A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Hafen apparently understood the enduring controversy surrounding collective remembrance of Sand Creek, particularly the knotty question of whether the bloodshed would be memorialized as a battle or a massacre. His private notes from the period indicate that for months he had wrestled with the implications of the wording for the Colorado Historical Society’s roadside marker. And in a short essay on the slaughter published in the Lamar Daily News four days before the monuments’ unveiling, Hafen tried to explain the inexplicable: how white Coloradans had perpetrated such a heinous crime. He described Sand Creek as “perhaps the most controversial subject in Colorado history,” noting, “some have called it a ‘battle’ in which the Indians got what they deserved, while others have labeled it an ‘unjustifiable massacre.’ ” In Hafen’s telling, the “tragic engagement” grew out of “contact” between the “incompatible cultures of the red man and the white man.” Sand Creek, in other words, had been an inevitable and unfortunate outgrowth of American expansion onto the Great Plains. After placing the violence within that frame of reference, Hafen concluded his essay: “As is common in human relations, there are various points of view, and right is not all on one side.” At the time, such insights represented a relatively nuanced treatment of Sand Creek. In retrospect, though, Hafen’s essay reads like equivocation—particularly when placed side by side with the wording of the Colorado Historical Society monument on Highway 96.16

  A state-sponsored obelisk, which was erected near Chivington, Colorado, in 1950 to memorialize Sand Creek. Its plaque read, “North eight miles, east one mile, is the site of the Sand Creek ‘Battle’ or ‘Massacre’ of November 29, 1864[.] Colorado volunteers under the command of John Chivington attacked a village of Cheyennes and Arapahoes encamped on Sand Creek. Many Indians were killed; no prisoners were taken. The white losses were ten killed and thirty-eight wounded. One of the regrettable tragedies in the conquest of the West.” (Courtesy History Colorado, Scan 10025732.)

  One thing Hafen did not mention, in either his speech or his newspaper article, was the relationship between Sand Creek and the Civil War. Divorcing the massacre from its historical context, as opposed to linking the violence to the Civil War as at the memorial on the capitol steps in Denver, made sense in these years. Between the run-up to World War I and the years after World War II, federal authorities sometimes drummed up support for involving the United States in overseas conflicts in part by encouraging Americans to look back to the Civil War as a virtuous and glorious fight, emblematic of the nation’s commitment to defending freedom against tyranny. President Lincoln’s standing as the great liberator, as well as the stock of citizen soldiers cast as the Union’s saviors, soared in these years. Sand Creek, though, increasingly perceived in an ambiguous light even in Colorado—“ ‘Battle’ or ‘Massacre’ ”—and throughout the West, did not fit into this popular vision of the Civil War as a good war. Disentangling the massacre from the Civil War, consequently, served both nationalist and internationalist aims at the time. The 1950-vintage memorials, both the one atop the overlook and the other near the state highway, reflected these priorities, as did Leroy Hafen’s speech and newspaper essay, which painted Sand Creek against the bloody backdrop of the Indian Wars only.17

  By 1997, the roadside obelisk had disappeared from the Kiowa County landscape. The hilltop marker, though, remained on Bill Dawson’s property, still proclaiming the land below it the “Sand Creek Battle Ground.” For more than half a century, out-of-town visitors had come there to contemplate the horror of the massacre and to pay their respects to its victims, leaving all manner of tributes: small bolts of cloth, tobacco, flowers, jewelry, and the occasional animal skull.18

  The historical and spiritual significance of the site, and the pilgrims who arrived there through the years, had slowly broadened Bill Dawson’s vision of Western history. He met people on his land that he otherwise would not have, and forged unlikely friendships, including with Laird Cometsevah, who regularly arrived there to perform sacred rituals and mourn his ancestors. As Dawson grew “curious why some folks would sit on the creek bluff on my north forty and gaze out across the countryside,” he also became dissatisfied that all he knew about Sand Creek had come from his “eighth grade Colorado history” class. He began studying the subject. He had always defended the soldiers under Chivington’s command, seeing them as kindred spirits: Coloradans who had volunteered to serve their country. He had insisted that Sand Creek had been a battle, ugly perhaps, but nevertheless righteous. By the mid-1990s, though, as he consumed more history books and developed close ties with Indian people, especially Cometsevah, who patiently explained the ceremonies he performed at the site, Dawson’s view of Sand Creek slowly shifted. His sympathy for Chivington’s troops slackened as his identification with the Cheyennes tightened. He eventually decided that Sand Creek had been a massacre.19

  Throughout those years, Dawson remained a committed and capable steward of the land. He improved the property both for his midsized ranching operation—for his personal gain in other words—and also because he viewed his piece of prairie as somehow akin to a community trust, a historical treasure that required considerable protection. Despite his ironclad faith in untrammeled private property rights, Dawson even accepted that the land’s association with the massacre conferred upon it something like quasi-public status. He typically allowed sightseers, curious about the massacre, and Indian people, who wanted to perform traditional rituals, onto his property. He asked only that these guests take their trash out with them and, beginning in the early 1980s, that they also leave a small donation in a collection box that he nailed to a fence post near the monument overlook. For more than twenty years this unlikely relationship between accommodating landowner and uninvited guests worked relatively smoothly.20

