A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  Laird Cometsevah, though pleased that the Civil War memorial had been reinterpreted, remained frustrated because of the turmoil complicating his tribe’s efforts to protect the Sand Creek site. He worried also that the ceremony at the Colorado capitol would allow “white people to think they’ve paid their debts to the Cheyennes” and that the new plaque would not substantively shift collective memory of Sand Creek. The Denver Post’s coverage of the rededication ceremony suggested that Cometsevah had reason to be concerned. The Post perpetuated myths about the massacre and suggested that white Coloradans had secured for themselves expiation on the cheap. An editorial in the paper began with wishful thinking (“Colorado and the country finally are coming to terms with the saddest episode in state history”) then suggested that Sand Creek could be blamed on a small number of convenient scapegoats (“a mob of 700 half-drunk militia volunteers, armed with field artillery and commanded by Col. John Chivington”) before concluding with a misreading of current events (“the effort [to preserve the massacre site] was saved by businessman Jim Druck.… Three cheers for Jim Druck”). Cometsevah, meanwhile, insisted, “the soldiers were guilty, but the federal government was responsible for the genocide committed at Sand Creek. And the federal government still owes my people.” Notwithstanding Jim Druck’s help, the effort to memorialize the site had stalled because Cometsevah’s “people were still dealing with what happened at Sand Creek.”45

  The Post article, and Cometsevah’s reaction to it, recapitulated one of the enduring controversies surrounding the memory of Sand Creek: the question of ultimate responsibility for the bloodshed. In the wake of the violence, even those Coloradans, including Silas Soule, who allowed that Sand Creek had been a massacre pinned the blame on John Chivington or his ostensibly ragtag troops. Chivington, these people suggested, was an opportunistic coward, a politically motivated climber, a bloodthirsty madman, or some toxic combination of all of the above. His troops, another line of argument suggested, were the dregs of society: drunks, mental defectives, common criminals, or worse. From this perspective, the massacre could be dismissed as a one-off event, the work of a depraved element, marginal characters in no way representative of Colorado society. More than a century later, that view still proved alluring for some Denver-area journalists (just as it would for Senator Campbell at the site’s opening ceremony). Blaming the massacre on fringe characters, or their debased commander, allowed editors at the Post to ignore the structural issues lurking beneath Sand Creek: how a murderous federal Indian policy, carried out by the army, abetted the settlement of the West. The bloodiest chapter of the region’s history, then, could be redeemed through acts as simple as the casting and unveiling of a culturally sensitive plaque.46

  Laird Cometsevah found such views maddening. His tribe remained mired in contentious politics that he viewed as one lingering by-product of the massacre. “The chiefs killed were important,” he said, before turning to an analogy popular at the time among the descendants: “Imagine what it would have been like if the terrorists had flown planes into the Capitol and the White House. Chaos. Then how long would it have taken for the government to recover? My people still suffer from the losses at Sand Creek. Our government still hasn’t recovered completely.” Back in Oklahoma, where he spent his time performing a chief’s duties—caring for elders at the tribes’ senior center, safeguarding Cheyenne cultural practices, and preparing an Article 6 claim—Cometsevah waited. With his vision of preserving the massacre site as a step toward securing reparations for the descendants stalled, he believed that his tribe needed, more than ever, to embrace its traditions. Sitting with his wife, Colleen, Cometsevah suggested, “Our system of government just does not work.” Colleen Cometsevah added: “Those of us who still respect our Indian ways are the only thing holding our tribe together now.” The longer the impasse over the Druck deal persisted, the more frustrated the Cometsevahs became with the waiting.47

