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Post by elisabeth on May 17, 2008 2:27:54 GMT -6
This is sounding better and better. My copy's going to take a while to trudge across the Atlantic, unfortunately; can't wait!
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Post by Scout on May 17, 2008 6:31:20 GMT -6
The book sounds interesting but I don't think you can reform Fetterman's reputation by portraying him as "warm and friendly." What does this have to do with the outcome of the massacre, uh, I mean battle?
Indian accounts agree that as Fetterman and company crested Lodge Trail Ridge ridge the Indian decoys in the valley below, near Peno Creek, began taunting them. According to the Indian accounts a number of Fetterman's men broke rank and began charging willy nilly down toward the Indian decoys. Fetterman as commander should have called them back or at least held the rest of the command in check. The Indians said soon after the whole command charged down into the valley in one large disorganized mob. I suppose at this point Fetterman decides to follow. What else can a commander do but FOLLOW his men? If these accounts are true, and I have no reason to doubt them, command broke down before the battle even began. In fact body recovery parties say the bodies were strung out for some distance showing lack of any military structure whatsoever. Two of the civilians along for the joy ride were Fisher and Wheatley, wood contractors, who had new Henry rifles and wanted to get some Indian fighting in before they left the post. All these gung ho personalities were a recipe for disaster.
As crazyhorse stated,: Jim Bridger was a scout for the command. He told Carrington (paraphrase) "Your soldiers are crazy for chasing Indians like they were Rebs."
I can't imagine any soldier's account which could change or alter what is known to have happened. Here again, the Indians were considered inferior warriors by the military which led to yet another military disaster. To bad West Point didn't teach a class called 'Indian Fighting 101: introduction on how to keep your hair."
Again, the book sounds very interesting and may offer some new insights.
S
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Post by elisabeth on May 17, 2008 7:22:53 GMT -6
True, it won't change the fact that it was a mess and shouldn't have happened ... But it'll be nice to have a clearer picture of what he was really like: whether arrogant and boastful, as caricatured, or a Mr. Nice Guy simply doing his best.
It is bizarre that the Fetterman affair didn't serve as precisely that Indian Fighting 101 class. Everyone knew the story, everyone knew how it had happened; by early May of 1867, Custer is helpfully lecturing Keogh about "the Indians' Ruse De Guerre" of decoying small parties away from their posts; yet by the end of June, we have Barnitz falling for the very same ploy, escaping Fetterman's fate by the skin of his teeth. And Custer himself does much the same on the Yellowstone expedition; it dawns on him only just in time that he's cheerily riding straight into an ambush. Slow learners, it has to be said ...
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Post by elisabeth on May 29, 2008 10:13:57 GMT -6
OK -- got this today, and have of course devoured it from cover to cover. Verdict on a first reading: slightly clumsily written, and the "women" aspect is somewhat bolted on ... but full of good stuff. Excellent on the personalities involved; excellent on the politics; and a very nice last chapter on the historiography.
Could have used some maps. It'd also have been good to have some of the reports she mentions, e.g. Carrington's, and Fetterman's report of the December 6th fight ... Still, some interesting photos we don't often see, e.g. of the two Carrington wives, and of obscure-ish people like Ten Eyck.
Worth a read, I'd say.
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Post by cefil on May 29, 2008 11:26:38 GMT -6
...the "women" aspect is somewhat bolted on ... Very true. It struck me as much more about Carrington himself: his actions, and the machinations of the military and political hierarchy in affixing blame...a fascinating story in itself, but not dependent upon the actions of the women. It seemed to me to be a real stretch to compare their efforts, and the impact thereof, to those of Libby Custer...altogether more of a good marketing "hook" for this book than a meaningful contribution to the story. That said, however, the book contains much that is interesting. The pre-massacre descriptions of Fetterman do seem very unlike the rash & arrogant bully who emerged in Carrington's subsequent reports (and the characterization picked up by most historians). The impact of army politics (the great reorganization, especially) also made for interesting reading. So, if you're interested in this particular incident, and/or the operations of the frontier army, this book is definitely worth your time. cefil
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Post by Scout on May 29, 2008 20:54:32 GMT -6
I was reading a review online somewhere about this article and the writer was saying Carrington was 'paranoid' after the deaths of Fetterman and his command. (gee, I wonder why?) The reality was that the walls of Ft. Kearney were only 7 or 8 feet tall and the snow was something like four feet high which means the Indians could have walked over the palisades if they had chosen to. So, yes, there was reason to be paranoid for the safety of the fort. Carrington seemed, to me, to be a very logical and competent commander who had the safety of his fort first in his mind. After losing 80 men needlessly it reduced his manpower tremendously.
