Episode 2 - Battles of Platte Bridge Station & Red Buttes

On the morning of July 26, 1865, Lieutenant Caspar Collins and Commissary Sergeant Amos Custard rode into the history books during the Battles of Platte Bridge Station and Red Buttes. These small battles left an indelible mark on the history of Central Wyoming and especially the City of Casper, Wyoming.

 Join Jeremy and John as they explore these important battles...and how the City of Casper got its name thanks in part to a typographical error.

Chapter Markers
Introduction - 00:00
US Expansion On the Great Plains - 02:40
History of Platte Bridge Station - 07:36
Sand Creek Massacre - 11:54
Battle of Platte Bridge Station - 14:01
Between the Battles - 25:40
Battle of Red Buttes - 28:45
Aftermath & Discussion - 31:27

Episode References
"The Battle of Platte Bridge Station and Red Buttes." Wyoming Historical Society, 2014, accessed January 7, 2024, https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/battles-platte-bridge-station-and-red-buttes.

McDermott, John D. Circle of Fire: The Indian War of 1865. Kindle ed. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003.

"Fort Caspar Museum Faq." City of Casper, 2014, accessed January 17, 2024, https://www.fortcasparwyoming.com/f_a_qs.

Thanks for tuning into Buffalo Tales and exploring the tracks across Wyoming's past. You can contact us directly through our Facebook page, Buffalo Tales.

Transcript

On the morning of July 26, 1865, Major Martin Anderson ordered Lieutenant Caspar Collins to reinforce a small wagon train led by Commissary Sergeant Amos Custard.

Custard's detachment en route from Sweetwater Station was encamped at Willow Springs, located 25 miles east of Platte Bridge Station, located near present-day Caspar, Wyoming.

Anderson had good reason to believe Custard's wagons would soon come under attack.

Shortly after leaving Platte Bridge Station, Collins' party was ambushed by a large force of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota warriors.

Under fire, the soldiers retreated back to the bridge, losing several, including Collins himself.

Meanwhile, Custard's party came under attack at what was later called the Battle of Red Buttes.

Only a handful of Custard soldiers survived.

Welcome back to Buffalo Tales.

I'm Jeremy Yates, and I'm joined by John Woodward as we share the tales, trails, and history of Wyoming.

For our second episode, we're traveling back to 1865 to explore the Battle of Platte Bridge Station.

Thank you All right, folks, we are back.

For our second episode.

Yes, so we haven't been pulled off the air yet.

Yeah, hopefully not.

So this episode is going to be covering the Battle of Platte Bridge Station, which is pretty near and dear to both Jeremy and I, since we both live here in Caspar, Wyoming, and the battle took place within spitting distance of where we are at the moment.

Like we did in our first episode, before we jump into the actual battle, let's talk a little bit about the background and set the stage for where we're at.

So first thing, let's get back to that imaginary rectangle that is the state of Wyoming.

Now, if you were to draw a line straight from the north to south and from east to west, creating like a bullseye in the middle of the state, Caspar is located just to the east of that middle point.

So we're not quite in the geographic center of the state, but we're close enough for government work, I'd say.

So that's where a lot of this action is taking place, although there are different actions and activities that are taking place in northern Wyoming and also eastern Colorado.

So yes, we're gonna jump around to another state, which we don't usually do, but...

It's important, trust us.

Yep, so here we go.

The first thing to realize is immigration across the Great Plains was increasing significantly from the 1840s onward, especially with the discovery of gold in California, which is 1848, Idaho in 1862, and Montana in 1863.

Nothing drew people like the possibility of gold and instant wealth.

So you have these large overland trails connecting places like Independence, Missouri to Virginia City in Montana, places around Boise, Idaho, and then obviously up to Oregon.

With the Oregon Trail, you have one of the trails going into Utah for the LDS settlers, and then the folks that are going all the way out to California.

These gold fields at the time were pulling in about $100,000 worth of gold annually.

So that's, you know, we think that's a lot of money now, but that would have been hundreds of millions of dollars if you counted it out to today.

Also along those westward lines of transit, you have a new technology coming in in the 1860s, which was the Transcontinental Telegraph.

So the Telegraph basically was a galvanized steel wire that was strung coast to coast, put up on poles, and then you have these little glass insulators to make sure that they're going.

And there are stations.

Yeah, with big, like, early batteries, right, John?

Yeah.

So they were positioned pretty much every 15 to 20 miles along the route because, you know, this wasn't today where you could, you know, plug it into the wall.

I mean, electrical power was in its infancy.

So you needed to be able to get and keep power along the line.

Thankfully for the Telegraph folks, at this case, it was the Pacific Telegraph Company.

They were able to co-opt a lot of the stage and mail stations that existed along those transcontinental routes.

