The Kidder Fight occurred during Hancock's War, a conflict between the United States Army and the Lakota and Cheyenne peoples. Following the Dakota War of 1862, tensions remained high in the region as the U.S. military sought to maintain control and suppress Native American resistance. Governor Alexander Ramsey of Minnesota had called for United States Volunteers to organize in the state to support military campaigns, leading to the formation of units such as Hatch's Minnesota Cavalry Battalion under the command of Edwin Aaron Clark Hatch.
Lyman Stockwell Kidder, who had enlisted as a Private in Hatch's Battalion following these calls for volunteers, participated in the military operations of this period. On July 2, 1867, Kidder was killed during the engagement that became known as the Kidder Fight, also called the Kidder Massacre. The battle took place during the broader conflict of Hancock's War against the Lakota and Cheyenne.
Kidder's death in this engagement marked a significant moment in the American Indian Wars. As a military officer who had served during both the Civil War and the subsequent campaigns against Native American tribes, his death exemplified the continuing conflict between the United States Army and Indian nations in the post-Civil War period. The Kidder Fight became a notable engagement in the history of the Indian Wars, remembered as one of the conflicts during Hancock's War.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
11 US soldiers killed including Lt. Kidder; Indian losses unknown
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.