Dead Man’s Trail: Wyoming Ghost Story

In 1866, danger haunted every mile of the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud and his Sioux warriors were at war, defending their homeland against broken treaties and encroaching forts. 

Soldiers rode under constant threat, their lives hanging by a thread in the lonely stretches between outposts.

Into this peril walked Private Dave Duck, carrying an urgent dispatch through hostile country. Yet, when he reached Fort C. F. Smith, the men there met him not with relief but with disbelief.

That was because Dave Duck had already been buried.

Join us along the Bozeman Trail, where the Red Cloud War rages... and the dead sometimes walk beside the living.

This ride down Dead Man’s Trail is brought to you by Rooted in Legacy — helping you capture your own stories before they fade like dust on the Wyoming wind. Learn more at https://legendrockmedia.com. 

Transcript

“Dead Man’s Trail”

In 1866, danger haunted every mile of the Bozeman Trail. Red Cloud and his Sioux warriors were at war, defending their homeland against broken treaties and encroaching forts. 

Soldiers rode under constant threat, their lives hanging by a thread in the lonely stretches between outposts.

Into this peril walked Private Dave Duck, carrying an urgent dispatch through hostile country. Yet, when he reached Fort C. F. Smith, the men there met him not with relief but with disbelief.

That was because Dave Duck had already been buried.

Join us along the Bozeman Trail, where the Red Cloud War rages... and the dead sometimes walk beside the living.

The Pioneers of Outlaw Country. 

Cowboys, Lawmen and Outlaws… to the businessmen and women who all helped shape Wyoming. 

Here are their stories

 Dead Man’s Trail

 The Bozeman Trail was a road of promise… and death.

 In 1866, Fort Phil Kearny stood like a lone outpost on the edge of the frontier, surrounded by the Powder River country claimed by Red Cloud and his Sioux warriors. Every wagon train that rattled down that dusty trail was a gamble. Every soldier who rode out of the fort knew he might not ride back.

 The Sioux called it war. The Army called it duty. For the men stationed here, it was survival.

At any moment, a wood train could be ambushed. A scout could vanish into the hills. The war cries could echo out of nowhere, and in seconds, the quiet prairie turned into a killing ground.

This was life along the Bozeman Trail. A place where courage met fear, and sometimes, the dead refused to stay buried.

I’m Jackie Dorothy, and this is Pioneers of Outlaw Country: Wyoming Ghost Stories.

Tonight’s ride down Dead Man’s Trail is brought to you by Rooted in Legacy — helping folks capture their stories before they fade like dust on the Wyoming wind. Learn more at LegendRockMedia.com. 

Fort Phil Kearny was not alone on the Bozeman Trail.

In 1866, Colonel Henry B. Carrington was ordered to secure this dangerous route through Sioux territory. He planned a chain of forts to protect travelers and supply lines — Fort Reno on the Powder River, Fort Phil Kearny near the Bighorn Mountains, and Fort C.F. Smith at the crossing of the Bighorn River. A fourth post, meant for the Clark Fork, was abandoned before it ever rose.

These lonely garrisons were strung out across hundreds of miles of hostile country. They were connected only by rough trails and the men brave enough to ride them. When a fort needed help or orders, the army didn’t have telegraphs or trains. They relied on couriers on horseback, carrying dispatches through territory where a man could vanish without a trace.

One of those men was Private Dave Duck, a soldier given a simple mission: deliver an important dispatch from Fort Phil Kearny to Fort C.F. Smith.

It should have been a routine ride. However, when he reached his destination… the soldiers there showed him his own grave.

In the autumn of 1866, Private David William Duck of the Eighteenth Infantry was stationed at Fort Phil Kearny under Colonel Henry B. Carrington. 

 The fort’s history has been written in blood. The Sioux war parties of Red Cloud had turned the Bozeman Trail into a deadly gauntlet, and the massacre of Captain Fetterman’s command would soon make national headlines. 

 When orders came to deliver dispatches to Fort C.F. Smith on the Bighorn River, Duck set out alone. The country was alive with hostile warriors, so he traveled by night, hiding during the day wherever the land offered shelter. 

