John H Monnett

The Fetterman Fight ranks among the most crushing defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the nineteenth-century West. 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. With no survivors on the U.S. side,...