The Wagon Box Fight

The tide of war swung back to favor
the soldiers on August 2 of 1867. At
what has become known as "The
Wagon Box Fight, " outside of Fort
Phil Kearny , Captain James W. Powell
and a detail of 31 men were attacked
by a great horde of Red
Colud's Sioux warriors numbering
several thousand. As in the Nelson
Story battle, Captain powell had had a
surprise for the Sioux. A short time
before, the command had been issued
S p r i n g f i e l d rifles converted by a
"trapdoor" breech from muzzle-loaders
to breechloaders of 50-70 caliber.
Powell's men had plenty of copper
cartridges and they poured such a
rapid and withering fire into the
Sioux that they were forced to withdraw
with great losses.

A tragic personal note in 1867

wasthe shooting of John Bozeman, for

whom the Bozeman Trail had been

named. Bozeman was killed by a

Model 1841 "Mississippi" rifle, which

had somehow come into possession

of a Blackfoot Indian.

Another costly repulse for the Indians

near Fort C.F. Smith on the

Big Horn River was further repayment

for the Fetterman massacre. In 1868,

at a fork of the Republican

River, in what was Known as "The

Beecher Island Fight," fifty cavalrymen

armed with breechloaders stood

off 700 Cheyennes. But there was

more hard fighting to come. The Indians

became more desperate when,

in 1869, the railroad which had cut

through their hunting grounds Iinked

East and West. With the railroad

come settlements and into the settlements

came hunters seeking quick

money by harvesting buffalo hides.

By this time Sharps and Remington

had developed strong breech-loading

rifles shooting long, powerful metallic

cartridges. Armed with Sharps

rifles 28 buffalo hunters and a woman

held off a war party of 1000 Indians

at Adobe Walls. Among these men

were Billy Dixon, a famous scout,

and W.B. (Bat) Masterson, later to

become famous as a lawman.

The goverment gave tacit approval

to the wanton destruction of the

buffalo herds. They reasoned that the

West was an area which providence

had provided for an expanding population

and once the Indians were deprived

of their food supply they could

be contained on limited reservations

and easily controlled. While idealistic

in conception, government ambitions

were somewhat brutal in their fulfillment .

Turning the empty plains into

farms and ranches, converting the

trails to railroads with towns and cities

strung across the continent was a

nice dream for the white man but the

nomadic red man was not readu to

give up his way of life'without a final

struggle. The 1870s and 1880s were

to see that struggle.

by:Gun Digest EDITED BY JOHN T. AMBER

Colts and Sharps

Going into the latter 1850s the horse
soldiers in the West received some im-
proved weapons. Big Colt 44 Army
pistols, called the Dragoon Model,
replaced the old single-shot pistols.
These were caplock six-shooters
weighing 4 pounds and were hard
shooting weapons. Some were fur-
nished with an attachable shoulder
stock, making them into a "pistol-
carbine." This experiment, along with
an 1855 Model Springfield single- shot
caplock pistol with attachable stock,
proved unpopular; the soldiers pre-
ferred the reliable breechloading
Sharps carbines, very popular
throughout the West. Some were used
by the Pony Express, by stagelines
and others as well as by the military.
In 1858, the same year as the gold
rush to Pike's Peak in Colorado, the
Butterfield Overland Mail completed
its first run, providing a link in trans-
contiental travel from coast to coast.
Two years later the pony Express
started the drumming of hoof beats
between St. Joseph, Missouri, and
Sacramemto, California. oter, although
Riders of the Pony Express pre-
ferred the Model 1851 Colt Navy pis-
tol, a 36-caliber six-shooter, although
a few carried the big 44 Dragooon Colt,
106 having been furnished by the
army and 25 by citizens of Sacramen-
to. The Colt"Navy" pistols were so
named more for the baval scene en-
graved on their cylinder than for their
use by that branch of the service.
The army supplied 60 of the 54-cali-
ber Model 1841 "Missisippi" rifiles
for use at the Pony Expreess relay
stations. The riders preferred the
light 52-caliber Sharps carbines when
it was necessary for them to carry a
shoulder arm.
When General James H. Carleton
led his California Volunteers into Ari-
zona in 1862 to drive the Confederate
forces back into Texas, his men were
armed with 58-caliber Springfield ri-
fled muskets, Sharps carbines, Colt
36 Navy pistols, and sabers. Team-
sters were given the big44 Colt Dra-
goon six-shooters.
Life for the army became increas-
ingly difficult as all kinds of people
filtered into the West. More stage-
lines crisscrossed the teritory, with
Ben Holladay emerging as "The
Stagecoach King," but soon to be
succeeded by Wells Fargo. By this
time the Henry, the Model 1866 Win-
chester (both 44 rimfere caliber) and
56-52 Spencer repeating rifles had ap-
peared. These, along with the ever-
effective double barrel shotguns,
were often part of the armament used
by stagecoach guards "riding shot-
gun."
After the War between the States.
pioneers like Charles Goodnight
Jesse Chisholm drove herds of cattle
north to Colorado and Wyoming, and
to railroad shipping points in Kansas.
Not satisfied with this, in 1866 Nel-
son Story decided to drive a herd of
3000 cattle up to the fine grazing
lands of Montana. The Sioux had
Bozeman Trail through Montana were
undermanned no escorts were avail-
able, but Story had an ace in the hole.
Somehow he had managed to obtain
a number of the first Remington roll-
ing-block 50-caliber breechloaders to
be sent into the west, and when the
Sioux attacked theu received such a
hot reception from Story and his men
that they were driven off with severe
losses.
It was a different story in December
of 1866 when Brevet Lieutenant Col-
onel William J. Fettermen led a de-
tachmeny of 81 men on a scouting
mission from Fort Phill Kearnu, a fort
on the Little Piney hated by the In-
dians. Armed primarily with Civil
War muzzle-loading rifled muskets
and some Sharps carbines, Fetter-
man's command was surprised by
2000 Sioux and shot down to the last
man. James Wheatley and Isaac Fish-
er had accompanied Fetterman, wish-
ing to experiment with their new Hen-
ry 44-caliber 16-shot rimfire rifles:
they were later found slumped over
piles of empty cartridge cased and
brutally mutilated.

