A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  As the descendants exulted, people throughout the West congratulated themselves for having opened a door to cross-cultural reconciliation. Some Coloradans, including Georgianna Contiguglia, head of the Colorado Historical Society, viewed the Sand Creek legislation as heralding a new era of open-mindedness in the region’s perception of its past. “We now have enough homes of the rich and famous designated as historic sites in Colorado,” Contiguglia suggested. “We need more places and sites that relate to ordinary and more diverse people.” Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, speaking to a reporter from the Denver Post, extolled the nation’s resilience and explained of the memorial that it would salve old wounds: “After years of denial and dishonor, America has found the courage to face the flaws of our past and honor those killed at Sand Creek.” Allowing that “creating a national historic site where so much innocent blood was shed cannot undo the past,” Campbell nevertheless suggested, “it can serve as a living symbol of healing.” Editors at the Omaha World-Herald amplified this message: “America’s increasing maturity as a society is demonstrated by an act of Congress in the closing days of this year’s session.” Still, the article sounded a cautionary note: “monuments can be healing or they can be divisive,” before suggesting to readers, “the 21st century is approaching; the time is long past for Americans, no matter what ethnicity or personal family history, to be divided over things that happened in the 19th.” The Sand Creek site, in this view, would serve not only as a memorial to the Native people killed at the massacre but also as a prompt for individuals eager to forgive and forget historical tragedies.2

  Bill Dawson, too, initially delighted in the act’s passage. Senator Campbell’s legislation directed the National Park Service (NPS) to prioritize Dawson’s property when acquiring land for the historic site. Dawson, consequently, believed that he would soon realize his goal of cashing out his ranch and leaving Kiowa County for greener pastures. He had worked hard over the preceding years, playing his cards carefully and well. He had cultivated friendships with Laird Cometsevah, Steve Brady, and several other descendants. He had influenced the NPS personnel process during the site study. And even when he had not been invited to consultation meetings, he had outmaneuvered his opponents, maintaining a central place for himself in the search process.3

  The village controversy remained the greatest obstacle to Dawson’s long-simmering plan to extricate himself from his ranch. Confronted with Doug Scott’s and Jerry Greene’s findings about the massacre site’s location, Dawson produced a competing thesis. Although carefully sourced, his theory ultimately rested on a claim of authority as a proprietor. Having worked the land for decades, Dawson explained, he knew its contours, its capacities, even its secrets. He respected Scott and Greene. “I thought those guys were top-flight,” he recalled. Familiar with their work on the Little Bighorn battlefield, Dawson had “fought tooth and nail” to have the two experts attached to the Sand Creek project. As time passed, though, he lamented that Scott and Greene lacked the local knowledge necessary to temper what he saw as their intellectual arrogance. He viewed the village controversy as a threat to his pocketbook and his politics. If federal officials thought that academic expertise could trump hard-won experience, as Dawson believed happened often in the West, he would prove them wrong.4

  Even when the site searchers unearthed relatively few relics from his ranch’s soil, Dawson had an explanation rooted in his knowledge of local history: through the years, treasure hunters had picked the land clean. “It was a big thing back in the early days of settlement of this county,” Dawson explained, “[for] homesteaders to pack a picnic basket and attach a team of horses to the wagon. They’d go to the Sand Creek site and have lunch, and the men would hunt artifacts.” Dawson’s grandfather, for example, had weathered lean years on the ranch, times so bad that when the wind howled the soil disappeared, exposing hardpan beneath. In those moments, “you’d walk out there and see stuff laying out everywhere. And people used to come with buckets and pick it up, literally take buckets full of artifacts away.” The NPS’s Site Location Study corroborated these stories, though some Kiowa County residents recalled searching for arrowheads and Civil War–era ordnance to the north of the marker on Dawson’s property. Regardless, collectors had exhausted the South Bend’s bounty, Dawson concluded. That there were so few remnants of the massacre still to be found in that spot—the “traditional site,” he typically said, echoing Laird Cometsevah—made perfect sense.5

