Diaries - Letters

     "....some of the most dramatic events in the nation's history unfolded in this arid region with the brief two-year struggle for control of the land around Fort Phil Kearny symbolizing the efforts of two disparate cultures to control their destinies."

Quote from Margaret Carrington, in "Absaraka, Home of the Crows"

     "With tens of thousands (of buffalo) in a herd, sweeping back and forth, filling the valleys as far as the eye can reach and adding their weight and numbers to the other substantial claims of the red man to entitle this same Absaraka, 'their last and best hunting grounds."

Quote from Susan Badger Doyle, in the Introduction to "Journeys to the Land of Gold: Emigrant Diaries of the Bozeman Trail, 1863-1866"

     The research of Bozeman Trail scholar and Association Advisor  Dr. Susan Badger Doyle has affected forever our understanding of the Bozeman Trail. Susan writes, "Ironically, those who most influenced the routes and the character of the trail were the people and forces in place long before John Bozeman attempted his first passage: the Indians, mountain men and traders in the Rocky Mountain West and Northern Plains. Bozeman himself pioneered very little of the trail. ......the Bozeman Trail thus typifies the American tendency to reduce complex realities to singular, spectacular concepts and dramatic events."

Quote from William Tall Bull in  "We Are The Ancestors of Those Yet To Be Born" *

     "When Cheyennes made a decision about the future, they cared more how the future would affect the tribe as a whole rather than how it would affect them personally. They cared about the survival of the culture and of the Cheyenne as a people sometimes more than they cared for their own lives."

Excerpt from the diary of Davis Willson, August 7, 1866, near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, from "Journeys to the Land of Gold: Emigrant Diaries from the Bozeman Trail, 1863-'66:

"To the west rise the Big Horn Mountains, snowcapped and, more than ever, grand and beautiful in the light of the golden morning...... As we passed the Fort some distance we came to a halt for nearly an hour and a half on account of the difficulty of the trains in advance, in crossing the stream and ascending the bluffs beyond.  As we lay there the brass band at the Fort commenced playing.  Such sounds in such a scene!  There was something in the wild, sweet strains that filled and floated through the deep reechoing valley that spoke of home; yet so far distant and in so wild a place that it partook of the nature of the scenes around it.  It was like looking through the 'glass of time' into the dim Past, viewing with kindled emotions the forms and scenes that once enshrined and hallowed it, and yet the wild adventuresome Present all the while floating before diming and blinding the vision."

Facts:
Despite mention in Carrington's report of December 21, it is not true that Fetterman and Brown shot each other the day of the fight. Surgeon Horton's autopsy report shows that Brown died of a bullet wound to the head, but Fetterman's autopsy report and also the testimony of American Horse, a Sioux warrior, to Judge Eli Ricker of Nebraska, indicates that American Horse killed Fetterman. This account was documented by El Belish in an article in Annals of Wyoming, published by the Wyoming State Historical Society.

Quote from Robert A. Murray:
"The Montana Road (Bozeman Trail) has played and continues to play an important role in the history of the region, one that should be explained and interpreted in both educational and tourist communications, so that Americans local and distant can better appreciate the role of this ancient trail from prehistoric times to the present."

Fact:
• As many as 90 wood wagons at a time sometimes travelled the wood road to gather logs for the building of the stockade and buildings at Fort Phil Kearny.

Quote from Joseph Marshall, Lakota author and educator:

     "Indian history is like a song with many voices. It is time for Arapaho history to be told by the Arapahos and for the Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Arikara, Blackfeet, and so on to be told by members of those tribes. But we Indians must not tell our stories simply to vent anger, cause guilt, or generally to beat others with the bloody stump of the past. We must tell our stories to serve a purpose, to add them to the reality of the human history of this continent. In short, everyone must realize that without Indian histories, the human history of this continent is not complete."

The most hated enemy the Crow Indian people faced were the white people intruding upon their last and best hunting grounds.

The answer is: False

NOTE: For an outstanding article on this subject, see "The Crow and the Bozeman Trail" by Frank Rzeczkowski in the Winter 1999 issue of MONTANA: The Magazine of Western History.

The Crow's most hated and feared enemy were the Lakota (Sioux), who vastly outnumbered them and had pushed them north from what had been their territory for several hundred years. The Crow were generally friendly with the white people. Some of the most fierce battles of the time and before were intertribal, with the Crow and Shoshone allying with the army, as they did at the Battle of the Rosebud in 1876, against the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho.

