The Battle of Julesburg took place on January 7, 1865, near Julesburg, Colorado between 1,000 Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota Indians and about 60 soldiers of the U.S. army and 40 to 50 civilians. The Indians defeated the soldiers and over the next few weeks plundered ranches and stagecoach stations up and down the South Platte River valley.
The Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho on November 29, 1864, caused a large number of Indians on the Kansas and ColoradoGreat Plains to intensify hostilities against the U.S. Army and white settlers. On January 1, 1865, the Indians met on Cherry Creek (near present-day St. Francis, Kansas) to plan revenge. In the meeting were the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, the Northern Arapaho, and two bands of Lakota Sioux, the Sichangu under Spotted Tail, and the Oglala under Pawnee Killer. Roman Nose was probably among the Cheyenne warriors. The Indian army numbered about 1,000 warriors. They decided that their target would be Julesburg, Colorado, located along the South Platte River.[1]
Julesburg was a prominent way station on the Overland Trail. It consisted of a stagecoach station, stables, an express and telegraph office, a warehouse, and a large store that catered to travelers going to Denver along the South Platte. The residents were described as "Fifty men ... all armed to the teeth with everything arranged so they could fight behind sod walls.[2] One mile west was Fort Rankin (later Fort Sedgwick) with a complement of one company of cavalry, about sixty men, under Captain Nicholas J. O'Brien.[3] The fort, although only four months old, was formidable, measuring 240 by 360 feet (73 by 110 metres), and ringed by a sod wall 18 feet (5.5m) tall.[4]
Battle
Painting of a Cheyenne scout.
The Julesburg Battle is unusual in that the main source of information about the battle comes from the Indian side, mostly from George Bent, a half Cheyenne/half White warrior who participated in the battle. Bent later told the story to anthropologists George Bird Grinnell and George E. Hyde.
A painting of the Brule chieftain Spotted Tail, one of the leaders of the Sioux in the battle.
The Indian plan was to lure the soldiers out of Fort Rankin into an ambush and overwhelm them. Big Crow, a Cheyenne, picked ten men as the decoys. They charged at the fort and retreated in haste. Captain O'Brien led most of his men and a few civilian volunteers out of the fort to chase the Indian decoys. About three miles from the fort, O'Brien had almost ridden into the ambush when young Indian warriors fired at the soldiers prematurely, alerting him to the presence of a large number of warriors hidden behind nearby bluffs. The soldiers fled back toward the fort with the Indians in pursuit. The Indians caught them about 300 yards from the fort. Some of the soldiers were cut off. They dismounted to defend themselves and were killed.[5] The surviving soldiers and civilians, including Captain O'Brien, made it back to shelter in the fort. Fourteen soldiers and four civilians were killed in the battle. Bent says that no Indians were killed or wounded, although the soldiers claimed they killed about 60.[6]
All the civilians in the community were sheltering in the fort and the Indians, unopposed, looted the stage station, store, and warehouse carrying away a large amount of plunder. The soldiers in the fort fired a couple of artillery rounds at the Indians without effect.[7]
Cheyenne warrior George Bent and his wife Magpie in a photo taken many years after the battle
Aftermath
Responding to the attack, General Robert Byington Mitchell gathered together 640 cavalry, a battery of howitzers, and 200 supply wagons at Cottonwood Springs (near present-day North Platte, Nebraska) and marched southwest to find and punish the Indians who had attacked Julesburg. On January 19, he found their camp on Cherry Creek, but the Indians had departed several days previously. With more than 50 soldiers incapacitated by frostbite in the bitterly cold weather, Mitchell gave up the chase and returned to his base. The only action during his expedition was when a small band of Indians rode through his camp at night, firing into the soldier's tents.[8]
The Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had decided to move north to the Black Hills and Powder River Country of South Dakota and Wyoming. En route, from January 28 to Feb 2, the Indians raided ranches and stagecoach stations along 150 miles of the South Platte Valley between what are today the towns of Fort Morgan, Colorado and Paxton, Nebraska. The Sioux struck east of Julesburg, the Cheyenne west of Julesburg, and the Arapaho in between. At night, Bent said "the whole valley was lighted up with the flames of burning ranches and stage stations, but the places were soon all destroyed and darkness fell on the valley."[9]
Bent participated in a raid near the Valley stagecoach station, near present-day Sterling, Colorado. The Cheyenne captured 500 cattle and had a skirmish with a company of army cavalry. The army claimed they killed 20 Indians and recovered the cattle; Bent said none were hurt, two soldiers were wounded, and only a few cattle were re-captured by the soldiers.[10] Most of the Indian depredations were unopposed, although three Sioux warriors were killed in an attack on a wagon train. Bent noted that nine recently discharged soldiers who had participated in the Sand Creek massacre were killed by Cheyenne and their bodies mutilated.[11]