You know, most people, if they can remember that most famous game, the Oregon Trail, you know, they think of the different stops along the route.

All the ways to die of dysentery on the way.

Yep, or get bitten by a rattlesnake.

Oh, I forgot about that one.

Or go hunting.

That was always my favorite part.

I always cheated and played a doctor because you had more money and your family wouldn't die.

I did too, but when you think about those routes, there were stage stops, you know, every 15 or 20 miles.

And at those stage stops, every third stop or so might have a blacksmith.

A store.

A store, a place to send mail.

So, there were people growing and living along the Great Plains all the way from Missouri to, you know, different points across the West.

When that telegraph was being in place, because it was so important, it went live in the fall of 1861, just as the Civil War was starting, it provided vital communication to those goldfield areas and to those population centers across the West, places that were helping contribute to the Union War effort.

Which is why the protection of, I mean, it was always my view, and we can argue about this in a minute, John, but like that the real reason we had all the forts was to protect the telegraph wire.

Because if you are Lincoln or his war cabinet, you don't want, like California, which is giving you all this money to pay for the Civil War, you don't want to be losing contact with them.

You need to keep those funds coming in.

Absolutely.

So the first three forts along the Overland Trails were built before the telegraph was a real thing.

So that was Fort Kearney in Nebraska in 1848, Fort Laramie here in Wyoming in 1849, and then Fort Hall in Idaho in 1849.

You ever been to Fort Hall?

Yeah, I think I was in like the third grade, you know, the summer before my fourth grade year.

Sometime I vaguely remember it.

I've never been to Fort Hall.

I've been to Fort Laramie.

Every Wyoming kid has been to Fort Laramie.

It's like a required fifth grade trip.

I still have my hardtack, I think.

It's probably still edible.

Hardtack will last forever.

But after these stations, just like Jeremy said, the Army co-opted a lot of these telegraph posts to have small detachments of soldiers to help protect the line.

These stations, these detachments were placed, you know, every 25 to 50 miles.

And one of those stations was Platte Bridge Station.

Now it's important to realize that all these actions were not happening in a vacuum.

The indigenous peoples that were living on the plains at the time saw this gradual encroachment.

Especially once gold was discovered in California, the Overland Trails went from a few hundred people a year to tens of thousands of people.

And it's disrupted game, causing issues for everyone, the people moving through, the people living there, and the indigenous people that had been living there.

With their lifeways disrupted, it caused a lot of conflicts between indigenous parties and the folks that were either setting up their commercial ventures or passing through.

So let's talk a little bit about Platte Bridge Station itself.

The North Platte River, which is located here in Caspar, is part of the Greater Platte River watershed and part of what National Park Service historian Merrill Mates called the Great Platte River Road.

People would start following the Platte Valley in Nebraska, crossing Nebraska into what is now modern-day Wyoming, and then following the North Platte up to where we are in Caspar and the Platte Bridge Station.

And Platte Bridge Station was like your last chance to cross the Platte, and also where the trip got bad for overland travelers, because that's where you had water and essentially grass the whole way until you got there, and then that's when things start to get tricky.

The next bit of passage over to the Sweetwater and Sweetwater Station is a barren stretch of about 50 miles or so.

But crossing the river was an important task.

The Platte at this time could be anywhere between 20 and 40 feet wide, and usually around 10 feet deep.

It was a treacherous place, especially for those wagon trains that were coming into the Caspar area in typically May, June, and early July.

There was water run-offs from snowstorms.

So you could even be here during flood conditions.

So the first commercial crossing enterprise was opened in 1847, when a group of LDS pioneers constructed a crude ferry across the North Platte.

And this was originally to get the LDS immigrant trains across the river and on their way to the Salt Lake Valley.

But they weren't opposed to taking paying customers for other people who were crossing.

A few years later, a different commercial enterprise is established by Jean-Baptiste Richard, who was a very interesting businessman and liquor smuggler.

He liked to go down to the New Mexico territories and bring up what they called Taos Lightning.

Oh, I didn't know that.

So he was often on the run from the authorities for bringing up illegal things.

But Richard and several of his business partners built the first bridge, about 1852, 1853, in Evansville, Wyoming, not too far from the Oregon Trail State Veterans Cemetery.

Oh yeah, it's just down the little slope from it.

And for people that aren't familiar with Wyoming geography, because why would you be, Evansville, it's like a little sister community to Caspar.

Even now, it's in the same, like, census district, metropolitan area.

We like to think of it as sort of like a suburb.

It is sort of like a suburb.

But don't tell the people from Evansville that, because they don't like it.

No, the mayor of Evansville, as there was recording, is a guy that I worked with.

He looked suspiciously like me, and people would always come up to him and me and fake guy was him, and ask me to do IT stuff.

