Lieutenant Casper Collins: Fighting the Odds at Platte Bridge

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A general hinted he was a coward; some said he was a showoff. But most hailed 20-year-old Lieutenant Caspar Collins as a hero for what he did one day in the summer of 1865–lead 20 men, unfamiliar to him, against anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 Indians just outside Platte Bridge Station in what is now Wyoming. Casper, the city in central Wyoming, was named for the young lieutenant, but is spelled differently. So, too, a nearby creek and a mountain. A fort bearing his name (with the second ‘a’ left intact) has been restored and houses a museum.

As a youngster back in Dogwood Knob, the family home in Hillsboro, Ohio, Caspar liked to draw pictures of Indians and tepees. But on this July day, far from his boyhood home, he saw more Indians than he had drawn in his life. And there would be no going home again.

The Battle of Platte Bridge, like many other frontier events, had its roots in the westward migration. Covered wagons that jolted along the Oregon Trail in 1865 were crossing the North Platte River at Platte Bridge. Tensions with the nearby Indians were high because buffalo hunters continued to slaughter bison and treaties continued to be broken. The Civil War had drained fighting power from the western outposts; the Indians had more freedom to harass emigrants and cut telegraph lines. But with war’s end in April, more soldiers headed West to deal with the Indian problem.

For years the North Platte Valley had been the domain of such Indian tribes as the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho. In 1864, General Alfred Sully fought a three-day battle in North Dakota that drove even more Sioux south toward the North Platte River. Sully and other officers considered all the Plains Indians hostile, and certainly more Indians began to show hostility after Colonel John M. Chivington led his 3rd Colorado Cavalry against a peaceful Cheyenne village at Sand Creek on November 29, 1864. The infuriated Cheyenne and their Arapaho allies ripped up telegraph wire, ambushed emigrant wagon trains on the Oregon Trail and attacked white settlements in early 1865.

In this tense environment, a violent confrontation at Platte Bridge Station, a stockaded outpost on the south bank of the North Platte River near a 1,000-foot-long bridge, was not so surprising. The bridge was the last crossing of the North Platte, and destruction of the bridge and station would disrupt emigrant travel. ‘Platte Bridge was a strategic point,’ wrote S.H. Fairfield in 1904. ‘It was here that the savages from the Powder River country crossed to the lines of travel on the southern overland route where they reaped a rich harvest….The military forces at Platte Bridge Station were a hindrance…and the redskins were determined to remove the soldiers out of their path.’

In July 1865, the 11th Ohio Cavalry’s designated commander, Lieutenant Henry Clay Bretney, who had his headquarters at Platte Bridge Station, arranged for Lieutenant Collins, stationed at Sweetwater Station near Independence Rock, to take a detail of 10 men east to Fort Laramie to pick up remounts for Sweetwater. Bretney gave Collins permission to remain at Fort Laramie a few days while his detail returned.

In the meantime, back at Platte Bridge Station (located between Sweetwater Station and Fort Laramie), the Kansas and Ohio troops stationed there not only skirmished with Indians but also feuded among themselves. It all came to a head on July 12 when Captain James Greer of the 11th Kansas Cavalry attempted to usurp command from Bretney. But, as Bretney later said, ‘the Kansas boys had to ‘hunt cover’ and allow the Ohio boys to conduct the station as they saw fit.’

When Major Martin Anderson arrived to take command four days later with 40 men of the 11th Kansas Cavalry, he didn’t like what he saw at the station. He decided it would be best to banish Bretney and his Ohioans to Sweetwater Station to the west. And so, when 11th Kansas Cavalry Sergeant Amos J. Custard, escorting a wagon train to Sweetwater, obligingly arrived at Platte Bridge with 16 dismounted men of Company H and 11 men of Company D, Anderson acted. He had Bretney and his men, along with three six-mule army wagons of supplies, accompany Custard to Sweetwater. Of the 11th Ohio, only Sergeant Merwin and his crew of three remained behind to man the mountain howitzer.

Tags: 19th Century, American Indian Wars, Historical Conflicts, Native American History, Wild West

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