The Wagon Box Fight

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The Wagon Box Fight was an engagement on August 2, 1867, in the vicinity of Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, during Red Cloud's War. A party of 26 US Army soldiers and 6 civilians were attacked by several hundred Lakota Sioux warriors. Although outnumbered, the soldiers were armed with newly supplied breech-loading Springfield Model 1866 rifles and Lever Action Henry rifles, and had a defensive wall of wagon boxes to protect them.

The troops a Ft. Kearny had just experienced the Fetterman Massacre in which a group of ten warriors, including the later-legendary Crazy Horse, acted to lure a detachment of soldiers into an ambush by attacking woodcutters outside the fort, killing all 81 men under the command of Captain William J. Fetterman.

With this recent background, Samuel S. Gibson's Company A of the 27th Infantry, was sent out with the wood-cutting wagon train, as a guard for the month, to do escort duty to and from the fort daily, and also to protect the woodchoppers in the pinery.

Samuel S. Gibson's first-hand account of the battle appeared in a 1922 book of collected works "The Bozeman Trail," in a 25-page chapter entitled " The Wagon Box Fight." (Republished here.)

In order to protect their stock from night attacks by Indians, the contractors improvised a corral six miles west of the fort on a level plain. They removed the boxes from their wagons, and formed them into an oval shaped enclosure into which their stock was driven every night. The pinery where the logs were being cut was at some little distance from the wagon box corral. Several tents were pitched just outside the corral where the woodchoppers and soldiers bunked. Seven thousand rounds of ammunition were arranged inside the corral, and everybody was instructed, in case of an Indian attack at the pinery, to retreat to the corral, where it was considered that a good defense could be made until relief arrived from the fort.

Unlike during the Fetterman Fight, the troops at the fort had recently received 700 new breechloading Springfield rifles of fifty-caliber, with 100,000 rounds of ammunition, which replaced the old muzzle-loaders with which they had been previously armed.

Thus on that fateful day in 1867, when Red Cloud's warriors attacked, this time the 26 soldiers had the advantage of ready made fort made of wagons, as well as improved rifles.

As Gibson relates, when the first warriors attacked, "I soon found a place in one of the wagon beds on the south side of the corral, and here I found Sergeant McQuiery and Private John Grady. Grady was the only one to speak to me, inviting me to come in with them, saying: 'You'll have to fight like hell today, kid, if you expect to get out of this alive.' ..."