The Battle of Solomon’s Fork was a brief skirmish between Cheyenne warriors and a cavalry detachment of the United States Army that occurred on July 9, 1857, on the Solomon Fork of the Smoky Hill River in north-central Kansas Territory, near present-day Penokee. A punitive expedition led by Colonel Edwin "Bull" Sumner had been pursuing the Cheyenne since May in retaliation for attacks on emigrant wagon trains. A portion of Sumner's forces finally discovered a large Cheyenne war party waiting for them on the river's north bank.
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.
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