  In the year after the ceremony at the Colorado capitol, what had once seemed like a placid union of casino gambling and the politics of memory threatened to end in an ugly divorce. Jim Druck, still “uneasy” about owning the massacre site, sought compromise with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Business Committee. But that body, made up of eight representatives drawn from throughout the tribes, remained evenly split. In the last week of April 2003, Druck traveled to Oklahoma to plead his case to the full tribal electorate. At a series of public meetings, he explained that his company collected approximately $1 million in profits for the tribes each month. He debunked rumors that he planned to build a casino on the Sand Creek site. And he produced a copy of the agreement that he had signed with the business committee a year earlier. Then Druck tried to leverage Laird Cometsevah’s cultural authority within the community, recruiting the chief to lobby on behalf of the deal. The performance did not go well. Someone apparently manipulated the sound system when Cometsevah rose to speak. The audience heard only static. Cometsevah stalked out. Druck followed him at the microphone, but protestors shouted the businessmen down.48

  The impasse only broke because, even if Sand Creek’s commemoration mattered a great deal for the tribes, mammon sometimes trumped memory. In July 2003, Jim Druck accepted a shorter extension on the management agreement than he had originally negotiated with the tribes a year earlier, and the business committee voted through the deal. A relieved Druck informed Alexa Roberts that he would convey the Sand Creek property to the tribes early the following winter. Roberts had for months been trying to ease fears among her neighbors in Kiowa County: some still worried about the arrival of casino gambling in their community; others were more concerned that the national historic site might not open at all, another body blow for an economy already staggered by protracted drought. Roberts “was very happy to have some good news to share when [she] went to the grocery store” in Eads. The deed transfer, she said, would take place at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes’ casino sometime around the anniversary of the massacre.49

  In the interim, the memorialization effort attracted more controversy, including renewed struggles over the designation of Sand Creek as a massacre and the proper placement of the historic site. On September 4, 2003, a crowd, mostly made up of middle-aged and older men, gathered in the ballroom of a Colorado Springs hotel. They arrived clad in raiment familiar to Western history buffs: pressed pants, cowboy shirts and boots, and bolo ties. Beneath chandeliers casting dim light and surrounded by oak paneling, they wandered around a book exhibit and gossiped with old friends about their hobby: “Did you see that article about the Earps in Wild West?” “Yeah, I did. It was pretty good, right? It kind of me reminded me of that talk we heard in Tucson a few years back.” Participants had traveled from around the United States for the Twenty-Fourth Annual Assembly of the Order of the Indian Wars (OIW).50

  Jerry Russell, a political consultant and advertising man from Little Rock, Arkansas, best known for jingles he wrote to help sell his candidates to voters in local and statewide elections, began the OIW in 1979. A longtime advocate of preserving Civil War battlefields, whether threatened by development or neglect, Russell had for years arranged popular “roundtables,” traveling seminars accompanied by tours of key sites, focused on the “war between the states.” He eventually decided, “It’d be neat to do Indian Wars stuff because that’s what I’m interested in too.” The Colorado gathering, highlighting Sand Creek and the Civil War in the West, united Russell’s two historical passions. The meeting also allowed him to continue fighting against what he saw as a pernicious trend: the NPS’s effort to include multicultural perspectives in its interpretation of historic sites.51

  A bear of a man, possessed of a rich baritone and a jocular manner suited to his work in public relations, Russell groused: “It’s tedious how politically correct we’ve become. We can’t leave the past alone. We’re constantly reinterpreting history guided by our own values.” Years earlier, in an opinion piece he penned for his local newspaper, Russell laid out his philosophy of preservi
ng Civil War sites. Condemning the NPS’s shift in focus from military history emphasizing battlefield tactics and grand strategy to deeper questions surrounding the war’s causes, context, and consequences, Russell suggested that multiculturalism had besieged the nation’s history. He singled out Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. for insisting that the NPS should “interpret slavery as ‘the cause’ of the Civil War.” Russell contended, “Battlefields are not about ‘causality’ … battlefields are not about ‘blame’ or any political agendas or any socio-cultural agendas.” Instead, he finished, “battlefields are about honor.” In 2003, Russell announced that he had come to Colorado to redeem John Chivington’s besmirched honor by touring “the Sand Creek Battlefield.” He explained that as far as he was concerned, “[the NPS’s] decision to use the word ‘massacre’ tells you all you need to know. Visitors won’t have a chance to make up their own minds about what happened there. The government has already decided for them: it was a massacre.” Russell wondered, “When did we decide that it’s always white people bad, Indians good? When did we decide that Sand Creek was a massacre?”52

