by Ari Kelman
Leading to the October consultation meeting, Scott and Greene had thought the tribal representatives would be thrilled by their analysis, which seemed to ratify with science the descendants’ massacre stories. From the fact that the village had been unguarded, to the enduring image of American and white flags flying over Black Kettle’s lodge, to the tragic case of White Antelope singing his death song as bullets cut him down, the Cheyennes and Arapahos recalled their massacred ancestors as peaceful individuals double-crossed by violent whites. Even if the documentary record remained divided—with Colonel Chivington and his partisans insisting that the attack had been a battle, warranted because Black Kettle’s village had been filled with hostile warriors, and Silas Soule, George Bent, and others countering that Sand Creek had been an outrageous act of moral cowardice, a massacre—Scott and Greene believed that the archeological evidence had settled the matter once and for all. Black Kettle’s people had been victimized by Chivington and his troops, just as the descendants contended.7
As for the fact that the NPS’s blend of documentary and archeological sources undercut many of the descendants’ perceptions of where the massacre had taken place, Scott and Greene had an answer for that as well. Relying on terms of art more typically used by scholars describing the collection of quantitative data, the men insisted, of both the Bent maps and oral histories, that they were “accurate but not precise.” Greene noted, “Bent’s account was very useful not in terms of where, exactly, the village was located, but more in a schematic sense of placing the massacre in the general vicinity of the South Bend on Dawson’s property.” He added, “So when you think of Bent’s drawing, it’s complementary to where we finally found the site.” Scott made a similar argument about his findings’ relationship to the oral histories: “I don’t see it as a problem. I see it as the difference between accuracy and precision. Their stories are accurate. The massacre occurred in a bend of Sand Creek. But if you want to talk about precision, that’s where the physical evidence and the historical record puts it a little further north.” Because, in their view, the archival and archeological research remained compatible with Bent’s maps and the tribal oral histories, Scott and Greene were “taken aback, really kind of shocked that the descendants didn’t want to accept the scientific data.”8
NPS officials explained away the controversy as a by-product of antithetical epistemologies. The NPS looked to empirical methods: archival research and archeological fieldwork. The massacre descendants, by contrast, relied on indigenous cultural practices: oral traditions, ancestor veneration, and guidance from the spiritual realm. “There’s this schism,” Frost suggested. “We’re very much a culture that likes to put everything on paper, get everything written down, and have notebooks and binders and Xeroxes.” He concluded, “It was a mistake to be dealing with people who have an oral culture by presenting them constantly with written stuff.” Christine Whitacre went a step further, suggesting that the divide could not be reduced to comfort with oral versus written sources. She believed something deeper separated the searchers. “Archeological evidence and historical documentation carried little weight with many of the tribal representatives,” she remembered. Laird Cometsevah, for one, “heard voices on the site.” Because of that, Whitacre said, “I don’t think it was oral history so much as traditional tribal knowledge he valued.” The search, in this view, had become a clash between a people of history, the NPS, and a people of memory, the descendants.9
The conflict was never quite that stark. In part, the tribal representatives were, as the NPS officials suggested, upset at the Denver meeting because the NPS map undercut the oral histories and traditional methods that allowed some descendants to “feel where Sand Creek happened.” Steve Brady and Laird Cometsevah had long believed that they knew exactly where the massacre had taken place: right where George Bent had mapped it at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Brady and Cometsevah visited Bill Dawson’s ranch through the years, their ancestors spoke to them, marking the field with the sounds of women screaming or children crying. Guided by those experiences, an exasperated Cometsevah fumed before the archeological dig: “The Cheyennes feel the Dawson site is the original site. It’s not the Indians that’s looking for it.” He continued, “But according to the National Park Service they have to document or pinpoint the Sand Creek area.” And in the wake of the fieldwork, he reiterated, “The Cheyenne have always known where it is. It has always stayed in the Cheyenne mind.” Brady, for his part, accepted the archeology’s importance. But he inverted Doug Scott’s and Jerry Greene’s claims about methodological precision: “the digging proved we found part of the site, sure. But our elders told us what happened there. And the Cheyennes already knew exactly where Black Kettle’s people camped.” In choosing to ignore this evidence, Brady believed, the NPS evinced “typically high-handed behavior, another effort on the government’s part to dictate to us important chapters from our own history.”10
