The next day was bitterly cold. The sky was overcast and lowering, with indications of a tremendous storm. The Indians were not accustomed to active operations under such conditions, and there was no sign of them about. Carrington determined to go out to ascertain the fate of his missing men. Although all the remaining officers assembled at his quarters advised him not to undertake it, lest the savages, flushed with victory, should attempt another attack, Carrington quietly excused his officers, told the adjutant to remain with him, and the bugle instantly disclosed his purpose in spite of dissenting protests. He rightly judged that the moral effect of the battle would be greatly enhanced, in the eyes of the Indians, if the bodies were not recovered. Besides, to set at rest all doubts it was necessary to determine the fate of the balance of his command. His own wife, as appears from her narrative,^[13] approved his action and nerved herself to meet the possible fate involved, while Mrs. Grummond was the chief protestant that, as her husband was undoubtedly dead, there should be no similar disaster invited by another expedition.

In the afternoon, with a heavily armed force of eighty men, Carrington went in person to the scene of battle. The following order was left with the officer of the day: “Fire the usual sunset gun, running a white lamp to masthead. If the Indians appear fire three guns from the twelve-pounder at minute intervals, and, later, substitute a red lantern for the white.” Pickets were left on two commanding ridges, as signal observers, as the command moved forward. The women and children were placed in the magazine, a building well adapted for defense, which had been stocked with water, crackers, etc., for an emergency, with an officer pledged not to allow the women to be taken alive, if the General did not return and the Indians overcame the stockade.

Passing the place where the greatest slaughter had occurred, the men marched cautiously along the trail. Bodies were strung along the road clear to the western end farthest from the fort. Here they found Lieutenant Grummond. There were evidences of a desperate struggle about his body. Behind a little pile of rock, making a natural fortification, were the two civilians who had been armed with the modern Henry rifle. By the side of one fifty shells were counted, and nearly as many by the side of the other brave frontiersman. Behind such cover as they could obtain nearby lay the bodies of the oldest and most experienced soldiers in Fetterman’s command.

In front of them they found no less than sixty great gouts of blood on the ground and grass, and a number of dead ponies, showing where the bullets of the defenders had reached their marks,^[14] and in every direction were signs of the fiercest kind of hand-to-hand fighting. Ghastly and mutilated remains, stripped naked, shot full of arrows—Wheatley with no less than one hundred and five in him, scalped, lay before them.

Brown rode to the death of both a little Indian “calico” pony which he had given to the general’s boys when they started from Fort Leavenworth, in November, 1865, and the body of the horse was found in the low ground at the west slope of the ridge, showing that the fight began there, before they could reach high ground.^[15] At ten o’clock at night, on the return, the white lamp at masthead told its welcome story of a garrison still intact.

Fetterman had disobeyed orders. Whether deliberately or not, cannot be told. He had relieved the wood train, and instead of returning to the post, had pursued the Indians over the ridge into Peno Valley, then along the trail, and into a cunningly contrived ambush. His men had evidently fought on the road until their ammunition gave out, and then had either been ordered to retreat to the fort, or had retreated of their own motion—probably the latter. All the dead cavalry horses’ heads were turned toward the fort, by the way. Fetterman and Brown, men of unquestioned courage, must have been swept along with their flying men. There may have been a little reserve on the rocks on which they hoped to rally their disorganized, panic-stricken troops, fleeing before a horde of yelling, blood-intoxicated warriors. I imagine them vainly protesting, imploring, begging their men to make a stand. I feel sure they fought until the last. But these are only surmises; what really happened, God alone knows.

The judgment of the veteran soldiers and the frontiersmen, who knew that to retreat was to be annihilated, had caused a few to hold their ground and fight until they were without ammunition; then with gun-stocks, swords, bayonets, whatever came to hand, they battled until they were cut down. Grummond had stayed with them, perhaps honorably sacrificing himself in a vain endeavor to cover the retreat of the rest of his command. The Indian loss was very heavy, but could not exactly be determined.

Such was the melancholy fate of Fetterman and his men. The post was isolated, the weather frightful. A courier was at once despatched to Fort Laramie, but such means of communication was necessarily slow, and it was not until Christmas morning that the world was apprised of the fatal story. In spite of the reports that had been made and fatuously believed, that peace had obtained in that land, it was now known that war was everywhere prevalent. The shock of horror with which the terrible news was received was greater even than that attendant upon the story of the disastrous battle of the Little Big Horn, ten years later. People had got used to such things then; this news came like a bolt from the blue.

