Summit Springs

On July 11, 1869, troops from the United States Army clashed with a band of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under Tall Bull in what became known as the Battle of Summit Springs. Colonel Eugene A. Carr directed the army's effort, while Tall Bull, leading his warriors, lost his life in the fighting. The soldiers had been sent out in response to raids Tall Bull's Dog Soldiers had carried out across north-central Kansas. South of present-day Sterling, Colorado, near where Washington County meets Logan County, the site of the clash can still be found today.

Background

The years following the Homestead Acts and the close of the Civil War brought waves of American settlers onto the central plains, and this growing presence inevitably strained relations with the Indian tribes already there. By 1869 the Republican River Valley, long held by the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under Chief Tall Bull, had become a flashpoint of mounting hostility. Kansas settlements suffered a rising tide of raids, culminating on May 30, 1869, when Cheyenne warriors struck near Fossil Creek, killing thirteen settlers and carrying off Susanna Alderdice, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of four, along with Maria Weichell. News of the two women's capture provoked public fury and calls for the army to act.

Nebraska's Governor David Butler pressed General Christopher C. Augur, who commanded the Department of the Platte, to respond, pointing to warnings from settlers and scouts about the danger still building in the region. Augur's resources were thin, so at first he could only arm the settlers themselves, sending fifty Spencer carbines and ten thousand rounds of ammunition, while assuring them that cavalry would soon be dispatched to sweep the valley clear.

Acting on Augur's instructions, the Republican River Expedition set out from Fort McPherson on June 9, 1869, led by Colonel Eugene A. Carr, a seasoned commander nicknamed "The Black-Bearded Cossack." Nearly a month of frustrating pursuit followed, marked by brief brushes with Indian parties, equipment troubles, and punishing marches that sometimes covered thirty miles in a single day across unforgiving terrain. By July 3, Carr's scouts had come upon an empty Cheyenne camp, a sign that Tall Bull's band might not be far off. Then, on the afternoon of July 10, they discovered another Cheyenne camp, one abandoned barely a day earlier. Seizing the opportunity, Carr ordered his men on a forced march through the night, setting up the surprise assault on Tall Bull's village that would come the following morning.

Battle

Once the Pawnee Scouts commanded by Major Frank North guided the column to Tall Bull's encampment, Carr organized his force, 244 troopers from the 5th United States Regiment of Cavalry alongside 50 Pawnee Scouts, into a coordinated assault that struck the unprepared camp from three directions simultaneously. Captain Luther North of the Pawnee Scout Battalion recounted an episode from that fight in his book Man of the Plains: roughly half a mile away from the main line, a Cheyenne boy of about fifteen had been watching over a herd of horses. He barely noticed the approaching soldiers before they were nearly upon him. Springing onto his mount, he rounded up the animals and drove them toward the village with troops firing at him the entire way. Though his horse was fast enough to carry him to safety alone, he refused to abandon the herd, guiding all the animals in first. At the village's edge he wheeled around and joined warriors attempting to hold back the assault long enough for women and children to flee, and it was there he fell fighting. Luther North insisted no one could have shown greater courage than that boy.

During the fighting, Major Frank North spotted a warrior rising up to take aim at him. North fired first and killed him, and the fallen man proved to be Chief Tall Bull. Elsewhere in the battle, Pawnee fighters trapped twenty Cheyenne warriors inside a ravine. Relying solely on bows and arrows, the trapped men held their attackers off until their supply of arrows was exhausted, at which point the Pawnees closed in and killed every one of them.

The anthropologist George Bird Grinnell, whose later work in collaboration with George Bent in the twentieth century helped document these events, recorded that beyond Tall Bull and the twenty men slain in the ravine, nine additional deaths came at the hands of the Pawnee Scout Battalion. These included two warriors named Lone Bear and Pile of Bones, an elderly Suhtai woman riding a slow pony, two Sioux women fleeing on foot, a Cheyenne woman with two children (one boy, one girl), and an aged Sioux woman thrown when her horse stumbled and fell. Grinnell attributed only four deaths to parties other than the Pawnee Scouts: the wife, mother-in-law, and two small children belonging to a man called Red Cherries. Together, Grinnell and Donald J. Berthrong tallied 23 warriors, one boy of fifteen, five women, and two children killed by the Pawnee Scout Battalion, plus two additional women and two children whose killers went unidentified, bringing the overall death toll to 35. Despite the 5th Cavalry fielding more men, it seems the Pawnees accounted for more of the killing that day.

A single Cheyenne fighter managed to flee the battlefield astride Tall Bull's easily recognizable white horse. The following day, during a separate skirmish, scout William Cody, known as Buffalo Bill, shot the rider down, which led Cody to believe he himself had killed Tall Bull. In writing his biography of Luther North, Grinnell added a footnote addressing this claim, remarking that although Cody later insisted he was Tall Bull's killer, and Cody's supporters dismissed Luther North's version as fabricated, Frank North, despite being Cody's business partner in cattle ranching, nonetheless described the shooting in detail in a manner that matched what Luther remembered.

Carr's own account listed just one casualty on his side, a wounded trooper, while claiming his men had killed 52 Indians. Seventeen women and children were taken prisoner, and the cavalry seized more than 300 horses and mules in addition. Among the captives were two white women: Susanna Alderdice, who was murdered by those holding her, and Maria Weichell, who survived her wounds and was freed. Beyond the human toll, the triumph brought substantial plunder, over 400 horses along with camp provisions, and broke the regional dominance the Dog Soldiers had held.

Aftermath

On July 15, Carr and his men reached Fort Sedgwick, where he was able to declare the mission a success. Praise for the achievement came from Augur, General W. H. Emory, and the legislatures of the surrounding region. Because the expedition had removed the Indian danger from the Republican River Valley, settlers moved into the area at a much faster pace than before. Later missions bore out that the region had indeed been pacified.