by Ari Kelman
6
YOU CAN’T CARVE THINGS IN STONE
In September 2003, after the Order of the Indian Wars (OIW) visited Colorado, the Sand Creek memory fight shifted to a new venue: the Internet. The struggle to memorialize the massacre became more public than it had been since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when William Byers, Helen Hunt Jackson, and George Bent had argued over Sand Creek in the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers. In 1999, an Eads resident named Sharon Pearson created a website to boost Kiowa County’s economic prospects. Against a backdrop of sky blue, Pearson placed images of the open prairie on her home page. Beneath enticements to visitors—“The vast beauty of Kiowa County is … only a 2 to 3 hour drive from Denver and Colorado Springs. Visible wildlife and scenic vistas provide welcome relief from the snarl and congestion of crowded cities.”—she offered descriptions of local attractions (hunting, fishing, camping), an information clearinghouse (public notices, business listings, a community calendar), and updates about the status of the Sand Creek site, including a “discussion forum” where people could chat about the massacre. After Jerry Russell strafed the National Park Service (NPS) during his tour of the Bowens’ ranch, the Sand Creek forum became an online coffeehouse, with people from throughout the nation weighing in on the memorial’s future.1
Alexa Roberts worried that attacks on the NPS, growing out of Jerry Russell’s dealings with the Bowens, might compromise her partnership with the residents of Kiowa County. Unfortunately, some local people still distrusted federal authorities, including Roberts, even though she had woven herself into the fabric of the community. She had made her home in town. She had attended functions that marked the passage of time in the county, from high school plays to the annual fair. And she had cooperated with local law enforcement, elected officials, and landowners, trying, at every step of the memorialization process, to ensure that the creation of the historic site would not burden Kiowa County’s infrastructure. In short, she had been a good neighbor. And as time had passed, she had harvested the fruits of her outreach efforts. “I think people eventually stopped seeing me as a fed,” she recalled, “and started to look at me as part of the local scene.” But then the OIW controversy cropped up. Bill Dawson’s ranch remained in the hands of a casino magnate. The Sand Creek historic site existed on paper only. Its doors were closed to the public; as an engine of economic development, it had stalled. In that context, charges of federal bungling and arrogance threatened to undermine relationships Roberts had worked hard over time to build in Eads.2
Jerry Russell had his own worries. He had agreed, as part of the deal to gain access to the Bowen ranch, to send out a press release in the days leading to the tour. He had promised to explain key elements of Chuck and Sheri Bowen’s grievances against the NPS. Fearing the potential for public relations fallout, Alexa Roberts had tried to nip the problem in the bud. She had asked Ed Bearss and Jerry Greene, friends of Russell, to explain the NPS’s side of the dispute. They had agreed. But Russell had proceeded anyway, reporting that the OIW had visited the Bowens’ ranch, “the real Sand Creek site,” as opposed to the former Dawson property, a pretender. Reporters ignored the story, leaving the Bowens feeling betrayed again. Russell tried to mend fences with them, thanking the Bowens for their hospitality in an e-mail asking OIW members to post to the Kiowa County website and share experiences from the tour of the family ranch. Russell’s gesture doubled as an act of defiance toward the NPS. He pointedly suggested that commenters might want to note that Chuck Bowen had made “a persuasive case for believing that the site of Black Kettle’s village was on the Bowen Ranch.”3
Internet-based discussion fora allow people with a variety of shared interests to congregate in cyberspace, where they can chat about their common passions: cooking, knitting, parenting, politics, and so on. If one looks hard enough, one can turn up sites in dusty corners of the Web devoted to almost any topic under the sun. Assuming they share a common language, cat fanciers or philatelists in Nome, Alaska, can converse, in real time, with like-minded individuals in Harare, Zimbabwe. These sites flirt with fulfilling the Net’s promise as a social experiment: by annihilating the space and time separating their users, they create functioning communities. But the results are often less utopian than that. With participants distant from one another, their identities obscured by pseudonyms, the Web can become