A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  As for the massacre’s particulars, Bent related that when the soldiers arrived at Sand Creek just before dawn, he had heard shouts warning of their approach. Startled, he dashed from his lodge and “saw that Black Kettle had a flag up on a long pole, to show the troops that the camp was friendly.” Chivington’s men ignored the signal and “opened fire from all sides.” Bent then scrambled two miles upstream and discovered “the main body of Indians, who had dug pits under the high banks of the creek.” These makeshift “holes” in the sand were the trenches that Chivington later insisted proved that the Cheyennes and Arapahos had prepared in advance for combat. At day’s end, Chivington finally “drew off his men,” having concluded “the largest slaughter of Indians ever on the Plains.” But by Bent’s reckoning Chivington’s body count far outstripped the facts, which were tragic enough. “About one hundred and fifty” corpses littered the field, “(three-fourths of them [from] women and children),” as soldiers cast about for macabre trophies.65

  For Bent, the ruthlessness of Chivington’s men, evidenced by their mistreatment of women, children, and the dead, made a lasting impression, suggesting a lack of basic humanity among the Colorado volunteers. In his Frontier articles and letters he wrote to Hyde, Bent emphasized the desecration of Native bodies at Sand Creek, intimating that these atrocities—like the earlier killing of Lean Bear—had enduring repercussions in the region. For example, in the wake of the massacre, he recalled, a Cheyenne war party had attacked a group of soldiers that had fought under Chivington, finding in their baggage “2 scalps and lots of things that had been taken at Sand Creek.” The Cheyennes recognized “the scalps of White Leaf and Little Wolf that were killed at Sand Creek.” The outraged warriors revenged themselves upon their defeated foes, mutilating their corpses.66

  Blessed with nearly half a century’s hindsight, Bent’s most powerful refutation of Chivington’s Sand Creek stories pivoted on the massacre’s consequences. Whereas to his dying day Chivington insisted that Sand Creek had pacified the Plains Tribes, clearing the way for civilization’s spread throughout the region, and Soule only suggested that the opposite might prove true, Bent knew for certain that the bloodletting had touched off the brutal Indian Wars. As he recounted in the Frontier, the day after the massacre, he and a group of battered survivors had made their way northeast, rendezvousing with a Cheyenne camp on the Smoky Hill. Once there, they swapped stories of Chivington’s perfidy, of Black Kettle’s unrequited efforts to avoid violence, and of the Colorado volunteers’ depravity. Although Bent wrote that some Cheyennes, including Black Kettle, had “still stood firmly for peace with the whites,” he recalled that “most,” upon hearing what had happened to their kin at Sand Creek, “were for war.” The militants then joined Spotted Tail’s and Pawnee Killer’s bands of Brule Sioux, along with the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and some Northern Arapaho warriors, in a winter camp. They plotted their reprisals, eventually taking the unusual step of dispatching raiding parties during the year’s coldest months.67

  In the remaining Frontier articles, Bent recounted the region awash in violence. Blood first spilled at Sand Creek could not easily be staunched. It overflowed the Plains’ river basins—the Platte, the Arkansas, the Smoky Hill, the Republican, the Powder, the Tongue—running through eastern Colorado, into Kansas and Nebraska, north to Wyoming and Montana, before flowing back south again. Bent suggested of the Cheyennes and Arapahos that, haunted by memories of Sand Creek, they refused to yield to federal troops. He recalled General Winfield Scott Hancock asking the Dog Soldiers to parley in 1867, but “Tall Bull, head chief of the Dog Soldiers, told Hancock that would not do.” If the Cheyennes saw soldiers approaching, Tall Bull explained, “they would say another Sand Creek Massacre.” After all, “it had been only three years since Chivington had attacked.” Together, Native warriors disrupted the mail, menaced stage lines, and drove off workers building railroads. Chivington, Bent explained, had wrought with Sand Creek the very thing that the colonel claimed to have prevented: a conflict that threatened expansion in the West. U.S. troops commanded by Thomas Moonlight, William Fetterman, and, most famously, George Armstrong Custer all fell in the fighting. The Frontier series finished there, with Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn. That episode completed a tragic and potentially transgressive narrative arc: from an episode of violence deemed a battle by most white Westerners but a massacre by Bent, to another deemed a massacre by most white readers early in the new century but a battle by Bent.68

