A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Puzzled, the two collectors traveled to Denver, where they contacted David Halaas, the chief historian at the Colorado Historical Society. They told Halaas, “the ground was completely sterile, there wasn’t any evidence at all that a massacre happened there,” and suggested that maybe the slaughter had taken place in another creek bend, eight miles to the north of the Dawson ranch. Halaas, a native Coloradan and one of the leading experts on the massacre’s history, at the time was almost finished writing a book about George Bent. Although Halaas found the prospect that the site had been misplaced “potentially earthshaking,” akin, in his words, to “suddenly losing track of the Gettysburg battlefield,” he remained uncertain about the story’s credibility. Neverthless, he approached his coauthor on the Bent book, Andy Masich, who, as vice president of the Historical Society, also served as Halaas’s boss at the time. Together, they began the initial search for the Sand Creek massacre site.2

  Their hunt ultimately would prove significant less for its results than for the interdisciplinary methodology it introduced, for bringing a disparate cast of characters together, and for touching off a series of nettlesome controversies—all of which would later shape the National Park Service’s (NPS) effort to create the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Still, even if Halaas and Masich’s search would end in anticlimax, it began dramatically. The two historians convinced the Colorado National Guard to take them up in Huey helicopters during a training exercise on September 1, 1993. Halaas, recalling the film Apocalypse Now, noted how much he regretted not having brought along a recording of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for background music. The gunships took off from Buckley Field, near Denver, and headed southeast before flying over Dawson’s property and then further upstream to a second large bend in the creek. After spending a day in the air and poking around on land, Halaas, Masich, and the colleagues they brought along found no compelling evidence of the massacre at all. Still, they believed that Dawson’s ranch might have hosted the bloodshed. “It looks right, feels right, and meets all contemporary descriptions,” Masich wrote after their field trip. But he also cited “an archeological rule of thumb”: “no battle-related artifacts, probably no battlefield.” The two men decided that the search was “way too big of a project for a weekend kind of thing.” So they turned for help to the Colorado State Historical Fund (SHF), one of the nation’s most ambitious historic preservation initiatives.3

  The SHF disbursed grants underwritten by taxes levied on legal gambling in the Colorado mountain towns of Cripple Creek, Silver City, and Black Hawk. The grants, ranging from small sums to well into the six figures, supported preservation efforts that “demonstrate[d] public benefit and community support” throughout the state. In the case of Sand Creek, the SHF solicited an application from a professor named Dick Ellis, who directed the Center for Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College, in Durango. Ellis was a typical Westerner. Which is to say, he was originally from somewhere else. Growing up on Long Island, he heard tantalizing stories about the wonders of Colorado from a family friend, who came back from vacations there with pictures of mountain vistas and aspen groves. After graduating from Colgate University in upstate New York, Ellis made his way to Colorado and entered the PhD program in the University of Colorado–Boulder’s history department, where he met David Halaas. Ellis earned his doctorate in 1967 and then spent a year teaching at Murray State, in Kentucky (while there, he shared an office with the eminent historian of country music, Bill Malone), before landing a job at the University of New Mexico. Although he enjoyed his time in Albuquerque, he longed for Colorado, and in 1987 happily exchanged city life for Durango’s small-town living. Six years later, Halaas, who recalled that his graduate school colleague had a great deal of experience working closely with Native Americans, came calling.4

  When Halaas contacted Ellis in 1993, asking if he wanted to “put together an effort to find the site of the Sand Creek Massacre,” Ellis replied, “When did you lose it?” But like nearly everyone else who heard about the mystery, Ellis found himself hooked. Sand Creek remained an unusually ugly plot point in the state’s creation story. Chivington had attacked the peaceful Indians camped at Sand Creek, most historians agreed by the 1990s, not only because of his personal ambition to enter politics, but also as a way of vaulting Colorado beyond territorial status and toward statehood in the wake of the Civil War. Native Americans, from Chivington’s perspective, stood in the way of progress’s steady march westward. They had to be removed, or, in the case of Sand Creek, exterminated outright. That same story, tailored to fit particular circumstances, might describe much of nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian relations throughout the West. So if David Halaas exaggerated somewhat in likening the loss of the massacre site to misplacing the Gettysburg battlefield, he did not inflate the case by much—at least not for most Western historians, who, as the twentieth century wound down, viewed the massacre as a critical flash point in the decades-long wars between the U.S. Army and Native peoples on the Great Plains, conflicts that only ended with the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Eager to play a role in shaping how and where the critical event would be remembered, Ellis signed on to the search.5

