BECKY’S TRIP Day Five
Becky’s Trip Day Five
September 30, 2019
Although the forecast had given us some hope that Becky might be able to view the Bighorn Mountains, such was not to be. Old mother nature just didn’t want to play fair with us. As we left Billings on the last day of September 2019, and once again headed east on I-90, the weather was fair on our way down to Wyoming and the entranceway to the Cloud Peak Scenic Byway. Our plans were to take US 16 West from Buffalo through the southern portion of the Bighorns to Worland, Wyoming. In Laurence Parent’s Scenic Driving WYOMING this iconic ride is scenic drive #26 Cloud Peak Scenic Byway: Ten Sleep to Buffalo. From Worland, we planned to take US 16/20 North to its junction with US 14 and then US 14 East through the northern Bighorns to its junction with I-90 a few miles south of the Montana State Line. This is scenic drive #29 Big Horn Scenic Byway: Dayton to Shell. Time permitting, we might have taken US 14 Alternate west to the Medicine Wheel National Historic Site, scenic drive #30 Medicine Wheel Passage Scenic Byway: Burgess Junction to Big Horn Lake. Alas, it just wasn’t so.
It is about 108 miles from Billings to the Wyoming border via I-90 East. Another hour would bring us to the Buffalo of Wyoming (it has nothing to do with Niagara Falls). As we traveled south, Doug noted that the cottonwoods, in particular, on the Crow Reservation were really starting to put on a show, transitioning from the soft green to a really pretty soft yellow.
On the way is a place dear to my heart, for I am writing a novel based on the historical place called Fort Phil Kearny Historic Site and the Fetterman Battlefield. Since we did not have time to visit these places on Sunday, we stopped on our way south to Buffalo. That site is only about twenty minutes north of the southern gateway to the Bighorns Mountains.
As I mentioned on our previous day’s journey to the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, there is a rest area on I-90, about half an hour out of Billings, at mile marker 476. There is another rest area, on I-90, not too long after crossing into Wyoming. It is at exit 23. This is a Visitor Center and you actually get off the interstate to reach this one. As with the other rest area/visitor centers I have seen in Wyoming, it is excellent.
Since there was a possibility for rain, we stopped at the battlefield first. We did not go beyond the fence and walk the trail as I had two short weeks earlier. Becky got a few snapshots of the Fetterman Massacre Memorial which stands at the spot where Lieutenant Colonel William Judd Fetterman and the infantry soldiers under his command were slain.
Afterwards we visited the Fort Phil Kearny Historic Site and spent the better part of an hour viewing the Interpretive Center and shopping in the Gift Shop before touring the grounds around the old fort site. One wall has been rebuilt, and the outline of the fort had been laid out, including where each building was. The state of Wyoming has never been able to find the funding to completely rebuild the fort.
Phil Kearny was the largest of all western forts and is what one could imagine a fort would look like back in the latter half of the 19th century. Fort Laramie, which was about 170 miles southeast of the historical post on the two Piney Rivers, did not even have a stockade. It was an open post as many such forts were. During the period known as Red Cloud’s War, which lasted from 1866 to 1868, this more well-known post was relatively peaceful, while the area around Fort Phil Kearny was in a stage of constant turmoil and virtually under siege.
Although everyone is aware of what happened on the Little Bighorn River in June 1876, many do not know about a similar battle, which some would call a massacre, that occurred a few miles from Fort Phil Kearny on a cold winter’s day ten years earlier.* Lieutenant Colonel William J. Fetterman, who some say made a boast that “with eighty men he could ride through the entire Sioux nation,” was annihilated when he took a body of seventy-eight soldiers and two civilians (exactly eighty men) over Lodge Trail Ridge and into history. Some of the same Native Americans who would count coup on Custer ten years later on a hill overlooking a riverbank about ninety miles north, were at this battle on December 21, 1866. Crazy Horse, the famed Oglala leader, who had such a momentous role in the Custer rout, had one of the pivotal rolls by decoying the soldiers into a well-prepared trap of well over 1,000 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. Although George Armstrong Custer had almost three times as many men (212 soldiers) than Fetterman did, many Indians who fought in both battles said that they suffered more heavily in the earlier battle than they did in the more famous Custer’s Last Stand. The two civilians, firing the 1866 Henry Repeating Rifle and several NCOs (non-commissioned officers) put up a fierce stand before being over-whelmed. The rest of Fetterman’s command did not fare as well. And a point of note: as with so many such battles, the anger and hatred by the Native Americans showed no mercy. All but one of the men under Fetterman’s command were mutilated, many very grotesquely. One man, little Adolph Metzger a German-born bugler died so bravely, however, that to the Sioux warriors he was given what they would call “full military honors.”
When Metzger ran out of ammunition he fought, to the death, with the only weapon he had left—his bugle. Wounded multiple times, he was finally overwhelmed and killed. However, the warriors so respected his courage that his body was the only one not mutilated. In fact, as a sign of respect, they covered his body with a buffalo robe. Many years later, that bugle was found by local ranchers and it now resides in the Jim Gatchell Museum in Buffalo, Wyoming. I have seen it with my own eyes. He had used it so much that the musical instrument was completely bashed in so that it looked like it had been run over by a truck.
As we left, the fort, we paid a visit to the Portugee Phillips marker. This remarkable man had made the kind of journey that legends are made of. After the death of Fetterman and his men, Colonel Henry Bebee Carrington, the commanding officer of Fort Phil Kearny, asked for volunteers to travel almost 240 miles to Fort Laramie to ask for reinforcements. This lone man, a civilian, riding Carrington’s Kentucky thoroughbred horse through hostile territory as well as a howling blizzard left that night of December 21, 1866 and arrived at Fort Laramie, arriving on Christmas night. James Wheatley and Issac Fisher, the two civilians with Fetterman on his ill-fated campaign, had been his partners.
*Sitting Bull, once said, “I do not understand this word massacre. If our people win a fight, it is a massacre. If you white men win, it is a victory. Why is it never a massacre when the white men win?”
After tanking up at Buffalo with gasoline and food (Subway), we proceeded only a few miles on the Cloud Peak Scenic Byway before encountering dense fog, which only would have become worse with increasing elevation, so we turned around. Heading back to Buffalo, we managed to arrive at the Jim Gatchell Museum just as they were closing. I convinced the lady running the place to let us view the bugle that Adolph Metzger used in his final moments on earth. We couldn’t take any photos but at least we got to see it.
And that wrapped up our travels with our good friend Becky. We made the journey back to Billings without incident, nor any significant rainfall. We are hoping the next time she makes it back to Montana that the weather will be a little better.
