by Ari Kelman
Although Secretary Harlan proved sympathetic to Doolittle’s entreaties, he had little patience for hostile Indians. He believed that Commissioner Dole—whom Harlan soon forced out—had abdicated his responsibilities, allowing the army to seize unfettered control of Indian affairs. With Dole gone, Harlan would try to reclaim that policy portfolio for the civilian branch of the government by enacting a series of new initiatives. In a letter to Major General Pope, Harlan later proposed relocating Native people to small reservations far from whites, an idea very similar to one recommended by Pope to Secretary of War Stanton more than a year earlier. Harlan argued that peaceful tribes, facing scarcities of game and helped along by white authorities, would eventually abandon their traditional ways. In the meantime, he warned, violence on the path to assimilation would be met with overwhelming force. Harlan also informed Dennis Cooley, the new commissioner of Indian affairs, that the army should handle belligerent Native people. In effect, Harlan hoped to establish a partnership between the departments of Interior and War: the former would work with peaceful tribes; the latter would squash resistance.69
After Sand Creek, a tribal alliance sought revenge, attacking white settlers across the Plains. The U.S. Army repeatedly failed to engage these warriors, in the process losing its dominion over Indian affairs. As federal authorities later examined the causes and consequences of the tribal insurrection, they decided that peace made more sense than war. Although many settlers in Colorado still longed for a policy of extermination, the tide had turned in Washington. Observers pointed to Sand Creek as the reason why, noting: “The history of the Chivington massacre is too fresh in the public mind, and will be forever too atrocious in history for the preaching of any further doctrines of that sort.” In a letter to Senator Charles Sumner, Samuel Tappan, an advocate of Indian rights who had served under Chivington, offered a more penetrating analysis. Blaming his former commander for Sand Creek obscured more than it revealed, Tappan suggested. The root rather than proximate cause of the slaughter “rest[ed] with those highest in authority, for not having fixed and well understood policy that would have frustrated the possibility of a Sand Creek massacre.” In that context, federal emissaries negotiated the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, including within it Article 6’s promise of reparations. The Arapahos and Cheyennes had earned themselves a reprieve, even if it would not last.70
Christine Whitacre took account of that history in the second volume of the Sand Creek Massacre Project, buttressing the claim that the Sand Creek site merited inclusion within the National Park System. “In its immediate, direct, and long-range impacts upon the Cheyenne and Arapaho societies and the plains Indian community,” Whitacre writes, “as well as in its immediate and subsequent bearing on the progression of federal Indian and military policy respecting the plains tribes, the Sand Creek Massacre comprised an event of outstanding significance as reflected within the broad national patterns of United States history.” Here was the argument the NPS would make when testifying before Congress: the massacre had shaped both Native and national history.71
In spring 2000, the effort to memorialize the massacre took another sharp turn. Rick Frost sent a draft of the site study to Senator Campbell. From the beginning, Campbell had received updates on the process from his trusted Colorado press secretary, James Doyle, and also from his friends Steve Brady and Laird Cometsevah. The senator knew that the village controversy—“a little bit of a disagreement,” he understated—still divided the search. But though he did not want “to offend the tribes,” the NPS’s boundary compromise alleviated his concerns. Of the contested terrain he suggested, “let’s take the whole thing,” reasoning, “if you got the whole area, we can split hairs later whether the campfire was here or there.” That might not have been good history, but it seemed like excellent politics. And since Campbell typically understood history as an extension of politics, he scheduled Senate hearings for mid-September, planning to discuss a new unit of the National Park System: a Sand Creek massacre historic site.72
Two weeks before the Senate took up the question of memorializing Sand Creek, a woman named Linda Rebeck arrived at the Colorado Historical Society. Rebeck brought with her a stack of letters that had belonged to her grandfather, Marl Blunt. She had stumbled upon the correspondence in her mother’s keepsake trunk, stored away in the attic of her home. Blunt, it appeared, had settled in Colorado in 1859, and some of the papers that he later passed on to his heirs related to the massacre. Among them were documents previously unavailable to historians and other researchers, including gruesome dispatches from Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, detailing their experiences at Sand Creek. Officials at the historical society immediately recognized the importance of Rebeck’s find and sent the materials along to Senator Campbell in Washington. Campbell made the documents the centerpiece of his hearings.73