  Because of ongoing controversy surrounding the massacre in Colorado, and because Sand Creek occupies a central place in the histories of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples, the SHF offered an initial grant, allowing Ellis to consult with the tribes, prior to moving forward with a full-blown search for the site. Ellis and his team spent eighteen months working on “diplomacy,” making multiple trips to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, the Northern Arapahos’ Wind River Reservation in Ethete, Wyoming, and the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho Reservation in Clinton, Oklahoma. Ellis recalled trying to “figure out who was who,” learning, in other words, who needed to be involved in the project. As time passed, he discovered that each of the tribes had groups, some more formal than others, devoted to representing the massacre’s descendants: for the Northern Arapahos, the Ridgelys, Eugene Sr., a painter and tribal elder, and Gail and Eugene Jr., his sons, both educators; for the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, Chief Laird Cometsevah and his wife, Colleen, a genealogist who had, for more than two decades, been tracing links back to Sand Creek; and for the Northern Cheyennes, the members of the Sand Creek Massacre Descendants Committee, led by Steve Brady, headman of the Crazy Dogs Society, and his younger brother, Otto Braided Hair, who oversaw the tribal descendants’ Sand Creek office.6

  For many of the descendants, stories of the massacre were dearly held, passed from one generation to the next, a family heirloom akin to a sacred text. Across nearly a century, from the start of the reservation era until relatively recently, Cheyenne and Arapaho people were discouraged, sometimes violently, from telling their Sand Creek stories. Boarding school administrators, Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, and other white authorities believed that keeping alive memories of the massacre preserved links to the past, to a traditional way of life, hindering acculturation. These stories, consequently, took on added significance because they were endangered and thus preserved away from prying eyes. Steve Brady, for instance, learned about Sand Creek when he was a little boy. He lived in a one-room log house with his paternal grandparents, who oversaw his cultural education. When night fell, Brady often crawled into bed with his grandfather, who told “creation stories, stories of the battles his parents had fought, stories of ordeals, of the massacre, of the good times and the hard times they endured.” Laird Cometsevah heard the story of Sand Creek from his father, who recounted the family’s history outside, usually on camping trips, away from nosy outsiders. And Norma Gorneau, another member of the Northern Cheyenne Sand Creek Massacre Descendants Committee, explained that she always cried when relating her family’s massacre story, knowing that her memories of Sand Creek came down to her at great cost through the generations.7

  The massacre remained a living memory for many descendants; it shaped their daily lives, helping to fo
rge their individual and collective identity, as well as their relationship to family and tribal history. Many Sand Creek stories depicted the massacre as a watershed, suggesting, much as George Bent once had, that it was the moment when even Black Kettle’s peace faction finally had to reckon with the apocalyptic consequences of onrushing white settlers’ endless land hunger and the rapacious nature of the U.S. government. Steve Brady, well aware that he might have sounded melodramatic, nonetheless suggested that the betrayal at Sand Creek “taught the Cheyenne people that whites would never let us live in peace.” Laird Cometsevah agreed with that stark assessment. “After Sand Creek,” he said, “the Cheyennes understood that the white government would always take what it wanted, right or wrong.” Brady, Cometsevah, and other descendants’ Sand Creek stories underscored that Chivington had attacked bands that both wanted and believed they had already secured peace with whites. Memories of the massacre suggested, consequently, that Indian people should be wary of promises made by non-Indians. That many descendants were forced through the years to safeguard their Sand Creek stories from white censorship only amplified this painful lesson as time passed.8

