by Paul Martin
From his sanctuary in Spanish Louisiana, Mason continued to plunder river traffic, and he widened his pillaging to the Natchez Trace, the five-hundred-mile-long wilderness trail linking southwestern Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee. Flatboat crews returning to the Ohio Valley after delivering their cargoes to New Orleans routinely used the Natchez Trace, since they usually sold their boats for lumber at the end of each voyage (the clumsy, slow-moving craft were difficult to sail upriver). With the profits from their trip bulging in their pockets, the boat crews made tempting targets for highwaymen. Mason had a confederate in Natchez inform him when prosperous travelers were setting out along this lonely footpath so that he could lie in wait and swoop down on them. It’s said that he carved the message “Done by Mason of the Woods” into a tree at the scene of his crimes, or wrote his name in his victims’ blood.12
Mason’s renown eventually led to his downfall. When a previous victim recognized the pirate leader in Mississippi in 1802, the territorial governor put a price on Mason’s head. To avoid capture, Mason and his family slipped back into Spanish Louisiana. They hid out in an abandoned house at Little Prairie, south of New Madrid, passing themselves off as farmers. Suspicious of the new arrivals, neighbors alerted Spanish authorities. In January 1803, a militia troop raided the home, capturing Mason along with Wiley Harpe, who was then hiding under an assumed name. (Little Harpe had barely avoided capture by a Kentucky posse just three years before. Micajah Harpe had been killed by the posse, his severed head placed in the fork of a tree as a warning to other lawbreakers.)
The Spaniards took the suspects to New Madrid for a preliminary hearing. Mason kept up the pretense that he was a simple farmer, in spite of a glaring discrepancy in his story: the militiamen had confiscated his belongings, which included more than $7,000 in cash and those twenty human scalps—not exactly the possessions of an average farmer.13 The commandant at New Madrid transferred the captives to New Orleans for final disposition. After determining that no crimes had taken place in Spanish territory, the governor general of Louisiana decided to hand over the outlaws to American authorities in Mississippi.
While Mason and Harpe were being transported upriver to Natchez, they managed to escape. That’s when Little Harpe’s character shone through once more. Hoping to earn the hefty reward that the governor of Mississippi had offered for Mason’s recapture, Harpe and a fellow bandit named James May murdered the outlaw captain and cut off his head, which they delivered to Natchez to claim the bounty. Predictably, the two men were recognized, arrested, and tried. Little Harpe and his accomplice received a slightly different payoff than what they’d hoped for, one they thoroughly deserved: both men were convicted of piracy and hanged. Like Big Harpe, Little Harpe suffered the indignity of having his head lopped off and put on public display.
The death of Samuel Mason brought a brutal chapter in the history of the frontier to a close. Afterward, large-scale, organized piracy withered away along the lower Ohio and the Mississippi. Although brigands continued to plague travelers for several more years, the later gangs were smaller and more localized than Mason’s roving band. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803—the same year that Mason died—the region’s steadily growing population gradually produced more effective law enforcement. After 1820, the rapid increase in the number of steamboats on the rivers meant that fewer flatboats—the pirates’ main target—were used to carry passengers and trade goods. The steamboats were too large and too fast for pirates to attack. By around 1830, river piracy had all but disappeared.14
In his forty years of thieving and decade of killing, Mason forged a deservedly fearsome reputation, although the mellowing effect of time might lead some people today to look back on him as a colorful rogue, like the seafaring pirates who’ve inspired so many fictionalized accounts in books and movies. But there was nothing romantic or swashbuckling about Samuel Mason. He was no Jack Sparrow, sashaying his way through rollicking adventures. Mason was an unregenerate troglodyte—a cave-dwelling miscreant who contributed little to the human race besides misery.
Mason enjoyed a surprisingly long life given his calling and the period in which he lived. It’s ironic that he perished at the hands of fellow murderer Wiley Harpe, a man whose heart was as black as his own. Of course, there could have been no more fitting end for the cutthroat captain of Cave-In-Rock than to die by the sword by which he’d lived.
