- The Battle of the Little Bighorn is the most famous military skirmish of the Plains and Indian Wars, and in 2026, we mark its 150th anniversary.

But in Wyoming, here near Fort Phil Kearny in Johnson County, a battle of nearly equal significance was fought: the Fetterman Fight.

Today, there's a fabulous new interpretive center helping us learn more about it.

We'll be here at that new interpretive center today, along with two experts on the battle.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

Many viewers have heard of the Battle of Little Bighorn fought in the summer of 1876 in Montana.

A lesser-remembered battle in the decades-long Plains and Indian Wars, but perhaps just as consequential in its way, took place 10 years earlier in Johnson County, Wyoming, near the huge American military outpost called Fort Phil Kearny.

Fought on the first day of winter, the Fetterman Fight at the time was the biggest military defeat for the US Army since the War of 1812.

In 2026, a newly expanded, improved, and updated visitor center at the Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site adds depth to the story of the fort, the fight, and the consequences.

Presiding over the expansion and the site itself is Wyoming historian Sharie Shada.

We happen to be at a fairly nice round number in terms of an anniversary, which was 1866, 160 years ago as we're sitting here in June of 2026.

So the fort comes along in 1866.

I'll say this, with the familiarity of having lived in Wyoming all my life, if you'd asked me what the year it opened was, I would've thought later for some reason.

These conflicts and the westward expansion and so forth was not just a few year period.

It went on for decades.

The fort itself was significant in several ways, one of which I think I'm right in saying, enormous compared to many of the other frontier military outposts.

- Yes, absolutely, and it was the largest stockaded fort.

- [Steve] What does that mean?

- It means that there is a giant log wall, or was, around the entire 17 acres.

- I see.

Compared say to Fort Laramie, didn't have the big wall around it.

- No, it's open.

It's open.

- [Steve] The stockade was here because we needed it.

- [Sharie] The army really felt like they did, yes.

- [Steve] What was going on here then?

- So the Horse Creek Treaty or Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 designated all of this land north of the Oregon Trail as tribal land.

And so when gold was discovered in Montana and John Bozeman said he found a, quote, "shortcut" right through the heart of Indian territory, the settlers were not welcome.

They weren't supposed to be here.

They were getting attacked all the time.

So the government decided to build three forts along this trail.

And Fort Phil Kearny's the center one, the largest one, and it was the headquarters.

- Treaty had been in place for a long time and suddenly here they come and- - Yeah, it was right in the heart of, right next to several sacred sites for them.

It's where they came to resupply lodgepoles for their homes, where they hunted.

This is like somebody bulldozing a highway through your house, basically.

It was a big deal.

And so the army was definitely not welcome here.

- I'm glad you mentioned resupplying of wood for homes.

This is a great spot for a fort, and I know it was scouted out pretty well and had some strategic advantages.

But one thing that it wasn't was near a forested area particularly.

And as you pointed out, the fort itself relied on a big sturdy, thick wooden wall, which was logs standing side by side.

Where'd the wood come from?

Because looking around where we are, there just isn't enough.

- There's not.

Most of it came from what's now the town of Story about four or five miles away, and they would go over and get their wood for not just the stockade wall, but for building, for fuel, for cooking, all of that.

- So a slow-moving wagon train with a bunch of logs on it, wood on it, a fairly easy target for someone wanting to interfere with it, which is what kept happening.

- [Sharie] Yes.

- It reached its terrible peak late in 1866 when a famous, but maybe not quite so famous as it could be, battle called the Fetterman Fight.

Who was Fetterman then related to the Fetterman Fight?

- Yes, so Fetterman was an officer here and he led what became the Fetterman Fight and he was the officer in charge of that.

- It became a bloodbath.

It was an ambush of troops who didn't know really what they were doing, who may have been commanders who may have been disobeying orders, in the very least performed unwisely, who were lured into trouble.

Just a lot of things went wrong there.

- Mm-hm, mm-hm.

For the army.

- For the army.

Everybody who went out was killed.

- From the fort, mm-hm.

- Nobody came back.

- Right.

- Dave McKee leads the Fort Phil Kearny Bozeman Trail Historic Association.

He's an expert on the battle and the battlefields.

The battlefield site and memorial and monument for the Fetterman Fight, as it's come to be known, at least to some people, the warring tribes that came into conflict with the US Army had a different name for it.

And there's a fascinating, compelling story about how that came about.

- The tribal forces, of course, were trying to expel the soldiers from what they believed was their territory, prime bison hunting ground and territory.

So they developed a plan in hopes of ambushing the relief forces from the fort.

And the day before the battle, they were hoping for a vision.

And so a spiritual man named Crazy Mule went out to seek a vision in advance of the battle.

And he went out three times, and each time he came back, he had a number of soldiers in his hand.

