by Drury, Bob
The more circumspect Red Cloud also recognized that the white man’s war had finally arrived on his doorstep, first from the east following the troubles in Minnesota, and now from the south. There was nowhere to run. Nor, he reasoned, should his people have to run. It was time, once and for all, to fight the mighty United States and expel the Americans from the High Plains. He had long planned how to do this. The only question had been when. Sand Creek had answered that: Now.
• • •
In the early spring of 1865, not long after the southern tribes reached the Powder River Country, the leaders of the Sioux and Cheyenne soldier societies convened a war council on the Tongue. With over 2,000 braves at their disposal, Lakota war chiefs such as Red Cloud, Hump, and Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses plotted strategy with an assortment of Cheyenne counterparts including the regal Dull Knife1 and the ferocious Roman Nose, who had lost kinsmen at Sand Creek. Although each tribe kept its own laws and customs, all were gradually coming to think of themselves as “The People.” They had the Americans to thank for that.
Red Cloud was the first to address the gathering. “The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian,” he told his fellow fighters. “I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me in this land and it belongs to me. The white man was raised over the great waters, and his land is over there. Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room. There are now white people all about me. I have but a small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep it.”
No more eloquent statement of purpose was required. For once the squabbling bands and tribes were in agreement, and it was decided that after the early-summer buffalo hunt—which would prove a particularly cumbersome affair, given the number of mouths to feed—the main force of the coalition would strike the whites at the last crossing of the North Platte on the trails west. This was the Bridge Station outpost, about 130 miles upstream from Fort Laramie. In the meantime, smaller groups of raiders who could be spared from the hunt were sent west, south, and east to keep the soldiers protecting the “Glory Road” and the South Pass of the Rockies off balance, while also gathering intelligence regarding the Army’s movements.
It was a sound plan that leaped to a rousing start in April when a war party of Dog Soldiers burned out a key stage relay station west of Fort Laramie on the Wind River. The Indians killed all five of the station’s defenders and staked their mutilated corpses on trees. A large detachment of cavalry under Fort Laramie’s gallows-happy temporary commander, Colonel Moonlight, rode out to hunt the Indians down. But as in the Army’s ineffectual response to Julesburg, Moonlight’s patrol wandered in circles over 450 miles of Wind River country without seeing a hostile. Meanwhile the offending Dog Soldiers had moved east and were raiding the outpost at Deer Creek along the North Platte in conjunction with Lakota riding with Young-Man-Afraid-Of-His-Horses. Through May and June they attacked Wyoming stage stations, emigrant wagon trains, and small Army patrols, scalping and burning from Dry Creek to Sage Creek. On one humiliating occasion a platoon dispatched to chase down raiders returned to Fort Laramie at dusk and reported no Indians within twenty-five miles of the post. They had no sooner unsaddled their horses on the parade ground than a band of about thirty Lakota galloped into the fort, shooting, yelling, and waving buffalo robes. They stampeded the Army mounts through the open gates. They were never caught.
The brazen raids led General Dodge back in Omaha to again vent his spleen on the Laramie Loafers. There were at least 1,500 and probably closer to 2,000 docile Indians living within ten miles of the fort, and in June the general ordered his new field commander, the California General Patrick Connor, to wipe them out. Connor quite sensibly replied that these people were “friendlies,” and reminded Dodge that if they had not risen after the atrocities on the gallows, he doubted they ever would. Further, he said, if the United States was intent on turning every Indian on the Plains against the whites, a massacre of the Loafers would be a fine start. Dodge blinked. After consulting with the War Department he telegraphed Connor to instead round up the Loafers and transport them southeast to Fort Kearney, where they would ostensibly be taught to farm. Fort Kearney was on the Lower Platte, deep in southern Nebraska: Pawnee country. The Loafers were indeed manageable, but they were not eager to be shipped into the heart of their ancient enemy’s territory.
