A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas followed Bomar to the dais, offering a quiet jeremiad. A farmer’s son, Brownback had announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination two months earlier. But at Sand Creek he projected the image of a supplicant searching for absolution, rather than an office seeker campaigning for votes. He had spent the morning prior to the ceremony walking among the Cheyenne people camped in the creek bottom, listening to their stories of the massacre. His speech suggested that the experience had moved him. “The spilling of innocent blood here is a gross sin that pollutes the land,” he suggested, “and we must acknowledge it and repent of it.” Brownback then admitted the federal government’s complicity throughout much of U.S. history in the murder and dispossession of Native peoples, before adding, “there’s healing needed in federal and tribal relations, healing that must precede true peace.” Brownback concluded with a plea for compassion: “As a U.S. senator from a Plains state, I deeply apologize, and I’ll work to right this wrong. I humbly ask the Native Americans here, and their leaders in particular, to forgive us.” He walked from the podium, eyes cast downward, showered by thunderous applause.35

  Marilyn Musgrave, eastern Colorado’s congressional representative, spoke next. Reaching out to constituents embittered by the NPS’s decision to label Sand Creek a “massacre” rather than a “battle,” she insisted: “when we look at our history, we never want to rewrite it.” Musgrave hinted that revisionists at the Sand Creek memorial had bowed to political correctness when they had chosen to mute the note of triumphalism common at most national historic sites. Then she struck a conciliatory tone. Years earlier, Musgrave, a staunch conservative like Brownback, had been pilloried in the local press for ignoring her home district, including the then-uncertain fate of the Sand Creek site, and instead focusing on the high-profile national debate over gay marriage. To answer her critics, Musgrave relied in her speech, as Brownback had in his, on a rhetoric of Christian redemption. But instead of apologizing for her own or her nation’s sins, she congratulated the audience (and herself) for mourning the dead: “We’re doing what good people do. We’re remembering the wrongs. We’re regretting. We’re repenting.” She implied that penitents could shed the sins of history simply by visiting the memorial.36

  The past would not be laid to rest so easily. Silas Soule’s struggles with guilt and redemption—individual, collective, national—still shrouded the memorial at its opening gala. Soule, who at Sand Creek refused to order the men he commanded to fire, worried afterward that the attack could only be called a massacre. By early December 1864, news of Soule’s and other officers’ concerns about Sand Creek had reached Denver. And less than a week later, a critic, perhaps Soule himself, suggested that “Chivington ought to be prosecuted.” Reaching out to their contacts in the abolitionist network back east, including Senator Charles Sumner and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Soule and his confidantes began spreading word of the slaughter.37

  On December 14, just two weeks after Sand Creek, Soule poured his emotions out onto the pages of a letter he wrote to his friend and former commander, Edward “Ned” Wynkoop. At the time, Soule was only twenty-six years old. Handsome and headstrong, he had arrived in Colorado four years earlier, part of a wave of argonauts eager to find fortune in the gold fields west of Denver. Prior to that, Soule had lived in Kansas. His family settled near Lawrence in 1854 with the New England Emigrant Aid Society, an organization of free-soilers devoted to ensuring that Kansas would remain untainted by slavery as it moved toward statehood. In time, Soule earned a reputation as an abolitionist Jayhawker. He became acquainted with John Brown and squared off with pro-slavery border ruffians. Eventually, though, he left Bleeding Kansas for Colorado. And shortly after he arrived there, the Civil War started. Soule answered the call to arms, joining the 1st Colorado Regiment. By 1864, he had moved up in the ranks. On the eve of Sand Creek, he wore a captain’s epaulettes and commanded Company D.38

