A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  As the final days of 1864 ticked down toward the new year, several disgruntled officers from the 1st and 3rd Regiments began openly questioning the veracity of Chivington’s account. With the nation hopeful that the Civil War might soon end, newspapers in New York and Washington ran articles about atrocities recently committed on the frontier by soldiers who reportedly had slaughtered defenseless Indians. On December 29, the Denver press broke the story locally but with a different spin: enemies of the West and of Colonel Chivington were conspiring to tarnish the reputation of the heroes of Sand Creek. Then, early in January, officials in Congress and the War Department concluded that the allegations necessitated investigating Sand Creek. As this tide of recriminations rose around him in early 1865, Chivington treaded water. He allowed his former subordinates and editors at several Denver papers to mount spirited defenses of his good name and leadership. But when the first of what eventually would be three inquiries opened in the following months, Chivington testified on his own behalf.20

  In April 1865, the colonel offered federal investigators his fullest recounting of the massacre. Across more than seven single-spaced pages, he answered nineteen pointed questions. He provided information ranging from autobiographical tidbits to his impression of the intentions of the Native Americans killed at Sand Creek. He recalled that the previous November his men, approximately five hundred soldiers, had attacked more than a thousand Cheyennes and Arapahos, of whom “about seven hundred were warriors.” Responding to a drumbeat of allegations that these Indians had actually been peaceful, he noted the “unusual number of males” in the camp, hinting at their dark aims: perhaps so many men had gathered there because “the war chiefs of both nations were assembled … for some special purpose.” Coloradans, Chivington went on, had feared that a vast confederation of Indians was scheming at the time to obliterate settlers on the Plains. Were these Native people part of that unholy alliance? Chivington could not say for certain. But, he explained, the warriors in this camp had prepared in advance for violence, belying later claims that they had been friendly. “Many of the Indians,” he noted, “were armed with rifles and many with revolvers.” And they had fortified the ground. “They had excavated trenches under the bank of Sand Creek,” he seethed, taking “shelter in these trenches as soon as the attack was made, and from thence resist[ing] the advance of my troops.” The Colorado volunteers had fought not with innocents, Chivington asserted, but with well-armed warriors, combat-hardened hostiles ready for a pitched battle.21

  Pressed by examiners on whether his troops had violated the rules of civilized warfare, killing women, children, and the elderly and plundering the enemy’s camp for valuables, Chivington first dodged the question and then dug in, maintaining that Sand Creek had been a legitimate engagement. Although he could not “state positively the number of women and children killed,” he insisted, “from all I could learn, I arrived at the conclusion that but few … had been slain.” As for allegations that his subordinates had ignored the regulations governing the handling of property seized from the enemy, Chivington demurred, insisting that his men had properly disposed of the goods they had taken from the field. Anyway, he concluded with a rhetorical wave, the “trinkets taken at the Indian camp were of no value. The soldiers retained a few of these as trophies; the remainder with the Indian lodges were destroyed.”22

  Chivington next explained why he had attacked the particular Indians at Sand Creek, bands that dismayed critics noted had been arrayed under peace chiefs like Black Kettle and Little Raven. Questioning this conventional wisdom, Chivington claimed again that the Cheyennes and Arapahos had actually been hostile. But when asked for specifics—“Give in detail the names of all Indians so believed to be hostile, with the dates and places of their hostile acts, so far as you may be able to do so.”—he instead offered a composite sketch of savages who for years had menaced settlers on the Plains. “When a tribe of Indians is at war with the whites,” he lectured, “it is impossible to determine what party or band of the tribe or the name of the Indian or Indians belonging to the tribe so at war are guilty of the acts of hostility.” Having stripped Native people of their individuality, suggesting that any given Indian was neither any better nor any worse than the next, Chivington still concluded of the Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek, “they were of the same tribes with those who had murdered many persons and destroyed much valuable property on the Platte and Arkansas rivers during the previous spring, summer and fall.” This damning fact, he insisted, “was beyond a doubt.”23