Nonetheless the Loafers were escorted under armed guard from Fort Laramie in early June, and as they passed the site of the Brule village where Lieutenant Grattan had met his end eleven years earlier, the ghosts seemed to stir them. A few nights later Crazy Horse slipped into their camp and discovered that they were already plotting an escape. He buoyed their spirits when he informed them that a war party of Strong Hearts was lurking just behind the low hills across the North Platte. The next morning, under the pretense of letting their herd graze, the Loafers lured their Army escort into an ambush. Five soldiers, including the officer in charge of the detail, were killed on the very spot where, fourteen years earlier, the Horse Creek Treaty to end all red-white hostilities had been signed. Seven more were wounded. The only Indian casualty was a Sioux prisoner, executed while still in chains.
The newly militant Indians then swam the river with their ponies as the Strong Hearts formed a defensive shield. They rode north. The next day they were pursued by Colonel Moonlight leading a contingent of 235 Ohio, Kansas, and California cavalrymen from Fort Laramie. By the time the hard-riding American force reached Dead Man’s Fork, a small creek flowing into the White River near the Nebraska–South Dakota border, more than a third of the troopers had been forced to turn back after their big American steeds gave out crossing the waterless, hardscrabble tract. The fugitive Loafers and the Strong Hearts had counted on this. They hid themselves amid the thick sage and chokecherries that lined the stream’s steep banks. When what was left of the troop dismounted to water the herd, the Indians sprang. They stampeded and captured the entire remuda, leaving Moonlight and his company to walk back to Fort Laramie over 120 miles of trackless prairie. Moonlight vowed never again to enter hostile territory without proper pickets and hobbles for his mounts, even if it meant disobeying orders. He needn’t have worried. On reaching Fort Laramie, the colonel was relieved of command by General Connor, who cited his incompetence, and shortly thereafter Moonlight was mustered out of the service by General Dodge.
The Army had no idea when, where, or how the hostiles would strike next. But old frontier hands like Jim Bridger assured the officers that it was a long-held Indian custom to celebrate even the most minor victories with weeks of feasts and scalp dances. There was time, he said, to amass and mount a large enough force to ride out and surprise them. With this, a degree of complacency settled over the forts and camps along the Oregon Trail. But for once the mountain man was mistaken because Red Cloud was yet again one step ahead of his enemies.
* * *
1. It is a measure of the integration between the Northern Cheyenne and the northern Lakota that this Cheyenne chief, named Morning Star in his own language, was by now almost universally known by his Sioux name, Dull Knife.
19
BLOODY BRIDGE STATION
Buffalo and Indians had forded the North Platte at the site of Bridge Station for centuries. Sometime in the early 1840s former mountain men had begun operating crude ferries to accommodate the first emigrants crossing the river en route to Fort Laramie. And in 1859 the Missouri Frenchman Louis Guinard had opened a trading post on an oxbow near the ford. Guinard constructed a 1,000-foot bridge spanning the flow, and soon thereafter the government expanded his adobe trading post into a sturdy redoubt constructed of lodgepole pine on the river’s south bank. Telegraph poles were erected, and a company of cavalry was deployed to protect the new line. It was Red Cloud’s idea to attack Bridge Station. He knew that defeating its garrison and burning the fort and bridge would halt overland emigrant traffic for months. Victory at Bridge Station would also provide the Indians with an opening for further incursions against the s
maller Army camps that had sprouted along the Oregon Trail.
For most of that summer the station had been manned by a feuding mix of Kansas and Ohio men, among them twenty-year-old Lieutenant Caspar Collins of the 11th Ohio Cavalry. As a child Collins had dreamed of fighting Indians, and when he came west in 1862 he was impatient for the opportunity. But after three years on the prairie his natural curiosity had tempered his bloodlust, and he had been known to ride off by himself along the Upper Powder, camping with friendly Oglalas and Brules. There were even reports that in less troubled times Crazy Horse himself had taught Collins bits of the Lakota language as well as how to fashion a bow and arrows. By all accounts Collins was an affable and capable junior officer, with a sterling reputation among the enlisted men. In July, when a large company of Kansas cavalry arrived at Bridge Station, he was bemused more than anything else. “I never saw so many men so anxious in my life to have a fight with the Indians,” Collins wrote in a letter home. “But ponies are faster than American horses, and I think they will be disappointed.”
