Fort Larned had no stockade or wall because the Army never built one there, and most forts on the Great Plains likewise lacked stockade walls. Experience in plains warfare showed that Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, Apaches, and Lakotas usually preferred surprise attacks on smaller groups of soldiers, while direct assaults on strong frontier Army positions were rare. On the vast treeless plains, obtaining enough large logs to enclose a post the size of Fort Larned would also have been very difficult. At Fort Larned, the bend of the Pawnee Fork and its oxbow-shaped dry former riverbed blocked attacks from every direction except the south, and rifle ports in the south buildings and the blockhouse guarded that weaker side. In 1864, Kiowas raided the corrals and pastures south of the post and captured more than 170 horses and mules. Afterward, the Army dug earthworks linking the dry oxbow with the blockhouse and extending around to the Pawnee River, but these were later leveled because officers decided the works gave cover to attackers. At Fort Atkinson, sixty miles southwest, the Army did build low adobe walls around a post usually occupied by fewer than eighty soldiers, though Comanches or Kiowas camping nearby in large numbers could easily have overrun that defense.