by Ari Kelman
For the moment, though, most of Colorado’s tribal peoples waited on their reservations, struggling to survive the winter of 1863–1864 despite chronic food shortages and frequent disease outbreaks. Evans’s paranoia about Indians abated. But with spring’s arrival his anxiety returned, and Evans renewed his campaign for federal protection. He soon discovered to his dismay that Samuel Curtis, the region’s newly minted military commander, rightly believed that the ongoing upheaval in Kansas represented a greater threat to the Union than did bands of starving Indians conducting occasional attacks on outlying white settlements. Evans raised the specter of the Dakota War, warning Curtis that Sioux bands were on the warpath. Curtis coolly replied that he appreciated the information but needed to focus his attention, and troop strength, elsewhere. Curtis maintained that posture until rumors of livestock theft began spreading in April, signaling that renewed trouble might be imminent as the Cheyennes and Arapahos launched spring raids.23
With troops fanning out to keep the peace, hostilities became more rather than less likely. Skirmishes, including a brutal fight on April 12, 1864, at Fremont’s Orchard, soon followed. Governor Evans responded by peppering General Curtis with missives about the hazards of inaction. And though the plains remained quieter than they had the previous spring, fear gripped Colorado, among both settlers and Cheyennes, who, an officer in the field reported, were “very much alarmed and appeared to be very anxious to remain on good terms with whites.” It was not to be. On May 3, soldiers under Major Jacob Downing attacked a Cheyenne camp near Cedar Bluffs. Downing crowed to John Chivington: “I believe now it is but the commencement of war with this tribe, which must result in their extermination.” When Curtis received news of the fight, he wrote to Evans, imploring him to contain further hostilities, as “the fate of the nation depends much on the campaigns of this season against the Great Rebellion.” But just two weeks after that, Lieutenant George Eayre’s men killed Lean Bear and Star, two peace chiefs, who rode out to parley with the federal troops. Many of the surviving Cheyenne witnesses vowed revenge. Governor Evans had lost control of the situation.24
On June 11, with chaos stalking Colorado, a ranch foreman named Nathan Ward Hungate worked with another hired hand (recorded only by his surname, Miller) in the pastures of Van Wormer’s property. The ranch stood approximately thirty miles southeast of Denver, near the banks of Box Elder Creek. The landscape rolls gently in that part of Colorado, and the plains usually remain bright green early in the summer. As Hungate and Miller tended the stock they supervised, a column of smoke billowed above one of the ranch buildings, catching their eye. Hungate dropped his work and sprinted toward the fire, thinking of his family back at the ranch house. Miller dashed off in another direction, looking for help. When neighbors arrived on the scene, they found Hungate, his wife, and their two daughters, one four years old, the other an infant, dead. Some accounts suggested that Hungate’s wife had been raped. Because the corpses had been scalped and mutilated, the onlookers assumed that Native people were responsible for the murders. The crowd then carried the broken bodies to Denver, where they lay “in a box side by side, the two children between their parents.”25
Equal parts public memorial and cautionary tale, this gruesome display stood on one of the city’s main streets, inciting violence by playing off the fears of captivated spectators. An incredulous newcomer to Colorado, a chemistry professor just arrived from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote to his wife, “all the people of the town with a few honorable exceptions went to see them [the bodies].” As news of the murders circulated throughout the area, terrified settlers, fearing an all-out assault from a confederation of belligerent tribes, poured into Denver from the plains to the east. The Hungates’ ruined corpses became the centerpiece of a community gripped by collective panic. When rumors of additional Indian attacks spread, they tipped the city over the edge. On June 15, 1864, reports surfaced that a force of Indians, “three thousand strong,” stood poised to strike Denver. “Every bell in the city sounded,” and “men, women, and children pushed through the streets … literally crazed with fear.” With armed gangs on patrol, Denverites hunkered down for a long night spent waiting for an attack that never arrived. The next day, it turned out that the army of hostile Indians had actually been drovers, their cattle kicking up dust on the way to market.26
