A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  3

  THE SMOKING GUN

  Historical research and writing are neither streamlined nor aesthetically pleasing tasks. Instead, they are often painfully similar to the process of accretion—and sometimes seem to play out across similar sweeps of geological time. Historians frame questions about the past and then read, watch, or listen to huge numbers of “texts,” the current term of art for their sources. Sifting through these materials, they take notes, retaining tiny fragments of relevant information for later use. After doing this for months, years, even decades in some instances, they assemble the evidence they have collected, fashioning strata of ideas from an aggregate of facts, before arraying these layers, one atop the next, usually in the form of analytical narratives structured by a central argument. In this way, scholars transform fine-grained information into knowledge about the past. This is the historian’s method, tortuous and somewhat arcane by design, an outgrowth of turn-of-the-twentieth-century efforts to approximate the practices of then-ascendant earth and life sciences. And this methodology, albeit sometimes far more fluid than depicted here, sits at the core of most historians’ disciplinary identity, their sense of themselves as professionals both bound and elevated by shared scholarly practices.1

  This work may be difficult, lonely, even tedious. But it is rarely boring, especially not when research hinges on historical sleuthing, carrying with it the thrill of the chase. For instance, urgency animated the historians’ team early in the site search. Lysa Wegman-French and Christine Whitacre, focused on the chance to help solve an enduring mystery, relished the prospect of finding Sand Creek. They felt like cold-case detectives. As an added bonus, they believed their work would serve not just the National Park Service (NPS) but also the affected tribes. Wegman-French recalled that when news of the site study began filtering through the halls of the NPS offices, located in the foothills west of Denver, she said to herself, “This will be fantastic.” In summer 1998, with Whitacre temporarily detailed to Yellowstone National Park, Wegman-French began familiarizing herself with the published literature on the massacre as well as conducting preliminary research in local archives. The following fall and winter, after Whitacre returned to her regular post, the two women continued searching through document collections in Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and a variety of other regional repositories.2

  The NPS historians benefited from having a narrow research agenda, defined by a small set of questions, guiding their inquiries. They asked only what the historical record could contribute to the search with regard to the location and shape of Sand Creek in November 1864; the distance and route the Colorado volunteers had marched toward the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps; where Chivington and his troops had bivouacked after the massacre; and if period maps could shed light on any element of the slaughter’s location. They hoped to learn, based on documentary evidence, where, exactly, the violence had unfolded. The broader context surrounding the massacre lay outside the scope of their task. This was true for Wegman-French and Whitacre, and also for Gary Roberts and Jerry Greene, both of whom culled documents from collections located nationwide, including the Library of Congress and the National Archives.3

  As the team’s work progressed, its members weighted firsthand accounts more heavily than other perspectives. This represented an easy choice, because historians typically value primary more than secondary sources. By utilizing these materials, scholars believe they are able to get closer to the subject of their inquiries, just a step removed from events and actors otherwise shrouded by the mists of time. For Jerry Greene, especially, decades of ordering the chaos of cross-cultural warfare had taught him to distrust hearsay and place his faith instead in “participant testimony”; time and again, such sources had helped him unravel historical mysteries. Given Greene’s stellar reputation—Wegman-French called him “the Park Service’s recognized expert on the Indian Wars”—his opinion carried added significance during the search. In fact, he had been offered the team captaincy before Christine Whitacre accepted the job. Greene only turned down the position because he worried at the time about offending new colleagues at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, where he had just accepted a post when the NPS began assembling personnel for its site study. As Greene sifted through evidence, trying to locate the massacre site, he kept looking for accounts from “people who were there.” This preference meant that the team often relied, by default if not design, on narratives produced by the men under Chivington’s command.4

