by Ari Kelman
But dissenting voices, ringing with skepticism born at Sand Creek and hardened during the tortuous process of memorializing the massacre, questioned this promise of easy diversity. These critics understood that for most of American history, whites had systematically written Native people out of the national narrative, more commonly forgetting than remembering them. For instance, most historic sites that recount the sweep of westward expansion adopt the perspective of white settlers. Given the celebratory vector of American memory projects more broadly, this is not especially surprising. In fact, few nations—the cases of South Africa and Germany are notable counterexamples—spend much time and energy remembering their sins alongside their heroic exploits. As a result, when memorials in the United States discuss Native Americans at all, they typically use them as benchmarks for national progress, as objects rather than subjects. These monuments often prop up frontier mythologies, celebrating, with imperialist rhetoric, the conquest of the American West and the dispossession of its indigenous inhabitants. Adding insult to injury, these sites regularly cast Native people as uncivilized by suggesting that they have no history of their own, that they are exclusively a people of memory. Until recently, even the NPS’s historic sites typically framed the Plains Indian Wars using the words of Robert Utley, a renowned scholar and one-time NPS chief historian, who labeled the violence a “clash of cultures.” Utley’s phrase obscured responsibility for that conflict.6
Hoping to shift that context, many of the Native people who helped to create the Sand Creek historic site rejected what they saw as a hollow offer of painless healing and quick reconciliation at the opening ceremony. Concerned that the memorial might be a stalking horse for an older assimilationist project—the U.S. government’s long-standing effort to strip tribal peoples of their distinctive identities—these skeptics instead portrayed the site as an emblem of self-determination. They understood that controlling the interpretative apparatus at a national public space, distant from the Mall in Washington, DC, but still wielding the weight of federal authority, offered them an opportunity to define insiders and outsiders. Consequently, they had fought for years to steer the commemorative process, struggling over nomenclature by insisting that the memorial be called the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. They had turned next to narration, demanding that the site tell the massacre story from a Native perspective, featuring Cheyenne and Arapaho voices informed by indigenous knowledge. Finally, they had seized the chance to root their heritage in southeastern Colorado’s landscape, reclaiming a piece of what once had been their homeland. As tribal traditionalists, they worried that modernity had besieged their way of life. They believed that the memorial would help them preserve their cultural practices, securing their future by venerating the past. For these activists, the site would serve tribal rather than federal interests.7
Other participants at the opening ceremony expressed suspicions about the memorial for a host of additional reasons: because the federal government remained unpopular on southeastern Colorado’s plains, particularly when it insinuated itself into local land-use disputes; because of the perceived taint of political correctness hovering over what some onlookers viewed as an unnecessary reinterpretation of Colorado’s history; and because of a gnawing sense that including the word “massacre” in the site’s name indicted the U.S. Army. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the nation embroiled in two controversial wars, some observers worried that a memorial questioning the military’s rectitude flirted with anti-Americanism.8
Kiowa County commissioner Donald Oswald served as a greeter when he spoke first at the opening ceremony. He did not mention the massacre at all, instead expressing his hope that visitors would enjoy themselves during their stay and consider returning to the area in the future. That the memorial recalled one of the great injustices in Western history stood beside the point for Oswald; he saw the site as an engine of economic growth. His remarks made sense in context. Some of his constituents had misgivings about the historic site. Their home was unusually stable, and they liked it that way. County residents often were born, raised, and died on a single piece of land. They knew their neighbors the way many Americans know their families. As Rod Brown, another county commissioner, noted, “Nobody has to use turn signals in Eads, because everybody knows where everybody else is going.” Seven in ten people residing in Kiowa County at the time had lived there for more than five years, a figure nearly 20 percent higher than for the rest of the state. The prospect of becoming a “gateway community,” hosting thousands of heritage tourists annually, thus threatened the county’s sense of itself as a quiet place, distant from the churn of urban life. Many local people also worried about tethering themselves to a service economy. They were used to being relatively independent, one of the virtues they saw in their agricultural way of life. The historic site, a sacrifice on the altar of commerce, seemed like a devil’s bargain, then. It would force change on a place fond of stasis. As Janet Frederick, head of the Kiowa County Economic Development Corporation, suggested, “there is always that fear of the unknown. It’s very comfortable here without any surprises.” But something had to give; crisis heralded compromise.9
Over the previous five years, as Colorado’s population had boomed by more than a tenth—an echo of the previous decade’s even more explosive growth—Kiowa County had experienced an exodus. Approximately 15 percent of its residents had left, usually for the promise of one of the cities, including Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, Denver, Fort Collins, and Cheyenne, sprawling up and down the Front Range. Mirroring trends found throughout the nation’s beleaguered small towns, young people especially had fled, leaving behind a rapidly aging population. Something like one in ten Coloradans were senior citizens when the Sand Creek site opened, compared to almost a quarter of Kiowa County’s residents. So when Commissioner Oswald addressed the crowd gathered at the site’s opening, he understood that if his community was not yet dying, it surely was on life support. The memorial offered a last-ditch chance to ensure that the county would have a future—even as it struggled to preserve its past.10
Still, some Kiowa County residents fretted about advertising that federal troops had perpetrated a “massacre” in their backyard. Janet Frederick, the site’s most committed local booster, explained, “people get a little defensive,” worrying that “they’re going to be looked at as the bad guys.” At the same time, she regretted that some of her neighbors found it easier “to see the cavalry and Colonel Chivington [who commanded the soldiers at Sand Creek] as more like us than the tribes are.” Frederick understood the effect of demographics: Eads was 98 percent white. She also knew that the historical bonds linking Kiowa County’s twenty-first-century residents to the violent dispossession of the Native Americans who previously had lived there could become suffocating. Again, few local people took pride in their relationship with John Chivington. But as Frederick allowed, some of them nevertheless recognized him as closer kin to them than the Cheyennes and Arapahos that his men had slaughtered in 1864.
