The Wagon Box Fight

On the morning of August second, eighteen sixty-seven, Captain James Powell had twenty-six soldiers and six civilian woodcutters camped along Little Piney Creek, about five miles northwest of Fort Phil Kearny. They had removed the wagon boxes from their running gear and arranged them in an oval corral to protect their mules. The arrangement was improvised shelter. It was about to become a fortress.

Nearly a thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, under the direction of Red Cloud and High Back Bone, struck at dawn. The warriors had just seen the Fetterman Fight the previous December, where they had overwhelmed and killed eighty-one soldiers by luring them out of the fort. The strategy was proven. They expected to do it again.

But Powell's men had something the warriors did not expect: brand-new Springfield Model eighteen sixty-six rifles, converted to breech-loading. Under the old muzzle-loading system, a soldier fired once, stood exposed while he rammed a new charge, and could manage perhaps two or three shots per minute. The breech-loader changed everything. A trained soldier could fire ten to fifteen rounds a minute, and Powell's men were well-supplied with ammunition.

The warriors charged in repeated mounted waves, expecting the rifles to fall silent during reloading. They never did. The sustained fire stopped every charge. Warriors who had ridden through the muzzle-loading era found that the old tactics of closing fast on horseback no longer worked against men who could keep shooting. The battle lasted several hours. A relief column with artillery finally arrived and the warriors withdrew. Three soldiers were killed in the corral, and four civilian woodcutters were killed about a mile away. Warrior losses are disputed but were estimated by Powell at around sixty dead and a hundred and twenty wounded.

The Wagon Box Fight was not the last engagement of Red Cloud's War. But it demonstrated something that would reshape every future conflict on the northern Plains: that the repeating breech-loader fundamentally altered the balance of firepower. Red Cloud won his war regardless. The Army abandoned the Bozeman Trail forts the following summer and his warriors burned them to the ground. But the weapon that stopped his charges at Wagon Box Creek never went away.