Mochi's War

by Enss, Chris

  Mochi’s War

  Mochi’s War

  The Tragedy of Sand Creek

  Chris Enss and Howard Kazanjian

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2015 by Chris Enss and Howard Kazanjian

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Enss, Chris, 1961-

  Mochi's war : the tragedy of Sand Creek / Chris Enss and Howard Kazanjian. — 1st edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-6077-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4930-1394-4 (e-book : alk. paper)

  1. Mochi, approximately 1841-1881. 2. Sand Creek Massacre, Colo., 1864. 3. Cheyenne Indians—Biography. 4. Cheyenne Indians—Wars, 1864. 5. Indian prisoners—Florida—Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (Saint Augustine)—Biography. 6. Prisoners of war—Florida—Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (Saint Augustine)—Biography. 7. Indians of North America—Relocation—Florida—Castillo de San Marcos National Monument (Saint Augustine) 8. Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site (Colo.) I. Kazanjian, Howard. II. Title. III. Title: Tragedy of Sand Creek.

  E83.863.E58 2015

  978.8004'97353092—dc23

  [B]

  2015005372

  TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is intended to be a tribute to those who lost their lives at Sand Creek and those who endured after the tragedy. Half of the royalties from the sale of this book will go to support the Sand Creek National Historic Site.

  The following individuals and organizations helped make this work possible: Sara Keckeisen at the Kansas State Historical Society; Tom Mooney at the Nebraska State Historical Society; Sarah Gilmor at the History Colorado Center; Allen Arnold, information technology specialist at Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine, Florida; and the Denver Public Library. Alexa Roberts and Eric Sainio at the Sand Creek National Historic Site were kind and generous and we’re grateful for their assistance. Special thanks to the talented people at Globe Pequot who skillfully transformed the raw material of this manuscript into a product we’re proud to share. We appreciate Erin Turner and her willingness to review a proposal on the subject of Mochi and the Sand Creek Massacre. Erin has been a constant source of encouragement and we are indebted to her.

  Foreword

  Mochi’s War encapsulates the story of a ruthless woman warrior who was born out of the pits of the Sand Creek Massacre. The word “warrior” sends a tingle of fear down the spine and conjures up a fierce, merciless fighter seemingly invulnerable to fear or intimidation.

  There are many reasons that a Native Indian woman would fight and become one of the warriors. Most nineteenth-century women who fought in battles and conflicts did not pursue the life of a warrior on a permanent basis. Most women fought because there was an urgent need for them to do so, which the reader will find out quickly was the case for this twenty-four-year-old Cheyenne warrior.

  Howard Kazanjian and Chris Enss write of the malice in the young woman’s heart and the revenge that sat heavily on the edge of her tomahawk. This woman warrior was willing to fight to the death using bloodthirsty tactics to achieve victory. Hers is not the usual image that we would associate with women, but there were many female Native American warriors.

  When asked to name some famous Indian women, most people have difficulty recalling anyone other than Pocahontas or Sacagawea; readers will have no difficulty remembering Mochi, the Cheyenne Warrior, after engaging themselves in Mochi’s War.

  Rebecka Lyman

  Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal Tribune

  Introduction

  Mochi was so distinguished for fiend-like fierceness and atrocity that it was not deemed safe to leave her on the plains. She was a fine looking Indian woman but as mean as they come.

  —Observation made by a military officer after Mochi’s arrest on March 5, 1875

  Somewhere amid the high plains sage country, the Big Sandy Creek once ran red with the blood of dozens of Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children. On November 29, 1864, hundreds of members of the Colorado Volunteers poured down upon a sleeping Indian camp, leaving in their wake the slaughtered remains of Native Americans who were scalped and mutilated.[1]

  The unprovoked attack on the Indian settlement was led by Colonel John Milton Chivington, who is said to have ordered every Indian at the scene killed. To those settlers and traders who had been terrorized by the Indians and because of exaggerated reports of Indian attacks on families and troops, the Sand Creek Massacre was regarded by some as proper retribution on the Indians, and Chivington was revered for his actions.

  The event that forced frontiersmen and women to address the serious issues that had been building between them and the Indians occurred on June 11, 1864. Rancher Nathan Ward Hungate, his wife, Ellen, and their two little girls were slaughtered by Indians. Their mutilated bodies were brought to Denver and put on display in the center of town. The people there were thrown into a panic. In the following weeks, at the mere mention of Indians in the outlying areas, women and children were sent to homes that were fortified and guarded. Plains travel slowed to a trickle. The supply of kerosene was exhausted, and the settlers had to use candles.[2]

  A regiment of one hundred day volunteers known as the Third Colorado Cavalry was organized, and George L. Shoup, a scout during the Civil War, was named the outfit’s colonel. At the same time, John Evans, governor of the Colorado Territory, issued a proclamation stating: “Friendly Arapahoe and Cheyenne belonging to the Arkansas River will go to Major Colley, U.S. Indian Agent at Fort Lyon, who will give them a place of safety. . . . The war on hostile Indians will be continued until they are effectually subdued.”[3]

  On August 29, 1864, before the regiment saw active service, a letter from Cheyenne leader Black Kettle explaining that the Indians had agreed to make peace was delivered to officers at Fort Lyon, 150 miles away from Denver. The letter noted that Cheyenne and Arapaho war parties had prisoners they would like to exchange for Indians being held by the volunteers.[4]

  Major E. W. Wynkoop of the First Colorado at Fort Lyon marched his troops to Black Kettle’s camp to collect the captives. While there, Wynkoop persuaded the chief to send a delegation to Denver to talk about the conditions for peace.

