The Bozeman Trail and the Fetterman Fight: Wyoming's Forgotten War

In December 1866, Captain William J. Fetterman rode out of Fort Phil Kearny in what is now northern Wyoming with 80 men to relieve a wood-cutting party reportedly under attack. They never returned. Within half an hour, all 81 were dead in a decoy ambush planned by Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, High Backbone, and more than a thousand Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. At the time it was the worst defeat the U.S. Army had suffered on the Great Plains, exceeded only by Little Bighorn ten years later, and it broke American confidence in the strategy of trying to hold the Bozeman Trail through Lakota hunting grounds.

Two years later, the U.S. abandoned all three Bozeman Trail forts and signed the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which closed the trail and left the Powder River country to the Lakota and their allies as unceded Indian territory. Red Cloud would not sign until the forts stood empty. The treaty held for eight years, until the discovery of gold in the Black Hills brought the U.S. back to the Powder River and ultimately to Custer’s death at Little Bighorn in 1876.

This is the story of the Bozeman Trail conflict and the Fetterman Fight.

The Bozeman Trail (1863-1868)

In 1862, gold was discovered at Grasshopper Creek in what is now southwestern Montana. By 1863, the Virginia City and Bannack mining camps had attracted thousands of prospectors and the demand for a direct supply route from the established Oregon Trail to the Montana gold fields became urgent.

John Bozeman, a Georgia-born prospector who had come to Montana for the gold rush, partnered with the mountain man John Jacobs to scout a direct route. The trail they laid out in 1863 left the Oregon Trail at Deer Creek Crossing near present-day Glenrock, Wyoming, and ran north through the Powder River Basin, along the east foot of the Bighorn Mountains, and into the Montana gold country. The alternatives were a steamboat up the Missouri to Fort Benton and 250 miles overland, or the Oregon Trail to Fort Hall and about 275 miles north. Bozeman’s diagonal saved weeks.

It also cut directly through the heart of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho hunting grounds. On paper the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty had assigned the country west of the Powder River to the Crow, and its second article let the United States build roads and posts in every signing nation’s territory. On the ground, the Lakota and their allies held the basin as their own. The trail’s wagon traffic, livestock grazing, wood cutting, and hunting were treated as an invasion.

Wagon trains traveling the Bozeman Trail in 1863-1865 faced consistent attacks. By early 1866 the U.S. government decided to enforce the trail’s existence with military force. The strategy: build a string of forts along the trail to protect emigrant wagon trains.

The forts (1866)

Colonel Henry B. Carrington was given command of the Mountain District of the Department of the Platte in early 1866 with orders to establish three forts along the Bozeman Trail. The forts were:

• Fort Reno (already existing as Fort Connor, renamed). On the Powder River near present-day Sussex, Wyoming.
• Fort Phil Kearny (built summer 1866). Near present-day Banner, Wyoming, on Piney Creek at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. The largest of the three forts; Carrington’s headquarters.
• Fort C.F. Smith (built late summer 1866). On the Bighorn River in present-day southern Montana.

Carrington’s force consisted of about 700 men of the 18th U.S. Infantry, accompanied by their families (including Carrington’s wife Margaret, whose 1868 memoir AB-SA-RA-KA, Home of the Crows is one of the few first-person accounts of the period). Construction of Fort Phil Kearny began that summer.

From the moment construction began, the forts were under constant Lakota attack. Wood-cutting parties (the forts depended on continuous logging from nearby pine forests for construction materials and firewood) were ambushed almost daily. Mail riders were attacked. Stock was stolen from the picket lines. The fort’s National Historic Landmark nomination counts 51 hostile actions in the last five months of 1866, in which more than 150 people were killed and hundreds of head of livestock taken.

The Lakota strategy, led by Red Cloud and the war chief Crazy Horse (then in his mid-twenties), was sustained pressure: not large set-piece engagements, but constant raiding designed to make the forts untenable through attrition.

