GREEN RIVER -- In early April 1870, three officers and 62 enlisted men with the U.S. Cavalry's Company I left their barracks in Omaha, Neb., for summer duty at the Medicine Bow station on the Union Pacific Railroad.

On June 25, a detachment commanded by 1st Lt. Christopher T. Hall was sent from the station in pursuit of what was deemed a party of four hostile Indians.

After chasing the band about four miles, the soldiers found that they had been decoyed into the main body of the Indian camp and were quickly trapped and surrounded.

Following a raging half-hour gun battle, the detachment pulled its sabers, charged and drove the Indians back across the Little Medicine Bow River.

Hardly anything else is known about the relatively insignificant skirmish.

But by using metal detectors and other methods to scavenge the battle site for artifacts, independent film producer Jim Bowman of Colorado thinks the evidence will tell the real story.

He hopes to show that story in a new documentary film series his company is developing for possible distribution to interested producers.

For the past few weeks, Bowman and a film crew have been picking up the pieces of history left from the Medicine Bow battle location for the first segment of the proposed film series titled "Wild West Scenarios."

"We're literally making stories out of the things we're finding on the ground," Bowman said in a phone interview.

Bowman's start-up film company -- Way Out West Production, Inc. -- has been working on the first four segments. The series aims to explore the artifacts left from lesser-known historical events, and then use the evidence to speculate to viewers about what might have actually happened at a given site.

"We take a look at the evidence and then we match a story to it," Bowman said. "We're mostly looking for sites that have no real history behind it, no record or written documentation, but that have a real story to tell using the evidence we find.

"Basically, we're finding things at these sites and then putting them together and coming up with a scenario of what might have happened. There's so many things that happened in Wyoming that nobody knows about," he continued. "So many people came out west and nobody ever heard of them again and there was a reason for that. Maybe we can tell a few of those stories."

Spencers, Springfields

Bowman, a machinist who lives in Kersey, Colo., is best known in Wyoming for organizing the infamous and now annual "There Goes the Neighborhood" prairie dog shoot around Medicine Bow several years ago.

Bowman has also produced many hunting films that have been distributed under the Way Out West moniker.

For the past few weeks, his production team has been filming and using metal detectors to search for artifacts on a private ranch in Carbon County where the Medicine Bow battle was believed to have occurred.

To find the exact battle site on the property, Bowman said the team searched for two specific types of cartridges that were used by Cavalry soldiers at the time -- a .56 caliber Spencer and a .50-.70 Springfield.

"So in this case, we know what cartridges we're looking for and when we've found those cartridges, we know we've found the exact site," he said. "Once we find the site where the soldiers were, we can then determine where the Indians were and where their cartridges might be.

"We also expect to find some cartridges from the Indian side from shooting toward the Cavalry and then we can determine pretty much who was where, and when, and what they were doing."

Bowman said the producers have targeted three other sites to film episodes for the series. Two are in Colorado and the third in Wyoming.

He said as part of their agreement with the Medicine Bow landowner for access to the site, the rancher will get to keep all of the artifacts found on the property.

"Now we're kind of looking for production firms or investors willing to participate in the project ... and we've been involved in talks" with a television production company in New York City, he said.

"We see many opportunities for a TV series, perhaps on the Discovery Channel or History Channel or something like that," Bowman said.

Contact southwest Wyoming bureau reporter Jeff Gearino at 307-875-5359 or gearino@tribcsp.com

SUGGESTIONS?

Jim Bowman said Way Out West Productions wants to hear from people with ideas about sites that would make for interesting Wild West Scenario segments. He can be reached at 970-346-0354.