By Mike Anton
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

He had chased them across the frontier for five weeks, and as Maj. Gen. Eugene Carr rode hard to where the scouts had reported seeing a large band of Indians, he hoped it wasn't another false alarm.

Because if this indeed was Tall Bull's camp of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, Carr knew his 5th Cavalry could end it all right here. The raids on homesteaders. The attacks on crews building the fast-approaching railroad. Five years of war on the plains.

Carr had followed Tall Bull's trail for 300 miles. Now, on July 11, 1869, far from home, his men and horses thirsty and tired, he neared the place in Colorado territory the Indians called White Buttes, the place the whites called Summit Springs.

For more than 2,000 years, tribes roaming the prairie had camped here.

In less than two hours, they would be gone.

Today, the place is known as Washington County, Section 1, Township 5 North, Range 52 West.

The last major Indian battle on Colorado's plains was fought here, south of Sterling, on a Sunday afternoon 130 years ago. But no trace of the killing remains. Cattle graze behind a barbed-wire fence. A metal windmill bangs in the wind.

Several monuments mark the spot, yet for more than 50 years the site was lost. When, in 1922, a historian asked locals to show him the battlefield that changed the state, they couldn't. Even today, most Coloradans have never heard of the Battle of Summit Springs.

"It was the last stand of a people who were making a stand for freedom," said David Halaas, chief historian for the Colorado Historical Society. "For Indian people in Colorado, Summit Springs was a catastrophic defeat."

The short, fierce battle marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, opening for settlement a part of Colorado that many had considered too dangerous.

It marked the conquest of ranching and farming over hunting and gathering. The conquest of fences over the open range. The conquest by a people who believed that Manifest Destiny gave them title to the land over a people who believed their creator made the land for them.

With conquest, one language won out over another. One model of economics, politics and law. One history -- written, not spoken.

"Summit Springs was the end of a civil war in eastern Colorado between two American armies and two American people," historian Duane Smith said. "It was the conquest of one culture over another culture, and it had the same impact on Colorado as the Normans coming into England did."

In Colorado, conquest is the legacy from which everything since has flowed, the legacy that cleared the way for all others.

The Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine warned his people of the danger the newcomers would pose centuries before they arrived:

"Some day the Earth Men will come. Do not follow anything they do."

In 1851, a treaty gave the Cheyenne and Arapaho control over most of Colorado's plains. But within a decade, thousands of people were passing through on their way to the state's gold camps. Settlements popped up. In 1864, Indians began to attack.

That November, the massacre by state militiamen of a peaceful band of Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho along Sand Creek ignited a war.

The survivors of Sand Creek made their way north to Tall Bull's camp near present-day Cheyenne Wells. The Dog Soldiers, a military society, were outcasts among the Cheyenne, seen as hotheads by peace chiefs such as Black Kettle and White Antelope. But now White Antelope was dead, killed at Sand Creek. Any hope for peace was dead, too.

The Dog Soldiers took leadership. Within a month, a huge village of Southern and Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakotas assembled near Julesburg -- more than 10,000 people, 2,000 of them warriors. In January 1865, they attacked a 100-mile front along the South Platte River Trail, Denver's lifeline to the east. The fires could be seen for hundreds of miles.

"Every stage station, every ranch, every stagecoach that came by was struck," Halaas said. "For 10 months it went on. Hundreds were killed. The trail all but closed. It was a period of unrelenting victory for the Indians."

It wouldn't last. A series of treaties cleaved the massive Indian coalition band by band. Most Southern Cheyenne moved to reservation land in Oklahoma. Three years later, the Dog Soldiers were again largely isolated.

Tall Bull understood that his world was changing.

"The buffalo are fast diminishing," he told people. "The antelope that were plenty are now few. When they are all gone, we shall be hungry. But we will never make peace that forces us to settle down. We have been a free nation, and we will remain so, or die."

Carr had set off from Fort McPherson, Neb., undersupplied and undermanned -- 400 soldiers plus 150 Pawnee scouts, whom Carr considered ''lazy and shiftless'' but better than nothing.

Carr also had 23-year-old William Cody, who was becoming a legend as a buffalo hunter and tracker. Cody was also a man who liked to put on a show.

Once, he watched the Army's scouts methodically surround a herd of buffalo in search of dinner. ''Let me show your Pawnees how to kill buffalo,'' Cody said and he rode off, killing 37 in a half-mile sprint, one every 50 feet, one for nearly every shot.

The soldiers marched under a relentless sun, often all day without water, through rugged terrain that broke their wagons and made them ill, looking for Tall Bull and his party of 500 men, women and children.

In five weeks they had found nothing, just the endless waves of a brown sea.

Then, on July 8, their luck changed. Signs of fresh hoof prints. Two attacks by Cheyenne warriors. In Colorado now, Carr believed they were close.

July 9. A forced march, 30 miles. ''Oh, how hot and dry,'' Major Frank North wrote in his diary.

July 10. Thirty-two miles, only standing rainwater to drink. Suddenly, three abandoned camps, one after another. The shoeprint of one of two white women that Tall Bull had taken hostage.

