A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Nearly a century later, due to shifting cultural values, Bent’s heritage made it more rather than less likely that his Sand Creek story would be taken seriously and that his massacre narrative would shape future collective memories. Bent’s private correspondence and published writings offered the NPS historians rare insight into Cheyenne perspectives on the massacre. And two maps that he produced with George Hyde between 1905 and 1914 seemed even more useful than his prose. In the preface of Life of George Bent, Hyde bemoans those maps’ disappearance. But thirty years later, as the NPS began looking for the site, the charts had long since turned up again. Though both appear at first glance like mere line drawings, each contains a wealth of information. The first, held by the Western History Collection at the University of Colorado, depicts a large, gentle curve in Sand Creek; the whole of the massacre site is enveloped within that bend. Several chiefs’ camps are noted, along with “Chivington’s trail,” the placement of the Colorado volunteers, the site of the sand pits, and other details, including spots where women and children were killed. The second map, housed at the Oklahoma Historical Society, also encompasses the slaughter within a large bend (somewhat sharper in this case) in the creek. Elements of the massacre, including artillery positions, are marked with numbers, interpreted by an annotated key at the bottom of the page. Beyond that, most of the particulars are similar to those of the first sketch. Bent apparently worked with other massacre descendants to produce these drawings, in effect mapping Cheyenne memories of Sand Creek onto the page, seemingly a boon for the NPS historians’ team.17

  But Jerry Greene had doubts. Although he recognized the politics surrounding Bent’s recollections of Sand Creek, understanding that a Cheyenne survivor of the ordeal wielded extraordinary cultural authority that might impinge on the NPS’s interpretation of sources, Greene remained skeptical about the maps’ accuracy. He worried especially because Bent had produced his drawings so long after the fact—“more than forty years later”—an interval that threatened to cloud even the most vivid memories. Worse still, Bent had not worked on the maps alone, leaving Greene unsure whether the drawings represented unmediated first-person perspectives, his preference for primary sources, or consisted instead of composite sketches of recollections. Greene fretted about whether the maps’ details might have been derived from an unknown group of people who had not been present at the massacre. And if memory is malleable under the best of circumstances, he knew, its transmission from one person to the next, across space and time, only makes it more so. So Greene, who valued Bent’s drawings for their indigenous provenance and their graphic depiction of Sand Creek, could not resolve his mixed feelings about their utility.18

  George Bent’s maps of Sand Creek, produced between 1905 and 1914. His maps feature a variety of details, including where various bands of Cheyennes and Arapahos camped on the eve of the violence, the shape of the stream at the time of the attack, the location of artillery there, and the so-called sand or rifle pits during the massacre. (University of Colorado at Boulder, University Archives, Bent-Hyde Collection, Box 1, Folder 1, Sand Creek Map, 1 image; Oklahoma Historical Society.)

  In late summer 1998, two revelations pushed Greene beyond ambivalence toward outright skepticism. George Bent, in addition to having twice drawn the massacre site, had produced two other maps depicting the region in which the slaughter had taken place. For Lysa Wegman-French, the corpus of Bent’s cartography seemingly held the “key” to unlocking the site mystery. With infectious enthusiasm, she recounted her study of Bent’s maps. She recalled visiting CU Boulder’s Western History Collection, where she viewed a sketch, brittle with age, on the brink of disintegration, and experienced a “historian’s moment,” a palpable thrill at possessing the source that she thought would lead to her quarry. Wegman-French remembered thinking: “George Bent held this paper in his hands; this is his handwriting.” But after returning home and scrutinizing the paleography on copies of Bent’s regional maps, she realized that the script on them appeared not to have been a product of his hand. It seemed that Bent had not drawn those maps himself. Instead, George Hyde had likely rendered the maps’ broad strokes before sending them on to Bent, who then had added particulars about the massacre’s location based on his memories and research.19