i

The Conquest of California

The progress of this army may be
quickly summed up by stating that
they took New Mexico with hardly a
shot fired and quickly occupied that
vital territory. General Kearny, leav-
ing others to the occupation duties,
took a detachm in of about 100 men
and started out for C alifornia. A short
distance out of Sante Fe, Kearny met
Kit Carson on the trail. Carson was
returning from California to visit his
family in Taos. Akvised of the impor-
tant nature of Kearny's missionm, Car-
son agreed to turn around and guide
the soldiers to SanDiego for a ren-
dezvous with sailors and marines of
the Pacific Squadron commanded by
Commodore Robert F. Stockton. At
San Pascual, northeast of San Diego,
the Dragoons met a force of superbly
mounted Californianos and a desper-
ate fight ensued. They eventually
reached San Diego and, with a force
of men from the Pacific Squadron,
marched north to victories at the San
Gabriel River and at Los Angeles.
Fremont, in command of a force re-
cruited in northern California, took
so long on the way south that he ar-
rived just in time for the surrender.
Sailors and marines of the Pacific
Squadron were still using flintlock
muskets in 1846. Some had pikes and,
as has been mentioned, a group of
skirmishers had Colt revolving cylin-
der caplock carbines.
Following closely after the first ap-
pearance of U.S. soldiers in the South-
west under General Kearny, Col. Phil-
ip St. George Cooke was ordered to
build a wagon road from the Rio
Grande to the Pacific Ocean. Recruit-
ing a battalion comprised mostly of
Mormons, who had been stranded on
the way west while migrating from
Illinois, Cooke's "Mormon Battalion"
of about 400 men raised a lot of dust
and did a creditable job. One of the
conditions of their enlistment was
that they could retain thier arms when
mustered out in C"alifornia. They were
armed with an assortment of weapons,
mostly smoothbore muskets, but a
few of the fortunate ones had Model
1841 brass-mounted caplock rifles.
These excellent guns were 54 caliber
and are sometines called the "yager"
or "mississippi" rifle. they saw ser-
vice in many areas of the West and
were second only to the Hawken rifle
in efficiency and popularity.
While all this activity was going on
westward from the Missouri into the
Southwest, other trails farther north
felt the tread of venturesome Amer-
icans seeking a new life and land of
their own.
Following Captain L.E. de Bonne-
ville's expedition into Oregon in 1832,
the missionaries Whitman and Spald-
ing made the journey to christianize
the Indians. By 1846 the dispute
with England over the U.S.-Canadian
border was settled, and the Hudson's
Bay Company was forced to move its
posts up into British Columbia.
While they had been in the Oregon
Territory, however, many of those
"Northwest" flintlock trade guns
came into the hands of Indians of
that area.
With land in the Oregon Territory
open to homesteading, the trail to
Oregon through South Pass, Fort
Bridger and Fort Hall was rutted by
the passing of many wagons. In 1847
Brigham Young and his followers
swung southwest from Fort Bridger,
saw the great salt lake, and declared
"This is the place! " While the Mor-
mons in Utah obtained a number of
Colt cap and ball pistols and other
arms manufactured in the East, it
was not long before their own gun-
smiths were turning out weapons.
Among these artisans was Jonathon
Browning, father of John M. Brown-
ing, who was a greater western history-
maker than John Moses Browning,
whose inventions were eagrly sought
and used by Winchester, Colt, and
other prominent arms manufacturers!
By 1849 the stamped west got in
full swing--gold had been discovered
in California. Now the role of the
army was complicated and greatly ex-
panded. There were forts to build
and emigrants to be protected from
the Indians who were beginning to
get very restive over all this traffic
through lands which had been their
private preserves for years.