On August 2, 1867, a small force of U. S. soldiers found themselves surrounded by hundreds of Lakota warriors at the base of Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. Just eight months earlier and only three miles away, the same warriors had annihilated Captain William Fetterman and his 80-man command in a devastating ambush.
Now they were charging again, determined to repeat that victory. With no escape possible, some soldiers kicked off their boots, ready to fight in their socks. They had fashioned loops from their shoelaces to hook under their rifle muzzles, allowing a quick toe-pull trigger if capture seemed imminent. They feared being taken alive more than death itself.
Two factors turned the tide in their favor: relentless firepower and a clever barricade of 14 overturned wagon boxes that provided crucial cover on the open prairie. Leading the defense was 36-year-old Captain James Powell, a figure nearly erased from history. Powell had joined the army as a teenager, serving in the final stages of the Mexican-American War in 1848. He spent the 1850s riding with the cavalry, rising to first sergeant before the Civil War brought him a commission as second lieutenant in the 18th U.
S. Infantry. With that regiment, Powell fought in nearly every major battle of the Western theater, from Shiloh to Chattanooga. At the Battle of Jonesboro near Atlanta in 1864, his unit stormed a fortified Confederate line under blistering fire.
Powell took multiple hits and survived, but surgeons could not extract two Confederate bullets lodged in his chest—souvenirs he carried for the rest of his life. By late 1866, newly promoted to captain, Powell returned to his regiment at Fort Phil Kearny alongside fellow officer William Fetterman. They arrived in the middle of Red Cloud’s War, a fierce Lakota resistance against U. S.
encroachment on the Bozeman Trail. The fort depended heavily on timber from the nearby Big Horn foothills, essential for building stockades, barracks, and fuel. Logging crews, often lightly guarded, were prime targets for hit-and-run ambushes. Colonel Henry Carrington, the fort’s commander, sent Powell to rescue one besieged wood train, and he pulled it off flawlessly with no losses.
Just two days later, when another party came under fire, Fetterman pulled rank on Powell and led the relief force himself. On December 21, 1866, Fetterman’s entire command was annihilated. Powell’s troops helped recover and bury the mangled remains, a gruesome task that seared the warriors’ brutal tactics into their memories. With the Lakota settling into winter camps, the real enemy became nature itself.
Brutal sub-zero blizzards cut off the Bozeman Trail, halting all resupplies. By December’s end, 28 enlisted men were sick. By April, that number surged past 90—nearly a fifth of the garrison—mostly ravaged by scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency that turned hearty soldiers into shadows of themselves. The troops at Fort Phil Kearny suffered the same illness that had tormented sailors for centuries.
Their rations consisted chiefly of preserved beef and dry biscuits, lacking the essential vitamin C needed to ward off scurvy. Sailors had been saved by citrus extract, but border troops in the 1860s received only acetic acid, if supplies were available at all. Officials assumed soldiers could plant gardens and access fresh produce. But that proved impossible at Fort Phil Kearny.
One soldier remembered, “Every man who stayed at the fort when they built it caught scurvy. Some lost their teeth and some lost use of their limbs. During spring, as the grass emerged, plenty of wild onions appeared, and the scurvy men were ordered out to eat them. ” One civilian who had labored at the fort said he continued suffering from scurvy’s effects long afterward.
As the new year arrived, the army was restructured, and Powell’s unit became Company C, 27th Infantry. When spring arrived, the fighting season resumed. Many troops at Fort Phil Kearny were sent on tasks across the Powder River region, guarding mail runners and protecting supply trains. In early April, a mail train was discovered near the Powder River with all personnel killed and the correspondence scattered around the ambush site.
At the end of June, a large group of natives approached the fort. These were not Lakota or Cheyenne but 125 lodges of Absaroka, known as the Crow, plus Nez Perce. The Crow had long fought against the Lakota and Cheyenne, and as Europeans entered the region, the Crow allied with the newcomers—an enemy of my enemy arrangement. It is worth noting that while the Sioux claimed the forts on the Bozeman Trail violated their territory under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Sioux lands were actually farther east.
The Crow claimed the territory west of the Powder River where the forts stood. In the end, no one adhered to the treaty’s terms. That day, after the Crow arrived at the fort, a Sioux war party drove off the Crow’s horses. The Crow chased them down, recovered most of their horses, and claimed to have killed three Sioux warriors.
A detachment of cavalry and infantry accompanied the Crow to defend and support the friendly natives. Several days later, the Crow departed to hunt along the Big Horn River. The Crow were not the only guests at Fort Phil Kearny that summer. As with every official catastrophe, lawmakers became involved.