  Luckily for Dick Ellis, he did not represent the federal government. Luckier still, when he traveled to the Arapahos’ and Cheyennes’ reservations, he often brought along David Halaas, who became a close friend and confidant of Brady and Cometsevah, the most influential of the Cheyenne descendants. Steve Brady was an imposing man. He stood about six feet tall, was wide across the shoulders and thick around the middle, and usually wore his jet-black hair in a ponytail. He walked slowly, as though savoring his surroundings, and spoke in a rumbling baritone. But he rarely said much and often intimidated his audiences with long silences. When he did talk, the words usually came out deliberately. And he punctuated much of what he said with a deep belly laugh and a mischievous gleam in his eyes. Like many Cheyenne people, Brady used humor, rooted in good-natured teasing, to leaven even the most somber situations—except when he got angry, frightening storms that, if one managed to weather them, proved to be both exceedingly rare and usually deployed for effect. Laird Cometsevah, by contrast, carried himself with an air of almost preternatural calm. More than six feet tall, wiry as a long-distance runner, he wore his gray hair cropped short and loped through space with graceful strides. Cometsevah commanded any room, no matter how large or full, that he entered, even though he almost never raised his voice above a loud whisper and spoke in a raspy tenor marked by a mild Oklahoma accent. He possessed grace, charisma, gravitas; people were drawn to him. The two men, Cometsevah and Brady, often worked as a formidable duo. Over time they became useful allies for Ellis.9

  That alliance went both ways, proving Ellis lucky thrice over, as the descendants’ interests aligned with the site searchers’ goals. The head of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes’ business committee pointed Ellis toward the Cometsevahs, who proved sympathetic, arranging a meeting with “thirty or forty descendants.” Ellis then went to the Northern Arapahos, whose tribal government suggested working with the Ridgelys. Next came the Northern Cheyennes. Steve Brady, laughing, recalled Ellis, Halaas, and Andy Masich arriving in Lame Deer for the first time: “three white guys … thinking about pursuing the massacre site.” Brady’s Descendants Committee had tribal authorization to deal with all issues related to Sand Creek, and he indicated that its members would be willing to cooperate with the site search. Mildred Red Cherries, who also served on that committee, explained the choice: “We decided it was all right for them to get funding and try to find it [the site] since we needed the location to try to go after Article 6.” Red Cherries meant that many of the Northern and Southern Cheyenne descendants had already begun pursuing the reparations promised in Article 6 of the Treaty of the Little Arkansas but never delivered by federal authorities. Both Brady and Laird Cometsevah believed that looking for the site would further that goal by publicizing the injustice of Sand Creek.10

  Having secured tribal support, Ellis received funding to start searching. Choosing not to rely on any single scholarly discipline for guidance, he devised a plan elegant for its methodological breadth but, in the end, short on results. Gary Roberts, a historian whose dissertation represented the gold standard among studies of Sand Creek, would comb through archives, looking for hints of the site’s location in the documentary record. An aerial photographer would try to locate the trails that Black Kettle’s people had traveled on their way to camp prior to the slaughter. A team armed with metal detectors would reconnoiter possible sites for relevant artifacts. An expert in remote sensing would search deeper beneath the earth’s surface. And the tribal representatives would offer guidance. As time passed, each of these efforts yielded nothing but frustration: Roberts learned that historical documents offered little clear evidence about the site’s placement; from above, the trails petered out when they crossed land that had been regularly cultivated for more than a century; the remote sensors discovered little of consequence; and the Cheyennes and Arapahos, who never really had any doubts about the site’s location, looked on bemused. The team of metal detectors, meanwhile, waited for Doug Scott, a renowned battlefield archeologist, to find time in his busy schedule to coordinate their efforts.11

  Although the preliminary results disappointed Ellis, these early efforts to pinpoint the massacre’s location proved more significant than he realized at the time. Many of the relationships, some friendly, some adversarial, forged during the search became critical when the NPS attempted to find and protect the Sand Creek site. David Halaas became close with Steve Brady and Laird Cometsevah. Brady and Cometsevah, in turn, grew comfortable working together on projects related to Sand Creek. And William Dawson, who owned the land that most observers believed had hosted the violence, changed a number of his deeply held views because of his experiences during the search: he accepted that Sand Creek had been a massacre, whereas he had long insisted that it had been a battle; he became close with several of the Cheyenne people, whom he had distrusted for decades; and, perhaps most important of all, he eventually decided that he wanted to sell his property and leave Kiowa County, the place where he and his wife had lived most of their lives.12

