What would Colonel Carrington have done about the unrecovered bodies on Mount Rainier?
The Fetterman massacre was the decisive victory of the Sioux Indians against the U. S. Calvary. It led to the U. S. Government suing for peace with the Sioux Indians and Chief Red Cloud literally dictating the terms of the peace treaty.
After this massacre what was the reaction of the colonel who had lost so many of his men? The following quotes from The Heart of Everything That Is-a New York Times bestseller, tell us what he did.
His wife, the post surgeon, and his four surviving junior officers tried to talk him out of it. They all agreed it was a terrible idea. Colonel Carrington insisted. He would not allow hostiles to sense any weakness. But the more powerful reason was that he had to see for himself. It was midday and bitterly cold on December 22. Eighty-three soldiers and civilians, the best he could select, followed him through the front gate toward Lodge Trail. Storm clouds studded down from the north.
Carrington was surprised that the Indians had not followed up the massacre with a sunrise attack. When the bugle blew reveille and the report of the morning gun echoed back from the hills, he had expected the sound to be met with howls, eagle whistles, and arrows. But as the pale sun rose farther over Pilot Knob not an Indian was visible on the ridges and hills. This, Carrington knew, did not mean the Indians were not there.
While his troop assembled he had whispered to Mrs. Grummond a promise to retrieve her husbands body
Jim Bridger's failing eyesight and the biting cold may have made him less of an asset to the battalion-the old man's arthritis barely allowed him to walk, much less mount a horse and ride for any length of time.... Bridger had pulled himself out of bed that morning and limped out into the day. Despite the intense pain in his joints he volunteered to ride as a scout. He, too, expected an attack at any moment, and he'd decided that when it occurred it would be as fine an occasion as any to end his career and his life.
The temperature remained around zero, and darker storm clouds blotted out the sun as the detail trod silently past the rock pile and reached the high ground strewn with boulders. The rocky earth along the ridgeline was streaked with frozen pools of blood, and the bodies were so stiff that one civilian likened the task of loading them onto the wagons to stacking cordwood. The mules again huffed and kicked at the smell of blood and offal, and soldiers were assigned to hold their heads and reins to keep them from bolting. One team of mules threw off the flailing handlers and dumped a half-filled wagon. Corpses frozen into grotesque contortions tumbled across the slope. "It was," wrote a witness,"a terrible sight and a horrible job.".
The men on the ridge... had been butchered, but cavalrymen in the detail recognized infantry insignia mixed among the dead. One horseman, John Guthrie, noted, "Some had crosses cut on their breasts, faces to the sky, some crosses on the back, faces to the ground.... We walked on top of internals and did not know it in the high grass. Picked them up, that is their internals, did not know the soldiers they belonged to, so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man's gutts and an infantry man got a cavalry man's gutts."
From the ridgeline the wagons rolled slowly down to Peña Creek, where Lieutenant Grummond and Sergeant Augustus Lang were discovered. Grummond's head had been severed and his body had suffered the usual mutilations. Not far away from him lay the frozen hulk of Jimmy Carrington's pony, Calico. The horse too, had been scalped.....A few hundred yards down the creek bed lay the bodies of James Wheatley, Isaac Fisher, "and four or five of the old long-tried and experienced soldiers." Piles of spent Henry rifle cartridges littered the little ring created by their slain horse and an additional ten dead ponies. Outside the defensive circle a soldier counted sixty-five smudges of dark, clotted blood, perhaps indicating where an Indian had fallen.
It was dark before the column moved back over the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge..... Back inside the fort Colonel Carrington handed Frances Grummond a sealed envelope containing a lock of her husbands hair. Not long afterward, the blizzard that had threatened all day began. The temperature dropped to twenty below and by daylight on December 23 snowdrifts had crested so high against the
west wall of the stockade that guards could walk over it.... all through the day before Christmas Fort Phil Kearny was tense. A triple guard remained at every loophole.
If any scintilla of holiday spirit still breathed it was smothered by the steady whine of handsaws and a clanging of hammers on nails as carpenters worked around the clock constructing pine coffins-two men to a coffin except for the dead officers, Captain Fetterman, Lieutenant Grummond,and Captain Brown had separate caskets. The coffins were numbered to identify each occupant, and Colonel Carrington dispatched a grave-digging detail to break the frozen earth beneath Pilot Knob. He hoped for a solemn Christmas Day service. But even continuous half-hour work shifts could not accomplish that. The snow was too high, the ground was too hard, and the threat of another attack was too overwhelming to spare enough men. So a day late, on December 26, forty-two pine boxes were hurriedly interred in a shallow fifty-foot-long trench.
Following the somber ceremony there was nothing to do but batten down Fort Phil Kearny and wait. For what, only God and Red Cloud knew.
In July 1908, for the first time since the Battle of the Hundred-in-the-Hands forty-two years earlier, Colonel Carrington returned to the site.... The few men and women still living who had occupied Fort Phil Kearny had been invited to mark the Independence Day weekend by visiting the rocky knoll in the Peña Creek Valley where Captain Fetterman had fallen and where a monument was to be erected
consecrating the battle. Today the stone marker rises from the yellow sweet clover and the purple Canada thistle....
On that day in 1908 Colonel Carrington, who was eighty-four, wore his blue colonel's uniform and was accompanied by his wife,....
Those attending the 1908 reunion were surprised by the vigor of the old soldier as he delivered an extemporaneous, hour-long speech.... this would be Colonel Carrington's last hurrah.
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