Customer Reviews

Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth

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I was somewhat leery of this book, after reading that the author was a prof of NA history,... fearing it would be an PC apologist for the NA viewpoint. It is not. I am no stranger to the Fetterman fight, having read Dee Brown's "the Fetterman Massacre", Shannon Smith's "Give me 80 Men", "The Bloody Bozeman" by Johnson, etc. I found this book to be a highly readable, interesting account, which summerizes and dissects many other earlier accounts of the Fetterman disaster. Monnett does a wonderful job, carefully, delicately dissecting the battle and participants with a sharp scalpel...and reveals the truths of what actually happened and did not happen. He also delves into the motives of the various participants who survived (just as Ms. Smith above). One of the great epic stories of annihilation of U.S. army troops, by indigenous peoples using little more than bow and arrows! (only 6 of the 81 found with gunshot wounds) This book presents both sides of the fight with neutrality/reality. Easy to read, hard to put down!
This is really the Rosetta stone of the Fetterman fight, which I feel sure will be in any serious library of western studies. I highly recommend this book!!

This book is an excellent addition to the literature on the Fort Phil Kearny saga. Rather than rehash the Carrington version of events, Monnett looks a little deeper to other information about Fetterman, Grummond, and other key players. He also does a fair job of analyzing the field itself and what could be reconstructed about the battle from the location of soldier remains and the physical evidence, both contemporaneous and archaeological.

Although the complete truth will never be known, he makes a fairly convincing case that Fetterman has been unfairly maligned by history, and that Carrington never set the record straight as to do so would both injure the widow of the true culprit, Lt. George Grummond, and expose to some extent Carrington's deficiencies as post commander at Phil Kearny. Add to that the fact that Carrington later married the widow Grummond, and Fetterman bore the brunt of the blame for the massacre. As Monnett shows, he may not even have spoken those legendary and fateful words about riding through the entire Sioux nation with 80 men.

At this point in history, it seems unlikely that Fetterman will ever be "rehabilitated" - the event is both too obscure to most and too deeply ingrained to others. But Monnett's book makes a good start. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to go beyond Dee Brown in understanding the Fetterman Fight.

The author is a PC "ethnohistorian" who acknowledges that this work is revisionist. However, he points to blaming Lt Grummond instead of Capt. Fetterman for the defeat (assisted by Col. Carrington), as his revisionist theory. Okay, that would be a magazine article, not a 241 page book.

The author makes so many erroneous statements, it is difficult to know where to start. He gives his anti-war credentials early, stating "... a majority of serious (military history) scholars of this subfield, and I definitely include myself in the mix, are among the most vocal antiwar activists in Western Civilization." He recognized that Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" exhibited marginal historical methodology, factual errors and serious omissions, but then lauds the book as revolutionary and inspiring. I guess if the book had been entirely fiction, it would have been even more important.

He states that the Euro-American exploitation of American Indians was "the greatest depopulation and sometimes outright genocide in the history of the world." Gee, and here I thought World War II, the campaigns of the Mongols, or the Taiping Rebellion took top honors in those categories. The author notes the "geophysical changes" on the Great Plains in the two decades before 1866 and their importance. Okay, there was a widespread drought for ten years, but the not "geophysical changes." An 80 man unit (company sized) becomes a "battalion" and he mentions the Power River area multiple times as having "a rich history of cultural interaction." Huh? Before the acquisition of the horse, the Plains Indians were a hunter-gatherer culture in the Late Stone Age. "Rich" is definitely an overblown adjective. The horse was only the Indians' second domestic animal after the dog. The use of overblown adjectives is one of the many problems in this work, for example the hanging of a Cheyenne warrior at Fort Laramie was described as "ghastly" and "part of a violent breakdown of civilization." More humorously, the author says, "Today the Powder River Basin looks much the same as it did in 1865." No doubt he has photographic evidence for that contention.

