A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek Read online

  A MISPLACED MASSACRE

  A MISPLACED MASSACRE

  Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek

  Ari Kelman

  HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

  2013

  Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Jacket design by Tim Jones.

  Jacket photo by Tom Carr.

  Publication of this book has been supported through the generous provisions of the Maurice and Lula Bradley Smith Memorial Fund.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Kelman, Ari, 1968–

  A misplaced massacre : struggling over the memory of Sand Creek / Ari Kelman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-674-04585-9 (alk. paper)

  1. Sand Creek Massacre, Colo., 1864. 2. Cheyenne Indians—Wars, 1864. 3. Chivington, John M. (John Milton), 1821–1894. 4. United States. Army. Colorado Cavalry Regiment, 3rd (1864)—History. 5. United States. Army. Colorado Cavalry Regiment, 1st (1862–1865)—History. I. Title.

  E83.863.K45 2012

  978.8004'97353—dc23 2012012122

  CONTENTS

  List of Maps and Illustrations

  Preface

  1 A Perfect Mob

  2 Looters

  3 The Smoking Gun

  4 Accurate but Not Precise

  5 Indelible Infamy

  6 You Can’t Carve Things in Stone

  Epilogue: When Is Enough Enough?

  Notes

  Index

  MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

  Map of Colorado

  Sand Creek Massacre site

  Sand Creek Battle Ground marker

  Obelisk erected to memorialize Sand Creek

  Colorado Civil War Memorial, Denver

  Plaque affixed to the base of the Colorado Civil War Memorial

  George Bent’s maps of Sand Creek

  Samuel Bonsall’s map of military sites along the Western frontier

  Map of the site of the Sand Creek Massacre, based on archival projections

  Map of archeological findings at the Sand Creek Massacre site

  Map of the boundary of the Sand Creek Massacre site

  National Park Service map of the Sand Creek Massacre site

  Southern Cheyenne, Southern Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne map of the Sand Creek Massacre site

  Revised plaque placed at the Colorado Civil War Memorial

  Stand of young cottonwoods at Sand Creek

  Map of Jeff C. Campbell’s theory of the projected course of Sand Creek in 1864

  PREFACE

  I first became aware of Sand Creek more than two decades ago, while reading a letter written by an enlistee in the Iron Brigade, the unit that suffered the highest rate of casualties in the Union Army. At the time, I was looking through sources for my undergraduate thesis in one of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s reading rooms, and I hoped that the tattered pages spread out before me would reveal what had motivated volunteer troops to fight with such ferocious courage during the Civil War. I never adequately answered that question, but I still remember details of the document: written in a shaky hand, the words filled with remorse that caught me off guard, the paper cracked and yellowed with age. Looking back, the note must have been composed sometime in 1865 as its author, a farm boy from Indiana, bemoaned an event that had taken place the previous year, a slaughter he labeled “Chivington’s massacre.” The passage caught my attention because the soldier seemed to think that an explosion of violence on the borderlands, a faraway “massacre,” somehow diminished the integrity of his own service. More than a little confused, and with no Internet search engines at my disposal—truly, those were benighted times—I approached one of my mentors and asked for help. Who was Chivington? What was this mysterious episode? I found out that Sand Creek was actually part of the Indian Wars and not related to the Civil War at all. Alas, another wasted day in the archives—or so I recall thinking.

  Fifteen years later, having read more about Sand Creek while in graduate school, I moved to Colorado, where I taught history and discovered that the massacre can be hard to escape. Thoroughfares that crisscross urban areas along the Front Range, a chapel on the campus of the university where I worked, a lonely town in the middle of the state’s Eastern Plains, a snow-capped mountain looming over the city of Denver—all these and more bear the names of Sand Creek’s sponsors and perpetrators. It seemed that by the end of the twentieth century, though most Coloradans no longer celebrated the massacre, they were still haunted by that chapter of their history. After learning that the National Park Service, partnered with descendants of Sand Creek’s victims and survivors, hoped to commemorate the violence, I began following that project closely. I attended public hearings, met with the principals in the memorialization process, and decided to write a book about how various groups of people have recalled the massacre very differently—from its aftermath in late 1864 through the opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in 2007. I learned that the massacre has always been hotly contested, a vivid example of the truism that collective remembrance both shapes and is bound by contemporary politics. You hold in your hands the result of my efforts: a study of the collision of history and memory, of past and present, at Sand Creek.