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Post by Scout on May 29, 2008 20:58:34 GMT -6
Now is this an actual book or an article in the Montana history magazine? I only see the magazine article listed.
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Post by elisabeth on May 30, 2008 2:04:45 GMT -6
It is an actual book: University of Nebraska Press, ISBN 978-0-8032-1541-2, and available from Amazon. As cefil says, it's terrific on Carrington himself, on the politics, and so on. Good on the supply/manpower problems, too.
She mentions the height of the walls, and that they had to dig a trench in the snow to prevent the Indians from simply sauntering across. Not frightfully far-sighted of Carrington, really, to build them that low; but then he'd been led to expect it would be a relatively peaceful posting, and maybe wasn't anticipating the degree of hostility he actually met.
The whole thing is quite fascinating, especially the post-massacre shenanigans, and those especially if one bears in mind what was going on in parallel, as it were, with Custer and the 7th. Gives us a much more 3-D view of that first year on the frontier.
A tiny point, but interesting: for all that Sheridan claimed this as his own stroke of genius in '68, it's actually Philip St. George Cooke in 1866 who comes up with the idea of striking Indian villages in winter. "An extraordinary effort in winter, when the Indian horses are unserviceable, it is believed, should be followed by more success than can be accomplished by very large expeditions in the summer, when the Indians can so easily scatter", he told Carrington.
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Post by Scout on May 30, 2008 8:17:14 GMT -6
I don't think there are any huge forests in the area. Pine trees were the most available. Some of you who live in the area can throw down on this. Timber is less available than here in eastern America and remember, the wood cutting party was some distance from the fort which led to the whole debacle in the first place. Besides the wood for the construction of the fort they also needed it for fuel.
The bodies brought in to the fort must have been a hideous site, nude frozen bodies in every possible position and full of arrows, frozen in the corpses plus the gruesome mutilations. A sad site.
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Post by elisabeth on May 30, 2008 9:11:44 GMT -6
On reflection, I suppose it was quite bright of him to build a stockade at all; most of the Plains forts didn't have one.
Carrington's own map of the area, on p. 106 of the book, shows quite a bit of wood around: he's got "Piney Summit, heavily timbered", "Dense Orchard of small pines, sheltering game in winter", "Pine-clad Peno Head" ... There's no scale to indicate exactly how far these pine woods are from the fort, but he's certainly got plenty to draw upon. Much luckier than, say, the Kansas forts, where the sight of a tree was almost an unimagined luxury.
True, it must have been a ghastly sight. According to this book, Margaret Carrington wrote that there was a "universal disinclination" among the officers to go back the next day to fetch in the remaining bodies; they were brought back only because Carrington himself insisted. Awful.
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Post by stevewilk on May 30, 2008 9:44:57 GMT -6
The bodies of the officers, Brown, Fetterman and Grummond, were buried on Christmas Eve at 1:00 pm; without any ceremony or military honors. Capt. Ten Eyck was rather shocked by this lack of protocol but noted that both Carrington and Powell deemed this necessary. To Ten Eyck, twice a POW and survivor of the infamous Libby Prison, this was indeed a strange new kind of war.
An excellent read is Portraits of Fort Phil Kearny, published by the FPK/Bozeman Trail Association. Contains biographical essays of several of the major players in the Ft. Phil saga.
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Post by elisabeth on May 30, 2008 11:38:55 GMT -6
That sounds most interesting. Would you happen to know where and how the Association sells that? There doesn't seem to be any mention of publications for sale on their website.
