Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth (review)

Some stories of the American West hold endless fascination. The Battle of the Little Bighorn comes to mind. Although less well-known, the 1866 demise of Captain William Fetterman's entire command near Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory, at the hands of Lakota, Northern Cheyennes and Arapahoes, is another. These events represent significant Native American victories against a better armed, though momentarily greatly outnumbered, army. The U.S. forces suffered catastrophic loss of life. In recent decades battles in wars of conquest and colonialism, such as the Little Bighorn and Fetterman fight, have become weighted with political significance. They are fulcrums through which contemporary sensibilities filter. As those sensibilities change over time, so too do the historical interpretations of these battles.

John H. Monnett's new book on the Fetterman fight is a carefully researched and crafted history for the twenty-first century. It refects current sensitivities and approaches and applies them to a story that has not had such close analysis in over forty years. He presents the Fetterman fight, then, as part of a shared Indian-white history where all participants' perspectives are necessary to understanding the outcome. For Native American views, he relies upon ethnographies, Indian participants' eye-witness accounts (often recorded years after the event), oral histories, and winter counts. Monnett also relies upon insights from environmental history, particularly regarding Indian use of the contested Powder River country, in order to make the point that economic resources were as much at stake as political and military control.

The majority of sources, however, are military and most of the book focuses on that perspective. With scrupulous care, Monnett examines an impressive number of manuscript collections, army records, and government documents. Surely he has found almost everything extant related to Fort Phil Kearny and the so-called Red Cloud's War. He reconstructs all events related to that cold December day in 1866 when Captain William Fetterman led eighty men into a perfectly coordinated decoy maneuver and to their deaths. Monnett concludes that blame for this disaster should rest not on Fetterman or even his commanding officer, Colonel William B. Carrington, as others have argued, but on Lieutenant William Grummond. He also concludes that while Oglala warrior Crazy Horse may have participated in the battle, no credible eyewitness account verifies that. Nor is there any evidence he served as a decoy. Tat latter story first appeared in Mari Sandoz's 1942 semifictional biography of Crazy Horse and found its way into other secondary literature thereafter.

Those conclusions will primarily interest frontier military historians and Indian Wars specialists. The broader message comes in Monnett's argument that Fetterman lost on that fateful day because "the Indians of the plains flawlessly executed a decoy maneuver with a large number of warriors in a major fight" (p. 238). The army lost because the Indians won. An inexperienced, arrogant army did not understand the kind of effective guerilla warfare their skilled foes could execute. The descendants of those men, who also live in this nation, honor the memory of the Fetterman fight. Although the United States eventually secured conquest (Monnett argues through the legal chicanery of the Treaty of 1868), Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe people, to this day feel pride in the skill their ancestors demonstrated that day.