  Making common cause with the Cheyenne descendants, whose moral authority, Dawson understood, buttressed the weight of his local knowledge and property rights, he kept insisting that the NPS had not, in fact, unearthed Black Kettle’s village. Instead, he argued, the searchers had discovered the location where Chivington and his troops had camped following the massacre, when the Colorado volunteers had destroyed lingering remnants of the Indian village. Both Doug Scott and Jerry Greene were skeptical about this version of events, as well as about other facets of Dawson’s theory. His views “did not accord with the historical record in any way, shape, or form,” remembered Scott, who wondered if “pride of ownership” and a “desire to sell his land” had clouded the rancher’s objectivity. Despite doubts within the NPS’s ranks, though, Dawson emerged from the village controversy with his ranch still the centerpiece of the proposed historic site, thanks in part to backing from Laird Cometsevah and Steve Brady. Then, in October and November 2000, Dawson’s erstwhile enemies became his allies: the federal government that he so reviled increased the value of his property. He would finally have his payday.6

  But how much would Dawson be paid? And by whom? Those were two of the unresolved questions plaguing the memorialization effort throughout 2001 and into 2002. The longer it took for answers to emerge, the more frustrated Dawson became. The delay stemmed partly from the conditions that he had imposed on prospective buyers, including federal negotiators. He could not imagine running a ranch with “tourists wandering around the fence lines, trampling the grass and scaring the cows.” The liability issues alone made such an arrangement unwieldy. He decided that he would not sell only a portion of his land; any deal would have to be all or nothing. And he would dictate the price. From as far back as his first interactions with Ward Churchill in 1997, Dawson had factored the property’s historic significance into his asking price. He had set the number at $1.5 million then. His demands had remained consistent through the years. With passage of the Sand Creek legislation, that figure, approximately five times what his land would have fetched at market were it not associated with the massacre, seemed more reasonable than ever to Dawson. And after September 28, 2001, when the site joined the National Register of Historic Places, $1.5 million seemed like an outright bargain. A lucky bidder could own a piece of Western history.7

  But the NPS, despite being the most likely buyer, could only pay fair market value for property. Federal regulators, safeguarding the public coffers, had long since tied the hands of NPS personnel in land negotiations. At a series of gatherings held in Colorado, Montana, and Oklahoma in 2001 and 2002, the NPS tried to educate the descendants and local proprietors about constraints governing the acquisition of land for units of the National Park System. Agricultural property in Kiowa County typically sold for between $120 and $264 per acre, depending on improvements and access to water. By contrast, Bill Dawson wanted approximately $1,000 per acre for his land. The Cheyennes supported him, insisting that he should receive his asking price because of the unique meaning of the site. Christine Whitacre, though, explained at a contentious meeting held in Colorado early in 2002 that as far as the NPS was concerned there was “no such thing as a higher price for historic value.” Even though the NPS wanted to buy Dawson’s ranch, it could not up its offer based on the property’s cultural significance. An increasingly impatient Dawson found this “inflexibility infuriating” and wondered if it was a “negotiating ploy.”8

  Early in 2002, Dawson’s frustration erupted into outrage. On February 14, the
Conservation Fund, a national organization “dedicated to advancing America’s land and water legacy,” sent the NPS a valentine: it purchased 240 acres of property within the boundaries of the historic site from the Goodrich family and conveyed title to the NPS. Earl Goodrich had homesteaded the land in 1909, and his grandson, Marc, served as family spokesman when he announced to the press: “We are pleased that the NPS is moving ahead with the project.” The Goodrich deal reflected fair market value, which worried Dawson. He grew more concerned, though, when the Internal Revenue Service investigated and then fined him around that time, citing him for not declaring consultation fees that the NPS had paid him during the site search. Dawson, incredulous about the timing of the audit, believed that someone at the NPS, either hoping to intimidate him into dropping the asking price for his land, or perhaps retaliating against him for past transgressions, had tipped off the IRS. This was typical behavior for thuggish bureaucrats, Dawson believed, an example of federal authority run amok. Hoping to put a stop to the perceived harassment, Dawson contacted Senator Campbell, who inquired with the NPS’s regional director. Nothing more came of the charge, but the event became a trigger. In March 2002, a livid Dawson decided not to wait any longer. He put his ranch up for sale to the highest bidder.9

