Eating Crow 1

               ‘They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they
                 kept but one- They promised to take our land...and they took it.’
                                                                                                 Red Cloud


Iron. Chris wasn’t humming next morning, as he prepared our breakfast. We had asked for it early, and he hadn’t had much sleep. I poured some coffee, and through an Old West book of Lyon photographs I’d never seen. There were two of the Hudson Bay Company trading post in Rat Portage. Outside the store, in the early morning light, Indians waited. I showed Chris, over the stove.
“That’s my hometown in Northern Ontario.” I said. “I never thought it had anything to do with the westerns I used to watch in the Saturday matinees at the Paramount.”
“If you really knew how dirty and raggedy the Old West was, you wouldn’t want any part of it.” He said, dishing out the eggs.
An antique painting of the woman in the hat wrapped with a scarf, on the Victorian floral wallpaper behind the breakfast table, looked like Robyn. We ate quickly, and grabbed our bags.
“Which anniversary is it?” He asked. I had forgotten about that.
“Thirty-first.” I said.
“How’d you like the trains?” He asked. I nodded.
“Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want.” He said. “Have fun in Wyoming.”
Robyn and I left him, and the edge of town, for the Bozeman Trail. The sun was still above the morning cloud cover, trying to ignite the tan sediment of the mesas. It was a country of sage and juniper, and freedom. See Grizzly Bears 5 miles. But not for all.
Gusty crosswinds shook our wagon, as we passed over the Yellowstone River. A skunk had apparently died, not long before we reached the other bank. In a land of logs and elk horns and American flags, we drove through a fire burnout area, and a house on a lone homestead that had been lucky. Big Timber- wood salvage. Our map became a metaphor. Crow Reservation Land had cut the Custer National Forest in two, and there was more cleaving to come- fracking in Columbus, and a billboard for Adam and Eve- your romance superstore- coming to Billings soon. Three BNSF locomotives pulled a coal train past a van of Disabled American Veterans. If you don’t meet the devil every now and then, it means you're traveling in the same direction. Steak ahead…Hunger behind. I am a child not a choice. Microwave towers crept up over the ridges.
“Those used to be Indians.” Robyn said. We passed oil tanks of coal bed natural gas, big No Smoking signs wrapped around their curves.
“No peace pipes.” I said. There was a momentary shimmer off the plastic tarp of a Star Ranger from Jacksonville, Florida. The time to live and the place to die. That’s all any man gets. No more, no less.
Robyn and I were heading to the graves of two men of the Old West, who got both in spades.
The first had been a Civil War hero and in 1866, as a 33 year-old captain in the Second Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment, was stationed at Fort Phil Kearny to protect the immigrants traveling to Virginia City goldfields, invading along the Bozeman Trail. Never take down another man’s fence. William Judd Fetterman had boasted that with eighty soldiers, he could ‘ride through the whole Sioux Nation.’ No one had informed the Sioux.
His commanding officer, Colonel Henry Carrington had advanced along the Bozeman Trail ahead of him in June, into Powder River Country, the hunting grounds of the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho. Carrington, with 700 soldiers and 300 civilians, had established three forts along the trail, including his headquarters at Fort Phil Kearny. The fort’s construction had been plagued by fifty Indian attacks, and several dozen soldiers and civilians had been killed. The Indians, mounted and mobile, had always appeared in groups of less than a hundred, and stole as many horses as each occasion allowed.
Fetterman’s arrival in November put Carrington under pressure, reinforced by an order from General Cooke at Fort Laramie to take the offensive, in response to the ‘murderous and insulting attacks.’ His first opportunity made Carrington look even less up to the task. Fetterman ended up rescuing him from the hundred Indians trapping his effort to relieve the work detail west of the fort. Two soldiers were killed and four wounded. Carrington's guide, old Mountain Man Jim Bridger, remarked that his troops ‘don't know anything about fighting Indians.’
Chastened by the experience, Carrington reconstituted his soldiers and officers into six companies, intensified military training, doubled the number of guards for the wood trains, and kept the fifty serviceable horses he still possessed saddled and ready to sally, from dawn to dark.
When the Indians attacked another group on December 19th, Carrington sent his most cautious officer, Captain Powell, with explicit orders not to pursue them beyond Lodge Trail Ridge, two miles north of Fort Kearny. Powell followed orders, accomplished his mission, and returned safely. The following day, Carrington refused a proposal from Fetterman, to lead a group of civilians in a raid on the Lakota village on the Tongue River, fifty miles away.
But the woodpile doesn’t grow much on frosty nights, and the morning of December 21, 1866 was cold enough to freeze the words out of your mouth. About ten o’clock, Carrington dispatched a wagon train, guarded by ninety soldiers, to the nearest source of firewood for Fort Kearny, the ‘pinery’ about five miles northwest. Less than an hour later, Carrington's pickets on Pilot Hill signalled by flag that they had come under attack. Carrington ordered a relief party of 79 soldiers, and two civilian volunteers. Claiming seniority, Fetterman asked for and was given command. He would finally get his eighty men, and the chance he had been waiting for, to make good his boast.
Once again, Carrington’s orders were as clear as the air. ‘Under no circumstances’ was the relief party to ‘pursue over the ridge, that is Lodge Trail Ridge.’ The first thing Fetterman did on leaving the fort, was to immediately climb towards the steep hill of snow and ice that was the Lodge Ridge. If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s a good idea not to use your spurs.
You can’t weigh the facts if you got the scales weighed down with your own opinions, and the most important fact, inaccessible to Fetterman that day, was who was directing tactics on the other side of the Lodge Ridge Trail.
