Hot Station Wagon
Tensions High On the Bozeman Trail
On this day, 144 years ago, a classic David versus Goliath battle occurred in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains of present-day north central Wyoming. A six-person civilian wood-cutting party under the guard of 26 men from Company C, 27th Infantry busied themselves harvesting timber in an area called Piney Island for fuel and building material to supply Fort Phil Kearny, six miles to the west.
Unknown to them, an estimated force of one to two thousand Sioux and Cheyenne warriors under the Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud had congregated in northern Wyoming and split themselves into two groups. Their objective was to destroy to US Army forts built to protect the Bozeman Trail, a travel route through the tribes’ prime hunting territory. The two nations had been engaged in hostilities against the army and travelers along the trail for over a year in an effort to rid the area of white intrusion. They had a stunning success in December, 1866 with the annihilation of eighty soldiers near Ft Phil Kearny in the Fetterman Massacre.
The first group of warriors traveled towards Fort C. F. Smith in southern present-day Montana and attacked a hay-cutting detachment on August 1, 1867. The other moved into the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny and executed an attack on the wood-cutting party. Prior to the battle, the wood-cutters of the Gilmore and Porter Company had removed the boxes from several wagons and arranged them in an oval configuration to corral their livestock at night for protection from theft by the Indians. Their camp had been erected over a half a mile away.
The Battle
Just after daybreak on the morning of August 2, 1867, the Indian warriors initiated a two-pronged attack against the wagon box corral and the wood-cutters’ camp. According to Samuel Gibson, a private on watch a short distance for the wagon box corral that morning, “Garrett and I watched the Indians coming across the foothills, like a swarm of bees, on the north side of the Big Piney…” (Hebard 47). Personnel at the camp scattered for safety in the nearby mountains.
Company C, under the command of Captain James Powell, took cover behind the wagon boxes on the perimeter of the corral. Over the next five hours, these men mounted a strong defense against a numerically superior enemy. On that hot August day, the men under attack had to contend with a lack of water as well as the smoke from fires ignited by flaming arrows shot into the corral.
Their success can be, in part, attributed to the fact that they had been recently supplied with fifty-caliber Springfield breech-loading rifles. The warriors expected delays in gunfire from the soldiers so that they could recharge muzzle-loading rifles common at the time. Firearms quickly reloaded with cartridges were something that they were not familiar with. After the soldiers discharged their new rifles, the warriors would approach on foot in waves only to be cut down by the sustained and rapid rate of gunfire.
