They Didn't Just Kill the Settlers - The HORRIFYING Truth About Catherine & Sophia German (1874)

On September 11, 1874, a Southern Cheyenne war party led by Medicine Water attacked the German family beside the Smoky Hill River in western Kansas, one day's ride from Fort Wallace. John and Lydia German, their son Stephen, and their daughters Rebecca Jane and Joanna were killed. Four sisters were left alive: Catherine, 17, Sophia, 12, Julia, 7, and Addie, 5. They were carried south across Indian Territory into the Texas Panhandle, and for months they were moved from camp to camp while the army hunted for them through one of the hardest winters of the Red River War. This is the story of why the riders spared the four girls, and what that choice really meant for them. We follow the German family from a worn-out farm in north Georgia to the Kansas plains, and the war party back to Sand Creek, Adobe Walls, and a woman named Mochi. We ride with Lt. Frank D. Baldwin's charge of empty supply wagons at McClellan Creek and find what Billy Dixon and the scouts saw under a pile of buffalo hides. Then we follow the words spoken in Stone Calf's lodge, the surrender at the Darlington Agency, the prisoners sent to Fort Marion, and the $10,000 that paid for the sisters' future, and where that money came from.