Sand Creek Massacre

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Sand Creek massacre (1864), among the most egregious atrocities committed by Anglo-Americans against the Indians and one of the darkest episodes of the Plains Indians wars. The Colorado territory governor, rebuffed when he tried to buy Cheyenne/Arapaho hunting grounds, ordered militia commander Chivington, an ex-preacher who had performed creditably against the Confederates in New Mexico, to provoke incidents to justify their forcible removal. To combat the crisis thus created, the governor and Chivington raised the 3rd Colorado Cavalry among mining camp scum. As winter approached and the term of enlistment for this unit was near to expiry, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle requested a meeting and was told to surrender his arms at a military outpost, and to camp nearby. Obediently, he camped at Sand Creek some 30 miles (48 km) from Fort Lyon with 600 followers. On 29 November Chivington and his rabble surrounded it, opened fire with howitzers and then charged. One to two hundred mainly old men, women, and children were killed and many were scalped and sexually mutilated. The heroes were cheered when they displayed these souvenirs at the Denver opera house. Even in the midst of the American civil war, this incident and the Plains-wide war it provoked were too much for Washington legislators to stomach. Chivington (but not the governor) was denounced during a congressional investigation and forced to resign. Black Kettle died during an attack by Custer on his Washita river camp in 1868.

— Hugh Bicheno

A surprise attack by forces organized under Col. John M. Chivington on peacefully assembled Cheyenne near Sand Creek, Colorado, November 29, 1864. Of the 500 Cheyenne in the village, more than 200 were indiscriminately killed, including many women and children. The attack set off widespread fighting between settlers and Plains Indians.

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Sand Creek Massacre, an attack on a village of sleeping Cheyenne Indians by a regiment of Colorado militiamen on 29 November 1864 that resulted in the death of more than 200 tribal members. About two-thirds of the dead were women and children. Many bodies were brutally mutilated and their scalps were strung across a Denver theater stage to the delight of an applauding audience.

By 1864, the previously united Cheyenne had divided into two bands that followed the northern and southern buffalo herds. In that year, with regular army troops redeployed for Civil War service and the borders between Indian and non-Indian settlements often in dispute, American settlers on the plains feared tribes like the Cheyenne who had access to weapons. In Colorado, Governor John Evans authorized the commander of the state's militia, a former Methodist minister named John M. Chivington, to patrol the eastern borders of the territory to guard against Indian attacks. Chivington's aggressive tactics worried the friendly Southern Cheyenne sufficiently that they sought out Major Edward Wynkoop at Fort Lyon on the Arkansas River. The Southern Cheyenne's leader, Black Kettle, turned four white captives over to Wynkoop and promised to live peacefully on a reservation. News of this breakthrough did not please Evans and Chivington, however, for they had just organized a new regiment of Colorado militiamen who had volunteered for 100 days of service and had been promised an Indian war.

Wynkoop brought Black Kettle to Denver to meet Chivington. On 28 September, Chivington met with the Cheyenne and invited them to establish a camp near Fort Lyon. By November nearly 230 lodges of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho had surrendered. Because of the need to hunt game, Black Kettle's group set up more than 100 of their lodges along Sand Creek. It was this camp that Chivington and his forces attacked on 29 November. When Chivington attacked, Black Kettle assumed it was a mistake. The chief raised an American flag and a white flag over his tipi in a sign of friendship. The Colorado volunteers rode on. Remarkably, Black Kettle was not killed at Sand Creek; he would die four years later in another unprovoked attack by American soldiers on the Washita River in Indian Territory.

While celebrated in Denver, a great many Americans met the Sand Creek Massacre with horror. Congress launched an investigation of the tragedy and within two years had established a Peace Commission to draw up equitable treaties with groups like the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Sioux. Sand Creek remains a biting memory for both the Cheyenne and non-Indians, but efforts to acquire the site of the massacre for a national park have only recently borne fruit.

Bibliography

Moore, John H. The Cheyenne. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996.

Utley, Robert. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.