A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Rick Frost understood that both the geomorphology and the archeology would churn earth sacred to the tribes, raising the difficult question of what would happen if the search teams uncovered human remains or other artifacts during their digging. As Joe Big Medicine, a Southern Cheyenne Sand Creek and NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) representative remembered, “We didn’t like the idea of disturbing our ancestors who were murdered there. They hadn’t rested since Sand Creek.” Laird Cometsevah then raised the issue of ownership, given that the dig would take place on private property. “I personally feel that human remains have priority for return (to Native people),” he explained. Other “artifacts can be dealt with somewhere down the line.” Doug Scott, who would direct the archeological fieldwork, had a great deal of experience working with tribes around NAGPRA issues. He and Frost assured the descendants that the NPS would follow established protocols. Excitement then crowded out anxiety for most of the people at the meeting. The NPS team members and the tribal representatives were curious to see what the archeology would turn up, to learn if they were closing in on the proper massacre site.61

  Some local landowners, by contrast, remained wary, concerned that their property rights might be trampled amid the hubbub. Without their cooperation, the search process would grind to a halt. Rick Frost thus tried to calm the proprietors, those at the Cow Palace meeting and those who stayed away. Residents of Kiowa County said of August “Pete” Kern, whose land holdings sat to the north of Bill Dawson’s, that “he buys land; he doesn’t sell it.” So it was in this case. Aware of the search legislation’s willing-seller-only provision, Kern politely insisted that the NPS would not buy any of his property. But he would not obstruct the search, because he was not threatened by it. Bill Dawson, though, hoped that the project would conclude with him selling out. Still, he had other concerns. It had been a very damp spring, and Sand Creek, often bone dry, ran relatively high at the time. Dawson relied on his ranch for economic survival, and he knew that his land would be even more fragile than usual. Until the NPS assumed liability for any damage its efforts caused, he worried that the searchers would tear up the fertile creek bottom. Once he was sure that he had no financial exposure, though, Dawson agreed to open his gates.62

  Chuck and Sheri Bowen would not be placated so easily. By spring 1999, their long-standing wariness of the NPS had hardened into outright distrust. Aware that his upcoming dig required their consent, Doug Scott had visited the Bowens in mid-March, laying the groundwork for the upcoming site location meeting in Lamar. Like his friend Jerry Greene, Scott spent hours listening as the Bowens explained their elaborate theories of how the massacre had played out on their property. Scott was more interested in the artifacts they had unearthed, especially a fragment of mountain howitzer, “a very important item” in his view. He left the Bowens, having asked them to consider forgoing their ad hoc reconnaissance in favor of professional efforts. He also reassured them that he would take them seriously, though he believed that the archeological record, as evidenced by their vast collection, did not support their perspective.63

  In spite of Doug Scott’s visit, the Bowens stewed. They worried that their land might “be condemned” if the NPS determined that it had historical significance. And even if the NPS paid for their family ranch, the sum would be inadequate, they believed. The NPS could only offer “fair market value” for land. Such an assessment, the Bowens knew, would not account for “future lost earnings” or “the history associated with the place.” The price would be calculated based on the cost of “dry land, grassland, Kiowa County ranchland.” It would not be enough, the Bowens concluded, to compensate for the sentiment attached to their family’s property. They also believed that NPS officials had been high-handed during the search. They were especially annoyed with Jerry Greene. The Bowens recalled “liking Greene personally,” but they believed that he had discounted their expertise and was hostile to the idea that the massacre had taken place on their land. They were half right. Greene suspected that the massacre had spilled onto the Bowens’ property; it seemed likely to him that the sand pits had been located on their ranch. Still, he deprecated the Bowens’ research methods. They had “pulled artifacts from the ground without thinking,” he later complained, thus complicating future investigations. For Greene, a meticulous scholar, the Bowens’ recklessness was nearly inexplicable and entirely unacceptable.64