David Halaas and Gary Roberts suggested that the Soule-Cramer letters were so important because they “validate[d] much of the testimony taken during the congressional and Army hearings” that looked into Sand Creek. In notes to Ned Wynkoop, their former commander, Soule and Cramer justified their decisions not to commit to the fight. They corroborated that surrender flags had flown in Black Kettle’s camp. They verified that members of the 1st and 3rd Colorado Regiments had mutilated Native bodies, including taking men’s and women’s genitalia as trophies. They substantiated charges that the Colorado volunteers had murdered an infant and eviscerated a pregnant woman. They confirmed that Chivington had stationed pickets around Fort Lyon, so officers horrified by his plan to “massacre the friendly Indians camped on Sand Creek” could not leave without first receiving permission. And they bore out scattered claims that several chiefs at Sand Creek, confident that they had consummated an agreement with white authorities at the Camp Weld conference months earlier, initially had greeted the onrushing troops as friends.74
Because they ratified elements of the Arapahos’ and Cheyennes’ oral histories, Soule’s and Cramer’s words captured the descendants’ attention. Steve Brady believed that the letters were critical because they originated with white soldiers rather than Native Americans: “It’s one thing when these stories come from Indians. When white people hear us bitching and complaining about the massacre, they say to themselves, ‘There they go, whining again.’ But when these reports come from the cavalry that was there assaulting the village, well, that’s something else again. That’s something that will force whites to sit up and take notice.” Almost immediately, the Northern Cheyennes began honoring Soule and Cramer in much the same way that Holocaust survivors venerate so-called righteous gentiles, non-Jews who saved Jewish people during the Shoah: as individuals whose basic humanity transcended ethnic or racial differences in a critical moment of history. Otto Braided Hair began inviting Soule’s and Cramer’s descendants to attend Sand Creek ceremonies, including the healing runs, where the soldiers’ letters would be read aloud on the steps of the capitol in Denver, or at graveside ceremonies held at the city cemetery where Soule was buried.75
Silas Soule, especially, impressed the descendants as one of only a few white martyrs of Sand Creek. Not only did he stand down during the massacre, but he also was among the first people to spread the word about what had happened there. Soule wrote his note to Ned Wynkoop a bit more than two weeks after Sand Creek. He hinted that Wynkoop might pass along the information to a well-connected friend, Samuel Tappan, who had long feuded with Chivington. Tappan, in turn, would presumably reach out to his friend, General John P. Slough, who formerly had commanded the 1st Colorado but who by then was stationed outside Washington, DC. At the end of 1864, Wynkoop followed the script to the letter: he contacted Tappan, who wrote to Slough. Wynkoop next received orders to return to his old command at Fort Lyon, where he looked into the massacre. His damning report on Sand Creek led directly to congressional and military investigations. When the latter convened in February 1865, Soule rose as the first witness, with Joseph Cramer following soon after. The
ir testimony undercut the claim, popular in Colorado at the time, that Sand Creek had been a glorious battle. The military commission recessed on April 20, 1865, allowing Chivington time to organize his defense. Three days after that, two men changed the course of the inquiry and recast public memories of Sand Creek.76