He was predicting how many soldiers they would get.

- This is what will happen.

- Yes.

And they sent him out the fourth time and he came back and said, "I have a hundred soldiers in my hand."

So the ensuing battle was called the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand by the descendants of the tribal warriors.

- And this is the kind of detail that you feel is vital to be recalled and remembered when we're at a site like this and learning more about it.

It's not just the name of the battle that the cavalry gave it, the army gave it.

- Right.

And I love history when it paints a more holistic picture.

And so it's always good to get the oral histories from the tribal participants as well and see both sides.

- One of the key parts and the reason that this battle took place was the fort is in a pretty good spot for a lot of ways, but there was one key shortcoming, which was... - [Dave] They were a long way from wood.

- Which they needed.

- Which they needed to build the fort and for heating and for cooking.

So they took wagons and went out to woodcutter camps to get the wood and bring it back to the fort.

And the tribal folks saw this and they said, "You know, if we harass the wood trains, they'll send relief forces out and maybe we can get some decoys and maybe we can get them to chase the decoys over Lodge Trail Ridge-" - Which is here.

- In front of us.

"And then we could ambush them and put a serious defeat on them."

So they tried that on December 6th - I want to stress that date.

I mean, for example, this is the 150th anniversary of Battle of Little Bighorn, which took place this time of year, presumably in this kind of weather.

Now, of course, there's no great type of weather to have a deadly battle, but there's terrible kind of weather to have it in.

And so we're talking about the wintertime in the mountains of Wyoming.

- Yeah, winter and cold, harsh weather.

- Yeah.

- So they tried this ambush idea on December 6th and it almost worked.

Then they tried again on December 21st and they attacked one of the wood trains.

Colonel Carrington gave orders to Fetterman and Grumman to take a relief column out with explicit orders to not chase any of the Indians over Lodge Trail Ridge.

- So what did they do?

- They chased the decoys over Lodge Trail Ridge.

They'd selected a small group of decoys for the Arapaho, Eagle Head and Black Coal, for the Northern Cheyenne, Wolf Left Hand and Big Nose, and among the Lakota, American Horse and Crazy Horse.

So they did chase them over Lodge Trail Ridge and then the decoys went out along the ridge here.

- [Steve] So you can see- - And began to chase them, yeah.

- Some of the trail up to the top of the ridge.

And just as a quick aside, part of what we're seeing here in these faint ridges is the Bozeman Trail itself.

- Yep, segments of the Bozeman Trail go right through the battlefield.

They chased them out there, and as the cavalry and infantry chased the decoys, they began to hesitate.

And the oral history is that the decoy Big Nose from the Northern Cheyenne stopped, whirled around, and taunted them.

There's even a story that he rushed in and bumped against one of the infantrymen and then ran off again.

So the infantry and cavalry continued to chase the decoys off the north end of the ridge, where they met a large contingent of Oglala Lakota who were waiting for them.

And the cavalry then began to come back up on the ridge and retreat.

At the same time, the decoys had signaled tribal forces who were hidden down below on both sides of the ridge that the soldiers were in place and they should charge, which they then began to do.

So there was this mass retreat.

And then finally there were a few soldiers who made it back to the monument behind us, to this area, where they were then dispatched.

But the battle itself took about 40 to 45 minutes.

So it wasn't a particularly long battle.

And the soldiers were in a bad spot because the infantry were still using the muzzle-loading Springfield rifle.

- For people who might not understand what the great disadvantage of that would be in a close quarters fight, it's that one shot at a time and then you have to reload the thing in this cumbersome way.

- Yeah, so you can get one volley off and then if you're faced against mounted warriors, you're pretty much out of time.

- That might be it.

- That might be it.

The cavalry did have carbines, and actually, the interesting story there is that at the fort, they did have a regimental band and they came with carbines.

So Carrington gave the carbines to his cavalry, but it still didn't make any difference.

They were just outgunned and outnumbered on this particular day.

Another interesting story is that with the cavalry was a bugler named Metzger, and he was a German immigrant, probably immigrated to the US in the mid 1860s, fought in the Civil War, but ended up here.

And when they recovered the bodies after the battle, his was the one that had not been mutilated.

He'd actually been covered with a buffalo robe and left untouched.

And the oral history from the tribal side is they were honoring his bravery, that he kept bugling and, at the end, was hitting warriors with his bugle and smashing his bugle.

After the battle, they recovered the bodies and they were first interred in the Fort Cemetery, which is the grounds are still there today and you can visit.

And then a few years later, they were disinterred and they were moved to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.

So that's where the fatalities here now rest, including Metzger.

