The Fetterman Fight ranks among the most crushing defeats suffered by the U.
Critical to understanding the nuances.
The Indians, for their part, used their knowledge of the terrain to carefully plan and execute an ambush, ensuring them victory.
Rather, they fought bravely to the end.
Nor did his men flee the field in panic.
Narratives like those of Miniconjou Lakota warrior White Bull suggest that Fetterman\'s actions were not seen as rash or reprehensible until after the fact.
Monnett\'s sources paint another picture.
Traditional histories have laid the blame for Fetterman\'s 1866 defeat and death on his incompetent leadership--and thus implied that the Indian alliance succeeded only because of Fetterman\'s personal failings.
In the resulting conflict, the Lakotas and Cheyennes defended their hunting ranges and trade routes.
Army began to construct new forts along the Bozeman Trail.
S.
At the same time, the discovery of gold in Montana encouraged prospectors to pass through the Powder River region on their way north, and so the U.
Climate change in the mid-nineteenth century made the resource-rich Powder River Country in today\'s Wyoming increasingly important to Plains Indians.
Supplemented with archaeological evidence, these narratives flesh out historical understanding of Red Cloud\'s War.
Monnett presents these Native views, drawn from previously published sources as well as newly discovered interViews with Oglala and Cheyenne warriors and leaders.
In Eyewitness to the Fetterman Fight, award-winning historian John H. side, the only Eyewitness accounts of the battle came from Lakota and Cheyenne participants.
S.
With no survivors on the U.
On December 21, 1866--during Red Cloud\'s War (1866-1868)--a well-organized force of 1, 500 to 2, 000 Oglala Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors annihilated a detachment of seventy-nine infantry and cavalry soldiers--among them Captain William Judd Fetterman--and two civilian contractors.
Army in the nineteenth-century West.
S.
The Fetterman Fight ranks among the most crushing defeats suffered by the U
