Every trip to the woodcutting area became a potential engagement.

The soldiers assigned to guard the wood trains lived in a state of sustained alertness that ground on morale over time.

The men who were building the fort were doing so under constant threat, which slowed construction and created an atmosphere of siege that the commanders had not anticipated when they planned the operation.

The pressure extended to the supply lines.

The forts were connected to the outside world by a single road — the Bozeman Trail itself — and that road was regularly attacked by warriors who knew it far better than the soldiers did.