  The Bowens’ fears about dispossession also colored their perceptions of the tribal representatives. They insisted that they were “not anti-Indian in any way, shape, or form.” But like most everyone in Kiowa County, they had little experience with Native people. They had read about Cheyennes and Arapahos in old-fashioned histories filled with cartoonish portraits of Indians: savages either bloodthirsty or noble, but rarely in between. The descendants, by contrast, were human beings, not archetypes. And after the Cow Palace meeting, having been confronted with the tribal representatives’ rough edges, the Bowens assumed that they wanted their ancestral land back, including the massacre site, and that the NPS, bowing to “political correctness,” could not be trusted to protect the interests of local proprietors. Worse still, the Bowens believed that the NPS and the tribes had colluded with Bill Dawson, stacking the deck so the search would conclude that the slaughter had taken place on his land. This made sense, the Bowens reasoned, because Dawson wanted to sell and they did not. Finally, Rick Frost’s decision to allow the meetings to start late grated on the Bowens. As the Cheyennes and Arapahos slowly filed into the hall, the punctual Bowens read the Indians’ tardiness as contempt.65

  Concerned that they were being cast to the margins of the search, Chuck and Sheri Bowen replied by insisting that they had ironclad proof that the massacre had taken place on their ranch. The descendants responded coolly. Laird Cometsevah resented the Bowens’ challenge to his authority. Then a rumor began swirling around the Cow Palace that the Bowens had offered to sell their land for $18 million. Six weeks earlier, a man named Robert Perry, representing the Bowens, had written to Laird Cometsevah, noting that the “true site” could be had for that price. For the NPS, statutorily bound to pay only fair market value for property, such a sum was completely out of reach and did not merit a second thought. But for the Arapaho and Cheyenne delegates to the search, the figure was an affront. It seemed that the Bowens were holding tribal history hostage in hopes of extracting a huge ransom. Joe Big Medicine summed up the descendants’ views by describing the Bowens as “greedy people.” The meeting ended with the Bowens upset at the NPS and the tribes. Yet the couple nonetheless agreed to allow the site searchers on their property. They wanted recognition for their hard work and feared that they would be cut out of the process otherwise. To be ignored in that moment, the Bowens reckoned, was worse than being mistreated.66

  The day after that contentious meeting, the geomorphological investigation proceeded. On April 21, a team began a two-day survey of the Bowen and Dawson properties, boring three-inch-diameter holes several meters into the earth at forty spots along Sand Creek. The samples they retrieved revealed little buildup of soils over time, suggesting that only small changes had taken place in the land since the era of the massacre. Laird Cometsevah greeted the news with awe. He realized that when he “visited the massacre site” he “walked on the same earth [his] ancestors walked,” underscoring the collision of past and present at Sand Creek. Doug Scott was also thrilled with the results. He planned to use metal detectors to search for artifacts during the upcoming archeological phase of the study. Because there had been “little aggradation” (buildup of soil) since 1864, Scott felt confident that metal detectors would be “well within their range,” a “nearly ideal inventory tool.” It was just a question of whether the searchers would look in the right place.67

  If historians drift comfortably between the humanities and the social sciences, and anthropologists typically identify with the latter category, archeologists are social scientists who flirt with harder sc
iences. And for a young subdiscipline like battlefield archeology, questions of scholarly taxonomy or methodological orientation became all the more important. So it was that Doug Scott designed his research protocols with rigid scientific standards—and perhaps police procedural dramas, popular on television at the time—in mind. Scott said, “I love using crime scene analogies. Historians equal detectives. In the archives, they interview witnesses and possible suspects. Victims, too, if they’re still alive.” From those materials, they “get a story down on paper.” But historians are often left with “conflicting stories.” That is when the “forensic scientist, the archeologist” steps in, “gathering hard evidence.” Only by mating the two disciplines is it possible to “complete a more accurate picture of the past.” Scott, consequently, hoped that his data would be unimpeachable, answering, without any doubt at all, the question of where the Sand Creek massacre had happened, and perhaps hinting at how the bloodletting had unfolded—though the latter issue was beyond the scope of the site search.68

