Fort Phil Kearny State Historic Site

Colonel Henry Carrington's troops began the fort on July 13, 1866, on a bench between the Piney creeks, to guard the Bozeman Trail through Powder River country the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho had never agreed to give up. A stockade that size needed timber, and the wood trains hauling it down from the pinery in the mountains were attacked again and again for the two years the fort stood.

On August 2, 1867, warriors struck the woodcutters' camp on Little Piney Creek, some five miles to the west. Captain James Powell had lifted the boxes off fourteen wagons and set them in an oval as a corral, and he and about thirty soldiers and civilians fought from behind them for most of the day, firing through holes punched in the wood. They had just been issued breech-loading Springfield rifles, converted from muzzleloaders, and some seven thousand rounds, and the ammunition saved them. Lieutenant John Jenness was among the handful of defenders killed before a relief column came out from the fort. Powell claimed sixty warriors killed; later estimates run about half that, and whether Red Cloud himself was there is uncertain.

The fort, the Fetterman battlefield and the Wagon Box site were made a National Historic Landmark together in 1960. The state keeps an interpretive center and a reconstructed stretch of stockade on the fort grounds, and the Wagon Box site has its own memorial a few miles away.