And I could never do it.

So I just started like, saying, yep, it's ready to go.

And then I'd call it.

Small town life.

So after Reshaw's bridge was in operation for a few years, it got some competition a little bit further downstream from Lewis Gennard.

Gennard was a former associate of Reshaw, but he started building a much larger bridge in 1859.

And it was located roughly where the Fort Caspar Museum is located right now.

This complex was a lot larger.

It included a full blacksmith shop and also a trading post.

So it was very active not only with immigrants, but also with different indigenous peoples that were coming close and trading at the post.

As the telegraph line was being built, the army selected the bridge and established Platte Bridge Station in 1862 to help protect the lines basically in 50 miles in either direction.

Right, because the next one, before that, is Deer Creek Station, right, and then Sweetwater Station.

Yeah, so to the east is Deer Creek Station and then to the west on the, I'm not sure what drainage the Sweetwater is part of.

But that was the next station on the line.

All I know about the Sweetwater, John, is that an old rancher once told me that you should never dunk your head in the Sweetwater because it makes you go crazy.

Must be a Fremont County thing.

Must be.

I mean, I grew up in Fremont County, but we never did that.

My only memories of the Sweetwater Station is the lovely Y Dot Rest Area that's located right there.

Let's take ourselves away from Central Wyoming for just a moment and move into eastern Colorado.

Because to really set the stage of what happens at Platte Bridge and Red Buttes, we have to talk about one of the most heinous acts against indigenous people in the American West, and that is the Sand Creek Massacre that happened in 1864.

On November 29th, 1864, Colonel John M.

Chivington led an attack by the 3rd Colorado Cavalry on a Cheyenne and Arapaho village located in southeastern Colorado.

This particular village was led by a chief named Black Kettle and comprised about 750 people, mostly women, children, and older men.

Black Kettle and his village were complying with government requests for protection as they were in the vicinity of Fort Lyon, Colorado.

Chivington attacked and killed about 230 people.

His, and I'll use the word barbarism, because I think that's the only word that can describe it, was on display when his troops returned to Denver carrying some very unsavory trophies of what happened.

It's important to note that two of the companies of soldiers of the Third Colorado, including a company led by Silas Sowell and another one by Joseph Kramer, refused Chivington's orders and did not participate in the attack.

But after the Sand Creek Massacre, survivors fled, spreading the news to other Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota camps.

This attack drew calls for vengeance and led to the sacking of Julesburg, Colorado and several other attacks that took place in January and February of 1865.

But news of this would continue to spread and the flames that were ignited at Sand Creek would continue to come back to haunt people for the next several years.

And so that's the ignition source for what happens at Platte Bridge and Red Buttes six months later.

Right, as part of the larger, almost vengeance war of the Arapaho, Lakota, and Cheyenne.

So let's talk about the preparations for the battle.

So wind forward until June, July of 1865.

Various Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne bands have gathered about midsummer along the Tongue River in northern Wyoming, somewhere in the vicinity of Sheridan.

This camp by some estimates had as many as 10,000 people there.

In late July, the assembled leaders proposed striking at Platte Bridge Station with the attempt to destroy Gennard's Bridge.

The idea was to burn down the stockade, destroy the bridge as a way of halting western encroachment onto not only the Powder River Basin but other parts of the west.

An offensive striking force of between 2,000 and 3,000 warriors left the encampment moving south sometime about July 24th.

It took them about a day, day and a half to reach the Caspar area.

This force included a number of prominent individuals amongst the various nations that would continue to play major leadership roles in the decades to come.

These included old man afraid of his horses, young man afraid of his horses, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Dull Knife, White Bull, Roman Nose and George Bent.

George was a son of a Cheyenne woman, owl woman and a western trader, William Bent.

He had spent and had experience in both his mother's indigenous communities and also the western communities of his father.

But after Sand Creek, he made the decision to give up all of his American heritage and to return to his mother's people and would continue to be a big part of their efforts both at Julesburg and then later at Platte River Bridge.

Ultimately, he became a government interpreter and then settled with the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma, passing away right after the end of the First World War.

And perhaps accounts of the Plains Battles of the mid-1860s basically provide almost all of the historical record from the indigenous point of view.

The goal of the striking force was to draw soldiers away from the station using basic decoy tactics and then once that smaller force was out and destroyed then attacking the stockade and the garrison up front.

So we get to the day of July 25th.

Soldiers at Platte Bridge Station spot a small group of about 20 mounted warriors on the bluffs north of the post.

A detachment of the 11th Kansas went out to engage them but fell back when they realized that they were outnumbered.

Later that afternoon, about 4 o'clock or so, a wagon from Fort Laramie arrives at the station and the driver of that particular wagon reported that raiders were trying to drive off or capture the post's cattle herd, which was about 2 miles east.