Although Carrington had conducted himself in every way as a brave, prudent, skilful, capable soldier, although his services merited reward, not censure, and demanded praise, not blame, the people and the authorities required a scapegoat. He was instantly relieved from command by General Cooke, upon a private telegram from Laramie, never published, before the receipt of his own official report, and was ordered to change his regimental headquarters to the little frontier post at Fort Caspar, where two companies of his first battalion, just become the new Eighteenth, were stationed, while four companies of the same battalion, under his lieutenant-colonel, were ordered to the relief of Fort Phil Kearney.

The weather had become severe and the snow was banked to the top of the stockade. The mercury was in the bulb. Guards were changed half-hourly. Men and women dressed in furs made from wolfskins taken from the hundreds of wolves which infested the outside butcher-field at night, and which were poisoned by the men for their fur. Upon the day fixed precisely for the march, as the new arrivals needed every roof during a snow-storm which soon became a blizzard, Carrington, his wife and children, his staff and their families, including Mrs. Grummond, escorting the remains of her husband to Tennessee, and the regimental band, with its women and children, began that February “change of headquarters.” They narrowly escaped freezing to death. More than one-half of the sixty-five in the party were frosted, and three amputations, with one death, were the immediate result of the foolish and cruel order.

It was not until some time after that a mixed commission of soldiers and civilians, which thoroughly investigated Carrington’s conduct, having before them all his books and records from the inception of the expedition until its tragic close, acquitted him of all blame of any sort, and awarded him due praise for his successful conduct of the whole campaign. His course was also the subject of inquiry before a purely military court, all of them his juniors in rank, which also reported favorably. General Sherman expressly stated that “Colonel Carrington’s report, to his personal knowledge, was fully sustained,” but by some unaccountable oversight or intent, the report was suppressed and never published, thereby doing lasting injustice to a brave and faithful soldier.

At the same time the government established the sub-post between Laramie and Fort Reno, so earnestly recommended by Carrington, in October, calling it Fort Fetterman, in honor of the unfortunate officer who fell in battle on the 21st of December.

Perhaps it ill becomes us to censure the dead, but the whole unfortunate affair arose from a direct disobedience of orders on the part of Fetterman and his men. They paid the penalty for their lapse with their lives; and so far, at least, they made what atonement they could. A year later opportunity was given the soldiers at Phil Kearney to exact a dreadful revenge from Red Cloud and his Sioux for the slaughter of their brave comrades.

I. The Improvised Corral on Piney Island

Red cloud, who had been one of the subchiefs of the Sioux, gained so much prestige by the defeat and slaughter of Fetterman’s men that he became at once the leading war chief of the nation.^[16] The angry braves, flushed with conquest and eager for blood, hastened to enroll themselves by thousands in his band.

Fort Phil Kearney had been in a state of siege before: it was more closely invested now than ever. Contrary to their usual avoidance of the war-path in cold weather, throughout the long and bitter winter there was no intermittence to the watchfulness of the Indians. The garrison was constantly in arms. Attacks of all sorts were made with increasing frequency. The letters from the soldiers which got through to the East adequately describe their sense of the dire peril which menaced them. “This may be my last letter” is a frequent phrase. Travel on the trail was abandoned. As soon as possible in the spring, reinforcements were hurried up and the fort was completed, but the same state of affairs continued right along without intermission.

With the advance of summer Red Cloud gathered his warriors and determined upon a direct attack upon the fort itself. He was tired of skirmishing, stampeding stock, cutting off stragglers, etc. He wanted war, real war, and he got it! If, or when, he captured the fort, he would advance upon the other two forts in succession and so clear the country, once and for all, of the detested invaders, whose soldierly qualities he seems to have held in contempt. For the campaign he proposed he assembled no fewer than three thousand warriors, the flower of the Sioux Nation. Probably half of them were armed with firearms, Winchester rifles, Spencer repeating carbines, or old army muskets, including those that had been captured from Fetterman’s party. Under cover of frequent skirmishes, which prevented much scouting on the part of the troops, Red Cloud gathered his warriors undiscovered and unmolested, and prepared to attack about the first of August, 1867.

