In the summer of 1869, eastern Colorado had become a killing ground. For five years, the Cheyenne had waged a desperate war of vengeance against American settlers, fueled by the horror of the Sand Creek Massacre, where Colonel John Chivington’s troops had butchered a peaceful village of men, women, and children. Now, under the legendary Dog Soldier chief Tall Bull, raiding parties swept the plains with a brutality that terrorized the frontier. The violence reached its peak on Sunday, May 30th, when Tall Bull’s warriors struck the homesteads along the Saline River.
That morning, two young men, Eli Ziegler and his brother-in-law John Albertson, spotted a group of horsemen and debated whether they were soldiers or Cheyenne. They were Cheyenne. The warriors split, half charging the two men while the other half, led by Tall Bull, continued up Spillman Creek. Ziegler and Albertson fled, barely escaping and hiding under a creek bank until nightfall.
Nearby, the Cheyenne cut down a Danish immigrant couple on a Sunday stroll, then attacked George Weichel and Fred Meigerhoff. The two men fought desperately, covering the escape of Weichel’s wife, Maria, until their ammunition ran out and they were killed. Maria Weichel was captured. Elsewhere, the warriors struck the home of Michael Haley.
The women inside, Susanna Alderdice and Bridget Cain, both pregnant, fled toward the river with their children. Cain hid beneath the riverbank, praying her infant would not cry out. Susanna was not so fortunate. Her three sons were killed by arrows, and she was lashed to a horse, clutching her eight-month-old daughter, Alice.
Raiders also killed a teenage boy, John Strange, and wounded his companion Arthur Schmutz, who ran miles with arrows in his back before collapsing at the Strange family cabin. That night, a rescue party gathered at a neighboring ranch. They found the dead, buried the Danish couple and the other men where they fell, and discovered four-year-old Willis Alderdice still alive, riddled with arrows. A messenger begged the army surgeon at the nearby 7th Cavalry camp to treat the boy, but the surgeon callously refused, an act one witness later described with bitter contempt.
When Thomas Alderdice and John Strange returned from a business trip, they were told the brutal truth: Strange’s son was dead, and Alderdice’s family was killed or captured. Refusing to wait for a reluctant army, Alderdice, an experienced scout, took to the plains alone. He found the Cheyenne camp but returned for help, only to find the cavalry had moved on. He traveled to Fort Harker, where he was denied a meeting with General John Schofield.
Only after a newspaper exposed the army’s indifference did Schofield agree to see him, but the meeting produced nothing. Alderdice returned to the Cheyenne camp alone. It was empty. Searching the abandoned lodges, he found his infant daughter hanging from a tree.
He buried her in the hard prairie ground, and all hope seemed lost. Finally, General C. C. Augur ordered Major General Eugene Carr to pursue Tall Bull’s band.
Carr assembled the 5th Cavalry and a contingent of Pawnee scouts, including the legendary frontiersman William F. Cody—Buffalo Bill. After weeks of tracking, on July 11th, Carr’s men located the Cheyenne village and attacked at noon, catching the inhabitants completely by surprise. The village erupted in chaos.
Tall Bull, seeing no hope, ordered his people into a small ravine, where he and his Dog Soldiers prepared to make a final stand, tethering themselves to the ground with their lances to signal they would fight to the death. As the cavalry charged, Captain Sylvanus Cushing found a bloodied young woman crawling toward him, crying out in German. It was Maria Weichel. She had been shot in the back by her captors and left for dead, but she had survived.
Meanwhile, Thomas Alderdice searched frantically through the burning village for his wife. The fighting in the ravine was savage. The Pawnee scouts, longtime enemies of the Cheyenne, fell upon the warriors with particular fury. Tall Bull’s youngest wife was killed early.
Lone Bear, one of the warriors covering the retreat, was unhorsed and killed by the Pawnee. Wolf with Plenty of Hair, the young warrior tethered to the ground, was cut down where he stood. Eventually, Tall Bull himself was shot and killed, though accounts of who fired the fatal shot differed. Buffalo Bill Cody would later claim the kill, but Captain Frank North’s journal makes no mention of it.
When the fighting ended, only one Cheyenne remained alive in the ravine: Tall Bull’s youngest wife, Sundance Woman, severely traumatized and taken prisoner. North discovered the body of Susanna Alderdice nearby, struck by a war club and shot above the left eye. Sundance Woman later stated that Tall Bull himself had killed her captive. Thomas Alderdice, who had lost his wife, unborn child, infant daughter, and nearly all his sons, buried her near the battlefield.
The soldiers burned the village, and a grisly necklace of human fingers was found in one lodge, bearing a wedding ring that Maria Weichel identified as her husband’s. The army marched the prisoners and the survivors toward Fort Sedgwick. Maria Weichel recovered and later gave birth to a healthy girl. The Cheyenne were so traumatized by the destruction that they refused to return to bury their dead for two months, until Lakota allies finally carried out the grim task.
Tall Bull’s surviving warriors slowly drifted north or surrendered at Fort Supply. Thomas Alderdice remarried and raised his surviving stepson Willis, who carried the scars of Dog Soldier arrows for the rest of his life and walked with a limp until his death in 1920. Alderdice would not revisit the site of the massacre for forty-two years, and when he finally did, he could not find the graves of his sons. The Battle of Summit Springs was a decisive victory for the army, but it was also the beginning of the end for the Cheyenne way of life on the plains.
It was a brutal, blood-soaked chapter in the long and tragic war between the encroaching settlers and the Plains tribes.