They were gaining, now just 20 miles behind them.

''In the morn we move early,'' Major North wrote that night. ''We will have a fight tomorrow sure.''

The conquest of the Indians on Colorado's plains was so total, so complete, that it is everywhere and nowhere at once. For non-Indians, it is something that is rarely, if ever, thought about. Like breathing.

"I don't know that it particularly shapes people's lives," Nell Brown Propst said. "What has shaped the people here more than anything is the weather."

It has sculpted the character of the plains, touching every man, woman and child who has ever lived here, forming the backbone of the region's history for 130 years.

There was the terrible winter of 1871. The killer blizzards of the 1880s. The drought of the 1890s, when the futures of so many withered in the heat.

"There were, of course, the dust storms of the 1930s," said Propst, a 74-year-old writer, historian and ranch wife. "There was one year the corn blew down all across eastern Colorado and it all had to be picked by hand; 1958, I think it was. The blizzard of 1948 was devastating. The flood of the Platte and Arkansas in 1965 had a tremendous effect on people here. And, of course, this is known as the hail belt. More hail falls here than anywhere else in the world.

"It's a dubious honor."

The Propst family has called Logan County home since 1873, ever since Sid Propst traded the economic collapse of the post-Civil War South for the total unknown of a burgeoning West.

Historian Nell Brown Propst walks through a ravine at Summit Springs. It was here that Tall Bull and his fellow Dog Soldiers met death under withering fire from U.S. Army troops.

Thousands were lured to Colorado in the decades after the Battle of Summit Springs by ads touting the plains as the land of opportunity, a farmer's paradise of rich soil and plentiful rain.

"All of this was baloney," Nell Propst said. "There was one tree between Julesburg and here. But Sid just fell in love with it."

It was land that had been largely abandoned after the South Platte raids. But now, with the Indians gone, it filled up fast. In 1870, barely a thousand people called Colorado's eastern third home. By 1890, 29,000 did, by 1910, more than 100,000.

They were safe from attack, but not from the weather. Or the lack of water. Or the always fickle farm economy.

Most of Sid Propst's family followed him out from Alabama and homesteaded. The land, of course, was free. But it came with a price, and over the years more have failed than succeeded in this rough, unpredictable country.

"No people ever paid more for free land," Nell Propst said.

"There was nothing easy about it," added her husband, Keith.

Still isn't. Keith Propst is 73 and built as solid as a grain silo. He oversees the family's substantial ranch and farm operation, which stretches from the Platte to the hills on the horizon and beyond.

"It's all tied up in land," he said of his wealth. "Anyone who's in agriculture, their standard of living is about half what it is in Denver. A lot of the young people leave -- hell, my kids all left. I don't have two cars in the garage or a damn boat or a summer mansion and spend half my life with recreation. We work nearly every day."

Propst is the only one in his family still ranching. He wonders if he'll be the last Propst to run this land.

"I'm not predicting it. But I could foresee it. Everything changes."

His grandfather reportedly once found three skulls at Summit Springs. As a boy, Propst found arrowheads and Indian artifacts scattered everywhere.

No more.

"They've all been picked up or covered up."

Out of sight and out of mind, a casualty of time.

"I'm not exactly proud about what happened to the Indians," Keith Propst said. "I don't think it was exactly noble. There were broken treaties and all that. But it was inevitable. People were coming west by the tens of thousands, looking for freedom somewhere. They found it here.

"Somebody said life isn't fair. I don't know how you judge all that. It just wasn't going to stay the same, I can tell you that. Nothing does."

The boy was tending the Cheyenne herd when he saw the charge. A line of horses sweeping toward him like a dust storm. The Pawnees stripped for battle. The soldiers with their sabres flashing in the afternoon sun.

He could have run, saved his life. Instead, the 15-year-old drove his ponies down into the valley, hoping to get them into the camp.

''People are coming!''

The cry brought Tall Bull from his lodge. He saw the boy pushing the herd down the hill, and then the column closing in fast from behind.

The Pawnees and the soldiers hit the camp like a thunderclap, raining bullets down on the scattering Cheyenne. The valley overflowed with the screams of women, the cries of horses and warriors, the crack of gunfire. Many escaped on foot, grabbing nothing but their children. Others were shot dead where they stood.

They had been taken completely by surprise, and it was Tall Bull's fault. The 54-year-old Dog Soldier chief knew it. He had camped here while scouts searched for a place to cross the swollen Platte for their escape to Montana. He was certain the soldiers following him had lost his trail.

Tall Bull went back into his tepee and shot a woman hostage in the chest. ''Follow me,'' he shouted and led a group of 20, including his wife and a daughter, into a series of ravines, narrow sandstone fingers that would soon close on them like a fist.

''My heart is bad,'' Tall Bull told his wife, knowing now there could be no escape. ''I cannot endure this.''

He thrust a knife into his horse and moved his family back. He climbed the loose rock to the top of the wash. He raised himself over the edge, shot at a soldier on horseback and ducked back down.

Frank North swung out of his saddle and dropped to one knee. He aimed his rifle at the spot where the shot had come from. He waited. And then a warrior came up, and North pulled the trigger. Tall Bull fell back into the abyss, a bullet through his head.

