June 21-27, 1867; (Russell, Kansas): During the spring and summer of 1867, Cheyenne and Lakota Indians raided up and down the line of the Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division (later the Kansas Pacific). By late June, the rail tracks extended to Fort Harker, near Ellsworth, Kansas. The surveyors, graders, and construction crews, who worked seventy-five miles or more beyond the end of track, were woefully exposed to hit-and-run Indian raids.
On 23 May a surveying party under Col. W. H. Greenwood was attacked at Monument Station. Indians fought the workers near the latter's camp for more than four hours, stealing thirteen mules before being driven away. The attacks turned deadly on 21 June, when Indians attacked and killed seven workers in a railroad cut a mile west of the North Fork Big Creek, near present-day Victoria, Kansas. The Union Pacific erected a stone monument to the slain workers. (Today, only one chiseled name, Henry McDonney, remains legible.)
On the same day, a grading crew camped near Walker Creek, near present-day Gorharn, Kansas, was also attacked. Theodore Goeckler was driving a team of mules, hauling rock from a quarry north of the line. Shortly after noon, Indians attacked. Goeckler managed to unhitch the mules, jump on one, and ride for the relative safety of the camp. Before he could make it there, he was shot and fell to the ground. He got up to run, but a warrior lanced him to death. Afterward, Goeckler's fellows brought his body back to camp and buried it on the west bank of Walker Creek, just south of the railroad.
The next day, Indians killed and scalped three more rail workers. The incident occurred within twenty miles of Fort Harker. John D. Perry, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division, wrote to Kansas governor Samuel J. Crawford complaining that the Indians had driven more than a thousand of his laborers east of Wilson's Creek (present-day Wilson, Kansas). The workers were unarmed, and the nearest soldiers were far to the west of the main work sites, near Fort Wallace. Perry asked Crawford for arms and protection; Crawford forwarded the message to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
On 24 June Robert M. Shoemaker, a construction contractor for the railroad, also wrote to Governor Crawford and reported that two more workers had been killed in an attack near Bunker Hill. Shoemaker asked for "five hundred stand of the best arms you have, with plenty of ammunition," Four days later, Shoemaker wrote to Crawford again, relating that one of his camps was attacked on the morning of 27 June. Worker John Kessler was killed and another, George Waite, was badly wounded. Shoemaker reported that the workers, now armed, had killed six Indians. After the fight, Shoemaker personally went to Fort Harker to get military guards. The same week, a contractor based at Fossil Creek Station lost three laborers in an Indian attack.
In response to these raids, Governor Crawford received permission to raise a volunteer cavalry force of eight companies. The unit became the Eighteenth Kansas Cavalry Battalion, one of only two state military units raised solely to combat Indians.
