Wagon Box Fight - Aftermath

Aftermath

The Wagon Box Fight is prominent in the folklore and literature of the Old West as an example of a small group of American soldiers holding off a much larger group of Indians. The new, faster-shooting rifles of the soldiers are cited as the reason for the survival of the soldiers in the wagon box corral against a superior number of attackers.

Estimates of Indian casualties range from "an unlikely low of two to an absurd fifteen hundred." Captain Powell estimated that his men killed 60 Indians, a "wildly exaggerated" estimate in the opinion of some historians. The Wagon Box Fight was the last major engagement of Red Cloud's War. Possibly the impact of the battle, and that of the similar Hayfield Fight a day earlier, was to discourage the Indians from attempting additional large scale attacks. "This was the large charge Crazy Horse ever led against whites occupying a strong defensive position. He had learned that Indians with bows and arrows could not overwhelm whites armed with breech-loaders inside a fortification." For the remainder of 1867, the Lakota and their allies concentrated on small-scale, hit-and-run attacks along the Bozeman Trail.