  From Fort Leavenworth, Major General Samuel Ryan Curtis, commander of the Department of Kansas, telegraphed Chivington prior to the conference with the chiefs: “I shall require the bad Indians delivered up; restoration of equal numbers of stock; also hostages to secure. I want no peace till the Indians suffer more.” Chivington took the order to heart.[5]

  Not everyone agreed that Chivington deserved the praise he received from some after the massacre at Sand Creek. Many politicians and military leaders objected to his savage assault on the village. According to Oklahoma Governor Henry S. Johnson, Chivington’s act “brings a revolt in the heart of every American citizen and will stand in history to condemn the civilized government that sought to deal with the question of what to do with the Indian.”[6]

  The number reportedly killed at Sand Creek varies widely from 63 people to 200. Most historians agree that the death t
oll was around 160.

  This photo of the Southern Plains delegation was taken in the White House Conservatory on March 27, 1863. Interpreter William Simpson Smith and the Agent S. G. Colley are standing at the left of the group; the white woman standing at the far right is often identified as Mary Todd Lincoln. The Indians in the front row, left to right: War Bonnet, Standing in the Water, and Lean Bear of the Cheyenne, and Yellow Wolf of the Kiowas. The identities of the second row are unknown. Within eighteen months from the date of this sitting, all four men in the front row were dead. Yellow Wolf died of pneumonia a few days after the picture was taken; War Bonnet and Standing in the Water died in the Sand Creek Massacre.

  Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19914

  Adding to the tragedy, Black Kettle, a prominent Cheyenne leader, believed he had entered into a peace agreement with the United States Army. Historians say that when the first shots were fired on the camp, Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white cloth of truce to signal the desire to talk peace.

  A warrior was born out of the tragedy at Sand Creek—one that would live only to see her slain family avenged. The Cheyenne Indian woman driven to violent and desperate measures was named Mochi. For more than ten years, she engaged in raiding and warfare against the United States government along with her husband, Medicine Water. These Cheyenne renegades became two of the most feared Indians in the American West.

  “The Cheyenne hated a liar as a devil hates Holy water,” Indian agent Captain Percival G. Lowe wrote in his memoirs in 1896 about the uprising of Mochi and the other outraged Indians who survived the Sand Creek Massacre. “And that is why when they came to know him they hated the white man. They did not crave stealthy murder but wanted their enemies to die an overt and brutal death over what happened on the Sand Creek.”[7]

  Chivington never anticipated the backlash that occurred. He believed the Sand Creek Massacre would put a stop to the Indians’ attacks on wagon train parties and military caravans, but instead it stirred the Plains Indians, specifically the Southern Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho, into war with systematic attacks on the South Platte Valley from south and southeast and from north and northwest. Fourteen major battles would be fought, from the attack on the Julesburg, Colorado, outpost to the Lone Tree Massacre in Kansas.

  The Indian Wars in the West were fought because white trappers, miners, and settlers were invading Indian hunting grounds and ancestral burying spots. They were wars of conquest for the whites and attempts to repulse the invaders by Indians. Beginning with the first Sioux War in 1854 and culminating in the last grand stand of the Indians in 1876, the government, and occasionally the Indians, broke treaties between each other over and over again.

  The events at Sand Creek motivated Mochi to embark on a decade-long reign of terror. With each raid she remembered the horror of the massacre, and it goaded her on to commit brutal outrages on those encroaching on Indian soil. The war between the Indians and the government lasted ten years after the Sand Creek Massacre occurred. Mochi’s war ended with her arrest and imprisonment in 1875.

  Chivington’s name was disgraced by Sand Creek. He had been a well-known minister and hero of the Civil War battle of Glorietta Pass, New Mexico. Even before his death in July 1891 his name had become synonymous with murder and controversy. Mochi’s name as well brought to mind brutality and killing. She didn’t start the battle that resulted in her family’s demise, but she did contribute to the terror that swept across the plains from 1865 to 1874.

  1. Rocky Mountain News, December 17, 1864.

  2. Harpers Weekly 36, no. 18 (1868).

  3. Ibid.

  4. Rocky Mountain News, December 17, 1864.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Kansas City Star, October 16, 1927.

