The Way West

As if settlers in Lincoln County, Kan., had not endured enough from Cheyenne raids across north-central Kansas in 1868, terror returned to the Saline River valley on May 30, 1869.

The Dog Soldiers, a warrior society made up of Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho families, maintained that the settlements were an invasion of their traditional lands. Others had moved to reservations ceding their rights to the Kansas prairies. The Dog Soldiers, under the leadership of Tall Bull, saw themselves as the last defenders of the culture that had been passed down from their ancestors.

The Dog Soldiers descended from the west along Spillman Creek, killing and plundering as they went.

Esrkild Lauritzen and his wife Stine, a German couple living along the Spillman were surprised and killed. Maria Weichel was taken captive after her husband and a friend were killed in a running fight. Further downstream Susannah Alderdice watched in horror as her three sons were killed. She was taken captive with her baby daughter, Alice. Two miles away teenager John Strange was killed and his friend Arthur Smutz were mortally wounded the same bloody day.

Susannah’s husband, Tom Alderdice, was away in Junction City at the time of the attack. On his return he set out alone to track the raiders to their main village. Alderdice had tracked Dog Soldiers before. He had fought the Cheyenne the previous September in northeast Colorado at Beecher’s Island.

After finding the village he traveled to Fort Leavenworth, giving the location of the village to Gen. John Schofield.

Meanwhile, Maj. Eugene Carr’s 5th Cavalry, led by the famed scout Buffalo Bill Cody, scoured north-central Kansas in search of the Dog Soldier village. Maj. Frank North’s Pawnee Scouts, mortal enemies of the Dog Soldiers, supported Carr’s command.

June 28 was the turning point for Carr’s scouting foray. A trail of lodge poles perhaps a week old was discovered. The village was on the move.

On June 29 supply wagons from Fort McPherson reached Carr and his troops with a telegram from Gen. Schofield. The telegram, with the Alderdice information confirmed that Carr was chasing the same Indians that had committed the depredations in the Saline River valley. For the first time, Carr learned that the Dog Soldiers held two captive women.

Continuing west, Carr’s expedition camped very near the site of the Beecher Island fight of nearly a year before. He then turned north to Frenchman Creek near present-day Holyoke, Colo. There, an abandoned village was discovered.

The command continued closing in. Sunday morning, July 11, they knew they were very close. With scouts searching in every direction the village was soon located at a place called Summit Springs.

Although within two miles of the village, the Dog Soldiers were still unaware of Carr’s presence. At 2 o’clock on a hot, windy afternoon the charge was sounded. No one in the village heard a sound over the wail of the wind. Death was at hand. The reckoning had begun.

A young brave of perhaps 15 years of age, herding horses on the prairie, was the first to recognize the attack. He quickly mounted the best horse in the herd to move the horses toward the camp. According to Luther North, brother of the commander to the Pawnee Scouts,“He was mounted on a very good horse and could easily have gotten away if he had left the herd, but he took them all in ahead of him, then at the edge of the village he turned, joined a band of warriors that were trying to hold us back, while the women and children were getting away, and there he died like a warrior. No braver man ever lived than that 15-year-old boy.”

The battle lasted about 20 minutes as warriors fired from the canyons of the chalk bluff to the east. Drawing fire, warriors fought valiantly while their women and children escaped to the prairie. Tall Bull was shot from his horse as he openly directed a defense of his village. When the fight was over Susanna was found dead. Killed, it is said, by Tall Bull’s wife. She was buried at the site in a grave that has yet to be relocated. Maria was shot through the breast but was saved by the company surgeon.

The battle at Summit Springs broke the resistance of the Dog Soldier Society. Their great leader Tall Bull was dead, and their people scattered to the wind. What had been would be no more.

In Lincoln County a monument was erected on the courthouse square in 1909. With names inscribed its final declaration reminds the onlooker to” REMEMBER THE DAYS OF OLD”. And so we do, on The Way West.

“The Cowboy,” Jim Gray is author of the book Desperate Seed: Ellsworth Kansas on the Violent Frontier, Ellsworth, KS. Contact Kansas Cowboy, 220 21st Road, Geneseo, Kan. Phone (785) 531-2058 or kansascowboy@kans.com.