The limits of the military reservation had been fixed at Washington—without adequate knowledge of the ground and in disregard of General Carrington’s request and protests—so as to exclude the timber land of Piney Island, from which the post had been built, and from which the nearest and most available wood supply must be obtained. The post had been completed, but immense supplies of wood would be required for fuel during the long and severe winter. This was to be cut and delivered at the fort by a civilian outfit which had entered upon a contract with the government for the purpose. One of the stipulations of the contract was that the woodmen should be guarded and protected by the soldiers.

Wood-cutting began on the 31st of July, 1867, and Captain and Brevet-Major James Powell, commanding “C” Company, of the twenty-seventh Infantry, which was formerly a battalion of the Eighteenth a part of the command which had built the fort, and to which Fetterman and his men had belonged, was detailed with his company to guard the contractor’s party. Captain Powell had enlisted in the army in 1848 as a private soldier. The Civil War had given him a commission in the regular service, and in its course he had been twice brevetted for conspicuous gallantry, once at Chickamauga and the second time during the Atlanta campaign, in which he had been desperately wounded. He had had some experience in Indian fighting before and since he came to the post, and had distinguished himself in several skirmishes, notably in the relief of the wood train, a few days before Fetterman’s rashness and disobedience precipitated the awful disaster.

Arriving at Piney Island, some seven miles from the post, Powell found that the contractor had divided his men into two parties. One had its headquarters on a bare, treeless, and comparatively level plain, perhaps one thousand yards across, which was surrounded by low hills backed by mountains farther away. This was an admirable place to graze the herds of mules required to haul the wagons. As will be seen, it could also be turned into a highly defensive position. The other camp was in the thick of the pine wood, about a mile away across the creek, at the foot of the mountain. This division of labor necessitated a division of force, which was a misfortune, but which could not be avoided.

Powell sent twelve men under a noncommissioned officer to guard the camp in the wood, and detailed thirteen men with another noncommissioned officer to escort the wood trains to and from the fort. With the remaining twenty-six men and his lieutenant, John C. Jenness, he established headquarters on the plain in the open.

The wagons used by the wood-cutters were furnished by the quartermaster’s department. In transporting the cordwood, the woodmen made use of the running gears only, the wagon bodies having been deposited in the clearing. In order to preserve their contents and to afford as much protection as possible to their occupants in case of Indian attacks, the quartermaster’s department was in the habit of lining the wagon beds with boiler iron; and, to give their occupants an opportunity to fight from concealment, loopholes were cut in the sides. Almost every authority who has written of the fight has concluded that the particular wagon beds in question were so lined. This is a mistaken though natural conclusion. In a letter to an old comrade who wrote an account of the subsequent action,^[17] Powell makes no mention of any iron lining, and it is certain that the wagons were not lined, but were just the ordinary wooden wagon beds.^[18]

There were fourteen of these wagon bodies. Powell arranged them in the form of a wide oval. At the highest point of the plain, which happened to be in the center, this corral was made. The wagon beds were deep, and afforded ample concealment for any one lying in them. I sometimes wonder why Powell did not stand these beds on their sides instead of their bottoms, making a higher and stouter inclosure, the bottoms being heavier than the sides; but it is clear that he did not. There were plenty of tools, including a number of augers, in the camp, and with these Powell’s men made a number of loopholes about a foot from the ground, in the outward sides of the wagons.

At the ends of the oval, where the configuration of the ground made it most vulnerable for attack, especially by mounted men, two wagons complete—that is, with bodies and running gears—were placed a short distance from the little corral. This would break the force of a charge, and the defenders could fire at the attacking party underneath the bodies and through the wheels. The spaces between the wagon bodies were filled with logs and sacks of grain, backed by everything available that would turn a bullet. The supplies for the soldiers and wood party were contained in this corral.

Instead of the old Springfield muzzle-loading musket, with which the troops mainly had been armed up to this time, Powell’s men were provided with the new Allen modification of the Springfield breech-loading rifle. He had enough rifles for his men and for all the civilian employees, and a large number of new Colt revolvers, with plenty of ammunition for all. The new rifle had never been used by the troops in combat with the Indians, and the latter were entirely ignorant of its tremendous range and power and the wonderful rapidity of fire which it permitted. They learned much about it in the next day or two, however. A quantity of clothing and blankets was issued to the troops at the fort on the first of August, and supplies for Powell’s men were sent down to him.

