



|
Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings
 |
FORT PHIL KEARNY and RELATED SITES
Wyoming
|

|
Location: Johnson and Sheridan Counties. The fort
site and those of the Fetterman Disaster and Wagon Box Fight lie within
a few miles of one another just off I-90 in the vicinity of Story. The
fort and Wagon Box sites are located on secondary roads, and the
Fetterman Disaster site is on U.S. 87. Follow road markers.
|
|
The tragic events associated with Fort Phil Kearny,
the Fetterman Disaster, and the Wagon Box Fight form one of the most
dramatic chapters in the history of the Indian wars: the bloody 2 years
of warfare in 1866-68 sparked by bitter Sioux opposition to the invasion
of their hunting grounds by prospectors bound over the Bozeman Trail to
the Montana goldfields. In one of the few in stances during the Indian
wars when the Army was forced to abandon a region it had occupied, the
Sioux triumphed and the forts were evacuated. But the conflict
foreshadowed the final disastrous confrontation between frontiersman and
Indian that ensued on the northern Plains as the westward movement
accelerated after the Civil War.
Strikes in 1862 by Idaho prospectors in the mountains
of western Montana triggered a rush to the diggings at Bannack and
subsequently to Virginia City. The next spring John M. Bozeman and John
M. Jacobs blazed the Bozeman Trail. Running north from the
Oregon-California Trail along the eastern flank of the Bighorn Mountains
and then westward, it linked Forts Sedgwick, Colo., and Laramie, Wyo.,
and the Oregon-California Trail with Virginia City. Spared the
circuitous route through Salt Lake City, gold seekers soon poured over
the trail, which crossed the heart of the hunting grounds the hostile
Sioux had recently seized from the Crows. The Sioux, taking advantage of
the absence of Regular troops in the Civil War, quickly unleashed their
fury.
In 1865, at Fort Sully, S. Dak., the Government
concluded treaties with a few Sioux chiefs. In return for the promise of
annuities, they agreed to withdraw from the vicinity of emigrant routes
and not to attack them. The commissioners, however, had dealt with only
unimportant leaders of the bands along the Missouri Rivernot the
people who really mattered. Red Cloud, Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, and
other chiefs who roamed the Powder and Bighorn country to the west vowed
to let no travelers pass unmolested.
 |
Fort Phil Kearny, from a sketch
by Bugler Antonio Nicoli, 2d Cavalry, in 1867. (National
Archives) |
In the late spring and summer of 1866 a U.S.
commission met with these leaders at Fort Laramie, Wyo. In the midst of
the council, Col. Henry B. Carrington and 700 men of the 18th Infantry
marched into the fort. When Red Cloud and the other chiefs learned that
their mission was the construction of forts along the Bozeman Trail,
they stalked out of the conference and declared war on all invaders of
their country. That summer and fall Carrington strengthened and
garrisoned Fort Reno and erected Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith.
Nevertheless., by winter Sioux, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne warriors
had all but closed the trail. Between August 1 and December 31 they
killed 154 persons in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny, wounded 20 more,
regularly attacked emigrants, and destroyed or captured more than 750
head of livestock. Even heavily guarded supply trains had to fight their
way over the trail. The forts endured continual harassment, and wagon
trains hauling wood for fuel and construction had to ward off
assaults.
Sioux efforts focused on Carrington's headquarters,
Fort Phil Kearny, situated between the Big and Little Piney Forks of the
Powder River on a plateau rising 50 to 60 feet above the valley floor.
The largest of the three posts guarding the Bozeman Trail, it was one of
the best fortified western forts of the time. It ultimately consisted of
42 log and frame buildings within a 600 by 800 foot stockade of heavy
pine timber 11 feet high, and had blockhouses at diagonal corners. A
company of the 2d Cavalry reinforced Carrington's infantry.
 |
Diorama of the Wagon Box Fight.
(National Park Service) |
Strong defenses were necessary. The warnings of Red
Cloud had not prevented the fort's establishment, but he soon put it
under virtual siege. Carrington, saddled with 21 women and children
dependents who had accompanied him from Fort Kearny, Nebr., maintained a
defensive stance. A clique of his younger and more impetuous officers,
who disliked him and resisted his attempts to impose discipline, were
contemptuous. Prominent among them was Capt. William J. Fetterman, who
boasted that he and 80 men could ride through the whole Sioux
Nation.