  By studying the 1st and 3rd Colorado Regiments’ Sand Creek stories, collected in written sources ranging from sworn testimony to memoirs, the NPS historians gleaned a great deal of useful information. The soldiers who mentioned the massacre’s proximity to Fort Lyon, for example, placed the distance between the two at twenty-five to forty-five miles, with most recalling that they had marched forty miles the night before the slaughter. Luckily for the NPS, Fort Lyon’s location, unlike Sand Creek’s, remained well known: about thirty-five miles south of Bill Dawson’s ranch. Several men also recalled walking a well-worn “Indian trail” on their way to the Cheyenne and Arapaho camps. As for the carnage itself, many soldiers suggested that blood had been spilled near the “Big Bend” or the “South Bend of Sandy Creek”; almost all of them sited the killing on the stream’s north side; of those who remembered the sand pits, the fortifications Chivington pointed to as proof that the Indians at Sand Creek had been hostile, most thought they had been between a quarter mile and a mile from Black Kettle’s village; and they overwhelmingly suggested that the engagement had sprawled across an area more than five miles long and well over a mile across. Finally, in the aftermath of the chaos, Chivington, his subordinates reported, had bivouacked within a mile of the killing field.5

  What the NPS team could not find when searching through archives was much Native American testimony about the massacre—though not for lack of interest or effort. The NPS historians hoped that their study would feature indigenous voices. Lysa Wegman-French, for her part, had trained at the University of Colorado–Boulder (CU) with Patricia Nelson Limerick, a leading scholar among the so-called New Western historians, a group whose work placed the experiences of Native Americans on par with those of Euro-American settlers. Limerick’s masterpiece, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, argues that Westerners today live with the consequences of their bloody history, including events like Sand Creek—even if she never mentions the massacre specifically in her book. Arguing against Frederick Jackson Turner’s so-called Frontier Thesis, Limerick suggests that there was no discernible moment when a line of Euro-American settlement overcame the region’s roughhewn identity, replacing it with something all new and relatively refined. Instead, she writes, reverberations from the past thunder through the West’s present. For the NPS historians studying Sand Creek, an event whose implications still shaped the experiences of whites and Indians throughout the region, Limerick’s work had special resonance.6

  During the site search, Wegman-French sometimes thought about her time at CU, where she had experienced the massacre’s lingering power. A fight over Sand Creek’s legacy had engulfed the Boulder campus in spring and fall 1987, when OYATE, a Native American student organization, “resurrected a 20-year-old campaign to strip” Nichols Hall, a university building, of its name. Captain David Nichols, the hall’s namesake, had served in the 3rd Colorado Regiment and commanded troops at the Sand Creek massacre. Local legend also held that he later had made a midnight ride from Denver to Boulder, a trip that formed a cornerstone of CU’s founding myth. Because of his centrality in the university community’s collective memory of the school’s origins, in 1961 CU renamed a dormitory in Nichols’s honor. Native American students, pointing to the atrocities committed at Sand Creek, had intermittently protested that decision in the years since. But the conflict intensified in 1987. Children of the Red Power Movement, steeped in a campus culture that increasingly viewed Western history through a postcolonial lens, began dem
anding that the university suture an “open wound that keeps the bigotry from healing.”7

  CU’s chancellor at the time, James Corbridge, dealt with the controversy by asking Patty Limerick to study whether Nichols’s name should be erased from the dorm (a question similar to the one later asked by the Colorado legislature about the Civil War memorial on the capitol steps). Limerick spent months investigating a series of issues surrounding Sand Creek and Captain Nichols: Had the bloodshed been a battle or a massacre? How had Nichols understood his role at Sand Creek, as well as the event’s place in the sweep of Colorado’s settlement? Was there any truth to the midnight ride story? And how did grim episodes from the West’s history relate to the controversy over the naming of buildings at CU? Limerick later produced a document, “What’s in a Name?,” a 138-page study, long on nuance and documentation, of what she labeled an “ideal topic to raise the crucial questions of Colorado’s complex history.”8

