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LCPL Amarjit Pun and the Sterling Submachine Gun by WILL DABBS

The early 1960s saw a smoldering border dispute between East Malaysia and Indonesia bubble over into violent armed conflict. Note the Sterling submachine gun carried by the soldier in the foreground.

In the early 1960s, a tidy little war broke out along the border between Indonesia and East Malaysia on the island of Borneo. European colonialism had subdivided the planet into a bewildering amalgam of fiefdoms and protectorates, and the sundry peoples involved yearned to define themselves in the aftermath of the Second World War. On August 29, 1964, this tidy little war got quite messy.

Though typically small of stature, the Gurkhas are legendarily hard warriors.

Lance Corporal Amarjit Pun was the second-in-command for the point section of 10 Platoon, C Company, 2d Gurkha Rifles, on a company-strength patrol along the border south of Kumpang Langir. A company-sized element can be unwieldy on a protracted combat patrol, and all involved were looking forward to getting back to base for some rack time. However, as the patrol headed for home, they unwittingly walked into a kill zone.

 On the tail end of an extensive combat patrol, LCPL Amarjit Pun and his men were tired and ready to get home.

The ambush was of the classic sort. Indonesian infantry well concealed in the jungle underbrush allowed the Gurkhas to walk deep into their killing ground before initiating the ambush with a murderous rain of small arms fire. In the first salvo, Lance Corporal Amarjit’s section commander was grievously wounded, while one of his NCOs was killed outright. The light machinegun team was also taken out of action. The Number 1 gunner was killed and his Number 2 badly hurt. Another rifleman was hit as well. The situation for LCPL Amarjit’s Gurkhas looked grave.

The ambush is a staple of Infantry warfare. An enemy unit launches a surprise attack from a position of stealthy advantage. The defending troops have only moments to respond.

It is the most basic tenet of Infantry training to instinctively assault through an ambush. This goes against every natural urge a man might have in combat. When faced with murderous fire from an unexpected quarter, the natural response is to drop or hide. However, hesitating inside a kill zone equals violent gory death.

A buddy who was there once told me that mobility was life on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion.

A friend who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944, once told me that stagnation meant dying. He said the fire coming from the German pillboxes was indeed overwhelming, but that combat leaders on the ground pushed their men forward into the chaos. He explained that he charged across the beach to cover, but that every member of his small unit that hesitated on that beach died.

 To survive a proper ambush an attacked unit must respond quickly and instinctively with overwhelming violence of action.

Infantry soldiers are therefore trained on immediate action drills in response to an ambush. They are expected to react instinctively without a great deal of conscious thought. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of LCPL Amarjit Pun, this compact little man seized the initiative and took charge.

Turning the Tide

The magazine-fed Bren light machinegun was the unit’s most effective weapon. Getting the Bren back into action was therefore the top priority.

LCPL Amarjit charged forward and retrieved the fallen L4 Bren gun intending on using the discarded weapon on the attackers to help break the ambush. As he hefted the heavy gun another burst of fire raked over him, striking the Bren and putting it out of action. A lesser man might at this point have run or broken. LCPL Amarjit, however, was a Gurkha.

LCPL Amarjit Pun’s primary weapon was the compact Sterling submachine gun. The young Gurkha put his SMG to good use this day.

Amarjit Pun stood his ground in the center of the worn jungle track and unlimbered his British-issue L2A3 Sterling submachinegun. Fire poured in from Indonesian troops concealed a mere ten yards away. LCPL Amarjit thumbed his selector to full auto and squeezed the trigger, raking the jungle with 9mm rounds.

Aggressively run, the Sterling submachine gun produces a prodigious volume of fire.

Amarjit emptied his Sterling at its cyclic rate and dropped the empty magazine. All the while he shouted encouragement to his comrades. He fished out a second 34-round mag, shoved it into the gun, jacked the bolt back, and emptied it at the nearby Indonesians as well. Throughout it all, heavy fire from the ambushing soldiers ripped the jungle and tore Amarjit’s patrol to ribbons. LCPL Amarjit burned through magazines as fast as he could cycle the gun.

The Weapons

The Bren gun was a staple among Commonwealth forces for decades. The rimmed .303 cartridge fired by the original versions demanded the sharply curved magazine.

