The Hayfield Fight

-


Private William Bunny applies some emergency doctoring after the Hayfield Fight, August 1st, 1867.
A party of 21 soldiers and 9 civilians were attacked by Red Cloud's Lakota Sioux, anywhere between 500 and 800 warriors.  Unknown to them, the soldiers had been issued breechloading Springfield Model 1866 rifles, a metallic cartridge affair.  The civilians were armed with repeating Spencer rifles.  There was a corral that the hay cutting party managed to get to, and they surprised the Oglala warriors with the volume of fire in their defense.  Their officer dead, a sergeant took over and when he was wounded a civilian, D. A. 'Al' Colvin directed the defense.  Although the fight was heard at Fort C. F. Smith 2.5 miles away, Lt. Colonel Luther Bradely took his own sweet time sending reinforcements.  The best that can be said about him is that he was overcautious, I would say cowardly and indecisive.  The U. S. lost 3 dead, 4 wounded, the Sioux 8 to 23 dead, no one has any idea but the soldiers were knocking Indians off horses left, right and center with aimed .50 caliber fire so many must have died.  As usual the Sioux took their dead with them.  Colonel Bradley downplayed the action in his report, it is not as well known as the Wagon Box fight the next day near Fort Phil Kearny. (7 dead, 2 wounded, unknown Indian casualties but a lot).
These two fights took place in rolling country, I have drawn a more Monument Valley background because it looks cool.  9 months before the Army lost 81 men in the Fetterman massacre, this may have led to Col. Bradley's pusillanimous behavior.  Not until Little Bighorn ten years later did the Army lose more men, thanks to an idiot showoff commander with Presidential aspirations.  Crazy Horse was one of the participants in the Wagon Box thing, he was part of a decoy party designed to split up the soldiers.
Crazy, Pops!


 Red Cloud.

  "They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they kept but one -- They promised to take our land ... and they took it".


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Father's Last Escape

-
Image
It happened in the late and forlorn period of complete disruption, at the time of the liquidation of our business. The signboard had been removed from over our shop, the shutters were halfway down, and inside the shop my mother was conducting and unauthorized trade in remnants. Adela had gone to America, and it was said that the boat on which she had sailed had sunk and that all the passengers had lost their lives. We were unable to verify this rumour, but all trace of the girl was lost and we never heard of her again.  A new age began - empty, sober and joyless, like a sheet of white paper. A new servant girl, Genya, anaemic, pale, and boneless, mooned about the rooms. When one patted her on the back, she wriggled, stretched like a snake, or purred like a cat. She had a dull white complexion, and even the insides of her eyelids were white. She was so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices: it was sickly and inedible.  At that t
Read more

Two Bad Men, Said Their Murderers

-
Image
John Choate, 25 August 1818 - 3 August 1869 Crokett Choate, 1842 -3 August 1869 This tells of a grave by the dashing wave A fond friends lip that did quiver Of an eye that's hid by a leaden lid And a voice now stilled forever. John on the left.  They were originally buried where they were killed but October of that year the Refugio Masons moved the bodies to Rockport.  This was all part of the Sutton-Taylor feud, the Suttons were backed by the U. S. Government and of no particular righteousness, they were badge wearing murderers and bullies.  The two story house with the porch running around the second floor in the left background belongs to my sister.  A lovely house and the best behaved neighbors possible! Photos by Steve Davis. The man who killed them.  Sheriff.  Regulator. Murderer. https://books.google.com/books?id=PUvanZiwzdUC&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=john+and+crockett+choate+death+jack+helm+gunfight&source=bl&
Read more

Roller Ball Murder

-
Image
The game, the game: here we go again. All glory to it, all things I am and own because of Roller Ball Murder. Our team stands in a row, twenty of us in salute as the corporation hymn is played by the band. We view the hardwood oval track which offers us the bumps and rewards of mayhem: fifty yards long, thirty yards across the ends, high banked, and at the top of the walls the cannons which fire those frenzied twenty-pound balls-similar to bowling balls, made of ebonite-at velocities over three hundred miles an hour. The balls careen around the track, eventually slowing and falling with diminishing centrifugal force, and as they go to ground or strike a player another volley fires. Here we are, our team: ten roller skaters, five motorbike riders, five runners (or clubbers). As the hymn plays, we stand erect and tough; eighty thousand sit watching in the stands and another two billion viewers around the world inspect the set of our jaws on .multivision. The runners, those bastards
Read more