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DECEMBER  21:

1884 Khartoum Sudan - General Herbert Kitchener leads British troops into Khartoum; find General Charles Gordon's garrison was wiped out three days earlier; the expedition was transported up the Nile by Canadian voyageurs and Caughnawaga Mohawks recruited by Col. Garnet Wolseley, who had previously employed them during the Red River Campaign in 1870. 

December 21, 1866:  The "Fetterman Massacre" happens today.
 
 

BACKGROUND:
From http://www.iusb.edu/~lyoung/1866.html
 

The Battle of The Hundred Slain or The Fetterman Massacre

Captain Fetterman

Early in December young Lakota warriors, including Crazy Horse and He Dog, executed an elaborate decoy manuever to draw soldiers out of the fort. They were very successful and killed several officers and severely wounded several other soldiers. In the next weeks an ambush was carefully planned and a location for a trap was chosen. Two thousand warriors moved south and set up camp two miles north of the chosen trap location. Ten young warriors were selected from the different tribal groups represented for the most dangerous job of decoying the soldiers. These decoys performed elaborate manuevers to lure the soldiers into the trap. When they were all inside the trap, the decoys signaled to the concealed warriors who rose up and killed all 80 of the soldiers. Nonetheless, casualties among the Indians were great because they were poorly armed to compete with the new repeating rifles of the soldiers.

The Indians named this battle The Battle of the Hundred Slain. The whites knew it as the Fetterman Massacre because the soldiers were led by Captain Fetterman, who had boasted that he could defeat the entire Sioux Nation with a single company of cavalrymen. Col. Carrington was appalled by the mutilation of the bodies they found. Had he seen the bodies of the Indians slain at Sand Creek, the condition of these bodies would have come as no surprise.
 

*****
 

>From "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown.  Random House, Publishers.  ISBN No. 0 09 952640 9.
 

(The following continues on from the text posted on December 6 ...)
 

... By the third week of December everything was in readiness, and about two thousand warriors began moving south out of the lodges along the Tongue. The weather was very cold, and they wore buffalo robes with the hair turned in, leggings of dark woollen cloth, high-topped buffalo-fur moccasins, and carried red Hudson's Bay blankets strapped to their saddles.  Most of them rode pack horses, leading their fast-footed war ponies by lariats.  Some had rifles, but most were armed with bows and arrows, knives and lances.  They carried enough pemmican to last several days, and when an opportunity offered, small groups would turn off the trail, kill a deer, and take as much meat as could be carried on their saddles.

About ten miles north of Fort Phil Kearny, they made a temporary camp in three circles of Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos.  Between the camp and the fort was the place selected for the ambush - the little valley of Peno Creek.

On the morning of December 21, the chiefs and medicine men decided the day was favorable for a victory.  In the first gray light of dawn, a party of warriors started off in a wide circuit toward the wood-train road where they were to make a feint against the wagons.  Ten young men had already been chosen for the dangerous duty of decoying the soldiers - two Cheyennes, two Arapahos, and two from each of the three Sioux divisions, Oglalas, Minneconjous and Brules.  Crazy Horse, Hump and Little Wolf were the leaders.  While the decoys mounted and started off toward Lodge Trail Ridge, the main body of warriors moved down the Bozeman Road.  Patches of snow and ice lay along the shady sides of the ridges, but the day was bright, the air cold and dry.  About three miles from the fort, where the road ran along a narrow ridge and descended to Peno Creek, they began laying a great ambush. The Cheyennes and Arapahos took the west side.  Some of the Sioux hid in a grassy flat on the opposite side; others remained mounted and concealed themselves behind two rocky ridges.  By mid-morning almost two thousand warriors were waiting there for the decoys to bring the Bluecoats into the trap.