At that point, Major Anderson, who is the post commander, sends out Captain James Greer to engage the raiders and Greer's command was able to kill one of the Cheyenne leaders, a chief named Highback Wolf, during the engagement.

That night, Major Anderson did an inspection of the station's weapons and garrison, making sure they could do whatever preparations they could.

Which seemed like not a lot.

It seemed like some men only had 20 rounds for their rifles, but they did have a small 12-pound artillery pre-switch, which comes up later, but they were undersupplied because it's a long way from...

And even though this is right at the end of the Civil War, most of the Union's supplies were to the east, to the major theaters of the Civil War.

The volunteer units that were stationed in the west were not that well-supplied.

And some of the American soldiers in the west were what we call galvanized Yankees, which is really quite interesting.

And John, tag in if I get any of this wrong.

But what happens is Confederate soldiers that have been captured, some of them were given the opportunity like, okay, we won't put you in a prisoner of war camp.

You can disavow the Confederacy and we'll put you on the line at these plane stations.

Yeah, basically they were given their liberty with the promise that they would not be used to fight Confederate forces.

And so these were Southerners who were put in Union uniforms, sent out west, hence the term galvanized Yankees.

And they were all across the plains in those war years.

So that night everyone is just waiting for something to happen.

They know something is about to.

The morning dawns on July 26th and a small group of soldiers arrive from Sweetwater Station.

Now this is led by First Lieutenant Henry Retney and another officer, Captain A.

Lybe.

Now Captain Lybe was one of these galvanized Yankees.

Oh, you was?

They were on their way to Fort Laramie to draw pay for their soldiers.

Right, because Fort Laramie had just gotten the monthly money ship.

Yeah, so they were on their way to Fort Laramie and Anderson stops them.

He's like, hey guys, we got stuff going on.

Right.

Retney also informs Anderson that he had passed Sergeant Custard's party near Willow Creek about halfway between the post and Sweetwater Station at that time.

Can I ask you a question here, John?

Is Custard like a teamster basically?

I've never figured this out in all of my time here.

So, he's what's called a commissary sergeant.

So, he is a noncommissioned officer, but he would be more supply.

Retney runs into Custard, right?

And tries to get him to come with them, right?

Yes.

And Custard says no.

I also want to preface that we're saying Custard like the dessert, not Custer.

This gets a little confusing.

So, Retney presses Anderson, hey, you got to send some people out there to escort Custard and his men back to the station.

And he needs to press 100 men and the howitzer.

Yeah, which it's important to realize that was almost the entire post's compliment.

You know, Retney, he comes up again, you know, there are two requests.

Finally, after a little bit of conjoining, Anderson agrees to send out a 20-man force.

But none of the officers from the 11th Kansas volunteer.

Right, but Caspar Collins, the son of William Collins, who is the regimental commander for the 11th Ohio and based at Fort Laramie, had just got to Platte Bridge Station with new mounts, right?

Yeah, about a day or 20 years old.

He was there like a day before.

And he impetuously says, I'll do it.

Right.

And almost immediately he's like, what did I just volunteer for?

Right, right.

And some of the people in the command structure under Anderson, so that's important to remember that Collins isn't even under the command structure of this person.

No.

So then some of them are putting themselves on the sick list and things like that because they just know that this is not going to be good.

And the other half is a reminder that the Kansas officers are a month away from mustering out.

Oh, okay.

So they know something's up, they know this is dangerous, they don't want to volunteer for a dangerous assignment and then bite it within a month of going home.

Caspar Collins was a pretty interesting young man before he passed away.

Sorry to spoil that, everybody.

You don't get many towns named after you if you don't.

But he was trained as an engineer, right?

I think that sounds about right.

And the reconstruction of Fort Caspar is based on his drawings of the fort.

He learned to speak Lakota fluently, had personal relationships.

Some people suggest he had personal relationships with Crazy Horse.

He definitely had a personal relationship with several members of the Lakota Nation.

Don't know exactly who or to what level.

But enough that people were able to recognize him and they saw him as someone who was approachable.

But anyway, Collins, he tries to backtrack and then Anderson says, well, are you not willing to follow a direct order?

And Collins is like, yes, sir, I will.

So about 730 that morning, Collins and what's been enlarged to a 25-man detachment leave the post.

These are mounted and they are from the 11th Kansas I and K companies.

They carried mostly 50 caliber single shot Smith carbine rifles, which had about a 14 shot a minute maximum rate of fire.

But they didn't have a whole lot of ammunition to spare.

I think I read that some of these guys had maybe 20 rounds of ammunition for these guns.

Basically, one of the things that Anderson had done the night before was actually have a lot of his soldiers making up cartridges for these Smith rifles, which they could do because they weren't the like the metallic cartridges that we see today.