  Russell might have addressed his questions to Dee Brown, an author he knew back in Arkansas. Born in a timber camp south of Shreveport in 1908, Brown lived in Louisiana until he was five years old, when his father died. His family then moved to southeastern Arkansas, where Brown grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of her father’s exploits with Davy Crockett. Brown loved books and movies as a boy, devouring Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson and going to Westerns when he had the chance. After graduating from high school, he attended Arkansas State Teachers College, where he studied history and prepared for a career as a librarian. For much of his adult life, Brown worked at the University of Illinois library. In his off hours, he wrote, relentlessly and with flair, eventually producing twenty-nine works of adult fiction and nonfiction. In 1970, shortly before retiring and returning to Arkansas, Brown published one of the most influential accounts of Native American history ever written: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.53

  As Brown’s subtitle suggests, he wrote Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee as an “Indian history of the American West.” In the two years that he banged out the book on a manual typewriter, he tried to examine the region’s conquest and settlement through the eyes of its dispossessed tribal peoples. “I’m a very old Indian,” he said of his authorial voice, “and I’m remembering the past.” The memories were bleak. Beginning with the policy of removal under President Andrew Jackson, when the U.S. government created a “permanent Indian frontier” beyond the ninety-fifth meridian, and moving through the era of the Gold Rush, Brown indicts federal Indian policy. The book then hits its stride when he turns to the Indian Wars. He paints those conflicts as a series of slaughters, suggesting that “the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.” That process culminated with the murder of the Lakota Ghost Dancers, in 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Underscoring the depravity of whites, ranging from elected officials to U.S. cavalrymen, who participated in the bloody encounters he catalogs, Brown ends his book in the wake of the carnage at Wounded Knee with a macabre passage riddled with the era’s painful ironies: “It was the fourth day after Christmas in the Year of our Lord 1890. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church, those who were conscious could see Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters. Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.”54

  The Cheyenne people figure prominently throughout Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, with Sand Creek occupying one of the book’s longest and bloodiest chapters. Relying on accounts produced by eyewitnesses sympathetic to Black Kettle’s bands, Brown adopts a narrative arc and interpretive frame similar to those of George Bent and Silas Soule, highlighting many of the same grim details: the spring skirmishes that set the wheels of injustice in motion; Governor Evans’s two summertime proclamations; the Camp Weld conference, where Chivington offered the Arapahos and Cheyennes protection if they came in to Fort Lyon; the night before the bloodshed, when Chivington reportedly anticipated “wading in gore”; Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer replying, noting that targeting the Native people camped on Sand Creek would be “murder in every sense of the word”; the attack itself, when Black Kettle flew both white and American flags over his lodge, when White Antelope fell in a hail of bullets, calmly singing his death song, and when Chivington’s men ran roughshod, slicing genitalia from their victims, including, in one observer’s words, a “squaw cut open with an unborn child … lying by her side.” For Brown, Sand Creek was a massacre, another grisly chapter among many in the West’s history.55