While the Bren light machinegun has become irrevocably associated with British and Commonwealth troops fighting everywhere from North Africa in World War 2 to the Falklands, the gun was actually a Czech design. A license-produced version of the Czech ZGB 33 light machinegun, the ZGB 33 was itself a modified variant of the ZB vz. 26. Vaclav Holek was the primary designer. The name Bren is a portmanteau derived from Brno, the Czech city in Moravia where the gun was designed, and Enfield, the site of the Royal Small Arms Factory.

The L4A4 Bren was the center of mass of LCPL Amarjit’s Infantry section. 

The earliest Bren gun weighed about 25 pounds and fed from a sharply curved magazine located atop the weapon to accommodate the rimmed .303 British round. The L4A4 Bren used by LCPL Amarjit’s men was the later version rechambered to accept the rimless 7.62x51mm cartridge. This variant can be identified at a glance by its straighter magazine. This 30-round box magazine was intentionally designed such that it would be interchangeable with that of the L1A1 SLR FAL rifles used by British forces at the time.

During the earlier Malay Emergency (spuriously named because British insurers wouldn’t pay claims incurred during a declared war) there was a $1,000 bounty offered for every Bren gun surrendered by Malayan insurgents.

The Bren is indeed heavy in action, but its sedate 500-rpm rate of fire renders it thoroughly controllable. The Bren served in a similar role as the American BAR. Unlike the BAR, the Bren enjoyed a quick change barrel capability. The reliable tilting bolt, gas-operated action rendered splendid service in dirty environments. Additionally, while the gun was limited by its magazine feed system, the top-mounted design made mag changes fast. Each man in a British Infantry squad typically carried spare magazines for the Bren.

The Sterling submachine gun (right) was a thoroughly civilized and generally improved version of the previous Sten gun.

The Sterling submachine gun was an evolutionary improvement on the Sten that helped the British win World War 2. Developed in 1944, the Sterling was the brainchild of George William Patchett, the principal designer at the Sterling Armaments Company of Dagenham. Trial versions of the Sterling actually saw limited action in the closing months of World War 2, specifically with British Commando forces and at Arnhem with the British 1st Parachute Division during Operation Market Garden.

The Sterling was one of the most advanced open-bolt SMGs ever produced. More than 400,000 copies saw service.

The Sterling generally favored the Sten that inspired it but represented an improvement across the board. The pistol grip was set at the rough center of balance of the gun, and the weapon fed from a superb side-mounted 34-round curved magazine. The Sterling was designed from the outset to feed from either Sterling or Sten magazines.

The Sterling represents a balance between ease of manufacture and tactical effectiveness.

The Sterling is built around a drawn steel tube milled out and perforated as needed. It is finished out in a peculiar bake-on crinkle finish. This finish seems strangely similar to pickup truck bed liner. While early Sterlings featured a charging handle slot milled in line with the ejection port, production models were moved slightly higher.

A skilled gunsmith can combine a demilled Sterling parts kit with a transferable Sten tube to form a hybrid Stenling.

One curious aspect of the Sterling design as it relates to American shooters is that the gun can be legally constructed from a registered transferable Sten tube. The BATF has allowed enterprising gunsmiths to adapt Sten tubes to accept demilled Sterling parts kits. The final product is referred to as a Stenling in the vernacular. As the Sterling is a markedly more pleasant and effective weapon than the Sten, this is a popular conversion.

The Sterling saw extensive service with the Indian armed forces.

The Sterling’s delightful balance and sedate 550-rpm rate of fire make it unusually controllable. The gun fires from the open bolt and is selective fire via a thumb-operated selector level oriented above the trigger. The collapsible stock on the Sterling is a bit complex but remains nonetheless rigid and effective.

The bloke shown here in the foreground is packing a Sterling SMG.

The Sterling is one of the most controllable open-bolt subguns I have ever run. The telescoping recoil system of the German MP40 is perhaps incrementally smoother, but the Sterling still runs like a champ. The Sterling is also unusually compact and handy. This makes it the ideal weapon for combat leaders and second-line support troops who might need their hands free for other tasks.

The Rest of the Story

 Jungle combat is frequently close range and pitiless. Note the early .303 Bren carried by the Number 2 man in this patrol.  The last three troopers are packing Australian Owen guns.

LCPL Amarjit stood his ground on that tiny jungle trail, dumping magazine after magazine of full auto 9mm fire into the Indonesian troops. His furious close-range assault broke the back of the ambush and bought enough time for the rest of the company to maneuver in place and displace the enemy. The Indonesians subsequently retreated into the jungle. Amarjit’s Gurkhas gathered up their casualties and returned to their base camp.