  A rancher who had spent the better part of his life working outdoors, Bill Dawson carried himself with a sense of quiet power. Often taciturn, when he felt challenged or sank his teeth into a subject that held his interest, he became suddenly expansive. Declarative sentences then tumbled from his mouth in rapid-fire bursts. To hammer a point home, he would slow his cadence, weaving didactic tales filled with dramatic irony and sarcastic asides, revealing himself as a born storyteller. Dawson was also, at first glance, a bundle of contradictions. He was a deeply learned man, an autodidact and lightning-quick study, with an insatiable appetite for fine-grained information about military history and ordnance. But he mostly held intellectuals in contempt for their soft lives. He was a committed patriot, proud of his honorable service in the U.S. Navy. But he believed that the federal government was little more than a dangerous nuisance: intrusive, imperious, and prone to flights of fancy. He was unafraid to throw his weight around and could be a bully. But he went out of his way to charm people with courtly manners. He loathed “political correctness” and scorned contemporary trends toward identity politics. But he admired the Cheyennes, counting Laird Cometsevah, Steve Brady, and Otto Braided Hair among his friends. He was a complex man, in his own words “brutally honest” and “a bit ornery.”13

  For three decades prior to the beginning of Dick Ellis’s site search, Dawson had owned the property that most people believed had hosted the bloodletting. That assumption rested on an earlier era’s effort to commemorate Sand Creek. Although the word “massacre” represented an uncomfortable compromise for many local people when the national historic site opened in 2007, Kiowa County had a long history of deploying memories of Sand Creek, typically sanitized for mass consumption, to spur its economy. On August 6, 1950, for instance, the county unveiled two Sand Creek historic mark
ers at an elaborate public ceremony. The first sat atop a small rise overlooking a lazy bend in the creek, located several miles north of State Highway 96. At a time before most Americans traveled via interstate highways, the chambers of commerce in Eads and Lamar, the area’s two largest towns, paid for the historical marker, hoping to entice motor tourists to stop for a rest in their communities. The hilltop monument hewed closely to the Sand Creek story that had circulated in the region since John Chivington and his troops had returned to Denver after the massacre in December 1864. The ochre marble slab featured an image of a “lifelike Indian” wearing a “full war headdress” above the words “Sand Creek Battle Ground.” Paul Steward, who produced gravestones in Lamar, had carved the monument. Boosting the event, the local press conferred legitimacy on the artist’s rendering by describing Steward as a “lifetime student of Indian lore.” And at the unveiling, Levi Rutledge, who owned the property at the time, promised that interested sightseers would always be welcome to visit his land.14

  The Sand Creek Battle Ground marker, ca. 1950s, seen from the top of the monument overlook. The photographer was facing upstream, looking along the ridgeline (to the left) and down into the dry creek bed. The earth around the monument has subsequently filled in, so the base of the marker sits flush with the surrounding soil. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection; Opan Harper, photographer; X-32025.)

  The hilltop marker did its work by pairing with the second monument, an obelisk sponsored by the Colorado Historical Society, fashioned of stone and located just outside the small town of Chivington, just off Highway 96. Bearing a bronze plaque headed by the mixed message “Sand Creek: ‘Battle’ or ‘Massacre,’ ” the state’s column suggested that by 1950, cultural politics had already begun complicating efforts to memorialize the violence. The monument recounted the barest facts of the massacre, relying on the passive voice to obscure responsibility for the bloodshed, and pulling its punches still further by avoiding any mention of atrocities or even the number of Indian people killed. By contrast, the marker placed Chivington’s losses precisely at ten dead and thirty-eight wounded. The text concluded by calling Sand Creek “one of the regrettable tragedies of the conquest of the West”—all in all, an ambiguous set of messages, whispering of the need to placate wealthy Historical Society donors, the people of Kiowa County, and other Colorado taxpayers. After eating a celebratory dinner, roughly three hundred people, including Colonel Chivington’s granddaughter and descendants of some of the Native Americans present at the massacre, drove to the highway marker. They wound their way from there in “a caravan of autos” to “the actual battle ground,” where Paul Steward gave a tour of the “battle area.” Leroy Hafen, Colorado’s chief historian in 1950, oversaw both dedication ceremonies.15