A special commission was created to investigate the Fetterman fight. Powell was questioned by the panel on July 24. His testimony, combined with others, placed blame on Colonel Carrington rather than Fetterman. Carrington strongly disliked this and later wrote a response to the panel regarding Powell’s statements.
It likely felt like relief for Captain Powell when his 51-man unit left Fort Phil Kearny at the end of July. It was his company’s turn for their 30-day rotation at the timber camp, protecting loggers who chopped timber for the fort. The camp was located several miles west of the fort near the base of the Big Horn Mountains, at a remote site called the Lateral Camp, situated by a small pine stream about a mile from the mule herd and corral. Fourteen wagon boxes were taken off their frames and placed on the ground in an oval, forming a corral.
They were spaced far enough apart for a man to walk between them but close enough that animals could not pass through. The troops set up their tents a short distance south of the enclosure. Powell dispatched 12 men to protect the loggers and another 13 to guard the wagons traveling to and from the station. That left 26 troops plus his newly arrived second-in-command, First Lieutenant John Jenness.
The 24-year-old Jenness had spent much of the Civil War in an artillery unit defending Washington, D. C. After the war, he received a commission in the new 27th Infantry and had just been assigned to Captain Powell’s company in July. The Lateral Camp was not within view of the corral.
A small picket post was established on a hill several hundred yards south of the enclosure. On August 2, 1867, Private Sam Gibson, an 18-year-old newcomer to the unit, was assigned as a guard there. After breakfast, Gibson was at his post when a fellow trooper spotted enemy warriors coming down the hill. Plenty of warriors.
These warriors were mainly Lakota Sioux. After the annual Sun Dance, the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne were eager to bring the fight to the army. But they could not agree on the best way to do it. The Cheyenne wanted to attack Fort C.
F. Smith in southern Montana, while the majority of the Sioux wanted to return to Fort Phil Kearny. The warriors decided to follow their instincts and attack whichever target they wanted. The Sioux chose Fort Phil Kearny.
The war leaders intended to use the same strategy that had brought them victory over William Fetterman: wait until the troops fired their guns, then charge while they were reloading and overwhelm them in close combat. But the warriors had failed to anticipate one critical factor—the weapon in Sam Gibson’s hands. Just a few weeks earlier, the men of Company C had exchanged their antiquated muzzle-loading muskets for newly issued Trapdoor Springfield rifles, which loaded at the breech. The old muskets could manage roughly three shots per minute.
The new Springfields could fire five or six times as fast. Fetterman’s troops had been armed with muzzle-loading rifled muskets. Powell held a crucial edge that Fetterman did not—one the warriors were also unaware of. Gibson couldn’t help but fire at the warriors, but he soon saw they were vastly outnumbered and sprinted back toward the corral.
Captain Powell, who had been bathing in a nearby creek, did the same. The warriors swiftly overran the outlying camp, killing three soldiers and driving the rest into the surrounding hills. Several hundred mounted warriors chased off the men tending the mules and captured the herd. Powell and Jenness rapidly assembled their available soldiers and passed out ammunition around the wagon boxes forming the corral.
Gibson and the other pickets still had to sprint several hundred yards to safety, evading gunfire. Luckily, one soldier emerged to provide cover: Max Littman, a company NCO who spoke barely any English. Gibson feared a reprimand for abandoning his post without orders. But Powell instead commended him, saying, “You’ve acted nobly, my boy.
You could not have done better. Now men, find your places in the wagon boxes. You will be fighting for your lives today. ”
Within minutes, hundreds of mounted warriors surrounded Powell’s command.
He commanded 26 soldiers along with four civilians who managed to reach the corral. One of them was R. J. Smith, a seasoned teamster who had been at Fort Phil Kearny since it was first established.
Smith would later say the soldiers by 1867 had learned from earlier clashes that fleeing from an attack was the worst course of action. Smith noted that the soldiers now carried superior firearms and were much more skilled at fighting the Indians. They had learned it was far safer to stand and face them than, as in the previous year, to turn their backs. “If you run from an Indian, you become his prey,” he said.
That morning, Smith had been out deer hunting with a partner but spotted warriors in the area and could not get back to the fort. He took a position on the corral’s north side and arranged his weapons: two Spencer carbines and two revolvers. Beside him, Private Thomas Doyle, known as Tommy, piled ox yokes into the gap separating two wagon boxes. Gibson stationed himself behind a box on the south side alongside two veteran soldiers, Sergeant John McQuery and Private John Grady.