His real name was Maȟpíya Lúta, but that wouldn’t fit around the less melodic forked tongues of the white invaders. He was born close by two other forks, on the river that Calamity Jane swam, near what is now the city of North Platte, Nebraska, to equally discordant-sounding Lone Man and Walks As She Thinks. His parents died when he was three, and the future chief of the Oglala Lakota was raised instead, customary among the matrilineal tribe, by his maternal uncle, Old Chief Smoke.
Fetterman was racing to encounter the brilliant radiance of one of the most capable Native American strategists the US Army would ever face, towards the opening gambit of what would become Red Cloud’s War.
Before the winter snows would force them to disperse their large encampment on the Tongue River, Red Cloud, and other Indian leaders, had decided to launch a large military operation against Fort Kearny. He assembled almost two thousand warriors north of the Lodge Trail Ridge, more than would be at the Battle of the Little Bighorn ten years later. Cheyenne and Arapaho lay in ambush on the west side of the trail, Lakota on the east. There would be friendly fire collateral damage. Ten warriors were chosen to decoy the soldiers, including a young Oglala named Tȟašúŋke Witkó, who the forked tongues of the white invaders would later call Crazy Horse.
Your life is in the hands of any fool who can make you lose your temper. Fetterman fired volleys at the small group of Indians harassing his flanks and taunting his soldiers. At the top of the ridge, in violation of Carrington’s orders, he made the fateful decision to follow the Indian decoys north, rather than turn east to rescue the wagon train. A short time later the flag signal came to Carrington, back at the fort, that the wood train was no longer under attack. He may have thought that Fetterman had successfully routed the Indians by surprising them from the detour he had taken up Long Trail Ridge. But that wasn’t what was happening.
Fetterman was out of sight of the fort, pursuing the decoys over the ridge summit with his infantry, sending his calvary further ahead, under the command of 2nd Lt. George Grummond, another distinguished Civil War combat officer, but also a bigamist, who had been court martialed for drunkenness and abuse of civilians. Fetterman made it half a mile further. The decoys gave their own signal, and Red Cloud’s ambush erupted from both sides of the trail. There’s no way to get down from a high horse gracefully.
It was around noon back at the fort, when Carrington heard heavy firing to the north. Every time you shoot at someone, plan on dying.
Fetterman’s infantry took up position facing outwards in a small circle among some large rocks where, huddled together, he and fifty men were annihilated in desperate hand-to-hand fighting. A mile further on, his thirty horsemen came under sniper fire with bows and arrows, and then charged with spears and clubs. It took twenty minutes for the Indians to kill the infantry, and another twenty to dispatch the calvary, all on foot, using mostly stone age weapons. Only six of the 81 soldiers died of gunshot wounds.
Fetterman and his battalion quartermaster, Captain Frederick Brown, committed suicide by shooting each other in the head, at the exact moment that a Lakota warrior named American Horse was slashing Fetterman’s throat. Give me eighty soldiers, and I’ll ride through the whole Sioux Nation. Sometimes you get and sometimes you get got.
The Indians scalped, stripped, and mutilated the bodies of the soldiers, ensuring that they would be unable to partake in the physical pleasures of an afterlife. The next day, as a blizzard was approaching, Carrington found his soldiers, castrated, their eyes torn out and laid on rocks, noses and ears cut off, teeth chopped out, brains taken out and placed on rocks, and hands and feet severed.
The only two civilian volunteers, Wheatley and Fisher, carrying brand-new sixteen-shot Henry repeating rifles which caused a disproportionate number of Indian casualties, had had their faces ‘smashed into bloody pulp, and Wheatley had been pierced by more than a hundred arrows.’ The last trooper to die in the battle, Adolph Metzger, was an unarmed teenage bugler who had used his instrument as a weapon, until it was battered shapeless. His was the only body that hadn’t been mutilated, covered instead with a buffalo hide by his enemies, in tribute to his bravery. Carrington buried the bodies of the Civil War hero, his officers and his men on Boxing Day, in a common trench. Fetterman had never married and left no heirs. His pension was sent to his mother.
What would become known as ‘The Battle of the Hundred Slain’ was the worst military disaster, with the most casualties ever suffered, by the United States on the Great Plains. An entire US Army command had been exterminated. The mood of the nation built on a belief in their own Manifest Destiny grew sullen, and sour. Over the two years following the Fetterman Massacre, the prosecution of Red Cloud’s War would result in a total Indian victory. Red Cloud signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which established the Great Sioux Reservation in 1868. The white invaders agreed to abandon their forts and the Bozeman Trail, and to withdraw completely from Lakota territory. For the first time in its history the United States Government had negotiated a peace which conceded everything demanded by the enemy and which extracted nothing in return.
Two years later, Red Cloud visited Washington D.C., and met President Ulysses S. Grant. We eat, we sleep, we rest and soon we’ll be all better again.
But of course, it wasn’t to last. Red Cloud’s sovereignty over the Powder River country would only endure for another eight years.
In 1874, a US Army reconnaissance mission into the Great Sioux Reservation found gold, in an area held sacred by the local Indians. The General that led the expedition into the Black Hills, would soon have his own ‘pretty day for making things right,’ just like and a decade after the calamity of Captain William Fetterman. Well, enjoy it, 'cause once it starts, it's gonna be messy like nothing you ever seen.



   ‘I have two mountains in that country- the Black Hills and the Big horn
   Mountain. I want the Great Father to make no roads through them. I
   have told these things three times; now I have come to tell them the
   fourth time.’
                                                                   Mahpiua Luta (Red Cloud)