Battle of Summit Springs

Located about 14 miles Southeast of Sterling, CO., The last Native American battle in the area was fought between the Cheyenne and Sioux Tribes and the Army Cavalry using Pawnee scouts on July 11, 1869. Tall Bull was killed, also Susanna Alderdice, one of the women captives was killed. Rescued was captive Marie Weichell.

The Following information was produced several years ago by a local resident well researched in the Battle of Summit Springs. The Writer presents different points of view, from several sources. Language reflects available research texts, and is typical of the decade the article was written in. The Logan County Chamber of Commerce has not altered it.

On a Sunday afternoon, 120 years ago on July 11, 1869, the Battle of Summit Springs was fought.

Four stones mark the battle site which is five miles east of Highway 63 on the Washington-Logan County line road.

On that hot July day, General Eugene A. Carr with 300 men of the Fifth Cavalry and a battalion of Pawnee Indian scouts, attacked a band of some 500 Cheyenne Dog soldiers led by Tall Bull. Fifty-two Cheyenne Indians, including Tall Bull, were killed while the remaining Cheyenne fled or were captured.

Two of their women, Maria Weichel and Susanna Alderdice, had been kidnapped by Tall Bull during a bloody raid on their homes near Lincoln, Kan., on May 30, 1869.

At Summit Springs, Wiechel, a rather well-to-do German girl about 20-years-old, was found outside Tall Bull's lodge. Her husband had been killed in Kansas.

During the Fifth Cavalry's attack, Tall Bull shot Maria, but fortunately the bullet deflected off a bone. She lived, and through a German interpreter and her heartbreaking tears, described the torture, abuse, stench, and torment she and Susanna had endured the previous six weeks.

Maria was taken to Fort Sedgwick, was released on August 4, 1869, and it is thought, married her hospital attendant.

Found dying in Tall Bull's lodge was Susanna Alderdice, a 28-year-old mother of four children, all who she watched brutally killed in Kansas by the Cheyenne. During the battle at Summit Springs, she was fatally tomahawked in the head by one of Tall Bull's Squaws. The frontier mother was buried the next day.

After the battle late in the afternoon of July 11, a severe storm accompanied by lightening, thunder and hail pounded the battle site, the Cavalry, and the pitiful fleeing Cheyenne.

The next day a torch was put to the Indian property, their clothing, provisions, and lodges. The only casualty suffered by the Fifth Cavalry was a scratch from an arrow on the forehead of a soldier.

Buffalo Bill Cody, a scout in the Fifth Cavalry, many years later made this last Plains Indian battle in Colorado a part of his Wild West show.

Along with being the last Indian battle in Colorado, Summit Springs is significant in that it effectively crippled the marauding Cheyenne Dog soldiers and prevented future devastating attacks on white frontier settlements.

On July 11, 1969, at the Centennial commemoration of the battle at Summit Springs, a military unit dressed in cavalry uniforms performed riding maneuvers on horseback.

Then, Col. Ray G. Sparks, a Kansas historian, told the audience of the Cheyenne raids in Kansas and the resulting battle at Summit Springs.

During the planning of the commemoration, an argument arose. From whose viewpoints should the history of Summit Springs be written - the white man or the Indians?

Col. Sparks sided with the white man's view. Timothy Kloberdanz, a Sterling native and then college student, and now a professor at the University of North Dakota, argued in favor of the Indian's view point.

Col. Sparks concluded that the frontier had to be made safe from the Indian's deadly assaults which included murder, mutilation, kidnapping and raping women, and theft.

For centuries, these raids against neighboring tribes. With the appearance of white settlements, the Indians had new and greater opportunities for raids. The Indian had to be conquered, which occurred through the northeastern Colorado battle, said Col. Sparks, who wrote "Reckoning at Summit Springs".

Kloberdanz countered that the white man was stealing the Indian's lands, killing off their buffalo, and committing acts of atrocity upon them, such as the Sand Creek massacre.

The Indian's assaults were designed to protect themselves and their lands and also to retaliate against the white man's attacks.

The white man's ready access to weapons and their superior numbers led to the genocidal destruction of numerous Indians and their very culture.

Summit Springs, Kloberdanz said, was not a battle, but a massacre and a deep injustice.
Kloberdanz brought these ideas together in 1969 in a 17-page history of the battle called, "The Tragedy at Summit Springs, From the Viewpoint of the Indians."

The argument continued throughout the commemoration, and was never fully resolved. Some Indians attended the commemoration, but they were for formal observances. They drove stakes with flags, representing the slain Indians, into the ground as a memorial to their fallen ancestors.

Finally in 1971, Kloberdanz erected a stone at the battle site commemorating a Cheyenne Indian boy's heroic act during the battle in which the boy was killed.

On the 110th anniversary in 1979, a small commemoration was observed. Of importance at that time was the recent publishing of the book "Sound the Charge," written by Richard Weingardt, a Sterling native and now a Boulder architect.

"Sound the Charge" is a more in-depth study of the battle, complete with illustrations.

Copies of the three histories can be found at the Overland Trail Museum, which also houses, encased in glass, a miniature reproduction of the battle, along with one of the early markers at the battle site, as well as other Indian articles.

July 11, 1869 is indeed a day from history to remember - one that not only affected Logan County and the plains of Colorado, but the entire Western United States.

The frontier from that day was safe for settlement, and the Cheyenne Indian's way of life was tragically brought to a close.