On the morning of August 29, 1865, General Patrick Edward Connor's column, a few hundred soldiers with Pawnee scouts, came out of a draw and attacked an Arapaho village of about five hundred people camped in the bend of the Tongue River here. It was the camp of Black Bear and Old David, and many of its men were away fighting the Crow on the Bighorn, so it held mostly older men, women and children. The firing was indiscriminate. Women and children died with the warriors, Black Bear's son among the dead, and the soldiers burned some 250 lodges with the food stored in them and drove off the horse herd. They took about twenty women and children captive and later let them go. Counts of the Arapaho dead run from about thirty-three to more than sixty.
The men who could fight covered the flight of the rest up Wolf Creek, then turned on Connor and forced him back to the village. It was the only real fight of his Powder River Expedition, which ended with little else to show, and Connor was relieved of his command. Two and a half years earlier he had led the soldiers at the Bear River Massacre in Idaho. The survivors of the village became one more burden on the Arapaho bands that took them in.
The site is now a town park and campground on the Tongue River in Ranchester, with a monument to the attack.
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