II. The Wild Charge of the Sioux

Having matured his plans, Red Cloud determined to begin his attack on Fort Phil Kearney by annihilating the little detachment guarding the train.^[19] Parties of Indians had been observed in the vicinity for several days, but no attack had been made since Powell’s arrival until the second of August, when, about nine o’clock in the morning,^[20] a party of some two hundred Indians endeavored to stampede the herd of mules. The herders, who were all armed, stood their ground and succeeded for the time being in beating back the attack. While they were hotly engaged with the dismounted force, sixty mounted Indians succeeded in getting into the herd and running it off. At the same time five hundred other Indians attacked the wood train at the other camp.

The affair was not quite a surprise, for the approach of the Indians had been detected and signalled from the corral on the island a few moments before. In the face of so overwhelming a force the soldiers and civilians at the wood train immediately retreated, abandoning the train and the camp. Here four of the lumbermen were killed. The retreat, however, was an orderly one, and they kept back the Indians by a well-directed fire.

Meanwhile the herders, seeing the stampede of the mules, made an effort to join the party retreating from the wood train. The Indians endeavored to intercept them and cut them off. Powell, however, with a portion of his force, leaving the post in command of Lieutenant Jenness, immediately dashed across the prairie and attacked the savages in the rear. They turned at once, abandoning the pursuit of the herders, and fell upon Powell, who in his turn retreated without loss to the corral. His prompt and bold sortie had saved the herders, for they were enabled to effect a junction with the retreating train men and their guards and the soldiers and civilians, and eventually gained the fort, although not without hard fighting and some loss. One thing that helped them to get away from the Indians was that the savages stopped to pillage the camp and burn it and the train. Another thing was the presence of Powell’s command, which they could not leave in the rear. After driving away the others and completing the destruction of the camp, they turned their attention to Powell’s corral.

Some of the clothing that had been received the day before had not been unpacked or distributed, so it was used to strengthen the weak places in the corral. Powell’s men lay down in the wagon beds before the loopholes; blankets were thrown over the tops of the beds to screen the defenders from observation and in the hope of perhaps saving them from the ill effects of the plunging arrow fire, and everything was got ready. Everybody had plenty of ammunition.

Some of the men who were not good shots were told off to do nothing but load rifles, of which there were so many that each man had two or three beside him, one man making use of no less than eight. Four civilians succeeded in joining the party in the corral—a welcome addition, indeed, bringing the total number up to thirty-two officers and men. Among this quartet was an old frontiersman who had spent most of his life hunting in the Indian country, and who had been in innumerable fights, renowned for his expertness in the use of the rifle—a dead-shot. This was the man to whom the eight guns were allotted. Powell, rifle in hand, stationed himself at one end of the corral; Jenness, similarly armed, was posted at the other, each officer watching one of the openings covered by the complete wagons, which were loaded with supplies so they could not be run off easily by hand.

While all these preparations were being rapidly made, although without confusion or alarm, the surrounding country was filling with a countless multitude of Indians. It was impossible at the time to estimate the number of them, although it was ascertained that more than three thousand warriors were present and engaged. Red Cloud himself was in command, and with him were the great chiefs of the great tribes of the Sioux, who were all represented—Unkpapas, Miniconjous, Oglalas, Brulés, and Sans Arcs, besides hundreds of Cheyennes.

So confident of success were they that, contrary to their ordinary practices, they had brought with them their women and children to assist in carrying back the plunder. These, massed out of range on the farthest hills, constituted an audience for the terrible drama about to be played in the amphitheater beneath them.

We can well imagine the thoughts of that little band of thirty-two, surrounded by a force that outnumbered them one hundred to one. Their minds must have gone back to that winter day, some seven months before, when twice their number had gone down to defeat and destruction under the attack of two-thirds of their present foemen. It is probable that not one of them ever expected to escape alive. The chances that they could successfully withstand an attack from so overwhelming a number of foes of such extraordinary bravery were of the smallest. But not a man flinched, not a man faltered. They looked to their weapons, settled themselves comfortably in the wagon beds, thought of Fetterman and their comrades, and prayed that the attack might begin and begin at once. There were no heroics, no speeches made. Powell quietly remarked that they had to fight for their lives now, which was patent to all; and he directed that no man, for any reason, should open fire until he gave the order.

