Fort Dilts State Historic Site

Fort Dilts is the wagon circle that became a fort — the sod wall thrown up in September 1864 by Captain James Fisk's emigrant train, ninety-seven wagons bound for the Montana gold fields on a shortcut nobody had mapped. Fisk had expected General Sully's army ahead of him; instead he had fifty convalescent soldiers and a Hunkpapa Lakota force — led, by the record, under Sitting Bull — that had just fought Sully at Killdeer Mountain and was in no mood to let a military-escorted train pass through.

The attack on September 2 killed nine; the train crawled twelve miles under harassment and then circled on September 4, stacking a six-foot sod wall around eighty wagons. Inside it they buried three of their dead — including Jefferson Dilts, whose name the fort took — and held out sixteen days until eight hundred cavalry from Fort Rice broke the siege. The would-be miners went home; the sod walls are still there, eight miles northwest of Rhame, looking much as they did.

The file keeps Fort Dilts: the shortcut that failed, the Hunkpapa siege, the sod breastwork, and the wagon train that never saw the gold fields.

Fort Dilts is the archive's siege file — Fisk's shortcut, the circled wagons, and the sod fort the prairie kept.