- You've mentioned a more famous, I think, to the general audience battle, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which took place 10 years after this, reminding us that the whole conflict that might be called the Plains Wars or the Plains and Indian Wars was a decades-long thing, one of the longest military conflicts that the United States Army ever had.

Back at the Fort Phil Kearny Visitor Center, Superintendent Sharie Shada said the expanded facility affords more space for visitors, exhibits, and events.

When and why was it decided that the interpretive center here, visitor center, ought to be changed?

- Well, maybe five years ago or so, we received funding from the Helmsley Charitable Trust.

And they had approached the then-Superintendent Misty Moore, who's now our district manager, about possible expansion for the visitor center.

Everybody who's been superintendent out here always thought, "What if we had more?

What would we do with it?"

And so when she was the superintendent, they approached her and got the ball rolling and, of course, the state park support, and then committees met and advisors came in, and there's just so many people who have a long history with the fort, and- - Yeah, because it's not just a, "Let's build a new building."

- No.

- Or, "Let's put in new lights," or, "Let's repaint or re-letter the signs that are already here."

You took this as an opportunity to improve everything.

- We did.

- And that includes historians and geographers and map makers and all those sorts of people, right?

- Yes.

Yes.

We have advisors who were here when this became a historic site in the 1980s.

They're still around and they're a wealth of knowledge.

So we brought them in, and past employees, past superintendents.

We talked to so many people to make sure that our vision was inclusive.

What not only do visitors want to see, but what's important to our advisors and community?

What do they want to see here?

- What's better about the site for someone who wants to learn more about it?

- We have more room to do more exhibits, so we can talk about more.

We also have extra space inside for programs.

We've been getting a ton of community support and people coming out to listen to our different speakers or book signings or whatever.

And we have just been able to utilize the remodeled space for what was originally there and our expanded space too.

- Was there anything wrong with the interpretive material that was here before?

- No.

- "Well, we've learned since the 1980s that this is what really happened," or that sort of thing?

Or is the opportunity more just refining and... - Yeah, it was more opportunity to expand.

What we had before was great and it filled the space that we had, but now we have more space to fill.

For this project, we had a whole exhibit design team, EXP Studios out of Providence, Rhode Island, and they have team members that specialize in everything.

So we had a researcher and exhibit text writer, script writer.

And so he must know a billion things about a billion different places because he really dove in to what we do here.

We told him what we want to see and everything, but he kind of became the expert and then created the text.

We fact checked it, refined it, ran it by our advisors, but we had a main exhibit text writer, which was great because you tell the same story over and over again and it's nice to have somebody on the outside looking in who can phrase it in a different way and freshen it up.

(chuckles) Yeah.

- You say designer.

So there's also someone with an eye for how an exhibit ought to be done and how maybe it ought to be done better or how it's going to be done in a new space.

- Right, people who do this all the time for a living.

So the graphic designers, the fabricators, the coordinators, the video people, (chuckles) everything, everything.

They had a big team that we worked with and it was really great.

- What do you want a visitor to come and stay an hour and walk away with?

- The fort was only here for two years.

It is such a blip in time when there were people here for over 12,000 years.

We only talk about the first, well, these two years that the fort was here, but people were here before.

We want to talk about especially the tribes that the fort would have dealt with.

They allied with the Crow, or the Crow allied with the US Army, but then there was also the Cheyenne, the Lakota, the Arapaho that all have history here.

And so making sure we went to those different tribes and worked with them and said, "What do you want people to know coming through here?"

And kind of explain that.

And then we explained the army, not just army life, but this was a whole town with families and children and women and civilians, and so highlighting their experiences too.

- Viewers might remember that a year or so ago, you led us through the historic Trail End mansion in Sheridan.

And in case anyone's wondering what you're doing here, you have a fairly wide purview of sites that you're responsible for.

What are those?

- Yes, so I have Trail End and its associated ranch, the LX Bar Ranch.

Then I have Fort Phil Kearny and its associated battlefields, Fetterman Fight, Wagon Box Fight site, and Connor Battlefield.

- [Steve] One of the battlefields she mentioned, Wagon Box, saw a final skirmish in 1867, which ultimately spelled the end of the immense fort.

Battlefield historian Dave McKee took us there next.

- In order to protect the wood trains that were going back and forth from the forest to the fort to supply wood, they established a field headquarters here.

And they built a temporary corral by taking the boxes off the wagons and lining them in an oval about 30 by 60 feet in size actually to hold their mules in.

- The mules.

- So that was the wagon-box corral.

So that was their field headquarters.

So about seven months after the Fetterman Battle, on August 2nd in 1867, tribal forces began the morning by attacking the two woodcutting camps, one on Piney Creek behind you and then another woodcutting camp on Little Piney Creek.

The contingent of tribal forces that attacked that were led by Crazy Horse.

Three soldiers were killed in those engagements.

