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

  Their trip down memory lane continued early the next day, when the four men found still “more battlegrounds.” Van Loan, the bewildered scribe along for the ride, quipped: “It was a good thing that four instead of forty of the old-timers turned up for the reunion, else there would have been forty battlegrounds and 400,000 arguments.” The veterans, he related, had sown confusion wherever they had traveled in southeastern Colorado: “Before the visit of the survivors every man between Kit Carson and Chivington knew exactly where the fight took place. Now nobody is sure about it.” Van Loan then traded in romantic rhetoric common at the time: Native Americans were a vanished race. Their disappearance, he suggested, had been inevitable, “a foregone conclusion.” But in the reporter’s telling, this familiar story carried more than a whiff of lament. When the Cheyennes and Arapahos had retreated before the floodtide of white civilization, washed out of Colorado by Chivington’s men—“It wasn’t nice work, but it had to be done,” P. M. Williams recalled—those tribes had taken their indigenous knowledge of the local landscape with them. “The plains Indian was once intimately acquainted with [this place],” Van Loan wrote, “but the red man is now nothing more than a vivid memory—fading away like everything else connected with the aboriginal owners of the soil.” Well into their dotage, and without Native guides to orient them, the quartet of veterans “left the site of the battlefield unmarked.”30

  It remained that way well into the future. In 1923, the Rocky Mountain News asked, “Where was the stage upon which the tragedy of Sand Creek was enacted?” and concluded, “The place is indefinite.” Nearly twenty years later, the federal Works Progress Administration, an arm of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, could do little better in its Colorado guidebook, directing parties interested in seeing the site to “inquire directions locally.” That was not bad advice, given that some residents of Kiowa County—like the confident ranch hand who had driven the four veterans on their tour in 1908, or the local proprietor who had misdirected them to a pile of cow remains—still believed that they knew exactly where the violence had transpired. Disparate theories provided the fodder for what became a decades-long game of telephone: the massacre happened right here, no over there, blood had been shed just across that next rise, or perhaps nowhere nearby. The uncertainty lingered until 1950, when, with the ceremony dedicating the hilltop memorial bearing the words “Sand Creek Battle Ground,” a mason distilled scattershot perspectives into something that looked an awful lot like historical precision. The massacre site was there for anyone to see, just beneath the monument overlook located on Bill Dawson’s ranch.31

  Unless it was actually somewhere else entirely. Roughly half a century later, as Senator Campbell contemplated buying Dawson’s property, it seemed that the memorial served as an ironic reminder of the haziness of collective memory in southeastern Colorado rather than as a useful guide to the massacre site’s actual whereabouts. When Campbell held hearings on March 24, 1998, to discuss the fate of his memorial legislation, NPS officials testified that nobody knew the massacre’s exact location. Over the previous six months, NPS personnel, already aware of Campbell’s interest in memorializing Sand Creek, had begun investigating the possibility of turning the Dawson property into a national historic site. Cathy Spude, one of the NPS staffers charged with vetting the project’s viability, remembered that Jerry Rogers, her boss at the time, “had very strong views about the integrity of the sites incorporated into the Park System.” Rogers shared Campbell’s passion for memorializing Sand Creek, later arguing that the NPS needed to “fill the huge empty space of sites that deal with American Indian history and culture.” But Rogers also worried about an ongoing public relations disaster surrounding the establishment of another national historic site, which was still embarrassing the NPS. His familiarity with that episode colored his perception of the Sand Creek project.32

