by Ari Kelman
As often happened during the search, the participants’ views on contemporary developments could in part be traced back to the era of the massacre. For the NPS staff, though immersed in the project and committed to their partnership with the descendants, Sand Creek was a subject of study and the site search a job that needed doing. For the tribal representatives, though, the massacre shaped their daily lives. As the ethnographies demonstrated, for the descendants, “the Sand Creek Massacre is not an event relegated to the past, but is a very real part of the Cheyenne people’s contemporary identity.” That was never more obvious than in Mildred Red Cherries’s reaction to the Bowens’ demand that she sign a legal release before entering their ranch. Red Cherries recalled worrying that the Bowens were asking her, in her official capacity as a representative to the search team, to sign “for the tribe.” She insisted that she did not have the authority to do that and would rather walk away from the search entirely than risk committing her tribe to a document that she did not entirely understand handed to her by people that she did not trust.77
In that moment, painful lessons drawn from the contested history of the Treaty of Fort Wise guided Red Cherries. In the wake of an 1859 gold strike in Colorado, tens of thousands of white migrants flowed into the Front Range, and territorial officials began pressuring the federal government to remove local tribes from the plains east of Denver. The Indians there stood in the way of progress, whites argued, threatening instant towns that were cropping up to mine the miners working claims in the mountains. In summer 1860, panic-stricken Denverites worried that the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, in cahoots with other Indian peoples from the region, would descend on the city, slaughtering its inhabitants. William Byers, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, responded to this ostensible menace by releasing a stream of inflammatory broadsides. Respectable whites would take matters into their own hands if the army did not pacify the tribes, he warned: “forbearance will cease to be virtue, public sympathy will be aroused by some overt act, or terrible outrage committed by the Indians, and a horrible and indiscriminate war will ensue.” Byers received satisfaction in July, when Congress appropriated funds to treat with the tribes.78
In September of that year, Arapaho and Cheyenne peace chiefs, including Little Raven, Left Hand, and, somewhat later, Black Kettle and White Antelope, arrived at a ranch owned by William Bent, George Bent’s father, a trader who also held a commission as the federal Indian agent for the region. At Bent’s property, tribal leaders planned to meet with Commissioner of Indian Affairs A. B. Greenwood. Late in the month, negotiations began, culminating in an agreement that limited the tribes to a triangular reservation located between Sand Creek and the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. By design, the site would bring the Native people into contact with the supposedly civilizing influence of white settlers, a move that reflected federal Indian policy at the time. Greenwood also believed that the land offered the Cheyennes and Arapahos the best chance of abandoning their bison-based economy and embracing sedentary agriculture instead. The tribes, though, continued hunting buffalo. And the reservation’s proximity to whites, coupled with food scarcities caused by the ongoing colonization of Colorado, ushered in escalating depredations in spring and summer 1864. Those depredations then led to reprisals from white settlers, to Governor Evans’s decision to raise the 3rd Colorado Regiment, and finally to the massacre.79
Searching for the site nearly a century and a half later, Mildred Red Cherries knew that history. She knew, too, that Black Kettle and White Antelope had insisted, when striking their deal with Greenwood, that they “would enter into such an agreement, and settle down, and allow the remaining portion of their tribe to locate where they saw proper.” In other words, the peace chiefs had clarified that they spoke only for those bands that followed them. The rest of the Cheyennes, including the more militant soldier societies, whose leaders at the time scorned peace, could go their own way. In the ensuing years, however, territorial and federal authorities, including John Evans and John Chivington, ignored this element of the Fort Wise treaty. Evans and Chivington relied on divide-and-conquer tactics, insisting that the accord bound the entire tribe to the reservation that Black Kettle and White Antelope had accepted only for a small fraction of their people. Now, Red Cherries, serving in her capacity as a tribal Sand Creek representative, drew on that history when she confronted the Bowens. She reacted by insisting that that she did not have the authority to sign for the Cheyenne people. No matter how many times the Bowens claimed that they simply wanted her as an individual to release them from liability, they could not persuade her to believe them.80