Some little time was spent by the Indians in making preparations, and then a force of about five hundred Indians, magnificently mounted on the best war ponies and armed with rifles, carbines, or muskets, detached themselves from the main body and started toward the little corral lying like a black dot on the open plain. They intended to ride over the soldiers and end the battle with one swift blow. Slowly at first, but gradually increasing their pace until their ponies were on a dead run, they dashed gallantly toward the corral, while the main body of the savages, at some distance in their rear, prepared to take advantage of any opening that might be made in the defenses. It was a brilliant charge, splendidly delivered.

Such was the discipline of Powell’s men that not a shot was fired as the Indians, yelling and whooping madly, came rushing on. There was something terribly ominous about the absolute silence of that little fortification. The galloping men were within one hundred yards now, now fifty. At that instant Powell spoke to his men. The inclosure was sheeted with flame. Out of the smoke and fire a rain of bullets was poured upon the astonished savages. The firing was not as usual—one volley, then another, and then silence; but it was a steady, persistent, continued stream, which mowed them down in scores. The advance was thrown into confusion, checked but not halted, its impetus being too great; and then the force divided and swept around the corral, looking for a weak spot for a possible entrance. At the same moment a furious fire was poured into it by the warriors, whose position on their horses’ backs gave them sufficient elevation to enable them to fire over the wagon beds upon the garrison. Then they circled about the corral in a mad gallop, seeking some undefended point upon which to concentrate and break through, but in vain. The little inclosure was literally ringed in fire. Nothing could stand against it. So close were they that one bullet sometimes pierced two Indians.^[21]

Having lost terribly, and having failed to make any impression whatever, the Indians broke and gave way. They rushed pell-mell from the spot in frantic confusion till they got out of range of the deadly storm that swept the plain. All around the corral lay dead and dying Indians, mingled with killed and wounded horses kicking and screaming with pain, the Indians stoically enduring all their sufferings and making no outcry. In front of the corral, where the first force of the charge had been spent, horses and men were stretched out as if they had been cut down by a gigantic mowing-machine. The defenders of the corral had suffered in their turn. Lieutenant Jenness, brave and earnest in defense, had exposed himself to give a necessary command and had received a bullet in his brain. One of the private soldiers had been killed and two severely wounded. The thirty-two had been reduced to twenty-eight. At that rate, since there were so few to suffer, the end appeared inevitable. The spirit of the little band, however, remained undaunted. Fortunately for them, the Indians had met with so terrible a repulse that all they thought of for the time being was to get out of range. The vicinity of the corral was thus at once abandoned.

III. Red Cloud’s Baptism of Fire

Red Cloud determined, after consultation with the other chiefs, upon another plan which gave greater promise of success. Seven hundred Indians, armed with rifles or muskets and followed by a number carrying bows and arrows, were told off to prepare themselves as a skirmishing party. Their preparations were simple, and consisted of denuding themselves of every vestige of clothing, including their war shirts and war bonnets. These men were directed to creep forward, taking advantage of every depression, ravine, or other cover, until they were within range of the corral, which they were to overwhelm by gun and arrow fire. Supporting them, and intended to constitute the main attack, were the whole remaining body of the Indians, numbering upward of two thousand warriors.

With the wonderful skill of which they were masters, the skirmishing party approached near to the corral and began to fire upon it. Here and there, when a savage incautiously exposed himself, he was shot by one of the defenders; but in the main the people of the corral kept silent under this terrible fusillade of bullets and arrows. The tops of the wagon sides were literally torn to pieces; the heavy blankets were filled with arrows which, falling from a distance, did no damage. The fire of the Indians was rapid and continuous. The bullets crashed into the wood just over the heads of the prostrate men, sounding like cracking thunder; yet not one man in the wagon beds was hurt. Arguing, perhaps from the silence in the corral, that the defenders had been overwhelmed and that the time for the grand attack had arrived, signal was given for the main body of the Indians to charge.

