General Carrington marked out the walls of the fort, after a survey of the surrounding country as far as Tongue River, set up his sawmills, one of them of forty horse-power, capable of cutting logs thirty inches in diameter, established a logging camp on Piney Island, seven miles distant, with no intervening hills to surmount, which made transportation easy, and began the erection of the fort. Picket posts were established upon Pilot and Sullivant Hills, which overlooked approaches both from the east and the road to the mountains. Three times Indians attempted to dislodge these pickets, once at night; but case-shot exploding over them, and each time causing loss of men or ponies, ended similar visitations.
The most careful watchfulness was necessary at all hours of the day and night. The wood trains to fetch logs to the sawmills went out heavily guarded. There was fighting all the time. Casualties among the men were by no means rare. At first it was difficult to keep men within the limits of the camp; but stragglers who failed to return, and some who had been cut off, scalped and left for dead, but who had crawled back to die, convinced every one of the wisdom of the commanding officer’s repeated orders and cautions.[[7]]
To chronicle the constant succession of petty skirmishes would be wearisome; yet they often resulted in torture and loss of life on the part of the soldiers, although the Indians in most instances suffered the more severely. One single incident may be taken as illustrative of the life of the garrison.
One afternoon, early in October, the picket reported that the wood train was attacked to the west, and shortly after signalled the approach of a small party of soldiers from the east. Detachments were sent from the post in both directions. It proved to be not a reinforcement of troops or ammunition supplies, but two ambulances with two contract surgeons and an escort of eight men, besides Bailey, the guide, and Lieutenant Grummond, who had just been appointed to the Eighteenth Infantry, and his young bride. As they approached the main gate, accompanied by the mounted men who had been sent out to meet them, they were halted to give passage to an army wagon from the opposite direction. It was escorted by a guard from a wood train, and brought in the scalped, naked, dead body of one of their comrades, a strange welcome, indeed, to the young wife, who, upon leaving Laramie, had been assured of a beautiful ride through fertile valleys without danger, and sadder yet in its sequel two months later.
Meanwhile the work of erecting the fort was continued. It was a rectangle, six hundred by eight hundred feet, inclosed by a formidable stockade of heavy pine logs standing eight feet high, with a continuous banquette, and flaring loopholes at every fourth log. There were enfilading blockhouses on the diagonal corners, with portholes for the cannon, and quarters for officers and men, with other necessary buildings. The commanding officer’s quarters was a two-story building of framed lumber, surmounted by a watch-tower. The officers’ and men’s quarters were built of logs. The warehouses, four in number, eighty feet by twenty-four, were framed.
East of the fort proper was a corral of slightly less area, surrounded by a rough palisade of cottonwood logs, which inclosed the wood train, hay, and miscellaneous supplies. Everything—stockade, houses, stables, in all their details, blacksmith shops, teamsters’ quarters, and so on—was planned by Carrington himself.[[8]]
The main fort inclosed a handsome parade ground, in the center of which arose the tall flagstaff planned and erected by a ship carpenter in the regiment. From it, on the 31st of October, with great ceremony and much rejoicing, the first garrison flag that ever floated over the land was unfurled. The work was by no means completed as it appears on the map, but it was inclosed, and there were enough buildings ready to house the actual garrison present, although the fort was planned for a thousand men, repeatedly promised but not furnished, while all the time both cavalry and the First Battalion of the Eighteenth were held within the peaceful limits of Fort Laramie’s control.
Early in August Captain Kinney, with two companions, had been sent ninety miles to the northward to establish the second post on the Big Horn, which was called Fort C. F. Smith, and was very much smaller and less important than Fort Phil Kearney. The third projected post was not established. There were not enough men to garrison the three already in the field, much less to build a fourth.