Collins’s reflections aside, there was bad blood between his Ohioans and the rough Jayhawkers, and not long after Collins was dispatched to Fort Laramie to secure fresh mounts, the commander of the new Kansas contingent banished most of the Ohio troops to a more isolated post farther west on the Sweetwater. Collins knew nothing of this development as he waited at Fort Laramie to join a patrol riding back to Bridge Station, and it was his bad luck to have still been there when General Dodge’s new field commander General Connor arrived. Connor was yet another of the Army’s hot-tempered Irishmen—he had been born in County Kerry—and in addition to his temper he possessed a constitution as hardy as a Connemara pony’s. He was soon to acquire the Indian nickname “Red Beard” for the ornate copper sideburns that set off his lupine eyes set deep in a face as pinched as a hatchet blade. Connor spotted Collins apparently idling on the parade ground one day, and he tore into the young lieutenant before several witnesses.
“Why have you not returned to your post?”
Collins attempted to explain. The general cut him off.
“Are you a coward?”
Collins was shaken. “No, sir.”
“Then report to your command without further delay.”
Collins rode out the next day.
Connor’s rebuke may have been ringing in his ears when Collins reached Bridge Station on the afternoon of July 25 to find only a skeleton squad of his Ohio company still remaining. It was the very day Red Cloud had chosen to attack. The war chief’s tactics were the same as the plan that had nearly worked for the southern tribes at Fort Rankin, near Julesburg. Earlier that morning, before Collins’s arrival, the main body of Cheyenne and Lakota—which included Oglala, Brule, Miniconjou, Sans Arcs, and Blackfoot Sioux warriors—had concealed themselves behind the red sandstone buttes on the north side of the river. But, taking a lesson from the botched ambush at Fort Rankin, Red Cloud had raised a police force from Crazy Horse’s Strong Hearts as insurance in case his excitable braves tried to break cover too early. The Cheyenne recruited members of their own Crazy Dog Society to do the same. Red Cloud then sent a dozen or so riders in full battle regalia out into the little valley fronting the station, hoping to draw out most of its 119 defenders.
At first a howitzer battery seemed to have taken the bait, but after crossing the bridge the cannoneers moved no farther, opting to dig in on the north bank of the river and merely lob shells into the hills. Red Cloud was restless but waited until the tangerine twilight turned to charcoal dusk before signaling for the decoys to return. That night he altered his plan and selected a small party of Bad Faces to creep into the culvert beneath the north side of the bridge and hide themselves amid the brush and thick willows. At dawn he again deployed his baiting riders, who this morning cantered even closer to the fort and taunted the soldiers by shouting obscenities, in English, that they had learned from traders.
Again the ploy looked to have worked. The gates opened and at the head of a column of cavalry rode Lieutenant Collins. Red Cloud had no idea that the horsemen were coming out not to fight the decoys, but to escort into Bridge Station five Army freight wagons returning from delivering supplies to the Ohioans on the Sweetwater. By this time even the rawest recruit on the frontier was aware of the Indians’ repeated use of a handful of braves to lay a trap. Collins had also been warned. Earlier that morning, as he donned the new dress uniform that he had purchased at Fort Laramie, several of his remaining Ohioans had tried to dissuade him from riding out with only twenty-eight men. When he persisted they implored him to at least request from the Kansan commander a larger detail. Again Collins said no, and at this a fellow officer from his regiment handed him his own weapons, a brace of Navy Colts. Collins stuck one into each boot, selected a high-strung gray from the stable, and mounted up at 7:30. Before departing he handed his cap to his Ohio friend “to remember him by.”
