Haunted Wyoming: soldier was ambushed and buried…

It was December 21, 1866, when an entire commando was wiped out in a battle against the Plains Indians in Wyoming Territory. The Fetterman fight and the loss of the lives of 76 soldiers, three officers and two civilians, shocked the nation.

The events of the battle are shrouded in mystery, as is the strange story of a soldier from the same fort who risked his life to deliver important dispatches from his commander.

Journalist and Civil War veteran Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce shared the story in his short story “A Man with Two Lives.” He said that David William Duck had told him a strange story from the Wyoming frontier when Duck was traveling alone through a hostile country.

Bierce himself was in the Great Plains during this time and was familiar with all of the men involved in the Fetterman Fight.

In mid-1866, he joined General William Babcock Hazen as part of an expedition to inspect military posts on the Great Plains.

The expedition traveled by horse and wagon from Omaha and arrived in San Francisco in December, the same month as the Fetterman Fight.

Bierce received the rank of honorary major before resigning from the military and eventually finding a successful career as a journalist and author.

‘Dead Duck’ tells its story

“Duck is an old man living in Aurora, Illinois, where he is universally respected,” Bierce wrote in 1893 in his book “Can Such Things Be?” decades after the Fetterman fight. “However, it is commonly known as ‘Dead Duck.’”

This is the story told by Duck to Bierce.

“In the fall of 1866, I was a private in the Eighteenth Infantry. My company was one of those stationed at Fort Phil Kearney, commanded by Colonel Carrington. The country is more or less familiar with the history of that garrison, particularly with the massacre by the Sioux of a detachment of eighty-one men and officers (none of them escaped) for disobedience to the orders of their commander, the brave but reckless Captain Fetterman.

“When that happened, I was trying to make my way on important dispatches to Fort CF Smith in Big Horn. As the country was infested with hostile Indians, I traveled by night and hid myself as best I could before the break. To make it better, I went on foot, armed with a Henry rifle and carrying three days’ worth of rations in my backpack.

“For my second hiding place I chose what looked in the dark like a narrow canyon leading through a range of rocky hills. It contained many large rocks, loosened from the sides of the hills. Behind one of them, in a group of mugwort, I made my bed for the day and soon fell asleep.

“It seemed as if I had barely closed my eyes, although in reality it was around noon when I was awakened by a rifle shot, the bullet hitting the rock just above my body. A band of Indians had followed me and almost surrounded me; The shot had been fired with execrable aim by a guy who had seen me from the top of the slope.

“The smoke from his rifle gave him away, and as soon as I stood up, he got up and rolled down the slope. Then I ran hunched over, dodging between clumps of sagebrush in a storm of bullets from unseen enemies.

trapped

“The rascals didn’t get up and chase me, which I thought was quite strange, because they must have known from my trail that they had only one man to deal with. The reason for his inaction soon became clear. I hadn’t gone a hundred meters when I reached the limit of my run: the head of the ravine that I had mistaken for a canyon. It ended in a concave rock breast, almost vertical and devoid of vegetation. In that dead end I was trapped like a bear in a pen. The chase was unnecessary; They just had to wait.

“They waited. For two days and two nights, crouching behind a rock crowned with a mesquite tree, and with the cliff behind me, suffering agonies of thirst and absolutely no hope of deliverance, I fought the guys at long range, occasionally shooting at the smoke from their rifles, as they did from mine, of course, I dared not close my eyes at night, and the lack of sleep was a terrible torture.

“I remember the morning of the third day, which I knew was going to be the last. I remember, a little hazy, that in my desperation and delirium I jumped out into the open field and started firing my repeating rifle without seeing anyone to shoot at. And I don’t remember anything else about that fight.

Escape

“The next thing I remember was getting out of a river just as night fell. I didn’t have a rag of clothing and I didn’t know anything about my whereabouts, but all that night I traveled, cold and with sore feet, towards the north. At dawn I found myself at Fort CF Smith, my destination, but without my dispatches. The first man I met was a sergeant named William Briscoe, whom I knew very well, his astonishment at seeing me in that condition and mine. He asked me who the hell I was.

“‘Dave Duck,’ I replied; ‘who should that be?’

“He looked like an owl.

“‘You look like it,’ he said, and I watched him move a little away from me. ‘What’s wrong?’ he added.

“I told him what had happened to me the day before. He listened to me, without taking his eyes off me, and then he said:

“‘My dear friend, if you are Dave Duck, I must inform you that I buried him two months ago. I went out with a small exploring party and found his body, riddled with bullet holes and freshly scalped, otherwise somewhat mutilated. .also, I’m sorry to tell you… right where you say you made your fight. Come to my tent and I’ll show you your clothes and some letters I took from your person, the commander has your dispatches.

“He kept that promise. He showed me the clothes, which I resolutely put on; the letters, which I put in my pocket. He made no objection, then took me before the commander, who listened to my story and coldly ordered Briscoe to take me to the guardhouse.

“On the way there I said, ‘Bill Briscoe, did you really bury the body you found in these clothes?’

“‘Sure,’ he replied, ‘just like I told you. It was Dave Duck, all right; most of us knew him. And now, you damn imposter, you better tell me who you are.’

“‘I would give anything to know,’ I said.

“A week later, I escaped from the guardhouse and left the country as quickly as I could. I have returned twice, looking for that fateful place in the hills, but I couldn’t find it.”

the journalist

The recorder of this story, Bierce, was a Union soldier during the Civil War and fought in several battles, including the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862. This terrifying experience became the source of several short stories and the memoir “What I saw Shiloh.” “.

During his lifetime, Bierce was better known as a journalist than as a fiction writer. He wrote realistically about the terrible things he had seen in the war and helped pioneer the psychological horror story.

As a result of his reputation as a journalist, many of his ghost and war stories, including “The Man with Two Lives,” were received by some as fact rather than fiction, and the line between what was real and what was fake became blurred. .

In 1913, Bierce, 71, told reporters that he was traveling to Mexico to learn firsthand about the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared without a trace, one of the most famous disappearances in American literary history. He was never seen again and his own disappearance became a legend.

Bierce left behind this strange story from the Wyoming Territory, leaving readers to ponder what was real and what was the imagination of this former soldier.

Jackie Dorothy can be reached [email protected].