  Bent still had stories to tell. After experiencing the initial thrill of appearing in print, like many first-time authors he found himself craving more. His articles created a bit of a stir in Colorado, where some of Chivington’s partisans resented Bent’s revisionism, but he received little attention beyond that. He did not become rich or famous, and he blamed the Frontier. “I don’t think the Frontier is much of a paper,” he complained to Hyde. The Frontier then shut its doors, leaving Bent searching for another outlet for his prose. Hyde, for his part, assured Bent that the market craved a book about the Cheyennes and that he was the man to help produce such a volume. Bent agreed. And so, for another decade, he wrote to Hyde, the subjects of his letters ranging from the poetic (accounts of Cheyenne rituals) to the geographic (maps of important events from the tribe’s past, including depictions of the massacre) to the prosaic (Bent’s circuitous quest for an effective safety razor).69

  Although Bent died long before the fruits of his labor with Hyde found their way into the public eye, their book, Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters, offers the Cheyenne historian’s last word on Sand Creek. The chapter on the massacre begins with discussion of a map, which George Hyde regretted had been lost some time before the book’s publication. Bent explains that he had produced the drawing with the help of tribal elders, “who were in the camps at the time of the massacre.” Working together, they had sketched out details of the violence, including the location of the Cheyenne and Arapaho villages during the assault, the shape of the stream in November 1864, and the direction from which the Colorado volunteers had approached Sand Creek.70

  As in his Frontier articles, Bent then recalls that Black Kettle had an “American flag tied to the end of a long lodgepole and was standing in front of his lodge … the flag fluttering in the grey light of the winter dawn.” He adds, “When the soldiers first appeared,” neither Black Kettle nor White Antelope, who a year earlier had traveled with Lean Bear to Washington on a peace mission, could “believe that an attack was about to be made on the camps.” Waving his flag, Black Kettle kept signaling to the onrushing troops that his bands were friendly. White Antelope, for his part, “had been telling the Cheyennes for months that the whites were good people and that peace was going to be made.” He had even “induced many people to come to this camp, telling them that the camp was under the protection of Fort Lyon and that no harm would come to them.” Now, though, ashamed of his complicity in the unfolding slaughter, he “made up his mind not to live any longer.” He “stood in front of his lodge with his arms folded across his breast, singing the death song: ‘Nothing lives long, Only the earth and the mountains.’ ” The soldiers obliged White Antelope; they “shot him and he fell dead in front of his lodge.”71

  In this telling, Bent spills little ink recounting how troops mangled the corpses of fallen Native people—“this butchers’ work”—focusing instead on the massacre’s aftermath. “There we were,” he recalls, “on that bleak, frozen plain, without any shelter whatever [Chivington’s men had burned the remnants of the camp after the fight] and not a stick of wood to build a fire.” Covering their exposed kin with grass, able-bodied Cheyennes and Arapahos shambled downstream, walking among “the naked and mutilated bodies of the dead” as they combed the field for “wives, husbands, children, or friends.” Bent concludes, “That night will never be forgotten as long as any of us who went through it are alive.” So it came to pass. Word spread that Chivington’s troops were being feted “as heroes” in D
enver, that some of them had taken “ghastly souvenirs” from Sand Creek—including “tobacco bags made of pieces of skin cut from the bodies of dead Cheyenne women”—while others were exhibiting Indian scalps at a Denver theater as “the audience cheered and the orchestra rendered patriotic airs.” The ordeal’s survivors, meanwhile, carried only bitter memories with them from the massacre. For two hundred more bloody pages, Life of George Bent catalogs how those recollections helped fuel the Indian Wars, the author remembering how violence begat violence, a final challenge to John Chivington’s claim that Sand Creek had quieted the Plains.72