  As I began doing the research for this book, I realized that I would have to move beyond archival records and consult oral histories as well. As a result, I conducted well over a hundred interviews that eventually produced in excess of 3,500 pages of transcribed text. By the time this volume appears in print, copies of those transcriptions and the original taped conversations will be available as part of the National Park Service’s Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site collection, housed within the Western Archaeological and Conservation Center in Tucson, Arizona. It probably goes without saying that as a participant-observer, I became part of the memorialization process that I documented. Nevertheless, I do not appear as a character in these pages. I made the decision to remain in the background because although I relate this story, it is not in any meaningful way mine, and the people who can legitimately claim it as their own are far more interesting than I am. After making that choice, I then adopted a nontraditional architecture for this book. Rather than proceeding neatly in chronological order, the events that I recount here often moved in fits and starts, as the past impinged on the present. To make this point, I use the central narrative of the historic site’s creation as the book’s spine; I flesh out that tale with flashbacks to the era of the massacre and various moments when people struggled over Sand Creek’s memory.

  Those struggles taught me that I misunderstood the massacre when I first learned about it as an undergraduate pondering an especially beguiling primary source. From the perspective of the soldier whose letter I read, a young veteran gazing west from the trenches outside Richmond, Virginia, Sand Creek looked like an abomination and an aberration, a fit of frontier brutality that threatened to diminish glorious achievements hard won during a terrible but ultimately just war. As this book will demonstrate, by reversing that frame of reference, we can see that for Native people gazing east from the banks of Sand Creek, the Civil War, looked like a war of empire, a contest to control expansion into the West, rather than a war of liberation. The massacre, then, should be recalled as part of both the Civil War and the Indian Wars, a bloody link between interrelated chapters of the nation’s history.

  A project like
this rests upon the work of dedicated archivists and librarians. I owe a great debt to the outstanding staff members at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; the Buffalo Bill Historical Center; the Colorado Historical Society; the Colorado State Archives; the Denver Public Library’s Western History and Genealogy Collections; the Huntington Library; the Library of Congress; the Montana State Archives and Libraries; the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC; the National Archives and Records Administration, Great Lakes Region; the National Museum of the American Indian; the National Park Service, Intermountain Region; the National Park Service, Western Archaeological and Conservation Center; the New York Public Library; the Office of Interlibrary Loan and the Special Collections at the University of California, Davis’s Shields Library; the Oklahoma Historical Society; the Oklahoma State Archives and Records Management; the Special Collections at Colorado College’s Tutt Library; the Special Collections at the University of Colorado Library; the Special Collections at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library; the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma; and the Wyoming State Archives.