Despite the furious exchange of fire, LCPL Amarjit Pun was miraculously unhurt.

LCPL Amarjit was unhurt during the chaotic exchange. However, his uniform and equipment had been pierced by Indonesian bullets in three different places. The combination of LCPL Amarjit’s unswerving bravery in the face of the withering enemy attack and the heavy volume of automatic fire from his Sterling submachine gun broke the Indonesian ambush and prevented further casualties to his Gurkha unit.

LCPL Amarjit Pun was awarded the Military Medal for his bravery during this exchange. This is a 1918-vintage version of the decoration.

LCPL Amarjit Pun earned the Military Medal for his actions on that jungle trail back in 1964. The Military Medal was established in 1918 and was used to recognize acts of valor among other ranks such as NCOs and Warrant Officers. Recipients were granted a modest stipend and entitled to include the post-nominal letters “MM” after their names in official correspondence. Though the award was discontinued in 1993 in favor of the Military Cross which is granted to all ranks, the Military Medal still recognizes exceptional bravery in combat.

Soldiers throughout the centuries fight for their comrades on either side. Vapid slogans and lofty ideals don’t count for much amidst the fury of a dank jungle ambush.

Wars are fought for territory, greed, and all manner of lofty nationalistic motivations. However, men invariably fight for their buddies. When the incoming fire seemed overwhelming and his comrades were falling LCPL Amarjit Pun unlimbered his Sterling submachine gun and won the day. Sometimes big things do indeed come in small packages.

The L4A4 Bren gun soldiered on all the way through the First Gulf War.
The Sterling SMG was ultimately supplanted in British service by the L85 assault rifle.

 

 The Indonesian-Malaysian Confrontation fought in Borneo was one of the world’s first conflicts to see relatively widespread use of airmobile helicopter assets. 
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The Wagon Box Fight, 1867 by KERRY DRAKE

Sioux and Cheyenne warriors who gathered west of Fort Phil Kearny on the morning of Aug. 2, 1867, had several reasons to feel confident as they prepared to attack civilian woodcutters and the U.S. Army troops assigned to protect them.

Nine months earlier, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors had attacked troops along the Bozeman Trail about four miles north of the fort, which is located near present-day Story, Wyo, on the east flank of the Bighorn Mountains halfway between the present towns of Buffalo and Sheridan. Tribal leaders sent out a small band of decoys that managed to lure Capt. William J. Fetterman into an area where he and all 80 of his men were ambushed and killed. At the time, it was the worst military defeat ever suffered by the Army on the Great Plains.

 

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On Aug. 2, 1867, Oglala Sioux warriors attacked troops and civilian woodcutters replenishing Fort Phil Kearny’s wood supply several miles northwest of the fort. Wikipedia.

 

Red Cloud’s War

In the summer of 1867, looking to repeat their success, Indians—furious that white men the year before had built three forts along the new Bozeman Trail across their land in the Powder River Basin—planned attacks on two of the forts. The federal government contended the forts and defense of the trail were necessary because the route offered the quickest path to gold mine discoveries in Montana. The conflict became known as Red Cloud’s War.

 

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Oglala Sioux Chief Red Cloud led the tribe’s resistance to the U.S. Army’s incursion into the Powder River Basin in the 1860s. Whether he was at the Wagon Box Fight is unclear. First People.

 

Sioux Chief Red Cloud had vowed to kill every white man found on the Indians’ land. The Indians harassed troops and white travelers more or less continually. The next large attacks after the Fetterman massacre came in August.

One contingent of warriors battled soldiers and civilians at the Hayfield Fight on Aug. 1, 1867, near Fort C.F. Smith on the Bighorn River in southern Montana Territory. Early the next morning, Red Cloud and more than 1,000 warriors gathered and attacked woodcutters and soldiers near a spot about six miles northwest of Fort Phil Kearny.

What happened over the course of six hours on August 2 became known as the Wagon Box Fight, a relatively small battle that became well known for several disparate reasons. It was the Army’s first chance to claim victory after the Fetterman disaster, though in retrospect the fight seems more like a draw. At the time and since, there were widely conflicting reports on the number of Indian casualties, and for this reason too the fight continues to draw the interest of students of the Indian Wars.