Cheyenne traditionalists, especially Laird Cometsevah, had another reason for locating the site in the shadow of the monument overlook on the Dawson ranch. Two decades earlier, Cometsevah had accompanied the Sacred Arrow Keeper, the tribe’s most important spiritual leader, to Sand Creek. The Arrow Keeper consecrated the soil in the South Bend, making “Cheyenne earth” there. For Cometsevah, memories of that ritual loomed over the search: “Spiritually and religiously, [we] claimed that spot for the Cheyennes. I’m going to do everything I can to fulfill that ceremony. The Arrow Keeper wasn’t wrong.” Cometsevah’s usually quiet voice rang as he insisted: “I wasn’t wrong. That’s exactly where the massacre happened. That’s right where Chivington killed our people.” In sum, Cometsevah had an enormous, albeit intangible, investment in his contention that Dawson’s property had hosted the massacre. If it turned out that the Arrow Keeper had been wrong, that Cometsevah had been wrong, he might lose standing in the search process, credibility in future reparations claims, and perhaps even some of his cultural authority as a chief. He had to be right.11
As for oral histories, the Northern Cheyennes had not yet started collecting theirs. Luke and Steve Brady, along with their brother, Otto Braided Hair, still struggled to comply with traditional protocols before asking tribal elders to share their memories of the massacre. The NPS’s compressed timeline threatened their efforts, but the Bradys refused to hurry. Recalling the chronology and that her tribe’s elders still “hadn’t shared their stories of Sand Creek,” Mildred Red Cherries felt like she had been “stabbed in the back” when the NPS revealed its map. And because the NPS had ignored pertinent details from the Southern Cheyennes’ oral histories, which had already been recorded, as well as traditional methods and the Arrow Keeper’s claim to part of the Dawson ranch, Laird Cometsevah snapped, “They’re calling our ancestors liars. They’re discounting our whole history.” He raged, “The Park Service folks gave their word they’d listen to us. We’ve got stacks of paper proving it. But they don’t care about Cheyenne earth or whether our ancestors died or the stories our elders passed down from Sand Creek. And they don’t care about their word when it comes to Indians.”12
Cometsevah’s accusation highlighted an issue that NPS personnel overlooked in the wake of the Denver meeting. The descendants, and the tribes they represented, were not exclusively a people of memory, steeped only in an oral culture. They also studied written history; they were well versed in the archival record. Cometsevah and Steve Brady, especially, had an encyclopedic knowledge of many of the documents relating to the massacre. Both men could recite passages from Governor Evans’s fateful proclamations during summer 1864, from George Bent’s memoir, and from the key treaties signposting the road to and from Sand Creek: Fort Laramie, Fort Wise, and the Little Arkansas. Both men also believed that across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries white authorities had repeatedly broken written promises to the Cheyennes. And both men were determined that the NPS would not be allowed to repeat that history during the Sand Creek search or after the
memorial opened to the public. Accordingly, Brady and Cometsevah struggled to bind the NPS, using a series of written rather than oral agreements, to weigh tribal evidence prior to reaching any conclusions during the site study.13
Before writing the Sand Creek legislation, Senator Campbell had spoken with Brady and Cometsevah, the tribal leaders he deemed most influential on issues related to the massacre. Campbell learned that the Cheyenne descendants would cooperate with the NPS only if the agency incorporated tribal perspectives into its search. NPS officials then reassured Campbell that they were eager to collaborate with the tribes. Still wary because of historical precedent, elements of Campbell’s legislation—along with parts of Executive Order No. 13804 and the National Historic Preservation Act—tied the NPS to the descendants and shaped the tribal representatives’ sense of their own power during the process. Campbell’s bill mandated, for instance, that the NPS “work in consultation with the” Cheyennes and Arapahos. Executive Order No. 13804 required that federal agencies, when dealing with indigenous people, partner with tribes on a government-to-government basis. And the preservation act stipulated that any time the NPS undertook a project that might affect “American Indian lands or properties of historic value to the tribes,” the NPS had to consult with the relevant Native groups.14
