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

  The next morning, the fifth day of Soule’s testimony, investigators doubled back over the same terrain that Chivington had covered during the preceding sessions. Soule then replied to several more questions from Chivington, reiterating some of his earlier testimony and underscoring his sense that the Native people waiting in the Sand Creek camps had believed at the time of the assault that the troops at Fort Lyon would protect them: “I heard Wynkoop tell some of the chiefs, I think Black Kettle and Left-Hand, that—in case he got word from Curtis not to make peace with them, that he would let them know, so that they could remove out of the way and get to their tribe.” With that, Soule finished. The federal investigators and Chivington left him to sift through his recollections of the bloodbath and where he fit into that grim history. Soule had no Sand Creek memorial where he could make a pilgrimage and seek expiation for his part in the massacre; he had only his unsettled thoughts.51

  Nearly a century and a half later, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell knew the history of Silas Soule’s struggles and considered him one of the heroes of Sand Creek. When Campbell strode to the dais at the historic site’s opening ceremony, he wielded a potent combination of political and moral authority, rooted in an autobiography that read like a script treatment for a feature film. Born outside Sacramento, California, to a tubercular mother and an alcoholic father who denied his own Cheyenne heritage, Campbell sometimes lived in orphanages when his parents became overwhelmed by their responsibilities. After dropping out of high school, he entered the Air Force, served honorably in the Korean War, and earned a graduate equivalency degree. He then mustered out of the service and began studying at San José State University, where he found time to become a world-class judoka. In 1963, he won a gold medal in judo at the Pan-American Games before injuring his knee the following year while competing at the Tokyo Olympics, ending his athletic career. Campbell then got married and moved to his wife’s home state, Colorado, where he began raising champion quarter horses. In the early 1970s, at the height of the Red Power Movement, he reconnected with his Cheyenne relatives and became renowned and wealthy designing jewelry inspired by Native American themes. He entered politics in 1982, winning a seat as a Democrat in the Colorado state legislature. He won again when he ran for U.S. Congress in 1986. And in 1992, Coloradans sent him to the U.S. Senate, still as a Democrat, before he switched parties in 1995. Campbell retired from politics in 2004, completing a run-of-the-mill Native-American-boy-transcends-hardscrabble-roots-to-become-Olympic athlete/horse breeder/jeweler/U.S. senator story.52

  Campbell seemingly had more invested in the Sand Creek memorial than anyone else at the opening ceremony. And his goals for the site were both lofty and complex. He authored the legislation creating the memorial and shepherded the bill through the Senate. The site’s opening realized a quarter-century’s dream for him, capping a career in which he had used his political sway to champion Native American causes. At the ceremony, he served as a bridge, connecting the local, state, and federal officials who spoke before him with the Indian people who would follow him. This was a familiar role for Campbell, who inhabited two worlds throughout his adult life: Washington, where, as a senator, he was a member of what some people called the “world’s most exclusive club”; and the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, a place he knew as “home,” where he remained part of the Cheyenne Council of 44 Chiefs. On this day, his speech demonstrated that he saw the memorial as connecting the two.53

  Wearing tribal regalia—a feathered headdress, its band adorned with elaborate beadwork, a vivid red and blue trade blanket draped over his shoulders, and an eagle staff in his left hand—Campbell played two roles at the opening ceremony: the authentic Indian and a senior statesman representing the U.S. government. Invoking a myth that dated back to the aftermath of Sand Creek, he claimed that the massacre had been perpetrated not by federal troops but by ragtag members of the Colorado militia, “raised, a good number of them, from the thugs and alcoholics and the ne’er-do-wells of Skid Row in Denver.” Campbell then recalled Sand Creek’s gruesome details, becoming the first speaker to do so, before returning to a refrain of healing, suggesting that the site offered forgiveness for those individuals willing to remember the dead. “Our tears,” he said, “are tempered with the hope of a better future and a better relationship between people of all races.” He concluded by absolving Sam Brownback and other gathered mendicants of their sins, seemingly closing the book on Sand Creek once and for all: “I think of the people here today that their hearts are good, they understand healing, and the circle is complete.” Reconciliation had moved within reach because the memorial promoted cross-cultural interactions. And if Campbell’s audience believed that the massacre had been the work of gun-toting drunks in the state militia, rather than a tragic result of federal policy carried out by the U.S. military—an idiosyncratic rather than a structural calamity, in other words—then healing would be easier to achieve for all concerned.54