On the night of April 23, Silas Soule was with Hersa Soule, his bride of just three weeks, out visiting friends in Denver. As Soule and his wife headed home around 10 p.m., he heard the sound of gunfire. When he investigated the source of the shots, Charles Squires and William Morrow, both soldiers in the 2nd Colorado Cavalry, reportedly ambushed him. Soule squeezed off a round from his revolver, winging Squires, before dying of a gunshot wound to the face. Denverites knew that Soule had just testified against Colonel Chivington. The murder transfixed the city. A bit more than a week earlier, on April 14, President Lincoln had been assassinated. The manhunt for John Wilkes Booth continued as Denverites wrestled with their own apparently political murder. Samuel Tappan, taking a rest from investigating the massacre, wrote in his diary, “The barbarism of slavery culminated in the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the barbarism of Sand Creek has culminated in the assassination of Capt. Soule.” Tappan was not the only observer to make that connection, as Soule died at a moment when Americans were more willing even than usual to embrace conspiracy theories and make heroes of the dead. Soule’s funeral, consequently, turned into a municipal occasion, with many of Denver’s elites paying their respects. John Chivington, though, remained at his home, likely preparing testimony for the ongoing Sand Creek investigations.77
After killing Soule, Charles Squires and William Morrow fled Colorado. Morrow seemingly disappeared without a trace. On June 13, however, the Rocky Mountain News reported that Squires had been apprehended in New Mexico by Lieutenant James Cannon. A month later, on July 11, Cannon brought Squires back with him to justice in Denver. Two nights after that, Cannon died in his hotel room, apparently poisoned. Some observers believed that Chivington’s supporters had killed again on their colonel’s behalf, though no evidence came to light to substantiate that contention. Squires, meanwhile, waited in jail for his trial. But just after his court martial finally began in October, somebody picked the lock on Squires’s cell. He escaped and was never caught. It turned out that Squires had powerful allies—his brother edited a prominent newspaper, and the Squires family counted among its friends General Daniel Sickles and General John Pope, as well as many others—some of whom apparently helped him avoid capture. Soule’s martyrdom, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, became important again when the U.S. Senate took up the matter of a Sand Creek memorial.78
On September 14, 2000, Senator Craig Thomas gaveled to order hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks, Historic Preservation, and Recreation. Senate Bill 2950, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Establishment Act of 2000, was on the docket. The bill’s sponsor, Senator Campbell, rose first to speak on behalf of his legislation. Rather than offering his own testimony, Campbell read the Soule and Cramer letters aloud and then introduced them into the Senate record. Before ceding the floor, Campbell noted, “I do not know of any worse atrocity, frankly, in American history.” John Warner, one of the most respected voices in the Senate at the time and a renowned champion of the nation’s armed forces, rose after Campbell. Steve Brady, on hand to speak in support of the bill, wondered if Warner would defend the troops under Chivington. Instead, a visibly shaken Warner revealed that Campbell’s testimony had been “the most moving and compassionate reading of a tragic chapter of American history” that he had ever heard.79
After a representative from the NPS suggested that the federal government had remained silent about the massacre for too long, Steve Brady spoke. First, he took care of business, stating that the search had accomplished its goals. “It is unquestionably clear, absolutely clear,” he said, brushing aside the village controversy, “that there is no more room for ambiguity. The location and extent of the massacre site and area has been identified.” Brady next grappled with more complicated issues, including the open question of treaty claims: “Although Congress admitted responsibility [for] the atrocities, the acts of genocide, committed at Sand Creek, and promised reparations to the Cheyenne and Arapaho through Article 6 of Treaty of Little Arkansas of 1865, this remains an empty promise.” Finally, he spoke about NAGPRA, wagging his finger at museums that “presently hold within their collections those that were killed, mutilated and taken as trophies and/or specimens at Sand Creek.” David Halaas then reiterated the importance of the Soule-Cramer letters, before Senator Campbell entered affidavits of support from the Kiowa County commissioners into the Senate’s record. With that, Senator Thomas adjourned the hearing, and the waiting began.80
