Battle of Milk Creek

Battle of Milk Creek
Milk Creek Battlefield Park. The site of the battle was behind the park in the creek valley below.
Date September 29–October 5, 1879 Location 17 miles (27 km) northeast of present-day Meeker, Colorado Result United States victory
Belligerents
United States	Ute
Commanders and leaders
Wesley Merritt Thomas Tipton Thornburgh †	Ouray Nicaagat (Jack)
Strength
~700	~250
Casualties and losses
13 killed 44 wounded	19–37 killed 7 missing

The Battle of Milk Creek was an armed confrontation that began on September 29, 1879, in northwestern Colorado and coincided with the Meeker massacre. It lasted until October 5 as warriors of the White River Ute tribe besieged a United States Army detachment in one of the last true battles of the American Indian Wars.

In the years preceding the Meeker massacre, the idealistic but ambitious and debt-ridden Nathan C. Meeker had taken the advice of friend and mentor Horace Greeley to go west, where he made an ill-fated attempt to establish Union Colony, a utopian socialistic community at the site of present-day Greeley, Colorado. Failing there, Meeker then secured a position as U.S. Indian Agent for the White River Indian Agency through political connections.

The Ute tribe, ensconced protectively in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, were among the last remaining Native American horse nomads. In the centuries since their arrival in the Americas, horses had become so crucial to the Utes' survival that they had gained a sort of totemic significance among the Utes. As a federal Indian agent, Nathan Meeker embarked upon a program to replace the Ute lifestyle of hunting bison from horseback with plowshares and seeds.

The Utes, attached to their horses and culture, resisted Meeker's efforts. In the late summer of 1879 some of the tribe's hunters left the reservation for a buffalo hunt. Meeker considered this a flagrant violation of agency rules and then repeated his demand that the band kill some of their horses and ordered their race track plowed under. Tempers flared, culminating in a brief but portentous shoving match or fist fight between the Ute medicine man Canalla and Meeker. Meeker reacted by wiring Department of Interior superiors for assistance. The Department, having no enforcement power, then contacted the War Department and no less a person than General William Tecumseh Sherman for federal troops to quell what he considered to be the initiation of an Indian uprising.

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