A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Comparing his hometown of Eads to Lame Deer, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Rod Johnson depicted small towns filled with people who focused on spirituality and their families. He also saw patriots, whites and Indians proud to fly the American flag and serve in the nation’s armed forces. Considering his experiences with residents of Kiowa County and the descendants, he concluded, “we’ve got far more similarities than differences.” At the time, Rod Brown agreed in part. The taciturn Brown offered the Ridgelys the highest praise he knew, calling them “ranching-type people.” Beyond that, Johnson and Brown overlooked another point uniting these populations: both the residents of Kiowa County and the descendants saw the massacre site as a way to preserve their traditional way of life. Both groups were anxious about the future. Both felt threatened by external cultural pressures and economic hard times. Both worried that young people in their communities would be lured away from home and would abandon their values. Both believed that the site might help stave off those threats and protect their heritage. And for both, the memorialization effort necessitated uncomfortable partnerships. Neither the people of Kiowa County nor the descendants relished working closely with the federal government. At the same time, members of each group had misgivings about collaborating with the other. Still, they chose to set aside those concerns in service of a shared goal: cultural persistence. Rod Johnson believed that as long as they focused on what bound them together, they could work as a team, perhaps not always easily, but fruitfully.17

  Then the events of September 11, 2001, changed everything–or so the cliché indicated. Terrorists struck the United States less than a year after Congress voted through Senator Campbell’s legislation. A month and a week after that tragedy, with much of the nation still mourning, Alexa Roberts pondered the potential impact of the attacks on the effort to memorialize the massacre. Speaking on the campus of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, Roberts observed, “The nation and the world are just beginning to realize the consequences of a single morning on the freedoms we take for granted, on our global alliances, and on our trust in other people.” She considered a historical parallel: “After 137 years, the Cheyenne and Arapaho people are still overcoming the consequences of a similar morning, in which near genocide changed forever the freedoms they had taken for granted, their alliances with the United States, and their trust in other people.” She suggested, “the establishment of a national historic site to commemorate the Sand Creek Massacre is perhaps more relevant now than ever [because] it can remind us, as national monuments are intended to do, that our past shapes the present and the future.” The site would prod visitors to consider “that only a fine line separates the history of our own culturally motivated treatment of other Americans from the kind of intolerance and aggression we will not accept from terrorist enemies today.” Memorializing Sand Creek could foster empathy among all Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, she hoped.18

  As it happened, cross-cultural compassion seemed to be in short supply after 9/11. With smoke still shrouding the ruins of the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush and his advisors started ginning up support for two wars: in Afghanistan and later Iraq. Those conflicts, and the climate of hyperpatriotism that helped spawn them, had a huge effect on the effort to memorialize Sand Creek. First, after the September 11 attacks, with American troops fighting and dying overseas, people nationwide became fascinated by the mechanisms and content of collective remembrance. Second, the ostensibly omnipresent threat of terrorism prompted far-reaching discussions of state-sponsored violence, of the line dividing perpetrators from victims, and of the impact of American militarism. And third, as some members of the Bush administration began dividing the world into enemies and allies, with that sorting often hinging on race, region, and religion—white Westerners, steeped in Judeo-Christian values, versus nonwhite Easterners, typically Muslims—some residents of Kiowa County bristled at the prospect of a historic site in their community labeling the actions of U.S. soldiers a massacre.19

  With federal authorities encouraging Americans to view the world through a black-and-white lens—us versus them—an event like Sand Creek, which raised questions about the consequences of American imperialism and the actions of the U.S. Army, prompted renewed controversy. And some people in Kiowa County knew where they stood in the ensuing conflict: not with Alexa Roberts or Rod Johnson and their calls for tolerance and pluralism, but with the troops. It did not matter that Native people served at greatly disproportionate rates in the American military. With racial anxiety on the rise, Janet Frederick lamented that for a few of her neighbors, it proved easier to “identify with Chivington and his men” than with Indians “who we mostly don’t know and who can seem so different from folks around here.” Ruthanna Jacobs, who ran the Kiowa County Museum, a combined historical society and repository of local curiosities, was Chivington’s loudest defender in Eads. “The colonel was just doing his duty,” she insisted. “Now, some of the volunteers may have gotten a little bit out of hand. But that kind of thing happens in war.” Exhibiting empathy for the perpetrators rather than the victims, Jacobs added, “Chivington’s men were frightened for their lives.” Then she suggested that only Coloradans could judge the events at Sand Creek. “You have to understand that all the white people living here at that time were terrified. The Indians were on the warpath. They had raped and killed.” Summing up a neo-Chivingtonite perspective, she concluded: “Massacre? That’s just politically correct nonsense. I mean, how did white soldiers die if there were no warriors there? It surely was a battle.”20

