Battle of Mud Springs

About eight miles northwest of here, on the high plains of western Nebraska, stood a low sod-and-log structure called Mud Springs Station. It was a stop on the Overland Trail and one of the telegraph relay points that connected the coasts. In February of eighteen sixty-five, it became the site of a two-day siege that illustrated just how badly the United States Army had miscalculated the consequences of what had happened eleven weeks earlier at Sand Creek.

On November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four, Colonel John Chivington led seven hundred Colorado troops against a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment on Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado, killing more than one hundred fifty people, the majority of them women and children. The survivors scattered northward into the Powder River country, joining with Lakota Sioux warriors who were already angry about treaty violations and railroad surveys cutting through their hunting grounds.

By early February eighteen sixty-five, a large alliance of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors, numbering somewhere between five hundred and a thousand, moved through the Nebraska Panhandle cutting telegraph lines and raiding stations. On February fourth, they appeared at Mud Springs. Inside the station walls were fourteen men, only nine of them soldiers.

The telegraph operator tapped out urgent messages to Fort Mitchell and Fort Laramie before the lines went down. Through the night, Lieutenant William Ellsworth rode hard from Fort Mitchell with thirty-six additional men, reaching the station by morning. Reinforcements continued arriving, eventually bringing the army's total to around two hundred thirty soldiers. The warriors, well-armed and disciplined, pressed the fight through February sixth before withdrawing northward toward the Platte River, where a larger engagement would follow two days later at Rush Creek.

Casualties at Mud Springs were light on the army side, but the episode exposed a stark reality: the Sand Creek Massacre had not subdued the Plains nations. It had unified them. The fighting that followed Sand Creek would stretch for more than a decade.