Fort Phil Kearny and the Fetterman Fight
Near Sheridan, Wyoming
Fort Phil Kearny sat at the base of the Bighorn Mountains about fifteen miles south of present-day Sheridan, built in the summer of eighteen sixty-six to anchor the Bozeman Trail. Colonel Henry Carrington oversaw its construction. He knew the land was contested. He was warned repeatedly. What he could not fully reckon with was the scale of what Lakota war leader Crazy Horse had already planned.
On December twenty-first, eighteen sixty-six, Captain William Fetterman led eighty men out of the fort to relieve a wood-cutting party under attack. Fetterman had reportedly boasted that with eighty men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. He got exactly eighty. Crazy Horse and a small decoy party lured the column over a ridge called Lodge Trail Ridge, out of sight of the fort. On the other side, approximately one thousand warriors were waiting.
The fight lasted less than an hour. All eighty-one soldiers, including Fetterman, were killed. It was the largest loss of United States troops to Native forces until the Little Bighorn, ten years later. The post surgeon described the scene when the relief party arrived after dark: the ground frozen, the men stripped and left in the cold, the fort's lookout having watched the puffs of rifle smoke go silent one by one.
Carrington was relieved of command. The Army sent more men and new officers. But the fort's fate was sealed by the treaty negotiations already underway. In eighteen sixty-eight, the soldiers marched out and the Lakota burned it to the ground before the column had cleared the valley.
The site is preserved today as Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site, off Interstate Ninety north of Buffalo. The ridge where the column was destroyed is visible from the visitor center. The grass grows over it the same as it does everywhere else on the Powder River Basin floor.