  Eventually, though, yet another commemorative project began complicating Dawson’s site management. In 1986, the Colorado Historical Society replaced the 1950-vintage obelisk located near State Highway 96 with an updated interpretive marker, still sited approximately a mile east of the town of Chivington. The new sign, embodying a turn in the state’s official understanding of its own history, bore the heading “Sand Creek Massacre,” dropped the word “battle” entirely, thus casting the event in an unequivocally tragic light. The marker also gave clear driving directions to the site without indicating that the land remained in private hands. That oversight, coupled with the word “Massacre,” outraged Dawson, whose perspective on Sand Creek had not yet shifted entirely. He penned an angry letter to James Hartmann, the vice president of the Historical Society at the time, insisting that the “whole damn historical marker is hogwash,” nothing more than politically correct pandering to “Native American groups.” Dawson then vowed to close his property to visitors. Although Hartmann suggested that debates about whether Sand Creek had been a battle or a massacre were likely to “continue well into the future,” he agreed to post a notice that the site was private property. Still, the number of visitors to Bill Dawson’s ranch kept increasing.21

  Around that same time, Dawson observed a change in the behavior, a perceived erosion of courtesy mirroring a decline he sensed in the broader culture’s values, among the people who came to his property. Instead of relatively well-informed history buffs, tribal people, and the occasional harmless New Age seeker hoping to commune with a mythic version of the American West’s past, more and more “idiots” showed up at Dawson’s land. These guests increasingly searched not for immutable truths or spiritual sustenance but for a place to party. And while there, as they walked the consecrated earth they also trod on Dawson’s property rights. Visitors, he recalled, arrived “for an amazing assortment of reasons. Some came to clean out their automobiles, display their large collection of beer bottles, condoms, whatever.” Dawson eventually hit “a point where [he] was overwhelmed and just couldn’t cope.” The strain of overseeing such a controversial piece of real estate, a symbol of the costs of westward expansion and a sacred site for Indian pe
oples, exhausted him. As more time passed, his famously short temper frayed completely. He found himself mired in a series of bitter confrontations.22

  By the late 1990s, even after Dawson successfully lobbied the Colorado Historical Society to remove its highway sign entirely, episodes of gate crashing signaled that the time had come for him to move. One such disturbance took place in spring 1997, as Dick Ellis’s site search wound down. A woman named Pat Muckle and her brother, Mark Berge, sightseers from Boulder, arrived at Dawson’s land on March 3. As daylight faded, they ignored a posted sign asking for a $2 per person donation and instead “walked around the area” near the hillside marker. Dawson by this time had lost patience with inconsiderate guests and had begun staging morality plays for unwitting tourists. On March 3, he removed the license plates from Muckle’s car. When she and Berge returned from hiking around the site, Dawson, who had parked his truck behind their vehicle, demanded that they pay him $25 before he would return their tags. In a complaint Muckle later swore out against Dawson, she said that she had not realized that the site was privately held and that the proprietor’s aggressive demeanor had convinced her that he had a gun. It would not have been the first time that Dawson threatened visitors to his ranch, including cases in which he menaced people he deemed “trespassers.”23

  The Muckle incident unleashed a flood of criminal charges, more than a dozen in all, against Dawson, including possession of an illegal firearm, false imprisonment, and extortion. Dawson eventually pled out the case. But first, he had to spend a night in jail and “waste,” in his words, more than $20,000 on attorney’s fees. Then the trouble lingered, depleting reserves of social capital that he had accrued over time. News of his legal woes “spread like wildfire” in Kiowa County. As one local resident put it, “If you don’t know about this, you’re living in a cave.” Because Eads is a small town with an unusually stable population, judgments about longtime residents are based on hard-won reputations. The criminal proceedings diminished Dawson’s stature in his community. He had previously served as a municipal judge in town, earning “$200 per month to hear everybody’s dog disputes and various traffic things,” but the Eads City Council stripped him of that job. Worse still, his relationship with his neighbors suffered, damage that not even good fences could put right. Although he and his wife had lived in Kiowa County for more than three decades, the Dawsons began considering a move away from Colorado’s Eastern Plains.24

