by Ari Kelman
Although their treatment at the Senate hearings still rankled, the Cheyenne descendants nonetheless celebrated the passage of Senator Campbell’s legislation, because it served their interests. To begin with, there apparently would be no more linguistic debates surrounding Sand Creek memorials; the act defined the events of November 29, 1864, as a “massacre,” plain and simple, seemingly rendering the “Battle” of Sand Creek a relic from self-serving histories white Westerners had crafted in the nineteenth century and promulgated in the twentieth. At the same time, Campbell’s act acknowledged an unpaid debt, embedded in Article 6 of the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, owed by federal authorities to some Cheyennes and Arapahos. The legislation also noted, “the site is of great significance” to the descendants. Because of this, the tribes would have “the right of open access to visit the site and rights of cultural and historical observance.” The act then laid out the task at hand: the federal government, represented by the NPS, would collaborate with officials from the State of Colorado and the four affected tribes—the Northern and Southern branches of the Cheyenne and Arapaho—to “identify the location and extent of the massacre area and the suitability and feasibility of designating the site as a unit of the National Park Service.” Their detective work would have to be completed in just eighteen months, an ambitious timetable for an agency notorious for lengthy deliberation. And by placing the tribes on equal footing with the NPS, the act ensured that Cheyenne and Arapaho people would have voices in the memorialization process.44
The legislation included a final provision that touched off a number of unintended consequences for the way that Sand Creek would be remembered: land for the memorial could be acquired by the NPS from “willing sellers” only. The NPS would not be able to take property for the site through the legal mechanisms of condemnation or eminent domain. Upon hearing the news, some residents in Kiowa County, Bill Dawson especially, issued a sigh of relief. From the start of Dick Ellis’s site search, rumors had flown around the plains of southeastern Colorado, suggesting that private property would be seized if government authorities deemed it historically significant. That this scuttlebutt had amounted to little more than nonsense had not allayed many people’s fears. Then, Senator Campbell rested his act upon one of the bedrock principles of the Republican Party’s Western caucus at the time: the federal government, which already owned more than 35 percent of the land in Colorado, should not take property from private hands and place it in the public realm. Campbell made this decision not only due to immutable political doctrine but also because he desperately wanted community support for the Sand Creek project. What he did not realize was how much power he had unwittingly vested in the hands of local landowners.45
Bill Dawson, by contrast, recognized two likely outgrowths of the Sand Creek Act’s willing-seller-only stipulation: that he had instantly become a power broker in the process of commemorating the massacre, and that his land likely had gained considerable value overnight. So long as the descendants remained certain that the massacre had taken place on his property, Dawson controlled the fate of Senator Campbell’s “pet project.” If he refused to allow the NPS on his land to conduct further studies, or if he chose not to sell his ranch when the moment came to create the national historic site, there would be no Sand Creek memorial. At the same time, the real estate market holds heritage dear. Association with a significant historical event, coupled with the laws of supply and demand, can inflate a property’s price tag. Dawson knew this. He understood that his ranch’s value would fluctuate depending on its centrality to the massacre story, and that the tribal representatives, because of their role in the memorialization process, would help determine the importance of his land. The politically savvy Dawson thus played his cards carefully, nurturing his relationship with the Cheyennes and consolidating his position whenever he could.46
Even before the site search legislation passed Congress, Dawson demonstrated his mastery of the memorialization process’s shifting political landscape. Homer Flute, president of a pan-tribal organization known as the Sand Creek Massacre Descendants Trust, a splinter from Laird Cometsevah’s Cheyenne-only group, wrote Dawson in spring 1998, informing him of the group’s upcoming visit to the site for ceremonial purposes. Dawson by then had grown quite close with Laird and Colleen Cometsevah. Because of that friendship and also because of Dawson’s understanding of the ramifications of prescriptions on property acquisition likely to be lodged in the Sand Creek Act, he guarded his ties to the Cheyenne descendants’ groups jealously. He knew, too, that the Cometsevahs disparaged Flute as an interloper and a potential rival for a future reparations claim based on Article 6 of the Little Arkansas treaty. Dawson, accordingly, wrote back to Flute that his group would be neither welcome nor allowed to enter the property. Flute, apparently certain that his cultural authority would trump Dawson’s property rights, replied that the rancher could not ban Indian people from performing their traditional rituals at the massacre site. Dawson dashed off a rejoinder, saying that, as the sole proprietor at the site, he could and would prevent the group from entering his land. When Flute and his descendants’ organization nevertheless arrived at Sand Creek, Dawson proved his point. Sheriff’s deputies met approximately three dozen Native people at the county road. Dawson had secured a restraining order, barring them from his land.47