  Jacobs’s defense of the 3rd Colorado Regiment and its discredited commander sounded like faint echoes of the belligerent reactions in Denver after federal officials handed down the results of their inquiries in 1865. The investigations were politically motivated, Coloradans suggested at the time, the inquiries’ flawed conclusions the work of eastern swells who could not possibly comprehend the hard realities of settling the West. Chivington, in this view, was an agent of civilization who catalyzed the region’s development and hastened the inevitable decline of a doomed race. He covered himself in glory by saving the lives of countless innocent whites. And his detractors, the argument went, were fools or perhaps worse: outside agitators, intriguing at the expense of settlers who faced peril on the frontier. Above all, Sand Creek had been a battle. Labeling it a massacre insulted not just Chivington and his men but all of the people of the West. Such slights would not go unanswered.21

  Word that the bloodshed would be subject to federal inquiry appeared in the Rocky Mountain News just before New Year’s Day 1865. Referring to correspondence likely touched off by Silas Soule, the News reported, “Letters received from high officials in Colorado say that the Indians were killed after surrendering and that a large portion of them were women and children.” The result would be a “Congressional investigation.” Still, despite persistent rumors swirling around Denver that Chivington’s men had indeed committed atrocities, some members of the local press corps continued to hail the attack and its perpetrators. Editors at the Black Hawk Mining Journal admitted of the violence that “perhaps it was wrong in the sight of heaven,” but then suggested that it was not for them to judge, because they could “only see with eyes on earth. And looking with earthly, practical eyes, we see nothing to condemn but everything to approve in the action of the troops.” Other articles established that the carnage had been a battle by insisting that the Indians at Sand Creek had been hostile. The News, for example, noted, “it is unquestioned and undenied that the site of the Sand Creek battle was the rendezvous of the thieving and marauding bands of savages who roamed this country last summer and fall,” including the “confessed murderers of the Hungate family.” Given that, critics had to be motivated by “political ambition” or greed, hoping to “put money in their pockets.”22

  Congress, meanwhile, set its investigatory apparatus in motion early in 1865. The army also looked into Sand Creek. On January 11, Samuel Curtis
ordered Colonel Thomas Moonlight, then commanding the Military District of Colorado, to take charge of the matter. The next day, Ned Wynkoop arrived at Fort Lyon, where he began interviewing witnesses. And just three days after that, on January 16, Wynkoop wrote up his findings, denouncing the violence and blaming it almost entirely on John Chivington. “Numerous eye witnesses,” Wynkoop reported, “have described scenes to me, coming under the eye of Colonel Chivington, of the most disgusting and horrible character. The dead bodies of females profaned in such a manner that the record is sickening.” Less than a week later, Major Scott Anthony, previously one of Chivington’s most stalwart advocates in Colorado Territory, resigned from his position as commander of Fort Lyon. Anthony explained that he had stepped down “on account of [his] connexion with the ‘Sand Creek affair’ which really disgraced every officer connected with it, unless he was compelled to go under orders.” With even Chivington’s staunchest allies turning against him, the various investigations into Sand Creek gathered momentum.23

  On February 1, Thomas Moonlight, though far more concerned about Indians making war on nearby white settlements, nevertheless established a military commission to investigate allegations that Sand Creek had been a massacre. Moonlight selected Samuel Tappan to lead the inquiry. Tappan’s preconceptions about Sand Creek, coupled with his long-standing animus toward Chivington, were well known in Colorado, fueling later claims that the investigation had been trumped up, part of a politically motivated vendetta against the heroic Fighting Parson. Tappan, for his part, rejected suggestions of bias: “As to my alleged prejudice and alleged personal enmity, even if true, I should not consider them at all influencing me in performing the duties assigned me in this commission, especially after taking the oath as a member.” Those duties, Colonel Moonlight informed Tappan, included ascertaining whether the Indians at Sand Creek had fallen under the protection of the government; if so, by whose orders; whether Chivington had understood that to be the case at the time of the attack; whether the bands he had attacked were peaceful or, if not, whether they had engaged in depredations against whites; and whether Chivington had allowed atrocities to occur on his watch.24

  On February 15, the commission began collecting testimony, calling Silas Soule to the stand. The proceedings continued, in Denver and at Fort Lyon, for three months after that, interrupted only by recesses and a break to honor Soule after his murder. Chivington’s critics agreed on many points, including that the Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek had been peaceful and convinced that they were being protected by white authorities. Chivington knew this, witnesses asserted, but had still ordered the attack. Many of these people also claimed that Chivington had overseen the slaughter of women, children, and the elderly, and had allowed his troops to mutilate the dead. Chivington had then puffed up the number of warriors in the camp, as well as those killed, trying to transform an act of cowardice into one of courage. The colonel’s defenders, by contrast, flipped the script, insisting that the troops at Sand Creek had found white scalps in the camp; that they had been outnumbered by hostile Indians, some entrenched in pits prepared before the fight; and that they had faced off with savages guilty of perpetrating vile acts against whites during the previous spring. In this view, Sand Creek had been a battle.25