  With that established, Chivington admitted that he, along with John Evans, Colorado’s territorial governor at the time, had parleyed the previous September with Black Kettle and several other chiefs outside of Denver at Camp Weld. The Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders had left that gathering convinced that they had forged an agreement guaranteeing their people’s safety if they camped near Fort Lyon. Unfortunately, Chivington continued, the Indians had not fulfilled their obligations. They had never handed over the livestock and hostages their people had taken during recent raids. And, he added, General Curtis had later insisted that “there could be no peace without his consent.” So although Major Edward Wynkoop, formerly Fort Lyon’s commander, had “promise[d]” Black Kettle’s people “the protection of our flag,” Chivington said that Wynkoop had been cashiered for exceeding his authority in doing so. Curtis had replaced Wynkoop with Major Scott Anthony, who, when Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon the night before Sand Creek, had informed the colonel that the Native people camped nearby “were hostile.”24

  Chivington buttressed that contention by underscoring the essential fiendishness of all Indians, appealing to white racial solidarity, and invoking gender ideologies—the sanctity of white femininity—that structured Anglo-American society. “I had no means of ascertaining what were the names of the Indians who had committed these outrages,” he stated, “other than the declarations of the Indians themselves, and the character of Indians in the western country for truth and veracity, like their respect for the chastity of women who may become prisoners in their hands, is not of that order which is calculated to inspire confidence in what they may say.” Indians, he suggested, were interchangeable and inscrutable. Apparently drawing on the pseudoscience of the day—the work of theorists like Samuel Morton, who, based on measurements of skulls, argued against a single creation, positing instead “polygenesis,” the notion that people of different races were members of different species—Chivington reckoned that even reputedly friendly Indians, peace chiefs like Black Kettle, would ultimately revert to form. Subtle differences between individuals or bands must finally pale before the overweening power of immutable racial stock, he believed. As any self-respecting frontiersman knew, Indians were all alike: liars, kidnappers, rapists. And blood would out.25

  Chivington then replayed his trump card: more evidence of atrocities committed on white bodies. Nearly half a year after the fact, the single scalp that he had originally reported had multiplied into “the scalps of nineteen (19) white persons.” If those bloody remains did not justify the attack, then he pointed to “a child captured at the camp ornamented with six white women’s scalps.” “These scalps must have been taken by these Indians or furnished to them for their gratification and amusement by some of their brethren, who,” he spat sarcastically, “were in amity with the whites.”26

  When federal investigators offered Chivington an opportunity to enter additional exculpatory material into the record, he seized the chance to provide a history lesson, waving the bloody shirt by placing Sand Creek in the context of the Civil War. “Since August 1863” he “had been in possession of the most conclusive evidence of an alliance, for the purposes of hostility against the whites, of the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Comanche river, and Apache Indians.” This conspiracy of hostile tribes, he reminded his audience, had fomented their plan against a backdrop of disunion: “Rebel emissaries were long since sent among the Indians to incite them against the whites.” With t
he Cherokees already allied with the Confederacy, Westerners had to guard against more Indian trouble. In Colorado, he continued, George Bent (misidentified as “Gerry Bent”), son of borderlands trade tycoon William Bent and Owl Woman, his Cheyenne wife, had served as the South’s agent. Bent had promised the Cheyennes that with “the Great Father at Washington having all he could do to fight his children at the south, they could now regain their country.” In this way, Chivington made the Native people killed at Sand Creek enemies not just of whites in Colorado Territory but of the Union more broadly, the bloodletting not just a triumph in the Indian Wars but of the Civil War.27

