Oh What a Slaughter

by Larry McMurtry

  Reports that the Indians hadn’t wanted to fight were shouted down by the Chivington mob, but they kept leaking out. The carnage began to sit heavily on certain consciences, as it usually does after massacres. There had been a few soldiers, like Silas Soule, who refused to shoot down helpless Indian women or their children; in time some of them expressed their disgust at the proceedings. Chivington’s supporters were well in the majority, but there was a substantial minority opinion and it did get expressed.

  Even as the battle began there had been doubters who informed Chivington that the Indians were trying to surrender; but he brushed this aside. He did not want to hear from Indian sympathizers and was not pleased by the least equivocation on the part of his militia. He had gone on a mission of vengeance and he made no bones about that fact. He frequently reminded the soldiers of what had been done to white women in the recent raids, and he succeeded well enough in keeping most of his troops stirred up.

  But even Chivington, forceful as he was, did not succeed in banishing all doubt, all regret. The field of battle was one thing; a formal court of inquiry quite another. The formality inherent in even such a crude judicial procedure is about as far as civilized man gets from the dust, smoke, noise, and blood of a battlefield.

  The inquiry was ordered by Congress. Once it got underway, Chivington objected to almost every question that was asked. With his towering presence and his power of denunciation he could intimidate many witnesses, but not all witnesses. Silas Soule held his ground and yielded nothing to Chivington’s bluster; the preacher made little headway with old Jim Beckwourth either. In the East the greatly respected General Grant gave it as his opinion that what happened at Sand Creek had been nothing more than murder. (He was equally blunt about what happened at the Little Bighorn twelve years later, declaring at once that the tragedy was Custer’s fault, a judgment that cannot have pleased the grieving Libbie Custer.)

  Despite Chivington’s resistance, the commission of inquiry made it clear that what happened at Sand Creek was an out-and-out massacre. Joseph Holt, the army’s judge advocate, called it “cowardly and cold blooded slaughter, sufficient to cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy and the face of every American with shame and indignation.”

  In this the judge advocate clearly went too far, because there were plenty of American faces in Denver who expressed neither shame nor indignation. Neither Chivington nor Shoop was charged with anything; to have charged them at that moment in Denver would have led to civil insurrection.

  In April 1865, three weeks after he had married, Silas Soule, the officer whose testimony had done Chivington the most harm, was assassinated while taking a stroll on a pleasant evening. His murderer was most likely a man named Squiers, who promptly fled to New Mexico. The army sent Lieutenant James Cannon to apprehend him, which Cannon accomplished without undue difficulty. Squiers was returned to Denver but escaped again and headed west. This time Lieutenant Cannon could not pursue him because Lieutenant Cannon had been found dead in his hotel room, probably poisoned. Squiers was never brought to trial.

  The carnage and ambuscade on the prairies east of Denver did not stop. Julesburg was attacked a second time. Then the Civil War ended, a cessation that forced the military authorities to notice that there was a full-scale Indian revolt going on in the West, conducted by a goodly number of highly mobile and also highly motivated warriors who were, at this juncture, fully determined to prevent the whites from taking their land.

  Through the long winding, up and down, of the Indian wars, John Chivington remained popular in Colorado. To the end of his life he defied his critics, declaring, over and over again, that he stood by Sand Creek. He was to have his trials and sorrows. His son drowned and his wife died, after which he quickly married his son’s young widow, who soon took herself home. There were allegations of abuse. Chivington moved to San Diego, but soon returned to Denver, where he became an undertaker and, eventually, the county coroner. He died in 1894, about thirty years after the attack that made him famous, or infamous.

  * * *

  More than one Western historian has defended Chivington, one being J. P. Dunn, he of Massacres of the Mountains, who makes quite a spirited defense of the fighting preacher and his one-hundred-day volunteers. Dunn calls Chivington “a colossal martyr to misrepresentation.” In his polemic Dunn points out, correctly enough, that there was a life-or-death struggle taking place on the western prairies in the early 1860s. The conflict was brutal; many immigrants did lose their lives.

  It could hardly have been otherwise. The Indians were rapidly being squeezed out of the country that supported them—country they held dear. The tactical problem that the first Denver council tried to address, how to tell a peaceful Indian from a hostile Indian, was never solved. A fighter such as Roman Nose, a war Indian for sure, might nonetheless visit a peace Indian such as Black Kettle. Plains Indians moved around, visiting for a time with this band or that. The hostile and the peaceful were never to be easily separated out.

  After the Fetterman Massacre in 1866, General Sherman made a blunt exterminationist remark. According to H. L. Mencken, it was Sherman, not General Philip Sheridan, who, when approached by an Indian beggar at a railroad depot with the claim that he was a good Indian, replied that the only good Indian he had ever seen was a dead Indian.

  Sherman was not happy, two years later, at the end of what has been called Red Cloud’s War, when the government was forced into its only public retreat in the whole era of this conflict: it agreed to abandon three forts that had foolishly been thrown up along the Bozeman Trail. They had been supposed to protect miners and other travelers to Montana but happened to have been erected right in the heart of Sioux country. With what meager manpower the army had at the time they could not be defended.

