A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  The NPS’s outreach efforts—press releases, a direct-mail campaign, a website, and a series of open houses—yielded responses from thirty-two states and the District of Columbia, with nearly half of those replies coming from within Colorado. The stacks of comments heralded future triumphs and a number of challenges still facing the effort to commemorate the massacre. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believed that the federal government should create a Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, as opposed to less than one-tenth of commenters who called for no further action at all. Nearly 75 percent of those who favored a historic site hoped that the affected tribes would own the property with the NPS managing it. Many of these responses pointed to open questions of recompense, suggesting that Indian peoples had been displaced from the land in question and thus should be allowed to return to it: “It is only right that the tribes should own the property since it is stained with the innocent blood of their people.” Several other commenters acknowledged that while the federal government had the resources and expertise necessary to operate a historic site, only tribal ownership could guarantee that the hallowed ground would be treated with proper respect.55

  As for the memorial, replies looked forward and backward, focusing on honoring victims of the violence, healing wounds between white and Native peoples, and ensuring that something like the massacre would never happen again. “Sand Creek is a holy place,” one comment suggested, “a link to another time, to the spirits of their ancestors, and honoring that site as a National Historic Site not only shows reverence for the role played in our history by native people and remorse for a great wrong but also affirms a commitment to see that such tragedies not play out again.” Others noted that whites had a responsibility to confront the most horrific episodes from the nation’s history before true healing could begin: “The United States must face its past and recognize it, no matter how tragic.” Put another way: “the story needs to be told.” Or, more poetically: “Because ignorance thrives in darkness, shine a light on past wrongs and there is more hope for the future.” At the same time, many of the responses focused on the meaning of Sand Creek not for the dominant culture, but for indigenous people: “This project is for tribal people and ancestors lost.” Because of that, the descendants, several people suggested, should have special access to the site for ceremonial purposes.56

  Although the vast majority of respondents supported creating a national historic site, a small minority raised red flags. Screeds about the perils of left-leaning revisionism cropped up next to warnings about Kiowa County’s deep-seated hostility to federal authority. Several comments suggested that it might be appropriate to commemorate the massacre, but not if such an undertaking meant diverting property away from agricultural use: “a smaller memorial would be adequate”; “it is way too much land”; “using the larger acreage for this historic site is quite out of reason.” Other skeptics worried that federally funded political correctness would run amok at the historic site. “Enough is enough,” one offended observer insisted. “There was plenty of injustice to go around. But asking the taxpayers to pay for an expensive memorial because it is presently popular is not where we need to spend our money.” As ever in southeastern Colorado, for many people government was the problem. “You must understand,” wrote one aspiring John Galt, “that the words ‘Federal Government’ are not some of the most endearing and confidence inspiring in Kiowa County.” Another advocate of property rights railed, “I think the United States Government needs to leave the private lands alone.… These lands belong to the people and it is about time we say ‘NO MORE!’ Washington, D.C. GET OUT of Colorado and STAY OUT!” With local whites as well as the tribal representatives deeply distrustful of the federal government, the NPS had its work cut out for it.57

  Having just finished an eighteen-month sprint, Rick Frost and his colleagues were exhausted. But they had no time to rest. The deadline for their report to Congress loomed only months ahead. With the search team still bitterly divided, Christine Whitacre faced pressure to produce a document that would satisfy all comers—or at least avoid stoking additional conflict. What to do in such a moment? Throw a party, of course. On June 8, 2000, the searchers gathered in Denver for a final consultation meeting. They reviewed the public comments and hammered out some unresolved details for the site study. In a gesture of goodwill, the NPS then served everyone dinner. The NPS team would break bread with the Cheyennes, who would sit side by side with the Northern Arapahos, who would put aside their bruised feelings for the evening. The NPS intended the meal as a celebration of the search’s central achievement: finding the Sand Creek site. At the appointed hour, the team members gathered at a huge U-shaped table. Trays arrived. Then a pall settled over the room. Everyone gulped down food before going their separate ways. The NPS had planned a gala but instead had hosted something like a wake. When it was over, it was time to get back to the work of documenting the results of the memorialization effort to that point.58

  Stretching across nearly 550 pages, the two lavishly illustrated volumes of the NPS’s published report on the search are themselves monuments to the politics of memory surrounding Sand Creek. Christine Whitacre, who either compiled or wrote most of the document, found herself facing competing mandates: reconciling sometimes incompatible theories born of a grab bag of methodologies; mollifying the Cheyenne descendants, who, in the wake of the village controversy, fumed that the U.S. government once again had run roughshod over their political and cultural sovereignty; reiterating that Arapaho people had indeed been present at the massacre; tiptoeing through the minefield of unresolved Article 6 reparations; reassuring proprietors in Kiowa County, ranchers often hostile to federal authority, that the NPS would not seize their land; demonstrating to Congress that, because of its historical significance, the Sand Creek site merited inclusion in the National Park System; and finally, satisfying those same lawmakers that the NPS had found the killing field. The document, therefore, is built atop a bedrock of certainty, but its greatest virtue is its flexibility, expressed through a willingness to tolerate doubt. Whitacre acknowledged that when narrating a story as complex as the massacre’s, clashing interpretations are not only unavoidable but also useful reminders of deeper conflicts embedded in the nation’s history.59