And, really, leaders during that fight were High Backbone, who was also a key leader at the Fetterman Battle, and Little Wolf for the Northern Cheyenne.

So they regrouped and they came charging across this meadow right behind us towards the corral.

- This is during the day?

- During the day, in the morning.

- Morning.

- Early morning.

And they came across and inside the corral were 26 soldiers and six civilian contractors.

- Meaning woodcutters.

- Woodcutters or water carriers, but under contract to the fort.

Tribal forces came across.

The soldiers and civilians shot a volley.

And, of course, at that point, the tribal folks said, "Now we've got them because they're going to have to reload those old muzzle loaders."

- [Steve] Which had been the case at the Fetterman site.

- Yes.

- Did one shot, reloading, and you're in trouble.

- What the tribal people didn't know is that about a month before, supplies had reached the fort, including new Allin-modified Springfield breech-loading rifles.

So no longer the old muskets you can shoot and then reload with the breech.

So the soldiers could reload quickly and shoot.

So a second volley, and that surprised the tribal warriors.

So they regrouped, and during the course of that morning, they made four charges at this corral.

One across the field here, one from over below on Piney Creek, then a third one right here from behind the corral, and finally, in the late morning, they regrouped and charged from over here towards the corral.

Another interesting part of the battle was many of the warriors had their families with them and the families actually sat on the slopes, on this slope here and on this slope right over here, and cheered the warriors on.

- Isn't that an incredible tale of warfare that continued certainly into World War II where people come out to watch it almost for entertainment?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

It was.

So they managed to kill three soldiers inside the corral, including Lieutenant Jennis, who said, "I know how to fight Indians," and he stood up and was immediately shot and killed.

- Proved that he didn't.

- Proved that he didn't.

In the meantime, from the fort, the signal corps, which stationed themselves up on Pilot Knob above the fort, could see that there was a battle occurring and they signaled down to the fort and a relief force was sent.

And the relief force arrived here about 1:30 in the afternoon and brought a field howitzer with them and shot the field howitzer a couple of times.

And tribal forces probably said, "That's good enough for one day," and they left.

- [Steve] This is one of the actual wagon boxes or a recreation of it or what do we know about this object?

- [Dave] Old, but probably not that old.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- But it would have been this size, and they ringed this area.

And then, of course, when the tribes charged, they kind of shot over the top or in between.

- And you said they had their pup tents here as well.

- Yes.

Yeah, the soldiers did.

So it was a field camp and you would be out here for, I don't know, a week or so and then you would be relieved by soldiers from the fort and change places.

So they had their pup tents around the outside, the little white pup tents.

And so the descendants of the tribal people who were here call this the Battle of They Surrounded the White Tents.

That's their name for it.

- [Steve] Though it was not a defeat, it wasn't a resounding enough victory to maintain what was happening at the fort.

Is that fair to say?

- Two years of basically being pinned down inside the fort, I think the government said, "You know, this is costly."

The gold boom up in Montana was essentially over by now.

- So the whole idea of, "Let's protect people on the way to the gold mines," sort of irrelevant by that point.

- By that point.

And the tribe's persistence in continuing the pressure, in that sense, over a period of time is a victory for them.

They continued to put the pressure on.

So a year later in 1868, the government called the tribes in and they signed the Laramie Treaty of 1868, under which the US government abandoned these forts and discontinued use of the Bozeman Trail.

And it was on August 1st of 1868 that the army abandoned Fort Phil Kearny.

- One thing I want to ask you about before we're finished is something you told me about the Fetterman site monument that has a plaque on it.

I want you to talk about an error, and not so much deliberately made, but in the perception of what had happened there, that a descendant of a tribal leader told you about.

- [Dave] Yeah, the monument at the Fetterman site was erected by the Sheridan Chamber of Commerce.

- When was it erected?

- And in 1908, they had a dedication.

So they erected the monument.

And an interesting side story just about perspectives of history is many years ago, one of our founding board members, Mary Ellen McWilliams, took Bill Tall Bull of the Northern Cheyenne up to see the monument.

And Bill's great-great-grandfather, Blue Feather, was one of the warriors at the Fetterman Battle.

And so they stood in front of the monument and he read the plaque, the brass plaque, and he looked to Mary Ellen and he said, "You know, they got the plaque wrong."

And Mary Ellen said, "Well, what do you mean?"

And he said, "Well, read the last line on the plaque."

And it said, "And there were no survivors."

And Bill said, "Of course that's wrong because I'm standing here, so there were survivors."

- There were no white survivors.

- No white survivors.

So it's not trying to revise history.

It's telling the whole history and from the different perspectives of the different groups.

- [Steve] Now, that plaque has not been altered.

It still reads that.

- [Dave] Mm-hm.

(bright music)