In 1891, Major Mark Wainwright desperately attacks the fort at Concordia, Kansas, hoping to overcome the men inside and use its defenses to protect his forces against the Kansan reinforcements moving to surround them. That night, just as Wainwright sees the lanterns of the approaching soldiers, the fort falls and the major hurries his surviving men to shore up the holes in the fort's walls before the Kansans reached them. "It's going to be a hard day tomorrow, boys," he says to his men.