Battle of Julesburg: Revenge on the South Platte

The attack that shook Julesburg, Colorado in January of eighteen sixty-five was not a random raid. It was a calculated act of retaliation.

Six weeks earlier, on November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four, a Colonel named John Chivington led seven hundred Colorado militiamen in a dawn assault on a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, about one hundred forty miles south of here. The village was flying an American flag and a white flag of surrender. Chivington attacked anyway. Somewhere between one hundred fifty and five hundred people were killed, the majority of them women, children, and elders. The soldiers mutilated the bodies and returned to Denver with scalps they displayed at a theater to cheering crowds.

The Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, the Northern Arapaho, and allied bands of Lakota Sioux gathered on Cherry Creek in early January to plan their response. They chose Julesburg, the most important stagecoach and telegraph station on the Overland Trail along the South Platte River. On January seventh, eighteen sixty-five, roughly one thousand warriors executed a tactical feint. A small decoy party of Lakotas lured the post commander, Captain Nicholas O'Brien, out of Fort Rankin with about sixty soldiers. Once the troops were in the open, the main body of warriors rose from concealment and attacked.

The soldiers retreated to the fort with heavy losses. The warriors then systematically looted the stagecoach station, the warehouses, and the surrounding ranches, taking food and supplies they badly needed. They returned again on February second and burned the settlement to the ground before moving north toward the Black Hills.

Julesburg would be rebuilt. It moved location three times and eventually became a railroad town. But the January attack, coming so soon after Sand Creek, reverberated far beyond Colorado. It shut down the Overland Trail for weeks, cut telegraph lines, and demonstrated that the violence the United States had unleashed at Sand Creek would produce violence in return, across hundreds of miles of the central plains.