  There was more. While poring over copies of the Bent-Hyde regional maps, Wegman-French observed that the sketches seemed to mirror an 1890 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) map of southeastern Colorado sitting nearby. The two documents, upon further inspection, were nearly identical. When Wegman-French slid the Bent-Hyde diagram on top of the USGS map, she concluded that Hyde must have traced the map before forwarding it to Bent. Because of the excellent reputation enjoyed by USGS maps, Wegman-French initially believed that her discovery heralded great things for the search team. “The base map is as accurate as the USGS map,” she wrote to other members of the site search. In that case, the Bent-Hyde maps, in Wegman-French’s view, represented a “real place,” not just a landscape found only in Cheyenne memories; with the sketches guiding the NPS team, it would just be a matter of time before they discovered exactly where the massacre had taken place. But then Wegman-French learned that 1890 had been a horrible vintage for the USGS’s regional maps. Hyde, in other words, had apparently copied a flawed original, leaving “poor George Bent looking at this inaccurate map.” That the massacre site had been misplaced on Bent’s map suddenly made a great deal more sense. How to find it, though, remained a mystery.20

  Jerry Greene and David Halaas happened upon a possible answer around that same time. At the start of the NPS site search, the two friends met regularly to exchange news of their progress. After having lunch together one day early in August, they returned to Halaas’s office, where he rummaged through files, looking for materials to share with Greene. In the midst of his excavation, Halaas pulled out a copy of a map, passed it to Greene without comment, and returned to his search. Second Lieutenant Samuel Bonsall had prepared the document in 1868, while escorting Lieutenant General William Tecumseh Sherman, then in charge of all of the U.S. Army’s forces in the West, on a tour of “frontier” military sites—including Sand Creek. Bonsall’s map was “discovered” in 1992 by an archivist named Scott Forsythe, who, because it had been miscataloged in the Chicago branch of the National Archives, labeled it “something of an oddity.” Forsythe then forwarded a copy to Halaas, who at the time worked on Dick Ellis’s site search. Halaas apparently had not thought much about it since then. But Greene remembered stopping short as he scanned the sketch, thinking to himself: “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Nobody’s interpreted this thing at all.” He believed that the map could become the NPS historians’ “Rosetta Stone.”21

  Bonsall followed army rules while preparing his “strip map and journal,” a document featuring an unadorned line drawing, running from bottom to top along its left side, depicting his multiday journey from Fort Lyon to Cheyenne Wells with General Sherman, and lengthy annotations along its right side. Army regulations stated that “commanding officers of troops marching through a little known country” should keep such a precise record, “whose object … is to furnish data for maps and information which may serve future operations.” Consequently, “every point of practical importance should therefore be noted.” Bonsall did his duty; he followed these instructions to the letter. He recorded minute details about his expedition, including times and distances between “remarkable features of the country.” One of those landmarks, located near but not within one of Sand Creek’s large bends, he labeled in the style of the day: “Chivington’s Massacre.” That Bonsall would have used this language reflected two facets of contemporary perceptions of the violence: first, because of the army inquiry’s findings in 1866, some military personnel, even those serving in Colorado, referred at the time to Sand Creek as a massacre; and second, linking the bloodbath to Chivington alone, rather than to a place name, individualized culpability, evading questions of context. It was Chivington’s massacre, n
ot the army’s, and not the federal government’s.22

  Beyond that, Bonsall indicated that his detachment had left Fort Lyon near daybreak on June 16, at 5:30 in the morning. After traveling approximately thirty miles that day, Bonsall and company arrived at the site of “Chivington’s Massacre” late in the afternoon. Once on the scene, Sherman, who wanted to bring artifacts from notable Western battlegrounds back with him to Washington, DC, had his men scour the field for “relics.” The troops found human remains (skulls, some apparently from children, and several scalps), arrows, knives, “and many other things too numerous to mention.” They “collected nearly a wagonload” before camping overnight. Bonsall then noted that his group had moved on the next morning. He highlighted a spot on his map, roughly seven miles north of their campsite from the previous evening, where the road split into the so-called Three Forks. After opting for the center of the trio of paths, the group delivered General Sherman to a stagecoach that would take him to a rail junction. Sherman would begin his long trip back east from there. Bonsall and his men, for their part, returned to Fort Lyon several days later, their route again taking them past the massacre site.23

  A section of Samuel Bonsall’s map of military sites along the Western frontier, 1868. It includes a site marked “Chivington’s Massacre” and, just to its north, one labeled “Three Forks.” (National Archives.)