On February 2, the Indian caravan of several thousand women, children, and livestock crossed the frozen South Platte 25 miles (40km) west of Julesburg, heading north. The warriors raided Julesburg again, took the remaining supplies, and burned all the buildings. The 15 soldiers and 50 civilians sheltered in Fort Rankin did not venture outside the walls of the fort. Captain O'Brien and 14 men, who had been away from the fort, returned during the raid. Their presence was concealed for a time by smoke from the fires. Nearing the fort, O'Brien scattered the Indians with a round from his field howitzer; the men in the fort fired another howitzer to aid him, and O'Brien and his men dashed to safety inside the fort.[12]
With the Sioux leading, because they were more familiar with the route, the Indians left Julesburg behind and proceeded north across the divide between the South Platte and North Platte rivers. They would have additional skirmishes with the army at Mud Springs (near present-day Dalton, Nebraska) and Rush Creek.[13]
Notes
↑ Hyde, George E. Life of George Bent. Norman: U of OK Press, 1968, p. 168
↑ Robrock, David P. "The Seventh Iowa Cavalry and the Plains Indians Wars." Montana: The Magazine of Western History. Vol. 39, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), p. 12
The Arapaho are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota.
The Cheyenne are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, and the Northern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American tribes, the Só'taeo'o or Só'taétaneo'o and the Tsétsêhéstâhese. The tribes merged in the early 19th century.
Julesburg is the statutory town that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Sedgwick County, Colorado, United States. The population was 1,307 at the 2020 United States Census.
The Sand Creek massacre was a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army in the American Indian Wars that occurred on November 29, 1864, when a 675-man force of the Third Colorado Cavalry under the command of U.S. Volunteers Colonel John Chivington attacked and destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in southeastern Colorado Territory, killing and mutilating an estimated 69 to over 600 Native American people. Chivington claimed 500 to 600 warriors were killed. However, most sources estimate around 150 people were killed, about two-thirds of whom were women and children. The location has been designated the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site and is administered by the National Park Service. The massacre is considered part of a series of events known as the Colorado Wars.
The Dog Soldiers or Dog Men are historically one of six Cheyenne military societies. Beginning in the late 1830s, this society evolved into a separate, militaristic band that played a dominant role in Cheyenne resistance to the westward expansion of the United States in the area of present-day Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, where the Cheyenne had settled in the early nineteenth century.
Fort Caspar was a military post of the United States Army in present-day Wyoming, named after 2nd Lieutenant Caspar Collins, a U.S. Army officer who was killed in the 1865 Battle of the Platte Bridge Station against the Lakota and Cheyenne. Founded in 1859 along the banks of the North Platte River as a trading post and toll bridge on the Oregon Trail, the post was later taken over by the Army and named Platte Bridge Station to protect emigrants and the telegraph line against raids from Lakota and Cheyenne in the ongoing wars between those nations and the United States. The site of the fort, near the intersection of 13th Street and Wyoming Boulevard in Casper, Wyoming, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is now owned and operated by the City of Casper as the Fort Caspar Museum and Historic Site.
The Sioux Wars were a series of conflicts between the United States and various subgroups of the Sioux people which occurred in the later half of the 19th century. The earliest conflict came in 1854 when a fight broke out at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, when Sioux warriors killed 31 American soldiers in the Grattan Fight, and the final came in 1890 during the Ghost Dance War.
The Battle of the Tongue River, sometimes referred to as the Connor Battle, was an engagement of the Powder River Expedition that occurred on August 29, 1865. In the battle, U.S. soldiers and Indian scouts attacked and destroyed an Arapaho village.
The Powder River Expedition of 1865 also known as the Powder River War or Powder River Invasion, was a large and far-flung military operation of the United States Army against the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indians in Montana Territory and Dakota Territory. Although soldiers destroyed one Arapaho village and established Fort Connor to protect gold miners on the Bozeman Trail, the expedition is considered a failure because it failed to defeat or intimidate the Indians.
The Colorado War was an Indian War fought in 1864 and 1865 between the Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, and allied Brulé and Oglala Sioux peoples versus the U.S. Army, Colorado militia, and white settlers in Colorado Territory and adjacent regions. The Kiowa and the Comanche played a minor role in actions that occurred in the southern part of the Territory along the Arkansas River. The Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux played the major role in actions that occurred north of the Arkansas River and along the South Platte River, the Great Platte River Road, and the eastern portion of the Overland Trail. The United States government and Colorado Territory authorities participated through the 1st Colorado Cavalry Regiment, often called the Colorado volunteers. The war was centered on the Colorado Eastern Plains, extending eastward into Kansas and Nebraska.