While the war party was making its feint against the wood train, Crazy Horse and the decoys dismounted and waited in conceament on a slope facing the fort.  At the first sound of gunfire, a companyof soldiers dashed out of the fort and galloped off to rescue the woodcutters.  As soon as the Bluecoats were out of sight, the decoys showed themselves on the slope and moved down closer to the fort.  Crazy Horse waved his red blanket and darted in and out of the brush that fringed the frozen Piney.  After a few minutes of this, the Little Soldier Chief in the fort fired off his big twice-shooting gun. The decoys scattered along the slope, jumping, zigzagging and yelling to make the soldiers believe they were frightened.  By this time the war party had withdrawn from the wood train and doubled back toward Lodge Trail Ridge. In a few minutes the soldiers came in pursuit, some mounted, some on foot. (They were commanded by Captain William J Fetterman, who had explicit orders not to pursue beyond Lodge Trail Ridge.)

Crazy Horse and the other decoys now jumped on their ponies and began riding back and forth along the slope of Lodge Trail Ridge, taunting the soldiers and angering them so that they fired recklessly.  Bullets ricocheted off the rocks, and the decoys moved back slowly.  When the soldiers slowed their advance or halted, Crazy Horse would dismount and pretend to adjust his bridle or examine his pony's hooves.  Bullets whined all around him, and then the soldiers finally moved up on the ridgetop to chase the decoys down toward Peno Creek.  They were the only Indians in sight, only ten of them, and the soldiers were charging their horses to catch them.

When the decoys crossed Peno Creek, all 81 of the cavalrymen and infrantrymen were within the trap.  Now the decoys divided into two parties and quickly rode across each other's trail.  This was the signal for attack.

Little Horse, the Cheyenne who a year earlier gave warning to the Arapahos of General Connor's approach, had the honor of signalling his people, who were concealed in gullies on the west side.  He raised his lance, and all the mounted Cheyennes and Arapahos charged with a sudden thunder of hooves.

>From the opposite side came the Sioux, and for a few minutes the Indians and the walking soldiers were mixed in confused hand-to-hand fighting.   The infantrymen were soon all killed, but the cavalrymen retreated to a rocky height near the end of the ridge.  They turned their horses loose and tried to take cover among the ice-crusted boulders.

Little Horse made a name for himself that day, leaping over rocks and in and out of gullies until he was within 40 feet of the besieged cavalrymen. White Bull of the Minneconjous also distinguished himself in the bloody fighting on the hillside.  Armed only with a bow and a lance, he charged a dismounted cavalryman who was firing at him with a carbine.  In a pictograph that White Bull later drew of the event, he showed himself clad in a red war cape, firing an arrow into the soldier's heart and cracking him over the head with his lance to count first coup.

Toward the end of the fighting, the Cheyennes and Arapahos on one side and the Sioux on the other were so close together that they began hitting each other with their showers of arrows.  Then it was all over.  Not a soldier was left alive.  A dog came out from among the dead, and a Sioux started to catch it to take home with him, but Big Rascal, a Cheyenne, said, "Don't let the dog go," and somebody shot it with an arrow.  This was the fight the white men called the Fetterman Massacre; the Indians called it the Battle of the Hundred Slaim.

Casualties were heavy among the Indians, almost two hundred dead and wounded.  Because of the intense cold, they decided to take the wounded back to the temporary camp, where they could be kept from freezing.  Next day a roaring blizzard trapped the warriors there in improvised shelters, and when the storm abated they went back to their villages on the Tongue.

Now it was the Moon of Strong Cold, and there would be no more fighting for a while.  The soldiers who were left alive in the fort would have a bitter taste of defeat in their mouths.  If they had not learned their lesson and were still therewhen the grass greened in the spring, the war would continue.

The Fetterman Massacre made a profound impression upon Colonel Carrington. He was appalled by the mutilations - the disembowelings, the hacked limbs, the "private parts severed and indecently placed on the person".  He brooded upon the reasons for such savagery, and eventually wrote an essay on teh subject, philosophizing that the Indians were compelled by some paganistic belief to commit the terrible deeds that remained forever in his mind.  Had Colonel Carrington visited the scene of the Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred only two years before the Fetterman Massacre, he would have seen the same mutilations - committed upon Indians by Colonel Chivington's soldiers.  The Indians who ambushed Fetterman were only imitating their enemies, a practice which in warfare, as in civilian life, is said to be the sincerest form of flattery.