Finally, the fight is important in the history of tactics because it was the first time a large force of mounted tribesmen faced sustained fire from relatively rapid-shooting, breech-loading rifles. The warriors’ old tactics of closing fast on horseback for close combat with their enemies no longer worked—and they paid a heavy price.

The wood supply

Hundreds of infantry and cavalry soldiers based at Fort Phil Kearny needed a steady supply of wood from forests on the slopes of the Bighorn Mountains for construction at the fort, as well as a constant supply for fuel for cooking and for the next winter’s heating.

Protecting the contracted civilian woodcutters was thus one of the Army’s most important jobs if the troops were to survive in hostile country. The wood line where the prairie met the mountain forest was about six miles from the fort. Wagon trains of woodcutters and their soldier guards suffered constant small attacks during the entire two years Fort Phil Kearny was in existence.

 

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View toward the Bighorn Mountains and the site of the Wagon Box Fight, from the reconstructed stockade of Fort Phil Kearny. Vasily Vlasov, Panoramio.

 

On August 2, the tribes tried something much larger. The Indians held a distinct advantage because their foes had split into two groups. Civilian woodcutters decided to stay at a camp near the wood line, about a mile from a makeshift stock corral the soldiers had fashioned from14 wagon boxes, removed from their running gear and set on the ground. Logs were transported from the woodcutting camp to the fort resting directly on the running gear.

A wagon-box corral

The wagon boxes were 10 feet long, two and a half feet high and four and a half feet wide. The wood was only about an inch thick, with no lining. The boxes eventually served as the main line of defense against a massed Indian force determined to overrun the corral and the 32 men using it as cover.

Capt. James W. Powell was in command of C Company, 26th Infantry, which at the end of July had relieved the company previously guarding the woodcutters, and so his troops were new to the job. He set up operations at the corral.

Early on August 2, Powell sent 13 men out from the corral to guard the woodcutters’ camp and another 14 to escort wagons carrying wood to and from the fort. That left the captain and Lt. John C. Jenness at the corral with 26 enlisted men.

The soldiers at the corral were joined by two civilian teamsters who had left the fort that morning to hunt deer. The pair saw Indian smoke signals and tried to get back to the fort, but wound up at the corral instead.

The first attack

The Indians set their sights on the camp’s mule herd, with 200 warriors on foot trying to scatter the animals, but the mule herders kept the attackers at bay until a new wave of Indians managed to drive off the herd and set fire to the woodcutters’ camp. Simultaneously, about 500 Indians attacked the woodcutters. Then the woodcutters and their soldier guards tried to move toward the fort, bypassing the corral.

Three soldiers and four civilian contractors were killed, but Powell managed to divert the Indians’ attention by mounting an attack on the rear of the Indian force from the corral, which allowed the rest of the woodcutting camp’s occupants to hide in the timber or get to the fort. Within 15 minutes, an estimated 800 Indians on horseback surrounded Powell and his men at the makeshift corral.

Using field glasses to scan the area, Lt. Jenness reportedly told the men he spotted Red Cloud at the top of a hill with other Indian leaders. It has never been verified that Red Cloud was at the scene, and because the lieutenant didn’t know what the man looked like, Jenness may have misidentified another chief.

Trapdoor Springfields

Unlike Fetterman’s troops, who carried muzzle-loaders that could only fire three rounds a minute at most, the men at the wagon boxes were equipped with new breech-loading Springfield trapdoor rifles. Seven hundred of these weapons were brought to the fort a short time before by wood contractor J.R. Porter of the Gilmore & Proctor firm. They could fire 15 to 20 rounds per minute. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been any time for target shooting, and Army weapons training was known to be dubious at best. Still, most of the men managed to at least become familiar with the new rifles in the weeks since the weapons had arrived.

 

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New, breech-loading Springfield Model 1866

 

The soldiers punched two-inch holes into the wooden wagon boxes so they could fire through them. Yokes, bags of grain, kegs and other equipment were stacked between wagons for protection. Some men fired over the tops of the boxes, and blankets covered the tops to hide the men’s positions and provide limited protection from the arrows raining down on them.

The Indians were primarily armed with bows and arrows, lances and war clubs, though some had firearms captured months earlier during the Fetterman attack. They didn’t have much ammunition, however. The soldiers at the Wagon Box Fight began the battle with 7,000 rounds on hand—and this large supply saved their lives.

Once the attack began, most of Powell’s men kept their ammunition in their hats. Although this was convenient, it left their heads exposed to the sun and its sweltering heat. In addition, the troops had to deal with the stench: Indians coated their arrows with burning pitch that set fire to hay and mule and horse dung.