The decoys scattered as Collins and his troop crossed the bridge, followed on foot by the Ohio men and a few Kansans with Spencer carbines, eleven soldiers in all, acting as a volunteer rear guard. They watched from the riverbank as the riders moved half a mile into the North Platte Valley. The hills then erupted with painted warhorses, pinging arrows, and glinting steel. The Lakota swept down from the northern buttes, and the Cheyenne rode in from the west. On Collins’s orders the little column wheeled into two ranks and discharged a volley from their carbines. A bitter-tasting fog of smoke rolled toward the river. Then Collins flinched and nearly toppled from his horse. He had been shot in the hip, and a scarlet stain seeped through his pants leg. By the time he regained his balance there were so many Indians swarming his column that lookouts on the Bridge Station parapets lost sight of the Bluecoats in the swirling dust. Except for one. Lieutenant Caspar Collins, an arrow buried deep in his forehead, was clearly visible for a moment before he and his horse disappeared into a scrum of charging braves.
Indian and American horseflesh continued to collide at close quarters, the Indians slashing with knives and spears and swinging tomahawks and war clubs to avoid firing into their own lines. The unwieldy carbines were now useless, and cavalrymen fought back with revolvers. A galloping horse broke out of the smoky haze with a wounded trooper hunched over its neck, making for the bridge. Another followed. Then another. The rear guard opened up with the Spencers, firing wildly into the melee. As if by magic the Bad Faces hidden beneath the span appeared. They threw their bodies in front of the retreating horsemen. The rear guard charged them, desperate to keep the escape route open. Riderless horses and single riders with arrows protruding from all parts of their bodies galloped back through the pandemonium. A cannon boomed from the Bridge Station bastions, and soldiers on the catwalks watched an Indian drive his spear through the heart of a dismounted cavalryman, yank it out, turn, and lunge at another, piercing his chest. But the second soldier was not dead. He fell forward, pressed his revolver against his assailant’s head, and with his last cartridge blew out the Indian’s brains.
Thirty minutes into the fight Red Cloud signaled the Cheyenne chief Roman Nose to break off his Dog Soldiers. They thundered up the valley toward the approaching freight wagon train. The train’s five lead scouts, cresting a rise in the road that put them in sight of the fort, saw a horde of 500 Indians bearing down on them. The scouts galloped for the river and splashed their mounts into the current. Three made it across. The men at the bridge who had formed the rear guard, including the lieutenant who had given Collins his revolvers, retreated to the stockade. The lieutenant volunteered to lead a rescue detachment, reminding the post commander that the twenty wagoneers were also men from the 11th Ohio Cavalry. The Kansan refused, insisting that he needed every available body to defend the fort. The lieutenant punched him in the face, was subdued, and was taken to the guardhouse at about the time Roman Nose descended on the freighters, just reaching the same ridgeline as the scouts.
• • •
The Ohio teamsters recognized that
it was suicide to try to burst through so many hostiles. They made for a shallow hollow between the road and the North Platte. They formed the best corral possible with their five wagons and a few empty wooden mess chests, and attempted to hobble their thirty mules. But an Indian captured the bell mare and led her off, the rest of the animals following. With her went their last chance of escape.
Americans dropped one by one over the succeeding four hours; but the Indians’ arrows and muskets were no match for the soldiers’ breech-fed, seven-shot Spencer carbines, and the survivors managed to hold off their circling attackers. By midafternoon the Indians decided to take a new tack, slithering closer on all sides through shallow trenches they scraped out of the sandy soil with knives and tomahawks, rolling logs and large boulders before them. The besieged troop, holed up below the road, could not see them. But the men on the fourteen-foot walls of Bridge Station did. They fired howitzer shells as a warning, but the meaning of the signal was lost on the teamsters. By four o’clock the Indians had crawled to within yards of the makeshift stockade. All went quiet; then came a shrill shriek. The Indians rose by the hundreds, “seeming to spring from the very ground,” according to one historian. A fire broke out and soldiers on the Bridge Station walls could hear screams but could see nothing through the thick black smoke. The Indians were burning both men and wagons.
Night fell and the Lakota and Cheyenne returned to the hills while the post commander at Bridge Station counted twenty-eight men missing and presumed dead, twice as many wounded, and perhaps half left to fight. The telegraph lines east of the fort had been cut, and at ten o’clock a half-blood scout mounted a captured Indian pony and slipped through a side gate with instructions to ride for Deer Creek Station twenty-eight miles to the east. From there word could be transmitted to General Connor at Fort Laramie. The scout made it through.
