There was also sporadic fighting the next day November 30 , with two soldiers and perhaps a dozen Indians being killed. There is also some evidence that several Indian women joined the men in fighting from the pits in the sandy bank.
There was very real fighting. The valley was not a shooting gallery. It should also be pointed out that John Chivington did not command disciplined troops on that November day.
The Colorado Volunteers were not well-trained, and for the most part they were boisterous, vengeful, independent men from the wild mining settlements. There is no proof that the colonel in any way encouraged atrocities.
Finally, it should be pointed out that Chivington had political enemies. He was being proposed as the first congressman in Washington when Colorado was admitted as a state. He had rivals for that honor, and there was also a group of Colorado Territory officeholders who did not want the territory to become a state. They would lose their appointments to office if statehood was granted, so they wanted to discredit Chivington and all others who were working for statehood.
Then, too, some who testified were Indian traders, who were angry because the fight at Sand Creek had driven away the Cheyennes and the Arapahos. The honest traders were angry, but the most vindictive—the ones who offered the most damning testimony—were the ones like D. Colley son of Indian agent Samuel Colley , who were infamous for cheating the government and defrauding the Indians.
How valuable is their testimony? Twenty years after Sand Creek, the Colorado pioneers were celebrating the 25th anniversary of the settling of Colorado and invited Chivington to attend. Coloradoans asked him to come back and live among them, which he did. He died of cancer in Denver in October Battle or massacre?
Chivington guilty or Chivington innocent? This article was written by J. Jay Myers and originally appeared in the December issue of Wild West. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Wild West magazine today! In late November , Colonel John M. Some Indians were killed, while the soldiers took about 70 casualties. It is depicted as an epic struggle between good and evil.
Interpretation of almost every historical event will change over time, but the portrayal of Sand Creek has remained remarkably static. It had bad reviews from the beginning. Further examination, however, finds that the white hats and black hats were more often shades of gray, and that the hat colors of some of the characters should be completely reversed. The depiction of Sand Creek as a massacre stems from the machinations of a half-dozen people, three of whom were not even there.
These six are the real villains of the affair. Scoundrel number one is Major Edward W. Wynkoop, who had traveled a winding road before joining the Colorado Volunteers.
He was soon appointed sheriff in Arapahoe County in what would become Colorado. In April , Ned Wynkoop lost the election for city marshal, but the Civil War gave him new employment. In Wynkoop took over command at Fort Lyon. Boredom at the post caused many men and officers to go to Denver for excitement, and Chivington, now a colonel and in charge of the Military District of Colorado, cautioned Wynkoop about his conduct.
James G. This change caused Wynkoop future trouble. Smith and Indian agent Samuel G. Ex-agent William Bent was onto them. They withheld government goods, meant as annuities for the Indians, until the Indians traded something of value for them. John Smith acted as the Indian trader and was considered a partner in the business. Bent said that some Cheyennes told him they had no confidence in Colley, knowing the agent was swindling them out of goods.
All the time he was raking in money, Sam Colley continued to paint a pessimistic picture in a letter to Governor Evans. It looks at present as though we shall have to fight them all. In early September , a few Indians brought in a note from hostile tribes that indicated their desire for peace talks, and Wynkoop was determined to pay them a visit. Wynkoop knew expeditions were currently in the field looking to fight the Indians. He had been chastised before for going outside district lines, for not asking permission for his actions and for not keeping his own superiors informed of his movements.
John Smith accompanied them. Sam Colley stayed behind to send the news to Evans and Chivington. It was a close scrape, but they did return with four of seven white captives the Indians had, plus some chiefs, including Black Kettle and White Antelope.
Then they went to Denver for a peace conference. The problem was that neither Evans nor Chivington wanted a peace conference while prosecuting a war. The day after the council, Evans told Colley in a letter that he had not made any peace with the Indians, as it might embarrass the military operations against them—which apparently Wynkoop did not understand.