  With Bonsall’s map in hand, Greene dashed off an enthusiastic note to a colleague. Greene explained that Bonsall’s drawing “is to me the most important and compelling thing I’ve seen relating to the location of the Sand Creek site.” Because Bonsall had included mileage notations on his sketch, Greene could compare the landmarks that the lieutenant had highlighted to a modern map. The Three Forks in particular captivated him. He believed that it might be possible to locate that historic trail. Greene suggested that the searchers should stop their other efforts and focus exclusively on the Bonsall map, saying, “our immediate future endeavors should be tailored to corroborating its content.… [It] could well comprise the ‘smoking gun’ to finding this site.”24

  Intensive study of Bonsall’s map, coupled with two other sources, did lead the NPS historians to what Greene called a “Eureka moment” that appeared to confirm the value of their interdisciplinary methods. The NPS team first located the paths of the Three Forks on aerial photographs taken in the 1930s by the Soil Conservation Service, a New Deal–era federal agency created to ensure that the disastrous Dust Bowl would not be repeated. Greene then married that information to data drawn from a geomorphological report commissioned by the NPS for the search. That document indicated that Sand Creek’s flood plain (as opposed to the stream itself, which might have meandered) likely had not shifted significantly since the mid-nineteenth century. Greene next extrapolated from Bonsall’s notation of the Three Forks’ distance from his detachment’s campsite on the night of June 16, 1868 (roughly six miles), and the spot of “Chivington’s Massacre” (approximately four miles). Greene, finally, could place the Sand Creek site relatively precisely. The attack, he surmised, had begun just seven-tenths of a mile north of the hilltop memorial found on Bill Dawson’s land, the area typically associated with the violence. The location further upstream than anticipated, if proven accurate in the field, would explain why the massacre had been misplaced for so long.25

  The NPS historians delighted in their “discovery” and celebrated the source upon which it rested. But because of Jerry Greene’s exacting standards for evidence, they also dug deeper into Bonsall’s experiences at the Sand Creek site, contrasting his knowledge with George Bent’s. Aware that Bent’s drawings enjoyed more cultural clout than did Bonsall’s, the historians’ team highlighted the former’s shortcomings as a source. Bonsall had sketched his map just four years after the slaughter, they noted. And he had visited the site multiple times: first with General Sherman, and then when he returned, two years later, to collect more crania for the Army Medical Museum. He sent those skulls to Washington, where researchers studied the effects of gunshots on human anatomy, a grisly scientific outgrowth of the Indian Wars. For Greene, though, the precise nature of Bonsall’s connection to Sand Creek mattered little, so long as the historical record confirmed that the mapmaker had known the place well enough to produce a reliable source. Satisfied of that, Greene extolled Bonsall’s map as “the most directly compelling contemporary information … about the location of the Sand Creek Massacre.” It became the cornerstone of the historians’ efforts, far and away the most influential document they consulted.26

  Late in 1998, Greene found an opportunity to field test his theory. Based on his reading of the Bonsall map, Greene believed that the massacre had taken place less than a mile north of the monument overlook, traditionally accepted as the location of the bloodshed. On December 13 and 14, the NPS, hoping to drum up support from the community surrounding the presumptive site, held a consultation meeting, this time at the Cow Palace hotel in Lamar, thirty-five miles south of Eads. Following that gathering, Greene accepted an invitation from Chuck and Sheri Bowen to visit their home. Chuck Bowen’s father, Charles Bowen Sr., owned a sprawling ranch just upstream from Bill Dawson’s. Because of that, Chuck and Sheri Bowen, though they had asked Greene over for a visit, remained wary of cooperating with the NPS. Like many of their neighbors, the Bowens worried that if the NPS determined that their property had hosted the massacre, the government would evict them without recompense—no matter Senator Campbell’s strategic decision to include the willing-seller-only provision in his legislation. As Chuck Bowen remembered it, “people’s land had been condemned over this kind of thing. So yeah, we were concerned.” Still, the Bowens had a story to tell; they believed that their family ranch was the proper Sand Creek site. They wanted the world to know.27

