Kevin Costner Series Airs Long-Unrevealed Truth About Wyoming's Fetterman Fight

The Fetterman Fight that happened just outside of present-day Sheridan, Wyoming, is featured on History Channel’s latest docuseries, “Kevin Costner’s The West.”  

On Dec. 21, 1866, a group of infantry, cavalry and civilians under the command of Capt. William Fetterman had been wiped out after riding and marching into a trap sprung by more than 1,500 Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors.

For more than 130 years, it was believed that Civil War hero Capt. William Judd Fetterman boasted he could ride through the entire Sioux nation with 80 men. He was painted as an arrogant buffoon who directly disobeyed orders and ran over a ridge to his death.  

For years, Fetterman, an orphan with no one to defend his name, was maligned in history for what became known as The Fetterman Fight or massacre to the cavalry and The Battle of the Hundred Slain to the American Indians who won the battle.

Then along came a curious scholar who stumbled onto first-person accounts and started investigating the truth of just who Fetterman really was. 

Shannon D. Smith, former Wyoming Humanities director, had devoted years to uncovering the true story of Fetterman, and along the way became his biggest advocate.

She had discovered what other modern-day historians had also pieced together. Fetterman was the opposite of what he was portrayed as and was, in reality, an officer who was admired by his men and superiors. 

Rather than an arrogant spitfire looking for glory, he was a compassionate and respectful young man. 

Using primary sources, Smith built a chronological historiography of the event and her own research that she published in 2009 in the book “Give Me Eighty Men: Women and the Myth of the Fetterman Fight.”

Her research was subsequently used by Michael Punke, author of “Ridgeline,” a best-selling novel based on the Fetterman Fight. This, she believes, is what led to actor and director Kevin Costner’s team reaching out to her for their latest project about the American West. 

History Channel’s ‘The West’

Costner narrates the eight-part series and is its executive producer. The story of Fetterman will be aired later this month and is based on the research uncovered by Smith and others who used first-person accounts. 

During an interview with Fox News Digital, Costner said that he was shocked to find the stories they covered didn’t have happy endings.

"Almost everything I found was tragic,” Costner said. “There weren't a lot of happy endings, although there were people that made it on the backs of these kind of people." 

Fetterman’s story is one of the tragic tales shared by Costner. 

His team relied on Smith’s research to tell the story that she had uncovered about who Fetterman really was. The episode will debunk the myth that he was a callous, disobedient officer and share the story of how the Fetterman Fight helped shape the West.

Costner’s team flew Smith to Brooklyn, New York, for a whirlwind trip. She was interviewed for nearly four hours for the new series and shared her passion for the story behind the myths. Smith only had a week to prepare, and the experience was fascinating for the Wyoming historian.

“I was interviewed in an industrial warehouse that they rented, and they had a whole little shoot set up with all the lighting and I sat in one of those director chairs,” she said. “It was really difficult because they wanted me to speak in present tense.”

It was a year ago that Smith had been interviewed, and she’s been waiting for the project to come out. When the publicity and announcements for the episode came out recently, she could finally break her silence and start sharing the exciting news.

For Smith, the most exciting part of the Costner series is that the story of who Fetterman really is will reach a wider audience. 

Changing History

It all started for Smith while she was working on her graduate degree in history when she discovered a first-person account at the Nebraska State Historical Society that caught her attention. 

“I stumbled on a letter that was written by a woman to a Nebraska historian,” Smith said. “This letter was asking this historian to help her clear her father's name, because the very first book of history about Wyoming had just come out, and it claimed that Capt. Tenodor Ten Eyck could have saved Fetterman, but he was too drunk to do so.”

Ten Eyck’s daughter was putting a lot of effort to clear her dad’s name and Smith said she started pulling the little thread to discover more and more information debunking the stories surrounding the fight. Eventually, she had 15 letters between various people all talking about how they were going to try to help her clear Ten Eyck's name.