The Fetterman Fight (December 21, 1866)

On December 21, 1866, a wood-cutting party was attacked approximately 5 miles from Fort Phil Kearny. The relief force was assigned to Captain William J. Fetterman, a Civil War veteran. He is remembered for boasting that with eighty men he could ride through the whole Sioux Nation, but the line comes down through the memoirs of Carrington’s two wives, written in defense of their husband, and historians now treat it with suspicion.

Fetterman took 80 men, two of them civilians, which made 81 with Fetterman himself. His orders from Carrington were specific: relieve the wood train, do not pursue beyond Lodge Trail Ridge.

The Lakota plan was a classic decoy ambush. A small group of warriors led by Crazy Horse rode to within sight of the relief column, taunted them, and retreated slowly over Lodge Trail Ridge. Fetterman, ignoring his orders, followed.

On the far side of the ridge, in a valley known as Peno Creek, more than 1,000 Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors were concealed in two extended wings. As Fetterman’s column reached the bottom of the valley, the wings closed and engaged from both sides simultaneously.

The engagement lasted about half an hour. All 81 men in Fetterman’s command were killed. The bodies, when recovered the following day, showed signs of having been ritually mutilated in the Plains warrior tradition. Margaret Carrington’s memoir contains a restrained but detailed account of the recovery and burial.

Indian losses were never definitively counted.

The defeat was the worst single-day loss the U.S. Army had suffered in the Plains Indian Wars to that point. It would not be exceeded until Custer at Little Bighorn in June 1876.

The Wagon Box Fight (August 2, 1867)

Eight months later, on August 2, 1867, a small detachment of soldiers and civilians (32 men total) at a wood-cutting camp about five miles from Fort Phil Kearny were attacked by a Lakota and Cheyenne force estimated at 800 or more warriors. The defenders had set 14 wagon boxes (the wagon beds lifted off their running gear) on the ground as a corral and were equipped with new breech-loading Springfield rifles, far faster to reload than the muzzle-loaders the warriors expected.

The defenders held the corral for about six hours. Three of them were killed there, Lt. John Jenness and two privates, and more soldiers and civilian woodcutters died outside it. Estimates of Indian losses vary wildly, from two dead to 1,500. The fight was broken off when a relief column arrived from Fort Phil Kearny with a howitzer.

The Wagon Box Fight was, by Army standards, a defensive victory. By any larger measure, it confirmed that the Lakota could mass enough warriors to threaten the forts whenever they chose, and that the U.S. presence on the Bozeman Trail was effectively untenable.

The Fort Laramie Treaty (1868)

By late 1867, the U.S. government had concluded that the Bozeman Trail strategy had failed. A peace commission was appointed; negotiations with the Lakota began in late 1867 and continued through spring 1868.

Red Cloud’s terms were clear and simple: the U.S. must abandon all three forts, abandon the Bozeman Trail, and recognize the Powder River Country as exclusive Lakota territory. Red Cloud refused to sign any treaty until the forts were physically abandoned.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 was concluded on these terms. The U.S. agreed to:

• Abandon Forts Phil Kearny, C.F. Smith, and Reno, and close the Bozeman Trail.
• Set aside the western half of Dakota Territory, Black Hills included, as a reservation for the Sioux.
• Leave the Powder River country north of the North Platte as unceded Indian territory where the tribes could hunt and whites could not settle.

The U.S. abandoned the forts in summer 1868, and the tribes burned them soon after the soldiers left; at Fort Phil Kearny it was Cheyenne warriors who set the fire. Red Cloud signed the treaty at Fort Laramie on November 6, 1868. The Powder River country reverted to Lakota control.

Few Indigenous nations ever forced the United States to give up a military position and close a road on their terms. Red Cloud’s coalition did it here.

What the treaty held until (1868-1876)

The Fort Laramie Treaty held for eight years. During this period, the Lakota under Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other leaders maintained traditional life across the Powder River and Black Hills regions essentially undisturbed.

In 1874, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer led an Army expedition into the Black Hills and reported the discovery of significant gold deposits. By 1875, thousands of miners had violated the treaty by entering the Black Hills illegally; the U.S. government, unable or unwilling to remove them, instead pressured the Lakota to sell the Black Hills outright. The Lakota refused.