  I also could not have written this book without the help of the following individuals: Emily Albu, Thomas Andrews, Herman Bennett, Joe Big Medicine, Larry Borowsky, Chuck Bowen, Sheri Bowen, Ray Brady, Steve Brady, Barbara Braided Hair, Otto Braided Hair, Rod Brown, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Tom Carr, Steve Chestnut, Jon Christensen, Susan Collins, Colleen Cometsevah, Laird Cometsevah, Adina Davidson, Josh Davidson, Mark Davidson, Rachel Davidson, Bill Dawson, Bill Deverell, John Donohue, James Doyle, Jim Druck, Susan Ferber, Conrad Fischer, Karen Fisher, Homer Flute, Scott Forsythe, Janet Frederick, Rick Frost, Norma Gorneau, Andy Graybill, Jerry Greene, Chuck Grench, David Halaas, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Steve Hillard, Don Hughes, Andrew Isenberg, Ruthanna Jacobs, Karl Jacoby, Rod Johnson, Sasha Jovanovic, Abbey Kapelovitz, Len Kapelovitz, Anna Kelman, Sam Kelman, Andrew Kinney, Kevin Kruse, Gregg Kvistad, Thomas LeBien, Jacob Lee, Randy Lewis, Patty Limerick, Ed Linenthal, Modupe Lobode, Lisa Materson, Kathleen McDermott, Kyme McGaw, Sally McKee, Greg Michno, Craig Moore, Jennifer Morgan, Zach Morgan, Kathy Olmsted, Lorena Oropeza, Josh Piker, Miles Powell, Eric Rauchway, Mildred Red Cherries, Bob Reinhardt, Andres Resendez, Myra Rich, Ben Ridgely, Gail Ridgely, Alexa Roberts, Joe Rosen, Jerry Russell, Susan Schulten, Philip Schwartzberg, Doug Scott, Nancy Scott-Jackson, David Shneer, Robert Simpson, Judy Smith, Cathy Spude, Ellen Stroud, Barbara Sutteer, Paul Sutter, Ingrid Tague, Alan Taylor, Pam Tindall, Cecilia Tsu, Chuck Walker, Clarence Walker, Louis Warren, Lysa Wegman-French, Christine Whitacre, Richard White, Cynthia Young, Charles Zakhem, and Karl Zimmerman.

  The people listed above were incredibly generous with their time, and I thank them for their efforts on my behalf. They agreed to be interviewed, shared knowledge of the memorialization process in other ways, read part or all of my manuscript in draft, prepared elements of this book, provided me with a meal to eat or a bed in which to sleep while I did my research, or, in some cases, all the above. Their contributions have made this book better in more ways than I can count. The errors that remain are my responsibility alone.

  Additionally, I am grateful to a number of organizations that provided the financial support that allowed me to complete this project: the Colorado State Historical Fund; the Huntington Library; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the University of Denver Division of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; and the Office of Research and the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

  Finally, I dedicate this book to my best friend, Lesley, and my children, Jacob and Ben.

  1

  A PERFECT MOB

  Mixed emotions transformed the ceremony into equal parts celebration and memorial service. On April 28, 2007, the National Park Service (NPS) opened the gates to its 391st unit, the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Hundreds of people gathered at a killing field tucked into the southeastern corner of Colorado. The hallowed ground sits near Eads, population 567, in Kiowa County, which, when the wind whips from the west, is within spitting distance of Kansas. In many ways Eads is typical of small towns scattered across the Great Plains: derelict historic structures line its wide main street; its fiercely proud residents love their community while worrying over its future; and a fragile agricultural economy threatens to blow away in the next drought. The massacre site, located twenty miles northeast of town, sits on a rolling prairie, a place transformed by seasons. From late summer till winter’s end, it remains a palette of browns, grays, and dusty greens: windswept soil, dry shrubs, and naked cottonwoods. In early spring through the coming of autumn, though, colors explode. Verdant buffalo and grama grasses, interspersed with orange, red, and purple wildflowers, blanket the sandy earth, and an azure sky stretches to the distant horizon. That vivid quilt had not yet draped itself over the landscape on the day of the historic site’s opening. The trees lining the creek bottom were just beginning to leaf out; it looked like the NPS had made a bulk buy of olive-drab scenery at a local army-navy surplus store.1

  Colorado. (Adapted from the Sand Creek Massacre Special Resource Study, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service.)