  Sitting in the cold at Fort Lyon, Soule fumed as he recalled Chivington’s treachery. He remembered that when the 3rd Colorado volunteers had first arrived at the fort on their way to Sand Creek, the colonel had placed “pickets around the Post, allowing no one to pass.” With access to the garrison barred, Chivington “declared [his] intention to massacre the friendly Indians camped on Sand Creek.” An outraged Soule approached his fellow officers, telling them that “any man who would take part in the murder, knowing the circumstances as we did”—Soule, like Wynkoop, thought that Black Kettle’s and Left Hand’s people were peaceful and under the protection of Fort Lyon’s troops—“was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.” When he heard about this dissension in the ranks, Chivington apparently threatened Soule’s life. But Soule stuck to his guns. He approached the fort’s new commander, Major Scott Anthony, and told him that he “would not take part in [the] intended murder” of the Indians at Sand Creek. But if the Colorado volunteers instead targeted “any fighting Indians,” Soule would prove his race loyalties by going “as far as any of them.” Reassured by Anthony that Chivington planned to do just that, Soule joined a march that ended on the banks of Sand Creek.39

  Soule later recalled, “we arrived at Black Kettle’s and Left Hand’s Camp, at day light.” After Chivington’s men opened fire without warning, a soldier from the 1st Colorado and an interpreter trading in the camp “ran out with white flags,” signaling that the Indians were peaceful. The troops “paid no attention.” “Hundreds of women and children were coming towards us,” Soule remembered, “getting on their knees for mercy.” Major Anthony responded by shouting, “Kill the sons of bitches.” A horrified Soule related in his letter to Wynkoop that he had “refused to fire.” Instead, after taking his company across the creek, away from the melee, Soule watched, appalled, as artillery barraged the Native people: “Batteries were firing into them and you can form some idea of the slaughter.” “When the Indians found that there was no hope for them they went for the Creek, and buried themselves in Sand and got under the banks.” Here, Soule offered a different view of the fortifications that Chivington often cited as definitive proof that he had attacked a village overflowing with hostile Indians itching for a fight.40

  In his note to Wynkoop, Soule also tried to undermine Chivington’s efforts to bathe Sand Creek in the reflected glory of the Civil War. He wrote that the Colorado volunteers had been less heroic than harried, more craven than courageous: “There was no organization among our troops, they were a perfect mob.” Such a charge revealed that Chivington had lost control of his men, deflating his grandiose claims of outstanding leadership. Soule’s phrasing also called to mind more than a decade of sectional violence in his old home, Kansas, where first pro-slavery border ruffians and later guerrilla warriors led by William Quantrill had repeatedly laid waste to the town of Lawrence and other free-soil strongholds. These were mobs, most observers in the Union agreed, groups of violent thugs who had lashed out at virtuous pioneers, much as the men of the 3rd Colorado Regiment, Soule insinuated, had lashed out at peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho people.41

  Soule further undercut Chivington’s assertions of Sand Creek’s legitimacy by depicting what seemed to him a topsy-turvy world of civilized Indians and savage whites. He did this by answering every mangled white corpse that Chivington toted out to justify the violence with counterexamples of Native bodies desecrated by soldiers. Chivington’s men, Soule noted, had especially disgraced themselves and their commander by visiting unspeakable cruelties on Cheyenne and Arapaho women and young people. “It was hard to see little children on their knees … having their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized,” he wrote, and also, “squaws’ snatches were cut out for trophies.” In another case, he remembered that a “woman was cut open, and a child taken out of her, and scalped.” And in still another instance, a mother and her children, Soule recalled, had waited “on their knees, begging for their lives, of a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all firing.” The frantic woman finally “took
a knife and cut the throats of both children, and then killed herself.” Men suffered too. Among the defiled corpses were those of at least two chiefs, White Antelope and War Bonnet, who “had Ears and Privates cut off.” Soule wondered about the massacre’s implications for the project of civilizing the Plains: “You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there, but every word I have told you is the truth, which they do not deny.”42

