William Judd Fetterman

William Judd Fetterman 1833?-1866, American army officer. In 1861 he enlisted in the Union army from Delaware; he served throughout the Civil War and was twice brevetted for gallant conduct. After the war he remained in the army and was sent, in Nov., 1866, to Fort Phil Kearney in Wyoming. The Fetterman massacre occurred when, despite his unfamiliarity with frontier conditions and methods of indigenous fighting, he volunteered to lead a party of 80 men on supply escort duty. Fetterman ignored orders not to leave the trail and was ambushed by Native Americans under Red Cloud. He and his entire party were killed in the attack.

Crazy Horse (1840?–1877), war leader of the Oglala Lakota Sioux.Crazy Horse achieved renown in intertribal warfare on the northern Great Plains and in conflict with the U.S. Army. Introverted, mystical, and eccentric in dress and deportment, he excelled at hit‐and‐run tactics. Between 1866 and 1876, he gained distinction in combat with U.S. soldiers. On 21 December 1866, he led the decoy party that enticed Capt. William J. Fetterman and eighty soldiers to their destruction near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming. He also participated in the Wagon Box Fight nearby on 2 August 1867. His greatest fame, however, arose from his role in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 25 June 1876, when he and other warriors wiped out an entire unit of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry Regiment. The Indian victory prompted decisive military reaction, and on 6 May 1877, Crazy Horse surrendered at Camp Robinson, Nebraska. On 7 September, resisting confinement in the post guardhouse, he received a fatal wound from a soldier's bayonet. His people buried him at an unknown spot on the plains. He is remembered as the greatest of all Sioux war leaders.

Bibliography

Mari Sandoz , Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Oglalas, 1942.

Robert M. Utley

Circle Repertory Company (New York). After several years of informal collaboration and exploratory discussions, the group was founded in 1969 by Tanya Berezin, Marshall W. Mason, Robert Thirkield, and Lanford Wilson and was designed to promote the best in American playwriting. Among its many notable productions were Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore (1973), The Fifth of July (1978), Talley's Folly (1979), and Burn This (1988) as well as Jules Feiffer's Knock Knock (1976), Albert Innaurato's Gemini (1977), Sam Shepard's Fool for Love (1983), and William M. Hoffman's As Is (1985), one of the first and best plays about the AIDS epidemic. The emphasis at the Circle was always on the playwright, but certain company members, such as Berezin, Judd Hirsch, Trish Hawkins, Helen Stenborg, Jonathan Hogan, William Hurt, and Jeff Daniels, became familiar favorites who returned to the small space even after some of them found success on Broadway and elsewhere. The company lost its impetus in the early 1990s and by 1996 decided to close, more from a mutual desire by its creators to move on than for lack of audience interest. For nearly thirty years the Circle was one of Off Broadway's finest venues for promising American playwrights.