A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

by Ari Kelman

  By the time that Jerry Russell arrived in Colorado, wondering who to blame for the popular perception that Sand Creek had been a massacre, he could no longer put the question to Dee Brown, who had died less than a year earlier, at the age of ninety-four. Russell nevertheless acknowledged Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee’s importance in shaping the collective memory of Sand Creek, and the Indian Wars more broadly, for generations of readers. The book, after all, had been published during an early flash point, the struggle over the Vietnam War, in what became known as the culture wars in the United States, a conflict whose rearguard actions Russell and his troops in the OIW were still fighting. But Russell nevertheless argued, “we can’t just blame Dee Brown for how politically correct this country has become in recent years.” When asked to elaborate, he explained, “Some folks, bleeding hearts from back east, have been calling Sand Creek a massacre for a long time.” Russell concluded, “Maybe we ought to let Dee Brown off the hook and blame old Helen Hunt Jackson instead.”60

  Throughout most of her life, Helen Hunt Jackson ignored the plight of Native Americans, the vast majority of whom had long since been exterminated or removed from her childhood home in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Born in Amherst, in 1830, Helen Fiske grew up in a bookish home. Her father, a Congregational minister, taught Latin and Greek at Amherst College and authored a guide to classical literature. Her mother, who wrote children’s books and graceful letters to friends and family, died when Fiske was fourteen years old; her father died three years later, but not before having arranged for his daughter to study at elite boarding schools, where she met influential friends, including a young woman named Emily Dickinson. In 1851, Fiske married Edward Hunt, then a lieutenant with a bright future in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Two years after that, she gave birth to a son, who died before reaching his first birthday. She had a second son two years later, but personal tragedy remained her constant companion. In 1863, her husband died in an accident. And her second child died in 1865. Helen Hunt had spent most of her adult life mourning lost family. She decided to cope with her sorrow by following her deceased parents’ example: she took up the pen.61

  Ready to begin a new chapter in her life, Hunt placed a few short pieces in the New York Evening Post in 1865. The following winter, she looked for a setting more conducive to writing. She moved to Newport, Rhode Island, settling in a boardinghouse where Thomas Wentworth Higginson lived. Already established as a Civil War hero, a social reformer, an author, and an arbiter of good taste in New England literary circles, Higginson became Hunt’s mentor. Over the next few years, her career blossomed. Her stories and poems appeared in the most prestigious journals of the day. But then, suffering from a respiratory ailment in fall 1873, Hunt decamped from the damp eastern seaboard. She moved to Colorado Springs, where she breathed crisp mountain air and began courting with William Sharpless Jackson, a banker and railroad speculator. They married two years later. Jackson, putting down roots in western soil, explored her adopted state, learned its history, and passed that knowledge on to readers in vivid travel essays. Although these were relatively happy and successful years for Jackson, she missed the bustle of city life, especially the company of her old circle of writer friends. She traveled back east in 1879 to celebrate Oliver Wendell Holmes’s birthday. While in Boston for the party, Jackson attended a public lecture offered by Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca tribe. She found herself enthralled by Standing Bear’s story, and she devoted the rest of her career to working within the burgeoning Indian reform movement.62

  Jackson’s background fit the profile of a nineteenth-century social reformer: born in New England, raised in a Protestant evangelical household, befriended by leading activists. But despite close ties to people like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Jackson had yet to engage directly with politics. Hearing Standing Bear speak, though, awakened something in her. Three years earlier, the Poncas had rejected the federal government’s decision to resettle them in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Despite their protests, Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz ruled that they would nevertheless have to be evicted from their homeland in Nebraska. In 1877, the tribe began a long trek to their new reservation, where many of them—including Standing Bear’s only living son—died of malnutrition, malaria, and other diseases. A year later, Standing Bear, accompanied by a small group of followers, carried his child’s body back to Nebraska, where the Ponca chief hoped to bury his boy. Soon after they arrived, U.S. soldiers arrested them for having left their reservation without permission from federal authorities. While the Poncas waited under guard at Fort Omaha, Thomas Tibbles, an editor at a local newspaper, publicized their case, found them legal representation, and, after they won their freedom at trial, arranged for Standing Bear to embark on a multicity speaking tour in fall 1879. The chief discussed his tribe’s history and the federal government’s mistreatment of indigenous peoples. The audience at the Boston lecture included the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, as well as Jackson, who, after hearing Standing Bear deliver his speech, decided to turn her literary talents to ameliorating the suffering of Native Americans.63