Some of them were actually wrapped in like linen or different things.

So they were a little bit different.

Bretney also provides Collins with a pair of pistols that boots, and you know, the party departs the station.

Almost immediately, soldiers observe two indigenous forces moving west of the river, but south of the road and the route that Collins is following.

Anderson, recognizing that something is about to happen and Collins might be potentially ambushed, orders Bretney and Lybe to take a force out to serve as a rearguard for Collins, because he wanted to make sure that if Collins was ambushed, there would be a force that could help provide a little bit of relief.

So Collins and his 25 men could get back to the fort?

Basically, and it didn't take long for Anderson to be proven right.

Collins' detachment only makes it about a quarter mile from the bridge when they're ambushed by a force of Cheyenne dog soldiers led by a warrior named Big Horse.

So Collins, he kept his troops in order even though he was surrounded and potentially and really overwhelmed.

So Brettonian live soldiers began to provide a base of fire and covering fire for those soldiers.

And the station fired that 12 pound howitzer to help provide fire support for the siege party.

So right as Caspar Collins gets to the bridge, one of his men has his horse shot out from under him.

He rides out to go save that guy and then that's the last thing.

Yeah, four of the party including Collins are killed.

Collins is himself shot in the head with an arrow.

That's the final thing.

But Battle of Platte Bridge Station lasts somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes with most of the US forces retreating back to the protection of the stockade.

What I think is interesting in this part is, so we have a young officer who has not had a lot of experience, but under stress is able to not only command his men effectively to get them back, but does so without really putting a whole lot of stress on anybody else.

Yeah, that's interesting.

It seemed certainly that Caspar Collins knew that this was maybe his last ride because he gives his hat to a private, tells him to remember him with it.

Something like that.

I mean, I like to compare it with what would happen about 18 months later at Fort Philcarney when another officer decides to ride over the ridge thinking he can whip anybody with his force and ends up getting massacred.

But that's a story for another time.

But between the two battles, I pulled up an old Latin term, interprolium.

I'm happy you defined that because I was about to Google it.

So you have the interbellum, the interregnum.

In this case, we have the interprolium, which is the period between the two battles.

And if any Latinists are out there, especially you, Professor Holt, yes, I created...

I might have bastardized that word.

John and I both struggled under the tutelage of Dr.

Holt, the University of Wyoming.

Not for lack of his ability.

It was all between the headphones for me.

So it was all us.

But anyway, during this period of time, the indigenous forces cut the telegraph wires both east and west of the post.

For a five-mile chunk of it.

Yeah, so that cuts off the entire system from basically Deer Creek Station to Sweetwater Station.

So even if the folks in Fort Laramie recognized there was something wrong, it would still take someone from Deer Creek Station to go out and see what was going on and report back.

25 miles away.

Yeah, so it basically made the folks at Platte Bridge Station one of the most isolated US.

Army posts at the time.

And it's this when Anderson sends out Lieutenant George Walker to repair the lines.

And he sends out groups on either side to fix both edges at once.

And then it sends a couple dudes like three miles away to be a lookout.

And it all goes south very quickly.

Pretty much.

So that was about 9 a.m.

You have the Battle of Platte Bridge Station at like 730, 745.

And then by 9 o'clock, Anderson's trying to make repairs.

And Lieutenant Walker retreats.

And they suffer some casualties on that retreat because they're just not able to make those repairs.

At about 930 that morning, there's a big conflab at the post with all of the officers.

And things get really heated at this point.

Bretney is just livid.

And so he confronts Anderson about...

Causes him of murder.

Yeah.

That he was a negligent commander.

And then when another officer gets involved, Bretney strikes this other officer.

It's actually, I think, it's Lieutenant Greer.

I believe it is, yeah.

And as it continues, Anderson basically throws Bretney into the guardhouse to cool off.

When we were doing the readings for this, did you think Bretney kinda sounded like a cool dude?

I think Bretney was cut from the same cloth as the man 18 months later that would ride over the ridge.

For those...

I can see your point here.

I mean, Bretney wanted to be a hero.

Yeah.

And he definitely saw himself as a capable officer, whether he was or not, that we don't know.

His later life suggests he was maybe slightly less capable than he may be.

Probably.

But Anderson, you know, he lets Bretney out of the guard house later that afternoon after he's had some time to cool off.

Let's get back to Sergeant Amos Custard.

Now, Custard's detachment had been encamped at Willow Springs that night.

And then the morning of the 26th, they are coming in towards Platte Bridge Station.

Now, for the most part, the wagons hadn't been touched until they came within about five miles of Platte Bridge Station.

That's so close.

Because if you read like survivor accounts, they can say that they see the smoke from the burning wagons, from the fort.

