The Battle of Sappa Creek, or Massacre at Cheyenne Hole, was fought on April 23, 1875, between Company H of the Sixth United States Cavalry under the command of Second Lieutenant Austin Henely and a group of Cheyenne Indians led by Little Bull. The conflict took place in modern-day Rawlins County, Kansas, and was both the final and the deadliest battle in the Red River War.
The Battle at the Sappa was the result of escalating tensions between Indians, US settlers, and the US Government over the issue of land rights and buffalo hunting. The battle occurred as Henely was chasing after Little Bull's group, which had been sent running in panic caused by a nearby prison break from Black Horse, who was accused of murder, rape, and abuse. When Henely's company caught up with the Indians, they killed all that they could, taking no prisoners. This battle has garnered controversy from several individuals – authors, local settlers, and participants in the fight – over allegations of atrocities committed by Henely and his troops, including ignoring an attempt to parley and burning of living Indians.
In the 1850s the U.S. government started to try to confine the Indians to specific reservations. In 1867, the Indian Peace Commission was founded to resolve the many conflicts between the Indians and the U.S. government, including U.S. citizens, among the plains. The commission was to negotiate with the Indian tribes and form treaties to get them to move to reservations:11
In October 1865, the Treaty of Little Arkansas was signed between the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa Indians as the U.S. Government. The U.S. gave them a reservation covering parts of Kansas, Colorado, and almost all of the Texas panhandle. However, since the Texas panhandle was private land, the U.S. government had no authority to give that land to the Indians.:8-9 Out of the Council of Forty-Four, only 4 chiefs showed up to sign the treaty. One chief, Black Kettle of the Wautapi band, said he spoke for all of the tribes of Cheyenne although he did not.:xvi The Indians were promised firearms for hunting as part of this treaty, however, General Winfield Scott Hancock quickly outlawed the selling of firearms to any Indians. In response, the chiefs sent threats to the U.S. military for breaking the agreements of the treaty. Hancock responded by marching 1400 men from Col. Custer 7th Cavalry to the chiefs' villages. He first encountered a large Cheyenne and Sioux village where only two chiefs, Tall Bull and White Horse, came out to meet him. Outraged by this, Hancock threatened to send his army into the village to pull out the chiefs by force. With bad memories of the Sand Creek Massacre in their minds, the Indians started to run and abandon their homes. Hancock, although warned against doing it, burned 250 houses to the ground. President Andrew Johnson removed Hancock from his post and created the Indian Peace Commission in part to repair his actions. His violence against the Cheyenne and Sioux Indians will come to be known as "Hancock's War.":9-10
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 Sappa Creek — 6th Cavalry Fight (April 23, 1875). 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.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Wikipedia source.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.