William Wells Bent was a frontier trader and rancher in the American West, with forts in Colorado. He also acted as a mediator among the Cheyenne Nation, other Native American tribes and the expanding United States. With his brothers, Bent established a trade business along the Santa Fe Trail. In the early 1830s Bent built an adobe fort, called Bent's Fort, along the Arkansas River in present-day Colorado. Furs, horses and other goods were traded for food and other household goods by travelers along the Santa Fe trail, fur-trappers, and local Mexican and Native American people. Bent negotiated a peace among the many Plains tribes north and south of the Arkansas River, as well as between the Native American and the United States government.
Spotted Tail ; born c. 1823 – died August 5, 1881) was a Sichangu Lakota tribal chief. Famed as a great warrior since his youth, warring on Ute, Pawnee and Absaroke (“Crow”), and having taken a leading part in the Grattan Massacre, he led his warriors in the Colorado and Platte River uprising after the massacre performed by John M. Chivington's Colorado Volunteers of the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camping on Sand Creek, but declined to participate in Red Cloud's War.
George Bent, also named Ho—my-ike in Cheyenne, was a Cheyenne-Anglo who became a Confederate soldier during the American Civil War and waged war against Americans as a Cheyenne warrior afterward. He was the mixed-race son of Owl Woman, daughter of a Cheyenne chief, and the American William Bent, founder of the trading post named Bent's Fort and a trading partnership with his brothers and Ceran St. Vrain. Bent was born near present-day La Junta, Colorado, and was reared among both his mother's people, his father and other European Americans at the fort, and other whites from the age of 10 while attending boarding school in St. Louis, Missouri. He identified as Cheyenne.
Pawnee Scouts were employed by the United States Army in the latter half of the 19th century. Like other groups of Indian scouts, Pawnee men were recruited in large numbers to aid in the ongoing conflicts between settlers and the Native Americans in the United States. Because the Pawnee people were at war with the Sioux and Cheyenne and had been under constant pressure and aggression by those tribes, some of them were more than willing to serve with the army for pay. A number of Pawnee served between 1864 and 1871. They were armed with rifles, revolvers and were issued scout uniforms.
The Battle of Mud Springs took place February 4–6, 1865, in Nebraska between the U.S. army and warriors of the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. The battle was inconclusive, although the Indians succeeded in capturing some Army horses and a herd of several hundred cattle. Mud Springs is located 8 mi northwest of Dalton, Nebraska, and is today a National Historic Site.
The Battle of Rush Creek took place February 8–9, 1865, between about 185 soldiers of the U.S. Army and 1,000 warriors of the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes. The inconclusive battle took place 4 mi southeast of present-day Broadwater, Nebraska, along both banks of the North Platte River.
The Battle of Platte Bridge, also called the Battle of Platte Bridge Station, on July 26, 1865, was the culmination of a summer offensive by the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne Indians against the United States army. In May and June the Indians raided army outposts and stagecoach stations over a wide swath of Wyoming and Montana. In July, they assembled a large army, estimated by Cheyenne warrior George Bent to number 3,000 warriors, and descended upon Platte Bridge. The bridge, across the North Platte River near present-day Casper, Wyoming, was guarded by 120 soldiers. In an engagement near the bridge, and another against a wagon train guarded by 28 soldiers a few miles away, the Indians killed 29 soldiers while suffering at least eight dead.
South Platte Trail was a historic trail that followed the southern side of South Platte River from Fort Kearny in Nebraska to Denver, Colorado. Plains Indians, such as the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, hunted in the lands around the South Platte River. They also traded at trading posts along the route, as did white travelers. Travelers included trappers, traders, explorers, the military, and those following the gold rush. The trail was also used by the Pony Express.
The Powder River Battles were a series of battles and skirmishes fought between September 1–15, 1865 by United States soldiers and civilians against Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors. The fighting occurred along the Powder River in Montana Territory and Dakota Territory, in present-day Custer and Powder River counties, Montana and northeastern Wyoming.
Fort Wicked was a ranch and stage station on the Overland Trail from 1864 to 1868 in present-day Merino, Colorado. A historical marker commemorating the ranch is located at US 6 and CR-2.5. The ranch itself was located near a ford of the South Platte River, near where US-6 now crosses over the river. It was one of the few places along the trail to Denver that withstood an attack by Native Americans in 1864. It was named Fort Wicked for the "bitter defence" made by Holon Godfrey.
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