In late 1875, the U.S. ordered all Lakota and Cheyenne to report to reservation agencies by January 31, 1876, on penalty of being declared hostile. Most Lakota in the Powder River country either ignored the order or did not receive it. By spring 1876, the Army was preparing a coordinated campaign to bring them in by force.

The campaign culminated at Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876, where Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was destroyed by a combined Lakota-Cheyenne-Arapaho force in the largest single Army defeat of the Plains Wars.

The 1868 treaty was effectively dead by 1876. Within a few years the Lakota had been forced onto reservations, the Black Hills had been seized, and the brief period of Lakota military and political ascendancy was over.

Where to visit

Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site, near Banner, Wyoming, about 20 miles south of Sheridan off I-90 exit 44, roughly halfway to Buffalo. The fort site includes a reconstructed stockade wall, the original parade ground, a visitor center and museum, and interpretive trails. Multi-hour visit minimum.

Fetterman Battlefield, about three miles from the fort over Lodge Trail Ridge. A 1908 monument marks where Fetterman’s command was destroyed, and a walking trail with more than 30 interpretive signs tells it from both the Army and the tribal side. The view down toward Peno Creek still shows the topography of the engagement.

Wagon Box Fight Site, about five miles from Fort Phil Kearny, marked with a 1936 monument and interpretive signage.

Fort Laramie National Historic Site, in southeastern Wyoming near the North Platte River, where the 1851 and 1868 treaties were made. Multiple original buildings, full NPS interpretation. Worth a full day.

For visitors interested in the Wyoming Plains Indian Wars era, the Fort Phil Kearny / Fetterman / Wagon Box cluster is the densest concentration of substantive sites in the state. Budget a half-day to do all three properly. It’s not a fifteen-minute pull-off.

The sites are exposed, with little shade and no services on site at Massacre Ridge. An insulated water bottle and a Leatherman for getting through fence gates are the practical carry. Spring and fall visits at this elevation run cold; lined work gloves earn their weight in October.

Why it matters

The Bozeman Trail conflict is among the most consequential and least-remembered Wyoming military events of the nineteenth century. It ended in a clear strategic victory for the Lakota and their allies: the Army gave up its forts and the government closed the road. It demonstrated that determined Indigenous resistance, properly led, could defeat the U.S. Army in this period. And it set up the chain of events (the Black Hills gold rush, the 1875 ultimatum, the 1876 campaign, Little Bighorn, the Great Sioux War) that ended in the destruction of Lakota political independence within a decade.

For visitors interested in understanding what actually happened in the American West, as opposed to the Buffalo Bill version of what happened, the Bozeman Trail story is essential. It complicates the heroic-cavalry mythology of the Plains Wars. It demonstrates the complexity of treaty politics. It centers Indigenous strategy and leadership in a way that most Western mythology omits.

The sites are still there. The country looks the same. Worth visiting.

Related reading on this site

• The Johnson County War: how Wyoming’s cattle barons lost the range
• Buffalo Bill Cody: the man who sold the West to the world
• Tom Horn: stock detective, hanged in Cheyenne 1903
• Buffalo, Wyoming: the Occidental Hotel and the Bighorn Front
• Sheridan, Wyoming: home of King’s Saddlery
• Chief Washakie: the Eastern Shoshone leader who shaped Wyoming
• 9 Wyoming ghost towns worth the drive

Further reading

• Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed by John H. Monnett (University of New Mexico Press, 2008). The current standard scholarly account of the Fetterman Fight.
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (Holt, 1970). The classic popular history of the Plains Wars from the Indian perspective.
• Margaret Carrington, AB-SA-RA-KA, Home of the Crows (1868). First-person memoir by the wife of the Fort Phil Kearny commander.
• Dee Brown, The Fetterman Massacre (University of Nebraska Press, 1984; first published 1962 as Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga).
• Shannon D. Smith, Give Me Eighty Men: Women and the Myth of the Fetterman Fight (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). How the Carrington memoirs shaped the story.
• Wyoming State Archives, Bozeman Trail and Indian Wars collections.