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 U.S. Army's Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho on November 29, 1864, caused a large number of Indians on the Kansas and Colorado Great 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.
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". 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. 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 (5.5 m) tall.
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.
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. 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.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
This page covers Julesburg Overland Trail Raids — January to February 1865. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
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