My new frontier historical novel, Bozeman Paymaster: A Tale of the Fetterman Massacre, will be issued by Five Star Publishing in June 2022. I will post a prelude each month before that date to provide historical facts that occur before the story in the book begins. This is the third prelude.
Henry B. Carrington
Colonel Henry B. Carrington received orders on March 10, 1866, to move west with the Eighteenth U.S. Infantry from Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory, and fortify the Bozeman Trail with the regiment’s second battalion. Carrington’s orders came from his immediate superior, Brigadier General Philip St. George Cooke, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of the Platte. This new department had been created on March 5, 1866, with headquarters in Omaha. The department covered the States of Minnesota and Iowa, the Territories of Nebraska and Montana, and portions of Dakota Territory. Later, Dakota Territory became North and South Dakota and Wyoming.
The Department of the Platte was one of three departments in the Division of the Missouri, under the command of Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman, headquartered in St. Louis. Sherman reported directly to General Ulysses S. Grant, commander in chief of the U.S. Army with his headquarters in Washington, District of Columbia. The chain of command above Carrington was short.
Philip St. George Cooke
Cooke graduated from West Point in 1827 and served with distinction in numerous capacities during the early years of his career, principally in the West. As a Brevet Lieutenant Colonel in 1846, he commanded the Mormon Battalion, part of General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West which was on a mission to take New Mexico and California away from Mexico. The Mormon Battalion consisted of “soldiers” contracted from Brigham Young who needed cash to finance the movement of the Mormons from Nauvoo to the Great Salt Lake. The soldiers donated most of their pay and allowances to a church charity. Cooke’s Mormon Battalion surveyed a wagon road from Santa Fe south into Mexico and west to the Pacific coast. It was the longest infantry march in U.S. Army history. The route Cooke pioneered resulted in the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. James Gadsden, U. S. Ambassador to Mexico, bought this strip of land between the Gila River (the U.S. southern border at the time) and Mexico for $10 million (equivalent to $230 million today). This land strip would be needed later by the Southern Pacific to build its railroad.
J.E.B. Stuart
During the Civil War, Brigadier General Cooke served as cavalry division commander for Major General George B. McClellan. During the Seven Days Campaign in Virginia in 1862, Cooke’s son-in-law, Confederate Brigadier General J.E.B Stuart, rode completely around the Army of the Potomac, evading Cooke’s pursuit. This embarrassment ended Cooke’s field command responsibilities, and he served the remainder of the war on court-martial and recruiting duties.
Like Carrington’s assignment to command the Eighteenth US Infantry without having any combat experience, Cooke’s assignment as a department commander, without combat action in the latter part of the war, is somewhat of a mystery.
The December 2021 issue of Western Writers of America’s Roundup Magazine contains a book review I wrote about Bound by Steel & Stone: The Colorado-Kansas Railway and the Frontier of Enterprise in Colorado, 1890-1960, by J. Bradford Bowers. The author teaches history at Pueblo Community College in Pueblo, Colorado.
Vast herds of buffalo roamed the prairie land east of the Bighorn Mountains. Coupled with other game, fowl, and fish, this Absaroka area provided the perfect subsistence environment for the bands of Indians who fought among themselves to control access. Originally home to the Crows, the lure of plentiful buffalo proved too tempting for the Sioux who had been forced out of their traditional lands by the expansion of the white man. The newcomers pushed the Crows north into Montana, and the Powder River country became home to the Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyennes, and Arapahos. When the white man traversed their new homeland more frequently as he rolled up the Bozeman Trail with his wagon trains, these tribes resisted.
The June 2021 issue of Western Writers of America’s Roundup Magazine contains a book review I wrote about Iron Women: The Ladies Who Helped Build the Railroad by Chris Enss. Ms. Enss is the current president of Western Writers of America. She has been writing about women in the Old West for more than 28 years. She has made the New York Times bestseller list three times. She is the recipient of numerous writing awards including WWA’s Spur Award and the Will Rogers Medallion Award.
There is a minor error in the first line of the book’s Introduction which is repeated on the back cover blurb. The rails laid at Promontory Summit (not Point, as written) were iron (not steel, as written). Several years after the driving of the golden spike, the Union Pacific replaced the original iron rails with steel rails to provide necessary support for heavier locomotives. The Promontory Summit loop around the north end of the Great Salt Lake was abandoned after the turn of the twentieth century when the UP built a causeway straight across the lake. During World War I, the steel rails on the discontinued 44-mile loop were salvaged as part of a nation-wide scrap metal drive to support the war effort. Since this minor error does not detract from Chris’s excellent book, I did not mention it in the review. It is something only a railroad aficionado would notice.
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