an echo chamber, amplifying heated discussions. Liberated from the rules of civil discourse, participants often assume bad faith in their interlocutors, hurl epithets, and shout across the digital divide by typing in ALL CAPS. Before the OIW’s visit to the Bowen ranch, discussions on the Kiowa County website’s Sand Creek forum typically focused on the massacre’s details or on the status of the memorial. People inquired about topics like a prospective opening date for the site, the composition of the 3rd Colorado Regiment, or the best available biography of Chief Black Kettle. That all changed after the OIW membership descended, virtually, on Kiowa County for a second time. And though Jerry Russell later maintained that he had not anticipated the controversy that his e-mail request would stir up—protesting, “How could I have known?”—an impish chortle suggested otherwise.4
The pixel war that resulted from Russell’s pot-stirring ate up time and bandwidth, unsettling NPS officials, Kiowa County residents, and the descendants. The post that touched off the firestorm derided Russell’s original request, labeling the OIW’s members “racist” and suggesting that they “still think the American Indian is ‘the enemy.’ ” Written by someone posting under the screen name “Ron,” the missive explained that Russell had used the site’s placement as a stalking horse for reopening an age-old debate over whether the violence should be described as a battle or a massacre. Russell, Ron noted, “has launched another campaign to delete the term ‘massacre’ from all Park Service material dealing with the Sand Creek site.” But, Ron explained, “every credible historian who has written on Sand Creek has concluded it was a massacre.” Composing his post on the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Ron claimed the high ground in what he apparently saw as a struggle over the relationship between patriotism and public memory. Urging people to avoid the Kiowa County website, he asked that they instead “write one of our soldiers currently fighting for our freedom in Afghanistan and/or Iraq.”5
The next few posts disregarded Ron and followed Russell’s script: noting the fine time that the OIW’s members had had during their visit to Kiowa County, thanking the Bowens for hosting them, and remarking on the compelling evidence Chuck Bowen had presented to support his claim that the “Sand Creek affair” had taken place on the family ranch. Then Jeff Broome, the Denver-area professor who had made the match between Jerry Russell and the Bowens, engaged with Ron, insisting that people should ignore semantics and focus on the question of historical authenticity borne out by archeology. “The real issue,” Broome explained, was “where was the November 29, 1864 village of Black Kettle located and where did the fight/massacre/battle occur?” He reiterated, “That is the question and readers should not be diverted away from THAT issue by getting involved with the emotional issue of whether it was a massacre or a battle.” Based on seeing the artifacts, “the village in 1864 was on the Bowen property and not at the traditional site,” Broome insisted. “Regardless of how the new National Parks site is managed or what it is named,” he concluded, “the question is, do you want it on the real site or a site that had nothing to do with November 29, 1864?” From Broome’s point of view, people had a choice to make: between fealty to the past, represented by the Bowens’ tireless efforts, or a slapdash treatment of Western history, the interpretation offered by the NPS.6
At that juncture, another OIW member, Greg Michno, an independent scholar, weighed in. Yes, Michno agreed, the historic site’s proper location mattered. But so, too, did the unresolved question of whether Sand Creek had been a battle or a massacre. Moving forward, the dispute would have multiple fronts: one focused on the placement of the Sand Creek site, ano
ther on the proper designation for the violence, and a third on the question of who had the standing to speak authoritatively about such a contested episode from the region’s past.7
