Seven weeks later, on Dec. 21, 1866, Fetterman and 79 soldiers and civilians were killed in a lopsided battle that was soon mythologized as the Fetterman Massacre. Sept. 11 was a tragic date in American history long before the terrorist attacks of 2001. Like other myths, this one originated in controversy and was "built upon actual deeds and events, magnified, distorted and disproportioned by fiction, invention, imagination and speculation." So then came the events of December 21, 1866. This is about as accurate a presentation of the events leading up to and including the Fetterman Massacre in in December of 1866as you are going to get.The battle was the opening shot of the Plains Indian Wars. Richard Egan is Colonel Henry Carrington, the cautious commander of Fort Kearney along the Bozeman Trail. William Fetterman and some of his 80 troopers might have survived annihilation if just 500 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho had been waiting in ambush outside the stockade walls of Capt. The picket on Pilot Hill, having reported the train as having broken corrall and moved forward on its daily mission, I entertained no apprehension of further danger. With 81 fatalities, the Fetterman Massacre was the army’s worst defeat in the West until the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. American Indians remember it as "The Battle of the Hundred Slain." In 1866 Wyoming, a frontier scout tries to prevent a war between the Sioux and the U.S. when the Army builds a road and a fort on territory previously ceded to the Sioux by treaty. Col. Fetterman, I add these facts. Fetterman and his entire command -- ironically said to number 80 men -- were wiped out in about 20 minutes after riding and marching into a trap sprung by 1,500 or more Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors. Capt. Relative to the massacre of December 21 st, and to make more definite than set forth in my official report the exact movements of Brevet Lieut. Like Custer's Last Stand, the Fetterman massacre of books, novels, and articles keeps the myth solidly in the narrative of the country's heritage. A large band of Cheyenne and Sioux warriors under the command of Red … There is also a Fetterman Street and Fetterman Drive in Laramie, Wyoming. With Van Heflin, Yvonne De Carlo, Alex Nicol, Preston Foster. The actor Robert Fuller played the role of Fetterman in the episode, "Massacre at Fort Phil Kearny", which aired on October 26, 1966, on NBC's anthology television series, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre. Whites would later call it "The Fetterman Massacre." Crazy Horse, along with about nine others, indeed lured a brazen new commander of soldiers Captain Fetterman, who had boasted to his commanding officer Colonel Carrington: “Give me eighty men and I can ride through the entire Sioux nation” [i], took the bait and followed. William Judd Fetterman arrived at Fort Phil Kearny on Nov. 3, 1866, as the Indian attacks were peaking. Directed by George Sherman. William J. Fetterman.