Using these documents—rather than traditional practices or oral histories—as a foundation, the descendants later built more safeguards into their relationship with the NPS. When asked by the NPS to sign so-called cooperative agreements or memoranda of understanding for the search, tribal representatives balked. After consulting with their attorney, they insisted on inserting passages of restrictive language, clarifying the search process’s intent and the relative power that participants would wield during the study. The NPS finally offered the descendants several written guarantees: it would weigh evidence gleaned from “methods of the tribes’ choosing to help determine the site location”; it would “work to help achieve the goals of the Cheyenne and Arapaho with respect to the management and use of the site”; the “Cheyenne and Arapaho [people would] be a full partner in the project”; and it would make its “best efforts … to obtain the concurrence and signature of each Tribal Government on the location of the Massacre Site.” At the same time, the NPS hedged, noting, “the project is intended to also be of benefit to all American people.” Regardless, the descendants believed that they had protected their interests, that their voices would be heard. The NPS’s draft map, though, seemed to signal that the federal government, as it had so often throughout the nation’s history, was once again reneging on written agreements forged with Native people.15
That the NPS had concluded, no matter how tentatively, anything about the site’s location without consent from the tribal representatives seemed to the Cheyennes to echo ugly episodes from the past. And that NPS officials, faced with the descendants’ ire, insisted that the disagreement was a misunderstanding rooted in Native traditionalism compounded the Cheyenne delegates’ outrage. Rick Frost believed that the Cheyennes “had their oral traditions and their Arrow Keeper, who came and consecrated the earth in the bend. And for them that was all the evidence they needed about where the site was.” But, Steve Brady countered, the descendants also had written history, rather than just memory and traditional cultural practices, on their side. Brady pointed out that the Cheyennes relied on archival sources, including the Bent maps, in addition to ethnographies and indigenous methods of gathering knowledge, to support their contention that the massacre had taken place inside the Dawson South Bend. “Even then, they still don’t believe us,” Brady said. “They don’t believe Bent’s map. Bent was there. He was wounded. He had a white man’s education. But still they don’t believe his map.” In the end, this was the most infuriating thing for the Cheyennes: the conflict had not emerged out of a clash of methodologies or incompatible epistemologies; the NPS had not chosen written over oral sources, or Western science over Native traditions; the NPS had instead chosen one map over a second map as its guide in producing a third map.16
The history of those first two maps and their makers, Samuel Bonsall and George Bent, exacerbated a tense situation following the site location meeting. Bent was part of the Cheyenne tribe and a proud member of the Crooked Lances, a military society. Working with James Mooney, George Bird Grinnell, and George Hyde, he became one of the most effective stewards of his tribe’s cultural resources. Since its publication, Bent and Hyde’s Life of George Bent had served as a reference; for traditionalists, it remained an essential source of history and lore. Its sections on Sand Creek were especially influential for the descendants. Bent, after all, bucked conventional wisdom in Colorado and throughout the West, arguing that the bloodshed had been a massacre rather than a battle. He could credibly make that claim because he had been shot in the hip at Sand Creek and had barely escaped with his life. Through the years, his drawings also provided descendants with a guide to one of their most sacred sites. Bent mapped the tribe’s history. And as time passed, and other links to the massacre disappeared, many Cheyennes mapped their identities onto Bent’s drawings.17
No ethnographer or anthropologist ever interviewed Samuel Bonsall; no historian ever collaborated with him on a book about his life. His father was not a borderlands power broker, a renowned trade tycoon and liaison between federal authorities and tribal peoples; his mother was not an important cultural figure in her community, the daughter of a revered spiritual leader. Bonsall, unlike George Bent, lived most of his life in history’s shadows. What scholars know of him are bits and pieces gleaned from his service record. He hailed from Indiana. Just four months after the start of the Civil War, when he was only twenty-two years old, he enlisted in the Union Army. He fought bravely in several battles before mustering out in spring 1866. He promptly rejoined the army, serving another six years in the West, until his commanding officer finally recommended that he resign his commission because of a drinking problem. As noted earlier, Bonsall mapped the massacre’s location when he helped escort General William Tecumseh Sherman on a tour of western battlegrounds in June 1868. Bonsall then returned to Sand Creek, likely two years later, again combing the hallowed ground for human remains, including skulls that he shipped back east to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC.18