  In the Site Location Study, volume 1 of the Sand Creek Massacre Project, Whitacre balanced the relative weight of the evidence gathered during the search. Laughing, she recalled the challenge: “We were going to go where the evidence took us.” And “based on the preponderance of evidence, we’d figure out where the site was.” But as she began writing, she found herself thinking, “That just doesn’t work. Because ‘preponderance of evidence’? Whose evidence? That was really what it came down to in the site study.” Whitacre chose to explain the project’s interdisciplinary research design, outline the five possible locations the searchers had considered, and then allow each of the teams—historians, archeologists, and ethnographers (who included the tribes’ traditional methods)—to present their findings. Readers first encounter Jerry Greene’s extravagant praise for the Bonsall map and his explanations of the Bent drawings’ deficiencies, then view images of spent ordnance and graphic plots of the artifact concentration, and finally contemplate the sustained horror and anguish preserved in the oral histories. By the book’s last chapter, the contradictions have piled up like cordwood.60

  In her conclusion, Whitacre continues to walk a fine line between bold assertions and couched qualifiers. First: “Through a multi-disciplinary approach that included historical research, tribal oral histories and traditional methods, and archeological investigations, the National Park Service Sand Creek Massacre Site Location Study resulted in a definitive identification of the massacre site.” But then: “As with any historical event, however, our understanding of the Sand Creek Massacre is still limited and obscured through time, in this case 135 years. Thus, although the length and extent of the Sand Creek Massacre have been conclusively identified, there are�
�as the preceding chapters indicate—differing views regarding some of the specifics of the massacre within that boundary.” Those specifics included the location of Black Kettle’s village. So even as the study ends with cross-cultural comity—“The task has been completed, and the location and extent of the Sand Creek Massacre has been conclusively identified to the satisfaction of the National Park Service, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, the Northern Cheyenne, the Northern Arapaho, and the Colorado Historical Society.”—a cartographic coda bespeaks lingering controversy. One map depicts Doug Scott’s and Jerry Greene’s interpretation of Sand Creek, the other, the Cheyennes’ and Southern Arapahos’ vision of the violence. Together they draw the curtain on the site search, suggesting that the massacre might still be misplaced.61

  The second volume of the Sand Creek Massacre Project considers the best plan for creating a national historic site. But first, in a telling section, Whitacre grapples with the descendants’ frustrations with the NPS. “Throughout this project,” she allows, “the tribes, particularly the Cheyenne, also have expressed dissatisfaction with the consultation process.” More specifically, “they believe … that the National Park Service does not listen to the tribes.” And “there also are tribal feelings that the oral histories are not being given the same weight as the scientific studies.” Again, though, as during the village controversy, Whitacre suggests that the problem is both overstated and rooted in misunderstandings. “Consultation associated with this and other projects,” she notes, “has revealed differing opinions of what consultation means. Some tribal governments view consultation as a seat at the decision-making table. The National Park Service views consultation as gathering of information that will influence policy and decision-making.” After reading that passage, Laird Cometsevah snorted and said: “I honestly can’t say what that means. All I know is that the Park Service folks promised they would pay attention to our oral histories. They promised our traditional methods would matter. They promised they would listen. They didn’t. They broke those promises.”62

  After that, the report covers somewhat less controversial material: the likely environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the proposed memorial; the various site management alternatives considered by the NPS; and, perhaps most important of all, the historic significance of the massacre, the reason it should be the focus of one of the federal government’s first attempts at memorializing an event in which American citizens were neither heroes nor victims, but perpetrators.63

  Jerry Greene wrote that section, and in it he tried to mend fences with the descendants. He first had to steer clear of intertribal divisions. Greene begins, “In the lives lost at Sand Creek, both the Cheyennes and Arapahos experienced familial and societal disruptions that have since spanned the generations of their societies.” Likely with an eye on the Cheyennes, he adds: “While the event thus impacted both tribes, it most directly carried devastating physical, social, political, and material consequences among the relatively small (ca. 3,000) Cheyenne population, and indisputably changed the course of tribal history.” Because the Cheyennes lost so many chiefs—among them One Eye, White Antelope, and Yellow Wolf—as well as the headmen of several soldier societies at such a critical moment, with the tribe already fractured by the fallout from the Treaty of Fort Wise, Sand Creek’s impact reverberated across generations. Then, apparently nodding at the issue of Article 6 reparations, Greene notes that the tribes suffered enormous material losses as well. He continues by explaining that the massacre’s impact spread beyond the tribes, shaping Native-white relations “over ensuing decades.” Next, in a section headed “An Atmosphere of Pervasive and Nervous Distrust,” Greene details how Sand Creek not only poisoned interactions between the U.S. government and Native peoples, but also set the stage for reforming federal Indian policy. To make that case, the historian directs his readers back to the period immediately after the massacre.64

  National Park Service map of the Sand Creek Massacre site, based on reports by Jerome Greene and Douglas Scott. (Adapted from the Sand Creek Massacre Special Resource Study, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service.)