  Understood broadly, Soule’s letter to Wynkoop raised questions about the interwoven projects of preserving the Union and settling the West. Sand Creek left Soule unsure about the prospects of a society founded on so loose a definition of civilization that such fell deeds could take place beneath its banner. When, for example, he related the tale of the mother who had killed first her children and then herself rather than allowing her family to be gunned down by the Colorado volunteers, or of the eviscerated pregnant woman, her unborn child ripped from her body and then scalped by white soldiers, he relied on moral suasion, steeping his Sand Creek stories in cultural currents that ran throughout the era’s abolitionist literature. He also undercut Chivington’s charge that all Indians were alike, little more than faceless savages. This fit with Soule’s broader depiction of the Cheyennes and Arapahos as individuated: sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent. But ultimately, he took care to extend his critique only so far. He separated himself from the massacre but never from the struggle first to reunite the nation and then to expand it onto the Great Plains. Had Chivington targeted hostile rather than friendly Indians, Soule made clear, he would have fought beside his commander. The Union remained sacrosanct; the West had to be settled.43

  Accordingly, when apportioning blame for the massacre, Soule focused on Chivington. In this way, he exempted decent soldiers present at Sand Creek, including himself, from responsibility for the slaughter, while also shielding federal Indian policy from culpability. Soule charged that Chivington, driven by his ambitions, had planned and executed the attack not because he believed that Black Kettle’s and Left Hand’s people were hostile, but as a way of securing a promotion. Using the Civil War as an engine for mobility was common, Soule knew—in 1861, he had written to a friend that he would volunteer if he “could get a Lieutenant’s commission”—so it stood to reason that Chivington hoped “to be made General” in the wake of the attack. Given that, Soule conjectured, the colonel had inflated both the threat from the Indians at Sand Creek and also the number of dead: “Chivington reports five or six hundred killed, but there were not more than two hundred.” And of those, Soule continued, the vast majority were women and children. Worse still, though Chivington claimed that Sand Creek would make the Plains safer, Soule argued that more violence would actually result. “Our best Indians were killed,” Soule mourned of the peace chiefs cut down by Chivington’s men. Recriminations would flow from Sand Creek, he warned, suggesting that in its aftermath, “we will have a hell of a time with Indians this winter.”44

  Before Sand Creek, Soule held different views of Chivington and of the region’s Native peoples. In the months leading to the massacre, Soule corresponded regularly with his family. His letters included updates about his prospects, the occasional complaint about money woes, and reassurances about his behavior. In midsummer, he sent a note to his sister, Annie, joking, “You and Mother write for me to be a Christian and not be wild &c but the Army don’t improve a fellow much in that respect.” Still, he promised, there was hope, thanks to the efforts of his commanding officer, Colonel Chivington: “I think there is not much danger of my spoiling—our Col. is a Methodist Preacher and whenever he sees me drinking, gambling, stealing, or murdering he says, he will write to Mother or my sister Annie, so I have to go straight.” But in August, Soule’s tone changed. Writing again to his sister, he stated, “We have considerable trouble with the Indians—they would like to scalp us all.” By October’s end, though, he thought the danger had passed, at least temporarily. Of the same tribes, Soule said: “they are quite peaceable at present.” Black Kettle had recently parleyed with Chivington and Evans in Denver. Following that meeting, the chief had waited with his people “within a mile of [Fort Lyon] … for the purpose of making peace.” Reading the mood within the garrison, Soule noted ruefully, “I think Government will not make peace with them.” “If that is the case,” he guessed, “we shall have some fighting to do this winter.” Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon less than a month later.45

  Four days after sending his letter to Ned Wynkoop, Soule wrote to his mother. He recounted that two weeks earlier, he had been “present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly women and Children.” He explained that the Indians had been “friendly” and promised that he had “not let [his] Company fire.” Sparing his mother few details of the carnage, Soule mourned the “little Children on their knees begging for their lives” who had “their brains beat out like dogs.” He next wrote to his mother early in January 1865. He remained convinced that he had done right by refusing to burn powder at Sand Creek. He had since combed the “battle ground counting dead Indians.” He noted, “There were not as many as reported, not more than one hundred and thirty killed.” The putrefying remains of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people mocked Chivington’s vainglorious claims of 500 or 600 dead. As for the idea that the camp had housed dangerous warriors, Soule again noted that the evidence he had since recovered suggested otherwise. The corpses were mostly those of “women and children and all of them scalped.” He hoped that “authorities in Washington [would] investigate the killing of these Indians.” If they did, Soule was certain that his actions would be vindicated.46

