Death at Summit Springs: Susanna Alderdice and the Cheyennes

 | Wild West  | 0 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

On the afternoon of July 11, 1869, it was hot and windy in northeastern Colorado Territory — typical summer weather for that part of the country. But it was not otherwise a typical day. As the hour approached 3 o’clock, the order was given by trumpet to charge the Indian village at Summit Springs (near present-day Sterling, Colorado). At the sound of ‘Charge, 244 officers and men of the 5th U.S. Cavalry, along with 50 Pawnee Indians serving as scouts, quickly descended upon the village of 84 lodges. Cheyenne Dog Soldier Chief Tall Bull and his people could not have been more surprised.

The attack was swift and successful. In less than three hours, all the fighting was over. The Indians — mostly Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, but also a few Sioux and Arapahos — had been routed. By 6 p.m., at least 52 warriors, including the powerful and troublesome Tall Bull, lay dead in and around the village, and 17 Indian women and children had been captured. Amazingly enough, the cavalry had suffered just one casualty — a trooper slightly injured by a glancing arrow wound to the ear.

Almost as soon as the shooting stopped, a powerful hail and thunderstorm descended upon the village. Everyone took shelter, but lightning killed one horse while a soldier sat upon it. Twelve other horses had died during the fight, most from sheer exhaustion when the soldiers pursued the fleeing Indians for several miles. There were two other casualties that July day. Tall Bull’s village contained two young white women, who had been captured six weeks earlier in central Kansas. At the time of the 5th Cavalry’s attack, the women were at opposite ends of the village. As the soldiers rode in at the northern end, most of the Indians tried to escape to the south and east. Several of them first sought to kill the two captives.

Maria Weichel, shot through the back with a pistol ball, which hit a rib and lodged in the flesh of her left breast, was painfully and gravely wounded. She would recover. Susanna Alderdice, however, was not so fortunate. The mother of four children, pregnant with her fifth, was shot above the eye, and her skull was crushed by a tomahawk. Falling unconscious upon the hot prairie sand, she breathed her last just as her would-be rescuers discovered her. At 8 o’clock the next morning, under clear skies, Susanna was given a Christian burial. Wrapped in two lodge skins and the best buffalo robe discovered in the village, she was placed in a deep grave. Today, her grave remains unmarked somewhere in the desolate terrain of the Summit Springs battlefield.

Alderdice was born Susanna Zeigler in early 1840 in Green Township, Ohio. The first of Michael and Mary Zeigler’s several children, Susanna would grow up in the Buckeye State. On October 28, 1860, she married 20-year-old James Alfred Daily in Missouri’s Clay County. The Civil War was raging when they moved to Salina, a new town in central Kansas. James, taking advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862, had staked a claim. Susanna’s first child, John Daily, was born there on July 1, 1863.

James Daily heeded the call to duty on July 16, 1864, enlisting for 100 days in the 17th Kansas Volunteer Infantry. He was assigned to Company D and sent to Lawrence. On October 5, the month before James was due to return, Susanna gave birth to her second child, Willis Daily.

Just two days before his enlistment expired, James Daily entered the general hospital at Fort Leavenworth, suffering from fever. James was placed in quarantine, and 11 days later, on November 25, he succumbed to typhoid fever. Susanna Daily, called Susan by her family and friends, was left to raise the two young children, with the help of her parents, who had moved to the Salina area earlier.

The widow then met Tom Alderdice, originally from Pennsylvania, who was serving as a drummer in the 2nd U.S. Volunteer Infantry and was stationed along the Solomon River near Salina. But Tom had a secret he kept from everyone. He was a galvanized Yankee, having earlier served in the Confederate 44th Mississippi Infantry. Captured at Chickamauga in September 1863, he became a prisoner of war at Rock Island, Ill., where he remained for the next 13 months until he took the oath of allegiance and enlisted for a year in Union service on October 17, 1864. He was sent to Kansas, where he was less likely to desert back to Confederate service.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 19th Century, American Indian Wars, Historical Conflicts, Native American History, The Wild West, Wild West, Women's History