The Battle of Platte Bridge, July Twenty-Sixth, Eighteen Sixty-Five
Near Casper, Wyoming
The summer of eighteen sixty-five was one of the most violent on the central Plains. The previous November, at Sand Creek in Colorado, a militia force had attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village under a flag of truce, killing more than one hundred and fifty people, the majority of them women and children. The news had spread across the Plains nations. By spring, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors were striking settlements, relay stations, and military posts across a wide swath of territory.
On July twenty-sixth, somewhere between two thousand and three thousand warriors assembled near this river crossing, one of the largest Indigenous military concentrations of the post-Civil War era. The garrison at Platte Bridge Station held fewer than one hundred and fifty soldiers.
A wagon train carrying supplies was moving toward the station from the east. The commanding officer sent a relief column to escort it in. Lieutenant Caspar Collins, twenty years old and the son of a colonel, led about twenty-five cavalry troopers across the bridge. They rode directly into an ambush. Collins wheeled his unit and tried to cut back through the surrounding warriors. He was shot and struck by arrows. He did not reach the bridge.
The wagon train under Sergeant Amos Custard was surrounded five miles west of the station. All twenty-two soldiers defending it were killed.
Twenty-nine soldiers died in total that day. The garrison held the station but could not advance, could not rescue, and could only watch. The battle was among the deadliest Army engagements of that violent summer, and it ended with the warriors withdrawing on their own terms, having demonstrated clearly that the Army's hold on this crossing was far more fragile than anyone in Washington wished to believe.
The Army renamed the station Fort Caspar in Collins's honor. The city that grew up nearby kept the name, though not quite the spelling.