The deputies escorted Flute and his party to a spot nearby, where they mourned the dead and performed a pipe ceremony, separated from the monument overlook by barbed wire. At the close of the ritual, the trust’s attorney, Larry Derryberry, announced to the crowd, “the next step is to ask assistance from those in Washington, to take this issue to Congress and to the President.” Claiming a place for the massacre descendants near the pinnacle of a well-established hierarchy of victimization, Derryberry explained that his organization would seek “reparations comparable to those given Holocaust survivors, Japanese-American internees, Haitians, Ugandans, Rwandans, etc.” One of the descendants, Dorothy Wood, looked on with tears streaming down her face. She diagrammed the massacre in the sandy soil at her feet, noting where the lodges of Black Kettle and her ancestor, White Antelope, had been positioned during the slaughter. Wood then joined a somber parade of cars making the long drive back east to Oklahoma. The local press, revealing southeastern Colorado’s ongoing ambivalence about how to categorize Sand Creek, reported on the gathering in two adjacent articles, one describing the violence as a “massacre,” the other calling it a “battle.”48
At around the same time that Dawson faced off with Homer Flute, the NPS began gearing up to find the site—still months before Campbell’s bill became law. Aware that there would be little time to complete the search after the legislation passed both houses of Congress, NPS officials crafted a plan of action and tried to secure cooperation from all of the concerned parties. Cathy Spude, who at the time led the NPS’s Sand Creek search initiative, began pondering the composition of her team, using Dick Ellis’s experience as a guide. The site search, true to its origins under Ellis, would remain an interdisciplinary effort. Historians would scrutinize documentary sources. Anthropologists would collect ethnographies from descendants. Aerial photographers would search from above for historic trails. Geomorphologists would determine if Sand Creek had shifted its course since the time of the massacre, or if deposition or erosion had altered the earth’s shape significantly enough to render landmarks gleaned from the historical record useless. And finally, depending on the results of the above studies, battlefield archeologists would search all of the possible sites for artifacts. Before any of that could happen, though, Spude needed to gain the descendants’ trust while keeping Bill Dawson happy.49
Neither proved to be an easy task. Lingering resentments, born of the descendants’ treatment at the Senate’s site hearings, exacerbated their long-standing skepticism regarding the federal government and its proxies in the NPS. To bridge the divide, Spude turned to Colorado’s chief historian, David Halaas. “Because of the connectio
ns he had already made with the descendants,” she hoped that Halaas would act as a “liaison” between the NPS and the tribal represenatives. He rejected that role. Halaas’s relationship with the Cheyenne descendants, forged during the first site search, coupled with the research he was completing for his biography of George Bent, defined his identity far more than did his job at the Colorado Historical Society. Spude, who had begun her work with such high hopes for Halaas’s contribution, found herself “disappointed” by him, “unsure of where his loyalties lay at any point.” For his part, Halaas looked back without regret on the choices he made at that time. He recalled deciding to “throw his hat in with the Cheyennes when forced to pick sides.” As a result, his vision for the site search often clashed with that of the NPS. And when the NPS would lock horns with the Cheyennes, Halaas always backed the descendants.50
Because of Halaas’s relationship with the Cheyenne representatives, Spude was correct that he did not embrace the NPS’s site search as his top priority in summer 1998. While she focused on Kiowa County and Bill Dawson’s ranch, Halaas’s gaze lingered closer at hand, drawn by a Sand Creek memory fight heating up just a few hundred feet from his office door. In 1909, the Colorado Pioneers Association placed a Civil War monument on the state capitol steps in Denver. The Pioneers’ memorial—a Union cavalryman cast in bronze, on foot and carrying his rifle, peering westward into the middle distance where the foothills of the Rocky Mountains rise just outside Denver—featured a plaque affixed to its base, cataloging all of the “battles” in which Coloradans had fought throughout the Civil War. Sand Creek was listed among them. This perspective gathered significance because of the memorial’s placement. Located just outside the capitol’s front door and looming high above Civic Center Park, Denver’s most important municipal public space, the monument offered a de facto city- and state-sponsored memory of the bloodshed at Sand Creek.51
