by Enss, Chris
From November 1864 forward neither Northern or Southern Cheyenne have been admirers of the white men. More treaties were made with these noble people and all were broken. The Cheyenne refused to make another treaty with the United States. Their bitter experience had taught them. I need not tell the history of the deaths on the plains.
For whatever blunders and excesses were made by the government, the real sufferers are the innocent people of the border. . . . I need not go on. I envy no man’s head or heart that reads the last eight years of the Cheyenne history and does not feel pity for this hunted, outlawed people. I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just.[16]
Colonel Chivington disagreed with Bishop Whipple and maintained that the United States Army needed to “enact God’s justice.” According to an interview Chivington’s third wife, Isabella, did with historian Fred Martin in 1902, the colonel never deviated from the notion that “Indians who had committed depredations should be killed.” The war department’s investigation into the Sand Creek Massacre ended with no charges being brought against Chivington or his troops. The military did turn its back on Chivington and his name became synonymous with torture and murder. Colonel Chivington dismissed any disparaging comments about his actions, standing by his decision and insisting to all who would listen that he was justified. “[The Indians] are guilty of robbery, arson, murder, rape and fiendish torture,” he continued to tell family, friends, and supporters. “I believe it right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians who kill and torture women and children.”[17]
From January 1865 to July 1869, Chivington crisscrossed the western territory in search of a place to settle, grieve the loss of his military career, mourn the deaths of his wife and son, and avoid any further backlash because of Sand Creek. He returned to Nebraska in the spring of 1868 to attend a religious conference. From there he traveled to Chicago, where he visited with his son Thomas’s widow, Sarah. The two became romantically involved and were married on May 13, 1869.[18] Sarah’s parents were distraught over their daughter’s relationship with her former father-in-law and made their feelings known in the June 13, 1868, edition of the Petersburg Index. “We, the undersigned, take this method to inform the public that the criminal act of John M. Chivington in marrying our daughter was unknown to us and a thing we very much regret,” Sarah’s father, John Lull, announced in the short article. “Had the facts been made known to me of the intentions some measures would have been taken to prevent the consummation of so vile and unnatural an outrage,” he continued. “Even if violent measures were necessary I would have stopped it. Hoping this may be a sufficient explanation for what has occurred, we remain, John and Almira Lull.”[19]
The Chivingtons divorced less than two years after they exchanged vows. Chivington abandoned his bride and fled to Canada without providing monetary support for her. “He left me with nothing,” Sarah explained to a pension examiner in Washington, D.C., via letter. “And I had no desire to live with a criminal.” Sarah and John Chivington’s divorce was finalized on October 25, 1871.[20]
By mid-1873, Chivington had met and married Isabella. She was a forty-four-year-old widow of a Union soldier. The pair lived on a farm in Clinton County, Ohio, then relocated to the town of Blanchester. It was there Chivington traded in his plow for a newspaper called The Press. For several years Chivington had been on the editorial staff of publications such as the Christian Advocate of St. Louis and the Nebraska Methodist Quarterly. He made time for the job no matter what else he was doing to support himself.[21]
Throughout the Red River War, the name given to the military campaign the United States launched to remove the Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho Indian tribes to reservations, Chivington expressed his opinion about the Indians’ continual uprisings in the West. “As I said at the onset of this war,” Chivington wrote in the March 12, 1875, edition of The Press, echoing a statement he had made in 1864, “the Cheyenne will have to be roundly whipped or completely wiped out before they will be quiet. I should have been more vigilant. Damn any man who sympathizes with the Indians.”[22]
The frustration Chivington felt over the Indians’ behavior manifested itself in his marriage. He was physically abusive toward Isabella. She had him arrested not only for beating her but also for stealing money from her. Isabella appeared in court with a black eye and a bruised face, and the judge was ready to sentence Chivington to several years in prison for his actions. At the last minute Isabella decided to drop all charges and forgive her husband. He promised to pay the court costs, return his wife’s money to her, and never raise a hand against her again. According to an article in the August 15, 1881, edition of the Clinton County Democrat, “Chivington’s debt to the court has yet to be paid.”[23]
This Indian scalp was taken by one of Colonel Chivington’s troops at the Sand Creek Massacre. Historians maintain that the soldiers decorated their belts and saddles with these items.