  Because Bent viewed Sand Creek through the lens of Cheyenne history, he quickly moved beyond struggles over whether the violence should be recalled as a battle or a massacre—in part because for Native Americans that question had long since been answered, but also because focusing on the controversy over nomenclature threatened to diminish the event’s significance. Yes, of course Sand Creek had been a massacre, Bent observed, but it had been more than that: it had been the moment when it became impossible for even the most idealistic chiefs to hope for peace with white settlers. Bent consequently placed Sand Creek in the deeper context of the federal government’s long-standing dealings with Indian peoples. And when it came to the Cheyennes, he made certain to portray that relationship as reciprocal. His people, Bent always insisted, had not merely been buffeted by the political crosswinds whipping the Great Plains after the Civil War; they had fought to chart their own course during that stormy period.73

  Whereas Chivington and Soule depicted the Plains Tribes as purely reactive, their fates shaped solely by decisions external to their communities, or as hardwired by racial destiny for eventual ruin, Bent stressed the political independence of the Cheyennes. Although he never employed the words “sovereignty” or “self-determination,” his writings presaged these concepts, highlighting how his people had always relied on their own institutions—fractured and ineffectual though they sometimes were—for civil governance and military leadership. Still, for all his emphasis on tribal autonomy and the political give-and-take between Cheyenne and white authorities, Bent laid the blame for Sand Creek at the feet of federal officials. The U.S. government, he suggested, working blindly in service of an expansionist agenda, had used violence to uproot the Plains Tribes. The massacre, in this light, looked less like a one-time event, an exception rather than the rule, and more like a predictable outgrowth of public policy.74

  In another way as well, Bent’s Sand Creek stories differed from Chivington’s and Soule’s: Bent suggested that hypocrisy sometimes attenuated Civil War–era patriotism. He did this most often by leveraging allegorical meanings attached to the American flag. The Civil War began in April 1861 when Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard ordered an artillery barrage on Fort Sumter, the federal garrison located in Charleston harbor. After holding out for more than a day, the fort’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered the installation. Anderson later carried Fort Sumter’s flag, a powerful image of the nation besieged, with him to the Union. American flags of all kinds then became resonant symbols throughout the war; by 1864, the flag served as a synecdoche for the United States. Bent often recounted that the Colorado volunteers had fired on Black Kettle even as the chief draped himself in the flag, displaying his peaceful intentions by running Old Glory up over his lodge or waving it from a pole in his hand. Chivington’s Sand Creek stories charged Bent with treason, pointing to his service in the Confederate Army. Bent responded to such allegations with stories of his own, about the desecration of the flag, calling into question Chivington’s love of country.75

  In the end, Bent did not write to rebut Chivington’s Sand Creek stories or to amend Soule’s. He wrote so that his people’s ongoing struggle for survival would be remembered accurately. By the time that Bent began working with James Mooney, George Bird Grinnell, and George Hyde, the Southern Cheyennes lived on a reservation surrounded by the state of Oklahoma, approximately one hundred miles west of Oklahoma City. The Northern Cheyennes, who skirmished with the U.S. government late into the nineteenth century, had won a reservation sited on the Tongue River, roughly ninety miles east of the Little Bighorn Battlefield in southeastern Montana. Despite dire predictions of their impending demise, the Cheyennes had not vanished. They had survived Chivington’s onslaught and the Indian Wars. But what, Bent wondered, of another existential peril? What of modernity? Federal authorities continued trying to strip the Plains Tribes of their distinctive identity: sometimes shipping their children off to be acculturated at boarding schools; sometimes threatening traditional people, who struggled to preserve the tribes’ history and ancient ways, with retribution; and sometimes, as part of the Dawes Act, allotting parcels of their communally held land to individual proprietors. At the same time, popular fiction and historical accounts bastardized the Cheyennes’ past; in Bent’s words, “whites never get it straight.” As it became clear that sedentary farming, private property regimes, and coerced Christianity did not suit many Cheyennes and that mass culture threatened to sweep away their traditions, Bent worried that his tribe’s heritage might die out after all. He responded by devoting the last decades of his life to his memory project, gathering scores of tribal histories for publication.76

