The Battle of Dove Creek was a small engagement during the American Civil War that took place January 8, 1865, along Dove Creek in what is now southwest Tom Green County, Texas. Texan soldiers under Confederate captains Henry Fossett and S.S. Totten, misunderstanding which tribe occupied a discovered camp, attacked a tribe of peaceful Kickapoo Indians and were badly beaten by an organized defense.
In mid-December 1864, Captain N.M. Gillentine and two dozen Texas militiamen discovered an abandoned Indian camp of 92 shelter sites along the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, and, suspecting the site to be evidence of hostile Comanche or Kiowa Indians, called for militia to locate and address the threat. On January 1, 1865, Texas Frontier Battalion troops under the command of Captain Henry Fossett arrived at Fort Chadbourne to await the militia concentration. After two days, Fossett led his two companies in search of the trail and located the natives along the Dove Creek, encamped in timberland.
Just as Fossett prepared his morning assault, the exhausted militia troops arrived after hard forced march, and the two captains chose to cooperate in a joint attack. Totten agreed that the militia would form a line of battle and approach the camp in a frontal assault astride the creek from the north while better equipped Confederates under Fossett would maneuver around to the southwest, capture the Indians' grazing horse herd, and attack from the flank.
Kickapoo Indians inside the camp had been peaceful since the days of the Black Hawk War. In fact, they were migrating to Mexico to avoid the turmoil of the Civil War, but they were not unprepared for violence. The Kickapoo benefited from the well-placed camp, located on a tall bank covered with light timber and protected by natural brier thickets common to the Cross Timbers area. The first militia attacks suffered from brier hazards while under intense Indian rifle fire. According to a witness, three Texan officers (including Gillentine) and sixteen enlisted men were killed in the first few minutes.
Fossett's flank attack initially succeeded in capturing the herd, but assault by a Confederate detachment under Lieutenant J.A. Brooks broke down after native gunfire killed a dozen horses. Gradually, the isolated Confederate columns found themselves in crossfire with the Indians closing in. After a brief rout, militia reformed along the Spring Creek to the north, and Kickapoo pursuers inflicted additional casualties on the Confederates escaping to the camp.
List of wars involving the Confederate States of America
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.
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