  Around that time, two other Sand Creek investigations began: one run by Joseph Holt, the army’s judge advocate general, the other by Congress’s Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War (JCCW). Although Holt later excoriated Chivington, calling Sand Creek a “coldblooded slaughter” and suggesting that the crime committed there would “cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy,” his report generated relatively little controversy in the West. The muted reaction likely stemmed from Holt’s limited power; he could not charge Chivington, who had already mustered out of the army, with a crime. But the JCCW, because of its high national profile, captured the attention of Coloradans. The JCCW began its investigation in March 1865, calling witnesses, including Governor John Evans, and entering reams of exhibits into the record. The committee worked until early May. Chivington provided a lengthy written affidavit on his own behalf. In that document, he maintained that he had not known that the Native people at Sand Creek had camped there because white authorities had asked them to. He also claimed that the Indians had not been peaceful. Quite the contrary, he insisted, his troops had discovered nineteen scalps in the camp, one of them still fresh with gore, on the day of the attack.26

  When the JCCW issued its findings in early May 1865, the report represented the harshest assessment of Sand Creek to that time and perhaps since. The JCCW recommended that John Evans be fired as territorial governor and that John Chivington be cashiered prior to being tried before a military court—even though, again, he was already out of reach of the army, having resigned his commission months earlier. Appraising the host of outrages committed on Chivington’s watch, the committee stated: “It is difficult to believe that beings in the form of men and disgracing the uniform of the United States, soldiers and officers, could commit or countenance such acts of cruelty and barbarity.” As for Chivington, the report concluded that he had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savages among those who were the victims of his cruelty.” In sum, Colonel Chivington had perpetrated a horrifying massacre; he had committed what amounted to premeditated “murder”; and he had, in the process, rendered himself less civilized even than the Indians that his men had killed. While most of the federal officials investigating Sand Creek could agree that the Native people slaughtered there had been savages, this shared understanding still did not excuse whites who had violated the norms of civilized society during the violence.27

  The national press seized on the investigations’ lurid details, describing Chivington as a fiend and Sand Creek as an embarrassment. The Washington Chronicle called the attack a “bloody offense.” The Chicago Tribune, which apparently purchased purple ink by the gallon, went one better, suggesting that the massacre had been “an act of hideous cruelty garnished with all the accessories of fraud, lying, treachery, bestiality.” But many Western papers, evincing a combination of racism, regional pride, and willful disregard for the facts, disagreed. As the various commissions ground slowly toward their verdicts, borderlands journalists mounted spirited defenses of Chivington. Editors at the Nebraska City News, for instance, suggested that even if Chivington had attacked a peaceful village, they hoped other brave men would follow his lead, enlisting as soldiers in service of the West’s Manifest Destiny. The same paper later reiterated its stance: “At present we are in favor of the Rev. Col. Chivington and a religious extermination of the Indians generally.” And after the JCCW damned Chivington in its report, the Rocky Mountain News heaped scorn on the document, insisting that it was the work “of a few scoundrels who were blind to all else save the gratification of a petty personal malice.” In Colorado, and for many white settlers throughout the West, Sand Creek would remain a battle for years to come.28

  Whether as a battle or a massacre, the NPS could not memorialize Sand Creek without first acquiring the relevant property at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By spring 2002, though, Bill Dawson, never noted for his patience with federal officials, had moved beyond frustration with the NPS to unalloyed anger. Dawson preferred to see his ranch preserved for the use of the Sand Creek descendants and the public. But he needed leverage to negotiate with the NPS. In early March, having put his land up for sale on the open market, Dawson complained to a Denver reporter that the NPS’s offer to that point had been “so low I could sell it to either of my two neighbors for more.” He added, “the government has failed to negotiate in good faith.” Dawson warned that he would not “sell out, move away and work as a Wal-Mart greeter in [his] ‘golden years,’ ” noting with a hint of malice that if all else failed, he could repurpose his ranch as a private hunt club, catering to wealthy sportsmen. After hearing tidings of Dawson’s discontent, Senator Campbell ag
reed, “it is historic land and should have some premium price,” but went on to admit, “I’m not sure how much.” Campbell then described himself as disgusted by the idea of the site hosting “more killing, even if it isn’t people” and hoped that the government would find a way to match any offer Dawson might receive from another bidder.29

  It never became necessary for members of Congress to hold bake sales or search for loose change between the couch cushions in their Washington offices. Instead, Laird Cometsevah, along with other traditional chiefs in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, began lobbying their business committee, the equivalent of the tribal council, to do what the U.S. government could not: buy Dawson’s property. For Cometsevah, such a move would resonate symbolically; his tribe could reclaim a sacred place that had once belonged to it. But the issue remained money. The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes did not have the cash to make the deal. And Dawson was claiming that time was running out. Another buyer, whom he refused to identify, had begun negotiating with him. People hinted at the time that Dawson had fabricated the outside interest, hoping to pressure the NPS or descendants to act. Dawson, for his part, maintained that the other buyer was real. Regardless, the logjam broke. By early April, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Business Committee, though still lacking the funds necessary to complete the transaction, turned for help to a gaming corporation that managed the tribes’ casino. Southwest Entertainment, run by a man named Jim Druck, would put up money to buy Dawson’s ranch and then turn the property over to the tribes. In exchange, the tribes would renegotiate the terms of Southwest Entertainment’s management agreement.30