Tall Bull's wife and daughter surrendered. When the rest of the Cheyenne in the ravine wouldn't, a huge Pawnee named Traveling Bear strode into the labyrinth alone.

A storm brewed in the western sky. A few mintues later, Traveling Bear emerged. His hands held scalps, the ravine only death.

He hears them. Voices. People talking. Whispering. Over there, behind the barbed-wire fence where the cattle lazily chew grass.

"I can hear the spirits of the people," Richard Tallbull said. "I can hear them talking. But I can't understand what they're saying."

He is 81, has seen most of the 20th century and lived with the fallout of the 19th century, too.

That's because the conquest of the Indians in Colorado touched Tallbull profoundly, personally. It has shaped who he is, what he thinks. It is something he was born with, something he will die with.

He was given his great-grandfather's name, Tall Bull. But he later changed it to one word so that white people would understand that Tall wasn't his middle name.

He grew up in Oklahoma's Indian country. It's poor country, full of poor Southern Cheyenne, a place where the unemployment rate tops 60 percent.

"Used to be worse," Tallbull said, his lively eyes betrayed by a body wracked by diabetes and arthritis. "During the '30s, we were so poor we didn't know a depression was going on."

His father died of influenza when he was a baby. He went to government boarding schools where the teachers made him ashamed to be Indian. He left in the 10th grade.

Fencing in ranchland, above, symbolizes conquest on the Eastern Plains.

After World War II, he came back from Europe and used the GI Bill to get an auto mechanic's certificate.

"But white people down there wouldn't give you no chance," Tallbull said. "Nobody would hire me. So I couldn't get a job and I tore the damn certificate up and threw it up in the air."

He had a wife and kids and needed a paycheck, so he used a government job program for Indians and relocated to Denver in 1960. Eventually, he landed a job at Rocky Flats, in shipping and receiving. He worked there 15 years, making good money. He bought a house in west Denver and has lived there 39 years -- a tiny two-bedroom box in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Along the way, Tallbull got involved in local Indian politics. In 1976, he persuaded Denver Mayor Bill McNichols to set aside 80 acres of city land in Douglas County for the exclusive use of Indian religious and social groups. They named it Tall Bull Memorial Grounds.

He also joined a group that put on traditional dances for nonprofit organizations that held fund-raisers for needy Indians. One day, he discovered that a Boy Scout troop made $1,500 off such an event and kept it all. "They just gave us a bunch of old rags they didn't need anymore." Tallbull stopped performing for free.

"I went out to Sterling and dedicated a rest area three, four years ago," he said. "I got $250, a place to stay and there was a restaurant where I could eat. Anyway, I got to thinking of how the Cheyenne burned Julesburg. And I wondered what the people up there thought about that. Whether they still had a grudge." No one mentioned it.

He is old enough to have known people who were alive at the time of the conquest. He is among the last of a generation to have heard the story of Summit Springs firsthand.

He has been asked time and again to tell the story of his great-grandfather's last stand. Tallbull always refuses. Sometimes, he says it's out of respect. Other times, he has left the impression with people that he's looking for money.

Neither reason, it turns out, is true.

"The thing is, I don't know too much about it," Tallbull said. "I regret that I didn't listen closely to what the old people were saying back when I was growing up. They'd always repeat things, stories. But every time they'd get started I'd say, 'Oh, hell, I already heard that.'

"I should have listened more. I wish I had."

And when he listens to the voices out where the cattle graze, he wishes he could understand what they are saying, too.

Capt. Luther North sat down, dipped his cup in the creek and drank deeply. Tall Bull's band had been utterly defeated: Fifty-two Indians were dead and 17 taken prisoner. Hundreds of others roamed the prairie, their horses, belongings and futures gone. The 5th Cavalry had taken no losses, unless you counted the dozen horses that dropped dead of exhaustion.

North looked at the approaching storm clouds and dipped his cup again.

''Don't drink that,'' one of the Pawnees said and pointed to where the body of a dead Indian lay in the creek, the water flowing red through his crushed skull and into North's cup.

The following morning, Gen. Carr burned Tall Bull's village. He had captured a huge cache, including 274 horses, 144 mules, tons of food and clothing, scores of weapons, cash and gold, scalps and a necklace made of fingers. Also found was a ledger book containing 107 Cheyenne drawings depicting Dog Soldier battles, including the South Platte raids of 1865.

The soldiers took new horses for themselves. William Cody, it is said, picked the very best two. He named one Tall Bull.

Years later, Cody would sanitize and choreograph the story. Until 1906, the reenactment of the Battle of Summit Springs would close Cody's Wild West Show.

Six months after the battle, in January 1870, the Colorado legislature thanked Carr for making the plains safe for settlement.

That spring, a band of Southern Cheyenne who had taken refuge in Wyoming returned to Summit Springs looking for Tall Bull's bones. They couldn't find them. In their anger, they attacked a crew on the Kansas Pacific, killing several workers.

In August, the railroad reached Denver.

October 3, 1999

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