  By the same token, Campbell, like the other speakers at the ceremony, ignored the sinews that bound Sand Creek to the Civil War. He preferred that his audience recall that conflict as Silas Soule had hoped they would: a glorious struggle to preserve the Union, a moment when soldiers, white and African American alike, fought so that “a nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” would not “perish from the earth.” Remembered in that way, the Civil War occupied a sanctified place in the American imagination and served the interests of federal authorities. The conflict was a tragedy that consumed the lives of more than 600,000 men, but those deaths had not been in vain. Through shared sacrifice, the nation unshackled itself from the institution of slavery, redeeming itself in blood. Linking such transcendent recollections of a noble war fought in freedom’s name to the murder and dispossession of indigenous people, to racial animosities rather than to soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism, to ill-trained cavalrymen committing atrocities rather than to volunteer soldiers lionized in American culture for fighting for their country, risked sullying popular conceptions of the Civil War. With U.S. troops dying overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008 and the nation already bitterly divided politically, Senator Campbell stepped carefully through the treacherous landscape of American memory.55

  That Campbell segregated Sand Creek from the Civil War in his speech suggested that upholding patriotic orthodoxy sometimes demanded collective amnesia rather than remembrance. Monuments and memorials in the United States typically evoke neat visions of the nation’s history (Maya Lin’s stark Vietnam wall stands as an exception to this rule), rationalizing a chaotic and fractured past. But irredeemable episodes like Sand Creek remind Americans that as much as they might wish that their history proceeded in a regimented fashion, the past cannot so easily be trained to fall into line. Events like the massacre belie national narratives of steady progress and exceptional righteousness. They also call into question the legitimacy of the government’s monopoly on violence. Had Senator Campbell acknowledged the massacre’s connection to the Civil War, he would have underscored the consequences of imperialism on the borderlands. Had he examined the ways that U.S. history is shot through with ironies, he would have diminished the unifying power of collective memories surrounding the Civil War, a military endeavor viewed by most Americans as noble. Better then to forget Sand Creek’s relationship to the Union war effort. Better to depict the massacre as the work of marginal characters, outliers led by a vicious madman.56

  After three spokespeople read speeches for federal officials who could not attend the ceremony, reiterating the memorial’s palliative qualities, the program turned to other tribal speakers, who revealed that competing narratives still swirled around the historic site, much as they had during the era of the massacre. Eugene Little Coyote, the Northern Cheyenne tribal president, spoke about how the Sand Creek story had scarred him as a child, leaving him distrustful of whites. After allowing that the memorial’s creation held out some hope of healing for his trib
e, he observed, “there are many important people here today, and in particular some of the highest-ranking state and federal officials.” Turning to the senators, members of Congress, and governors arrayed behind him, Little Coyote asked “if the Cheyenne can trust the government to fulfill its … trust responsibilities, to insure that we have quality health care, quality education, and quality housing.” As he intimated, his tribe faced huge problems: nearly four in ten Northern Cheyennes were unemployed; half lived in poverty; and because of disproportionate rates of chronic illness, diabetes, and heart disease especially, they died a full decade earlier than the national average for all Americans. Little Coyote reminded the assembled dignitaries that the Northern Cheyennes could not treat sickness with memorials, could not feed their children on apologies, and could not find shelter within multicultural bromides.57