Greg Michno seemed like an improbable culture warrior. A slight man with a soft voice and thoughtful manner, he gathered himself, pausing for several beats, before speaking. Retired from a job in state government, Michno lived north of Denver, in a home with a large library and a view of the Rockies. The author of books on World War II and the Indian Wars, he had just completed Battle at Sand Creek: The Military Perspective when the OIW arrived in Colorado. Michno believed that the NPS, by focusing on the Dawson ranch, had trapped itself in a web of lies. “They can’t admit they’ve got the wrong place, because it’s going to make them look foolish,” he said. As for whether Sand Creek was a massacre, he framed the question using post-9/11 terms: “These people [the Arapahos and Cheyennes] were not peaceful. Black Kettle, he was harboring terrorists.” Turning to numbers, Michno elaborated, “Out of the 1,450 or so fights during the Indian Wars, there were only six battles in which the soldiers or militia lost more men, took more casualties, than at Sand Creek. So in the context of the Indian wars, it was a heck of a fight.” The NPS’s nomenclature did violence to the past, to the memory of decent soldiers. “It just cements it that it was a massacre,” Michno observed, “that it was some horrible atrocity committed by U.S. troops against Native Americans.” He concluded by scoffing at “politically correct Native American histories”: “They’re always victims. They’re always downtrodden, victimized by oppressive power. And there’s some truth to that, yeah. But it’s an excuse now. Get over it.”8
Michno brought an academic bearing and deep wells of frustration to the dispute at the Kiowa County website. “For a century,” he wrote, “Sand Creek has been portrayed as a massacre, and there has been good cause for the portrayal. There is another side to the issue, however, which has not gotten equal time, and that is from the military and pioneer perspective.” He went on to represent the Chivingtonite viewpoint, established during the federal inquiries following Sand Creek: “the Indians attacked on Sand Creek were not peaceful”; “they had been raiding and killing for years”; “those particular Indians were not under the protection of the soldiers”; and “there were white scalps found in the teepees.” In the end, Michno explained, all he wanted was “the preservation of the correct location where the village and fight actually took place, and, even more important, [to] have the NPS present the story in an even-handed manner.” He suggested, “Both sides need to be given,” so that “the visitor [could] form his or her own opinion.” The results would be palliative: “In this way, instead of aggravating wounds that have been with us for too long, perhaps we can start to heal them.”9
News travels fast on the Internet. For some readers of the Kiowa County website, Michno’s call for a reappraisal of Sand Creek seemed like moral equivalence. Less than two hours after Michno posted his comment, a man named Smoke Randolph dashed off a reply. He suggested, “wounds cannot heal when posts such as the one by Greg Michno contain such faulty and selective research.” After calling Michno “obviously ignorant,” Randolph demanded evidence that Black Kettle’s people had been hostile. He pointed to Silas Soule’s testimony, insisting, “Sand Creek was a massacre, an ambush of innocents, who were betrayed by Colorado authorities.” Michno’s rejoinder, which indicated that he was “concerned by [Randolph’s] anger,” did not defuse the tension. Randolph shot back that he still wanted Michno to show his work, to document assertions about the presence of white scalps in Black Kettle’s camp. When Michno ignored him, Randolph mocked the historian: “Well, it appears that our friend, Mr. Michno, has declined the invitation to provide sources for his ridiculous claims about Sand Creek.” Randolph then wrestled the flag from Michno’s grasp by questioning his patriotism: “Or maybe he’s just too busy to respond—maybe working on a new book—one that justifies the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”10
As charges and countercharges bounced around cyberspace, the conflict became still another echo of Sand Creek, this time the rhetorical skirmishes that followed the massacre. Chivington’s modern defenders, Greg Michno and Jeff Broome, worked to repair the Fighting Parson’s damaged reputation. His latter-day detractors, Ron and his ally, Smoke Randolph, stood opposite, eager to uphold the honor of Silas Soule and the Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek. The two sides even struggled over the same details that had been at issue in the decades following the massacre: the disposition, measured by the presence of white scalps in their camp, of the Native people butchered at Sand Creek; the reliability of the deponents who had provided eyewitness testimony about the event’s particulars; and the existence of a symbol, the American flag, that either had or had not flown over Black Kettle’s lodge during the melee. It seemed that this brave new world of online discourse could indeed annihilate space and time, sometimes bringing past and present into uncomfortable proximity.11