  When Soule got his wish and federal investigators inquired into the attack in February 1865, he offered an official rendition of his story, refuting Chivington’s history of Sand Creek. In early fall 1864, Soule reported, he and Ned Wynkoop had tried to recover several white captives from a group of Cheyennes and Arapahos camped near the Smoky Hill River. When “Major Wynkoop asked them to give up the white prisoners,” Soule recalled, the Indians had said “they were desirous of making peace with the whites.” Wynkoop replied that “he had not the power to make peace, but if they would give up the white prisoners he would take them to Denver before the governor [John Evans], and pledged himself to protect them from Denver and back.” After Black Kettle handed over a woman and three children—captives taken earlier in the summer during raids on outlying white settlements—Wynkoop held up the first part of his end of the bargain: he brought several peace chiefs, including Black Kettle, to Denver. The controversial parley with Chivington and Governor Evans took place a few days later.47

  Soule reported that the group had gathered in Denver at Camp Weld. “The Indians,” he said, had “seemed very anxious to make peace.” Governor Evans, though, insisted that he “could not make peace with them,” that they must instead “look to military power for protection.” Soule remembered Chivington telling “them that he left the matter with Major Wynkoop; if they wanted peace they must come into the post and subject themselves to military law.” Soule continued, “Major Wynkoop told them to bring the Indians of their tribe who were anxious for peace to Fort Lyon, and camp near the post.” Wynkoop then sent word to General Curtis “to see if peace could not be made.” Meanwhile, “the Indians complied with Wynkoop’s orders, and camped near the post.” Even after Scott Anthony relieved Wynkoop as commander of Fort Lyon, the Native people still believed that “they were protected … until the messenger returned from General Curtis.” Soule lamented that no instructions had arrived at the fort by late November. In sum, white officials repeatedly assured the chiefs that, pending further instructions from higher authorities, their bands would be safe; their fears allayed, the Cheyennes and Arapahos waited near Fort Lyon for word of their fate.48

  On the evening of November 28, Soule stated, Chivington had arrived at Fort Lyon. The colonel asked if Native people were nearby. Soule replied that, yes, “there were s
ome Indians camped near the fort, but they were not dangerous.” Instead, “they were considered as prisoners.” The next evening, Soule joined Chivington’s command, marching overnight and arriving at Sand Creek just before sunrise. When asked by investigators for more details, Soule noted that “at the time of the attack” there were “white men in the Indian camp … by permission of Major Anthony to do some trading with the Indians.” One of them, Soule related, had barely escaped the initial onslaught, running from a lodge with a white flag flying overhead. At the same time, many Cheyennes and Arapahos signaled their peaceful intentions by “holding their hands up.” Chivington’s men ignored their pleas, firing on women and children and later mutilating their bodies. Soule had not witnessed the fortifications that Chivington deemed evidence of the hostility of the Indian camp; he had seen “only holes under the banks in the sand” that he believed had been “dug the day of the fight.”49

  Following a brief recess of the inquiry, Chivington cross-examined Soule. As the accused faced off with his accuser, Chivington began by revisiting Ned Wynkoop’s initial contact with Black Kettle’s people, suggesting that some of them had been hostile. Soule agreed. Chivington then noted that after meeting with Wynkoop, those Indians had not delivered all of their white captives, as promised. Soule agreed again. Chivington, moving on to the weeks after the Camp Weld gathering, focused on the recalcitrance of the Dog Soldiers, the most militant Cheyennes, who had ignored Wynkoop’s order to camp near Fort Lyon. Soule allowed that “none of the Dog Soldiers came in.” Chivington next turned to the most controversial of Soule’s earlier statements, regarding atrocities perpetrated by the men of the 3rd Regiment. He demanded to know if Soule had witnessed any barbaric acts being committed by soldiers. Soule replied, of the Indians at Sand Creek, “They were scalped I know; I saw holes in them, and some with their skulls knocked in.” But, he admitted, he could not say for certain “how they were mutilated.” He “saw soldiers with children’s scalps during the day, but did not see them cut off.” After seeking a few additional details, Chivington finished interrogating Soule.50