Next Tuesday, Nov. 29th, marks the 153rd anniversary of one of the best known of scores of mass killings of Indians in the history of North America—the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho on the eastern plains of what is now Colorado. It was 1864, and with the Civil War eliminating soldiers like scythes, the men who slaughtered these natives were 90-day enlistees, a ragtag collection of volunteers, many of them ne-er-do-wells and outright criminals for whom killing Indians amounted to target practice.
Sand Creek wasn't something I learned about in my ninth-grade Colorado history class, and it's something that many Coloradans and most other Americans are still unaware of although almost everyone knows about Little Big Horn. The short version: on Nov. 29, 1864, Col. John Chivington and 700 volunteers attacked the peaceful Cheyenne-Arapahoe village on the Colorado plains and killed at least 150 people. Authorities had told the Indians they must move to the area if they wanted to avoid being attacked, and they had done so in good faith, a mistake tribes from the Massacusetts Bay Colony to the Modoc Valley of California had made.
The count of the Sand Creek dead in different sources varies greatly, in part because the soldiers on the scene that day exaggerated how many they killed. Most of the dead were warriors in their tales. Most of them were, in fact, children, women and old men, many of the young men being away on a hunt. But a few leaders of the two tribes were also killed: War Bonnet, Left Hand, White Antelope, Lone Bear, Yellow Wolf, Bear Man. One leader, Black Kettle, escaped, only to be killed by George Armstrong Custer’s men on the Washita River in 1868, an attack fictionalized in the 1970 movie, Little Big Man, in which, in a chilling scene, the 7th Cavalry storms out of the early-morning mist to the strains of “Garry Owen.”
Fifty years ago, in 1967, my Kiowa friend Tim Kloberdanz, my Navajo friend Charlie Cambridge, and I sought to get a student dormitory renamed at the University of Colorado. It had been named after Captain David Nichols—one of the officers at the Sand Creek massacre and later a lieutenant governor of the state. The name we chose was White Antelope, the Southern Arapaho chieftain killed in the massacre. We had founded the Student Crusade for Amerindian Rights (SCAR) two years before, and the dormitory renaming was one of several projects, including our eventually successful pressuring of the university to add American Indian Studies to the curriculum. It’s now the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.
A student referendum on the dormitory renaming was held and had passed 3-1 the year after I graduated in 1969. But the university’s board of regents rejected the name-change because family members of David Nichols, who had donated considerable sums of money to the university when it was founded in 1876 and for decades afterward, still lived locally and objected to the name change.
Eighteen years later, under fresh pressure from Cambridge, faculty and students, my friend, the MacArthur Grant recipient and Western historian Patricia Limerick, was asked to investigate David Nichols, which she did in What's in a Name? Nichols Hall: A Report. In 1989, the Nichols dormitory was finally renamed Cheyenne-Arapaho Hall.
At Sand Creek, the soldiers mutilated bodies, cutting off breasts and scrota for use as tobacco pouches, and rode into Denver with scalps tied to their pommels. The Colorado newspapers were delirious in their glee at what had happened.
And what exactly had happened? Let Capt. Silas Soule—who was at Sand Creek but refused to fight that day and wrote a letter about the massacre—describe it:
The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain. One squaw with her two children were on their knees, begging for their lives of a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all firing — when one succeeded in hitting the squaw in the thigh, when she took a knife and cut the throats of both children and then killed herself. ... They were all horribly mutilated. You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did.
Soule testified against Chivington in 1866. He was murdered soon after. One hundred thirty-five years after the slaughter, in 1999, Congress passed a resolution to establish the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Today, you can visit the site and on plaques like the one pictured, read during a self-guided tour a reasonably accurate history about the slaughter.
Despite this laudable effort to bring some truth to the story, there have nonetheless been numerous attempts to obscure or whitewash the killings deep into the 21st Century. A few years ago, for instance, History Colorado, an organization that was founded less than 20 years after the massacre, planned an exhibit about Sand Creek in its new building to be opened in Denver in 2012. Progress, right? Just one problem, as Patricia Calhoun of the Denver weekly Westword wrote nearly five years ago. Arapaho and Cheyenne descendants of the victims of the massacre living in Montana and Oklahoma hadn't been consulted, as they were supposed to have been, by History Colorado until just a few months before the exhibit was scheduled to open:
And when the [Northern Cheyenne] tribe was consulted, they did not like what they found. A quote from George Bent, a survivor of the massacre, had been edited beyond all meaning. Dates were wrong; spellings were incorrect. A letter written by Soule was to be featured, but it was one he'd written his mother: "I was never much of a Christian and am naturally wild. Our Col. is a Methodist Preacher and whenever he sees me drinking, gambling, stealing or murdering, he says he will write to Mother." Chivington himself seemed to be getting off easy — especially since in 1865, the congressional committee considering his actions had said it could "hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct.... He deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savages."
When the Colorado state historian flew to Billings to smooth over relations with Joe Fox, the vice president of the Northern Cheyenne, he said he found the experience "bruising," as "consultants from all three tribes expressed their deep sense of personal pain, insult, and outrage at History Colorado's interpretation, and requested a formal apology from the lead developer and the institution's CEO."
Just a month before the exhibit opened in April 2012, they got a meeting with Edward C. Nichols, a fourth generation Coloradan who was then CEO of History Colorado and a distant relative of Captain Nichols. The Northern Cheyenne wanted the exhibit not to open until it was reworked. But that didn't happen. Some modest changes were made, but when the tribe saw what was included and excluded in the exhibit, called Collision, they were deeply unhappy. Fox wrote Nichols four months after the opening, Calhoun reported, saying that Collision was still filled with "errors and omissions" and "Others reveal shabby research and a shocking lack of curatorial understanding of the massacre, the events surrounding it, and its meaning to history."
Once again, in a repeat of what has happened for the past half-millennium, American Indians were talked at, not listened to.
Fox again asked for collaboration with History Colorado. Nichols wrote a letter with a nopology and offering consultations. And the tribe responded that it would do so, with conditions. But nothing happened. You can read the details at the link. Thus, on the 150th anniversary of the massacre, visitors to the museum, as is so often the case, did not get an important part of the story—the Indian side.