The Boys of ’74:

Bozeman’s Forgotten Gamble on the Yellowstone

A Territory Short on Cash and Patience

By the winter of 1873, Bozeman was a town in need of a windfall. The placer gold that had drawn settlers to the Gallatin Valley a decade earlier was largely spent, and the national financial panic of that year had tightened credit and confidence across Montana Territory. Meanwhile, word had filtered back from the Northern Pacific Railroad’s survey parties, escorted the previous summer by Custer’s 7th Cavalry, that the lower Yellowstone country held promise, both as a corridor for commerce and, perhaps, as a source of new gold (“1870”). The catch was that the valley east of the Bighorn River lay within land the Lakota and their Northern Cheyenne allies considered their own hunting grounds under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, and neither people had any intention of ceding it without resistance.

Into this uneasy standoff between ambition and treaty rights stepped a group of Bozeman merchants, prospectors, and veterans who organized what became known as the Yellowstone Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition. Its stated purpose was practical enough: locate a workable wagon route down the Yellowstone Valley, determine how far the river could be navigated by steamboat, and, not incidentally, search for gold along the way (MacLean). Its unstated effect, as later writers have observed, was to test, and ultimately help erode, the boundary the Sioux had been promised six years earlier (Alegria).

Assembling “The Boys”

The expedition’s exact roster and command structure remain difficult to pin down with certainty, a reminder that even well-documented frontier ventures often rest on incomplete or conflicting testimony. Some accounts credit Frank Grounds, described as an experienced Indian fighter, with leading the column (MacLean), while other regional sources tie the venture more closely to Fellows D. Pease, a longtime Yellowstone country trader, former federal Indian agent to the Crow, and fluent speaker of Crow and Santee Sioux, whose name would later be attached to a short-lived trading post near the mouth of the Bighorn (“Pease, Fellows David”). It is possible both men played leading roles, one as organizer and financier and the other as field captain, but the surviving record does not allow a confident answer, and later regional historians have not fully reconciled the two accounts.

What is better documented is the expedition’s makeup and equipment. Roughly one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty men assembled at a rendezvous ranch between Bozeman and Mission Creek, a group that reportedly included Civil War veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, buffalo hunters, and at least one former slave, John Anderson, who had served during the war in a Kansas regiment of Black infantry and who signed on with the expedition as its cook (“Feb. 12, 1874”; Alegria). The party carried around two hundred horses and mules, twenty-eight yoke of oxen, twenty-two supply wagons, and, notably, two small artillery pieces along with roughly forty thousand rounds of small-arms ammunition, an arsenal that reflected both the group’s expectation of trouble and the degree to which the Montana Territorial government and the Army post at Fort Ellis were willing to help outfit a nominally private venture (“1870”). One of those cannons survived the expedition and now sits in the collection of the Gallatin History Museum in Bozeman, a rare physical link to the march (Mills).

Into a Montana Winter

The column departed its rendezvous point on February 12, 1874, a departure date confirmed independently by a Missoulian retrospective and by a genealogical compilation of Montana wagon road surveys drawn from period military correspondence (“Feb. 12, 1874”; “1870”). Leaving in February rather than waiting for spring was itself a gamble: temperatures along the route reportedly dropped to thirty degrees below zero, and the party faced three months of Montana winter and early spring before its return (MacLean). The route followed the Yellowstone downstream, generally along the north bank, through country that had seen repeated Army-escorted surveys in the previous three years but almost no permanent settlement.

The expedition’s immediate objective was the mouth of the Tongue River, which organizers believed marked both the practical head of navigation on the Yellowstone and the gateway to a supposed goldfield along a tributary the men called Wolf Creek. They never reached it. By the time the column neared Rosebud Creek, bison herds had already grazed off much of the forage the party’s stock needed, and the guides judged, correctly as it turned out, that the Lakota and Cheyenne bands watching their progress would not let the wagon train pass much farther without a fight (MacLean).

Blood on the Rosebud

That fight arrived before dawn on April 4, 1874, when an estimated six hundred Sioux warriors under Sitting Bull opened fire on the expedition’s camp on Rosebud Creek, an attack confirmed in a separate Missoulian historical retrospective that draws on territorial-era newspaper accounts (“Montana History Almanac”). It was, by most later tellings, the most serious of several engagements the party fought over the following weeks, an encounter regional historian French L. MacLean has called the Battle of Lodge Grass Creek, in which the besieging force may have numbered as many as fourteen hundred warriors, including fighters under the chiefs Hump and Inkpaduta (MacLean). The frontiersmen, digging improvised rifle pits and firing long-range buffalo guns, reportedly earned begrudging names from their opponents for both tactics, a detail that survives mainly through secondhand frontier reminiscence and should be read with appropriate caution rather than as settled fact.

