A closer look
Sand Creek, 1864—An American Killing Field
How does the language used to describe the past change how we understand it, remember it, and learn from it?
by Vincent DiGirolamo, Baruch College, CUNY
U.S. Troops Kill Tsitsistas (Cheyenne) and Inunaina (Arapaho) Men, Women, and Children
About 180 miles southeast of Denver, Colorado, spitting distance from the Kansas border, stands a granite slab marking the site of the Sand Creek Massacre. Rolling prairie stretches out in every direction. Recognized by the National Park Service in 2007, it is the first federally sponsored historic site to cast American soldiers as villains rather than heroes. On November 29, 1864, 675 Colorado Volunteers slaughtered almost two hundred peaceful Tsitsistas and Inunainas in the area. Native elders and National Park Service archaeologists long disagreed on the location of the actual massacre, and hence the proper placement of the site. How, then, could historians and other stakeholders—including Native and white descendants of the victims, survivors, and perpetrators—ever reach a consensus about what happened that day and its larger historical significance? The answer is that their conclusions—even their labeling the event as a battle or a massacre—have always been tentative and contested, products of continuous research and shifting political winds.
Nineteenth-Century Accounts of the Massacre
The first military reports and newspaper accounts described the encounter as a glorious military victory for the U.S. Army, but rumors of atrocities soon surfaced and led to a series on congressional inquiries that quickly recast the attack as a shameful slaughter of Indians who felt themselves on friendly terms with the U.S. government and safely encamped on reservation land. The main whistleblower, Captain Silas Soule, testified that women and children who tried to flee the attacking soldiers were shot down, scalped, and otherwise mutilated. Soule himself was gunned down in the streets of Denver in 1865, two months after he testified. The cavalrymen responsible were never brought to justice.
Native Americans also weighed in with their own testimony, maps, drawings, and memoirs, including the eyewitness account by Ho-my-ike (George Bent) and the ledger book illustration by Ho-na-nist-to (Howling Wolf):
With all this evidence at hand, the first historians of Sand Creek reached opposite conclusions. In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson drew on Soule’s testimony in her 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, which portrayed the events at Sand Creek as a massacre that detracted from the Union war effort. She condemned Federal Indian policy as an abomination akin to slavery. However, J. P. Dunn, author of the 1886 book Massacres of the Mountains, concluded that the slaughter was “far from being the ‘climax’ of American outrages to the Indian,” given the woeful record of Native-White conflicts in the East and the South. Merciless cruelty, including mutilations, were the order of the day, he said, given the unwillingness of some Native peoples to cease their resistance to white encroachments on their land.
Contested Twentieth-Century Memorialization of the Massacre
Journalists and scholars continually returned to the subject in the early twentieth century, culminating in the installation of a Civil War memorial on the steps of the Colorado state capitol in 1909, which listed Sand Creek as one of the battles or engagements in which the state’s soldiers fought during the war. Continuing in this vein, the state erected a roadside marker overlooking a bluff in 1950 that identified the area as the “Sand Creek Battleground.” John Milton Chivington, the pistol-packing Methodist minister who led the assault, insisted that Confederates had incited the Native rebellion in order to weaken the Union war effort. Some Native Americans viewed the Civil War as a contest to control expansion in the West, but Chivington’s characterization of them as “Red Rebels” was greatly exaggerated. Other pertinent facts surfaced during the inquiries, such as Chivington’s political ambitions, which were contingent on Colorado becoming a state and removing its Indigenous peoples.
In 1970, the year after revelations of the 1968 My Lai massacre by U.S. troops in Vietnam, young filmmakers in Hollywood released the revisionist western Soldier Blue, inspired by the events at Sand Creek. The movie’s protagonist was a young private who was repulsed by the massacre of women and children but unable to stop it. The era also produced the 1971 bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, in which historian Dee Brown devoted a grisly chapter to the Sand Creek massacre, portraying it from Native peoples' perspective as the savage betrayal that destroyed all possibility of peace. In “Brief Wyoming Mediation,” poet Diane DiPrima drew a direct link between the massacre and the racism underlying the war in Vietnam, but sought the healing touch of time: “I seek the place where your nature meets mine, / the place where we touch / nothing lasts long / nothing / but earth / & the mountains.”
Contemporary Reckonings with the Massacre
Anniversaries of the massacre occasioned new efforts to come to terms with the shame and injustice while also creating new difficulties. In the spirit of racial reconciliation, the United Methodist Church in 1994 issued a formal apology for the massacre and the role played by its own John Chivington, who defended its ferocity and necessity until the day he died. Likewise, in 2014, the 150th anniversary of the massacre, Governor John Hickenlooper issued a public apology to the Tsitsistas/Suhtai and Inunaina (Arapaho) peoples on behalf of the state of Colorado. But the sesquicentennial, occurring in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and in the midst of the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, found little enthusiasm for commemorations that called attention to military atrocities.
Memory keepers have remained active nonetheless; every November since 1999, members of the Tsitsistas and Inunaina nations and their supporters take part in a 180-mile relay known as the Spiritual Healing Run, from the Sand Creek Memorial site to Fifteenth and Arapaho Avenue in Denver, where Soule was assassinated. “It’s not a race. It’s a prayer,” said Tsitsistas elder Otto Braided Hair.
Reflection Questions
Was Sand Creek a battle or a massacre? How has that question been answered over the years and why does it still matter?
Should it be seen as part of the Civil War? What are the advantages and disadvantages of placing the violence in that context?
How do you evaluate the veracity of the documents? What questions do you ask of them? What criteria do you use to judge their merits?
How does the story of Sand Creek make you rethink the old saying, “History is written by the victors”?
Additional Reading
Michael Allen, “A Massacre in the Family: My Great-Great Grandfather and an American Indian Tragedy,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2014.
David Fridtjof Halas, “‘All the Camp Was Weeping’: George Bent and the Sand Creek Massacre,” Colorado Heritage (Summer 1995): 2–17.
Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961).
Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Louis Kraft, Ned Wynkoop and the Lonely Road from Sand Creek (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
Gary L. Roberts, Massacre at Sand Creek: How Methodists Were Involved in an American Tragedy (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2016).
Related Chapters
The Civil War: America's Second Revolution, 1861-1865New Frontiers: Westward Expansion and Industrial Growth, 1865-1877
Related Items
At the Sand Creek MassacreHo-my-ike's (George Bent's) Account
Silas Soule’s Testimony
"The Battle of Sand Creek"
Col. John Milton Chivington’s Report