whose time has come at last. I’ve done my best telling the story in the pages that follow. No soul alive can say if I’ve succeeded or failed … save for that silent, simple stone monument standing alone on Massacre Hill, standing alone against the brutal wind and time itself.

  Terry C. Johnston

  Massacre Hill

  Fort Phil Kearny Historical Site

  December 21, 1989

  Prologue

  “Donegan!”

  The big Irishman sprawled across the pine-frame cot in the corner of his cold, tiny cell didn’t answer. A small piece of him recalled where he lay. This guardhouse in the winter shadows of the Big Horn Mountains. The twentieth … no, that was last night. Now the twenty-first of December. Recalling how he was trapped here by Red Cloud’s Bad Face Sioux as he was on his way to the seductive gold fields of Alder Gulch, Montana Territory.

  He burrowed deeper still into his straw tick mattress, swimming lazily through that thick, warm place a man finds himself when he is clawing his way up, half out of sleep, yet so far down in the dreaming soul of him.

  Remembering days gone by and better times.

  “Seamus Donegan!”

  He heard his mother sing out, recalling the sweet sound of her voice as she would rouse him each morning to the weak tea and hard bread she set before him like a king’s ransom on that cracked blue china, there in that starving land of Ireland. Land of his birth.

  “You’ll be late now, Seamus! Your uncles will not wait long, they’ll have you know!”

  His uncles. His mother’s dear brothers. Each dawn young Seamus walked off between the two of them down the cobbled road, disappearing into the mist and the fog, the three of them to dig for potatoes, or hire themselves out to who might pay them a day’s wages for a day’s slave labors. Big, strong men, his uncles.

  “And one day you’ll grow every bit as big as they,” his mother sang many a morn as Seamus sipped at the weak tea and tore at the hard bread that was the staple of their poor larder there in County Kilkenny.

  So many died, Seamus remembered now in that warm pool of the dreaming. So many starving, wilting away. Many more simply falling ill to the sickness come to blanket the land. And always the dying shared the same look, their skin every bit as sickly gray as the molds come to rob the Irish of their potato crop. Famine descending like the locusts upon the Egypt of old, his mother would whisper in the darkness of their room at night. Whispering, as if the angel of death himself must not hear her curses on the famine that had taken her husband and one child already.

  “I’m sending you to America,” she had announced bravely one evening as they both held their hands over the small fire built among the moss-stones his dear, departed father had hauled to this small two-room house, one by one to build this fireplace for his new wife, expecting their first child. Their first was a boy they named Seamus O’Flynn Donegan.

  “I’ve writ your uncles, to tell them you’ll be coming to join them in that new land where they’ve gone.”

  And
when young Seamus had asked why he was going, she had explained that all things would be far better for a tall, strapping lad like he in that faraway land. And in her voice he read that there was no need of further discussion.

  The worst day of his life, that. Standing pressed among the hundreds of others near the rail of that rat-infested ship, waving farewell to the small woman among his brothers and sisters, all of them disappearing on the wharf in a misting rain. His mother’s damp hanky soon all he could see of her in the crowd. Great-Grandmother’s linen, handed down from bride to bride, now waving to him, clutched in that threadbare mitten missing two fingers. Seeing her firstborn son off on his long journey to a new start.

  Once clear of the rocky point of land that each Irishman understood would be the last glimpse he would long have of his native soil, the ship’s crew began barking and whipping and shoving and snarling. Until the Irish passengers were all below decks. “Steerage,” they were called for the first time. Like so much baggage or cargo, kept below in the bowels of that stinking ship.

  He would never forget that rocky point of land. Or that morning’s gray mist, for it was the last glimpse of the sky young Seamus Donegan would see for the better part of three months.

  Hunkered among the living, the half dead, and the few rotting corpses allowed to lie in their stench until taken topside and hurled without ceremony over the rail. “Steerage,” the British sailors called them all. Among the other crude things the British sailors called them as they eyed the young girls and attractive women among them.

  So many times at his mother’s table Seamus had never thought anything could be worse than what he and his family had had to eat back home in County Kilkenny. Until he looked down into a wooden bowl his first meal on that cursed ship. One bowl a day of something thick and slimy and mostly grease-scum. One bowl only. Far from enough to keep the new muscle on a youngster just beginning to fill out his tall, rawboned frame. Day after day in the dark, rat-swarm of a latrine where the desperate Irish lay beside one another, crawling over the weak and the dead like rats themselves. Reeking in their own urine and feces. Once a week they were allowed buckets of saltwater the British sailors roped down into the holds so these Irish passengers headed for Amerikay could wash down some of the stench. At such times they discovered a few more of the bodies that no longer moved beneath the splashing water. No longer fighting off the hungry, gnawing rats.