The Julesburg Project

03/03/2023

Finally started cleaning and conserving some of the 4,000 artifacts we’ve recovered over the last five years. We are using electrolysis to clean off the rust and grime. It’s helps make the artifacts appear more like they were in the nineteenth century. Thanks 🙏 to George Cromwell for educating us on the process!! Just took us awhile to get the needed equipment but now we are on a roll.

These pictures are some of what we’ve worked on the last few weeks. Any ideas on what sone of these are let us know.

01/07/2023

The End is but the Beginning:

With Colonel Summers and Captain O'Brien retreating to the safety of their forts sod walls defended with two bastions and two mountain howitzers, the assembled Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota Warriors were now free to secure their primary objective, the stores of the Overland Stage Company housed in their company warehouses at adjacent to Julesburg Station.

There is no doubt the warriors were eager to exact revenge on the US Army for the massacre at Sand Creek little over a month before, however, they had more important issues to focus on. They needed to reconstitute the bands that survived the massacre for they had nothing. All of their belongs, communal and individual had been left in their village as they fled Chivington's men.

Thus the warriors primary objective was securing the stores and stock from the Overland Stage Company so that it could be used to provide for the survivors as well as the bands that hadn't been attacked. Since the summer, the Army throughout the Department of Kansas, had been burning the prairie in an attempt to drive away the buffalo and deny the Tribes the ability to adequately prepare for the winter if the remained in the Republican River drainage.

Thus as the soldiers hunkered down in the fort the warriors and other members of the Tribes hauled away travois and wagon loads of good and likely hundreds of head of cattle back across the sand hills and ultimately to their camp on Cherry Creek. George Bent and others remarked that the camps on Cherry Creek and later on the South Platte were among the best resources he'd ever seen.

As I teased in the title, this was only the beginning of the operation along the South Platte. Throughout the day other groups of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota had been attacking stage stations, ranches, and wagon trains to as west as Valley Station. This too, is no coincidence at Valley Station was the nearest station west of Julesburg with troops stationed at it. By attacking the station the warriors were able to initially fix the troops at Valley Station so they couldn't reinforce those at Camp Rankin & Julesburg Station.

The attacks at the station and ranches also provided additional supplies to the raiding parties. These attacks would continue in Nebraska and Colorado for the next month. As the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota slowly made their way back to Julesburg for the Second Battle of Julesburg on February 2, 1865.

Stay tuned to use a flashback term, for posts on the anniversaries of key events to learn more details about the conflict in along the Platte in January and February 1865 and how it impacted the later Indian War conflicts in 1865 on through the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876.

The video is a short clip of the stage station site (Julesburg I) and what it looked today on the 158th anniversary of the battle. It is shot from the south looking north towards the river and the Upper California Crossing. The flag pole is the local marker for the site. Based on the evidence we recovered the last few years, it is clearly in the right ball park.

01/07/2023

The Main Battle:

After racing out the two to three miles to defend the civilians in the wagon train near the C&B Ranch, the men of the 7th Iowa began to pursue the smaller group of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota warriors that had attacked the wagon train. In doing so, according to the letters home by members of F Company, the &th Iowa pursued the warriors to the southeast an additional three or four miles up the bluffs and into the sand hills.

In their pursuit the broke into three detachments or squads, likely each pursuing a group of the warriors up an individual finger coming down towards the river. As they continued the pursuit, one of the detachments noticed two additional warriors appear from behind a bluff well ahead of the warriors being chased. What happened next is unknown and how long the initial battle took is not known so we can only speculate that on seeing the other warriors the detachments halted to assess the situation.

We do know, from George Bent, and the accounts of the 7th Iowa that moments later the entire sand bluffs south of the river came alive with warriors 1,200-1,500 in all from various bands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota. Shortly afterwards they descended on the three detachments inflicting heavy casualties. By the time retreat was ordered and the detachments and Captain O'Brien behind them made it back to the wagon train site, where Colonel Summers had remained, the Company had already suffered 12 men killed confirmed killed.

As they were in danger of being overrun, Captain O'Brien was told to return to the post and retrieve the artillery to help cover them on the entire units retreat back to the fort. He fought his way back, retrieved the artillery, and used it to help drive off the superior number of warriors so the remainder of the unit could escape back to the station and ultimately the post. Fighting their way back they took with them the civilians that remained in at the trains and station.

Philo Holcomb, sometime in the late morning telegraphed to Denver the events as he knew them. His strength of the Cavalry was a little off as he was the operator at the stage station.

"JULESBURG, 7TH—A train was attacked this morning about three miles below this post by a band of Indians numbering seventy-five. Two white men were killed and four wounded. Two Indians were killed. One hundred soldiers well armed and mounted are now in pursuit. The Indians are retreating to the Bluffs. Particulars soon. HOLCOMB, Operator."

You can see at this point he had no idea of the complex attack orchestrated by the combined Tribal force. If not for the two over eager warriors that sprung the ambush before the cavalry was in the kill zone, it is likely the entire command would have been decimated. Instead of ending the day with 15 dead troopers, it might well have been 40-50 dead troopers, an overrun fort, dozens of dead civilians. More on the historical fiction of what ifs, in a later post.

01/07/2023

The Battle Begins:

In the early morning hours of January 7th, 1865, while it was still the dark of night, the stage carrying the mail was headed west down the Overland Trail towards Julesburg Station. Shortly after descending the Devil's Dive, the steep drop from the upper terrace of the sand hills down to the lower terrace immediately above the South Platte River, the stage was attacked by a small party of warriors from the combined Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota force. The exact location of the attack is lost to time.