The Indians returned from Denver realizing that they could not make any peace treaty. Wynkoop, nevertheless, told them that they should bring their people closer to the fort. Soule, who had a more polished exterior than Wynkoop, but who was crafty under the veneer. He was attracted to the cause of John Brown and the Free-Soilers, and on one occasion went into a jail and broke free a man accused of stealing slaves. When insurrection-minded John Brown was captured at Harpers Ferry in and thrown in jail, Soule tried but failed to break him out.
Soule has been historically pictured as a man of principle, honesty and sobriety, but he proved several times that he would resort to trickery, lies and lawbreaking to achieve his ends. While stationed at Fort Lyon, Silas Soule was not easily taken in by friendly Indians, at least not before the Sand Creek fight altered his judgment.
Some of them steal a girl…out of Kansas, trade her from lodge to lodge, then come up with her at our parley on the Smoky Hill last month. A gift they say. Colly [sic] got more rations on her hands than the U. Cavalry and Northern tribes combined. Wynkoop and Colley got orders not to feed or give supplies to the Indians, but Colley disregarded Governor Evans, preferring to communicate directly with William P.
Wynkoop, perhaps feeling sanguine about what he thought he had accomplished, was soon to find out that his superiors were not happy with him. Wynkoop has laid himself liable to arrest and dismissal for absence without leave, and the Officer [Soule] who went with him liable for being absent without proper authority.
Supplies were to be kept under strict control. Wynkoop waited in anticipation of the orders that he was certain would bring instructions for concluding a peace treaty. Anthony set about clearing the Indians away from the fort, while Wynkoop boarded the eastbound stage. One wonders if the major really knew why he had been removed from command. In his March testimony to the Doolittle Commission and in his autobiography, Wynkoop said that he left Fort Lyon because he received orders to go to Fort Riley to take command of that post.
Either he was mentally unbalanced or he was evolving into the biggest liar on the Plains. After the November fight at Sand Creek, the dead and wounded soldiers had hardly been carted back to Fort Lyon before signs of trouble appeared. More trouble was brewing. Some hated Chivington, some felt betrayed, some sought to cloak their cowardice, and some saw a way to make money from the situation.
Letters were soon on their way to certain high officials, and from then on the episode exploded with deceit, obfuscation and recrimination. Harding wrote to John Wright, a personal enemy of Evans. The man who had done the most to cause the disaster was off the hook and allowed to pick the scapegoat. He chose Chivington, who resigned his military commission on January 4, These letters, as firsthand accounts of the massacre, reveal the moral resistance of some of the soldiers to the barbarism that surrounded them.
As primary sources, these letters show much about the atrocities at Sand Creek while also demonstrating how a hundred men stood in resistance to orders. Show 10 40 per page.
Looking for more information? Explore the other pages in this section to learn more. Box Eads , CO A lanky, deliberate detective, he cups a corncob pipe to light it in the flurrying snow before continuing. So the victims would have heard the hooves pounding towards them before they could see what was coming.
Campbell is reconstructing a mass murder that occurred in , along Sand Creek, an intermittent stream in eastern Colorado.
Today, less than one person per square mile inhabits this arid region. But in late autumn of , about 1, Cheyenne and Arapaho lived in tepees here, at the edge of what was then reservation land. Their chiefs had recently sought peace in talks with white officials and believed they would be unmolested at their isolated camp. When hundreds of blue-clad cavalrymen suddenly appeared at dawn on November 29, a Cheyenne chief raised the Stars and Stripes above his lodge.
Others in the village waved white flags. The troops replied by opening fire with carbines and cannon, killing at least Indians, most of them women, children and the elderly. Before departing, the troops burned the village and mutilated the dead, carrying off body parts as trophies.
There were many such atrocities in the American West. But the slaughter at Sand Creek stands out because of the impact it had at the time and the way it has been remembered. Or rather, lost and then rediscovered. Sand Creek was the My Lai of its day, a war crime exposed by soldiers and condemned by the U. It fueled decades of war on the Great Plains. And yet, over time, the massacre receded from white memory, to the point where even locals were unaware of what had happened in their own backyard.