  Throughout her report, Limerick struggled to reconcile history and memory by balancing competing perspectives from different eras: 1864, when Chivington and his men perpetrated the massacre; 1961, when CU dedicated Nichols Hall; and 1987, the contemporary context in which the naming controversy erputed. Of Nichols’s worldview, Limerick suggested, “the founding of universities and the killing of Indians represented service in the same cause. The project was to ‘bring civilization’ to Colorado.” More broadly, 1864-vintage Coloradans “saw Indian resistance as something comparable to the Confederate rebellion: an illegitimate revolt against a legitimate authority.” By contrast, Limerick noted, that same resistance appeared to modern eyes like “a logical, even predictable response to invasion, a defense of homeland.” As for the decision to name the building for Captain Nichols: “In 1961, in the minds of those who proposed his name for a building … war activities did not detract from his achievements; on the contrary, they added to them.” And on the validity of revisiting that decision, Limerick argued, “When a name that most people take for granted brings distress to a significant number of people within the University, then the University has an obligation to look into the problem.”9

  Turning to the superheated question of whether Sand Creek had been a massacre or a battle, Limerick maintained her cool. She allowed that “to members of the Third Colorado, the engagement felt like a battle, and not like a massacre, because they were, at various times, scared to death.” But then, after detailing the promises made by Ned Wynkoop to Black Kettle in the months leading to the slaughter, and also noting that the Arapahos and Cheyennes had camped at Sand Creek only because white authorities had guaranteed them safe harbor there, Limerick surveyed other renowned historians of the West and the Indian Wars. These scholars all agreed that Sand Creek had been a massacre. Robert Utley, for example, explained, “where noncombatants were killed deliberately and indiscriminately, I regard massacre [as] an appropriate term.” And yet he still recommended retaining the name of Nichols Hall. Arguing both as a historic preservationist and a professional historian, he suggested: “To readjust the nomenclature in order to appease the sensibilities of the present, however valid, is to do violence to the past, to the opinions and actions of previous generations.” He concluded that “Nichols Hall should remain Nichols Hall, not as a monument to Sand Creek, but as a reminder of how a previous generation felt about fellow Coloradan David Nichols.”10

  Limerick disagreed. She discounted Utley’s concerns about preservation, as the dormitory had carried Nichols’s name for less than three decades. She also found that the heroic narrative of Nichols’s midnight ride, the story that connected him to CU, likely was apocryphal. And finally, while she had initially hoped that the naming controversy could serve as a teaching tool, a chance to educate the university community about moral ambiguities woven throughout Colorado’s history, that goal, no matter how worthy, did not outweigh the anguish expressed by Native American students over the veneration, on the Boulder campus, of a man who had participated in depraved acts at Sand Creek. As a result, Limerick concluded: “The University [should] change the name of Nichols Hall, and carefully choose a replacement.” What had been an isolated conflict on the CU campus then escalated into a regional memory fight.11

  Word of Limerick’s report leaked out at the start of the fall semester in 1987. By that time, Richard Nixon’s backlash had long since devolved into Ronald Reagan’s culture wars. Historians around the United States found themselves on the front lines of skirmishes over how the past should be remembered. Upon hearing of Limerick’s findings, CU regents Roy Shore and Hugh Fowler mounted an offensive, characterizing “What’s in a Name?” as “revisionism,” little more than liberal propaganda. Shore claimed that Limerick was “biased,” that she “denigrate[d] people,” and suggested that rather than changing Nichols Hall’s name, it would be better to “let the dead bury the dead.” Armed with talking points seemingly plucked from a Vietnam-era time capsule, he insisted that “minority students were totally unaware of who Capt. Nichols was until the agitators brought up his name.” Both he and Fowler then accused Limerick of a historian’s sin: presentism, using contemporary standards to judge past events. Fowler also suggested, “if we decide to pull down all the statues of bad guys, we would not have any statues left.” Limerick, in this view, had abdicated her professional obligations in service of a radical multicultural agenda.12