The controversy at the Bowen ranch did not scuttle the site search. But it did further erode what little trust the Cheyenne descendants had in the NPS and local landowners (other than Bill Dawson, who remained in their good graces). The day following the debacle at the Bowens’ ranch, rain confined the searchers to their hotel. The tribal representatives met privately, discussing their grievances. Even after they spent the next day surveying the rest of the Bowens’ land, the Cheyenne descendants remained angry about how Mildred Red Cherries had been treated and anxious about the implications of the artifact concentration’s location. Rick Frost and Doug Scott, meanwhile, still believed that the archeological fieldwork represented a moment of reconciliation in federal-tribal relations—even as the cross-cultural partnership actually was sinking beneath waves of ill feeling.81
Scott’s and Frost’s misapprehensions stemmed from positive interactions they had at the time, including evening visits with the Cheyenne descendants. Laird Cometsevah, Joe Big Medicine, and Mildred Red Cherries often knocked on Scott’s hotel room door, asking to see the artifacts they had pulled from the ground earlier in the day. On the last night of the survey, after the second day spent at the Bowens’ ranch, Steve Brady joined the group. As Scott unboxed materials for the descendants, Cometsevah asked about the next step in the process. Seeking common ground with the chief, Scott explained, “Well, it may sound funny coming from me, an archeologist and white guy, but I’m going to listen to these artifacts.” He allowed that “They’re not going to speak to me spiritually the way they speak to you. But they’ll still tell me how old they are; they’ll tell me at least part of what they were doing there; and with that information, I’ll be able to tell a story about them.” He promised, “The story I tell will be fitted with your memories of the place, and the spiritual meaning of it, and also what the history says.” Considering all that transpired after that, Scott later grimaced, saying, “It was a wonderful conversation. It was exciting. When we separated that evening it was very jovial, very congenial. We believed we had discovered the Sand Creek site.”82
Again, though, the Cheyenne descendants recalled that interaction differently than Scott did. Steve Brady recognized the artifact concentration’s significance, viewing it as “absolutely unequivocal” proof, if not of the exact site of Black Kettle’s village, at least of the massacre’s general location. But for him and Cometsevah, the accession numbers that Scott attached to the artifacts brought to mind the way the massacre’s victims had been treated in the wake of Sand Creek. Brady thought of the museums that still housed human remains lifted from the killing field and pondered the “ballistics research that had been conducted on some of the Cheyennes slaughtered at Sand Creek.” Of Scott’s exacting research methods, Brady said, “Not everything has to fit into a box. And some things really shouldn’t, even if they can.” Cometsevah voiced similar concerns. “Numbers,” he began, “why do white people feel like they have to put numbers on everything, no matter how sacred?” To Cometsevah, Scott “seemed like he never considered that those bullets might have killed one of our ancestors. He was too busy slapping numbers on them and getting ready to study them in his laboratory.” Barbara Sutteer, the NPS Indian liaison, viewed that moment as a turning point in the process. Had the NPS treated the artifacts with more respect, Sutteer contended, much trouble might have been averted later. “But
the Park Service way was to deal with tribal materials as objects ready for museum cases,” she lamented.83
Doug Scott, meanwhile, had no idea that problems were afoot. He returned to his home, in Lincoln, Nebraska, elated about the discoveries the search team had made at the dig and eager to interpret the antique materials they had found; these varied objects would, as he had promised Cometsevah, speak to him. And because the searchers had found the artifact concentration so near where Jerry Greene had suggested they would, Scott quickly settled on a working hypothesis that he and Greene had batted around for some time. This was their ideal outcome: the searchers had discovered “Black Kettle’s village,” the precise spot where John Chivington’s men had descended upon the unsuspecting Cheyennes on the morning of November 29, 1864. Scott could not yet be sure, of course. He still had more work to do, applying scientific methods to test his theory. But he was confident that additional research would prove him correct.84
