Montana: The Magazine of Western History > Autumn 2004 'Give Me Eighty Men': Shattering the Myth of the Fetterman Massacre Calitri, Shannon Smith In 1866, near an isolated U.S. Army post in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains, a well-organized coalition of Plains Indians executed an ambush that killed Captain William J. Fetterman and his entire detachment of eighty men. This spectacular victory for the Sioux and their allies would have gone down in history as the greatest defeat ever handed to the frontier army if George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry had not ridden into immortality at the...