Frontier Partisans

Maybe it was the hat. Or maybe I bore the unmistakable stamp of a man riding an intense history high. When I walked through the door of the Fort Phil Kearny museum and visitors center, the lady on duty locked her radar on me. “So who would you say is most responsible for the Fetterman Disaster?” she queried as soon as I dropped my $5 donation in … [Read more...] about The Bozeman Trail War — Part VI — A Scapegoat And A Crazy Horse

We’ll turn for just a moment from one desperate scrape to another, earlier one. Talking about the Poe brothers’ hand-to-hand struggle with a pair of Wyandot warriors along the Ohio River on September 30, 1781. Let Pete Kosky sing the tale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtXpA1R1fcM Tracy Petro contacted Frontier Partisans with an appeal … [Read more...] about Seeking Information On The Poe Tomahawk

  The winkte rode his sorrel horse about frantically, zig-zagging among the hills near Peno Creek a few miles north of Fort Phil Kearny. The effeminate man — a “two-souled person” — blew on an eagle bone whistle, his head covered in a black cloth. The man/woman was seeking a vision that would guide the war leaders of a vast … [Read more...] about The Bozeman Trail War — Part V — One Hundred In The Hands

  This just keeps happening. I am NOT a gun crank. A firearms enthusiast, yes. A shooter, definitely. I don’t obsess over ballistics tables and firearms specs. So I’m not just being a fussbudget when I run across egregious errors and bellow out cusswords to make Al Swearengen blush. Clay Risen, in his new book The Crowded Hour: … [Read more...] about Working The Trapline — August 2019 — Mausers And Mayans

“The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous and agile an enemy to come to grips with.” — Robert Taber Through the fall of 1866, the Lakota/Cheyenne/Arapaho insurgents in the Powder River Country made life miserable for the garrison of Fort Phil … [Read more...] about The Bozeman Trail War — Part IV — Weapons And Combatants

A three-pronged summer 1865 expedition led by General Patrick Connor to punish the perpetrators of the Platte Bridge Station brawl and other attacks managed to smash up an Arapaho village at Tongue River, but the main militant force under the leadership of Red Cloud and Roman Nose generally evaded contact — except on their own terms. They harassed … [Read more...] about The Bozeman Trail War — Part III — Fort Phil Kearny

“If you go into our hunting country, our people will wipe you out.” — Lakota warning to trailblazer John Bozeman Like most trouble, it started over gold. More precisely, it started over a route to the gold. The Bozeman Trail, scouted in 1863 by Georgia prospector John Bozeman and mountain man John Jacobs, was an offshoot of the  Overland … [Read more...] about The Bozeman Trail War — Part II — Opening Gambit

Blame it on climate change. In the mid-19th century, the Little Ice Age receded, and the ecology of the Great Plains began to change. The rich, buffalo-supporting grasslands grew dry and the herds, already disrupted by the mass emigration of American wagon trains, migrated out of their usual haunts. The Lakota felt the change in their very … [Read more...] about The Bozeman Trail War — Part I — Spoils Of Conquest