The Tongue River Fight: Connor's Punitive Campaign
Near Sheridan, Wyoming
In the summer of eighteen sixty-five, the United States Army sent Brigadier General Patrick Edward Connor into the Powder River Basin with orders to punish, at all hazards, the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux who had been raiding emigrant trails and mail routes across the northern plains. The orders were blunt and the mission was punitive, not strategic. Connor was told to kill every male over twelve years of age.
Connor divided his force into three columns and sent them sweeping through the basin in what became known as the Powder River Expedition. The columns struggled with brutal late-summer heat, difficult terrain, and supply failures. Two of the three columns never made significant contact with any Native forces. But on August twenty-eighth, Pawnee Scouts riding ahead of Connor's own column located a large Arapaho village encamped on the Tongue River.
Connor moved immediately. He led about two hundred soldiers and seventy Pawnee, Omaha, and Winnebago scouts on a night march and struck Black Bear's village at dawn on August twenty-ninth. The Arapaho fought back, including a fierce counterattack by mounted warriors that briefly pushed the attackers back. In the end the village was overrun. Thirty-three Arapaho were killed, the lodges were burned, and more than five hundred horses were driven off.
The army called it a decisive victory. But the broader expedition collapsed. Supply trains failed to arrive. Connor's other columns wandered the basin without making contact. Warriors harassed his return march relentlessly. By September, the expedition withdrew without having broken the power of any of the tribes it was sent to punish.
The Tongue River fight is remembered now mainly as a forerunner, one of a series of government escalations in the Powder River Basin that would culminate, over the following decade, in Red Cloud's War and the catastrophe of the Little Bighorn. The government's approach to the northern plains, as demonstrated here, was to strike villages and call it peace. It was not peace.
