The Hayfield Fight occurred on August 1, 1867, during Red Cloud's War near Fort C. F. Smith, Montana. The engagement took place as part of ongoing conflict between the U.S. Army and Native American tribes in the region, involving a hay-cutting crew that required military protection in an area contested by Powder River warriors.
The fight involved 21 soldiers of the U.S. Army and a hay-cutting crew of nine civilians defending against an attack by several hundred Native Americans, mostly Cheyenne and Arapaho, with some Lakota Sioux. The soldiers were armed with newly issued breechloading Springfield Model 1866 rifles. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the American forces held defensive positions and successfully repelled the native warriors while inflicting casualties upon them.
While similar in circumstance and casualties to the Wagon Box Fight, which took place the next day near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, the Hayfield Fight has not received as much historical attention. In both engagements, the soldiers' defensive positions and their newly issued breechloading weapons are considered critical to their ability to withstand attacks by the larger forces of Powder River warriors. Following the Wagon Box Fight, which was the last major engagement of the war, native raids continued against travelers, soldiers, telegraph lines, and the Union Pacific Railway, which was under construction. The war was brought to an end the next year under treaty.
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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