Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site: #3 The Wagon Box Fight

FORT PHIL KEARNY: THE WAGON BOX FIGHT is the THIRD video in my three-part series on Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site near Banner, Wyoming.
Video #1: The Fort
• Fort Phil Kearny State...
Video #2: The Fetterman Fight
• Fort Phil Kearny State...
Video #3: The Wagon Box Fight
• Fort Phil Kearny State...
Fort Phil Kearny was the infamous frontier fort from which Capt. William J. Fetterman, on December 21, 1866, led a force of 80 infantry and cavalry into an ambush set by 2,000 Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. Fetterman and his command were annihilated in a 30-minute fight, the worst defeat for the U.S. Army in the West second only to Custer’s defeat in the Battle of the Little Bighorn ten years later.
Another famous fight associated with Fort Phil Kearny was the Wagon Box Fight, fought on August 2, 1867. Sioux warriors attacked woodcutters and soldiers camped at a cutting area five miles from the fort, trying for a repeat of the victory at the Fetterman Fight. The Sioux were initially successful, but 26 soldiers and six civilians took cover inside an oval of wagon boxes (wagons with the wheels and gear removed) used as a stock corral.
Soldiers with Fetterman had mostly single-shot muskets, but the men hiding behind the wagon boxes had breechloading, repeating rifles. The Sioux had expected their attacks to be met with a single volley and then the opportunity to overrun the defenders as they reloaded. But the repeated attacks by the warriors were met by volley after volley. When a relief force arrived from the fort, the Indians called off the attack.
The Wagon Fight Historic Site has many well done information signs. Pause the video to read the signs thoroughly.
The fort was established in July 1866 at the fork of the Piney and Little Piney Creeks in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains by Col. Henry B. Carrington of the 18th U.S. Infantry. Its mission was to protect travelers on the Bozeman Trail. But that trail cut right through the last great Indian hunting grounds on the Northern Plains. Indian resistance, especially under the leadership of Chief Red Cloud, was instant, continuous, violent, and successful. The treaty of 1868 closed the Bozeman Trail and Fort Phil Kearny. In August 1868 the fort was abandoned by the Army and burned by the Cheyenne.
I think an especially good book on the history of Fort Phil Kearny is Dee Brown’s “Fort Phil Kearny: An American Saga”, University of Nebraska Press, 1962. I bought a copy in the gift shop in the Historic Site’s Interpretive Center.
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• Firing the 12-pounder ...
Especially related to this video is my Western novel “B Troop”, which follows the experiences of a cavalry corporal and his “set of four” in an early Dakota winter in 1879. See a synopsis below. See jimjanke.com/b... to read the first chapter and for links to order either the e-book edition or the trade paperback edition.
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Jim
B TROOP:
November, 1879. Corporal John Taylor, one of Custer’s avengers,” is bored and lonely at Fort Grummond, a small, isolated outpost associated with a Lakota Sioux Reservation.
Orville Scheid, Indian agent, insists the Indian children learn English. Chief Stone Bear refuses. Scheid blunders and uses a single, ill-chosen word that terrifies the reservation’s people. The Sioux kill some troopers and agency employees, kidnap Scheid’s family, and launch a desperate attempt to flee to Canada. Major Nelson Prescott conducts an equally desperate mission to stop them.
Taylor’s life and that of B Troop explodes in violence and tragedy. Pursuit by the cavalry is relentless, but the resistance of the Sioux is persistent and resourceful. All in the teeth of a brutal Dakota winter that grinds down both pursuers and pursued.
A climactic confrontation erupts at the Missouri River, shy of the Canadian border. Taylor rescues Jeannie Scheid, Orville Scheid's daughter, and he learns a lot more about the young woman, the Sioux, the Army, and himself.
Ride along with Taylor and his set of four-Sean O’Dea, Linus Skinner, Hans Klausmeyer, and himself-and B Troop during this epic struggle.