  The army had, for once, truly overreached—it had underestimated the power of the tribes. Custer was to make the same mistake at the Little Bighorn.

  Once the forts were abandoned, the Indians burned them.

  Part of J. P. Dunn’s admiration for Chivington stems from the fact that the fighting parson never gave ground. He never tried to shift the blame for Sand Creek to anyone else, or to pretend that he had intended to do anything other than what he did do: kill as many Indians as possible. Dunn’s argument is that at this stage of the fighting nothing but merciless cruelty would impress the Indians. He even argued that the mutilations had the same purpose: to convince the Indians that white men could deal in terror as effectively as they themselves could. He felt that the Indians did not respect gentle treatment, though he himself knew that they did respect fair treatment.

  Dunn ends his defense with one of those purple perorations of which he was so fond:

  Was it right for the English to shoot back the Sepoy ambassador from their cannon? Was it right for the North to refuse to exchange prisoners while our boys were dying in Libby and Andersonville? I do not undertake to answer these questions, but I do say that Sand Creek is far from being the “climax” of American outrages to the Indian, as it has been called. Lay not that unflattering unction on your souls, people of the East, while the names of Pequod and Conestoga Indians exist in your books; nor you of the Mississippi Valley while the blood of Logan’s family and the Moravian Indians of the Muskingum stain your records; nor you of the South, while a Cherokee or a Seminole remains to tell the wrongs of his fathers; nor yet you of the Pacific Slope while the murdered family of Spencer or the victims of Bloody Point and Nome Cult have a place in the memory of men—your ancestors and predecessors were guilty of worse things than the Sand Creek massacre.

  That summary is hard to dispute. The burned-alive Pequots probably did have it worse. The reason Sand Creek gets highlighted is because some of those killed were prominent peace Indians. Black Kettle’s peaceful position had been well known for many years, but Chivington didn’t care. He attacked the largest encampment he could find—the more militant bands would not have been so easily found, and it’s doubtful that they could
have been surprised. Black Kettle’s band was easy pickings precisely because they believed they were safe. To some extent Black Kettle compounded this lapse when he was attacked and killed on the Washita.

  Arthur Penn’s rendering of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man contains at least three massacres. The first might loosely represent Sand Creek, the second the Washita, and the third the Little Bighorn. If Americans—or even Westerners—remember anything about Sand Creek it is that Black Kettle was frantically waving his American flag as the troopers charged in. Some say his companion White Antelope was holding up a peace certificate when he was shot dead; it is more probable that he was merely making some gesture of surrender. From the point of view of poorly trained or wholly untrained cavalry, that there were a lot of peace Indians in this camp might not have been obvious. Most of the attackers were probably more frightened than enraged, though rage or at least adrenaline arrived quickly enough once the shooting started.

  The mutilations the victors performed were horrible, though not nearly as encyclopedic as those the Sioux and Cheyenne managed to visit on Fetterman’s men two years later, in a battle that barely lasted half an hour. Here is what the troops found when they went out to bring in the bodies after the Fetterman wipeout: the words are those of Henry Carrington, at that time commander of Fort Phil Kearny, whose military career was destroyed by this disaster:

  Eyes were torn out and laid on rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers; brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out of sockets; private parts cut off and independently placed on the person; eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spearheads, sticks or arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knives; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles in calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms, and cheeks taken out. Punctures upon every sensitive part of the body, even the soles of the feet and the palms of the hand.

  Considering the short duration of the Fetterman Massacre, as opposed to the nearly all-day struggle at Sand Creek, the Sioux and Cheyenne made Chivington’s men seem like amateurs of massacre, which indeed they were.

  The same catalogue could be restated for the Little Bighorn, with the addition of decapitation and a few other refinements. Chivington’s hundred-day volunteers were for the most part Sunday soldiers, content with pouches made from scrotums and the like. When it came to making a meat shop they possessed only the crudest skills.

  I am not sure that Sand Creek admits of any conclusions. Two peoples with widely differing cultures were rubbing against each other, constantly and insistently. The Indians were trying to defend their cherished way of life, the whites to make that way of life vanish so they could go on with their settling, farming, town-building, etc.

  On a world scale countless massacres have been perpetrated over those and similar issues. Land is frequently a principal element in these disputes. Is it my land or your land, our land or their land? Time after time, in the Balkans, India, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Middle East, large parts of Africa, the same concerns develop. Peoples don’t seem to be good at sharing land, even when there’s a lot of it to share. Where land is in dispute massacres are just waiting to happen—it’s only a question of time, and usually not much time at that.

  The Marias River Massacre,

  January 23, 1870

  The massacre of Piegan Blackfeet in their winter camp on the Marias River, in what is now Montana, in January of 1870 is unique among the massacres considered in this book.

  Why? Because this large band of Blackfeet were dying anyway: of smallpox, at the rate of six or seven per day.

  It is not likely that Colonel E. M. Baker, who lead the assault on the Blackfeet camp, knew that the tribe was infected when he set out to eliminate them as a raiding force, but he found out soon enough and went right on with the killing; at the end of the day the army claimed to have killed 173 Indians, a big total.