  As the ceremony took on an increasingly militant tone, William Walksalong shuffled to the microphone. A Northern Cheyenne spiritual leader and member of the tribe’s Sand Creek Massacre Descendants Committee, he rejected the equation of reconciliation with healing, offering instead Native identity and self-determination as alternative medicine for what ailed his kin. “The majority of Indian people today,” he observed, “do not want to become plain Americans. Our desire is to retain our own way of life.” Walksalong suggested that if federal officials wished to promote healing, they should honor the treaty, signed after the massacre, promising reparations to the victims’ families: “I humbly and respectfully request of American leaders … to help us fulfill the promises made to them at the Treaty of the Little Arkansas in 1865.” Walksalong explained that he was not offering “a concession, but rather” viewed fulfillment of treaty obligations as “a measure of justice necessary for genuine forgiveness and reconciliation to occur.” Kind words and earnest sentiments were nice, he noted, but restitution for the massacre had to precede real healing. In this way, Walksalong, like Little Coyote before him, echoed the views of George Bent.58

  Looking back on the massacre at the beginning of the twentieth century, George Bent viewed Sand Creek as a hinge in Cheyenne history, an event that ended a relatively peaceful and prosperous era for the tribe and began a more violent and impoverished one: the Plains Indian Wars and the reservation era that followed. Bent, like Senator Campbell a hundred years later, often moved between worlds. His father, William Bent, was a trader and federal Indian agent, whose eponymous Fort Served as a hub for the bustling commercial networks on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. His mother, Owl Woman, was matriarch to the Cheyennes’ most prestigious kinship group and daughter of the Sacred Arrow Keeper, the tribe’s revered spiritual leader. Although George Bent was schooled in Missouri among whites, he typically felt more at home with his Cheyenne relatives. Nevertheless, at the start of the Civil War, he volunteered to fight for the South, eventually joining the 1st Missouri Cavalry. He saw action in several battles, including Wilson’s Creek and Pea Ridge, until Union troops captured him in summer 1862. After Bent swore a loyalty oath to the United States, he returned to his father’s ranch. But with anti-Confederate sentiment running high in Colorado at the time, Bent decided that it would be safer for him to live with the Cheyennes. In November 1864, he camped with Black Kettle near Sand Creek.59

  Bent was wounded in the massacre but lived. Still, federal officials inquiring into the violence apparently sought neither his testimony nor that of any other Native survivors of the ordeal. But even if he had been asked for his story, Bent likely would have declined in the aftermath of Sand Creek. He later recalled that following the massacre, he and his kin had been “afraid of going into any fort” or federal installation. And yet, despite institutionalized pressure to forget—the Cheyennes struggled against coercive programs in the 1880s and 1890s, the so-called era of assimilation, including violent reprisals for preserving tribal histories or maintaining traditional practices like the Sun Dance—Bent resolved to keep memories of Sand Creek alive. Americans at the time worried about what historian Frederick Jackson Turner labeled the closing of the frontier; pondered what conservationists warned would be the imminent extinction of the bison, not to mention that of the tribes dependent for their survival on those great beasts; and greedily consumed piles of dime novels about cowboys and Indians. With the West at the center of debates about the nation’s future, Bent worried that Native people were not speaking for themselves. So he began relating tribal lore to James Mooney, a renowned Smithsonian ethnographer; George Bird Grinnell, one of the fathers of professional anthropology; and George Hyde, a relatively obscure historian.60

  Bent quickly soured on Mooney (he “always thought he was right in every thing”) and eventually on Grinnell too (he would not “give credit to any body, only himself”). By contrast, for more than a decade Bent collaborated with Hyde. In 1905 and 1906, they placed a series of six articles in a monthly magazine, the Frontier, published out of Colorado Springs. In those essays, Bent went public with his stories of Sand Creek, calling it a massacre and fixing blame on John Chivington and his men for the years of violence that followed: “The real causes of the Indian War on the plains were the wanton attacks made by the Colorado volunteers on friendly Indians.” Bent then turned Chivington’s history of the era on its head. He said of the Civil War backdrop that although “some men in Colorado talked about ‘Rebel Plots’ ” and charged that he had worked as a “Rebel Emissary,” he had only served the Confederacy very briefly. Nevertheless, he admitted, “some Texas officers [had] schemed to bring their men up the Arkansas [River] in the spring of 1863, and, with the aid of Indians to attack and capture Ft. Larned and Ft. Lyon.” But, Bent noted, he had not participated in that doomed plot, which had foundered because the targeted tribes, “the Kiowas and Comanches, inveterate foes of Texas, refused to have anything to do with the scheme.” So too the Arapahos and Cheyennes, who, Bent said, likewise carried no brief for the Confederacy.61