Captain Powell and First Sergeant John Hoover took up a spot a couple of wagon boxes to the west. Sergeant Littman, however, doubted the wagon boxes would provide sufficient cover from hostile gunfire. He instead lay prone on the southwest edge of the corral behind a salt barrel, which he reinforced with a few ox yokes. Next to him, Private Jim Conlan got ready to fight from behind a barrel stuffed with beans.
Lieutenant Jenness occupied an exposed post near a covered wagon on the west side. He observed a group of native spectators on a hill to the east of the corral and remarked that he believed he could see Red Cloud himself positioning to watch the coming battle. Smith later remembered, “Sure you can, buddy. I told him to keep under cover.
” Jenness said he was compelled to expose himself in order to look after his men. Around the perimeter, the men removed their hats and used them to hold additional ammunition. Their preparations were suddenly interrupted as the Lakota launched their assault. Powell shouted one of the only orders he would give for the entire engagement: “Men, here they come.
Take your places and shoot to kill. ”
At the wagon boxes, there was little conversation. As Max Littman noted, “When we saw the hundreds upon hundreds of savage warriors pressing forward against our little improvised fort, not a man in the entire command expected to come out of that fight alive. ” Private Gibson later recalled that the expression on the men’s faces was not despair, but solemn and determined focus.
The Lakota’s initial move was a mounted charge sweeping across the plain from the southwest. Their strategy was sound: let the soldiers fire their volley and empty their single-shot muskets, wait for that critical moment when ramrods came out to reload, then close the distance and overrun the position. But to the warriors’ dismay, that expected lull in firing never came. With great courage, the Lakota pressed forward to within 100 yards of the corral.
But the relentless and concentrated fire from the soldiers’ lines finally forced them to withdraw. As Gibson remembered, the attempt cost the warriors heavily. The indigenous fighters were all within easy and deadly range, and the soldiers’ fire cut them down in great numbers. This devastating outcome was far from what the Lakota battle plan had anticipated.
The warriors fell back beyond the effective range of the rifles, but the plain was now strewn with their wounded. In the culture of the plains warriors, abandoning the dead or injured was unthinkable if there was any way to prevent it. The watching soldiers, even from their defensive position, couldn’t help but be impressed by the incredible horsemanship as warriors leaned from their mounts at full gallop, plucking fallen comrades from the earth without breaking stride. Yet the warriors did not retreat from the field.
The soldiers could clearly see mounted messengers racing back and forth, and the sound of war cries carried on the air. Gibson summed up the feeling in the corral: they didn’t know what form it would take, but they were certain another attack was imminent. It was clear the warriors had resolved on some desperate measure. All the soldiers could do was wait and watch, gripped by a terrible, wordless suspense.
During the tense buildup to one charge, a shout went up about the tents. The soldiers’ own canvas tents, still standing, were obstructing their view of the approaching warriors. From Gibson’s position, John Grady yelled to him, “Come on, kid. ” Along with a few others, the two men sprinted to the tents and hastily loosened the guideline ropes, causing the canvas shelters to collapse.
Just as Grady and Gibson made a dash for Captain Powell’s tent, First Sergeant Hoover’s voice rang out, ordering them back to cover immediately. The defenders in the corral were stretched too thin. They couldn’t afford to send men to every threatened point. Recognizing this, the Lakota shifted their approach.
They identified a key vulnerability: a steep, concealing drop-off just to the north. Abandoning another mounted charge, warriors now dismounted and used this natural terrain as cover, inching perilously close to the perimeter. From the edge of the drop-off, skilled marksmen began targeting the soldiers with deadly accuracy. On that threatened north side, R.
J. Smith worked his Spencer rifle and revolvers relentlessly, prudently saving two final pistol rounds as a last resort should the warriors ever break through. He would later reflect that in all his prior experience, he had never seen indigenous fighters endure such punishment with such resolve. They had, as he put it, brought all their sand with them.
The defenders’ own resolve was tested early. Private Henry Haggerty was shot through the left shoulder but continued to work his rifle with his right hand. His comrades kept word of his injury quiet, fearing it would demoralize the others. But some wounds couldn’t be hidden.
On the west side, Lieutenant Jenness was shot in the head and killed instantly. Littman tried to move a dead mule to shield the body, but it was too heavy. Sergeant Robertson instead laid a wagon cover over him. The casualties mounted.
