Platte Bridge: The Battle That Named Casper
Near Casper, Wyoming
The city of Casper, Wyoming takes its name from a twenty-year-old lieutenant who died about half a mile from here on the morning of July twenty-sixth, eighteen sixty-five. The story of how he got there, and what happened that day, runs right through the violent heart of the Plains Indian Wars.
Platte Bridge Station had stood at this crossing of the North Platte River since eighteen sixty-two, guarding the mail road and the new transcontinental telegraph line. It was a key waypoint on the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, and a pressure point as conflict between the United States Army and the allied Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations intensified across the central plains.
The immediate context was the Sand Creek Massacre of November eighteen sixty-four, in which Colorado militia killed roughly one hundred fifty Cheyenne and Arapaho people who had raised a flag of truce. The attacks that followed in spring and summer of eighteen sixty-five were, in significant part, a coordinated response to Sand Creek.
On the morning of July twenty-sixth, a supply wagon train under Commissary Sergeant Amos Custard was approaching the station from the west. To relieve it, Lieutenant Caspar Collins of the Eleventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry led a small detachment out from the fort. They rode directly into an ambush laid by a vastly larger force, estimated at two to three thousand warriors. Collins was killed in the fighting, along with four of his men. Custard and most of his escort were killed later that same day at what became known as the Battle of Red Buttes, a few miles west, when the same force overran the wagon train after a four-hour fight.
The Army renamed Platte Bridge Station Fort Casper in the lieutenant's honor, misspelling his first name in the process. That misspelling persists in the city's name today. The fort was abandoned two years later, then reconstructed in nineteen thirty-six with Works Progress Administration funds. The Fort Caspar Museum now sits on this site, preserving the history of the crossing that once connected the continent.
