The Bates Battlefield was the scene of an 1874 action in which an Arapaho encampment was attacked by U.S. Army forces under Captain Alfred E. Bates. The battlefield is a narrow valley in Hot Springs County, Wyoming, near the junction of the Big Horn Mountains and the Owl Creek Mountains. Variously called the Bates Battle, the Battle of Young's Point, the Battle of Snake Mountain and the Nowood Battle, the action was part of a campaign by forces under the command of Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan to protect the comparatively sedentary Shoshone under Chief Washakie from raids by their traditional enemies, the Northern Cheyenne, the Sioux and the Northern Arapaho.
In June 1874, "Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors decided to attack the Wind River Shoshones. As the invaders crossed the Big Horn Mountains, they had a disagreement about the purpose of their trip. Some claimed it was a raid for murder and the spoils of war; others said it was to steal horses. Because of the disagreement, the Arapahoes refused to participate."
Sheridan ordered Bates to raid the Arapaho camp, reported to comprise between 40 and 112 lodges. On July 1, 1874, Bates set forth leading Company B, 2nd Cavalry with 63 cavalrymen, 20 white and Shoshone scouts under Lieutenant R.H. Young, and a party of 167 Shoshone under Washakie.
Bates led thirty cavalrymen and twenty Shoshone against the encampment, occupied by Black Coal's people, at daybreak on July 4. Lt. Young took his scouts around to the other end of the village. Fighting went well at first for Bates' force, but the Arapaho moved to a nearby height and began to fire down onto Bates' raiders. Bates withdrew from the village without recovering his own dead., suffering four killed and five or six wounded, while reporting 25 Arapaho killed and 100 wounded. Other reports indicate the Arapaho suffered as few as ten casualties. Bates captured 350 horses of the 1200 to 1400 head associated with the village. Bates blamed his lack of overall success on the noise made by the Shoshone. Accounts of the battle by different parties reveal wide discrepancies in perceptions of the motivation, progress, and outcome of the fight.
The Bates Battlefield was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Photographs of the Bates Battlefield at the National Park Service's NRHP database
Bates Battlefield at the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office
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.
This page covers Battle of Bates Creek — Powder River Expedition 1874. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
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