  After leaving jail, Dawson returned home and locked his gates, barring strangers from his property. But keeping visitors away proved more difficult than he expected. Two weeks later, his phone rang. Dawson found himself on the line with Ward Churchill, a scholar of Native American studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder. Churchill, who since then has become notorious for intemperate comments he made about the 9/11 attacks, informed Dawson that he and a colleague wanted to visit Sand Creek. Dawson remembered replying: “I’m sorry, no, you won’t be seeing the massacre site. It’s closed.” A shocked Churchill asked if Dawson would sell his property rather than keeping the public from it. Dawson pulled a figure from the air, “maybe $1.5 million,” and Churchill responded that he would be back in touch soon. Six weeks later, Churchill rang Dawson again, asking if he would consider selling to cable television magnate and Western history enthusiast Ted Turner. Although Dawson, still smarting from his arrest, laughed at the idea, thinking, “nothing would give me more satisfaction than inflicting Turner and his wife [then the actress and antiwar activist Jane Fonda] on Kiowa County,” he knew that such a thing “wasn’t going to happen.” Another six months passed, and Churchill called again, this time announcing, “I have a buyer for your place.” Churchill was serious; he had contacted Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who wanted to acquire the land.25

  By then, James Doyle, Senator Campbell’s communications director in Colorado, had read about Dawson’s legal woes in the local papers. So when Dawson asked for a moment of Campbell’s time at a Republican Party fund-raiser held in southeastern Colorado in spring 1997, Doyle and Campbell knew that they might have an opportunity to move the site from the private to the public realm. After shaking the senator’s hand, Dawson remembered saying, “I’m the son of a bitch who owns Sand Creek,” before explaining that he might, for the right price, be ready to sell his land. Campbell had long been fascinated by the massacre. Some of his forebears had been killed there, and he had often visited the site through the years, “hearing, in the wind,” he said, “the sound of people crying.” At the time, Campbell held seats on the Senate Appropriations Committee, a position of power that allowed him to advance his legislative agenda, and on the Subcommittee on National Parks, part of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, a post that offered him a chance to shape NPS policy. In short, Doyle recalled, Campbell had “not just the will, but the ability to actually move on Sand Creek.” He began investigating the best way to acquire and preserve the property, which, he decided, meant designating the Sand Creek killing field a national historic site and opening it as a unit of the National Park System.26

  Senator Campbell immediately inquired about the NPS’s interest in Sand Creek while, at the same time, trying to firm up Bill Dawson’s commitment to selling. NPS officials, in response to a detailed questionnaire they received from Campbell’s office, scrambled to reassure the senator that they had long considered the Sand Creek site “extremely worthy” of preservation. And Dawson promised Campbell that he wanted to leave Kiowa County—assuming that he could get the right price for his land. Attempting to maximize his profits from the coming transaction, Dawson coyly admitted to a Denver reporter that he did indeed hope to sell out. But he would not reveal more than that: “My granddad said, ‘You never ask anybody how much land you got or how much cattle you got.’ We consider it poor form.” Reassured by the NPS that the commemoration process, if not necessarily the land acquisition process, would proceed smoothly, Campbell introduced a bill in the Senate on March 2, 1998 to purchase Dawson’s ranch. Editorials in Denver-area newspapers hailed the idea: “If Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell has his way, history buffs won’t have to contend with a gun-toting rancher to visit the site of the infamous Sand Creek Massacre on Colorado’s southeastern plains.” For the moment, it seemed that the Sand Creek property would quickly become a national historic site.27

  There was just one hitch: nobody knew for certain where the massacre had taken place. Dick Ellis had not yet completed his site location study. But his preliminary research already indicated that a Sand Creek massacre national historic site located on the Dawson ranch might well be misplaced. And David Halaas, who then worked closely with Ellis on the search, suggested as much in an interview with the Denver Post. “What we have here is a significant historical site that’s lost,” Halaas explained. Again comparing the unsolved mystery to the disappearance of Gettysburg’s hallowed ground, an analogy that he believed “conveyed the gravity of the situation,” Halaas insisted, “we shouldn’t be talking about acquiring it until we spend the money to find it.” He concluded wryly: “It was a well-known place at the time. But I guess no one thought to write down the coordinates.”28

  Those coordinates would have spared Senator Campbell and the NPS a great deal of trouble. As it happened, though, the site’s precise location was something that many Coloradans—like the prospectors who had, in 1993, come up empty while surveying Dawson’s ranch—assumed that they knew well, but upon closer examination perhaps did not. Misconceptions about the site’s placement had been documented since at least 1908, when four veterans of Chivington’s 3rd Colorado Regiment—Morse Coffin, W. H. Dickens, David Harden, and P. M. Williams—took a nostalgic tour of the site of their past exploits with Denver Post reporter C. E. Van Loan. Their driver, a local cowboy, assured the men “that he knew the exact site of the ‘battle ground,’ as the old timers persisted in calling it.” After setting out from Kit Carson, a hamlet located approximately twenty miles due north of Eads, the men bounced across the prairie, search
ing without luck for recognizable landmarks. A rancher they happened upon insisted that he could point them toward the proper site; he had found arrowheads and human remains there, he explained. But when they arrived at the location he described, “Mr. Coffin did not think so. The ground did not ‘look right’ to him.” And the telltale signs of carnage, the remains still on the field, turned out to be bones from “beef critters.” Before night fell, each of the men “had found a site which pleased him,” but they could not agree on a single place in common.29