Seeing this many people dispute the idea of Ten Eyck being too drunk to help Fetterman made Smith start to question other narratives surrounding the people involved in the Fetterman Fight. Eventually, she concluded that Fetterman, too, had been maligned and the root of the story that he was a buffoon came from his commanding officer’s two wives. 

“Two years after the Fetterman Fight, Colonel Carrington’s first wife wrote a book and tried to clear her husband's name,” Smith said. “The colonel had been accused of mismanaging the fort and having no military skills.”

Margaret Carrington’s book “Absaraka, Home of the Crows: Being the Experience of an Officer's Wife on the Plains” was a pushback at the national press and a military investigation that was damaging her husband’s reputation. 

After his first wife died in 1870, Carrington remarried a widow of the Fetterman Fight and she, too, advocated for her husband by publishing a book in 1908, “My Army Life and the Fort Phil Kearney Massacre: With an Account of the Celebration of Wyoming Opened."

“His second wife also lobbed all of these accusations against Fetterman,” Smith said. “After that, all historians just used those two women's narratives, saying Fetterman was just an arrogant, Custer-like buffoon who didn't obey Carrington's orders and ran over the ridge.”

After all her research, Smith’s conclusion was that Victorian women had more authority than they realized, and it was these women who created the story that Fetterman was at fault for the massacre.  

“None of the other Army men would question them because you just didn't question the honesty of a Victorian woman,” Smith said. “And so my thesis was about how women developed that myth and actually changed the story enough that it shaped it for 130 years.”

The Real Fetterman

The Fetterman Fight happened in 1866, the year that the Civil War officially ended. 

Most of the soldiers who had arrived at Fort Phil Kearney, especially the officers, had Civil War experience. When Smith looked at Fetterman's records, she found that he was a commanding officer over an entire brigade and at one point had more than 10,000 men under his administration. 

“Fetterman was very highly regarded by his upper generals and his upper military leadership,” Smith said. “He was also very revered and respected by his soldiers.”

The opposite was true for Col. Henry B. Carrington, a lawyer who spent the Civil War far removed from battle, and for Lt. George W. Grummond.

“Grummond was court martialed and cited multiple times for public drunkenness and beating other soldiers,” Smith said. 

Smith and other historians believe that Grummond was the actual soldier who disobeyed orders and ran over the ridge into the deadly trap.

“Fetterman had to follow him because he could hear the battle had started,” Smith said. “I have a lot of evidence that I present in my book that Fetterman really wasn't this arrogant ass that he was depicted as in most of the history books prior to mine.”

A letter that she had read in her research summarized Fetterman’s true character in her opinion.

“One of the young boys in the military band at the fort was married with a baby,” Smith said. “He talked about how Fetterman came and visited and put the baby on his lap. He just didn't strike me as the kind of guy that would be so belligerent and arrogant.”

Smith also believes that Fetterman did not underestimate the tribes as popularly reported. 

“He wrote in one of his reports that these Indians are much more sharp and shrewd and equipped to battle than we've been told or prepared for,” she said. “He knew that the Indians had the skills. He wasn't disrespectful of them.”

Fetterman was famous for having said, “Give me 80 men and I can ride through the whole Sioux nation.” 

Smith completely debunks that in her research, and this is the story that Kevin Costner’s documentary for the History Channel will share. 

“I just spent a lot of energy in clearing Fetterman's name,” Smith said. “The two wives didn't do this maliciously. They're protecting their husband, but they weren't on the battlefield themselves.”

Smith’s biggest takeaway from the historical record was that women, with a motive to protect their husband’s reputation, shaped the story of one of the biggest fights in Western frontier history. 

“Poor Fetterman was a bachelor and an orphan,” she said. “He didn't have any siblings or anybody to protect his reputation. The soldiers who wanted to state that Fetterman should not be depicted this way were silenced because the experts were these high-ranking Victorian women authors.”

Smith is looking forward to seeing how the documentary on Fetterman will be featured on the History Channel and is hopeful that the true story will be told. 

“Kevin Costner’s The West” airs Monday nights on the History Channel and the Fetterman episode will premiere June 23.

Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.