But that doesn't make any sense if they're, I always assumed they were actually closer to red mutes.

So, the advance party came within sight of the post at about 11 a.m.

Oh, wow, okay.

So, I mean, they were close enough that they could see the Platte Bridge Station.

But almost as soon as that sighting occurred, indigenous warriors spotted the detachment and moved towards it.

So, at this point, Custard breaks his force into two parts.

He takes Corporal James Schrader and puts him in charge of the wagons with a handful of soldiers to make sure that the supplies are safe, while he takes the rest of the balance of his troops forward to form a skirmish line to help protect the wagons.

Like Collins, these troopers were also equipped with that Smith.50 caliber carbine.

But I don't know really how many...

It sounded based on what I looked at, that everyone was underarm.

Pretty much.

Now, Custard sets up barricades and is able to largely keep that force occupied and engaged for several hours.

They estimate that he probably was able to keep things together until about four o'clock.

That's when the sound of gunfire really ceases.

And then the station observed smoke, like you mentioned, but that happened about 5 p.m.

So it's important to note that despite most of Custard's detachment being killed in that engagement, three soldiers did survive.

And that was Corporal Schrader, and then privates Henry Smith and Byron Swain.

And they were pretty lucky.

They swam across the river to avoid it, and then began to make their way covertly up and down different little ravines until they could actually get back to the post.

So they were using cover and concealment to make that their move around those different indigenous forces.

Now, the last bit there about Red Buttes takes place at about 5 p.m.

And that's when Bretney, now out of the stockade, takes a small detachment to go and try and recover the bodies of the fallen soldiers.

They did recover the remains of one, Private Moses Brown, but then they had to retreat almost immediately because they were engaged.

So that ends the battle itself.

But that night, there's a big camp of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapa hold a huge celebration before they start their trek back north.

The next morning, so that'd be the 27th, soldiers at the post observed mounted indigenous riders moving around, but they were gone by largely 8 o'clock or so.

So it was a pretty early departure.

They went out to survey the damage on the telegraph lines and they found that that damage on five miles stretch wasn't just the line being torn down, but it was also the poles being cut and carried away.

Some people suggested it was used to move injured or dead Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors.

Yeah, I saw that in the reading too.

I mean, that's possible.

I mean, I think it's just as possible that they recognize they need to destroy the line and that's the easiest way to do it.

So the soldiers at Platte Bridge Station would spend the next few days searching for the remains of their comrades and found a lot of them mutilated in some very horrific ways.

But really at that point there was not much that went on at Platte Bridge Station.

There were some reinforcements that came in and different things and communications were reestablished with Fort Laramie so people were aware of what had happened.

Now this episode helped precipitate a larger expedition into the Powder River Country later in 1865 led by Brigadier General Patrick Connor.

Now this column would involve about 2500 soldiers and various auxiliaries from I think the Crow and the Shoshone.

However, the Connor expedition really didn't achieve much.

They were never able to engage that large village that they had known was up there on the upper Powder River drainage.

And he was recalled fairly quickly, right?

Yeah, I think by the time that Connor's expedition made it into the Powder River Country, that encampment had largely broken up.

But the memory of both those, of the battle would continue.

I mean, those indigenous forces, the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and the Arapa, would continue to press US forces the following year with the start of a conflict that's better known as the Red Clouds War, which would see the successful closure of the Bozeman Trail and the different posts along the Bozeman Trail using the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.

So let's get back to 1865.

Platte Bridge Station was renamed Fort Caspar on November 21, 1865 in honor of the fallen Lieutenant Caspar Collins.

It wasn't called Fort Collins.

Because there was already a Fort Collins named after his father.

Father in Colorado.

So those are the sheep variety down at CSU.

Your alma mater's home base was named for Colonel William O.

Collins, the father of Lieutenant Caspar Collins.

However, when that renaming happened, there was a typographical error that continues to plague us even to the modern day.

So Caspar Collins was, his first name was spelled C-A-S-P-A-R.

Now, when the post was renamed, whoever wrote up the official writ named it Fort Caspar C-A-S-P-E-R.

So we had a vowel shift in there.

And that renaming would continue to persist when the city of Caspar, spelled as the fort, not the man, was established.

But the memory and legacy of the Battle of Caspar and the Battle of Platte Bridge Station and the Battle of Red Buttes continues on to this day.

I mean, the original fort was abandoned in 1867.

Yep, dismantled and taken, the buildings were taken to...

Fort Federman, which is located near present-day Douglas, Wyoming.

But the memory, especially thanks to some of the sketches done by Caspar Collins, helped the city of Caspar and the Works Progress Administration reconstruct the fort in 1936.

And that's part of the Fort Caspar Museum today.

Yeah, it's a great museum.