The stage with its powerful set of horses was able to outrun the attack and dash the 6-7 miles due west to the stage station, Julesburg Station. Upon arriving, the stage drive then raced by horse a mile west to alert the cavalry stationed at Camp Rankin of the attack. As the stage was safe at the station, Captain Nicholas O'Brien, Commander of Company F, 7th Iowa Cavalry declined to send troops out to hunt for the Native American warriors in the dark of night.

With their first attack (in military terms their initial supporting attack or feint) a failure to draw the calvary out, the warriors now descended on the wagon train camped just east of C&B Ranch. In the attack two civilians were killed and four more were injured. As the attack was only a mile or so away, the employees of the station could hear the gun fire and sounds of the battle.

As a result, word of this second attack quickly reached Captain O'Brien. However, this time as day was breaking and civilians were under attack, Captain O'Brien order his troops to their saddles. Due to tastings from his regiment, he could muster less than 40 troopers to head to the defense of the wagon train. As he departed the post and headed east down the trail, he was accompanied by his Regimental Commander, Colonel Summers and Captain Murphy, a fellow company commander who had escorted Colonel Summers from Alkali Station in Nebraska to Camp Rankin in the days prior.

Soon, Company F would be joining the fight, but doing so without any of its artillery as its two mountain howitzers were left at the fort.

01/07/2023

My friends the deer running east from the Ovid road towards the location of Fort Sedgwick and Camp Rankin.

01/07/2023

Tonight, just before midnight on the 6th of January the Town of Julesburg lies a sleep except for the cars and trucks running up and down Interstate 76 to the south of town and the same on Interstate 80 north of town and of course the frequent freight trains running down the Union Pacific main line, the old transcontinental railroad, that pulled the town north of the river as the tracks were laid to connect the Nation together by iron rails from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

158-years ago, the original Julesburg was a small cluster of buildings centered around the Overland Stage Company's stage station. The exact number is unclear but somewhere between 7-10 is likely fairly accurate from the 1860 census and other accounts. The station was located on the south side of the Platte, about a mile southeast of where Lodgepole Creek enters the South Platte. Directly south of this confluence was Camp Rankin, the garrison built by F Company of the 7th Iowa Cavalry. One mile east of the station (Julesburg I) and two miles east of Camp Rankin was the Connelly and Bullin Ranche where a a wagon train headed to the states was camped nearby for the winter. A few miles beyond to the east, down the overland Trail was the Devil's Dive where the "road" took a precarious drop down off the bench as the road headed towards Julesburg Station.

All of the people at these sites 158 years ago, had no idea that their world was about to change and they would become the focal point of the complex operation that would be conducted by the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota bands in Colorado and Nebraska as they banded together in battle to extract retribution for the Sand Creek Massacre, but more importantly, to acquire supplies needed by their people and especially the survivors of the massacre.

Following along throughout the day as we will highlight little known parts of the First Battle of Julesburg this weekend and see how we developed this more complete understanding of the battle over our research the last five years.

And check back in the coming weeks as we do a little post production and make a more complete video to tell the story of the battle.

And our apologies for the quality of the videos and photos. Its cold out there at midnight (abt 25' F) and even with the full moon it still hard to get good imagery. But we shouldn't complain, it was colder and a little darker in 1865 as the full moon that January wasn't until 11 January.

12/15/2022

Congratulations to Riley Limbaugh for winning the Anthropology and Geography Department’ s award for capstone projects. He did GPR work on the old post cemetery location.

09/06/2022

One area related to Fort Sedgwick we know needs more study is the post cemetery.

The soldiers and family members from the Fort Sedgwick cemetery are now interred at Fort McPherson National Cemetery near Maxwell, Nebraska. Fitting they rest there, as it was the 7th Iowa Cavalry that built what became known as Camp Cottonwood and then Fort McPherson when they arrived in Nebraska to guard the overland emigrant trails.

One area of the cemetery's history that not a lot is known is the details of the removal of the remains from Fort Sedgwick to the National Cemetery. Period newspaper accounts and the military records shed some light on the matter. Appears the soldiers from Fort Sedgwick were the first to arrive at the newly established National Cemetery in the fall fo 1873.

Sadly, the majority of the remains received at Fort McPherson were listed as unknown. Record keeping on post cemeteries was poor in the 1860s at best. In Army inspection reports from when the post in operation reported that a majority of the graves were already unknown. Wood markers decayed or were burnt in fires and apparently no plot records were kept by the post.

Hopefully in the coming months we can expand this story in much more details as we dig into the records at the National Archives and related non-invasive fieldwork.

05/08/2022

This weekend we took The Julesburg Project international with a presentation and poster at the 11th Biennial Fields of Conflict Conference. The conference was hosted (virtually) by the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and specifically, by the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology. The conference brings together archaeologists from North American and Europe who's work is focused on conflict and battlefield archaeology regardless of era. Presentations covered a 2000+ year period and dealt with sites from the United States and across Europe.

03/11/2022

03/02/2022

Had a good night in Steamboat Springs talking about my research on The Julesburg Campaign and Powell expeditions for the Treads of Pioneers Museum’s History Happy Hour series. Can’t be the view for an evening talk and it’s always good to be west of the Divide.

12/18/2021

While not posting much the past few weeks, it has been a busy month for the Project. Last week presented on the Project to the Loveland Archaeological Society and the Eureka Club (home of the HART project volunteers) in Denver. Also recorded a podcast for “A Life in Ruins” that airs on Monday.