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

3. Ladies of the Regiment

Ladies of the Regiment The population of Fort Phil Kearney fluctuated greatly during the first six months of operations on the Bozeman Trail. At its peak, nearly seven hundred soldiers and civilians lived and worked in the immediate vicinity, but as units were detailed to other posts or sent on mail and other duties, the number of soldiers averaged far fewer than the four hundred and fifty who marched up the trail with Carrington. The number of women at the fort would fluctuate as wagon trains with families passed through on their way to Montana, but from the records and manuscripts available, it appears that there were rarely more than a dozen women living at the post at any given time. From October to December there were five officers’ wives, two or three female servants, and a couple of enlisted men’s wives who also served as camp laundresses. Nineteen-year-old Elisabeth Wheatley and her husband, James, ran a civilian mess and boarding house just outside the gates of the stockade. The Sioux wife of Pierre “French Pete” Gazeau, a trader who had been in the region for several years, moved to the fort following an Indian attack that killed her husband and his business partner less than a month after the fort was established.1 Scholars agree with contemporary writers that women—particularly the ladies of “officer’s row”—changed the character chapter 3 Ladies of the Regiment 42 of society in a regiment. Army wife Frances Roe wrote in her memoirs that women’s “very presence has often a refining and restraining influence over the entire garrison, from the commanding officer down to the last recruit.” Roe also asserted that the least developed, most dreadful postings were “where the plucky army wife is most needed.”2 Roe drew a distinction between her fellow ladies and the other women of the army, a distinction that historians agree was not artificial, but “the result of different upbringings and outlooks. Officers’ wives raised with education, refinement, and a strong sense of reserve considered the other women on the frontier to be brawlers—tempestuous and uncouth—but necessary for their comfort.”3 In her seminal work on the dependents of the frontier army, Patricia Y. Stallard captured the essence of the “microcosm of the western military post,” where the inhabitants of such a small community could have no secrets. Citing an officer’s wife who lamented that “Gossip, malicious and otherwise, throve,” Stallard positions an officer’s wife as “the most outstanding asset to [his] career,” as long as she “could adroitly maintain her own personal honor while diplomatically advancing his career.”4 In Life and Manners in the Frontier Army, Oliver Knight describes a “rigid caste system” among the women of frontier army posts where “at the top sat the commanding officer’s wife—known to the Army as the K.O.W., because the literal abbreviation would not do.” Citing frontier army novelist and former soldier Charles King’s works, Knight wrote that “the tone of garrison life depends immeasurably upon its social leader, the wife of the commanding officer.”5 The commanding officer’s wife “was expected to set the standards of conduct on the post, function as the official hostess, and receive all civilian and military guests with equal courtesy.”6 Though Fort Phil Kearny was Margaret Carrington’s first garrison, she seems to have been ideally suited for the task of shaping the community into a proper Victorian settlement. Margaret was well liked by the other officers’ wives and was respected by the soldiers of the fort. At age thirty-four, 7. Margaret Irvin Sullivant Carrington. After General Sherman advised her to keep a journal of her adventures in a new land where “all would be peace,” Carrington was able to quickly publish a memoir from her notes and sketches. Her personal notes have not surfaced, nor have any photographs of her other than this one. From the Collections of American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Ladies of the Regiment 44 she was a mature and wise woman described as “commanding in presence” and “dignified in deportment.”7 Like most officers’ wives, she came from “a class level where household labor was performed by hand—a servant’s hands.”8 For many of these women, adapting to...