John Chivington
Winter locked the windswept plains of the Colorado Territory in icy silence. On this frigid morning of November 29, 1864, more than a hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho teepees stood among the bare willows and cottonwoods along Sand Creek, a stretch of dry streambed fringed with bluffs and ridges. The Indians still slept soundly beneath their buffalo robes as the first faint traces of dawn reddened the horizon.
Just weeks before, the leader of the Indians, renowned Cheyenne war chief Black Kettle, had agreed to surrender to the US Army. The peace talks had taken place outside Denver and at Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. In return for the Indians’ pledge to end hostilities against white settlers, Fort Lyon’s commanding officer, Maj. Edward Wynkoop, had given permission for Black Kettle’s band of several hundred Cheyenne, along with a small number of Arapaho, to camp in peace here at Sand Creek, a day’s ride north of the fort. Two banners hung from Black Kettle’s lodge pole to show that the band was under army protection, the US flag and a white flag of surrender.
Once a fierce warrior, Black Kettle was now an old man of seventy summers. He’d grown tired of the struggles between his people and the endless waves of settlers. Other Plains Indians, mostly younger warriors, still fought against the miners, ranchers, and townspeople encroaching on their homeland. During the previous year, bands of Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, and Kiowa had raided settlements all over the Colorado Territory. Tales of ambushes, murders, and scalpings kept white people on edge, whetting fears and hatreds that made coexistence seem impossible. For many settlers, the only solution was to eliminate every Indian from the territory.1
Inside his lodge, Chief Black Kettle awoke with a start. Women were shouting at what they thought were the hoof beats of an approaching herd of buffalo—a blessing that would mean fresh meat and additional hides to keep their people warm. The first warriors to emerge from their teepees gazed in the direction the sounds were coming from. What they saw weren’t buffalo. In the distance, some seven hundred mounted soldiers advanced on the sleeping encampment.2 The approaching troops resembled an apparition from hell. Bundled in thick coats, the men seemed to be frozen into their saddles, their beards rimed with frost. The majority of the troops belonged to the Third Colorado Cavalry, a ragtag group of short-term volunteers gathered from Denver’s barrooms and mines. Swords, knives, and axes glinted at the volunteers’ waists, and they carried a mismatched assortment of rifles, shotguns, and pistols. The rest of the soldiers were smart-looking troops of the First Colorado Cavalry assigned to Fort Lyon.
The men were led by Col. John Milton Chivington, a red-bearded giant who’d won acclaim two years earlier by helping to beat back a Confederate incursion in New Mexico, one of the few reminders in this region of the Civil War that was raging in the eastern part of the country. For some time, Chivington had held hopes that his military exploits would be a stepping-stone to public office. An ordained Methodist-Episcopal minister, he was nicknamed the “Fighting Parson,” and he intended to deliver righteous retribution on the Indians camped at Sand Creek—an achievement that wouldn’t go unnoticed by the voting public.3
Born on the Ohio frontier in 1821, Chivington was named after English poet John Milton. He learned to read from a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, along with the Bible and Book of Common Prayer. After studying to become a minister, Chivington served for a short time as a missionary to the Wyandot Indians in the Kansas Territory. In the 1850s, he took up the abolitionist cause. By 1860 he’d moved to the Colorado Territory, where his fervent preaching was mingled with antisecessionist screeds. When the Civ
il War erupted, Chivington won a commission as a major in the Colorado Volunteers. Though he was undisciplined and a relentless self-promoter, he proved to be an effective soldier.4 Following the victory in New Mexico, he was assigned to protect a large chunk of the Colorado Territory. With little threat remaining from Confederate forces, Chivington took the fight to a different enemy—the Plains Indians who’d been attacking settlers.
Chivington didn’t make much distinction between hostile and peaceful bands. By this point in his life, he seemed to think that all Indians were murderous savages who deserved to die. “It simply is not possible for Indians to obey or even understand any treaty,” he told a group of Denver church deacons. “I am fully satisfied . . . that to kill them is the only way we will ever have peace and quiet in Colorado.”5 The army’s regional commander, Gen. Samuel Curtis, was just as bellicose as the Fighting Parson. As far as Black Kettle was concerned, General Curtis felt that there was no binding peace agreement with the chief, despite the arrangement Major Wynkoop had made. Curtis assumed that Black Kettle would return to the warpath come spring.6 It was shaky justification for an attack on the encampment at Sand Creek, but it was all Colonel Chivington needed.
