Mud Springs

The station ground, about two miles west, carries an older stone. The Mud Springs Woman's Club set it in 1939, the year Etta A. Scherer and her children gave the site to the state. Its account of the fight differs from this one: it dates the battle to February 6 and 7, 1865, names only Sioux Indians against U.S. troops, and dedicates the ground as a memorial to all early pioneers who won the west. The Cheyenne, and the Sand Creek massacre this sign gives as the reason for the attack, are not on it.

What the plaque says

Mud Springs Mud Springs, so-named for its seeps of water, was an oasis on the dry plateau between Lodgepole Creek and the North Platte River. Overland travelers began using the springs in the late 1850s when a cutoff was laid out from Old Julesburg to intersect the North Platte valley trail near Courthouse Rock. In 1860-61 the famed Pony Express followed the cutoff, building a log and sod "home station" at Mud Springs. The station became a stop on the overland stagecoach route in 1861, then a telegraph office when the line reached there that August, ending its use by the Pony Express. On February 4-6, 1865, Sioux and Cheyenne warriors attacked Mud Springs after sacking Julesburg in retaliation for Col. John M. Chivington's massacre of peaceful Cheyennes at Sand Creek, Colorado, the previous November. The nine soldiers there held out until reinforcements arrived, and the warriors withdrew. The telegraph station was abandoned about 1877. In 1939 Etta Scherer and her children deeded the Mud Springs Station site to the Nebraska State Historical Society. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Nebraska State Historical Society, 2013

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Courthouse and Jail Rocks — 9.6 mi
  Two clay and sandstone buttes south of Bridgeport that emigrants called a castle, a capitol, a church and coffins before the courthouse and jail names stuck, with a path to their base.
• Chimney Rock National Historic Site — 23 mi
  The spire the trains watched for along the North Platte, measured again and again by the people passing it, and shorter now than when the first of them wrote it down.
• Fort Sidney — 24 mi
  Three surviving buildings of the post that guarded the Union Pacific at Sidney from 1867 to 1894, where a young army surgeon named Walter Reed found a ward full of ugly cases.

More markers nearby

• Amanda Lamme — 8.5 mi
• Courthouse and Jail Rocks — 9.6 mi
• Narcissa Whitman — 14 mi
• Bridgeport, Nebraska "Trail City, USA" — 14 mi