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Sand Creek Massacre
More often called a massacre than a battle, the attack by Colonel John M. Chivington's Colorado volunteers on Chief Black Kettle's village will forever be controversial.
By J. Jay Myers COLONEL JOHN M. CHIVINGTON drew up on the ridge at dawn on November 29, 1864. It was cold that day. He studied the situation below him, deciding how best to deploy his 750 Colorado Volunteers and four 12-pound howitzers. He saw 100 lodges (tepees) of Southern Cheyennes and 30 lodges of their Arapaho allies stretching for a mile along the bend of Big Sandy Creek in southeastern Colorado. Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle was the most prominent and influential leader in that village.
The colonel's decisions and actions that day would make him a hero. But only briefly. The hero's mantle was soon swept away and replaced by the devil's horns. Chivington became an American villain--reviled and denounced primarily because of testimony given in hearings before a Senate committee in the second session of the 39th Congress in March 1865. Not much attention, however, has been given to possible ulterior motives of people giving those eyewitness accounts of what happened that day.
Most of those who write about the action at Big Sandy Creek (usually called Sand Creek) state unequivocally that Chivington's bloodthirsty, frustrated 100-day volunteers attacked Black Kettle's peace-loving Cheyennes and their Arapaho friends without warning (see article in December 1993 Wild West). We usually read that they then just ran amok and wiped out the village in a wild frenzy of undisciplined bloodletting. Did they, however, really massacre, torture, scalp and horribly mutilate the bodies of their victims, as many as two-thirds of them defenseless women and children?
Was Sand Creek simply another terrible episode in the long, tragic tale of the white man's conquering of the Indian? Perhaps it was, but there are disturbing questions about the Senate committee hearings. Almost every reference to that action tells the same deplorable story. Yet, in later years, the people of Colorado welcomed Colonel Chivington, were proud to have him live among them and honored him by giving a town his name--and all of this was not just because the former Methodist minister had been a Civil War hero.
Soon after the shelling of Fort Sumter, S.C., in April 1861, John Chivington offered his services to William Gilpin, governor of Colorado Territory. Gilpin offered to make him a chaplain, but Chivington is supposed to have said: "I feel compelled to strike a blow in person for the destruction of human slavery...." So the governor appointed him major of a volunteer regiment.
Some months later, the "Fighting Parson" was appointed colonel and put in charge of the newly created Military District of Colorado. He watched the tensions escalate between the white settlers and the Indians. The Indians had discovered these white people were no longer just passing through on the way to the Far West as the Forty-Niners had done. These intruders were farmers and cattle raisers and were appropriating traditional hunting grounds, tearing up the land with plows, and putting cattle on grasslands needed by the buffalo.
The Cheyennes and the Arapahos tentatively seemed to accept the situation, perhaps believing it was only temporary. Black Kettle actually went to Denver on a friendly visit and was well-received. He apparently believed the whites would soon move farther west. Black Kettle did say, however, that he hoped none of them would say or do anything to stir up his people and that he hoped the whites would not stay too long because, after all, it was Indian land.
The stage was set for tragedy. The Cheyennes were becoming more destitute and restive. They continued their time-honored avocation of war against the Utes and the Pawnees. They frightened the white settlers as they passed by on their way to raid the Utes. But they frightened them even more on their return as they yelled and whooped and brandished Ute scalps. Small bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors robbed homes and stole cattle, provisions and horses.
Winter brought a lull in Indian activity. The Cheyenne and Arapaho war ponies were winter-lean, and besides, it was no fun to play war games in the cold weather. Old-time settlers said the peace during the winter was typical. The Indians always made peace in the winter--to get government blankets and food.
Winter and peace did leave together. The Cheyennes were hungry, and they stole cattle on several occasions. Troops were dispatched to punish the guilty. Still, the attacks on white settlers and travelers increased in 1863, and the situation in eastern Colorado continued to worsen in the spring of 1864.
Colonel Chivington was under the direct orders of Maj. Gen. Samuel Ryan Curtis, who believed the Indian agents "babied" the Indians and made them difficult to deal with on a "realistic" basis. Like most Denver citizens, Chivington was appalled when, on June 11, 1864, the mutilated bodies of Nathan Hungate, a rancher, and his wife and two children were brought into town and put on public display. The people were horrified, outraged and near panic. Trade on the supply trails was disrupted by raids. Food and various necessities were running short in Denver and other Colorado mining towns. More horror stories spread rapidly through the area.
Governor John Evans and most settlers believed there was a general Indian uprising. Hoping to break up what he thought was a united Indian front, the governor sent messages to the tribes to report to certain forts where they would be provided with food and protected from troops looking for hostile Indians.
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