  Chuck and Sheri Bowen seemed like mild-mannered people. They owned a small business in Lamar, a photography shop located on a tree-lined street, removed from the commercial bustle of the city’s main drag. They typically shied away from political discussions, avoided conflict when they could, and found refuge in their church and marriage. Their bond dated to a childhood friendship forged while growing up in Eads. Like most residents of Kiowa County, they had known about the massacre for as long as they could remember; familiarity and proximity had woven Sand Creek’s threads into their family histories. A scrapbook documented that warp and weft: a fading picture captured a frozen scene of Sheri’s aunts and mother reenacting the event as youngsters; a yellowed newspaper clipping revealed her mom playing the accordion at the ceremony opening the highway marker in 1950; another photo depicted a Cub Scout trip Chuck took to what he then knew as “the Sand Creek battleground”; and a map produced for a tour the Bowens led of the “traditional site”—the South Bend on Dawson’s ranch—reminded them that even in high school they had shared a keen interest in local history.28

  In 1993, their relationship to Sand Creek changed. With the news that the site had been “lost,” the Bowens started their own search. What had been an intermittent and satisfying hobby became, Sheri Bowen remembered, an “obsession.” She combed through thousands of pages of documents while her husband haunted his family’s ranch, crisscrossing the land with a metal detector, probing the earth for relics. Of her husband’s passion for the hunt, she recalled: “He got up and thought about Sand Creek, then he thought about Sand Creek during the day, and he went to bed thinking about Sand Creek.” Across the years, stacks of notes and boxes of antiquities piled up: bullets, arrowheads, regimental pins, utensils, and mysterious items awaiting identification by expert eyes. By the time the NPS began its site study, picking up in 1998 where Dick Ellis had left off, the Bowens had concluded that a significant portion of the massacre had taken place on their family’s property.29

  When Jerry Greene arrived at their home in 1999, the Bowens, who at great personal expense had fashioned themselves into lay historical archeologists—they had even produced a documentary film, a sort of vernacular dissertation chronicling th
eir efforts—relished the prospect of an NPS official finally lauding their achievements. Chuck Bowen remembered, “We had made a significant discovery, which we should have been credited with.” The Bowens detailed their theories for Greene and then displayed “three or four boxes of artifacts and a bucket of stuff we thought was junk.” Greene contemplated the treasures arrayed before him. He picked up a seemingly innocuous hunk of metal, which he quickly recognized as “very significant.” Although he remained cagey—he was unconvinced by the Bowens’ conclusions but wanted to avoid offending them—Greene knew that he was holding a remnant of shot from a mountain howitzer, a piece of artillery that had been fired by Chivington’s men at the Sand Creek massacre. Here was seemingly irrefutable forensic evidence linking the Bowen property to the slaughter and, barring a hoax, final vindication of the accuracy of Samuel Bonsall’s map.30

  Greene understood that the Bowens remained “suspicious” of him and the NPS, but he nevertheless asked to see exactly where Chuck Bowen had found the shrapnel. The Bowens agreed to show him the location. Early in the new year, Greene toured their ranch. Since the start of the NPS’s site search, he had struggled to assemble a detailed chronology of the massacre. The effort had forced him to wrestle with competing eyewitness testimony while determining the relative accuracy of conflicting sources. It was not until he walked the area where the Bowens had found the telltale fragment of howitzer shot that Greene finally put the pieces together. As he gazed southward from a small rise, he saw, perhaps a mile and a half away, the hilltop monument on Bill Dawson’s property. Greene recalled that, in that moment, “it all came together in a flash. I couldn’t believe it. These were the sand pits, where we were standing. And then everything that I’d been studying for the last several months just made sense.” Greene swallowed his excitement and walked off to gather his thoughts. On a map that he brought with him, he marked the precise spot where he believed the archeologists should dig.31