Carrington, Henry Beebee

Carrington, Henry Beebee, 1824–1912, U.S. army officer and historian, b. Wallingford, Conn., grad. Yale, 1845, and afterward studied at Yale Law School. Carrington ably reorganized the Ohio state militia and subsequently became adjutant general. In the Civil War he helped to save West Virginia for the Union by sending Ohio militia there. Later, as chief mustering officer of Indiana, he sent over 100,000 men to the war and was instrumental in quelling the operations of a secret society of Southern sympathizers. After the war, as commander of the Mountain Dist. of the Dept. of the Platte, he led the force that in 1866 attempted to open and guard the Bozeman Trail route to Montana. He planned and built forts C. F. Smith and Phil Kearney on this route. Blamed for the Fetterman massacre (see under Fetterman, William Judd), he was later exonerated. After his retirement from the army, Carrington was (1869–78) professor of military science at Wabash College. His Battles of the American Revolution (1876), supplemented by a volume of maps (1881), is a standard work. Ab-sa-ra-ka (1868), memoirs by his first wife, deals with his life on the plains.