Above all, Frederick’s participation in the public remembrance of Sand Creek had taught her about the difficulty of trying to reconcile seemingly incommensurable historical narratives. For throughout the memorialization process, competing perspectives on the massacre appeared, like restless ghosts from the past, both informing and constraining the contemporary struggle to recall the violence.11
Three massacre stories in particular still loomed over the historic site when it opened: the first from John Chivington, an enthusiastic perpetrator; the second from Silas Soule, a reluctant witness; and the third from George Bent, a victim and survivor of the ordeal. Read together, their tales suggest that so much uncertainty shrouds Sand Creek that seeking an unchallenged story of the massacre may not be merely futile, but also counterproductive. Instead, the mayhem can best be understood by sifting through conflicting, often hazy, accounts of the past. In part, discrepancies in the historical record can be ascribed to the so-called fog of war. Sc
enes of violence, especially mass violence, are notorious for breeding unreliable and often irreconcilable testimony. But in the case of Chivington’s, Soule’s, and Bent’s Sand Creek stories, their disagreements stemmed not only from the havoc they all experienced but also from the politics of memory surrounding the points they disputed: What caused the bloodshed? Could it have been avoided? Who should be held accountable for what happened? And was Sand Creek a glorious battle or a hideous massacre? Such questions raised thornier issues still: about the racial identities and gender ideologies that structured an emerging multicultural society in the West; about the interplay of politics and violence on the American borderlands; and, finally, about the righteousness of continental expansion and the bloody wars—both the Civil and the Indian—spawned by that process.12
Chivington, Soule, and Bent understood the stakes when they clashed over Sand Creek’s memory. And even if they could not know for certain that their dispute would reverberate across the years, they crafted and recrafted their stories, hoping to win adherents in a contest they suspected would have lasting implications. The nation, they recognized, had recently fractured over the fate of its western territories, over the question of whether federal authorities would allow slavery to root itself in that soil. The country’s future, they believed, would unfold in the same region, as white settlement stretched from the continent’s interior to the Pacific coast. Because Sand Creek took place as the Civil War raged, and because the massacre catalyzed the Indian Wars that followed, it seemed likely to be read by future generations as a pivotal chapter in the American story. Chivington, who believed that Sand Creek had been a noble and necessary part of winning the West, wanted the episode written into the national narrative as a glorious battle. Soule, who worried that the massacre would cast a pall over the preservation of the Union and westward expansion, hoped it could be forgotten. Bent agreed with Chivington: Sand Creek should be remembered by future generations. But he saw the violence as a tragedy in Cheyenne history, an ugly and violent outgrowth of the ongoing removal of the Plains Tribes. The struggle over how and even whether Sand Creek should be recalled would echo at the massacre site more than a century later.13
For his part, Chivington used the gallons of blood spilled along Sand Creek to depict a masterstroke. Late on November 29, 1864, with corpses still cooling on the ground, he passed along glad tidings to his superior, General Samuel Curtis, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of Kansas. Exhausted by the day’s fighting, Chivington wrote: “at daylight this morning [we] attacked [a] Cheyenne village of 130 lodges, from 900 to 1,000 warriors strong.” The fight had gone well, he bragged. His men had killed several chiefs, as well as “between 400 and 500 other Indians.” After memorializing his fallen troops—“9 killed, 38 wounded. All died nobly.”—Chivington justified the attack. Pointing to depredations allegedly committed earlier that year by the Native people his men had defeated at Sand Creek, he related tales designed to inflame observers familiar with the unfolding Anglo settlement of the Plains: “found a white man’s scalp, not more than three days’ old, in one of the lodges.” In sum, Chivington’s men had whipped “savages” guilty of desecrating white bodies, an outrage that demanded a quick reprisal administered by a sure hand. Sand Creek, in this view, was a job well done.14
Chivington seemed to understand in that moment that he stood at a crossroads. A Methodist minister, committed abolitionist, and stalwart Union man, he had preached Christ’s gospel on the Plains before arriving in Colorado Territory four years earlier, ready to spread the Good Word to heathen gold seekers prospecting in the foothills west of Denver. Stories, perhaps apocryphal, circulated in the ranks about an episode from before the war, when the “Fighting Parson” had faced down a pro-slavery mob in Kansas. Coolly placing twin revolvers on the pulpit beside his text, he had delivered a rousing sermon. A bull of a man—Chivington weighed more than two hundred pounds, towered six feet four inches tall, and possessed a booming baritone that sounded like it could overawe artillery on the battlefield—he rejected a chaplaincy early in the Civil War and instead volunteered to fight. Commissioned a major in the 1st Colorado Regiment, he earned fame in March 1862, when he led his men on a complex maneuver at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in New Mexico, cutting off an invading force of Confederates from their supply lines. But after his superiors promoted him to colonel, the ambitious Chivington’s military career stalled. He hoped to become a U.S. senator after the war, and Sand Creek presented him with a final chance to make his mark.15