It'd be great to know a lot more about the players in this. The "Eighty Men" book sketches them in quite nicely, but doesn't, for instance, touch on the Ten Eyck reaction you've mentioned above. It's that kind of thing that helps so much with getting to grips with character ...
Apart from that lofty motive, I have a more venal one (of course): I'm still trying to work out who Keogh's informant could have been for the absurd exaggerations in that New York Times piece posted a while ago -- alleging that Carrington made his sentries patrol with unloaded guns for fear of shooting an Indian, forced his men to salute all Indians, etc. It has the ring of Powell or Bisbee about it, but I've not yet found any link between them and Keogh. Ten Eyck wasn't imprisoned in Macon or Charleston in the summer of '63, was he? If he was, that might make him another possibility ... But then again, the gossip was probably flying from frontier fort to frontier fort, snowballing as it went, and no direct link might have been required. Could be that Carrington's cautious ways were already a byword out west long before the Fetterman disaster.
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Post by stevewilk on May 30, 2008 13:14:10 GMT -6
Elisabeth--try this link www.bozemantrail.org/newbookstore.htmTen Eyck was first captured in 1862 near Huntsville, Alabama. He was later paroled and reported to Camp Wallace, Ohio in Jan. 1863. His second capture occurred at Chickamauga, 20 Sep 1863; he was then sent to Libby. There he became ill and his wife was able to secure an audience with President Lincoln to attempt to gain his release. Lincoln remarked that he had given "...that order to Senator Howe and Senator Ten Eyck months ago!" There you go...evidently his father or other relation was a US Senator; so strings were pulled and he was paroled in Dec. 1864. Ten Eyck's first wife, Mary Hascall, died after giving birth to her their firstborn, son Thomas. A year later Ten Eyck married her sister, Martha. They then had four daughters, Mary, Alice, Minnie and Fannie. One married an army officer, not sure offhand which one. But like so many officers on the frontier, particularly the ones who'd seen the hell of war against the "Rebs", Ten Eyck was a heavy drinker and the bottle got him in trouble. He was court martialed in 1868 and sentenced to be dismissed from the service. With the intervention of Gen. W.T. (the book says W T Grant, must be typo since the website generalsandbrevets.com shows only two Gen. Grants, Lewis A. and Ulysses S.) Sherman, the sentence was overturned and Ten Eyck reinstated. He later took ill and requested leave; he was mustered out on 1 Jan 1871. Ten Eyck died in 1903 of a stroke at his home in Chicago at the age of eighty five. The book is listed at $7.50; I bought it at the fort several years ago at $12.95 (paperback). So that is likely an error.
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Post by elisabeth on May 31, 2008 9:41:42 GMT -6
Thanks for the link. Loads of other enticing stuff there as well, I see ...
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Post by Scout on May 31, 2008 11:40:26 GMT -6
Well the website shoots down two myths...
"According to the records of General Henry B. Carrington, "Portugee" Phillips and Daniel Dixon were paid $300 each for the trip to Horseshoe Station to send a telegram of the disaster. In addition, several other men reportedly rode with them from Fort Reno to Horseshoe Station, where a telegram was sent to Omaha and Washington, DC.
Phillips, however, did ride on to Fort Laramie alone and arrived at "Old Bedlam," probably in the beginnings of a blizzard, and during a ball on Christmas night. He was carrying an additional message from General Wessells at Fort Reno to the commander at Fort Laramie. That message has been lost, and there is no record we know of (but much speculation) as to its content.
The reports of a blizzard so bad that the snow drifted to the top of the 8'-high stockade at Fort Phil Kearny---so bad that those inside the stockade feared that the Indians would come over the wall and wipe them out the night of December 21---is not correct. According to diaries from the fort, it became bitterly cold that afternoon and night, but the blizzard was a day or two arriving. (There were no official weather records at the fort at that time). By the time Phillips arrived at Fort Laramie, conditions were bad enough to make it impossible for troops to leave there the next morning to relieve the command at Fort Phil Kearny. "
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