  For eleven days, May 17–27, members of the search team spread out in a broad phalanx, usually four to six people across, standing approximately thirty feet apart. Advancing in unison across the landscape, the group surveyed targeted sections of property, their arms sweeping back and forth like windshield wipers, as though washing the sandy soil with the metal detectors they held. With each new “beep” the team stopped and marked the spot with a pin flag, signaling the presence of a piece of metal buried in the earth. The line of searchers then moved on. A recovery crew armed with spades and trowels followed immediately in their wake, excavating the material found by the detectors. The artifacts then rested next to their telltale pin flags, awaiting a final recording crew, which assigned each specimen a number, jotted down its provenance, collected the object, and then refilled the hole from whence it had come. Finally, Doug Scott entered each of the artifacts the searchers found into a portable data collector and then uploaded the plotted coordinates onto a computerized map, creating a comprehensive inventory of every object the team pulled from the earth.69

  The archeological survey began on May 19–20, on Bill Dawson’s land. The searchers started by covering terrain enveloped in the South Bend of the creek. Across the two days, the team gradually worked its way from the shadow of the monument overlook to the east side of Dawson’s property. They turned up a great deal of metal as they advanced: baling wire, tin cans, even some bullets. But they found nothing dating from the nineteenth century. It was frustrating, particularly for the Cheyenne descendants, most of whom remained convinced that the massacre had played out in that crook of Sand Creek. Laird Cometsevah’s confidence rested in part on George Bent’s work. Guided by Bent’s text and maps, Cometsevah had visited the Dawson South Bend for years, performing sacred rituals there. In that time, he “heard the voices of children, of mothers, crying for help.” As a result, he recalled, he “knew that’s where Black Kettle’s people were killed.” The absence of physical evidence from that spot did not deter Cometsevah. He remained convinced that he was right.70

  The archeological investigations continued the next day, with the survey moving gradually north on Dawson’s ranch. Approximately three-fifths of a mile from the monument overlook, the metal detectors began steadily shrilling. The recovery team carefully dug artifacts from the ground and then waited impatiently for the recording crew to confirm their suspicions: the materials they had found dated to the massacre era. The searchers eventually unearthed an oblong band, three hundred feet wide by twelve hundred feet long, peppered with period pieces: bullets, an arrowhead, telltale fragments from a mountain howitzer shell. For Doug Scott, “this concentration of artifacts was an exciting find.” Noting that “archaeological investigations are based on the use of the scientific method as expounded in the field of the physical sciences,” Scott later surmised that the artifacts had lodged there when Chivington’s troops had fired on Cheyennes and Arapahos fleeing the massacre. In that case, Scott believed, there should have been relevant materials to the north and west as well. But the search team found no evidence in either of those directions. Scott, sticking to his methodology, then generated a second theory: the artifacts had lodged in the earth when Chivington’s men had overshot their targets, which suggested that more materials would be found to the east.71

  Scott deployed the searchers in that direction to test his new conjecture. “Within minutes” their metal detectors began bleating like a flock of sheep. Red pin flags, a field of artificial poppies, sprouted in the soil of Bill Dawson’s ranch. The searchers turned up more than three hundred artifacts in a swath stretching approximately a quarter of a mile long and a tenth of a mile wide. Team members pulled a vast array of equipment from the ground: ordnance, including bullets, arrowheads, and cannonball fragments, to outfit a small army; domestic materials, including skillets, kettles, knives, forks, spoons, cups, plates, bowls, and a coffee grinder, to prepare a grand feast; and hardware, including nails, barrel hoops, horseshoes, awls, and several crude scrapers, to stock a general store. It was an amazing and suggestive haul. Rick Frost, focusing on one artifact in particular, remarked, “shrapnel from the 12-pound howitzers is pretty sound evidence,” because “the only recorded use of howitzers in the area was along Sand Creek.” The search team, it seemed, had unearthed the massacre site.72