Despite the scale of the fighting described in these accounts, the expedition’s own casualties were strikingly light. A participant named James Gourley later recalled the march as one of the most dangerous ever undertaken into contested territory, adding, “losing only one man out of 146” (qtd. in MacLean). That single fatality, a young man remembered locally only through family history preserved at the Gallatin History Museum as a descendant of the Yates family, is corroborated independently in a Bozeman Magazine account describing the same detail drawn from a different regional history, Don L. Weibert’s The 1874 Invasion of Montana (Mills). The convergence of two independently sourced accounts on this single, easily overlooked fact is one of the more reliable threads running through an otherwise thinly documented episode.

Anderson, the expedition’s Black cook and Civil War veteran, was reportedly engaged directly in the fighting and later claimed, after returning to Bozeman, to have killed a son of Sitting Bull in close combat. Whether that specific claim can be verified is doubtful, and it should be treated as Anderson’s own account rather than an established fact, but his participation in the expedition and his later recognition are documented: in 1895 he was made a member of the Gallatin Pioneer Society, an honor conferred on veterans of the territory’s early settlement (Alegria).

Retreat and Reckoning

Having failed to reach the Tongue River and having found neither gold nor a defensible route for a permanent wagon road, the expedition turned back, eventually returning to Bozeman by way of the Bozeman Trail after a journey later estimated at roughly six hundred miles and three months’ duration (“1870”). Judged against its own stated goals, the venture was an unambiguous failure. No wagon road was built. No placer strike materialized. The Yellowstone below the Bighorn remained, for the moment, contested ground.

Yet the expedition’s significance, such as it is, lies less in what it accomplished than in what it foreshadowed. Contemporary federal correspondence shows Montana’s territorial legislature petitioning Congress that same year for protection of the Yellowstone Valley and of the road connecting Fort Ellis to the Dakota Territory, a formal acknowledgment that the government itself viewed the region as unsettled and dangerous (United States, Congress, House). At least a handful of the expedition’s participants, by later accounts including the scout later nicknamed “Muggins” Taylor, went on to serve with the Army during the 1876 Great Sioux War, and some of the same terrain the wagon train had traversed became relevant again two years later when news of Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn had to be carried back to the telegraph office at Fort Ellis (MacLean). The line between the two episodes should not be overstated; the 1874 expedition did not cause the events of 1876, but it belongs to the same slow accumulation of pressure, broken assurances, and probing incursions that made the later war difficult to avoid.

An Obscure Prelude

Despite its scale, its cannon fire, and its brush with some of the same Lakota leadership who would face Custer two years later, the Yellowstone Wagon Road and Prospecting Expedition never entered popular memory the way the Little Bighorn campaign did. Even specialists in Sitting Bull’s biography have acknowledged limited familiarity with the episode, a gap regional historians have only partially closed through newspaper retrospectives, genealogical archives, and the occasional surviving artifact such as the cannon now held in Bozeman (MacLean). What remains is a modest but instructive record: a private venture, quietly subsidized by territorial and military interests, that marched into disputed land in the dead of winter, fought its way to a standstill, and came home having changed almost nothing by design and a great deal by consequence.

Works Cited

Alegria, Crystal. “Bozeman’s Historic African American Community.” Bozeman Magazine, 1 Feb. 2022, bozemanmagazine.com/articles/2022/02/01/112993-bozemans-historic-african-american-community. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

“Feb. 12, 1874.” Montana 150, Missoulian, missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/montana-150/collection_f78e31e8-73ca-11e3-9347-0019bb2963f4.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

MacLean, French L. “Introduction.” The Fifth Field, 27 Oct. 2020, www.thefifthfield.com/ace-in-the-hole/introduction-2/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

Mills, Charlotte Miller. “Gallatin History Museum: An Amazing Place to Do Research.” Bozeman Magazine, 1 Apr. 2022, bozemanmagazine.com/articles/2022/04/01/113535-gallatin-history-museum-an-amazing-place-to-do. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

“Montana History Almanac: Sitting Bull Attacks Bozeman Expedition.” Missoulian, missoulian.com/lifestyles/territory/montana-history-almanac-sitting-bull-attacks-bozeman-expedition/article_08eadab6-5ca6-11e0-a2ab-001cc4c03286.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

“Pease, Fellows David.” Montana History Portal, Montana Historical Society, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/84685. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

United States, Congress, House. Memorial of the Legislature of Montana, Protection of the Yellowstone Valley and the Road from Fort Ellis to Bismarck, Dakota, from Hostile Indians. 43rd Congress, 1st session, House Miscellaneous Document 218, 1874. OU College of Law Digital Commons, digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/indianserialset/2146. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.

“1870.” Survey Summary, RootsWeb, sites.rootsweb.com/~mtygf/county/survey_summary.htm. Accessed 30 Aug. 2026.