The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, X-32078
Isabella felt sorry for her husband and the battle that raged within his soul. “He was a tormented man,” Isabella told historian Fred Martin in 1902. “He was unable to secure peace in Colorado, and I got in the way of the torment.”[24]
It took Chivington and the events at Sand Creek to set in motion the war that had been brewing between the United States government and the Indians since the Homestead Act was passed in 1862. The act granted individual settlers 160 acres of land each—in land already occupied by Indians.[25]
Nothing Mochi or the other members of the Bowstring Society had done reversed the move Congress had made or changed the fact that settlers continued to pour onto the plains undeterred. No sooner had the Bowstring Society dealt with one survey crew encroaching upon their land than another one followed. Not only was the Cheyenne war party contending with various geographical expeditions, but Colonel Nelson Miles and his troops were closing in on them, as well.[26]
The United States Army caught up with Medicine Water, Mochi, and the other warriors on August 31, 1874, at the Washita River’s headwaters and engaged them in a running fight. The Indians managed to get away, but not before losing one of their own in the skirmish. They rallied again after a second encounter with Colonel Miles, which resulted in the loss of a guide named Mule Smoke who had led the Indians out of danger. Determined never to surrender, the Cheyenne renegades regrouped and rode on to attack one last time. Their next raid would be among the most shocking of all in the Red River War.[27]
1. Peter Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 7; Patrick M. Mendoza, Song of Sorrow: Massacre at Sand Creek, 144; Patrick M. Mendoza, Ann Strange-Owl-Raben, and Nico Strange-Owl, Four Great Rivers to Cross: Cheyenne History, Culture and Traditions, 75; Linda Wommack and John L. Sipes, Jr., “Mo-chi: First Female Cheyenne Warrior,” Wild West Magazine, April 2008.
2. George E. Hyde, Life of George Bent Written from His Letters, 360–61; Peter Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 7; Patrick M. Mendoza, Song of Sorrow: Massacre at Sand Creek, 143–44.
3. T. G. McGee, Echoes of Eighty-Nine, 129.
4. Chronicles of Oklahoma, 292–98, www.hennessey.lib.ok.us/whokilled.htm.
5. Letter from Agent J. D. Miles to the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington, July 10, 1874.
6. Chronicles of Oklahoma, 292–98; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 8–9.
7. Mendoza, Song of Sorrow, 144; Hyde, Life of George Bent, 360–61.
8. F. C. Montgomery, “Lone Tree, Meade County United States Surveyors Massacred by Indians,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 1, no. 3 (May 1932), 266; Lawrence Journal World, May 4, 1933; Lawrence Journal World, March 21, 1935.
9. Lawrence Journal World, March 21, 1935; Lawrence Journal World, May 4, 1933; Montgomery, “Lone Tree, Meade County,” 266.
10. Montgomery, “Lone Tree, Meade County,” 266; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 9; Lawrence Journal World, March 21, 1935.
11. Lawr
ence Journal World, March 21, 1935; Montgomery, “Lone Tree, Meade County,” 266.
12. Atchison Globe, September 6, 1874.
13. Montgomery, “Lone Tree, Meade County,” 266.
14. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 9; Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 75; Hyde, Life of George Bent, 361–63.
15. Greencastle Star, February 22, 1879.
16. Ibid.
17. John Speer, “Report to Fred Martin of Interview with Mrs. J. M. Chivington.”
18. Ibid.; Patricia Kinney Kaufman, My Mother’s People to Colorado They Came, 35; Reginald S. Craig, The Fighting Parson: Biography of Colonel John M. Chivington, 234–35.
19. Petersburg Index-Appeal, June 13, 1868.
20. Ibid.; Kaufman, My Mother’s People, 35.
21. Craig, Fighting Parson, 233–34; Speer, “Report to Fred Martin.”
22. Lori Cox-Paul, “John M. Chivington: The ‘Reverend Colonel’ ‘Marry-Your-Daughter’ ‘Sand Creek Massacre,’” Nebraska History 88; The Press, March 12, 1875.
23. Clinton County Democrat, August 15, 1881; Speer, “Report to Fred Martin.”
24. Speer, “Report to Fred Martin”; Clinton County Democrat, August 15, 1881.
25. Morning Oregonian, July 25, 1862; Indianapolis Daily Journal, June 15, 1867.
26. Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 8–9; Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 75.
27. Mendoza et al., Four Great Rivers to Cross, 75; Harrison, Mochi: Cheyenne Woman Warrior, 8–9; Mendoza, Song of Sorrow, 144–45.