  Jackson campaigned by writing letters to prominent newspapers, including the New York Tribune. Pugnacious and scathing, her first missive damned Secretary of the Interior Schurz, who was also renowned as something of a reformer, for callousness, cruelty, and dereliction of duty. Schurz defended himself, explaining in an open letter that the decision to remove the Poncas predated his administration and that the tribe had acclimated quickly to life in Indian Territory. Early in 1880, as her exchange with Schurz helped keep Standing Bear in the public eye, Jackson turned her attention closer to home, to Colorado, focusing on another episode in which the government had mistreated Native people: the so-called White River War, which resulted in the removal of most Ute peoples from Colorado. The previous fall, Nathan Meeker, federal Indian agent to the Utes, had summoned cavalry support after his conversion efforts enraged the tribe. When the troops arrived, the Utes seized the offensive, holding off the cavalry and killing Meeker and nine of his colleagues. The fight lasted for nearly a week, ending only when the Utes withdrew from the field. In the aftermath of the violence, some outraged Coloradans fondly recalled John Chivington and called for “another Sand Creek” to quiet the Utes forever.64

  With the “Indian question” and Sand Creek back in the headlines, local sentiment along the Front Range typically favored the men of the 3rd Colorado and their unrepentant commander. One contemporary history of the region, written by W. B. Vickers, contextualized the Ute uprising by referring back to summer and fall 1864. Vickers granted that “the Sand Creek fight” had “evoked a great deal of hostile criticism” and had even in some quarters “been called a massacre.” But, he countered, “If so, it was a massacre of assassins, for fresh scalps of white men, women and children were found in the Indian camp after the battle.” In another dispatch to the Tribune, Jackson refuted such claims, defending the Utes and declaring that Sand Creek had actually been an unwarranted and depraved bloodletting. She insisted that the Arapahos and Cheyennes gathered at Sand Creek had been guaranteed “perfect safety” by white authorities in Colorado, that Black Kettle had flown both the American and a white flag on the day of the attack, that John Chivington’s troops had committed atrocities during the mayhem, and that they had returned to Denver as heroes, where the local press had celebrated those brave “Colorado soldiers” who had “covered themselves with glory.”65

  Such claims did not sit well with William Byers, who, as editor of the Rocky Mountain News at the time of Sand Creek, had defended Chivington from charges that he had massacred peaceful Indians. Picking up where he had left off a decade and a half earlier, Byers responded to Jackson with a letter of his own. Hewing to a line drawn by Chivington in the aftermath of the bloodshed, Byers claimed that the Colorado volunteers had discovered ironclad evidence that the camp at Sand Creek contained hostile warriors: “scalp
s of white men” which “had not yet dried”; “an Indian saddle-blanket entirely fringed around the edges with white women’s scalps, with the long, fair hair attached”; and the skin of a white woman stretched over the pommel of a saddle. He also denied that Black Kettle’s people had been under the protection of the government. He then insisted that corruption had compromised the Sand Creek investigations. Finally, he guessed that if Jackson “had been in Denver in the early part of that summer,” as Byers had been, “when the bloated, festering bodies of the Hungate family … were drawn through the streets naked in an ox-wagon, cut, mutilated, and scalped—the work of those same red fiends who were so justly punished at Sand Creek,” she would have offered a “word of excuse” for the Colorado volunteers. “Sand Creek,” he explained, had “saved Colorado, and taught the Indians the most salutary lesson they had ever learned.” Jackson could not understand this part of the state’s history, Byers concluded, because she had been back east, living in comfort and safety, at the time.66