True or False:

John Bozeman, by himself, staked out the single route known to us now as the Bozeman Trail:

The answer is: False

While John Bozeman and his partner, John Jacobs, certainly were instrumental in opening some segments of the Bozeman Trail, others such as Jim Bridger, Allen Hurlbut, and James Sawyers developed others. The maps of Bozeman Trail scholar, Susan Badger Doyle, show differing routes each year as well as differing military and emigrant routes. Such variant routes are common on all of the western trails.

This is true for many reasons: sometimes the grass was grazed down and travelers had to move to find feed for their animals; sometimes the military on horseback could go a shorter but more challenging route than could emigrants in their wagons; in some cases the travelers found a shorter way.

True or False:

• John "Portugee" Phillips rode 235 miles alone from Fort Phil Kearny to Fort Laramie through a raging blizzard to carry the news of the disaster on "Fetterman Ridge," where the entire command of Capt. William J. Fetterman lost their lives on Dec. 21, 1866.

The answer is: False

According to the records of General Henry B. Carrington, "Portugee" Phillips and Daniel Dixon were paid $300 each for the trip to Horseshoe Station to send a telegram of the disaster. In addition, several other men reportedly rode with them from Fort Reno to Horseshoe Station, where a telegram was sent to Omaha and Washington, DC.

Phillips, however, did ride on to Fort Laramie alone and arrived at "Old Bedlam," probably in the beginnings of a blizzard, and during a ball on Christmas night. He was carrying an additional message from General Wessells at Fort Reno to the commander at Fort Laramie. That message has been lost, and there is no record we know of (but much speculation) as to its content.

The reports of a blizzard so bad that the snow drifted to the top of the 8'-high stockade at Fort Phil Kearny---so bad that those inside the stockade feared that the Indians would come over the wall and wipe them out the night of December 21---is not correct. According to diaries from the fort, it became bitterly cold that afternoon and night, but the blizzard was a day or two arriving. (There were no official weather records at the fort at that time). By the time Phillips arrived at Fort Laramie, conditions were bad enough to make it impossible for troops to leave there the next morning to relieve the command at Fort Phil Kearny.

The ride of the legendary John "Portugee" Phillips, 235 miles in 4 days, is a major feat even without the raging blizzard, which any horseman could tell us would be impossible to navigate anyhow.

" .... I hoped to argue that any place .... must be understood historically through the interaction of many evolving relationships: people and grasses, animals and cultural institutions, myths and bison and marriage customs, droughts and diplomacy and jokes."                                                                            

Elliott West,
           author of The Contested Plains
and The Way To The West. 

The Land

"The soil you see is not ordinary soil. It is the dust of the blood of the flesh and bones of our ancestors. We fought and bled and died to keep other Indians from taking it and fought and bled and died helping the whites. You will have to dig through the surface before you can find the earth, as the upper portion is Crow. The land as it is, is my blood and my dead; it is consecrated, and I don't want to give up any portion of it."

---Curly, Crow Scout for Custer,
speaking at a council considering sale
of Crow land, 1907

Roots of Conflict

  "While Euro-Americans believed in ownership in fee simple, American Indians held that the land belonged to those who had cherished it from time's memory. The first conflicts between the races in the Rocky Mountain West came as the result of interference with the Indian pattern of land use....Indians realized very well that if whites, or even another Indian tribe, came and settled near them the game would be killed and their families would starve."

---John D. McDermott ,
   A Guide to the Indian Wars of the West

Along the Bozeman Trail

    "Here, (along the Bozeman Trail) in just ninety years, traders, trappers, explorers, soldiers, Indian warriors of half a dozen tribes, farmers, stockmen, and prospectors passed along its course in an almost constant procession, until railways and graded roads bypassed much of the trail, leaving grassed-over ruts and scattered historic sites to mark its route."

---Robert A. Murray,
       The Bozeman Trail: Highway of History

  "The Bozeman Trail was integral to American western expansion, U.S.-Indian relations, and environmental adaptation and change. It is not only its use as a gold-rush, military, and settlement trail but also the vast changes it caused in the multicultural landscape that are significant."  

       ---Susan Badger Doyle,
editor of Journeys to the Land Of Gold