They were led by the nephew of Red Cloud, a superb young chieftain, who was ambitious of succeeding in due course to the leadership now held by his uncle. Chanting their fierce war songs, they came, on arranged in a great semicircle. Splendid, stalwart braves, the flower of the nation, they were magnificently arrayed in all the varied and highly-colored fighting panoply of the Sioux. Great war bonnets streamed from the heads of the chiefs, many of whom wore gorgeous war shirts; the painted bodies of others made dashes of rich color against the green grass of the clearing and the dark pines of the hills and mountains behind. Most of them carried on their left arms painted targets or shields of buffalo hide, stout enough to turn a musket shot unless fairly hit.

Under a fire of redoubled intensity from their skirmishers they broke into a charge. Again they advanced in the face of a terrible silence. Again at the appointed moment the order rang out. Again the fearful discharge swept them away in scores. Powell’s own rifle brought down the dauntless young chief in the lead. Others sprang to the fore when he fell and gallantly led on their men. Undaunted, they came on and on, in spite of a slaughter such as no living Indian had experienced or heard of. The Indians could account for the continuous fire only by supposing that the corral contained a greater number of defenders than its area would indicate it capable of receiving. So, in the hope that the infernal fire would slacken, they pressed home the attack until they were almost at the wagon beds. Back on the hills Red Cloud and the veteran chiefs, with the women and children, watched the progress of the battle with eager intensity and marked with painful apprehension the slaughter of their bold warriors.

The situation was terribly critical. If they came on a few feet farther the rifles would be useless, and the little party of twenty-eight would have to fight hand-to-hand without reloading. In that event the end would be certain; but just before the Indians reached the corral, they broke and gave way. So close had they come that some of the troopers in their excitement actually rose to their knees and threw the augers with which the loopholes had been made, and other missiles, in the faces of the Indians. Others, however, kept up the fire, which was indeed more than mortal humanity could stand.

What relief filled the minds of the defenders, when they saw the great force which had come on so gallantly reeling back over the plains in frantic desire to get to cover, can easily be imagined. Yet such was the courage, the desperation of these Indians, in spite of repulse after repulse and a slaughter awful to contemplate, that they made no less than six several and distinct charges in three hours upon that devoted band. After the first attack made by the men on horseback, not a single casualty occurred among the defenders of the corral. It was afternoon before the Sioux got enough.

The Indians could not account for this sustained and frightful fire which came from the little fort, except by attributing it to magic. “The white man must have made bad medicine,” they said afterwards, before they learned the secret of the long-range, breech-loading firearm, “to make the guns fire themselves without stopping.” Indeed, such had been the rapidity of the fire that many of the gun-barrels became so hot that they were rendered useless. To this day the Indians refer to that battle as “the bad medicine fight of the white man.”

The ground around the corral was ringed with Indian slain. They were piled up in heaps closer by, and scattered all over the grass farther away. Nothing is more disgraceful in the eyes of an Indian chieftain or his men than to permit the dead bodies of those killed in action to fall into the hands of the enemy. Red Cloud recognizing the complete frustration of his hopes of overwhelming Fort Phil Kearney and sweeping the invaders out of the land at that time, now only wished to get his dead away and retreat. In order to do so he threw forward his skirmishers again, who once more poured a heavy fire on the corral.

This seemed to Powell and his exhausted men the precursor of a final attack, which they feared would be the end of them. Indeed Powell, in his report, says that another attack would have been successful. From the heat and the frightful strain of the long period of steady fighting, the men were in a critical condition. The ammunition, inexhaustible as it had seemed, was running low; many of the rifles were useless. They still preserved, however, their calm, unbroken front to the foe, and made a slow, deliberate, careful reply to the firing that was poured upon them.

Red Cloud, however, had no thought of again attacking. He only wanted to get away. Under cover of his skirmishers he succeeded in carrying off most of the dead, the wounded who were able to crawl getting away themselves. A warrior, protecting himself as well as he could with the stout buffalo-hide shield he carried, would creep forward, attach the end of a long lariat to the foot of a dead man, and then rapidly retreating he would pull the body away. All the while the hills and mountains resounded with the death chants of the old men and women.

At the close of these operations a shell burst in the midst of the Indian skirmishers, and through the trees off to the left the weary defenders saw the blue uniforms of approaching soldiers, who a moment afterwards debouched in the open.

An astonishing sight met the eyes of the relief party. Clouds of Indians covered the plain. The little corral was still spitting fire and smoke into the encircling mass. They had got there in time then. Without hesitation the troops deployed and came forward on the run. Their cheers were met by welcoming shouts from Powell and his heroic comrades.