The soldiers’ superior firepower drove back the initial wave of Indians and they retreated to about 600 yards from the corral and spent the next few hours making separate attacks on foot.

A long fight

Powell was at one end of the corral, with Jenness stationed at the other. Participants later reported that a few Indians managed to get within 5 feet of the corral, but none penetrated the barrier.

Jenness was shot in the head and killed, as were two privates, Henry Haggerty and Thomas Boyle. Two other privates were wounded in the fight.

A teamster, R.J. Smyth, later recalled the lieutenant’s bravery during the battle. “Lt. Jenness had just cautioned me not to expose my person, and to hold my fire until I was sure of getting an Indian at each shot,” Smyth said. “He had moved a few feet from my box when he was shot through the head, I think he died instantly. He was a grand, good man, and a fearless officer. I told him to keep under cover. He stated he was compelled to expose himself in order to look after his men.”

Several soldiers wrote firsthand accounts of the ordeal. Sgt. Samuel S. Gibson, who at 18 was the youngest soldier at the corral, recorded the most detailed and dramatic version of the event. He had been dispatched to guard duty at the woodcutters’ camp and had a skirmish with several Indians before he and another soldier made it safely to the corral.

“The whole plain was alive with Indians shooting at us, and the tops of the boxes were ripped and literally torn to slivers by their bullets,” he wrote. “How we ever escaped with such slight loss I have never been able to understand, but we made every shot tell in return, and soon the whole plain in front of us was strewn with dead and dying Indians and ponies. It was a horrible sight!”

Gibson added, “The Indians were amazed at the rapidity and continuity of our fire. They did not know we had been equipped with breech-loaders and supposed that after firing the first shot they could ride us down before we could reload.”

 

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The monument at the site of the Wagon Box Fight was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936. Wikipedia.

 

Sometime between noon and 1 p.m., hundreds of warriors led by Red Cloud’s nephew charged the corral on horseback, hurtling toward the wagons in a V-shaped wedge. Powell later recalled that things looked very bleak at that moment, especially because ammunition was running low and his men were exhausted from holding off the Indians for so long.

After Indians on horseback were initially forced to retreat from the corral area, they tried to attack on foot over the next three hours. On Sullivant’s Ridge, a hill to the east, were several hundred Indians out of range who had been watching the battle “like spectators,” but it appeared to Powell that they would enter the fray.

A howitzer rescue

Just at that moment, though, Powell said he heard the sound of a howitzer shell hit and saw a rescue party led by Maj. Benjamin F. Smith, who had 100 men with him.

“The shell fired was in the direction of the Indians [on the hill], but fell short, as I anticipated,” Smith noted in his report, “but [it] seemed to disconcert them as a number of mounted Indians who were riding rapidly toward my command turned and fled.”

The Indians who had been attacking the corral as well as the ones watching the action all retreated.

Smith, arriving at the corral, was shocked to find that most of the men had survived the intense encounter. He had expected them all to be dead. “It was a hard lot to look at. The day was hot and the sun was beating down on them in the wagon beds,” he wrote. “The smoke from their guns had colored their faces and they looked as though they had used burnt cork on their faces.”

Each survivor received a big drink of whiskey from a keg brought along on the rescue mission by the post surgeon, Dr. Samuel M. Horton.

Indian casualties

 

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Text on the 1936 monument overstates the number of Indian warriors and casualties. Vasily Vlasov, Panoramio.

 

Estimates of Indian casualties in the Wagon Box Fight, though, vary enormously; they range from two dead to 1,500. To date no one has come up with a definitive answer about why there is no agreement on the numbers.

“No [other] event has had more wild, inaccurate tales written concerning it,” writer Vie Willits Garber noted in a 1964 Annals of Wyoming article.

Two respected historians–Stanley Vestal and George Hyde–as well as several Sioux leaders said only six warriors were killed and six more wounded.

But there are accounts of people who later talked about the battle with Red Cloud. They said the chief told them that the count was much higher. Gen. Grenville M. Dodge interviewed Red Cloud in 1885, and he told him more than 1,100 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahos were killed or wounded at the fight. A Sioux medicine man, whose name was not recorded, visited the post of Col. Richard I. Dodge at North Platte in the fall of 1867. He told the colonel that the total of dead and injured was 1,137, and that figure was widely reported the same year as the battle.