  For months the controversy dragged on, capturing attention throughout the state. Claims of political correctness prompted counterclaims of insensitivity or full-blown racism. Captain Nichols’s descendants eventually weighed in, defending their family’s honor and insisting that the protestors were “trying to fight a war that’s been over for 100 years.” With the board of regents bitterly divided, Chancellor Corbridge backed Limerick, saying that he wanted the name changed. Finally, on November 19, 1987, the university regents voted, 5–3, to remove Nichols’s name, prompting a spokesperson from OYATE to proclaim it “a great day.” Still the conflict lingered. It took the regents another eighteen months to rename the dormitory Cheyenne-Arapaho Hall. Only then did the controversy finally abate. Years later, as she began looking for clues leading to the massacre site, Lysa Wegman-French remembered how Sand Creek could inflame people’s passions by bringing Colorado’s past and present into close proximity.13

  Neither Jerry Greene nor Gary Roberts had experienced anything as dramatic as the fight over Nichols Hall. But both men had long been familiar with Sand Creek, and they both hoped that Native American sources might help them find the site. Greene, throughout his career, had included Indian voices in his military histories of the West. And though Roberts had completed his dissertation more than a decade before the NPS started its site search, his work still represented a model of interdisciplinary inquiry, incorporating Cheyenne oral histories with more traditional manuscript sources. But in 1998, even as the NPS team made “every attempt … to locate and consider Cheyenne and Arapaho participant accounts of the Sand Creek massacre,” the thousands of pages of primary documents produced by Chivington and his men far outstripped both the number and impact of the indigenous sources the historians consulted.14

  That was the case not only because written records of nineteenth-century Cheyenne and Arapaho history are relatively rare, but also because none of the federal inquiries into Sand Creek featured depositions from Native American witnesses. Few Indians were U.S. citizens at the time of the massacre. Their second-class status would linger, with some exceptions, until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. Native people, consequently, rarely testified in federal proceedings. At the same time, as George Bent explains in his writings, the Cheyennes and Arapahos who lived through the massacre distrusted whites for the rest of their lives. As Laird Cometsevah suggested, these “folks had complied with the white government’s wishes and then were betrayed anyway.” They camped on Sand Creek at John Chivington’s and Major Scott Anthony’s behest; Black Kettle flew the American flag on the day of the massacre, signaling that his was a peace ca
mp; and they were slaughtered for their trouble. Most of the survivors of the ordeal then fled Colorado for the Republican River country, joining the bulk of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, as well as many Lakotas, camped there. Cometsevah scoffed at the idea that they then would have come in to testify. “They weren’t fools,” he said. All of this meant that Jerry Greene, because of his reliance on written documents, would have almost no Native American sources available to him as he did his research.15

  There was one notable exception: George Bent’s letters and writings. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Bent’s work with George Hyde constituted an intellectual threat to the Civil War memories propagated by veterans of the 1st and 3rd Colorado Regiments. Following John Chivington’s death in 1894, many of these men tried to embed their colonel’s Sand Creek stories in the glorious Civil War narrative being constructed by heritage groups around the United States—work that culminated in Colorado with the unveiling of the memorial on the state capitol steps in 1909. These efforts upset Bent, who responded by writing his own narrative of the slaughter for the public. He based his account on his own and other Cheyenne stories, recasting what Chivington had called a battle as a massacre in articles for the Frontier in 1905 and 1906. Bent’s essays outraged Chivington’s surviving loyalists. In the Denver Times, Major Jacob Downing deployed racial stereotypes in this memory war, calling Bent’s father, the renowned William, a “squaw man” for having married Owl Woman. He then trained his sights on George, denigrating him as a “cutthroat, and a thief, a liar and a scoundrel, but worst of all, a halfbreed.” Having littered the field with reputations, Downing finally assured readers that Sand Creek merited celebration as a noble part of civilizing Colorado and winning the Civil War in the West.16