  A decade earlier, Congress had created the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site, honoring the “forgotten founder,” a slaveholding patriot who fought in the Revolutionary War, helped draft and later signed the Constitution, and served as governor of South Carolina and then as a U.S. senator. Pinckney’s estate, located near Charleston, provided visitors with a period tableau, including a building that the NPS believed was the original plantation house. George Washington once dined there, a claim to fame that recalled a bygone era when preservation decisions hinged on associating structures with famous individuals. The NPS at the time had no units owned by signers of the Constitution. And in the late 1980s, the Pinckney property faced threats from encroaching development. These factors convinced the NPS that the Pinckney estate merited protection. In 1988, the NPS supported its establishment as a historic site. Three years later, though, a survey suggested that the Pinckney mansion had not been constructed until approximately 1830, long after Charles Pinckney had sold his property to pay off debts. The NPS, humiliated that it apparently had created a national historic site in what seemed to be the wrong location, began searching for the original Pinckney house. That hunt, ultimately successful, was still under way when Senator Campbell began considering memorializing Sand Creek.33

  With the Pinckney debacle serving as an ugly backdrop, Jerry Rogers, despite his desire to memorialize the massacre, initially handled Sand Creek with caution. An update about preliminary—and negative—results from Dick Ellis’s site search only deepened his doubts about Campbell’s plan. Rogers thought that the senator, because of his committee assignments and history of high regard for the NPS, had to be treated deferentially. But he also believed that the NPS could not support a bill “designating, without any further investigation, where the site would be.” If it later turned out that Dawson’s property was the “wrong site,” that the “historic event hadn’t taken place there,” the NPS would be left holding a sprawling ranch in southeastern Colorado, equal parts white elephant and black eye. Alluding to the structure at the center of the Pinckney fiasco, Rogers wrote his subordinates: “No more Snee farms for this kid.” More worrisome still, because of the politically charged nature of the event in question, Sand Creek might further poison federal-tribal relations. So when the NPS’s witnesses appeared at Senator Campbell’s hearing, they suggested that instead of buying Dawson’s land and creating a memorial right away, putting the cart before the horse in their view, they should focus first on “finding the site.”34

  Dick Ellis, meanwhile, was trying to do just that. Six months earlier, Doug Scott, the archeologist Ellis had tapped to oversee the fieldwork for the Sand Creek site search, had finally surveyed Dawson’s land. After decades of digging in far-flung and dangerous locales, Scott looked like artifacts would begin falling from his pant cuffs if you turned him upside down and gave him a shake. And they probably would have: fragments of shrapnel, shattered glass, and splintered bone. One of the pioneers in the emerging field of battlefield archeology, Scott could sometimes re-create the ebb and flow of scenes of mass violence by pulling bits and pieces from the ground, reading them like texts, and then assembling a chronology from what looked to the untrained eye like a random sample from the town dump. He was an affable, outgoing man, confident in his abilities; he enjoyed recounting stories of his successes, which spanned continents and decades. He first cemented his reputation at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, in Montana. He unearthed evidence suggesting that Cheyenne and Lakota warriors had outfought Custer’s men, rather than tricking them, an insight that allowed the NPS, which oversaw the site, to reinterpret the bloodshed there. After that triumph, Scott’s professional standing soared. He next excavated other sites from the Indian Wars and the Civil War. Immediately prior to coming to Kiowa County, he had worked in Bosnia and Rwanda, gathering evidence used in several war crimes prosecutions.35

  Despite Scott’s experience canvassing similar settings, the peculiar case of Sand Creek left him shaking his head. Before sending a large team of experienced metal detectors—members of the Pikes Peak Adventure League, accompanied by Steve Brady, the Ridgely
s, Laird Cometsevah, and several other massacre descendants—out to sweep the Dawson ranch in late September and early October 1997, Scott drew up a detailed work plan. Despite his preparations, his team, after covering acres of prairie terrain, came up nearly empty: no spent cartridges from Chivington’s troops and very little of the detritus that should have been cast off by the Arapaho and Cheyenne bands camped on the banks of Sand Creek. In short, the searchers found almost no hard evidence at all. Scott, though, still believed that they were looking in the right place. He kept repeating, “I don’t know why we’re not finding anything. It just ought to be here. All of the historical evidence points in this direction.” Still, after a week of looking, he gave up and pulled his team from the site. When he later compiled a report on his fieldwork, he noted that the archeology had been “inconclusive at best.”36