The calculation of 6.5 bison per person per year needed for Indian subsistance and the author's discussion is almost identical to the same presentation in "Comanche Empire." This seems rather high in both accounts assuming the average bison weighed 2,000 pounds and gave a dressed weight of 800 pounds of meat. That would mean each Indian man, woman and child needed 5,200 pounds of meat per year or 14 pounds per day to survive. Another calculation in question was the consumption of wood for firewood. The author states the Indians needed 3,000 pounds of wood per year for 100 people and that this represented 15 acres of woodland. As every woodcutter knows, 3,000 pounds is somewhere around a half cord of wood (depending on the type of wood) and represents 3-4 full grown trees. Doesn't sound like 15 acres of woodland to me.

The author repeats himself over and over again to make his points which are not very important to begin with. He seems to view the women of the time through modern ideas using such terms as "gender-role prescription" and such academic speak, and bases much (if not all) of his work on the Indian side on oral accounts passed down through the generations. Author Monnett states that oral accounts are useful and must be taken into consideration -- after all, the Indians know their history better than anyone else. Maybe, but in any other historical context, non-contemporaneous oral accounts would be largely ignored. There is a great deal of research concerning oral accounts being passed down disproving their accuracy. So why are the Indians an exception?

At any rate, I found this book to be light, fleshed out with very doubtful "facts" and testimonials, and overall with a great amount of repetition. That being said, there is some good here, although the reader will have to wade through a lot of extra wordiness to extract it. The author may very well be correct that the blame for the loss of Fetterman's command should rest on shoulders other that his, but why do we need to know what happened in Minnesota in 1862 (in a very quick overview) to understand this? Revisionism is not always done well, and is not always an improvement on earlier scholarship. In this case the author is clearly on the side of the Indians, and tends to treat all the Army officers and other white men with a level of distrust and condemnation. The best parts were the maps and diagrams.

For those of us who have spent time reading about "The Fetterman Fight" on December 21, 1866, outside of Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming we can be prepared to read a defense of William Judd Fetterman's conduct. Author John Monnett makes his case in which either Lt. George Grummond or Capt. Frederick Brown may have been more to blame than Fetterman. The fact is we are never going to know where the blame lies. Commander Henry Carrington was the only one alive who could defend himself, and he did his best to exonerate himself. The author also states that there is no evidence to definitely support Crazy Horse's participation in acting as a decoy to lead the soldiers beyond Lodge Trail Ridge. He may very well have taken part as other books state, but author Monnett says we don't have any actual proof. The native Americans didn't want forts in the Powder River country, and concentrated their harassment on Fort Phil Kearny to disrupt supplies along the Bozeman Trail to Fort Reno and Fort C. F. Smith located south and north of Fort Phil Kearny respectively. The United States army certainly didn't provide adequate support to these forts, and to be assigned to either of these out-of-the-way forts was not an assignment to relish. I found the book to be an interesting read regarding the history of Fort Phil Kearny, and the photographs were a valuable addition. The reader must just realize that we are not going to get a definitive answer as to who was to blame regarding the fiasco that took place on December 21, 1866. Fetterman has received enough blame from previous sources. Perhaps it's fitting that we should read a defense of this man who was unable to speak up in his own behalf.

This vivid and readable history is a re-examination of the so-called Fetterman fight, near Fort Phil Kearney, in the Powder River country of what is now Wyoming in the year 1866. The basic facts are as uncontested as they were grim for the immediately post-Civil War US Army, and glorious for the warriors of the joint Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapahoe who drew a large party of soldiers and cavalry into skillfully laid ambush, annihilating them to the last man. It was a bloody nose for the Army, which had established the fort to protect travel along the Bozeman Trail - and which now had proved that they couldn't even protect themselves. It would be the worse massacre of American soldiers in the Indian Wars until Little Big Horn, a decade later.

