Wagon Box Fight - Background

Background

In July 1867, after their annual sun dance at camps on the Tongue and Rosebud rivers, Oglala Lakota warriors under Red Cloud, other bands of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and a few Arapaho resolved to attack the soldiers at nearby Fort C.F. Smith and Fort Phil Kearny. These would be the first major military actions by the Indians in 1867, following up their successes in 1866, including the Fetterman Fight. Unable to agree where to attack first, the Indians split into two large bodies, variously estimated at between 300 and 1,000 Cheyenne and Sioux, moving against Fort C.F. Smith and a similar number, mostly Sioux and possibly including Red Cloud, headed toward Fort Phil Kearny.

In addition to guarding emigrants on the Bozeman Trail, major tasks occupying the 350 soldiers and 100 civilians at Fort Phil Kearny included gathering wood and timber from a pine forest about five miles from the Fort and cutting hay for livestock in prairie areas. These jobs were performed by civilian contractors, usually armed with Spencer repeating rifles and accompanied and guarded by squads of soldiers. The hay cutters and wood gatherers had been a favorite target of the Indians since the establishment of Fort Kearny one year earlier. Dozens of small raids had been directed against them; several dozen soldiers and civilians had been killed and hundreds of head of livestock had been stolen. The soldiers were on the defensive. Their capability to strike back at the Indians was severely limited by a shortage of horses and trained cavalrymen and their weapons, consisting of muzzle-loading Springfield Model 1861 muskets. However, soldiers had recently been issued breech-loading rifles that could fire about three times as fast as muzzle-loaders and could be more easily re-loaded from a prone position.

The Indians were poorly armed, probably possessing only about 200 firearms and less than two bullets per gun. Bows and arrows were their basic weapon. Bows and arrows were deadly at short range and in a fight on horseback or on foot but were ineffective against a well entrenched or fortified enemy.

To protect against Indian raids near the pine forest, the civilian contractors had constructed a corral made by removing 14 of the wooden boxes that rested on the chassis of wagons and placing them on the ground in an oval 60-70 feet (20 mts) long and 25-30 feet (8-9 mts) wide. Both soldiers and civilians in the wood-cutting details lived in tents outside the corral of wagon boxes. On July 31, Captain James Powell and his command of 51 men departed the walls of Fort Kearny on a 30 day assignment to camp near the wagon boxes and guard the wood cutters. Until then, the summer had been quiet, with few hostile encounters with the Indians.