In August 1868, the settlers of Colorado Springs and the surrounding El Paso County lived in constant fear. The Cheyenne and Arapaho, armed by the U. S. government with rifles and ammunition supposedly for hunting, had turned those weapons against the frontier settlements.

By early September, the raids had become so deadly that most ranch families along Fountain Valley had abandoned their homes and gathered in Colorado City for protection. Others fortified positions at McShane’s Ranch near Monuments, John Irion’s place on Cherry Creek, and Hustad’s Mill in the Pinery. It was harvest time, however, and the ripe grain could not be left standing. Men went out to the fields daily, armed, knowing that every trip into the countryside might be their last.

On September 3, 1868, shortly before noon, a band of forty to fifty Indians came charging down the valley of Monument Creek, sweeping up every loose horse in their path. The first settler they encountered was Robert F. Love of Colorado City, riding on the high ground east of the creek. Love knew flight was useless.

He dismounted, kept his pony between himself and the warriors, and leveled his revolver at them. The Indians maneuvered around him for a time, then passed on. They had no interest in attacking a man who could shoot back. Throughout their raids, they sought out the defenseless.

A few of the Indians crossed the creek to the house of David Spielman, who had just moved his family to Colorado City and was sleeping behind the open front door, exhausted. The warriors looked inside but did not see him. They took a horse from the corral and rejoined the main body, which continued rapidly along the low ground east of the creek. Charlie Everheart, an eighteen-year-old, had gone out that morning to check on his father’s cattle.

He was riding a small pony and had reached what is now the intersection of Platte and Cascade Avenues when he spotted the Indians. He turned for home and urged his pony to its limit, but the Indian horses were faster. They overtook him, shot him from his saddle, ran a spear through his body, and scalped him, taking all his hair except a small fringe at the back. The killing was witnessed from a distance by several people.

An hour later, a party brought his mutilated body back to Colorado City. The band then spotted a lone sheepherder known as Judge Baldwin about a quarter of a mile away. Baldwin tried to escape. He had no spurs and no whip, so he pulled off one of his long boots and used it to beat his horse to top speed.

It was useless. The Indians caught him near the present Fourth Ward Schoolhouse. A bullet struck him in the shoulder, passed upward through his neck, and came out through his jaw. He fell from his horse dazed but still conscious, and in his delirium he fought the Indians off with his boot.

The warriors judged the wound mortal. One of them ran a knife around the back of Baldwin’s head to take his scalp, then stopped. He had discovered that Baldwin had been scalped before, years earlier, by Indians in South America. For some reason, likely superstition, the warriors abandoned the attempt and rode off, leaving their victim to die on the prairie.

The band split into two groups. One moved northeast, crossing Shook’s Run, joined by other Indians who had been hiding nearby. It was said that two or three warriors stationed on the hill where the Deaf and Blind Institute later stood directed the movements of the killers with flags, wigwagging signals like those used in the army. The other group continued down the valley of Fountain Creek, where they came upon two small boys, the sons of Thomas H.

Robins, aged eight and ten, who were watching their father’s cattle. The boys saw the Indians coming and tried to escape, but they had no chance. One of the boys fell to his knees and raised his hands, begging for mercy. Two warriors reached down, seized each boy by the hair, shot them with revolvers, and flung their bodies to the ground.

The same afternoon, the narrator of this account, Irving Halbert, was binding wheat in a harvest field near what is now Broadmoor. About two o’clock, a horseman came riding furiously from the east. It was a Mr. Riggs, who lived near the mouth of Cheyenne Creek.

He brought the news of the killings: Everheart, Baldwin, and the Robins boys were dead, and the Indians were raiding in every direction. Halbert’s first thought was for his three young brothers, who were watching the family cattle near Bear Creek. He took a horse from the reaper, stripped off the harness except the blind bridle, and rode at top speed to find them. He met the boys about three-quarters of a mile south of Bear Creek.

They told him they had seen the Indians pursuing Everheart and Baldwin, counted thirty-five warriors in the band, and had fled toward the neighbors on Cheyenne Creek when the raiders split up. By the time they reached Colorado City, the bodies of Everheart and the Robins boys had been brought in. The party that went after Baldwin found him alive. No one thought he could survive more than a day or two, but within a month he was apparently well again.

The excitement in the town was intense. The territorial authorities could offer no help, and appeals to the federal government had gone unanswered. The settlers knew they had to rely on themselves, as they had in 1864. They repaired the old fort around the log hotel and organized their forces.

That night, ten volunteers, including Halbert, set out for Bayou Basin, where the Simpson party was surrounded by Indians. The next morning they rode up Monument Creek to Cottonwood, past the deserted Nef Ranch, and followed the route the Indians had taken when they ran off Teachout’s horses. About half a mile from the Pinery, they saw a band of about twenty mounted Indians on the south bank of Cottonwood Creek. Without hesitation, the settlers wheeled and charged.