Shortly after, Tommy Doyle, stationed next to R. J. Smith on the north side, was shot in the forehead. Private Haggerty, still fighting, was hit a second time and died.
For hours, the Lakota pressure was relentless, threatening to finally overwhelm the men in the wagon boxes. The dismounted marksmen to the north proved especially lethal—every soldier killed that day was hit by fire from that direction. Slowly, the hostiles began working their way clockwise around the corral, launching sudden rushes toward the boxes, only to be driven back each time by desperate volleys. Conditions inside the enclosure were horrific.
Beyond the constant fear of death, the deafening noise and thick, acrid gun smoke were overwhelming. As it was a corral, the ground was littered with old animal dung, now set alight by fire arrows launched by the attackers. The combined stench and smoke were choking. Thirst became a critical concern.
As canteens ran dry, word passed that there was water in two kettles stowed under a wagon just west of the corral. Under covering fire from the north side, two men crawled out, retrieved the kettles, and dragged them back to the desperate defenders. Securing that water was a small mercy, but it did nothing to stem the relentless assault. By this point, the assault was coming from both the east and the north, with hundreds more warriors looking on from the surrounding hills.
Two more privates went down, one shot in the shoulder and another in the thigh. The soldiers had been locked in a desperate close-quarters fight for nearly four hours. Lakota warriors had pushed to within mere feet of the wagon boxes. The situation looked grim.
Then something took everyone by complete surprise: a cannon shot. Major Ben Smith, the fort’s second-in-command, had been ordered to lead a quick reaction force to rescue Company C. Warriors had also appeared near Fort Phil Kearny itself that morning, and observers posted on Pilot Hill could clearly see the battle smoke rising from the wagon box corral. Major Smith advanced with a column of 100 soldiers, bringing along a mountain howitzer and 10 supply wagons.
The assumption back at the fort was that Company C had suffered devastating losses, if they hadn’t been wiped out entirely. The cannon blast from Smith’s column served a dual purpose: to scatter the warriors and to signal any surviving soldiers that help was almost there. In his official report, Major Smith wrote that upon arriving, he saw evidence of a stubborn and severe fight. The relief force was met with ecstatic celebration by the bone-weary defenders.
The post surgeon, Dr. Samuel Horton, gave every survivor a hearty swig of whiskey from his keg. Upon returning to Fort Phil Kearny, the post commander declared that every man who fought in the wagon boxes would receive a medal. Exact casualty numbers from the fight are notoriously difficult to confirm.
The army’s losses were recorded as three killed and two wounded at the corral itself, with another three soldiers killed at the earlier side camp. Regarding the Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, Captain Powell’s official report estimated their losses at roughly 60 killed and another 120 wounded. In the years since, claimed casualty figures have swung wildly, from over a thousand down to just a handful. Whatever the true human cost, the federal government had already decided how to handle Red Cloud’s War.
They calculated that pursuing peace would be far less expensive than continuing a war. In fact, a peace commission had been established even before the wagon box fight took place. This led to the signing of another treaty at Fort Laramie in 1868. As part of its terms, the army agreed to abandon the forts lining the Bozeman Trail.
In a twist of history, this concession was somewhat symbolic. The nearing completion of the transcontinental railroad would soon have made the Bozeman Trail obsolete regardless. Nevertheless, Red Cloud had achieved a definitive victory—one of the rare instances where a Native American tribe successfully forced the United States government to back down. The soldiers who fought side by side in the wagon boxes eventually scattered to their separate destinies.
Max Littman, the German immigrant who fought from behind a salt barrel, left the army in 1869. Sam Gibson made the army his lifelong career, serving for decades across the western frontier. John Jenness, the lieutenant killed in the corral, was first buried at the Fort Phil Kearny Cemetery. His remains were later reinterred at the Custer National Cemetery on the Little Bighorn battlefield, where he rests today beside other officers who fell during Red Cloud’s War.
So what became of Captain James Powell? The post returns from Fort Phil Kearny for February 1868 hold a brief, telling entry beside his name: he was relieved from active duty under special order number six. Following the wagon box fight, the post surgeon examined Powell and concluded that his old combat injuries rendered him unfit for further duty. Powell applied for a leave of absence and departed Fort Phil Kearny for good in October 1867.
He tried his hand at farming for a while before finally settling down with his wife in Peoria, Illinois. Alongside his physical wounds, there were whispers of struggles with his mental well-being in the years that followed. He spent the final 15 years of his life secluded within his Peoria home, passing away in 1903.
While James Powell wasn’t killed on the battlefield, he unquestionably gave his life and service to his country.