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

Preface

“With eighty men I could ride through the entire Sioux nation.” The story of the Fetterman Fight on December 21, 1866, near Fort Phil Kearny on the Bozeman Trail, is built almost entirely on this infamous declaration attributed to Capt. William J. Fetterman. Accounts of the incident point to this statement to support the premise that Fetterman’s arrogance blinded him to the danger of Indian warfare. Historians claim that bravado, vainglory, and contempt for the fort’s commander, Col. Henry B. Carrington, compelled Fetterman to disobey Carrington’s orders “not to cross Lodge Trail Ridge,” thus leading his men directly into a well-planned Indian ambush. The near universal acceptance of this thesis, presented in scores of books and articles in the more than 140 years since the battle—including most of the classics of Indian Wars history—is striking. Dee Brown’s The Fetterman Massacre, originally published as Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga in 1962, is widely regarded as the authoritative study of the event. Citing the doomed officer’s “reckless boasts” and “cocksureness,” Brown portrays Fetterman as so contemptuous of the Plains Indians’ military skills that he was oblivious to the overwhelming evidence of their superiority during his short-lived frontier service. MosthistorianspointtoFetterman’sarroganceandthestrained relationships between Colonel Carrington and his officers to explain Fetterman’s fatal decision to lead his men into ambush. Fetterman is positioned as a catalyst that ignited a long-smoldering resentment held by the fort’s officers, all battle-hardened Civil War veterans, toward Carrington, a book-learned militarist who had never seen combat. The subsequent inference is preface  Preface x that Carrington had so little military control at the fort that Fetterman felt free to disobey orders out of scorn for his commander . All of these conclusions are drawn from the assumption that Fetterman was driven by a one-dimensional obsession: his belief that a small detachment of white soldiers could easily handle any number of Indian warriors. In seeking to explain the events leading up to the catastrophe, all answers become corollaries to this presumption of Fetterman’s undaunted arrogance —completely obscuring any other potential interpretation . These analyses overlook the underlying political, social, and cultural influences that played a critical role in the story. Described by historian Robert Utley as “the opening of the final act of the frontier drama,” this incident reflects the complex inter- and intracultural dynamics of the United States and the Plains Indians at a pivotal point in history.1 Taking these factors into account offers a credible alternative to the traditional story’s dénouement that caricatures Fetterman’s arrogance and begs the question of how his reputation was so permanently marred. My quest to answer that question was launched in a documentary editing course in graduate school at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln when I stumbled across a letter in the Eli Ricker Collection in the archives at the Nebraska State Historical Society. In this letter, Frances Ten Eyck, daughter of Tenodor Ten Eyck, an officer who served under Carrington at Fort Phil Kearny, pleaded with Ricker and Carrington to help clear her father’s name after he had been portrayed as a coward in a recently published Wyoming history volume. Little did I know that this one letter would lead to a five-year obsession with the Fetterman story. The professor of the documentary editing course was Dr. Gary Moulton, acclaimed editor of the Lewis and Clark Journals and internationally recognized guru of historical editing. He was also the chair of my master’s degree committee. Moulton admonished us to “be as curious as possible” and to annotate to a nearly ridiculous level in order to learn how to make the hard Preface xi decisions of what to cut, for editing is the disciplined “study of scarcity.” Moulton’s rules were uncompromising. We were required to look at all aspects of a document and approach each with skepticism. And so it was that I dug so far into the Ten Eyck story that I came out on the other side! My editing project grew from the one letter to seventeen found in three different archives, and by the end of the semester I had read dozens of Fetterman books and articles including the Carringtons’ books and Brown’s excellent version. I think Moulton gave me an A for effort and sheer volume, as the eighty...