Chapter 8
Mochi
The sun had not quite risen over the vast Kansas plains when John German heard a sound that tempted him from his work packing his family’s belongings into their wagon. He surveyed the campsite with a careful eye. His wife Lydia and their seven children were each going about their morning chores and preparing to continue their journey to Colorado. The Germans were from the Blue Ridge region of Georgia and had spent the summer of 1874 traveling west. They planned to reach their new home before winter.[1]
John and Lydia’s oldest children, twenty-year-old Rebecca Jane and nineteen-year-old Stephen, were tending to the livestock in a field not far from the family campsite. For a brief moment all seemed as it should be; then, suddenly, a small herd of antelope darted across the trail, panicked. Several shots rang out, and the antelope scattered in different directions. Another shot fired and a bullet smacked John in the chest, and he fell in a heap on the ground. Lydia ran toward her husband. Nineteen members of the Bowstring Society rode hard and fast into the German family’s camp, whooping and yelling. Lydia continued running. A Cheyenne Indian on horseback chased her down and thrust a tomahawk into her back.[2]
Rebecca Jane grabbed a nearby ax and attempted to fight off the warriors as they rode toward her. She managed to hit one of her attackers in the shoulder before she was knocked unconscious with the butt of a gun, raped, and killed.[3]
Fifteen-year-old Joanna crawled to an empty, wooden box in the back of the wagon and waited, too terrified to move. She watched helplessly as her sisters—seventeen-year-old Catherine, twelve-year-old Sophia, seven-year-old Julia, and five-year-old Adelaide—stood huddled together, flanked on all sides by the Indians. Joanna’s long curls dancing in the hostile breeze caught the attention of one of the Indians, and he rushed over to the girl with his rifle in hand. He shot her, and she collapsed in the dirt, dead. Her sisters looked on in rapt terror as the Indian set his gun aside and scalped his victim.[4]
Mochi, who had participated in the raid, scanned the bodies of the German family before she dismounted her ride. With an ax in hand she walked to John’s lifeless frame, stopped and studied the blood gushing from his wounds. In a ghastly tribute to her own family who were slaughtered at Sand Creek, Mochi drove her ax into John’s head and then did the same to Lydia. According to Catherine German’s reminiscences, the “Indians then took what they wanted from our wagon. In a short time my once happy family life was forever ended.”[5] Catherine later recalled:
It only took a few moments to dash down upon us. With such surprise we could have done nothing, even if we had had good firearms. We may have been watched during the night.[6]
The Indians took us four frightened sisters, our six head of cattle, other booty and started in the direction whence they had come. Later, I was told they set fire to the wagon and burned what they did not want; as I do not remember seeing a blaze I think this was done after we were out of sight. I have no idea how far we rode until we came to where they had left their saddles and other traps. They always rode bareback when they made a raid. After making a short stop to get their belongings, the Indians traveled onward and soon crossed a stream of clear water. Oh, how I wished for a drink, but my captors gave no heed to my gestures.[7]
After a while they stopped and killed our cattle, roasted the meat, sang and made merry over the terrible deed of that morning. Indians offered us meat, but we were so terrified and heartsick that we could not eat. We four, sad captives huddled together terribly frightened. We were so shocked and stunned that we could scarcely realize what had happened. I could not think, and only saw over and over the dead bodies of my parents, sister and brother. I heard again the awful outcries of the Indians and their victims.[8]
The morning of the day we were captured was clear and bright, but about noon a rain storm burst upon us. This was the first rain since we had left Elgin, Kansas. How it lightning and thundered! After the first hard shower, it rained slowly all afternoon and evening. We had no shelter. The little girls were still so frightened that they kept very quiet. Doubtless, our recent tragic experience had taught silence. I noticed the change in Adelaide for she had been always afraid of strangers and had manifested her fear by crying and now she seemed awed into silence. As we rain-soaked, pitiful children huddled together, we tried to comfort one another in this our great distress and grief.[9]
The Cheyenne war party traveled south with their captives in tow. On the second day of the journey back toward the panhandle of Indian Territory, the warriors stopped to divide their prisoners among them. The two youngest girls were taken by the only other woman riding with the Bowstring Society and her husband. A young brave claimed Sophia for himself, and Mochi and Medicine Water took Catherine. “Then they bridled up the horses,” Julia remembered months after the ordeal, “and put sister [Addie] in front of one young buck and me in front [of] another on horseback. We were jolted until our necks got stiff.”[10]
According to the December 12, 1874, edition of the Neosho Valley Register, Catherine and Sophia were raped multiple times by Medicine Water and the other Indian tribesmen. On one occasion Catherine was stripped, painted, and tied to a horse by Mochi. Then she was “put on the prairie” as the Cheyenne called this accepted cultural practice. Several young men in the camp rode Catherine down and violated her. The Neosho Valley Register noted that “white women were considered as guilty as men who came to seize Indian lands and buffalo and they were treated in the way women of ill repute were treated.”[11]
Mochi was said to have been crueler to the teenagers after such attacks. “I felt a great dislike for that large squaw,” Catherine remembered in her account of the horrific event and of Mochi. “From the first she proved to be a hardhearted, brutal, cruel savage.”[12] She continued:
Sometimes we were given roasted pieces of meat because a squaw would see we could not eat the half-raw meat that the Indians enjoyed. The large squaw seemed delighted to see us tortured or frightened. Once when I was roasting a piece of liver over the camp fire, Big Squaw snatched it from the stick which held it and ate it just before I had finished cooking it.
Another day, a buck tried to make us eat raw meat and because we would not do so, she threw firebrands at us and would not let me come near to cook the meat. Big Squaw and the other Redskins often tried to frighten me by saying they were going to kill me. Sometimes I heard the threat and felt the muzzle of the gun against my back but I stood ve
ry still for I felt that death would be better than living a miserable life with them. I was despondent and did not care really what happened to me.
A few more tricks the Indians played on me. . . . Once they tried to make me believe that I was to be drowned. Early one frosty morning the large Indian who was with Big Squaw and who captured me made me go to the near-by creek and a crowd of mischief-loving fellows followed us. They doubtless expected to see some fun. There was a deep pool on our side of the creek, so my captor pushed me down the bank into the cold, deep water. Instead of struggling to get out, as they expected, I swam to the opposite side of the pool and walked out. How surprised they were! There were shouts of laughter for the joke was on the buck who pushed me into the pool and he had to wade a narrowed part of the stream to get me. No other attempt was made to drown me since they learned that I could swim. How I shivered! I had no other clothes so those had to be worn until they dried.