  The Cheyenne descendants, by contrast, were undeterred. They remained resolute in their conviction that the massacre had taken place on Dawson’s property. Steve Brady recalled, “you could just feel that we were in a very special place.” Upon arriving for the archeological reconnaissance, he, Laird Cometsevah, and Joe Big Medicine, another Southern Cheyenne massacre descendant, “conducted a ceremony,” and, in Brady’s words, “without any question at all, we knew that we were in the right place at that time.” He continued, “It was our cultural understanding that we were at the massacre site. It was just unequivocal.” In part, the Cheyenne representatives to the project drew upon deeply held feelings, a sense of place they associated with the massacre of their ancestors, whose spirits, they believed, still roamed that land. They also knew that other observers from their tribes, including Senator Campbell, had heard voices, often those of crying children, near the monument overlook. And most important of all, two decades earlier, in 1978, Cometsevah and the Sacred Arrow Keeper, the Cheyenne spiritual leader, had consecrated the ground there. In Cometsevah’s words, they had “reclaimed the land,” making it “Cheyenne earth.” Still, despite the descendants’ consensus, Brady worried: “white people aren’t going to believe that kind of thing without hard scientific evidence.” He was right. Ellis remained unconvinced by the Cheyennes’ certitude and later produced a report echoing Doug Scott’s findings, suggesting that the entire search had been inconclusive.37

  So when Senator Campbell held his Sand Creek hearings in Washington, DC, on March 24, Steve Brady and Laird Cometsevah, confident that they knew the site’s true location, testified about the importance of buying Bill Dawson’s property and creating a national historic site there. But Kate Stevenson, the NPS’s key witness before Campbell’s committee, demurred, warning that without “solid physical, archaeological, scientific, historically documented evidence,” purchasing the Dawson ranch would be rash and perhaps could wind up embarrassing the NPS. Stevenson concluded by suggesting, “To commemorate the event on the wrong spot would dishonor the victims, distort the history, and deceive the visitor. Nothing about your consideration of this legislation could be more important than to make certain that we have the correct location.” Frustrated that NPS officials were ignoring their cultural authority on the subject of Sand Creek, thereby undercutting the validity of the “traditional tribal methods” the descendants had used to locate the massacre site, Brady and Cometsevah nonetheless supported the NPS’s call for another investigation into where the slaughter had taken place. Senator Campbell, by then certain that such a process would be the best way to “acquire and preserve with honor and dignity” the Sand Creek killing field, sponsored the site location legislation. Both houses of Congress passed identical versions of the bill in September 1998. On October 6 of that year, President Clinton signed the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site Study Act into law.38

  Although he stood with the NPS during the Capitol Hill hearings, an irritated Steve Brady came away from the experience “reminde[d] of the way that white government always operates when dealing with Indian people: ask Indians for help, maybe get our help, and then thank us by hanging us out to dry. It’s the same as it ever was.” With the phrase “the same as it ever was,” Brady linked the nascent effort to commemorate Sand Creek with the era of the massacre itself. Time and again during the memorialization process, President Lincoln’s mystic chords of memory would begin to feel more like cords, cinching past to present, sometimes biting uncomfortably tight. For the descendants, especially, federal officials working in the NPS would appear guilty of recapitulating episodes from the road to and from Sand Creek.39

  In this case, Brady alluded to a plea for cooperation issued by Governor John Evans in June 1864. In the aftermath of the gruesome Hungate murders, with the city of Denver slipping into panic, Evans responded in two ways. First, he redoubled his requests for help from federal authorities. Second, he tried to separate Native people in Colorado Territory into two clearly identifiable and mutually exclusive groups: “friendlies” and “hostiles”. Working through “agents, interpreters, and traders,” on June 27 Evans reached out to “the friendly Indians of the plains,” asking for their help. He observed that some “members of their tribes ha[d] gone to war with white people.” Because of that, he warned, “the Great Father is angry, and will certainly hunt them out and punish them.” But, Evans continued, despite the escalating violence, white authorities still hoped to “protect and take care of” peaceful Indians “who remain[ed] friendly.” The governor then asked those Native people to go to “places of safety,” including, for the Cheyennes and Arapahos, Fort Lyon. “The object of this” plan, Evans concluded, was to “prevent friendly Indians from being killed through mistake.” As for Native people who had attacked whites, there could be no misconstruing their fate: “The war on hostile Indians will be continued until they are all effectually subdued.”40

