The Battle of the Tongue River, sometimes referred to as the Connor Battle, was an engagement of the Powder River Expedition that occurred on August 29, 1865. In the battle, U.S. soldiers and Indian scouts attacked and destroyed an Arapaho village.
Major General Grenville M. Dodge assumed command of the Department of the Missouri in 1865. Dodge ordered a punitive campaign to suppress the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho Indians who had been raiding overland mail routes, wagon trains, and military posts along the Oregon and Overland trails. He gave tactical command of the Powder River Expedition, as it was called, to Brigadier General Patrick Edward Connor, commander of the District of Utah.
The expedition was a multi-pronged affair involving 2,600 soldiers, civilians, and Indian scouts. Three columns of soldiers were to descend upon the Powder River Country of Wyoming and Montana, unite, and "make vigorous war upon the Indians and punish them so that they will be forced to keep the peace." Connor was in overall command and led the westernmost or left prong of the expedition. The forces under his direct command consisted of 380 soldiers: 6 companies of the 6th Michigan Cavalry, Company F of the 7th Iowa Cavalry, and Companies E and K of the 11th Ohio Cavalry. Also included were civilian guides headed by mountain man Jim Bridger, 95 Pawnee scouts under Captain Frank J. North, 84 Omaha and Winnebago scouts under Captain E. W. Nash, and 195 civilian teamsters. Connor left Fort Laramie on July 30, 1865, marching north. He established a fort on the upper Powder River which he named Fort Connor (later renamed Fort Reno) and left some of his men there to staff the fort.
Jim Bridger saw the smoke of an Indian village and Connor sent out Frank North and two Pawnees to find the village. On August 28, the scouts reported back that they had found the village about 35 miles west of Connor's force. Connor quickly collected his most mobile soldiers, consisting of about 200 soldiers with two mountain howitzer cannon and 40 Omaha and Winnebago and 30 Pawnee scouts, and marched that night toward the village. With Bridger leading them, they reached the village about eight a.m. the next morning.
The soldiers charged the village, having achieved complete surprise. The howitzers pounded the village while the soldiers rushed in, catching the Indians unprepared. In the melee, there was a great deal of indiscriminate firing and women and children were killed as well as warriors. The village, led by Black Bear and Medicine Man, had about 500 inhabitants. Many of the men were absent for a raid on the Crow along the Big Horn River, leaving mostly old men, women, and children in the village. After the initial attack the few able warriors in the village put up an effective defense, retreating about twelve miles up Wolf Creek while covering the flight of the women and children.
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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