  President Lincoln had just been reelected and General Sherman was still marching to the sea when the Colorado soldiers descended on Sand Creek. And when Chivington submitted his detailed account of the attack to federal investigators, General Lee had not yet surrendered at Appomattox Court House. The fate of the nation, including its western territories, still hung in the balance. But with the war nearly over, the Thirteenth Amendment (then awaiting ratification by the states) apparently had settled the question that had sparked the conflict in the first place: whether slavery would spread west. Men like Chivington believed that they deserved credit for the outcome. Abolitionists and nationalists, they had migrated to the territories in the 1850s in part so that the region might remain free soil. And many of them had, when the war started, enlisted to fight for the Union. In spring 1865, these loyal Republicans looked back over the road to disunion and the war itself and decided that the federal government owed them fair recompense for their patriotic sacrifices: the West should be theirs. But then it turned out that, blinkered by a relentless focus on the future of African American slavery, earlier debates over how best to settle the region had often ignored the complicating presence of the Native peoples already living there.28

  Chivington’s testimony, a regional document with national implications, emerged out of that silence. Before the Civil War, most observers had assumed that Indians, crippled by inferior racial stock, would vanish when faced with white settlers. Events like Sand Creek clouded such visions. The transition from savagery to civilization would apparently be bloodier. Chivington, hinting that the federal officials investigating Sand Creek possessed effete eastern sensibilities misplaced in the rough-and-tumble West, explained that his troops had understood the real problem. Unlike their civilian minders in Washington, DC, the men of the 3rd Regiment had recognized that if they mollycoddled the Plains Tribes, the nation would be denied its Manifest Destiny. They had removed an obstacle from the path of onrushing white settlement as surely as a farmer might clear a stone before the plow in his fields. Coloradans owed them a debt. The Union owed them a debt. And every settler who shouted “Westward ho!” in the years after Sand Creek would owe them a debt. He and his men, Chivington contended, had served as the shock troops of expansion, beginning an American revival on the frontier.29

  Turning away from the war, Chivington narrowed his gaze, from the national to the local, and telescoped his time horizon, from the more distant to the recent past. He offered as a final rationale for Sand Creek mute testimony from silent witnesses: the desecrated bodies of still more white victims of Indian depredations. In June 1864, he recalled, Native people had “brutally murdered and scalped” the Hungate family: a father, mother, and two girls living near Denver. On the borderlands, where cross-cultural interactions often spawned anxieties about the threat of racial decay, the loss of Ellen Hungate and her daughters, white females who served as a fragile community’s keepers of virtue, threatened the social order. Chivington suggested that following the Hungate murders, fear among settlers had escalated into desperation, and that desperation had, by fall 1864, quickened into an ironclad conviction that reprisals were not merely justified but necessary. The Hungates’ remains demanded retribution. At Sand Creek, Chivington said, his troops had meted out punishment appropriate to the Cheyennes’ and Arapahos’ crimes.30

  Chivington remained unrepentant for the rest of his life. In 1883, for instance, the Pike’s Peak Pioneers of ’58, a heritage organization devoted to commemorating the first generation of white settlers on the Front Range, celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of their members’ arrival in the region. They invited Chivington to deliver the keynote address at their gala banquet. Intimidating even in his dotage, he opened his remarks by asking, “Was Sand Creek a massacre?” He answered by pointing to the Civil War context: “If it [Sand Creek] was [a massacre], we had massacres almost without number during the late rebellion.” Next, he sneered in his detractors’ voice, “But were not these Indians peaceable?” Ignoring the ongoing Indian Wars, he claimed that Sand Creek had pacified the region’s Native peoples: “for almost nineteen years … none of them have been so troublesome as they were before.” Finally, he returned to the mutilated bodies of settlers. As ever, these remains—not just ever more but ever more broken as Chivington’s story changed over time—floated free of history, a chronicle of the misunderstandings that so often traveled back and forth across cultural lines, leading to bloodshed on the borderlands. From a single scalp originally, he now raged about “scalps of white men, women, and children, several of which they had not had time to dry and tan since taken” and an “Indian blanket … fringed with white women’s scalps.” He said, “These and more were taken from … the battle-field of Sand Creek.” Having recovered such persuasive evidence, the original question answered itself: “Peaceable!” he taunted, in a righteous fury, “I stand by Sand Creek!” He would have been enraged to learn that federal authorities planned, more than a century later, to memorialize the violence as a massacre rather than a battle.31