With their professional credibility and their love of country called into question, Michno and Broome returned to the fray. Michno answered Smoke Randolph’s challenge; he toted out sources, quoting from the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion and other primary documents. Pointing to testimony offered by members of the 3rd Colorado Regiment, he tried to substantiate the contention that Black Kettle’s people had been involved in the depredations visited upon settlers during spring and summer 1864. Thaddeus Bell, for instance, claimed to have seen “a good many white scalps” in the Sand Creek camp. Luther Wilson remembered “one new scalp, a white man’s, and two old ones.” And Stephen Decatur recalled the horror of stumbling upon “a number of white person’s scalps—men’s women’s and children’s,” including tresses of “auburn and hung in ringlets.” Broome, for his part, kept hammering a familiar theme: that the Dawson ranch “IS NOT CONNECTED TO NOVEMBER 29, 1864 AT ALL.” He suggested that anonymous critics like Ron, “who hide their identity,” were akin to the enemy “our good people fighting in Iraq are dealing with … right now.” Finally, Broome set the record straight, noting that he had, along with heeding Jerry Russell’s earlier call to post on the Kiowa County website, written to “a serviceman, sending him a package, and … a note telling him of my appreciation of his performance of duty to our country.”12
Back and forth it went for a month, each new argument receiving a quick rebuttal. With neither side giving an inch regarding the validity of the other’s evidence—Smoke Randolph charged that Greg Michno chose for “witnesses” a group of “thugs, lowlifes, criminals,” all men implicated in the slaughter at Sand Creek and thus animated by self-interest; Michno expressed qualms about Silas Soule’s character and motivations—the dispute turned from a discussion of sources to the more complicated issue of analysis, resting finally on the thorny question of who had the proper training to interpret Sand Creek. Ron repeatedly labeled Michno and Broome “pseudo-historians,” suggesting that their views could not be trusted. Randolph piled on, insisting that Michno stood at odds with scholarly consensus because of his “faulty and incomplete” research. Michno, dedicated to his craft, responded with long lists of citations. Broome then asked, “What constitutes a ‘Real’ historian?” He answered by citing his own book on the Indian Wars and then reasserting his academic credentials. Randolph just jeered that Broome had a “mail-order PhD.” By that time, the light-to-heat ratio had become vanishingly small.13
All the while, Alexa Roberts lurked on the sidelines, upset that her neighbors, her superiors, and the descendants could hear the screams emanating from cyberspace. “It was frustrating,” Roberts recalled. “We wanted to build trust between the tribes, the Park Service, and the people of the county. And here we had this thing playing out online, with all kinds of people claiming we had the wrong site and that Sand Creek was a battle.” After Jeff Broome and Greg Michno preserved their dignity by walking away from the fight at September’s end, another OIW member posted a comment, seeing if perhaps the argument might b
e stricken from the electronic record: “I wonder if the webmaster would consider cleaning the slate on this discussion site.” Roberts at the time contemplated asking Sharon Pearson to go a step beyond that and take down the entire website. But after Pearson rejected the call to scrub the offending posts, suggesting that people upset by the discussion should click away from the forum, Roberts decided against it: “It’s a dangerous thing when federal officials try to censor public comments.” Nevertheless, she readied herself for blowback.14
Roberts’s bosses were starting to wonder what could go wrong next with a site that seemed like it was doing the NPS’s image more harm than good. Meanwhile, the Cheyenne descendants fumed. Laird Cometsevah saw the Internet scuffle as evidence that some residents of southeastern Colorado, working with the OIW, could not be trusted. “If they can’t see that Sand Creek was a massacre,” he wondered, “how in the world can we be expected to work with these people?” Pointing to the NPS’s Site Location Study, the contents of the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, and the national historic site’s name, Cometsevah protested: “It’s not just Indian people calling Sand Creek a massacre anymore. The government says so too.” Jerry Russell, by contrast, delighted at the thought that people were scuffling anew over nomenclature. Considering the substance of Jeff Broome’s and Greg Michno’s posts on the Kiowa County website, Russell suggested, “If Custer and his men didn’t get massacred at the Little Bighorn, then neither did the Indians at Sand Creek. What’s good sauce for the goose is good for the gander. And it’s refreshing that somebody is finally supporting the troops.”15