Alexa Roberts greeted this theory with dread. At the time, she had not yet reached the midpoint of the ethnographic component of the site search, and already some of the stories the Arapaho and Cheyenne elders had shared suggested that Scott’s certitude about the precise location of Black Kettle’s village was badly misplaced. Roberts recalled riding from the archeological dig with Scott around that time and “distinctly hearing the words ‘village site’ being used a lot.” Speaking of “the village site, just one, especially right there”—distant from the monument overlook, the spot mapped by George Bent—did not square with what the descendants were telling her. Roberts later asked her colleagues if any other nomenclature might possibly be attached to the find. “Could it not be called the village site?” she wondered. “Maybe we could just call it part of the village site? The artifact concentration? Evidence of domestic artifacts? You know, a portion of the village site? Potential north end of the village site?” Growing more desperate as her pleas fell on deaf ears, she implored, “Is there anything else it can be called other than the village site?” No. “Zealousness and understandable enthusiasm took over,” Roberts remembered, “and it became the village site.” Her instincts were impeccable; more trouble was on the horizon for the search.85
4
ACCURATE BUT NOT PRECISE
The coffee was watery, the cigarette smoke stale, the recriminations bitter. On October 5, 1999, the site searchers met in Denver at yet another chain hotel, a concrete, steel, and glass tower plopped just off a busy artery in the city. The participants in the Sand Creek project had not gathered as a group since Doug Scott had completed the archeological fieldwork half a year earlier. The day began with updates from the National Park Service (NPS) teams. The drone of business as usual filled the room, interrupted only by the descendants “caucusing” or pulling Alexa Roberts and Barbara Sutteer aside for conversations about their ongoing oral history projects. It seemed that things might proceed without a hitch, deepening the NPS representatives’ impression that “everyone had reached consensus at the dig that we had found Sand Creek.” Then Rick Frost unfurled “a map of the length and extent of the massacre site.” On it, the NPS had marked the location of Black Kettle’s village, roughly a mile north of the hilltop memorial on Bill Dawson’s ranch. Frost, cringing, recalled that the NPS had labeled the map “DRAFT.” But even that precaution could not defuse “an explosion of emotion … on the part of the tribal folks.” The descendants were outraged; they believed they had been “betrayed.”1
Although he remembered being livid—“not surprised, mind you, because I never figured I could trust the federal government … but still hopping mad”—Laird Cometsevah unfolded his long legs from beneath the table where he sat next to his wife, Colleen, and strode deliberately to the front of the conference room. In those moments, with Cometsevah on the march, Rick Frost could feel his grip on the project slipping. He realized that the NPS “had made a huge mistake, that once something appeared on paper, the message to people was, this is a fact, this is it, this is done.” After staring for a moment at the NPS’s map, pondering the implications of the graphic representation of the massacre site, Cometsevah, using a red magic marker, “corrected the diagram.” He redrafted the NPS’s draft map, nestling Black Kettle’s village in the crook of Sand Creek, exactly where George Bent had located it at the start of the twentieth century and below where the monument still rested on Bill Dawson’s ranch. The room detonated into sharp discussions, testy back-and-forth sniping in which NPS personnel wondered if the Cheyenne representatives were acting in bad faith, while the descendants countered that the NPS was engaging in bureaucratic imperialism or “cultural genocide.” Cometsevah slowly walked back to his seat, having irrevocably altered the dynamics of the search.2
