The Fetterman Fight (panel)

The Lakota and Cheyenne call this the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, and the line the panel builds its story on is the weakest part of it. The boast that Fetterman could ride through the Sioux nation with eighty men reaches us through the books of Colonel Carrington's two wives, written to defend their husband, and the historian Shannon D. Smith argues it is a myth. After a skirmish on December 6, Fetterman himself said the war had become a hand-to-hand fight requiring the utmost caution.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site — 2.9 mi
  A Bozeman Trail fort whose wood trains were attacked for two years, and the wagon-box corral where its woodcutters held out behind new breech-loaders in 1867.
• Occidental Hotel — 17 mi
  Buffalo's 1880 grand hotel, its 1908 saloon ceiling still pocked with bullet holes, won once in a poker game and nearly torn down in the 1990s.
• Trail End State Historic Site — 17 mi
  A Texas trail hand's Flemish Revival mansion, five years in the building, that he barely lived in once Wyoming sent him to the governor's office and the Senate.
• Sheridan Inn — 17 mi
  A hunting-lodge hotel with sixty-nine gables, where Buffalo Bill is said to have auditioned Wild West acts from the porch.

More markers nearby

• With the Arrival Of... (Fetterman) — steps away
• The Interpretive Trail (Fetterman) — steps away
• Fetterman Monument — steps away
• John (Portugee) Phillips — 2.6 mi