At least as interesting as the recitation of events, as reconstructed from archeological findings, old letters, memoirs and official reports, and the tales of the victorious survivors told to researchers decades later is the authors' examination of how certain myths and conventional wisdoms grew out of the tangled circumstances of the Fetterman fight: was Captain Fetterman a reckless and hot-blooded fool whose impulsive pursuit of a decoy led more than eighty men to their deaths? Was it really another officer who was actually responsible for leading them into a trap? How much of that legend grew from the fort commander's attempts to paint his own efforts in the best possible light? Colonel Henry Carrington was a political general, and an administrator with no combat experience in the war just concluded; his junior officers were. How much resentment and ill-feeling that must have caused in his isolated command, in the bitter winter of 1866? At the end of it all, he was the only one left living to tell his side of it, leading to ambiguities that have kept historians and enthusiasts happily occupied ever since.

A couple of ironies - the territory disputed was only lately come to be the possession of the various Lakota divisions. It had formerly been controlled by the Crows. And it has usually been stressed in this kind of history that it was destruction of the buffalo herds that drove the Plains tribes to the wall. Being deprived of hunting for food and for skins was an open threat to their way of life. But the author points out a more subtle threat - that of the insatiable demand for wood - both for construction and for fires as white settlement progressed. Thirty years of emigrant traffic and settlement along the various trails west had devastated groves of trees for miles alongside those trails. The subsequent devastation to the environment threatened the Plains tribes at least as much as the decimation of buffalo herds.

Celia Hayes
The Adelsverein Trilogy

As a long time student of custer's battle, I had no real experience with Fetterman's battle, only the version history gave me. I find the arguements common sense and generally well supported. I was amazed at all the resourses which exist for a book on this battle. I thouroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone.

This is the second book in the last year (see also Give Me Eighty Men by Shannan Smith) that attempts to clear Captain William J. Fetterman of foolishly leading his men into an ambush where all were killed by an overwhelming number of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians on December 21, 1866. In my opinion, on that score, they succeed. It appears that the rash actions of Lt. George W. Grummond are responsible for the disaster.

While I enjoyed the book and know the ending (same as with Custer's defeat), I do wish the author had written the book by allowing the events to unfold before my eyes rather than constantly reminding me that Fetterman gets killed, therefore including information throughout the text that would have been better suited to its own chapter at the end.

There are some typos/errors but I didn't take notes as I usually do (to include them here) and some parts I felt could have been better presented. However, overall, I do recommend the book.

Dee Brown's Book "Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga" (later renamed "The Fetterman Massacre") for years has been regarded by many as the definitive work in the 1866-67 Tongue River campaign against the Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne. It remains the best work on the conflict. Mr. Monnett's book, in his efforts to create a new history of the battle, ignores completely facts documented by different individuals or gives them short-shrift... and often resorts to singly-sourced facts and little-publicized, widely-varying obscure Indian accounts of the battle.

His pronouncement that Carrington and Capt Brown did not commit mutual suicide is asserted...yet the corpses were found with identical powder burns in the left temple. James Wheatley and Issac Fisher, two civilian employees at the Fort, had volunteered to go out with Fetterman's relief group for the supposed attack on the wood train. They had 16 shot Henry rifles and were wisely positioned with the point squad. Mr Monnet seems unfamiliar with the standard Cavalry tactic of using a squad of 4 troopers as a unit. The Fetterman cavalry detachment with Lt. Grummond in command probably would have had such a squad riding "point". Wheatley and Fisher joined these men to "lead off'. Their bodies were found, according to different relief sources with 4 or 5 bodies of cavalrymen with them. These 6-7 men, operating in a sort of rifle pit constructed of dead Indian ponies, delivered a tremendous beating to the Indians, with between 60-70 pools of blood around the ring of these men when their bodies were discovered. In Mr. Bonnett's book, they were alone, in the lead.

A useless account that adds almost nothing to what is truly known about the campaign, other than some photographs of Carrington and Frances in their old age.

Ignore this one. Read Dee Brown's classic treatise instead.

Well-written but dry and scholarly look at the Fetterman story. Research for this book must have been very deep.
If you are a student of Fort Phil Kearny and Powder River history then this is a must read.