Hyde’s book, Red Cloud’s Folk was published in 1937, based on interviews Hyde had conducted decades earlier. Hyde said that late in his life Red Cloud, who died in 1909, claimed not to remember the Wagon Box Fight at all. The historian said that was unlikely, given the large number of warriors in the battle and the fact that it marked the chief’s last major fight.

In his official report, Powell estimated 60 Indians killed and 120 wounded–figures held up to ridicule by some historians as “wildly exaggerated,” while his Army superiors believed he was being incredibly modest about the body count. Enlisted men at the scene supported much larger claims, with various shooters putting the number of dead between 300 and 800.

The account of at least one Indian warrior, an Oglala Sioux named Fire Thunder, supports the claim of heavy Indian losses. He described “dead warriors and horses piled all around the [wagon] boxes and scattered over the plain.”

In 1969, at a reenactment of the Wagon Box Fight near Sheridan, Wyo., some Indian descendants of the participants claimed Indian casualties were between 1,200 and 1,500.

Hyde said while he knew of no written accounts of the battle by Indians, they did not regard the fight as a defeat. If the reports of six dead and six wounded Indians were accurate, as Hyde believed them to be, he said they inflicted more damage to the white men at the camp and the corral because they killed a total of six soldiers and four civilians, plus capturing a large number of horses and mules.

Aftermath

In the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, with the transcontinental railroad nearing completion and opening up a new, shorter route to the Montana gold fields, the government agreed to abandon the forts on the Bozeman Trail, to make the western half of Dakota Territory a large reservation for the Sioux and to allow the tribes to hunt buffalo in the Powder River Basin of what are now Wyoming and Montana. The tribes burned the abandoned forts shortly after the Army left.

The Wagon Box Fight was the last major battle of Red Cloud’s war against the white men he felt had invaded the land they had promised to his people. Some historians credit the battle with teaching both sides valuable tactical lessons. To the Army, it was now clear that Red Cloud commanded thousands of hostile warriors, not just a small number of malcontents.

The tribes, meanwhile, became convinced that they did not have a chance against large numbers of troops unless they could secure similar firepower, which they did by the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

 

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FortWiki.com. Click to enlarge

 

RESOURCES

  • Bate, Walter N. “Eyewitness Reports of the Wagon Box Fight.” Annals of Wyoming 41, no. 2 (Oct. 1969): 193-201.
  • FortWiki.com. “Sioux War of 1866-1868.” Accessed Feb. 28, 2014 at http://fortwiki.com/Sioux_War_of_1866-1868.
  • Garber, Vie Willits. “The Wagon Box Fight.” Annals of Wyoming 36, no. 1 (April 1964): 61-63.
  • Hyde, George E. Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians. Vol. 15, The Civilization of the American Indian. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975, 159-160.
  • Keenan, Jerry. The Wagon Box Fight: An Episode of Red Cloud’s War. Conshohocken, Pa.: Savas Publishing Co., 2000.
  • militaryphotos.net “The Wagon Box Fight August 2, 1867” Accessed Feb. 25, 2014 at http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?195915-The-Wagon-Box-Fight-August-2-1867.
  • Murray, Robert A. “The Wagon Box Fight: A Centennial Appraisal. Annals of Wyoming 39, no. 1 (April 1967): 105-107.
  • The Powell Project. “James Powell Reports on the Wagon Box Fight.” The commanding officer’s official report after the battle, accessed Feb. 25, 2014 at http://powellproject.tumblr.com/post/52483831856/james-powell-reports-on-the-wagon-box-fight.
  • “The Wagon Box Fight.” Annals of Wyoming 7, no. 2 (Oct. 1930): 394-401.

Illustrations

  • The image of the model 1866 trapdoor Springfield rifle is from Wikipedia. Used with thanks. The photos of the monument and the main sign at the Wagon Box Fight site are also from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
  • The map of the battle site is from FortWiki.com. Used with thanks.
  • The photo of the monument plaque and the view toward the mountains from the reconstructed Fort Phil Kearny stockade are by Vasily Vlasov, from Panoramio. Used with thanks.
  • The photo of Red Cloud is from First People, a child-friendly site about Native Americans and members of the First Nations, with more than 1400 legends, 400 agreements and treaties, 10,000 pictures, clipart, Native American books, posters, seed bead earrings, Native American jewelry, possible bags and more. Used with thanks.