The NPS’s reliance on Bonsall rather than Bent frustrated the Cheyennes, who focused on differences in the men’s biographies, their relationships to Sand Creek, and their behavior in the years after the massacre. Bent was Cheyenne, Bonsall white. Bent was wounded by federal troops at Sand Creek but lived. He was both a victim and a survivor of the massacre. Even if Bonsall had served in the Civil War’s eastern theater, more than a thousand miles away from Colorado when Chivington attacked Black Kettle’s village, the descendants nevertheless believed that he had been in league with the perpetrators. Most of all, Bent produced his maps as a means of preserving tribal history and culture. Bonsall, by contrast, penned his diagram only after desecrating Cheyenne corpses that he found scattered on the killing field at Sand Creek. And he later returned, in the descendants’ view recapitulating war crimes committed by some of Chivington’s men at the massacre, when he plundered the human remains at Sand Creek for a second time, in 1870. Given that, Steve Brady waved aside Jerry Greene’s insistence that Bonsall was the better source of the two mapmakers: “He [Greene] claims that he wants eyewitness testimony. Well, Bent was there. He had the scars to prove it. Bonsall only showed up years after the fact to pick at our ancestors’ bodies, like a vulture.”19
Laird Cometsevah, too, found it “insulting” that the person hailed for producing the NPS’s “Rosetta Stone,” the key to decoding the site mystery, had on more than one occasion defiled Cheyenne corpses. Cometsevah was especially stunned to learn that the NPS viewed such “depraved acts” as evidence of the mapmaker’s credibility—one NPS report suggested that “the most compelling argument giving weight to Bonsall [was] the FACT that he collected skeletal remains on the site.” C
ometsevah could not forget that Colorado authorities had repeatedly used the mistreatment of white bodies as a pretext for ginning up a war against the Cheyennes in summer 1864. The mutilation of corpses symbolized the horror of the massacre. Bonsall—“a grave robber,” in Cometsevah’s words—had taken part in these “crimes against humanity.” Here again, the ghosts of Sand Creek haunted the site search.20
Confronted with the NPS’s defense of Bonsall, the descendants rejoined by recalling a series of atrocities committed in spring, summer, and fall 1864. At that time, Governor John Evans became increasingly unhinged about the threat Native people posed to white Coloradans. In part, Evans’s fears emerged from the fact that federal troops were deployed elsewhere fighting the Civil War, leaving frontier settlers especially vulnerable to Indian attacks. Two years earlier, the Dakota Sioux, frustrated by years of treaty violations, had rebelled in Minnesota, killing hundreds of whites before the army crushed their uprising. With the Civil War ongoing, and the majority of Union soldiers fighting back east, the Dakota War cast a pall over Colorado in 1863–1864. Evans grew especially alarmed after receiving intelligence stating that Sioux emissaries had approached several local tribes about forging an alliance in fall 1863. He responded to these rumors by asking military authorities to keep more troops in the vicinity. When that request did not work, he sent desperate pleas to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, warning that a confederation “of several thousand warriors” waited nearby, “wild savages” who might “sweep off our settlers.” Evans intimated that the blood of white Coloradans would be on Stanton’s hands if the secretary failed to dispatch help.21
After writing to Stanton, Evans left for New York, where he lobbied colleagues on the Union Pacific Railroad’s board of directors to run track through Colorado. But he worried that the territory’s Native peoples might complicate his development schemes. Indians represented an impediment to progress in Evans’s view. This perspective, shared widely throughout the region, offered another reason to pacify or remove the tribes. At the same time, President Lincoln hoped to bring Colorado into the Union as a Republican state in 1864. More Republican votes would improve the chances of legislation pending in Congress, as well as Lincoln’s own uncertain reelection prospects the following November. Evans, for his part, delighted in the idea of statehood; he longed to serve as Colorado’s first U.S. senator. But when officials paved the way for statehood by calling for a constitutional convention in July 1864, racial violence on the plains threatened the plan. In sum, economic as well as political concerns impelled Evans toward Sand Creek.22