  Returning to 2008, after Commissioner Oswald finished speaking at the massacre site’s opening ceremony, Bill Ritter, Colorado’s governor, marched to the microphone. Distancing himself from anything like Chivington’s combative tone, Ritter offered an all-things-to-all-people speech. He focused on a safe message of healing through memorialization, extolling the resilience of Native people, and spoon-feeding his audience rhetorical pabulum by calling on Coloradans to “teach our children so that we never forget.” Rather than demanding that the assembled crowd confront the massacre’s grim details, Ritter suggested that they should remember the image of comity constructed at the ceremony, which, he suggested, abjured Chivington’s Sand Creek story by demonstrating that Native Americans and whites had finally “found a way to live in peace without conflict.” The audience, in other words, should appreciate the Sand Creek site not for its challenging content but for its upbeat process.32

  A view of the Sand Creek Massacre site. This photograph, taken from the dry creek bed, shows what is known as the monument overlook in the middle distance to the right. Atop that rise sits a small historical marker inscribed with the words “Sand Creek Battle Ground.” (Photo by Tom Carr.)

  Ritter’s sunny remarks suggested that he had no idea how painful commemorating Sand Creek had been; how, rather than improving federal-tribal relations, creating the memorial had laid bare two centuries of conflict between the U.S. government and the Cheyennes and Arapahos. As it had during the era of the Civil War and the Indian Wars, a struggle over control of the landscape had ignited modern disputes. Sometime late in the nineteenth century or early in the twentieth, Coloradans had misplaced the massacre. Many local people still knew approximately where the slaughter had taken place, but they were no longer able to point with certainty to its precise location. The relevant tribes, though, believed that they had never lost Sand Creek. Their spiritual leaders, relying on oral histories and maps produced by George Bent, had performed rituals at the site across the years, maintaining a connection between past and present through their stewardship of the land. As a result, when they created the historic site, the Arapaho and Cheyenne participants in the memorialization process had hoped to embed their perceptions of tribal history in southeastern Colorado’s sandy soil. NPS officials, however, had insisted that as a precondition of memorializat
ion they must first “find Sand Creek.” And when the NPS’s site search relied on methods and reached conclusions that three of the four affected tribes had rejected, the outraged Arapahos and Cheyennes believed that the NPS had dispossessed them of their memories while threatening their cultural sovereignty. The ensuing conflict recapitulated rather than atoned for past abuses, as federal officials dismissed Native perspectives on the geography and cartography of a tribal tragedy. Ritter’s view of the massacre site ignored this history.33

  For the next speaker, NPS director Mary Bomar, the memorial evinced her organization’s commitment to diversity. The NPS is a huge agency, usually perceived as a stalwart defender of the natural world because of the magnificent parks it oversees, but the NPS is also the country’s largest historic preservation organization. In that role, the NPS acts as the United States’ anthropologist, archeologist, and historian. Bomar, wearing her full dress uniform, including the iconic flat hat, embraced this responsibility, outlining a view at once ambitious and pluralistic for her agency: national narrator. “The public looks upon the National Park Service almost as a metaphor for America itself,” she explained. “The Park Service,” therefore, has to “ensure that the American story is told faithfully, completely, and accurately.” That story is often “noble,” she continued, as at units like Liberty Island, but it can also be “shameful and sad.” Regardless, “in an age of growing diversity,” Bomar suggested, “the Service must continually ask whether the way we tell stories has meaning for all of our citizens.” Reconciling the triumphs and tragedies of the nation’s past and reaching out to all corners in American society could best happen in “special places that unite us all”—places like Sand Creek.34