The Powder River Expedition had been troubled…

The Powder River Expedition had been troubled from the start.

The number of men to be involved in the campaign had been reduced from twelve thousand to twenty-six hundred because many soldiers had been mustered out of the army at the end of the Civil War.

The remaining soldiers were "mutinous, dissatisfied, and inefficient."

Few of the men and officers have had any experience fighting native forces or travel on the Great Plains.

Procuring supplies is also a problem.

Connor's twenty-six hundred men, organized into three widely separated units, have traversed hundreds of miles of what will become the sates of Montana and Wyoming.

The soldiers have been harassed by natives who avoid pitched battles.

Connor has establishes Fort Connor, later Fort Reno, and has destroyed an Arapaho village at the Battle of the Tongue River.

His Pawnee scouts also ambush and kill a band of twenty-four Cheyenne warriors.

Most of the time, however, Connor's three units are on the defensive, fending off native raids on their horses and supply wagons that leave many soldiers on foot, in rags, and reduced to eating raw horse meat.

On the whole, the expedition is "a dismal failure" carried out with "large, ungainly columns filled with troops anxious to get home now that the Civil War was over." ("Major General Patrick Edward Connor" The California Military Museum http://militarymuseum.org/Conner.html accessed 04/20/2019)