You should check it out if you're around.

I was an intern there in college.

Many years ago.

Many, many years ago.

It's a very cool site, though, because it's like layers of history.

It's like a rebuilt thing to commemorate a fort that no longer exists but now is its own historical piece because it's like, you know, from a New Deal project.

It's a cool place.

There's some neat stuff, great exhibits.

And, you know, the people at Fort Caspar over the years have uncovered the remnants of the battle itself.

I think the most striking is there is a playground that is just off of the main parking lot there at Fort Caspar.

It was installed, I think, in the 1990s or early 2000s.

And as they were doing the excavations for that playground, they uncovered human remains from one of the soldiers who had died in the battle.

They knew he had died because of the number of projectile points they found lodged in the skeleton.

I don't say this about Fort Caspar.

I don't generally believe in ghosts, but when I would have to go lock up the fort buildings at dusk by myself, I did it in a hurry.

There's kind of a creepy place sometimes.

Well, there's a reason why the museum hosts ghost tours there once a year.

And speaking to a mutual friend of both Jeremy and myself who has worked at the fort for many years, he has seen and experienced many different things over time.

And so whether you believe any of this or not, there's some weird goings on at Fort Caspar.

There's one part in the old barracks building where you'd have to lock the door and then walk through this barracks that was all set up to look like people had just left, so it was kind of creepy.

You had to walk through to the telegraph office and get out there and lock that door.

And I just was the whole time, I was like, don't turn around.

Just don't turn around.

Just don't turn around.

It's okay.

It's probably not a ghost behind you.

Just don't turn around.

I know it's totally dark outside right now, but it's fine.

Just don't turn around.

I mean, I was talking to one of the volunteers and he claims that one of the ghosts at the fort followed him home and he lives like on the other side of Caspar.

So it's like I said, whether you believe any of this or not.

There's other like, this is not a super natural podcast, but I know there's like a residence right by Fort Caspar that is also supposed to be very creepy to spend the night in.

That's what I hear and there's a reason why I don't want to stay there.

But no, they found, and there have been several other recoveries of human remains in and around that fort complex.

And there is actually a small cemetery that is part of the museum grounds that was recently expanded and updated thanks to the friends group that is associated with the museum, the Fort Caspar Museum Association.

Collins himself, though, was disinterred, reburied at Fort Laramie and then finally disinterred again and buried in Ohio.

That's right.

Part of the history has gone back to Ohio.

Now, the other half of it is the aftermath of the Battle of Red Buttes.

Now, there is to this day still a controversy as to where the Battle of Red Buttes actually occurred.

Same with the Battle of Platte Bridge Station.

They brought in archaeological teams.

They even brought, I forget, one of the survivors of the battle to come and show them where the battle was at.

They think they have an idea of where it's at, but they've never actually been able to say this is where the Battle of Platte Bridge Station is and this is where the Battle of Red Buttes was at.

You know, the big thing with Red Buttes is that when they were recovering the bodies, instead of bringing them back to the fort, they were interred in, I think, like a mass grave.

I think it was like two or three mass graves.

And they were able to identify one of them, but not all of them.

And so there's some guesswork out there.

And like with most archaeological sites, the authorities often do not identify the location to help protect it from looting or other kind of vandalism.

So that's one of the things that a lot of locals still talk about is, where was the battle?

Oh, it's constant.

And there's a bit of a lot of real estate development in that area.

So if you live over there in that side of town, you're putting in a sprinkler system.

Just be careful.

Yeah, I think there was a movie about that where someone was, they built a house over a cemetery.

Watch out for that clown puppet thing.

It still haunts my dreams, John.

I think this was like, I don't know, this was when we were coming up with ideas for the show.

This was one of the first ones we lit on just because we both live in Caspar.

It was a story we were fairly familiar with.

But I think this is really interesting.

And I know what I really liked this time, John, I know about you was like reading more about the people involved.

You have like a villain in the story, Chivington, who sets this whole thing in motion.

And who continues to be just a real unpleasant kind of miserable missing throat for the rest of his life.

You know, Bretney, who ends up getting court-martialed and dismissed from service, probably goes back in as a private and then ends up in Salt Lake City.

You have Anderson, who Caspar Collins' father has a board of inquiry on Anderson.

They find that Anderson had no right to command Lieutenant Collins to do that.

He was unprepared.

He ignored evidence at his disposal.

And then nothing happens with that.

But this was a very interesting thing.

And it's interesting because we live in a place that's this person's namesake.

And to try to put it in this larger context of the Sand Creek Massacre, Red Clouds War and Overland Trails, I think this is really interesting.

No, it's a good topic and one that even here in Wyoming, not a lot of people are familiar with, especially if they're not from the Caspar area or have lived in Caspar for a significant period of time.

