Second Cavalry under Captain Earl Van Dorn battles with Comanche Indians at Wichita Village in Indian Territory

Four companies of the U.S. Second Cavalry, numbering around 225 men, met with a large group of Comanche Indians at the Wichita Village on Horse Creek in what is today Grady County, Oklahoma.  The five hundred Comanche, unknown to Van Dorn, were on their way to a parley at Fort Arbuckle.  Van Dorn ordered a classic cavalry charge and after a two hour fight drove off the Indians who lost around seventy dead.  Lieutenant Cornelius Van Camp, a West Point graduate of 1855, was killed and Van Dorn himself wounded by an arrow. (By John Osborne)