Give Me Eighty Men: Women and the Myth of the Fetterman Fight

8. Women’s Work

Women’s Work It is not clear exactly when Margaret Carrington started to convert her journal into a book. Henry Carrington secured a second six-month medical leave, enabling the Carringtons to remain in Connecticut until the summer of 1868. After a brief return to the frontier, the Carringtons moved to Indiana, and in the fall, Philadelphia publishers J. B. Lippincott published Margaret Carrington’s Absaraka, Home of the Crows: Being the Experience of an Officer’s Wife on the Plains. Less than eighteen months had passed since Henry and Margaret ended their journey to Absaroka. Considering the amount of time to typeset and produce a 284page edition in 1868, it is safe to assume that Margaret began writing at the first sign of her husband’s difficulties while he was being interrogated at Fort McPherson in May of 1867. Prior to the publication of Absaraka in 1868, only two other army officers’ wives had published their memoirs, but the reading public had already demonstrated a great interest in the exciting, exotic, and titillating stories of a Victorian woman in dangerous Indian country.1 Absaraka was marketed to take advantage of the growing interest in these women’s stories of western adventures as the phenomenon of ladies “writing their way out” of the private sphere—Victorian women’s traditional domestic role—was in full swing.2 chapter 8 Women’s Work 160 Since before the Civil War, the literary marketplace had been what historian Alice Fans has called “strikingly feminized.” So-called domestic novels about home and family were the dominant form of fiction and the huge demand for these books opened the market for a flood of popular literature by and about women’s domestic participation in the nation’s internal conflict. Literary critics have observed that a “gendered nationalism” held sway in the publishing arena during this era as “streams of novels and omnibus volumes explored Northern women’s contributions to the war.”3 Margaret’s story about her life with the Civil War heroes of the Eighteenth Infantry Regiment and their role in advancing America’s “manifest destiny” took advantage of the market for this gendered nationalism.4 As Shirley Leckie points out in her biography of Elizabeth Custer, contrasting the culturally correct relations between army officers and their wives with unfavorable depictions of Native American family life served as “ideological justification for the conquest of the Plains tribes.”5 To justify the army’s mission to the Bozeman Trail, Margaret championed the Crow Indians, who had “lost possession by robbery” of their homelands through the “occupation by the Sioux and their allies.” Juxtaposing the “friendly” Crows against the aggression, violence, and “unrelenting hatred” of the Sioux, Margaret wrote that the Crows’ enemies “have become the white man’s enemy.”6 Though Mrs. Carrington framed the book as a personal guide for western travelers, Lippincott billed Absaraka as the dramatic story of Margaret and her children accompanying her husband on the highly publicized disastrous mission to the frontier. Predictably, she painted Henry Carrington as a dutiful leader, military hero, and dedicated husband and father. Absaraka gave Henry the platform he needed to defend himself through the irrefutable writing of his moral, loyal, and devoted wife. The book reinforced the key facts of Henry Carrington’s version of the story. Margaret Carrington was the first to publicly write that Fetterman frequently claimed that “a company of regulars could whip a thousand, and a regiment could whip the whole Women’s Work 161 array of hostile tribes.” She also wrote that Fetterman “was impatient because Indians were not summarily punished, and permitted this feeling and contempt of the enemy to drive him to hopeless ruin, where a simple deference to the orders and known policy of his commander . . . would have brought no loss of life whatever.” Mrs. Carrington’s description of the disaster of December 21 emphasized Henry’s clear and specific orders to Fetterman and cited the supposed identical order Carrington gave to Captain Powell two days earlier as proof. She also wrote that Fetterman “claimed by rank” to take the relief command that day. Throughout her story, however, Margaret stresses Fetterman’s noble spirit and gentlemanly and gracious character . Her main point about Fetterman was that, in spite of his unimpeachable character, he was driven to “reach forth for laurels that were beyond his reach.”7 In a...