  Doug Scott celebrated finding the artifact concentration. Once again in his storied career, Scott had proven the utility of battlefield archeology in historical investigations. But he realized that he had not achieved his goal without the help of others. To illustrate the point, he spun a lovely (and hyperbolic) yarn. Referring to the moments after the team found the artifacts, he recalled, “I had to get on the cell phone to call Jerry Greene and tell him that he was wrong: the site wasn’t where he had predicted it would be; he was off by about ten feet.” In fact, Scott later acknowledged, Greene’s projections had missed the mark by several hundred feet. Still, Scott’s story fashioned a usable past from the fragments of his memories of the search, creating a tale that legitimated not only months of hard work but also the disciplines involved in the hunt. In this telling, the scientific methods held dear by Scott and Greene could help solve even the most complex historical mysteries.73

  Archeological findings at the Sand Creek Massacre site; dots show artifact sites. (Adapted from the Sand Creek Massacre Special Resource Study, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service.)

  Members of the NPS team also recalled the scene at Dawson’s ranch as a cross-cultural triumph, a moment when the tribal represenatives and federal government set aside differences to achieve a common goal. Doug Scott said, “It was fascinating to watch the excitement build among the Arapahos and Cheyennes … to the point that they would grab a shovel from one of the volunteers and literally go out and dig up some of their own heritage.” Rick Frost trailed behind the metal detectors, working on the recovery team next to Mildred Red Cherries, a Northern Cheyenne descendant. “I must have dug up, I don’t know, two, three dozen pin flags that day,” Frost recalled, “and I was right next to Mildred. And nothing I ever dug was more than a piece of barbed wire, an old tin can, or something like that.” But “every time Mildred dug something up, it was an actual artifact: a piece of howitzer, a minié ball, an arrowhead.” He said, “It was stunning, something that made you feel the hand of fate in the mix, something that said, this is her place, her history, she’s going to be the one that makes the significant finds.” Then, as the sun fell, Luke Brady and Laird Cometsevah conducted a pipe ceremony to honor the massacre’s victims. Frost remembered being overcome by the moment and thinking, “it was hard to get past the feeling that we were in a consecrated place.”74

  Many descendants, by contrast, recalled that day not as a success but as another instance of federal insensitivity to tribal traditions, cultural sovereignty, and basic propriety. Laird Cometsevah worried that the artifacts’ location, more than half a mile from the monument overlook, would be construed as c
hallenging his grasp on Cheyenne history. Shaking his head, Cometsevah recounted his frustration: “the Park Service never admitted that we knew that place. Our ancestors were scattered across that land. The site should have been treated like a cemetery. There was no call for all the whooping and hollering they were doing.” The celebration smacked of disrespect to Steve Brady and Mildred Red Cherries as well. Brady noted, “Archeologists were jumping up and down, doing cartwheels and back flips when they found something. But the Cheyennes, they just walked off. You know, two different worlds.” Red Cherries echoed this sentiment: “It was emotional for us to find things like bullets or cannonballs. We wondered if they killed one of our ancestors. Meanwhile, the white people out there were laughing and feeling good. It was hard.” Of the pipe ceremony, which had so impressed Frost and other NPS observers, Barbara Sutteer suggested, “the tribes felt like the Park Service didn’t understand how to behave, how to watch quietly from a polite distance.” In the end, what had seemed to the NPS like a day of reconciliation and healing had in fact reopened old wounds for the tribal representatives.75

  Relations only deteriorated from there. After spending a day on Pete Kern’s land and then another day at a ranch several miles to the south, the searchers prepared to visit the Bowens’ property. But there was a catch. Still suspicious that the federal government would employ dirty tricks to seize their land, the Bowens asked all of the searchers to sign a release, absolving the ranchers of liability in the event of an accident. The request outraged the descendants, especially Mildred Red Cherries, who refused to sign away her rights. The Bowens responded that the document “wasn’t anything,” just protection so that nobody could “sue if [they] tripped or got bit by a snake or something.” Red Cherries would not relent. She turned away and began the long walk back toward Lamar. Other descendants rallied around her. Rick Frost worried that the search might splinter. A member of the NPS team eventually drove Red Cherries back to her hotel while the archeological investigation proceeded on the Bowens’ ranch.76