After informing Curtis of his exploits, Chivington found energy later in the day for other important matters: public relations. He composed a second note, to editors at Denver newspapers. Although the men of the 3rd Colorado Regiment had enlisted months earlier expecting to fight Indians, they had mostly loafed around the city instead, winning only reputations for ignoring bar tabs. Onlookers taunted the soldiers for their inactivity, labeling the outfit the “Bloodless Third.” Chivington’s Sand Creek story responded to these slurs by celebrating the significance of the violence. Grander in the second telling than the first, what had been an “engagement” became “one of the most bloody battles ever fought on these plains.” His men, he related, had attacked “one of the most powerful villages of the Cheyenne Nation.” The result represented “almost an entire annihilation of the entire tribe.” Perhaps concerned that he appeared to be gloating over fresh corpses, he then addressed “those gentlemen who are opposed to fighting these red scoundrels,” concluding, as in his earlier note, by referencing abominations supposedly committed by the fallen enemy: “I was shown by [my] chief surgeon the scalp of a white man taken from the lodge of one of the chiefs, which could not have been more than two or three days taken, and I could mention many more things to show how these Indians that have been drawing Government rations … are and have been acting.” The recovered remains again attested to the hostility and depravity of the vanquished Indians.16
Two weeks later, his perspective apparently sharpened by rest, Chivington wrote a more complete report to General Curtis. The colonel explained that on November 24, the 3rd Regiment, along with part of the 1st Regiment, had arrived at Fort Lyon, in southeastern Colorado, where they had collected more men and artillery, including at least “two howitzers.” Four days after that, he recalled, the column had marched northeast throughout the night until, “at daylight on 29th November striking Sand Creek, about forty miles from Fort Lyon.” There, the campaign “discovered an Indian village of 130 lodges, comprised of Black Kettle’s band of Cheyennes and eight lodges of Arapahos with Left Hand.” Chivington divided his troops and ordered an assault. Although the attack surprised the Indians, they “rallied” before “form[ing] a line of battle across the creek, about three-fourths of a mile above the village, stubbornly contesting every inch of ground.” A running engagement ensued. “The Indians,” facing heavy fire from infantry, mounted cavalry, and artillery, gradually “fell back from one position to another” across approximately “five miles.” Eventually, though, Black Kettle’s and Left Hand’s people “abandoned all resistance and dispersed in all directions.”17
In this telling, Sand Creek had been a terrible and glorious battle. As Chivington remembered it, his men, agents of an ascendant civilization sweeping inexorably across the Plains, had squared off against savages, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, guilty of countless crimes against white settlers in recent months. The fighting at Sand Creek had been so brutal, the Native warriors there so committed to their doomed struggle, that the soldiers had taken “no prisoners.” Instead, Chivington’s men had left between “500 and 600 Indians dead upon the ground … and all their lodges destroyed.” The contents of those dwellings “had served to supply the command with an abundance of trophies, comprising the paraphernalia of Indian warfare and life.” Leaving aside ethnographic curiosity, Chivington instead underscored the brutality of the clash, celebrating the soldiers who had given their lives during the fight, the two men who had since succumbed
to their wounds, and the thirty-eight others who had been hurt. The living and the dead, he proclaimed, had “sustained the reputation of our Colorado troops for bravery and effectiveness.” Again, Sand Creek had been a struggle between the forces of darkness and light. A new day, Chivington suggested, would dawn in its wake.18
At the close of his second dispatch to Curtis, Chivington alluded to a brewing controversy surrounding the violence. “I cannot conclude,” he sniffed, “without saying that the conduct of Capt. Silas Soule, Company D, First Cavalry of Colorado, was at least ill-advised, he saying that he thanked God that he had killed no Indians … proving him more in sympathy with those Indians than with the whites.” At Sand Creek, Soule had refused to commit his troops to the fight and had later raised questions about the violence. He suggested that the bloodshed had not been a triumph, as Chivington and his loyalists insisted, but a tragedy: a massacre of peaceful Indians. Tamping down these charges, Chivington reiterated to Curtis his earlier claims about the collective guilt of the Native people at Sand Creek: “The evidence is most conclusive that these Indians are the worst that have infested the routes on the Platte and Arkansas Rivers.” Again pointing to the mutilation of white bodies, Chivington this time multiplied the proof recovered at Sand Creek. Not just one scalp, as he had previously mentioned, but “several,” hacked from “white men and women,” were “found in their lodges.” Based on these grisly remains, he concluded, “the evidence was clear that no lick was struck amiss.”19