Cometsevah’s gambit stunned the NPS officials. Based on misapprehensions during the final days of the archeological reconnaissance, the NPS team had been confident that all of the searchers, including the descendants, were on the same page: they had “found the site.” And yet, roughly a year into the eighteen-month window that Senator Campbell had opened to look for Sand Creek, Cometsevah had defenestrated the NPS. “Not so fast,” he warned. “The federal government shouldn’t be so certain it knows what Indian people are thinking about their own history.” Cometsevah, in other words, demanded that the descendants be allowed to interpret their own past, without “meddling” from federal officials. Doug Scott remembered feeling “floored, caught flat-footed,” and deeply hurt by the suggestion that his findings ran roughshod over tribal history and traditional cultural practices. Only later, after regaining perspective, did he comfort himself by depersonalizing the experience: “There was such mistrust of the government’s representatives. So while Laird … may like us [members of the NPS team] as individuals, we still represent an entity he distrusts.” Christine Whitacre, meanwhile, looked on as Cometsevah redrew the NPS map. Aghast that the site study appeared to be crashing before her eyes, she thought to herself, “maybe this isn’t going to work.”3
Cometsevah’s reaction blindsided Whitacre and her colleagues in part because the NPS’s conclusions, depicted on the draft map, rested on ostensibly irrefutable evidence. During the archeological fieldwork, the search team had unearthed a vast concentration of artifacts, stretching nearly 1,500 feet long and approximately 500 feet wide. Doug Scott, after investigating those materials, had dated many of them to the era of the massacre. The NPS representatives then tried to prove that the fruits of their digging had once been part of a Cheyenne village. The NPS historians compared the artifacts with lists of goods that the federal government had provided as part of mid-nineteenth-century annuity programs to the Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Comanches. Next, because Chivington’s men had not maintained an account of the objects they had taken from Sand Creek, the NPS looked to complete catalogs of materials seized by federal troops following other violent encounters with Indians around that time: a Cheyenne and Lakota village, destroyed near Fort Larned, Kansas, in 1867; Black Kettle’s camp, razed by George Armstrong Custer’s troops at the Washita in 1868; and a gathering of Dog Soldiers, killed by U.S. cavalry at Summit Springs, Colorado, in 1869. In each case, as with the federal annuity lists, the NPS found significant overlap, suggesting that the “Sand Creek assemblage” likely represented part of “an 1864-era Cheyenne camp.”4
But questions lingered: was the artifact concentration all that remained of Black Kettle’s village, destroyed at the massacre? Or might the searchers have found detritus from another Cheyenne camp? Again, the evidence seemed both ironclad and, NPS personnel believed, likely to engender the descendants’ support and gratitude. Munitions unearthed during the search’s archeological dig matched lists of weapons wielded by the 1st and 3rd Colorado Regiments in fall 1864. Most telling, fragments from a mountain howitzer shell (as noted earlier, a cannon fired at the massacre) offered “mute testimony,” “nearly unequivocal” proof that the search had indeed located the correct site. Most of the artifacts also had been battered—bowls cracked, cutlery f
lattened, tools ruined—suggesting that Chivington’s men, after they had butchered some of the Indian people at Sand Creek, had destroyed the remnants of their camp. This kind of violence was typical of engagements during the U.S. government’s conflict with the Plains Tribes, as federal soldiers fought a total war against Native people they deemed savages. At Sand Creek, the Colorado volunteers tried to obliterate the remaining possessions they found littering the field. The troops rendered useless what little remained of the Indian encampment for any Cheyenne and Arapaho survivors who might return to scour the field, trying to piece together some of what they had lost there.5
A final element of the archeology had even broader implications for students of Sand Creek, including the descendants. The archeological reconnaissance turned up hardly any artifacts from weapons the Arapahos and Cheyennes “might have fired at the Colorado attacking force.” Considering that the bloodshed had involved hundreds of Native people desperately struggling to survive, a lack of weapons traceable to the tribes seemed revealing. For Doug Scott and Jerry Greene, “the absence of definitive artifacts of resistance [was] consistent with Indian oral tradition that the attack came as a complete surprise.” As many of the oral histories collected during the search suggested, the Indians at Sand Creek had not been passive or weak. They had not accepted their fate without resisting. But they had been too surprised and unprepared to mount a vigorous defense. The bloodshed had been a massacre: a shocking and devastating attack followed by indiscriminate killing of individuals who for the most part had not fought back.6