The herders, woodsmen, and guards who had escaped from their camp in the morning, had reached the fort at last with the news of Powell’s imminent danger. Major Smith, with one hundred men and a howitzer, was at once despatched to his support. No one dreamed that the force of Indians was so great, or perhaps more men would have been sent, although the number at the fort was still insufficient to permit of the detachment of a very large party. It was now three o’clock in the afternoon. The Indians, disheartened and dismayed by their fearful repulse, sullenly retreated before the advance of the charging soldiers. There was a splendid opportunity presented to them to wipe out Smith’s command with their overwhelming force, for they could have attacked him in the open; but they had had enough for that day, and the opportunity was not embraced.

Major Smith realized instantly that the proper thing for him to do, in the face of such great odds, was to get Powell’s men and return with all speed. Carrying the bodies of the dead and wounded, the little band of defenders joined the rescuers and returned to the fort, leaving the barren honors of the field to the Indians, Awho occupied it on the heels of the retiring soldiers.^[22]

IV. After the Battle. The Scout’s Story

Powell modestly estimated he had killed sixty-seven Indians and wounded one hundred and twenty. Most of his men declared the Indian loss to have been between three and four hundred, but it was not until a year after the battle that the real facts were ascertained from the Indians themselves. The loss in killed and wounded in the engagement, on the part of the Indians, was one thousand one hundred and thirty-seven. In other words, each of the defenders had accounted for at least thirty-six of the Indians. Amply, indeed, had the little band avenged the death of their comrades under Fetterman.

As Colonel Dodge justly says, the account reads like a story of Cortes.^[23] At first sight it appears to be incredible. In explanation of it, the following account, which Colonel Dodge has preserved of a subsequent conversation between the frontiersman to whom the eight guns were allotted and the department commander is of deep interest:—

“How many Indians were in the attack?” asked the General.

“Wall, Gin’r’ll, I can’t say fer sartin, but I think thar wur nigh onto three thousand uv ’em.”

“How many were killed and wounded?”

“Wall, Gin’r’ll, I can’t say fer sartin, but I think thar wur nigh onto a thousand uv ’em hit.”

“How many did you kill?”

“Wall, Gin’r’ll, I can’t say; but gi’me a dead rest, I kin hit a dollar at fifty yards every time, and I fired with a dead rest at more’n fifty of them varmints inside of fifty yards.”

“For Heaven’s sake, how many times did you fire?” exclaimed the astonished General.

“Wall, Gin’r’ll, I can’t say, but I kept eight guns pretty well het up for more’n three hours.”

On this occasion Powell received his third brevet for heroism and distinguished conduct on the field.

The next fall a new treaty was made with the Indians, and the post which had been the scene alike of heartbreaking disaster and defeat and of triumph unprecedented, was abandoned to them. The troops were withdrawn. The Indians at once burned it to the ground. It was never reoccupied, and to-day is remembered simply because of its association with the first and, with one exception, the most notable of our Indian defeats in the west, and with the most remarkable and overwhelming victory that was ever won by soldiers over their gallant red foemen on the same ground.

At this writing (September, 1903) the once mighty Red Cloud, now in his eighty-ninth year, is nearing his end, and already various claimants for the now practically empty honor of the Head-Chieftainship of the Sioux have arisen, the two most prominent candidates being young Red Cloud and the son of old Sitting Bull.

Note

Since the first publication of this article I have received the following letter, which, as it tends to confirm what seems incredible, the terrible Indian loss, I quote in full:

Dear Mr. Brady:

Although I am much nearer three score than fifty, I still enjoy historical romance and facts, and I have, I think, read most of your writings. I have just read your last article and it recalls a conversation with Red Cloud twenty years ago.

He was with my dear old friend, “Adirondack Murray” and, I think, J. Amory Knox and myself. He, Murray and Knox had been photographed in a group. In reminiscing in regard to the Piney Island battle, he said he went in with over three thousand braves and lost over half. Murray asked him if he meant over fifteen hundred had been killed then, and he said:

“I lost them. They never fought again.”

He knew Murray, Knox and myself wielded the pen sometimes but that we never used private talks. I tell you the above for your personal satisfaction. Sincerely,