From Denver, Chivington and his volunteers had ridden through two hundred fifty miles of snowy countryside to reach Fort Lyon, showing up unannounced on November 28. The colonel immediately informed the officers at the fort that he was ordering the First Colorado Cavalry to join his fight against Black Kettle. Two of the fort’s officers, Capt. Silas Soule and Lt. Joseph Cramer, objected to the plan, telling Chivington that an attack on Sand Creek would be equivalent to murder, since the Indians there were technically prisoners of war. Chivington reacted with fury. “Damn any man who is in sympathy with an Indian,” he bellowed.7
Most of Chivington’s troops supported the venture wholeheartedly, especially the untested volunteers of the so-called “Bloodless Third.” They were eager to get a taste of killing. On this bleak winter morning, as his men huddled in the subzero temperatures near the Indian encampment, Chivington announced that no prisoners were to be taken. When the burly colonel gave the order to attack, the troopers charged into the village, which had been shocked into wakefulness by an opening salvo from a battery of field guns. Chief Black Kettle’s American flag would offer his people no protection this day.
The startled Indians darted about in terror and confusion. Some of the women and children sought shelter along the banks of the dry streambed. The cavalrymen rode among them, whooping and shouting, hacking wildly with their sabers. Mothers with babies in their arms were cut down, tottering old men and women shot or impaled, little children crushed beneath the soldiers’ horses. As the killing frenzy heightened, the soldiers dismounted and began scalping and disemboweling their victims. It was a scene of such wanton slaughter that even battle-tested troopers were sickened.8
Relatively few of the village’s inhabitants were able-bodied men. Most of the warriors had left camp on hunting forays. The men that remained at Sand Creek put up a faltering resistance before herding the survivors to safety and fleeing toward a larger Cheyenne encampment at Smoky Hill River, some sixty miles to the north. When the fighting ended after several hours, an estimated one hundred fifty Indians lay dead on the frozen ground—most of them women, children, and the elderly. Many of the dead had been mutilated by soldiers gathering grisly souvenirs.9
Although Chief Black Kettle managed to escape, Colonel Chivington put the best possible spin on the attack. He dashed off a letter to General Curtis, claiming that his men had defeated a village “from nine hundred to one thousand warriors strong,” and that they had killed “between four and five hundred”—both gross overestimates.10 The one-sided nature of the fight was underscored by Chivington’s losses—only nine soldiers were killed. The colonel added that his men had performed “nobly.”11
Chivington, however, had no praise for the First Colorado Cavalry’s Company D, the unit led by Capt. Silas Soule. Captain Soule had held his men back, refusing to take part in the slaughter—an act of conscience that would have far-reaching consequences. After Soule returned to Fort Lyon, he documented the atrocities perpetrated by Chivington’s men in a letter to Major Wynkoop, who’d been transferred to Fort Riley, Kansas, in punishment for establishing peace with Black Kettle without General Curtis’s approval. “Hundreds of women and children were coming toward us and getting on their knees for mercy,” Soule wrote. “It was hard to see little children . . . have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.”12 Lt. Joseph Cramer also described the horrors he witnessed to Wynkoop: “Women and children were scalped, fingers cut off to get the rings on them . . . a squaw ripped open and a child taken from her.”13
Chivington called Soule a coward for disobeying his orders, but the young army veteran had proven his bravery many times over while fighting alongside Kansas abolitionists before the Civil War.14 Soule had also fought the Confederates in New Mexico—at the same battle in which John Chivington, then a major, earned his burst of fame. Any respect Soule had for Chivington evaporated the moment the colonel announced his plans to attack the Indian encampment at Sand Creek. “I knew it was being undertaken because of Chivington’s lust for glory,” Soule wrote to his fiancée in Denver.15
If that truly was Chivington’s motivation, he got his wish. Following the events at Sand Creek, Chivington was hailed as a hero. The Rocky Mountain News held nothing back in celebrating Chivington’s deeds: “Great Battle with Indians! The Savages Dispersed! 500 Indians Killed,” the newspaper trumpeted on the front page of its December 14, 1864, edition. Folks in Denver cheered and made speeches and got convincingly drunk—except for the citizens who doubted Chivington’s motives. They were worried that the attack on Black Kettle would just make the Indians more determined than ever to kill white people—which is precisely what happened.16 After Sand Creek, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux joined forces and fought white settlers with renewed fury. The ensuing conflict would drag on for years, costing the country dearly in lives and treasure.