Usually, she notes, signs for national historic sites lead to a presidential birthplace or patriotic monument. Visitors are also surprised to learn that the massacre occurred during the Civil War, which most Americans associate with Eastern battles between blue and gray, not cavalry killing Indians on the Western plains.
The Civil War, he observes, was rooted in westward expansion and strife over whether new territories would join the nation as free states or slave states. One reason Sand Creek remains little known is its geographic remoteness.
The site lies miles southeast of Denver, in a ranching county that never recovered from the Dust Bowl. The nearest town, Eads, is a dwindling community of about that can field only a six-man high-school football team.
The unpaved, eight-mile road leading to Sand Creek crosses short-grass prairie that appears almost featureless, apart from a few cattle and a grain silo 30 miles away in Kansas, visible on clear days. The historic site also offers few landmarks: a visitors center housed, for now, in a trailer, an Indian graveyard and a monument atop a low bluff beside Sand Creek, a narrow stream fringed by willow and cottonwood.
From all I could learn, I arrived at the conclusion that but few women or children had been slain. I am of the opinion that when the attack was made on the Indian camp the greater number of squaws and children made their escape, while the warriors remained to fight my troops. Squaws: Indian women not a friendly word to use. John Smith was a white government agent who was sent to Sand Creek to check out the Cheyenne Indian camp along Sand Creek before the attack.
He was present during the attack and had married an Indian woman. He had previously acted as an interpreter and Indian agent. Like Chivington, Smith was also asked afterward about what happened on November 29, This is a conversation written down for us to read. Question: How many Indians were there there? Question: How many persons in all, should you say? Question: men, women and children? Question: Do you know the reason for that attack on the Indians? Do you know whether or not Colonel Chivington knew the friendly character of these Indians before he made the attack on them?
Question: Were the women and children slaughtered indiscriminately , or only so far as they were with warriors? Question: Can you state how many Indians were killed — how many women and how many children? I do not think that I saw more than 70 lying dead then, as far as I went.
But I saw parties of men scattered in every direction, pursuing little bands of Indians. Question: What time of day or night was this attack made? Question: How large a body of [army] troops?
Question: What amount of resistance did the Indian [warriors] make? I think that probably there may have been about 60 or 70 warriors who were armed and stood their ground and fought. Those that were unarmed got out of the way as they best could.
Resistance: fighting back Questions:. Why did the Sand Creek massacre happen? The documents here will help students reconstruct events that led up to the attack on November 29, Soon afterward, there was even a debate about just what had occurred at Sand Creek.
The last two sources can help students see the contours of that debate. Option 1: The first lesson option would be to focus on documents 1, 7, and 8. The first document offers a map of the area and a chance to consider southern Arapaho and southern Cheyenne lands between and Students can compare the differences between the treaties on the map.
They then answer the questions about the change in boundaries for this Indian territory. Then students could work in groups to study either the Chivington or the Smith deposition.
This would include how many Indians were present at Sand Creek; how many men; how many women and children; how many of each group were killed. The Chivington source depicts Sand Creek as a battle between hostile men—the Colorado 3rd volunteers and the warriors of the two tribes.
The Smith source suggests that a massacre of mainly women and children occurred. After working in groups on individual sources, the class might compare the two to identify the key differences.
Students should be able to identify the two different perspectives. Students should notice which areas of the descriptions agree. Even though documents have different perspectives, the facts they agree on can be seen as being more trustworthy than those that differ.
You might ask students why the accounts are so different. Neither account voices the native perspective. Option 2: More advanced readers could consider all the documents in turn and then compare them. The first document offers some important background. The map illustrates the change in Indian territory from the Treaty of Ft. Laramie in to the Treaty of Ft. Wise in These are key years for the migration of Euro Americans into Colorado.
Then students might then consider documents Two through Six in order to develop a rough timeline of increasing suspicion and hostilities. Some whites and some Indians sought or thought about peace. Others reported only on violence and seemed to stoke fear. Last, student could turn to the Chivington and Smith sources again.
Option 3 : Have student start this project by reading a Colorado history textbook account of Sand Creek. Then compare that account with the information in these sources. What source information above did the textbook include?
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