Black Sun, The Battle of Summit Springs, 1869
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Authors: Terry C. Johnston
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Contents
The Plainsmen Series by Terry C. Johnston
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for my wife Rhonda who gives me a serene and safe place to write. More than inspiration, she is my motivation.
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It has been said that the Battle of Summit Springs was one of the few in history of the frontier which would measure up to all the requirements of the writers of western fiction.
âJames T. King
War EagleâA Life of General Eugene A. Carr
The severe and well merited chastisement given these savages by General Carr in July produced the most marked effect upon the conduct of the whole Cheyenne tribe ⦠the Cheyennes concerned have come in to Camp Supply and begged for peace, declaring they have had enough of War. It is believed ⦠that there are no hostile Indians on the Plains of Kansas or Colorado.
âMajor General John M. Schofield
Commander, Dept. of the Missouri following Battle of Summit Springs
This battle ended Indian terrorism in Kansas and Nebraska. The savages had never before received such a stunning blow in any engagement ⦠Considered as a complete success, the battle of Summit Springs takes rank with Washita Village; but in a broader sense it was of infinitely greater importance, as it forever secured to the white race the undisputed and unmolested possession of the Republican River and its tributaries.
âGeorge Frederic Price
Across the Continent with The Fifth Cavalry
The [Summit Springs] fight was the last in that section of the plains ⦠Eight companies were in action, which makes it a major battle by Indian wars' standards ⦠Summit Springs ⦠was one of a very few of these fights that would satisfy Hollywood and the writers of Westerns. The cavalry charged with bugle blowing, a woman was rescued (and later married a soldier), the slaughter of Indians was largeâas attested by a board of officers who counted the bodiesâand the troops suffered no losses.
âDon Russell
The Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill
Map drawn by author from General Philip H. Sheridan's campaign field map, furnished by the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, War Department, Washington, D.C.
(graphics drawn by Victoria Murray)
Map drawn by author from an official map provided courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.
(graphics drawn by Victoria Murray)
Author's Foreword
Perhaps most of you read this sort of thing last. After you've given the story a chanceâand only when you're willing to come back here and give these thoughts a moment of your time.
But not while there's a story to be told.
That's all right with me. Just as long as you remember while this story is still fresh in your mind that what you have read is the true stuff of history. Everyone here lived and walked the high plains of Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado in 1868â69. Everyone except two: Seamus Donegan, the reluctant Irish warrior, and the mulatto-turned-Cheyenne, Jack O'Neill. The rest of the characters in this account were breathing, living beings.
Through them you will not only learn of an obscure fight on the high plains in the summer of 1869, but you will ride along as a participant in the months leading up to that fated confrontation between the Fifth Cavalry and the feared Dog Soldier Society of Tall Bull's Cheyenne which occurred at an obscure place given the name of Summit Springsânot far from present-day Sterling, Coloradoâby the victorious leader of the blue-clad soldiers.
A time rich in momentum! Our grand republic speeding onward toward her centennial. At long last the nation had been joined by rail. In May of 1869 the Union Pacific and Central Pacific united in Utah by driving a symbolic golden spike to wed their rails. At the very least it was the hope for riches, if not gold itself, that would finally bring about the greatest of all Indian wars and effectively drive the nomadic tribes from the plains and back onto their reservations.
Furthermore, that year was a pivotal, fateful one for the frontier army. On March 3, just before the regiments took to the field for spring campaigns, Congress slashed both the appropriations and size of the army from 55,000 troops to almost 37,000. Those officers who remained after the Benzine Boards got done paring away the Civil War “fat” were once again left reeling under the cuts of manpower and matériel, complicated by a lack of national will to get the job done.
Yet within that core of the victorious Union army there remained some of the best fighting men this country has ever known. Besides Grantâwho was to be inaugurated that spring of 'sixty-nineâthere were his two closest subordinates, William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan. While the former reorganized the army and railed against the forces in Washington City who would emasculate the frontier army, the latter set about taking the fight to plains Indians.
Instead of merely reacting each time the Sioux or Cheyenne attacked a settlement, Phil Sheridan devised a plan whereby the army would search out and destroy those peaceful villages to which the guilty warriors returned after they had their fill of blood, booty and white prisoners.
Major Eugene Asa Carr's role in Sheridan's first winter campaign of 1868â69 is not generally known even by those conversant with General George Armstrong Custer's more glamorous defeat of Black Kettle's Southern Cheyenne on the Washita River. Yet Custer's Seventh Cavalry would not have enjoyed success at the Washita in November of 1868, much less brought about the capture and eventual surrender of Satanta's Kiowa near Fort Cobb or Medicine Arrow's Cheyenne on the Sweetwater that following spring, had it not been for the fact that Carr's Fifth Cavalry had simply left the tribes no place to run.
Perhaps even fewer readers know of this dramatic Battle of Summit Springs and how it effectively brought to an end the Cheyenne depredations against the settlers and freight routes across the central plains. Truth is, historians agree the victory of the Fifth Cavalry was of more lasting consequence than was Custer's campaign against Cheyenne and Kiowa in Indian Territory. Carr broke the grip of terror and bloodshed at the hands of the Dog Soldiers along the upper Republican and Smoky Hill rivers. The Fifth Cavalry effectively ended all cohesiveness of the powerful warrior society. Never again would the Dog Soldiers be the force they were before that July day in 1869. The remnants of that once-great fighting fraternity split: while most wandered south under Bull Bear to surrender in small bands at Camp Supply in what is now Oklahoma, only a few pledged allegiance to White Horse, who hurried north with his faithful to continue the fight alongside their northern cousins.
So successful was the Fifth Cavalry in this victory that in the fall of 1869 both the Nebraska legislature and the Colorado territorial assembly presented Major Carr with their unanimous resolutions of commendation and appreciation. Nebraskans praised the Fifth Cavalry for “driving the enemy from our borders and achieving a victory at Summit Springs, Colorado Territory, by which the people of the State were freed from the merciless Savages.” Soon afterward, the Coloradans praised both Carr and his soldiers for ending a reign of terror by the Cheyenne during which “the prosperity of the Territory has been greatly retarded during several years past ⦠[and] defenceless women and children of our pioneer settlements have been murdered by Savages, or subjected to a captivity worse than death.”
As you read the story, realize there was a flesh and blood Tom Alderdice, Kansas settler and former scout for Major George A. Forsyth at Beecher Island.
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There was as well a Mrs. Alderdice, Susanna by name, kidnapped by Tall Bull's band in raids along the Solomon. In that same camp was the second white female captive, Mrs. Maria Weichel, whose husband Gustaf was killed in a like raid. In one of those interesting footnotes to history, one can note that at Fort Sedgwick, where Mrs. Weichel recuperated, she fell in love with one of her attendants, a hospital steward. They were married soon after the Fifth Cavalry departed on the August campaign north to the Niobrara River country.