  7. Ibid.

  Chapter 1

  Tragedy at Little Blue River

  In the spring of 1875, a locomotive pulling several freight cars left Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, bound for Fort Marion, Florida. Thirty-three Cheyenne Indian prisoners were on board; only one was a woman. Her name was Mochi, which means Buffalo Calf Woman. She made the trip shackled and chained to her husband, a warrior named Medicine Water. The irons affixed to the thirty-four-year-old woman’s wrists and ankles were so tight they cut into her skin and made them bleed. Her flesh would be permanently scarred by the time the six-week journey to Florida came to an end.[1]

  Hundreds of curious men, women, and children witnessed the Indian captives being taken away. Some of the onlookers shouted at the prisoners and called them “murderers” and “savages.” Neither Mochi nor the other Indians responded. They didn’t consider killing the settlers during their raids on homesteads in Nebraska and Kansas as criminal. Driven by the desire to stop pioneers from taking over their homeland and by revenge for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians slaughtered by the invading force, Mochi went to war. She would suffer the consequence.[2]

  The prison that would be Mochi’s home for more than two years was the oldest fortification on the continent. It covered an acre of ground and accommodated a garrison of 1,000 men. Building of the fort began in 1620 and was completed in 1856. A Spanish coat of arms and the name of the chief engineer of the structure, along with the date the fort was completed, were carved into the stone above the entrance.[3]

  Cheyenne Indians were relegated to the north side of Fort Marion along with Arapaho inmates. The Comanche, Kiowa, and Caddo shared the west side. Mochi and Medicine Water were assigned to an area away from the rest of the Cheyenne captives because they were considered too dangerous to be with the other Indians.[4] Mochi was the only Native American woman to be incarcerated by the United States Army as a prisoner of war. There were other female residents at the fort, but they were wives of the prisoners who didn’t want to be without their husbands.[5]

  Mochi contemplated escaping when she first arrived, but the fort walls were sixteen feet thick and thirty feet high in spots. She slowly surrendered her physical self to the sentence she had been given, but her mind and heart could not be contained. The tragic circumstances that led to imprisonment in Florida haunted her. For Mochi, hardship and heartache began at a place in Colorado called Sand Creek.[6]

  Mochi was born in 1841 in Yellowstone, Wyoming. Her parents, whose names have been lost with time, adored their daughter. According to Cheyenne Indian historian Ann Strange Owl-Raben, Mochi’s childhood was not unlike that of any other Cheyenne. As was the custom, paternal elders named Mochi and blessed her life at a traditional naming ceremony. At the age of nine Mochi began learning how to skin and tan the hides of the animals hunted for the tribe. She was also taught how to sew, bead, identify herbs, and manage a lodge, along with a number of other tasks specific to Cheyenne girls.[7]

  By the time Mochi was a teenager, she was well acquainted with all the tasks for which Cheyenne women were responsible. In addition to cooking and cleaning, women built their family’s lodge and dragged the heavy posts used to make the tepee whenever the tribe moved. Cheyenne women took part in administering traditional medicines, storytelling, creating artwork, and playing music.[8]

  Exterior of Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida,

  State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory

  Mochi married her first husband when she was in her early teens. As custom dictated, she was carried into the wedding lodge by her new husband’s best friend. “She was dressed in clothing her husband had brought her, and his other gifts covered her arms and legs,” Ann Strange Owl-Raban noted about Mochi in her book Four Great Rivers to Cross. Mochi also wore a protective rope around her waist under her clothes. The rope wound around her thighs and extended to her knees. This rope was worn for the first few nights of a marriage so the newlyweds could get to know one another well without relying solely on the physical aspect of a relationship. “The rope was to be respected by the groom as long as the bride decided to wear it,” Owl-Raban noted about the Cheyenne marriage ceremony.[9]

  Chastity was highly respected by Cheyenne men and women. G
reat respect was given to men and women who did not consummate their marriage until months after their marriage ceremony. Consequently, women placed a high value on chastity as an expression of sacrifice and renewing. Cheyenne law notes that “the woman is above everything because the creator has given her power to spread people to cover the face of the earth.”[10]

  Mochi and her husband lived among their people with no other hope than that possessed by their ancestors, to live happily raising children of their own on the land that had been occupied for centuries by the Cheyenne Indians.

  Sixteen-year-old Laura Louise Roper hoped for roughly the same in life as Mochi. Born in Pennsylvania on June 16, 1848, to Hon. Joseph and Sophia Roper, Laura was considered by friends and neighbors to be a beautiful girl.[11] In early 1864, she accepted the proposal of a young wagon train driver named Marshall B. Kelley, and the couple planned to build a homestead along the Little Blue River in southern Nebraska. Marshall had already established a settlement several miles from a military outpost near what is now the town of Oak, Nebraska. Once they were married, Laura and Marshall were going to live in a log house and farm. On August 7, 1864, a band of Cheyenne Indians attacked the pioneers in and around the settlement. Among those assaulted was Laura Roper.[12]

  An article in the December 2, 1926, edition of the Marysville Advocate-Democrat newspaper reported that the great “western migration of settlers prompted the Little Blue River tragedy as well as many others like it.” Indians could see that with the increase in white sojourners the buffalo would either be exterminated or driven away and the red man would be left without food. “The total population of the Plains tribes was around 60,000,” the newspaper noted. “The coming of the white man drove the Indians to inaugurate defensive measures to save their ancient home and hunting grounds. And it so appears that the Kiowa, Apache, Cheyenne, with the Brule, Oglala, and Missouri Sioux agreed to drive the white man out of their domain by any means that they could devise.”[13]