  The site’s austere beauty suited the proceedings. A Northern Arapaho drum group opened the ceremony, playing a veterans’ song as a color guard carried American and NPS flags to positions flanking the dais. A Southern Cheyenne chief named Gordon Yellowman offered an opening prayer, while other dignitaries thumbed through notes for speeches that would stretch across more than three hours. After Yellowman finished, tribal chairmen, chiefs, spiritual leaders, U.S. senators, members of Congress, governors, NPS officials, and politicians from the surrounding community mourned the dead and lauded the process that had brought the diverse crowd together. The speakers shared, some implicitly, some explicitly, their visions for what the historic site could accomplish. Save for a few exceptions, they struck an optimistic pose: protecting the Sand Creek site not only honored the memory of the people killed at the massacre, promising long-deferred “healing” for the affected tribes, but also offered a blueprint for future cooperation between Native American peoples and federal authorities. Collective remembrance, if situated in a sacred place, could seal a historical rift, cut by violence, that yawned between cultures.2

  Memorials are shaped by politics. Contemporary concerns inflect how history is recalled at such places, as people engaged in the process of memorialization envision their projects with eyes cast toward the present and future as well as the past. This is especially true for federally sponsored historic sites, because government officials have long viewed public commemoration as a kind of patriotic alchemy, a way to conjure unity from divisiveness through appeals to Americans’ shared sense of history. This impulse may have been best expressed on March 4, 1861, when Abraham Lincoln responded to secessionists, then shredding the national fabric, with his first inaugural address. In the speech’s final sentence, Lincoln implored Southerners to heed the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land.” Those chords, he promised, would once again “swell the chorus of the Union” when “touched … by the better angels of our nature.” At historic sites scattered across the United States, including the shrine devoted to President Lincoln that opened in Washington, DC, in 1922, sentiments like these, evincing an abiding faith in the nationalizing power of public memory, have been carved into stone. These monuments ostensibly serve the nation’s interests by linking its disparate peoples and, simultaneously, legitimating the authority of the federal government. Out of common memories, the theory goes, Americans have forged a common identity—even, Lincoln believed, as they broke into warring camps.3

  Nowhere is this supposedly truer than at historic battlegrounds. At Lexington and Concord, Fort Mackinac and Chalmette, Petersburg and Shiloh, the Little Bighorn and
Pearl Harbor, battlefield memorials recall the deeds of American history’s patriots, warriors who died so that the nation might live. In preserving these sites, later generations have struggled to sustain the lessons of bygone eras, connecting past and present through memory. Conservators seemingly believe that blood-soaked ground is ideally suited to this kind of didacticism, not only because of the events that transpired there but also because the landscape appears permanent, unchanging through the years, and thus capable of trapping history in amber. By walking across a wooden bridge in Boston’s exurbs, slogging through a Louisiana wetland, scaling a rocky promontory overlooking the straits connecting Lakes Michigan and Huron, descending trenches cut deep into the ground in Virginia and Tennessee, reading a list of soldiers’ names carved into a granite marker looming over a Montana prairie, or gazing at drops of oil bubbling up from the depths of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Oahu, visitors to these sites are encouraged to stand tall against long odds, to remain steadfast in the face of privation, to rally round the flag, to practice eternal vigilance against unexpected perils, and to venerate sacred soil. Even as turbulent changes shake American society, history’s insights will remain accessible at such places. And the act of remembering, no matter how painful, will strengthen the foundation upon which the nation is built.4

  Sand Creek, most speakers at the site’s opening ceremony suggested, could play this role by encouraging supplicants to set aside their disagreements in service of healing. The justification for collective remembrance in the United States in recent years has often rested on a similar assumption: that memorialization has palliative qualities. From the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City to the National September 11 Memorial in Manhattan, memorial planners have secured public support for their initiatives by promising comfort to stricken communities and the nation at large. That Sand Creek would be the first unit within the National Park System to label an event in which federal troops killed Native Americans a “massacre” promised to deepen its utility. By remembering the dead and pondering the nation’s history of racial violence, site visitors would fuel cultural pluralism’s ultimate triumph over prejudice, brokering a rapprochement between long-standing enemies. At the same time, visiting the memorial landscape would exculpate the perpetrators’ heirs, because of their willingness to mourn while admitting their forebears’ guilt in a tragedy. This utopian vision suffused most of the speeches at the opening ceremony, typifying their authors’ hopes for the historic site.5