  Back and forth they went. Jackson cited chapter and verse from the Sand Creek inquiries. Byers countered that her critique, written so long after the fact, should not be trusted. Byers also expanded his claims to encompass Chivington’s most ambitious defense of Sand Creek. The violence, Byers said, had ended the region’s Indian problem. “We, who were so unfortunate as to be citizens of Colorado at the time, know that a very great majority of the savage atrocities of that period occurred before the battle of Sand Creek,” he began. “We know that the Sand Creek Indian camp was the common rendezvous of the hostile bands who were committing these atrocities, [and] we know that comparatively few occurred afterward.” He added, “No amount of special pleading, no reiteration of partial statements, and withholding of more important truths, will change the facts so well known to the earlier settlers of Colorado.” For the state’s pioneers, memories of Sand Creek, forged in an era of violence, remained immutable even in a time of peace. Jackson rebutted first with figures: the “Indian war” following Sand Creek had cost more than $30 million. If Chivington had intended to pacify the local tribes, he had failed. Then she waved the bloody shirt: fighting Native people on the Plains during that conflict had required “no less than 8,000 troops … withdrawn from the effective forces engaged with the Rebellion.” Sand Creek not only had been a massacre, she charged, it had also detracted from the Union war effort.67

  While Helen Hunt Jackson sparred with William Byers in the Herald’s pages, she also worked on a longer manuscript examining the federal government’s mistreatment of Native Americans. Later titled Century of Dishonor, Jackson’s book has much in common with Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. A relentless exposé of double-dealing, Century of Dishonor’s chapters detail the bloody consequences of a long series of shattered agreements between whites and tribal peoples, including the Cheyennes. As in Brown’s work, Jackson places the violence at Sand Creek in the context of numerous gory conflicts, suggesting that it was hardly unique, a by-product of a single individual’s treachery or the poor character of the Colorado troops. Instead, the bloodshed stemmed from misguided federal policy and represented a predictable result of “the robbery, the cruelty which were done under the cloak of this hundred years of treaty-making and treaty-breaking.” Jackson writes, “The history of the United States Government’s repeated violations of faith with the Indians thus convicts us, as a nation, not only of having outraged the principles of justice, which are the basis of international law; and of having laid ourselves open to the accusation of both cruelty and perfidy; but of having made ourselves liable to all punishments which follow upon such sins.” Only by repenting of those sins, by overhauling its treatment of Native American peoples, could the United States avoid being harshly judged by “any civilized nation who might see fit to call us to account, and to that more certain natural punishment which, sooner or later, as surely comes from evil-doing as harvests come from sown seed.”68

  Jackson wrote Century of Dishonor as a political brickbat. Upon its publication, in 1881, she sent copies, bound in red and embossed with a quote from Ben Franklin—“Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations.”—to every member of Congress. Most lawmakers ignored it. But the book nevertheless gained cultural purchase. With the Modoc War, the Red River War, and the Great Sioux War, including the Battle of the Little Bighorn, having just taken place, some officials in the Department of the Interior acknowledged that federal Indian policy had largely failed. They turned to reform. And though Jackson’s arguments about tribal autonomy were out of place during the so-called era of assimilation, many politicians eventually embraced her work. Even Senator Henry Dawes, who later crafted the government’s policy of general allotment, a sweeping effort at detribalization, admired Jackson. Century of Dishonor’s impact, then, outstripped its sales figures, particularly after Jackson’s Ramona, a story of California Native people that some observers have called the “Indians’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” became a sensation in 1884. Jackson died a year after that, a celebrated figure in American letters and politics. In the time since, her work has shaped popular memories of Sand Creek as a massacre, just as Jerry Russell claimed when he arrived in Jackson’s hometown of Colorado Springs more than a century later. Russell hoped that his Order of the Indian Wars would serve as a counterweight to Jackson’s and Dee Brown’s books, “balancing the way people think about Western history.”69

