Fort Phil Kearny and the Fetterman Fight

Fort Phil Kearny was built in the summer of 1866 under Colonel Henry B. Carrington to guard the Bozeman Trail, the road to the Montana goldfields that ran through the hunting grounds of the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho. It was the largest of three stockaded forts on the route, with eight-foot log walls around some seventeen acres, and at its peak held about 400 soldiers and 150 civilians. The Lakota leader Red Cloud and his allies saw the road and its forts as an invasion, and a war that bears his name began to build around the post.

On 21 December 1866 a relief party of 81 soldiers and civilians led by Captain William J. Fetterman left the fort to help a wood train under attack. Fetterman disregarded orders not to pursue the warriors beyond Lodge Trail Ridge; decoys, among them the young Crazy Horse, drew him into an ambush, and his entire command was killed in well under an hour. For the Lakota and their allies it was a great victory, remembered as the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand; for the army it was the worst defeat on the Plains to that date. Soldiers buried the dead in a common trench on 26 December. Indigenous losses are uncertain, with estimates ranging from a dozen to well over a hundred.

The fort itself did not last. In 1868 the Treaty of Fort Laramie closed the Bozeman Trail, the army left, and Northern Cheyenne warriors burned the stockade. Today the 1,000-acre Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site includes the fort grounds, an interpretive centre and the Fetterman and Wagon Box fight sites, and the property is a National Historic Landmark.

Reports of strange events are modest, and the site’s own superintendent describes them as largely unverified. Local legend places a soldier’s ghost walking by Little Piney Creek. Sharie Shada, the superintendent, told a local newspaper that an interpretive centre employee once saw books about Native Americans fall from a shelf, one of them flying across the room and breaking its binding, and that a visiting clairvoyant described a running man and mimed cocking a rifle at a spot where archaeologists had recently found three bullets. The annual Full Moon Fort evening has actors in costume as ghosts of the fort, a theatrical event rather than evidence.

A soldier’s apparition reported near Little Piney Creek and on the hill by the Fetterman site, an employee’s account of a book flying across a room, and the impressions of a visiting clairvoyant.

The reconstructed stockade, the interpretive centre, Little Piney Creek and the Fetterman Fight ridge about four miles north of the fort.

The Fetterman Fight is one of the most studied episodes of the Indian Wars, remembered by the Lakota as a victory and by the army as a massacre. Fort Phil Kearny’s Full Moon Fort evening events and battlefield tours bring its history, and some of its folklore, to visitors each year.