  Bent extended his critique of Chivington in the Frontier, scoffing at the claim that a pan-Indian alliance, united under the banner of various Sioux tribes, had represented an existential threat to whites prior to Sand Creek. The sovereign identities of the Plains Indians made such a thing impossible. “Some Sioux did come down that winter [1863–1864] with a war-pipe,” Bent allowed, but “the Cheyennes and Arapahos refused to smoke, thus showing that they intended to remain at peace.” The Kiowas and Comanches, pursuing their own political agenda, also rejected the Sioux’s entreaties. Bent then reiterated the real cause of the violence that had spiraled out of control at Sand Creek: American attacks on friendly Native people. This aggression, he noted, was born in the hothouse of the Civil War, as white racial anxiety ran rampant at the time, fostering paranoia and misapprehensions about monolithic Indian identity. At the same time, the Civil War grew out of a long-standing fight between the North and the South for control of the West. The same struggle gave rise to the Indian Wars, which involved different parties vying for dominance in the same region. Regardless, the Plains Tribes had not formed an alliance until after Sand Creek, Bent said, when memories of the massacre had provided them with a rallying cry, a common cause around which they ultimately had united.62

  Turning to the massacre’s prehistory, Bent’s perspective again differed sharply from Chivington’s. Whereas Chivington viewed the escalating mayhem in 1864 as evidence that the entire Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were waging war on white settlers, Bent recalled those episodes as ones in which many of his people had actually demonstrated remarkable forbearance. Bent remembered Colorado troops, in May 1864, murdering Chief Lean Bear in cold blood, even though a year earlier the chief had visited Washington as part of a peace delegation “and had papers to show that he was friendly.” In the event, when Lean Bear approached a group of soldiers, “intending to show his papers and shake hands,” their commander ordered them to fire. “Then the troops shot Lean Bear to pieces, as he lay on his back on the ground.” Other similar episodes followed, Bent wrote, suggesting that cumulatively these attacks �
��made the Cheyennes very angry.” Belligerent tribal factions eventually “began fighting, and were soon joined by the Arapahos.” Before too long, “the Kiowas and Comanches ‘chipped in’ and so nearly all the Indians on the Plains were at war.” But even then, Bent noted, many Native people did not fight.63

  Bent reported in the Frontier that at the end of summer 1864, peace chiefs, hoping to rehabilitate relations with whites, had struggled to end the violence. In August, Black Kettle, for instance, sent emissaries to Fort Lyon proposing prisoner exchanges. Ned Wynkoop, Bent wrote in passages that fleshed out Silas Soule’s recollection of these events, had agreed to meet with Black Kettle. At that gathering, Wynkoop recovered several white captives and convinced the peace chiefs to travel with him to Denver to parley with Governor Evans. In his letters to Hyde, Bent recounted that after the fruitless Camp Weld meeting, Wynkoop had “told Black Kettle and other chiefs that they could move to Fort Lyon and they would be protected” and that additional white officials had “told Black Kettle to move there and no harm would be done them.” Bent remembered, “This was the reason the Cheyennes moved toward Fort Lyon that winter.” Shortly after that, Bent returned to Black Kettle’s village, “now on the Big Bend of Sandy Creek, about thirty-five miles northeast of Ft. Lyon.” Approximately one hundred Cheyenne and ten Arapaho lodges waited there, where Chivington’s men attacked them a month later.64