Governor Evans, overmatched in the wake of the Hungate murders, redoubled his efforts to convince General Curtis to send a “regiment” to protect the city, implying that the conspiracy Evans had anticipated for months had finally claimed its first victims. As evidence, he pointed to the “murdered and scalped bodies brought in today.” There would be more corpses if help did not arrive soon, the governor warned. Absent credible evidence, he blamed the Cheyennes. In fact, a small party of Northern Arapahos, seeking revenge against Van Wormer for a perceived injustice from the previous year, had likely committed the murders. Regardless, Evans’s paranoia and politics combined, as he assembled unrelated violent episodes into a jigsaw puzzle depicting a coordinated threat. Only federal troops could save the day, he argued. Evans then imposed a curfew, organized the militia, and wrote to William Dole, commissioner of Indian affairs, suggesting that Colorado’s friendly tribes should be concentrated in places of safety. Finally, he asked for permission to raise a regiment of hundred-day volunteers devoted to fighting Indians. Evans would not abandon any of these schemes, or his paranoia, until after the massacre.27
In the event, John Chivington rallied his men on November 29, 1864, by recalling the fate of the Hungates and whites taken captive on the plains the previous summer. The Colorado troops exacted vengeance by committing atrocities against the Cheyennes and Arapahos. In the wake of the bloodletting, when Chivington’s men returned to Denver, they paraded through town with grisly mementos from Sand Creek. “Cheyenne scalps,” the Rocky Mountain News reported, “are getting as thick here now as toads in Egypt. Every body has got one, and is anxious to get another to send east.” Two area theaters mounted productions in which “trophies of the big fight at Sand Creek” served as props. One of the plays, The Battle of Sand Creek, was the first reenactment of the carnage in Colorado. As for the bodies left unburied on the bloody ground, they froze in winter’s cold. Years later, Lieutenant Samuel Bonsall despoiled those remains.28
More than a century after the massacre, the descendants remembered how their ancestors’ bodies had been treated. Several of the tribal delegates to the site search also served as Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) representatives. NAGPRA became federal law in 1990, capping a long struggle by Native activists who wanted human remains, along with other sacred materials, returned to their tribes. Repositories, ranging from archeology departments on university campuses to the Smithsonian Institution, had until then often stored or displayed such items around the nation. These artifacts were ugly reminders of the years around the turn of the twentieth century, when white observers had considered Indians a “vanishing race.” Anthropologists who hoped to preserve evidence of these endangered people began collecting indigenous antiquities at that time. NAGPRA would allow the affected tribes to reclaim their cultural patrimony. Some of the descendants had already spent years struggling to repatriate the remains of several victims slaughtered at the massacre. They hoped that eventually there would be a cemetery at the Sand Creek site, a place where their “ancestors could finally rest, easing their spirits.”29
After the Denver meeting, body parts scattered across the United States became another painful link between the massacre and the site search. When General Sherman visited Sand Creek in 1868, he asked his subordinates, Samuel Bonsall among them, to “hunt all over the battleground” for trophies, including human remains. And when Bonsall later returned to the site, he retrieved at least two more skulls, which he then shipped back east. Experts at the Army Medical Museum studied those remains in an effort to understand the impact of munitions on Native bodies. The crania next ma
de their way to the Smithsonian. There they waited, in the bowels of the National Anthropological Archives, stripped of humanity, known only by accession numbers. The skulls that Bonsall removed from the massacre site were used not just to improve the army’s ability to kill more Native Americans, but also by anthropologists, practicing “racial science”, who claimed that Indians were of inferior stock. This history did not make Jerry Greene’s claims about Bonsall’s reliability, or Doug Scott’s boasts about the unassailable nature of archeological evidence, more compelling for the descendants.30
