The Fetterman Fight: Red Cloud's Perfect Trap
Near Sheridan, Wyoming
On the morning of December twenty-first, eighteen sixty-six, a small band of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors rode within sight of Fort Phil Kearny and began harassing a crew of soldiers cutting timber in the hills. It looked like a routine raid. It was not.
The commander at Fort Phil Kearny, Colonel Henry Carrington, sent Captain William Fetterman out with eighty men to drive the warriors off. His orders were explicit: do not, under any circumstances, cross Lodge Trail Ridge. Fetterman had once boasted he could ride through the entire Sioux nation with eighty men. On this day, he got his eighty men and very nearly his wish.
Among the decoys taunting the soldiers back toward the ridge was a young Oglala warrior named Crazy Horse. He and roughly ten companions rode close enough to draw fire, then turned and fled, glancing back to make sure the soldiers were following. On the other side of that ridge, more than one thousand Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors lay concealed in the draws and tall grass, organized by Red Cloud in one of the most precisely executed ambushes in the history of the Plains Wars.
Fetterman crossed the ridge. Within half a mile, the decoys gave the signal. Warriors surged from both flanks simultaneously. The fight lasted approximately forty minutes. When it was over, all eighty-one soldiers, including Fetterman himself, were dead. Not one man escaped to bring back news. The fort learned what had happened only when a relief party followed the trail of silence over the ridge.
The Fetterman Fight was the worst defeat the United States Army had suffered in the West up to that point. Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn, which would come a decade later, would surpass it in scale. Red Cloud's War would continue for another two years, and when it ended, the United States signed the Fort Laramie Treaty of eighteen sixty-eight, acknowledged Lakota sovereignty over the Black Hills, and abandoned every fort along the Bozeman Trail. It remains one of the only wars in American history where the government conceded defeat and withdrew on the enemy's terms.