  What was odd about it—apart from the circumstance that the army chose to kill Indians who were dying already—is that the army claimed to have killed 120 warriors, a proportion of warriors to women and children not seen in any other massacre. J. P. Dunn throws up many statistics in order to suggest that the army’s count couldn’t have been right. There were always, in his view, more women and and children to be found in a camp than men.

  Well, if they don’t have smallpox, maybe. The 120 warriors might well have been in camp because they were too sick to be anywhere else.

  But if they were that sick, why bother to kill them?

  Because they were Blackfeet—probably the most feared of all Western tribes—that’s why.

  When Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their great trek across America and back in 1804–1806 they encountered many Indians, some of them ill-disposed toward the Corps of Discovery; but they got all the way to the Western Ocean without killing a single native, a high tribute to the care they took to get on with the local tribes.

  On the return journey they were not quite so lucky. While Captain Lewis and some of the Corps were exploring the Marias River country, not too far from where the 1870 massacre would occur, they traveled for a while with some Piegan Blackfeet, although the Piegans were well known to be brazen thieves.

  Sure enough, one morning, a Piegan boldly seized a rifle and attempted to make off with it. The attempt didn’t work and, in the struggle over the gun, the Piegan was stabbed to death. Another Piegan fired at Captain Lewis, who shot back, wounding him. Whether he died is debated. The Corps proceeded home; there was no more trouble with Indians—the stabbed Piegan was the only sure kill on the whole amazing journey.

  The Blackfeet country is in northwestern Montana and some of Idaho. No group of Indians was more determined to keep whites out of their lands. As early as 1731, when the great Canadian explorer La Verendrye tried to cross from what is now South Dakota to the Western Ocean it was most probably the Blackfeet who turned him back. Travel in the Blackfeet country, from the Yellowstone over to the Columbia, was just not safe.

  Indeed, one of the famous episodes in the history of the American fur trade involved the militant Blackfeet. On their way back down the Missouri in 1806 the captains met two intrepid traders who were resolutely setting out to trap in the High West. This intrigued young John Colter, a member of the Corps. He was given permission by the captains to go back upriver and try to keep his hair while he sought his fortune.

  John Colter did keep his hair, but, upon encountering some Blackfeet, two of his companions were not so lucky. They were killed, but the Blackfeet must have been feeling sporting, because they gave Colter a chance. He was stripped naked and told to run. The Blackfeet allowed him a decent start and then set out in pursuit.

  John Colter could run. With his life on the line he ran so hard that blood gushed out of his nose. Even so, one fast-running warrior was closing in on him, spear at the ready. Colter whirled suddenly, taking the warrior by surprise. He wrested the warrior’s spear away and killed him with it.

  Then he ran some more, finally eluding his captor pursuers by slipping into an icy pond and hiding under a beaver dam.

  The annoyed Blackfeet finally gave up.

  Naked, Colter walked out, through a land of geysers. The likelihood is that he discovered Yellowstone.

  The Blackfeet were a handsome people. The first painters who managed to get upriver, to Fort Union or Fort McKenzie, loved to do their portraits and have left us some fine ones.

  The painters were the American George Catlin and the Swiss Karl Bodmer. Some of the portraits they did on the upper Missouri between 1832 and 1834 are among the finest examples of Western art.

  The relevance of all this to the massacre of the dying Piegans in 1870 is that the militancy of the Blackfeet was well known and widely respected. That particular part of Montana is thinly populated even today, in part because of Blackfeet resistance.

  Thus when Colo
nel Baker arrived at the Blackfeet encampment that morning he killed the raiders he had come to kill. Many of them no doubt would have died, but Colonel Baker was not disposed to leave it to chance, his reasoning perhaps being that those who managed to recover would soon be able to be troublesome again.

  When Blackfeet were involved, the U.S. Army would rather be safe than sorry. They had come to kill, and they killed.

  Kiäsax, Piegan Blackfeet Man

  Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809–1893)

  Watercolor on paper

  The Camp Grant Massacre,

  April 30, 1871

  With the exception of the Sacramento River Massacre, Camp Grant seems to have been the least studied of these Western slaughters, though it is certainly remembered in Arizona by all the peoples involved: Apache, Mexican, Papago, and white. Sometimes it’s called the Aravaipa Massacre, for the creek north of Tucson where it took place. What distinguishes it from the other killings is that in this case all the people killed—excepting one old man and a “well-grown” boy—were women and children. At the Marias River all the victims were sick; at Camp Grant they were either female or young.

  The fighting men were not at home.

  The Aravaipa band of western Apache were as much feared as the other, more militant, bands, such as those that had been led at various times by Cochise, Victorio, or Geronimo. Though the Aravaipa leader, Eskiminzin, was a capable raider, the Apaches who eventually settled near Camp Grant were largely semi-agricultural. The commander at Camp Grant at the time, Lieutenant Royal E. Whitman, allowed them to camp near the post but kept them under tight control, counting them every other day and attempting to keep track of their goings and comings. Urged by his superiors, he made some effort to get them to go to the White Mountain Reservation, but they didn’t like the White Mountains and refused to go. Some of them became friendly with the local ranchers and helped them cut hay and do other chores.