In 1909, the Colorado Civil War memorial represented a local manifestation of a generational commemorative impulse sweeping the United States. Around the turn of the twentieth century, most members of the 1st and 3rd Colorado Regiments had died or were nearing the end of their lives. The same was true for Civil War veterans nationwide. The result was a huge campaign around the country to archive documents, publish regimental histories, and build monuments. All of this activity comprised part of an organized but diffuse effort to shape, for posterity, the way future generations would remember the war and the people who fought it. This upsurge in memorialization was akin to what students of collective memory call “the invention of tradition,” the way that societies create historical narratives or rituals to suit contemporary political or cultural conditions. Invented traditions are often crafted to maintain power relations and uphold the status quo. In the case of turn-of-the-century Civil War commemorative activity, communities were dealing with anxieties over massive changes facing the United States: industrialization, urbanization, and, among others, immigration. Nostalgia reigned, consequently, as Americans idealized the Civil War generation for its virtues and sacrifices. The monuments that cropped up were designed to inspire onlookers to venerate a shared iteration of the past and to embrace a reconciliationist narrative of the war.52
For members of the Pioneers Association, as well as other stewards of the Civil War’s collective memory in Colorado, including the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, Sand Creek presented something of a problem. Beginning during the era of Reconstruction and continuing through the early part of the twentieth century, a heroic narrative of the war predominated, in which both the Union and the Confederacy had fought hard, fought well, and fought for just causes. Unresolved issues, like the war’s deeper causes—including slavery, other ongoing racial inequities, and the lingering consequences of westward expansion—could be forgotten in service of an amicable reunion and the goal of getting back to the business of doing business. No room for events like a Sand Creek “massacre” existed in this story of the war and its aftermath, no room for atrocities, and, given the still-simmering conflict with indigenous people on the Plains, no room for Native Americans at all. If Sand Creek were to be part of this emerging national Civil War narrative, as Coloradans hoped in 1909, it would have to be cast as a “battle,” for there had been few “massacres” in that noble war.53
On July 24 of that year, the Pioneers Association unveiled its memorial, designed by John Howland, who had served in the 1st Colorado Regiment during the Civil War. With Colorado’s governor, John Shafroth, waylaid by a rockslide in the mountains, the state supreme court’s chief justice, Robert Steele, oversaw the ceremony before a parade of elderly veterans and a crowd of admirers numbering in the thousands. The press reported that “a hush of patriotic awe” fell over the throng as the American flag shrouding the monument slipped away. A twenty-one-gun salute pierced the thin air, a band played “Marching through Georgia,” balanced next by “Dixie,” and Senator Thomas “T. M.” Patterson then remarked, in the spirit of reconciliation: “We are all Americans today, and we all glory in one flag and in one country.” Ignoring Sand Creek’s impact on the Arapahos and Cheyennes, General Irving Hale, who spoke later, suggested that the “Civil War … made freedom universal.” The Pioneers Association had, it seemed, sanded down the massacre’s rough edges and carved John Chivington’s narrative of the slaughter into stone by including Sand Creek among the twenty-two Civil War “battles” in which Coloradans had participated.54
Eighty-nine years later, though, amid a storm of publicity generated by Senator Campbell’s plans for memorializing the massacre, Sand Creek seemed misplaced yet again, this time among the list of engagements arrayed on the Pioneers Association monument. On May 5, 1998, the Colorado legislature, whose members sometimes walked by the Civil War memorial on their way to work in the capitol building, decided to correct an “insult to the memory” of the “Native Americans who were killed at Sand Creek” and also to the “Colorado Civil war veterans who fought and died in the actual Civil War battles that are listed on the memorial.” The state legislature passed a joint resolution noting, “Sand Creek was not, in fact, the site of a battle, but of a massacre” and therefore would “be removed from the memorial.” Put another way, the words Sand Creek” would literally be erased from the list at the foot of the statue. A local sculptor would detach the plaque on which the twenty-two “battles” appeared, grind away the offending text, sandblast the remaining twenty-one, apply a patina to match the original color, and then reinstall the bronze plate at the foot of the statue. It seemed in that moment that generations of public remembrance could be scraped away and recast, the sins of the past wiped clean, all for the bargain price of $1,000.55
The Colorado Civil War Memorial, Denver. Originally unveiled in 1909, the memorial sits on the west side of the state capitol, facing Civic Center Park and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains beyond. (Courtesy History Colorado, C-Denver-Buildings, Govt-State-Capitol-Exterior, Scan 10037235.)