  Bill Dawson was not the only Kiowa County resident angry with the NPS after the Sand Creek Act became law. The release of the NPS’s two-volume report, coupled with details of Senator Campbell’s legislation, deepened Chuck and Sheri Bowen’s bad feelings toward the federal government. In its Site Location Study, the NPS downplayed the couple’s claims about the massacre having taken place on their property. The report allowed that Chuck Bowen had “collected, literally, hundreds of artifacts,” but then dismissed most of those finds because the materials dated to long after 1864. The Bowen property, Jerry Greene and Doug Scott believed, likely had hosted only the sand pits, the makeshift fortifications that the Arapahos and Cheyennes had dug at Sand Creek to escape the slaughter. As for the land that would form the bulk of the historic site, the Bowens insisted they were thrilled for their neighbor, Bill Dawson, that Senator Campbell had anointed his ranch. “We’ve never had an issue with Bill getting his money,” Sheri Bowen explained. “In fact, like I said many times, we hoped everything would work out.” But, Chuck Bowen added, Campbell’s relentless focus on the Dawson South Bend suggested that the fix had been in from the first. In his view, the outcome looked like a foregone conclusion, part of a petty conspiracy: Dawson had wanted to sell, his family had not. Dawson had then become close to the Cheyennes. The NPS team, consequently, had played politics with its findings, knowing that the South Bend could be had for the right price and that its acquisition would placate many of the descendants.10

  The Bowens expressed their opposition to elements of the memorialization process with the local press, using their property rights as a cudgel. The NPS plan, Chuck Bowen explained to a reporter after the Sand Creek Act passed, would “compromise” his family’s ranching operation. Although the federal government, because of Senator Campbell’s willing-seller-only provision, might not take their land outright, creating a unit of the National Park System next door would likely affect the same outcome: driving them out of business. But then, fueled by a sense of their righteousness and a quest they had not yet completed—Chuck Bowen recalled, “It [finding the site] was just driving us crazy. I kept thinking we’ve got to put this aside. But we just couldn’t.”—the Bowens remained engaged with the process. Based on more than 1,500 hours of detailed study of written sources and prospecting in the field, they had developed their “wood and water” theory of the site’s location: “ya gotta have wood, ya gotta have water.” In other words, their ranch, which boasted stands of trees and a freshwater spring, had the environmental features necessary to host a large Native American camp, whereas their neighbors’ land did not. They also returned to the table with the NPS, hoping they would have a better negotiating partner, someone who might more seriously consider the merits of their perspective on the massacre than in previous years.11

  With the ink from President Clinton’s signature not yet dry on the Sand Creek legislation, Alexa Roberts and Rick Frost met in Denver to discuss the memorialization process. Although the NPS typically assigned a superintendent to a new unit of the Park System closer to the moment when the site opened, Frost explained to Roberts that Sand Creek would be different. Because the subject of the massacre remained politically fraught, and because the NPS saw the memorialization effort as an opportunity to burnish its multicultural credentials, the NPS would choose someone to helm the site immediately—a leader designated to steer it through the land acquisition process necessary before opening. Roberts, invested in the project and aware that Frost wanted to distance himself from the struggles surrounding Sand Creek, wondered who would be asked to take on that task. Frost, she recalled, perked up and asked, “Would you be interested?” Roberts laughed off the question, thinking that the position would be a political minefield. But Frost was serious. The following summer, based on her strong relationship with the descendants, the NPS tapped Roberts for the job.12

  The Bowens, who had long since lost faith in Rick Frost, extended a clean slate to Alexa Roberts. In late summer 2002, hopeful that the NPS would reconsider its skepticism about the provenance of their artifacts, they asked Roberts and Doug Scott to review their collection again. On September 17, the NPS employees traveled to the Bowens’ home in Lamar, Colorado. Viewing an enormous array of relics laid out on a table in the couple’s basement, Scott found himself more impressed than he had been in 1999. He was particularly taken with a nearly complete cannonball from a mountain howitzer that Chuck Bowen had assembled. Bowen asked, “What do you think?” Scott answered, “I think you definitely have Sand Creek–related materials.” He added, “You’ve got village materials, and you’ve got a lot of personal stuff,” before speculating that the Bowens likely had the remnants of the sand pits on their property, as well, perhaps, as the spot where the Arapahos had camped in the days leading to the massacre. In other words, it still was not Black Kettle’s village, but Scott nevertheless reassured the Bowens, “There is no question you have part of the Sand Creek site on your land. There never has been a question of it. But you’ve found more.” Then he promised the couple: “I will say it in print that you found this, that you found a very important part of the site.” This offer pleased the Bowens, though they demurred when Scott asked if he could return some time in the coming months with other archeologists, who would professionally catalog the collection.13