  But on the eve of his death, in 1918, Bent worried that the trio of scholars he had chosen as partners and publicists had failed him. At the time, all Bent had to show for his years of toil were his essays in the Frontier, which, in his view, had come up wanting, and Grinnell’s Fighting Cheyennes, which, though successful, buried Bent’s efforts in the footnotes and amid the contributions of other informants. Two years earlier, Hyde had completed the bulk of an early draft of Bent’s memoir, but he had failed to secure a publishing deal. He kept searching until 1930, when, with the nation slipping into the Great Depression, he gave up and sold the manuscript to the Denver Public Library. There it languished for nearly forty more years until finally, in 1968, as the Red Power moment arrived, so did Life of George Bent. The book captivated tribal activists and students of history. Bent’s people had survived still more hardships. His stories had survived, too, and they would serve modern Cheyennes as a primer on their past.77

  Chivington’s and Soule’s stories, archived as part of the federal inquiries into Sand Creek, also survived the century after the violence. And when, in the 1990s, the NPS began thinking about how best to memorialize the massacre, dissonance between the competing accounts became deafening. Lasting repercussions of continental expansion; the power of racial ideologies in shaping the West; ongoing battles over the political and cultural sovereignty of Native peoples; the role of state-sponsored violence during the Civil War era; and the painful contradictions embedded in American nationalism: these were the core elements contested in Bent’s, Soule’s, and Chivington’s Sand Creek stories. It is no wonder, then, that as federal officials, tribal representatives, and local people living on Colorado’s Eastern Plains reopened debates surrounding the legacy of Sand Creek, they found themselves engaged in bitter disputes over the meaning of history and memory. Looking back to Bent’s, Soule’s, and Chivington’s massacre stories, they fought over many of the same issues and, because of the contingent nature of collective memory, others more in line with contemporary concerns.78

  The process of commemorating Sand Creek proved that the massacre remained a “history front” in a simmering “culture war,” as contested perceptions of the past revealed fault lines in the present. In many ways, participants in the Sand Creek memorialization project had incommensurable goals: national unity versus local autonomy versus tribal sovereignty. And so, while each new fight over American memory highlights the difficulty of agreeing on a single historical narrative within the confines of a pluralistic society, the case of Sand Creek proved unusually complicated. Time and again, the process nearly blew up because the United States is a nation of nations; because the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes are sovereign political entities, distinct cultures wi
th unique understandings of the past; and because residents of Kiowa County have their own perspectives on history, shaped by their own political interests and by features of their own community, which often diverge from the federal government’s or from Native peoples’. Collective remembrance in this case, it became clear, was as likely to tear scabs from old wounds as to heal them. But the Sand Creek site did eventually open its doors, because at critical moments each of the interested parties understood that a commitment to remembering the past meant accepting the existence of multiple, sometimes even competing, recollections rather than a single, unified collective memory. The story of how a diverse group of people worked to bridge cultural divides in order to find and remember a misplaced massacre is the subject of this book. That story began with a mystery.79

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  LOOTERS

  In late summer 1993, two amateur artifact collectors traveled to a southeastern Colorado ranch owned by a man named William Dawson. Variously described by people familiar with the effort to memorialize the massacre as “history buffs,” “treasure hunters,” or, with tongue in cheek, “looters,” the men drew attention to themselves in Eads, a Ford pickup kind of town, by arriving in a luxury car. Passionate about Western history, they wanted to return home with a small part of the past, to own a piece of one of the region’s greatest tragedies. They came looking for arrowheads, minié balls, regimental pins, or any other materials associated with the Sand Creek massacre. And they chose Dawson’s land because conventional wisdom dictated that Black Kettle’s and Left Hand’s people had, on the night of November 28, 1864, camped in a large bend in the creek there. The next morning the massacre reputedly had begun at that spot, before continuing upstream, a running engagement, for several miles. Oddly, though, no matter how hard the two men scoured the ground, systematically working a series of grids with their metal detectors, they found none of the relics that should have been spread across a site where more than a thousand people had fought for their lives during a daylong slaughter. The absence of artifacts made no sense. Unless, that is, there was a simple explanation: the men were prospecting in the wrong place.1