On the morning of August 8, 1864, a Cheyenne and Arapaho war party attacked a Denver-bound freight wagon train of twelve wagons from three outfits at Plum Creek, killing thirteen men and capturing Nancy Jane Morton of Sidney, Iowa, and nine-year-old Daniel Marble of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The train included six wagons reportedly from St. Joseph, Missouri, carrying shelled corn and farm implements, three wagons loaded with hardware and foodstuffs owned by William D. Marble, and three owned by Thomas Frank Morton, who was traveling with his wife Nancy Jane, her brother William Fletcher, and their cousin John Fletcher. During the attack the wagons scattered, some toward the river and others southward toward the bluffs, and all thirteen men in the combined outfits were killed, while Mrs. James Smith, traveling well ahead with her husband and his partner, escaped by hiding in a cattail marsh near the river. The attack occurred in full view of several east-bound freight trains and a small detachment of Seventh Iowa Cavalry soldiers halted at the Thomas Ranch a mile and a half west, where Lt. Joseph Bone sent an urgent telegraph message to Fort Kearny about thirty-five miles east, but troops did not arrive until ten o’clock that night. The victims were buried the next morning, with eleven bodies found scattered about the area and placed in a common grave in a field a few yards south; Lt. F.G. Comstock wrote that the men were buried in a long trench and that nothing had molested the dead before his arrival. Accounts identify some of the dead as James Smith, a Mr. St. Clair, Charles Hiff, William D. Marble, Thomas Frank Morton, William Fletcher, John Fletcher, and six unidentified teamsters. In early September, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle purchased Danny Marble and three other young captives taken along the Little Blue and released them to Major Edward Wynkoop of the First Colorado Cavalry in northwestern Kansas, but while awaiting return to his mother Danny contracted typhoid fever and died in Denver on November 9. According to legend, Mrs. James Smith died insane at Fort Kearny a few weeks later. Nancy Morton, wounded by two arrows, remained captive until about January 18, 1865, when traders sent by Major John Wood of the Seventh Iowa Cavalry ransomed her in the upper Powder River country of Wyoming. From Fort Laramie she returned by trail to Fort Kearny and then by stage to Nebraska City, passing this place where her family and friends had been murdered, and later wrote that the common grave brought back the memory of that fatal morning not as a picture but as a present reality. She reached her father’s home in Sidney on March 9, 1865, later remarried, and lived until 1912.