  Southern Cheyenne, Southern Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne map of the Sand Creek Massacre site, based on traditional tribal methods, oral histories, and maps by George Bent. (Adapted from the Sand Creek Massacre Special Resource Study, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service.)

  Having overseen the slaughter of his most likely partners in peace, John Evans snared himself in a self-fulfilling prophecy in early 1865: the Indian war that he had long dreaded. Following the massacre, enraged Cheyennes prepared for a winter offensive against whites, allying themselves with bands of Lakotas and Northern Arapahos. The tribes gathered in a huge camp, composed of more than a thousand lodges, located in the Republican River country of northwestern Kansas. From that base, warriors attacked before moving beyond the reach of retaliating whites. As early as January 6, the hostilities began, when a multitribal force struck the road near Julesburg, Colorado. The violence spread until, by month’s end, Native people controlled the most important routes in the region. The U.S. Army’s efforts at beating back this offensive, including setting thousands of acres of the plains ablaze, failed. The violence only subsided after the tribes withdrew from the field, joining their kin in the Powder River country to the north. By that time, more than fifty settlers had lost their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in property had been destroyed. The city of Denver again stood perched on the brink of panic.65

  Most of the federal troops stationed in Colorado had mustered out early in the new year, leaving territorial officials in a familiar and uncomfortable position: begging distant generals for protection. Ulysses Grant had just reassigned Samuel Curtis, who in the past had often turned a deaf ear to Governor Evans’s pleas, and tapped in his place Major General John Pope. Dick Ellis, the professor who oversaw the first Sand Creek site search, argues in his scholarly work that Pope was the army’s foremost expert on Indian policy. An advocate of reform, he believed that the treaty system had “worked injustice and wrong to the Indian” and “entailed heavy and useless expense on the government.” In Pope’s view, tribal peoples accommodated to reservation life should be removed to distant lands, beyond the reach of white settlement, where they could thrive. As for “wild” tribes, including the Arapahos, Cheyennes, and Sioux peoples, he thought they could live as they wished—so long as they remained at peace with whites. But at the first sign of violence, federal troops would “attack them, march through their country, establish military posts in it, and, as natural consequence, their game will be driven off or killed.” For the moment, though, Pope’s grand vision had to wait. He had a more immediate problem to solve.66

  With hostile Indians apparently still menacing the plains to the east and north of Denver, Pope’s subordinate, Major General Grenville Dodge, pondered the best way to pacify the allied Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux bands. Early in the Civil War, Dodge, then still a colonel, had headed a brigade at the Battle of Pea Ridge. Later, as a brigadier general, he had commanded a corps during William Sherman’s assault on Atlanta. Dodge, then, had experience on the frontier and had demonstrated that he would not shy from a fight. He also did not lack manpower in February 1865. Reopening trade on the Plains had become one of the military’s priorities, and General Pope allowed Dodge to pull troops from Kansas and Nebraska to assist in that effort. Still, Dodge had a problem: he lacked an enemy to engage. The main concentration of Native warriors had moved to the Powder River country, one of the few remaining spots in the region entirely controlled by Indian peoples. Dodge’s men, left behind, chased their own shadows. Upon hearing word of the warriors to the north, General Pope planned a spring attack. But that offensive and others like it foundered in the mud or were hamstrung by poor planning.67

  Similar problems plagued military operations on the Southern Plains. By the end of May, Senator James Doolittle, head of a delegation hoping to negotiate a peace with t
he tribes in the area, had arrived at Fort Larned, Kansas. Doolittle believed that further reprisals would only incite more violence. In a passionate letter to his former colleague in the Senate, newly minted Secretary of the Interior James Harlan, Doolittle explained: “As yet no great amount of bloodshed has taken place, except for the treacherous, brutal, and cowardly butchery of the Cheyennes on Sand Creek, an affair in which the blame is on our side.” Displaying empathy for Indians rarely seen among federal officials, he suggested, echoing Silas Soule’s and presaging George Bent’s Sand Creek stories, “It is that affair [the massacre] which has combined all the tribes against us. And why not? They were invited to place themselves under our protection. The sacred honor of our flag was violated, and unsuspecting women and children butchered, and their bodies horribly mutilated, and scenes enacted that a fiend should blush to record.” Only victims of the massacre, he insisted, still wanted war. And thus, Doolittle suggested, “As a matter of policy, even, as well as duty, I would propose terms to the Cheyennes for their losses at Sand Creek. It is just.” Perhaps so, but the gulf standing between justice and federal Indian policy still yawned wide.68