On December 21, 1866, a small war party, in a feint,
made a typical attack on a wood train returning eastward from Piney
Island to the fort. To relieve the train, Carrington sent out Fetterman,
two other officers, 48 infantrymen, 28 cavalrymen, and two
civilians81 men in all. Although warned not to cross Lodge Trail
Ridge, where he would be out of sight of the fort, Fetterman let a small
party of warriors decoy him northward well beyond the ridge and into a
carefully rehearsed ambush prepared by Red Cloud. Within half an hour,
at high noon, hundreds of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors
annihilated the small force to the last man. Relief columns from the
fort, which scattered the Indians, were too late to rescue Fetterman and
his men. They had suffered the worst defeat inflicted by the Plains
Indians on the Army until that time and one that vied with subsequent
debacles, such as the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Following the Fetterman Disaster, Carrington hired
civilians John "Portugee" Phillips and Daniel Dixon to carry a message
for Omaha headquarters concerning the disaster and a plea for
reinforcements to the telegraph station at Horseshoe Bend, near Fort
Laramie. Phillips continued on through a snowstorm to Fort Laramie on a
236-mile ride, honored in the annals of Wyoming history. Carrington was
replaced in January 1867.
 |
Artist's version of the
Fetterman Disaster. Harper's Weekly (March 23, 1867). (Denver
Public Library, Western Collection) |
By that summer the Indians had closed the Bozeman
Trail to all but heavily guarded military convoys, but the troops won
two victories. The Sioux and Cheyennes agreed to pool their resources
and wipe out Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith. One faction, in the
Hayfield Fight, attacked a haying party near Fort C. F. Smith on August
1, but suffered heavy casualties. The next day the other group, 1,500 to
2,500 Sioux and Cheyennes led by Red Cloud, set upon a detachment of 28
infantrymen guarding civilian woodcutters a few miles west of Fort Phil
Kearny. Most of the civilians succeeded in safely reaching the post, but
four were trapped with the soldiers in an oval barricade that had been
formed earlier as a defensive fortification from the overturned boxes of
14 wood-hauling wagons that had been removed from the running gears. The
troops were armed with newly issued beech-loading Springfield
riflesa costly surprise for the Sioux. Six times in 4 hours they
charged the wagon boxes, but each time were thrown back with severe
casualties. Reinforcements finally arrived from the fort with a mountain
howitzer and quickly dispersed the opposition. The Army reported only
about three dead and two wounded, but the Indians claimed the figures
were at least 60 and 120, respectively.
The Hayfield and Wagon Box Fights exacted a modicum
of revenge for the Fetterman Disaster, but they did not deter
hostilities. Forays increased steadily until the next year, when the
Government was forced to come to terms with the Indians. In the Treaty
of Fort Laramie (1868), in return for certain Indian concessions, it
bowed to Red Cloud's demands and agreed to close the Bozeman Trail and
abandon the three forts protecting it. As soon as this occurred, in July
and August, the Sioux, unknowingly celebrating the zenith of their power
on the northern Plains, jubilantly burned them to the ground.
The basically unaltered natural scene of the sites of
Fort Phil Kearny, the Fetterman Disaster, and the Wagon Box Fight,
despite surrounding ranch operations, are marred by but few modern
intrusions. Picturesquely located at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains,
they permit ready historical visualization. Nothing remains of the fort,
whose approximate location is about 1 mile west of U.S. 87 and 2-1/2
miles southeast of Story. The site is marked by one side of a stockade,
all that survives from a Works Progress Administration (WPA)
reconstruction in the 1930's, and a log cabin erected by the Boy Scouts.
The State owns 3 acres of the probable 25-acre site. About 5 miles to
its north, along U.S. 87 and about 1-1/2 miles northeast of Story, is
the spur ridge east of Peno Creek, and the route of the Bozeman Trail,
along which Fetterman and his men retreated southward. At the southern
end of the estimated 60 privately owned acres embracing the battlefield,
at the point where most of the bodies were found, stands a War
Department monument on a tiny tract of Federal land on the east side of
the highway. The only modern intrusion of consequence is the highway.
Another monument, lying in an upland prairie some 1-1/2 miles southwest
of Story, marks the location of the Wagon Box Fight, 1 acre of which is
State owned out of an estimated 40-acre total.
NHL Designation: 12/19/60
http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/soldier-brave/siteb37.htm
Last Updated: 19-Aug-2005
|