In August 1867, a war party of hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Ogallala chief Red Cloud left their camp on the Big Horn River hoping to destroy military posts along the Bozeman Trail, with some riding toward Fort C. F. Smith and others approaching Fort Phil Kearny. Soldiers under Captain James W. Powell of Company C, 27th Infantry, had been assigned to guard civilian woodcutters on Piney Island about six miles west of Fort Phil Kearny, where the firm of Proctor and Gilmore hauled wood to the fort on wagon chassis after removing the wagon boxes, which the woodcutters had used to build a corral of one-inch-thick pine for livestock protection and supply storage. On the morning of August 2, 1867, Red Cloud’s warriors launched a two-pronged assault on the wagon box corral and a nearby woodcutters’ camp. Vastly outnumbered, Powell’s force of 32 men took cover in the corral and defended their position with new breech-loading Springfield-Allin and Spencer rifles, repelling repeated charges for hours until a relief force under Major Benjamin Smith arrived and fired howitzers, after which the Indians abandoned the field. The battle left three soldiers and three civilians dead and two wounded, while Indian losses were uncertain but estimated by Captain Powell at about sixty dead and 120 wounded. The army abandoned its Bozeman Trail forts in the summer of 1868, and Red Cloud and his warriors subsequently burned them to the ground.