On August 29, 1865, at this site on the Tongue River, Brigadier General Patrick E. Connor, 125 cavalrymen, and 90 Indian scouts attacked an Arapaho village of several hundred lodges. After a swift night march, Connor’s men surprised and stormed the village. As women and children fled, the men held off the troopers before withdrawing. Connor pursued while Pawnee scouts rounded up the Arapaho horse herd and soldiers destroyed the village. When the Arapahos launched an aggressive counterattack, the army command retreated down the Tongue, and only their howitzers prevented the outnumbered soldiers from suffering serious casualties. Connor claimed his troops killed 35 Arapahos, but the actual number of killed and wounded among the Indians is unknown; seven army men were injured. The Battle of Tongue River ended with Connor’s withdrawal from the field under fire, hardly a victory though it inflicted serious damage on and outraged the Arapaho, and it resolved nothing. After the Civil War ended at Appomattox in April 1865, the nation’s focus turned to the Far West. In response to Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho resistance to white travel through Indian hunting lands and traffic on the Bozeman Trail, Connor launched an expedition of three separate columns into Powder River country. The columns struggled in an inhospitable land far from supply bases, and the expensive campaign failed, emboldening rather than discouraging Indians. Even so, this battle, the establishment of Fort Connor, later renamed Reno, on the Powder River, and the focus on the Bozeman Trail encouraged emigrant traffic. That helped spark twelve more years of warfare, ending only with the campaigns after Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s 1876 defeat on the Little Bighorn, when the army ultimately won control of these lands for the United States.