But then David Halaas heard about the resolution. He was still collaborating with Dick Ellis on the first site search at the time and was also just becoming involved with the NPS’s early efforts to memorialize Sand Creek. He had already established close ties with the Cheyenne descendants, especially with Laird Cometsevah and Steve Brady, who by then viewed Halaas as a friend and occasional advisor. Halaas also headed the Colorado Historical Society’s Roadside Interpretation Project, an initiative that placed displays throughout the state, offering surprisingly nuanced drive-through analyses of key episodes from the recent and distant past. This combination of duties arguably made Halaas the state’s most influential public historian, the person with the greatest understanding of and impact on how Coloradans experienced their heritage. As a result, Halaas had a keen interest in both shaping and protecting Colorado’s collective memories. At around the same time that Cathy Spude began doubting his loyalties, Halaas believed that he had found an important task—the struggle over the fate of the Civil War memorial—in whi
ch he could represent his employer, the State of Colorado, and his friends, the Sand Creek descendants, without any conflict of interest.56
Halaas feared that the legislature’s benign revisionism might inadvertently undermine the impact of Senator Campbell’s memorialization efforts. After learning that State Senator Bob Martinez, the monument resolution’s sponsor, had not consulted “the tribally recognized and official Sand Creek Descendants organizations in Oklahoma and Montana,” Halaas contacted Cometsevah and Brady, soliciting their views of the proposed changes to the plaque. Chief Cometsevah appreciated the “sentiment that Sand Creek should be considered a massacre and not a battle worthy of celebration” but worried nevertheless that the massacre had already been forgotten often enough in “history books and the public mind.” He also “pointed out the absurdity of Senator Campbell supporting a national bill to commemorate and remember Sand Creek while at the same time the Colorado Legislature supports a state resolution erasing Sand Creek.” Cometsevah and Halaas then suggested a compromise: instead of “removing Sand Creek from the statue, we should inform the public about the massacre through historical markers.” They would, in other words, apply the principles of the Roadside Interpretation Project to the Civil War memorial on the state capitol steps.57
A plaque affixed to the base of the Colorado Civil War Memorial. The list includes every Civil War “battle” in which Coloradans fought. Sand Creek is included on the bottom right. (Photo by author.)
When Cathy Spude asked Halaas to woo the Sand Creek descendants on the NPS’s behalf, he instead busied himself with lobbying Colorado’s legislature to reconsider its Civil War memorial resolution. At the same time, Halaas secured Spude’s unwitting support for his efforts, suggesting that the NPS sponsor a preliminary site location meeting with the descendants, a gathering that would be timed to coincide with the state legislature’s hearings on the Civil War memorial. Halaas also encouraged a diverse coalition to pressure the lawmakers. Activists within Denver’s Native American communities had long viewed the memorial’s text as an “assault on Colorado’s Indian history,” but they supported the idea of reinterpreting the monument rather than “erasing Sand Creek.” Tom Noel, a history professor at the University of Colorado–Denver and a local public intellectual, penned an op-ed in the Denver Post, advising the legislature to “keep the words ‘Sand Creek’ ” on the Civil War memorial on the capitol steps. Noel then pitched the importance of historical contingency to his readers, observing, “if each generation censors the monuments … of predecessor generations, history becomes hopelessly shortsighted. The story of Sand Creek, with all its various interpretations, needs to be left open for public discussions and reflection.” Finally, Halaas asked Brady and Cometsevah to appeal directly to the Colorado legislature—a request they honored with an impassioned letter imploring the state’s well-meaning lawmakers to foster remembrance rather than institutionalize forgetting of Sand Creek.58