Halbert warned against crossing the ravine where they had first seen the Indians, fearing an ambush, but the men were in a frenzy and would not listen. They dismounted to lead their horses down the steep bank and up the other side, and found no Indians at the crossing. But they had not gone a quarter of a mile before a mounted warrior appeared at almost that exact spot. The Indians on the south bank started running to the southeast, then turned east.

The settlers veered to keep themselves between the Indians and Colorado City. The warriors dismounted on an open flat, formed a circle with their ponies, and seemed to wait. Their guns flashed in the sunlight. Then, seeing the settlers still coming, they remounted and made for the Pinery, where their better horses let them escape into the timber.

The settlers resumed their march and reached Bayou Basin that evening. The besieged party had come in the day before, and the wounded were being cared for at Mr. D. M.

Holden’s ranch. With nothing more to do, the relief party started for home the next morning, seeing many Indian tracks but no warriors. For two weeks after the raid on the site of present-day Colorado Springs, the Indians had virtual possession of the northern and eastern parts of the county. They ran off Gills Ranch’s herd of horses, guarded though it was, by cutting an opening in the corral on the side opposite the guards.

They killed a demented man named Jonathan Lincoln in Spring Valley, who folded his arms and calmly awaited death rather than flee. They killed John Chateau on East Cherry Creek, John Grief and Jonathan Tolman on East Bayou, and ran off sixteen horses from the John Russell ranch. Near Monuments, a small band threatened the house of David McShane while the men were away. Mrs.

McShane and the neighboring women put up such a show of defense that the Indians abandoned the attack. They burned Henry Walker’s house about a mile east of the present Houston Station. From a hidden camp in the timber of the Divide, small parties went out daily to kill and rob. Around the 15th of September, the people of El Paso County formed a military company of eighty mounted, well-armed men, who agreed to serve without pay until the Indians were driven out.

Captain A. J. Templeton was elected to command, and Irving Halbert was among the volunteers. The company marched through the Pinery to Bayou Basin, past the site of Simpson’s siege, and down the Big Sandy Creek toward the Smoky Hill Wagon Road.

They saw no Indians, but they saw hundreds of dead cattle, cows shot with arrows that were still stuck in the carcasses, killed for no purpose, along with hundreds of live animals that had been driven off from the ranches. At a point about ten miles down the valley from the present town of Lehman, the Indian trail turned northeast, leading directly toward the Beecher Island battleground on the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River, where Colonel George A. Forsyth and his fifty scouts were at that very moment holding out against a huge force of Indians under Chief Roman Nose. Captain Templeton judged his small force too weak to follow, and their provisions were nearly gone.

On the way home, the men lived entirely on broiled beef without salt. They reached Colorado City without having seen a single Indian during the whole campaign. The company was disbanded. At least a dozen people had been killed in El Paso County and the surrounding region.

Many houses had been destroyed, crops had been lost, and probably five hundred horses and at least a thousand head of cattle had been driven off. The contest had been unequal. The settlers carried a miscellany of old muzzle-loading hunting rifles, while the Indians were armed with breech-loading guns using metal cartridges. Only the poor quality of the Indians’ ammunition and their habit of never attacking armed men saved many lives.

The federal government never made the slightest attempt to protect the settlers. In September 1866, General William T. Sherman, commander-in-chief of the U. S.

Army, stopped overnight in Colorado City on his way north from New Mexico. The settlers appointed the Reverend William Halbert, Irving’s father, as their spokesman to ask for a permanent force of troops on their eastern frontier. Sherman received the appeal with indifference. He said there were no hostile Indians in the neighborhood, then remarked sarcastically that it would probably be profitable for the people of the region if government troops were stationed nearby, so farmers could sell them grain at high prices.

He dismissed the committee. Two years later, after the massacre of Lieutenant Colonel Fetterman and his entire command near Fort Phil Kearny, Sherman telegraphed General Grant that the Sioux must be punished with vindictive earnestness, even to their extermination, men, women, and children, but he made no attempt to protect the settlers on the eastern borders of Colorado. Colorado had only a single delegate in Congress, without a vote, and no influence. The settlers were left to defend themselves as best they could.

The frontier of El Paso County faced the territory of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, the most cunning and bloodthirsty Indians on the American continents. Bands of these warriors roamed constantly in the headwaters of the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers, and it was easy for them to reach the settlements unseen. In the spring of 1869, a winter campaign by government troops under General Custer punished the Cheyenne and Arapaho severely at the Battle of Washita and in other engagements, and after that the people of El Paso County were left unmolested. The raids were over.

The settlers had survived through their own courage and resolve, with no aid from the nation they had come to extend its frontier. Judge Baldwin, who had escaped death on the prairie, died five years later under mysterious circumstances at the bottom of a well in a slaughterhouse, his pockets turned out and his wallet missing. It was deemed an accident.

The war that had almost wiped out the settlements was finished, and the people of the Pikes Peak region went back to their homes, knowing they had held the ground alone.