As the dispute over competing cartographies intensified, most of the NPS team members maintained that they had done nothing wrong. Quite the contrary, they insisted, they had succeeded where others had failed: the NPS, using an interdisciplinary toolkit and working within a circumscribed schedule, had pinpointed the massacre site. Nobody involved with the project would have disputed that broad contention. But because of the ongoing conflict surrounding the NPS’s map, a narrower question still threatened the project: Where had Black Kettle’s people camped on the morning of November 29, 1864? Inside or outside what the site searchers knew as the Dawson South Bend? That query, and the history and politics attached to it, left Rick Frost worried that the Cheyennes might scuttle the entire initiative. Frost and his colleagues struggled throughout winter 1999–2000 to craft a compromise that would keep the disaffected descendants in the fold.31
It would not be easy, because the Cheyennes preferred no memorial at all to one built upon the ruins of their cultural and political sovereignty. From the first, the tribal representatives had explained that they would not participate in the search if their voices were not going to be heard. And the “village controversy,” as people began calling it, suggested that the NPS would not, in the end, let the descendants’ Sand Creek stories guide the process. Instead, the NPS wanted to narrate key parts of the massacre from the perspective of Bonsall, an officer in the U.S. Army and a man who had taken part in what some of the Cheyennes labeled “the imperialist projects of westward expansion and forced Indian removal.” For all of the talk of healing that surrounded the memorialization process, this seemed to the descendants more like the NPS rubbing salt into old wounds. Consequently, the disagreement over Black Kettle’s village devolved into personal attacks, with some of Cheyenne representatives to the search accusing NPS personnel, most often Doug Scott and Jerry Greene, of recapitulating elements of the massacre itself, albeit “with documents rather than bullets” this time. It was, Frost remembered, the most difficult moment in the memorialization process.32
The NPS responded with a plan to placate the Cheyenne descendants and maintain the search’s integrity: its Site Location Study, the publication associated with the project, would suggest creating a memorial large enough to encompass all of the competing theories about the location of Black Kettle’s village. The boundaries of the proposed historic site would stretch for miles across the Kiowa County countryside, including the Dawson South Bend, the location of the artifact finds, and chunks of the Bowens’ property. With just six months left before the NPS’s deadline to share its findings with Congress, Christine Whitacre started writing. She would have to weave together methodological loose threads—the archival investigations, the oral histories, the tribes’ traditional cultural practices, and the archeology—as well as provide a brief history of the search process, an environmental impact assessment of the historic site proposal, and an abstract of the public’s response to the NPS’s inchoate plan. Under the best of circumstances, it would have been a daunting task. But in this case, Whitacre also had to try to reassure the Cheyenne descendants that the NPS had taken their views seriously. Her effort would be further complicated by the fact that the Northern Cheyennes had not yet started collecting their ethnographies, suggesting that their elders’ Sand Creek stories would have little bearing on Whitacre’s work.33
The blowback Whitacre encountered as she assembled the Site Location Study demonstrated how the village controversy had splintered the fragile search. Problems reached beyond federal-tribal friction and into the NPS’s relations with the State of Colorado, which to that point had typically been “cordial.” By challenging George Bent’s Sand Creek story, the NPS reinforced David Halaas’s already strong ties with the descendants while forcing Susan Collins, the state’s other representative to the memorialization project, to choose sides. Collins would have to back the federal government or the descendants.34
Boundary of the Sand Creek Massacre site. (Adapted from the Sand Creek Massacre Special Resource Study, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service.)