  Through the end of June, Evans’s maneuver seemed to be working, as relative calm settled on Colorado’s Eastern Plains. In mid-July, though, soldiers fired without provocation on Chief Left Hand, a diehard proponent of peace with American settlers, and more Cheyennes and Arapahos began to wonder if Governor Evans could be trusted. Some bands joined raiding parties, lashing out at settlements along the Platte route, while others migrated toward places that they deemed safe—places that sometimes differed from the ones Evans had specified. Colonel Chivington observed these movements and the intensified attacks some bands levied on stage stations and outlying ranches; he insisted that the tribes had joined with pro-Confederate guerrillas and belligerent Sioux bands. He also attended to politics, traveling the territory advocating for statehood and his own prospects. In early August, though, more bloodshed forced him to narrow his focus from civilian to military affairs. On August 7, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux warriors attacked several outposts, murdering some forty settlers and taking at least six women and children captive. Black Kettle, still hoping for peace with white authorities, attempted to demonstrate his good faith in late August by handing some of those hostages over to Ned Wynkoop. But it was too late by then. Governor Evans had convinced himself that the Plains Tribes posed an existential threat to Colorado Territory. Settlers, he believed, needed to do everything in their power to safeguard white civilization from what he saw as unchecked Indian savagery.41

  Governor Evans begged General Curtis and Secretary of War Stanton to send troops to Colorado or, failing that, to authorize him to raise a regiment of Indian fighters from the local population. While he waited for a reply, on August 11 Evans issued a second proclamation, this time urging “all citizens of Colorado, either individually or in such parties as they may organize, to go in pursuit of all hostile Indians on the plains.” He asked members of the state-sanctioned mobs that he was creating to “scrupulously avoid” peaceful Indians who had responded to his earlier call. But the governor offered no clues as to how whites should differentiate between hostile and friendly Native people. Instead, he provided incentives for “citizens, or parties of citizens” who chose to “kill and destroy … all such hostile Indians”: the right to “take captive, and
hold to their own private use and benefit all the property” of their victims. “The conflict is upon us,” he concluded, “and all good citizens are called upon to do their duty for the defense of their homes and families.” The next day, he received authorization from the War Department to raise a regiment for a hundred days—the 3rd Colorado—a force recruited, in Evans’s words, to “pursue, kill, and destroy all hostile Indians that infest the plains, for thus only can we secure a permanent and lasting peace.” Just a month and a half earlier, he had asked Colorado’s Native peoples for help, promising them safety in exchange for their assistance. More than a century later, Steve Brady recalled episodes like that one as he wrestled with whether or not to keep assisting the NPS to memorialize Sand Creek.42

  By 1998, Brady, along with Laird Cometsevah and several of the other descendants, had spent decades struggling against what they perceived as overweening federal authority, their efforts one part of a national movement to secure cultural sovereignty and self-determination for Native Americans. One of the fronts on which that fight had played out was the quest to reacquire parcels of land taken throughout the nation’s history from tribal peoples. In light of those pitched battles, as well as the lessons drawn from betrayals during the massacre era, having the NPS ignore their traditional practices—the implications of the Sacred Arrow Keeper’s ceremony conducted on Bill Dawson’s land twenty years earlier, the contact some tribal people had with their ancestors’ spirits at that spot, and the stories of Sand Creek passed from generation to generation—left the descendants more committed than ever to ensuring that they would have a meaningful say in the memorialization process. They would protect the Sand Creek site, reclaiming a parcel of their ancestral homeland. Then they would narrate their tribes’ history on that ground. They would preserve the past by embedding their stories in a sacred place.43