Major Wynkoop was especially critical of Chivington’s actions at Sand Creek.17 The letters Wynkoop received from Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer were searing indictments. Wynkoop urged authorities to investigate whether Chivington’s men had committed atrocities against women and children. Opposing Chivington, however, came at a price. The colonel’s admirers reviled anyone who found fault with the attack on Black Kettle’s band, calling them “Indian lovers” and threatening to shoot them on sight.18 The controversy came to a climax when both the army and the US Congress decided to look into the Sand Creek affair. Colonel Chivington resigned his commission in January 1865, putting him out of reach of a court-martial, but the investigations still went forward.
In February 1865, a military board convened in Denver to “obtain a true picture of what transpired at Sand Creek.”19 The first witness called was Silas Soule. Despite having had an anonymous death threat shoved under his hotel room door, Soule took the stand and recounted every last gory detail of the attack on Black Kettle’s camp. Soule told Chivington to his face that his hands were “dripping with the blood of innocent people.”20 Other witnesses gave evidence, but Soule’s was among the most damning.
After his testimony, Soule was shot at in Denver on two occasions, presumably by Chivington’s supporters. Then on the evening of April 23, 1865, as the twenty-six-year-old officer walked home with his bride of three weeks, he heard shots ring out in the distance. A soldier rushed up and told him there was fight a few blocks away. Having recently been appointed provost marshal of Denver, Soule set off to investigate the altercation. Kissing his wife good-bye, he told her he’d see her at home. Minutes later, Soule was lying dead in the street, shot down by Charles Squires, a vocal supporter of Colonel Chivington. Squires fled to New Mexico but was captured by one of Soule’s associates, Lt. James Cannon. Brought back to Denver to stand trial, Squires escaped and disappeared. Around that same time, Lieutenant Cannon was f
ound dead, apparently poisoned.
Though Chivington’s involvement couldn’t be proved, Soule’s friends were convinced that he was behind the crimes.21 Chivington never faced criminal charges for anything connected with Sand Creek or its aftermath, but he paid a heavy price nonetheless. Censured by the investigations, he couldn’t escape the public disgrace that followed. His attempt to parlay his notoriety into a seat in the US Congress went nowhere, and he was relieved of his position as a church elder. He scuffled around the country, struggling in various occupations and failing in a subsequent attempt to win public office. However, he never expressed any regret over his actions against the Cheyenne and Arapaho. “I stand by Sand Creek,” he declared toward the end of his life.22 Chivington died of stomach cancer in 1894, still muttering to anyone who’d listen that the killings he’d unleashed were sanctioned by God.
The Sand Creek Massacre, as it came to be called, claimed one other victim. The fallout from the attack ended the political career of Colorado’s territorial governor, John Evans, who’d actually backed the protection of peaceful Indians at one time. As for Chief Black Kettle, the old warrior escaped Sand Creek only to die four years later in a virtual replay of Chivington’s dawn assault. In November 1868, he was killed when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry raided a sleeping Cheyenne encampment along the Washita River in Oklahoma.
Books and articles continue to be published about Sand Creek, as writers struggle to discover the “truth” about one of the worst massacres of Native Americans in our country’s history. Some people remain convinced that Colonel Chivington did nothing wrong, that Sand Creek was a legitimate victory and its instigator a victim of personal animosities and political skullduggery.23 Even if it were true that Chivington’s enemies piled on while he was down, it’s still impossible to condone what took place at Sand Creek, where—according to multiple eyewitness accounts—scores of defenseless noncombatants were slaughtered indiscriminately. Moreover, to attack a group of Native Americans that had accepted terms of peace on the assumption that they might resume their hostile ways was an example of racial hatred overwhelming reason—one of history’s saddest and most repetitious storylines.
