Talk:Battle of Summit Springs

No Pawnee losses?
If there were any, should be listed. --HanzoHattori 17:15, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Flags
Native American tribal flags that were not in use at the time of the battle may not be included in the article, as per WP:MOSFLAG. Sensei48 (talk) 07:09, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Discussion Moved From Article - Dog Soldier Book
Thought this depiction of Summit Springs should be modified with facts. What follows is all taken from the Book Dog Soldier Justice: The Ordeal of Susanna Alderdice in the Kansas Indian War (University of Nebraska Press, 2009). That book very carefully works off of all the known documents detailing this battle – two chapters are devoted to Summit Springs - and uses records from the National Archives as well as other first-hand accounts.

One must be careful when consulting historical sources, and one must have a logical method for determining when records conflict, which – if any – should be taken as reporting the truth. For example, Luther North gave at least 10 different accounts of the battle, and none were written by him until well after the turn of the century when he was an old man, using his fading memory as his source. His brother, Frank North, – who did keep a diary at the time, albeit scamp with details - did not kill Tall Bull. There are several first-hand accounts of who killed Tall Bull, and the most likely man was Sergeant Daniel McGrath. Second was Cody. Third was Lt. Mason. Fourth was an unidentified Pawnee. And the sources continue. What one can conclude when studying all the accounts together is that the least likely person who killed Tall Bull was Frank North.

The Indians were not outnumbered 5-1. Indeed there were probably 500 Indians in the village at the time of the battle, and the majority escaped. There is not one account from the Indian or military side of this battle that credits a white man killing a woman or child, with the exception of one women who, in trying to escape, was caught and in her capture stabbed a soldier, resulting in her being shot. But that story, coming years later, is not reflected in the records, when Carr – who was a major in 1869, not a colonel, but who also was a brevetted major general from the Civil War and entitled to be addressed at that rank - said only one soldier suffered a slight ear wound from a glancing arrow. All Indian accounts of the fight attribute every woman and child casualty to the Pawnee. This is better explained by the fact that the soldiers were not engaged in trying to capture or kill the women and children – they were engaged in fighting the Indians, who were as well armed with pistols and rifles as the soldiers.

The soldiers did not divide into three groups to attack the village from three directions. They all came from the northeast – not the northwest as Carr mistakenly said in his official report written nine days after the battle – and the majority of the Indians escaped by running to the southwest and southeast. It should be noted too that the plunder this Dog Soldier camp had from their many raids into Kansas earlier that spring was so large that when the village was burned the next morning there had to be over 160 fires built to burn the plunder, estimated at over 10 tons. In addition several wagons in Carr’s expedition were filled with plunder he thought might be identified and returned to settlers.

To understand the military justification of this fight one must familiarize themselves with the awful and deadly raids these Indians did upon various pioneer settlements in Kansas, which was in retaliation to two fights Carr’s command had with these Indians earlier in May, on May 13 and 16 in northwest Kansas and southwest-central Nebraska – Elephant Rock and Spring Creek. At least 25 Indians were killed in these two fights. Earlier in March these Indians were able to escape from Custer in the Texas Panhandle when he rescued two female captives taken in deadly raids in north-central Kansas in August and October 1868. All of these facts are carefully documented in Dog Soldier Justice. Anyone who is interested in consulting the fight at Summit Springs should familiarize themselves with the documents used in Dog Soldier Justice. To do otherwise is to miss finding the truth. Jjeffersonbroome (talk | contribs)


 * there is NO justification for killing boys and girls it is a war crime in 2022, and should have been in 1869 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.38.155.134 (talk) 07:00, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Battlefield Site in Washington County Colorado
I have edited this article to show that the battlefield lies in Washington County, just a couple of hundred feet south of the Logan/Washington County Line. To get to the site one does, indeed, turn east on Logan County Road 2 from Colo State Highway 63 to proceed 4.4 miles, but, at that point, an unmarked road runs south taking one across the county line into Washington County, Sec 2, T5N, R52W. Dangnad (talk) 23:22, 15 January 2014 (UTC)