Senator Campbell’s hearings generated publicity in Colorado, where the use of the Soule-Cramer letters as evidence ignited yet another memory fight surrounding Sand Creek. The brouhaha began when the Denver Post quoted Patty Limerick, the University of Colorado historian who had studied the question of renaming Nichols Hall in 1987, saying that the documents contained little fresh information. Noting that the various Sand Creek investigations had turned up plenty of brutal testimony about the massacre, Limerick suggested that rather than providing new insights, the letters offered “more of a confirmation of what’s already on the record.” An outraged David Halaas responded, explaining that beyond the extraordinary good fortune of finding the papers on the eve of the Sand Creek hearings, Soule’s and Cramer’s correspondence had, more than a century earlier, thrown back the curtain on the massacre. “Everything that came later flowed from these letters,” he explained. Limerick backtracked, insisting that she had been selectively quoted in the original story and that, after reading the letters, she found their contents “dazzling.” By then, other local scholars had piled on, questioning the legitimacy of the accounts in some cases and attesting to their importance in others. Congress, meanwhile, deliberated about Senator Campbell’s memorial bill.81
As Coloradans bickered over the Soule-Cramer letters, the Senate passed the Sand Creek Act on October 5; the House followed suit on October 23. Three weeks shy of the massacre’s 136th anniversary, on November 7, 2000, with Americans casting ballots in a general election that would be among the most contentious in the nation’s history, President Clinton signed the Sand Creek legislation. The act embedded in federal law elements of George Bent’s and Silas Soule’s interpretation of the violence: Chivington’s troops had attacked “a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians”; more than 150 of those Native Americans, “most of whom were women, children, or the elderly,” had died in the slaughter that ensued; and “during the massacre and the following day, the soldiers committed atrocities on the dead before withdrawing from the field.” The act also justified memorializing the violence by noting that the massacre was both “of great significance to descendants of the victims” and “a reminder of the tragic extremes sometimes reached in the 500 years of conflict between Native Americans and people of European [descent].” The NPS, after obtaining “sufficient land,” would establish and manage the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.82
Observers who read the legislation closely might have predicted that the politics of memory would continue to shape the effort to commemorate Sand Creek. For example, the memorial would be huge, embodying the boundary compromise, the NPS’s solution to the village controversy. The historic site would span more than 12,000 acres of southeastern Colorado prairie. The act also reflected the affected tribal representatives’ concerns. A portion of the memorial would be dedicated to a cemetery, where the repatriated remains of the massacre’s victims would be interred. The descendants would have special access to the site for traditional cultural practices. They would also continue to have a say about the future of the memorial: “any reasonable need of a descendent shall be considered in park planning and operation.” As for local proprietors, Senator Campbell safeguarded their interest
s as well. The NPS would be allowed to acquire land through a variety of methods: donation, exchange, or purchase, but “only from a willing seller.” The NPS would also “give priority to the acquisition of land containing the marker in existence on the date of enactment of this Act, which states ‘Sand Creek Battleground, November 29 and 30, 1864’ ”—the so-called Dawson South Bend. In other words, as with the earlier Sand Creek legislation, the NPS would not be able to seize private property via condemnation or eminent domain, a sop to Kiowa County landowners, especially William Dawson. But it turned out that satisfying Dawson and the descendants would prove more complicated even than Senator Campbell anticipated at that time.83
5
INDELIBLE INFAMY
On a chilly night in mid-November 2000, the Northern Cheyennes marked the passage of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Establishment Act with a powwow held in the reservation town of Lame Deer. Women at the celebration wore brightly colored dresses. Men arrived clad in traditional regalia: feathered headdresses, patterned tunics and breeches, and intricately beaded moccasins. Deep into the night the descendants reveled in their recent success, honoring the memories of their forebears. They stepped, swayed, spun, and shuffled as members of a small drum group pounded out steady beats and sang in the Cheyenne language. Otto Braided Hair remembered feeling “like we had accomplished something for our tribe, especially for our ancestors killed at Sand Creek.” Quieter events took place on the Northern Arapahos’ Wind River Reservation and within the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation. After the bill passed, Gail Ridgely recalled thinking, “the spirits can finally rest.” Laird and Colleen Cometsevah, for their part, took comfort knowing that “generations will die out, but now Sand Creek will always be protected. Our great-grandchildren will be able to go there, to learn what happened there, and understand our people’s history.”1