Most third or fourth grade children in Caspar have gone to the Fort Caspar Museum and explored the fort as some sort of living history program.

But beyond that, it's one of these things that has sort of faded into the historical background again, much like the topic we talked about last week.

So although this is still, thanks to the Fort Caspar Museum, it still kept more in the forefront of everyone's mind.

And there's a monument to Caspar Collins at Ford Wyoming Center, which is an incredibly silly name for a civic event space.

We grew up calling it the Event Center or the particular pizza establishment on the hill.

Yeah, it looks like a pizza hut.

There's just no other way to describe it.

An old classic pizza hut.

Oh yeah, like an old school pizza hut, not one of these Wing Street types.

There's like a good looking statue of Caspar Collins on a horse there.

And then the Fort Caspar Museum and their friends group, the Fort Caspar Museum Association, will host Caspar Collins Day every July 26th, which is a big living history event where they'll do different period reenactments of different things.

They'll fire off their howitzers a couple of times.

Cool.

I think a couple years ago they even had a gentleman come in who could do like tin type photographs.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they bring on all sorts of people in there and it's a lot of fun.

That's super cool.

I don't know, I think this is interesting because it gives the opportunity to talk about the Plains War of 1865 in context.

Divorced from bad early, you know, bad westerns that my dad used to watch, right?

Yeah, there were, this showed up in a lot of those old 1950s and 1960s westerns, the ones that would be on television.

I think in the old show Fort Laramie, there was even a version of the Sand Creek Massacre.

I mean, they didn't call him Chivington, but he had a different name.

But that episode came up for different things.

I have a couple of questions, and since we're into the discussion period now, John, do you think one of the books we read, and we should cite our sources really quickly, one of the books I read was Circle of Fire, The Indian War of 1865 by Jack D.

McDermott.

McDermott postulates that had the expedition into the Powder River Country been allowed to continue, they might have been able to avert later engagements with Plains Indians, and maybe, I don't know, there's not a good word for it, but maybe you could have avoided Custer in 1876 and Red Cloud's War and continuing the engagements in the Intermountain West.

You know, it's hard to say.

I mean, for one, by the time Connor's force had made it into the Powder River Country, the large villages had been largely dispersed.

You know, they had gathered mid-summer, I think, probably for hunting and for different other purposes, and so by the time Connor makes it in, they've already dispersed.

So there's no central locus for Connor's forces to attack.

That's interesting.

I mean, a lot of the indigenous fighting that takes place are hit and run.

It's very much what we would call guerrilla warfare today.

I mean, the only time that you actually...

one of the few times you actually see a, say, a stand-up battle would be at the Battle of the Rosebud in southern Montana in 1876, right before, another week or so before the Battle of Little Bighorn.

But you didn't have those kind of forces engaged.

I mean, so I don't know if I agree with McDermott's position on that, but if Connor had been able to move earlier, potentially, like if he had been in the field by the 15th of July, and had been able to move up to the Powder River Basin, say, before that large indigenous force made its way to Platte Bridge Station, very likely.

But the other thing to think about is that, Connor had around 2,000 soldiers and auxiliaries with him.

If he would have engaged that encampment, which had 10,000 or so, looking at the forces, they would have largely been equally matched.

Isn't that interesting?

If not...

Underaged.

Yeah.

With the indigenous forces having potentially up to 3,000 fighters.

And some amazing legends of Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota, especially Roman Nose, very cool, Crazy Horse.

You have some of the most famous Indian warriors in the area that people still talk about.

These were warriors that would go on in the next decade.

Well, within, you know, Crazy Horse was involved at Cloud the following year at Fort Philcarney, obviously under the leadership of Red Cloud for that entire campaign.

So this is very early in their career, so to speak, as they continue into the next decade.

And one thing that I think was interesting was the grievances of the Cheyenne Arapaho and the quarter are very real.

I mean, they actually is Roman knows, right, goes to Fort Laramie and says, you know, we'll stop this under the condition that you hang Chivington.

I mean, like this is there's like real grievance and things like that, that just makes it makes you wonder what how things would have been different over the ensuing next two decades.

If the US government had reacted differently, if this hadn't been literally right after the end of the Civil War and things like that.

Well, I mean, Chivington was he was brought up on charges and there was a congressional inquiry into his conduct, but he escaped criminal charges because he resigned his commission.

Oh, really?

I think that's how he managed to avoid prosecution.

But he was seen as a pariah even amongst other American citizens the rest of his life.

Yeah, because of this action, but he never really faced legal consequences.

No, it's terrible.

So.

Thanks for joining us on Buffalo Tales for our chat about the battles of Platte Bridge Station and Red Buttes.

Just a few announcements and some housekeeping as we wrap up.

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Thanks, John.