Susan Collins received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Colorado–Boulder before becoming Colorado’s state archeologist. In that capacity, she helped administer the State Historical Fund, the agency that had granted Dick Ellis the money needed to conduct the first site search. When the NPS later began looking for Sand Creek, Collins saw Doug Scott as a friend and colleague. But she could not escape the sense that the NPS seemed more confident about its conclusions than the data merited. In a long, diplomatic letter to Christine Whitacre, Collins and David Halaas outlined their concerns. They supported the NPS’s proposed site boundaries while suggesting that the report they had seen demonstrated a “level of specific knowledge that is not fully supported by” the available evidence. Especially when it came to the location of Black Kettle’s village, Collins and Halaas believed, it made sense to project doubt rather than certitude. They also wondered why the NPS had rushed to judgment. On the one hand, the search had to be finished on deadline. On the other hand, they noted, “Greene and Scott wrote their reports without reference to the Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories.”35
The NPS team members knew by then that their interactions with the Cheyennes had strained to the breaking point. And they suspected that David Halaas’s loyalties lay with the descendants and George Bent, the subject of his book, rather than his colleagues at the NPS or the Colorado Historical Society. Looking back, Halaas concurred: “If you’re caught in between them like I was, you have to decide: what do you think? And I was with the Cheyennes.” Of the NPS’s overconfidence during the village controversy, he suggested, “you can disagree with Laird Cometsevah about any number of things. But when you start saying your theory is ironclad, that you’ve got science and history on your side, well, what are you doing?” He concluded, “And not to understand the implication of that kind of claim, and not be more sensitive about making it just shocked me.” At the time, Halaas still worked with the descendants on the memory fight unfolding on the capitol steps in Denver. At his, Laird Cometsevah’s, and Steve Brady’s urging, the state legislature had agreed to rescind its resolution removing Sand Creek from the list of battles on the Civil War memorial. Colorado would reinterpret rather than erase the statue’s text. But even though the NPS understood Halaas’s identification with the Cheyennes, the letter from him and Susan Collins suggested that the federal agency had alienated some of its most important allies.36
Rick Frost replied to Collins and Halaas with a point-by-point rebuttal stretching across seven pages. He defended the NPS’s methods and conclusions. On the most controversial point, the placement of Black Kettle’s village, Frost did not give an inch. Collins and Halaas wrote back, pointing out that there was no reason to dig in about a “relatively minor disagreement.” After all, following the archeological survey Doug Scott had allowed that there was still more work to be done at the site. Given that, Collins and Halaas suggested, the NPS had a clear path out of the village controversy: allow for the possibility that Black Kettle’s encampment had been larger than the draft map indicated. If the village had actually stretched from the location of the artifact concentration into the Dawson South Bend, where Bent had mapped it, all the searchers might be satisfied. Collins and Halaas concluded by dangling the possibility of consensus in front of Frost: “In short, we agree with the Massacre Monument boundaries proposed, congratulate you on the 1999 disco
veries, respectfully suggest that the village extent may be considerably greater than that shown on current NPS maps, and encourage continuing research to develop an interpretive plan.” Still the NPS team members were not ready to concede the key points in the controversy, and so they continued preparing to publish their Site Location Study.37
In the meantime, the NPS received backing from an unexpected source: the Northern Arapahos. About a month after the NPS unveiled its map, Ben Ridgely, cochair of the tribe’s governing council, wrote to Rick Frost: “The Northern Arapaho Business Council supports the documents of Dr. Doug Scott and Jerry Greene, and findings of the National Park Service in regard to the Site Location.” The Ridgelys later explained that they had made their choice after “looking at the data objectively.” Because both Ben and Gail Ridgely were educators who “respected science,” they noted, they had concluded that the NPS had the facts on its side. As far as Frost and Christine Whitacre were concerned, the Ridgelys’ reasoning mattered less than did their endorsement. The NPS finally had a tribal backer. But James Doyle, Senator Campbell’s staffer, realized that the Northern Arapahos’ letter also reaffirmed that no single collective memory of Sand Creek bound all of the descendants. “You would think that because all four tribes had people descended from the massacre that they would have had the most commonality in the whole search process,” Doyle observed, “but really they didn’t.” Dividing the tribal representatives within the turmoil of the village controversy, he fretted, might have disastrous consequences moving forward. As it turned out, events would bear out Doyle’s concerns.38