  At first glance, the OIW’s Colorado Springs meeting seemed like a relatively low-key affair, a close approximation of a small scholarly conference: seminar-style papers delivered to a fidgeting audience, followed by question-and-answer periods. But the content was the key. Many of the presenters focused their wrath on what they labeled politically correct histories. As for Sand Creek, they sometimes parroted John Chivington’s stories of the violence. Jerry Russell warned of the memorialization effort, “Ben Nighthorse Campbell will make sure the site only deals with the Indian side. And that’s just wrong.… For years, the Battle of Little Bighorn was called the Custer Massacre. But now, everything’s changed. They don’t say ‘massacre’ anymore because it’s pejorative, divisive. And yet the National Park Service will call Sand Creek a massacre even though the monument down there says battleground.” Mike Koury, a local author and editor who years earlier had fought to keep Sand Creek among the Civil War battles listed on the statue located on the state capitol steps in Denver, next gave a paper titled “I Stand by Sand Creek: A Defense of Colonel Chivington and the Third Colorado.” Koury explained that he would speak in the “spirit of reconciliation,” trying to “right the wrongs of the past.” Still, he continued, he would take care to “not infuse the [Sand Creek] battlefield with a modern meaning untrue to the past” nor “bend it artificially to serve contemporary needs.” With that said, he argued: “The 3rd Colorado did their job. Now some of them were overly zealous, and they did more than their job. But that’s not to condemn the regiment, the entire group.” So it went into the evening.70

  The event continued the next day, when the OIW traveled to Kiowa County for a tour of “the real Sand Creek battlefield”: the Bowen ranch. Months earlier, Jerry Russell had contacted Alexa Roberts, seeking permission to enter the national historic site. Ed Bearss, an expert on the Civil War and World War II who had retired years earlier from his job as the NPS’s chief historian, had agreed to lead the excursion. Russell assumed that Bearss’s participation would open doors at the NPS. Roberts, though, wrote back to Russell, informing him that the site was private property, owned by Jim Druck, and off limits to the public. Russell, annoyed that he would “have to scramble around now and see if [I] can come up with a solution to the situation,” charged that the NPS was more focused on satisfying its Native American patron, Senator Campbell, than on fulfilling its mandate to serve the public. Jeff Broome, the Denver professor who was an OIW member and who had worked with the Bowens in the past, then suggested to Russell that he inquire about going to their land instead. Russ
ell did that, heard the saga of the Sand Creek search from the Bowens’ perspective, and, after agreeing to champion their cause, received permission to visit the family ranch.71

  The tour captivated the OIW members. The Bowens laid out a table, covered with artifacts drawn from their land, in an Eads restaurant. Using a large map, Chuck Bowen pointed out where he had found the displayed materials and shared his view that the NPS had systematically gamed the Sand Creek search so that Bill Dawson’s property would become the centerpiece of the historic site. The NPS had done this, he explained, to placate Senator Campbell and the descendants, and also because Dawson would sell out and the Bowen family would not. Indians, in this view, had become the puppet masters of regional collective memory; the NPS was pursuing “a multicultural agenda” and assaulting American heritage. The group then loaded into vans and toured the Bowen ranch, listening to Ed Bearss’s version of the Sand Creek story.72

  Two days later, Russell made good on part of the deal that he had struck with Chuck and Sheri Bowen: he issued a press release, explaining that the NPS had again misplaced the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. The “real Sand Creek site,” Russell claimed, could be found on the Bowen ranch. After years of sparring with the NPS over the interpretation of Civil War battlegrounds, Russell had finally exacted his revenge. The Bowen property provided him with a competing narrative to undermine the story that the NPS would tell at the “traditional site,” the neighboring Dawson ranch. A month earlier, Alexa Roberts had written to Dwight Pitcaithley, then the NPS’s chief historian and a friend of Ed Bearss, hoping that Pitcaithley could convince Bearss to intervene with Russell on her behalf. Roberts suggested that the OIW would “discredit the National Park Service’s, Tribes’, and Congress’s efforts” to that point. “Every such event,” she explained to Pitcaithley, “derails much of the progress we have made in the site establishment effort.” Finally, she noted that, while the ensuing controversy would “delight the press,” it would also deepen preexisting worries among Kiowa County’s residents, making her job that much more difficult. Bearss and Jerry Greene, who also had worked with the OIW in the past, reached out to Russell. By then, though, it was too late. Roberts found herself shifting back into damage control mode.73