  Scholars greeted Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee with skepticism bordering on contempt. Most professional historians damned Brown’s work with the faint praise reserved for well-told tales that do not rise to the level of the academy’s analytical standards: he had produced a gripping narrative. From there, critics of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee covered a lot of ground, but most agreed that the book failed as scholarship on several levels: Brown had eschewed balance, instead writing a “polemic”; he had not interrogated his Native sources, apparently “believing that Indians only spoke or wrote the truth”; and he had “committed errors” of fact and “distorted the evidence.” Writing in the discipline’s flagship journal, the American Historical Review, Francis Paul Prucha, the nation’s foremost historian of federal Indian policy, leveled by far the harshest charges. Prucha treated Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee like a blanket infected with smallpox, suggesting that it was not merely flawed but dangerous. Brushing aside “praise given … by uncritical and unknowledgeable reviewers,” he warned colleagues, “the unwary reader may falsely assume that the book is a scholarly historical work.” He instead described Brown’s work as “subtly dishonest” and filled with “a great many errors,” adding up to “considerable misinformation.” Prucha concluded, “It is to be regretted that this sort of ‘Indian history of the American west’ gains such popular acceptance.”56

  There was the irony. For no matter how much professional historians derided Dee Brown’s work, his book captured the public’s attention. As Prucha feared, reviewers outside the academy raved about Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Thomas Lask, writing in the New York Times, described it as “original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking,” concluding, “It is a book both impossible to read and impossible to put down.” Phyllis Pearson, one of few Native Americans who evaluated the book in print, hailed it as “the first accurate and comprehensive account of how the western United States was taken from the American Indian.” Congratulating Brown for his humanity and originality, she suggested, “This is a book every Indian should read” and also that “White people … should read this book, too.” They did—in unbelievable numbers. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee spent more than a year on the New York Times Best Seller List, sold in excess of 5 million copies in the time between its publication and Brown’s death, and appeared in nearly two dozen foreign-language translations. The book became a phenomenon, one of the most popular histories of the American West ever written.57

  Whatever Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’s merits may have been, onlookers agreed that good timing helped account for its immediate success and its lasting impact. Brown published his book as Native people redoubled their struggle for civil rights, as public opinion about the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War reached a tipping point, and as many Americans searched for alternative spirituality during the so-called New Age. In 1968, a group of tribal activists formed the American Indian Movement. Just a year later, some of the organization’s members helped take over Alcatraz Island, signaling the arrival of Red Power on the national stage. Meanwhile, eight days before the start of the occupation of Alcatraz, a then-obscure investigative journalist named Seymour Hersh broke the story of atrocities committed by American soldiers serving under Lieutenant William Calley in Vietnam. Calley’s men, Hersh reported, stoo
d accused by the U.S. Army of killing more than one hundred villagers in the hamlet of My Lai. By the time Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee appeared in bookstores, a majority of Americans disapproved of the Vietnam War and grappled with the capacity of U.S. soldiers to slaughter innocent civilians; the modern civil rights movement had captured the nation’s attention, maintaining a steady focus on issues of equality and racism; and many white observers were fascinated by the traditional culture of Native people. As one reviewer understated, “Brown is clearly one of a few authors who manage to write the right book at the right time.”58

  Whether books or movies spur or mirror social change is always difficult to know for certain. But when Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, along with films like Soldier Blue and Little Big Man, all released in 1970, captivated audiences eager to embrace critiques of American militarism, they helped galvanize sympathy for the plight of Native peoples. If Paul Hutton, a celebrated Western historian, exaggerated when he claimed of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that “we all went to bed thinking one way about the Indian Wars and the Indian people and we woke up the next morning after that book was published and we never thought the same way again,” even Brown’s critics agreed that his work had a significant impact on readers. Richard White, for example, another renowned historian of the American West, bemoaned Dee Brown’s tendency to portray Native people as noble, passive victims, denying them an active role in their own history—“it’s as if it didn’t matter what Indians did, only what whites did to them”—but still allowed that, despite its flaws, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee had inspired him. And Donald Fixico, among the leading lights in the field of Native American Studies, saw the book’s publication as a taproot for his discipline. Sandy MacNabb, who worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the Nixon administration, went further, suggesting that Brown’s work, much like other important books of the era, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, helped shift federal policy by packaging complicated ideas for popular consumption: “you can’t affect public opinion unless the public knows what you’re talking about.”59