 Armed with a Henry rifle and three days’ rations, he crept through the wilderness. He was a single man on a silent trail between life and death.

 One night, searching for a hiding place before dawn, he stumbled into what seemed a narrow canyon. In the dark it appeared safe. It was a tangle of sagebrush and scattered boulders. Duck settled behind one of the rocks and soon fell asleep.

 By midday, a rifle shot shattered the quiet. The bullet struck the stone just above his head. He woke to find himself surrounded. A band of Sioux had trailed him through the night. The shot that missed him betrayed their position, and Duck managed to drop the marksman before sprinting for cover. Bullets tore through the sage as he ran, but the warriors didn’t pursue. He soon discovered why.

 The narrow canyon ended abruptly in a sheer wall of stone. It was no passage at all, but a trap. He was in a rocky bowl with no way out. Duck was caught like a bear in a pit.

 For two days and nights, he held his ground. Hidden behind a low rock, he fired at the faint puffs of smoke that marked the enemy rifles. 

 Thirst burned his throat; exhaustion blurred his mind. Sleep was impossible. By the morning of the third day, delirium had taken hold. 

 In a final burst of desperation, he charged into the open, firing wildly into the empty air.

 Then, there was nothing. Darkness swallowed him whole.

When Duck awoke, it was night again. He was half-submerged in a river, naked and shivering. 

His rifle, clothing, and dispatches were gone. 

He dragged himself to shore and began walking north through the darkness, guided by instinct alone. At dawn, he found himself at the gates of Fort C.F. Smith, the very place he had been trying to reach.

But the men who saw him there recoiled in shock. They recognized his face and swore he was dead. 

Months earlier, a scouting party had found his mutilated, scalped body in the hills near Fort Phil Kearny. They had buried him themselves.

In disbelief, Duck examined the proof they presented him. His uniform, his letters, and his personal effects had all been recovered from the corpse they swore was his. 

Yet here he stood, alive.

The officers refused to believe him. He was locked in the guardhouse as an impostor. A week later, he escaped and vanished into the frontier.

Years passed before anyone heard from him again. When he finally settled in Aurora, Illinois, the townspeople came to know him well as a quiet, respectable man. But among the locals, he carried a name whispered with uneasy humor.

They called him Dead Duck — the man who walked out of his own grave.

Journalist and Civil War veteran Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce first published this strange account under the title “A Man with Two Lives.” He claimed the story was told to him by David William Duck himself — a soldier who had walked alone through hostile Wyoming country and returned from his own grave.

Bierce knew this land. In 1866, he was part of an expedition led by General William Babcock Hazen, inspecting military outposts along the Great Plains — the same region where Red Cloud’s war was raging, and the Fetterman Massacre would soon take place. He traveled the same trails, met the same men, and understood the terror of isolation that hung over every fort along the Bozeman Trail.

A veteran of Shiloh and one of the most hard-bitten observers of war, Bierce turned his memories into haunting stories of soldiers caught between the living and the dead. His writing blurred the line between fact and fiction, between history and nightmare and perhaps that was the point.

In 1913, at the age of seventy-one, Ambrose Bierce set out on another journey. He told friends he was headed for Mexico, hoping to witness the revolution firsthand. 

Then he vanished without a trace. No body, no grave, no farewell.

Bierce simply disappeared, just like the ghosts he wrote about. He became one of America’s great disappearances.

He left behind this strange story of the Wyoming territory, leaving readers to ponder, what was real and what was the imagination of a former soldier.

Thank you for joining me along the Bozeman Trail. I am Jackie Dorothy, Wyoming historian and storyteller. If you liked today’s ghost story, be sure to subscribe and share it with others! 

Dead Man’s Trail has been brought to you by Rooted in Legacy, helping you to preserve your own family stories and memoirs. 

Next week on Pioneers of Outlaw Country: Haunted Wyoming, we ride with The White Devil — a ghostly white stallion of the 1800s said to protect wild mustangs from any cowboy who dared to rope them. Legend says this spectral horse still roams the Rattlesnake Range above Casper, Wyoming, haunting the hills and guarding his herd to this very day.

Join us… if you dare, for a ride with a spirit of the Wyoming frontier.

This was a production of Legend Rock Media.