  Scott and Roberts left the meeting confident that they had opened up the possibility of improved relations with the Bowens. But Chuck Bowen was not so sure. He sensed that Scott’s parting query betrayed the archeologist’s lingering doubts about the authenticity of his collection. He was right in part. Scott understood that the Bowens were not scholars and thus had not followed standard protocols when retrieving objects from the earth. Nevertheless, he wondered, why hadn’t they even taken photographs of themselves collecting? Regardless, following the meeting, Bowen approached Jeff Broome, a Denver-area historian of the Indian Wars and a collector of artifacts from the period, hoping Broome would examine his relics and help authenticate them. Broome agreed. After visiting the Bowens’ home, he called Doug Scott to share his enthusiasm for what he had seen. Scott, in turn, wrote to Chuck Bowen, asking again about cataloging his materials and also raising the possibility of conducting further archeological reconnaissance on his land. Bowen, in a note to Alexa Roberts, then dropped any pretense of cooperation, wondering: “In what ways would this benefit me and be good for me to do? How could it possibly go against me or my land? And also, with more archeology, how would I benefit?” Scott tried and failed to reassure Bowen, noting, “Our work in 1999 was never intended to be the last word in the archeology of the site.” But by then the Bowens had turned their attention to coping with a family illness. Only after a long convalescence would they reengage th
e NPS.14

  Most Kiowa County residents had relatively tenuous connections to Sand Creek compared to Bill Dawson or the Bowens. Janet Frederick, director of the Kiowa County Economic Development Corporation, suggested, “People know about it. It’s part of our history. But it’s not who we are.” Nevertheless, the news that the site would become a unit of the National Park System generated mixed feelings in Eads. On the one hand, the region was in grim shape. Between a drought parching the ranching industry and a general malaise gripping small towns nationwide, the prospect of tourists arriving with money to spend seemed hopeful—at least compared to no hope at all. On the other hand, local people loved their county’s tranquility and stability. Hosting the historic site would mean newcomers, uncertainty, and maybe unfettered change. Then there was the name. Most area residents had deep roots in Kiowa County. For generations their families had known the prairie landscape near the monument overlook on the Dawson ranch as the Sand Creek Battleground. Scout troops had visited the site, prospectors had hunted arrowheads there, and during high water some people had baptized their children in the creek. Now, with what seemed like little input from the local population, that familiar place would be renamed the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. As Frederick said, “Folks just didn’t know if they should feel ashamed, mad, or glad.”15

  Even some county officials were ambivalent about the historic site. Opening a unit of the National Park System in their backyard meant compromises, they realized. But they hoped to avoid what they saw as the ultimate devil’s bargain: pulling up their agricultural roots and becoming another interchangeable part of the nation’s exploding service economy. The county commissioners, including Rod Brown, had worked closely with Senator Campbell during the search process to protect their way of life. “We had all traded enough horses through the years,” Brown recalled, “to know that there’s always going to be a little give and take.” And while they had been willing to give a little on nomenclature—despite occasional misgivings among their constituents, the word “massacre” had not been a deal breaker—they had held fast on property rights. After the legislation passed, members of the Kiowa County Economic Development Corporation pondered how to refashion Eads into a “gateway community,” an attractive front door greeting visitors en route to a tourist destination. Janet Frederick and Rod Johnson understood that they had to walk a fine line, using a site of tragedy sacred to Native people to drive economic growth. The key, Johnson believed, would be avoiding “rubber tomahawk syndrome,” lining Eads’s streets with faux teepees filled with vendors selling kitsch. Johnson hoped his neighbors would do better than that because, despite their demographic homogeneity, they had “a lot in common with many of the Sand Creek descendants.”16