Soothing the Souls at Last

Silence and emptiness abound on this great sea of grass stretching to the pale blue horizon. Tumbleweeds spin past, hawks gaze from rusted fence posts.

On mornings like this, when all is still, Indian pilgrims sometimes walk along the crooked course of Sand Creek and listen. They say they can hear screams and sobs.

“There is a small group of us who hear spirits all the time,” said Laird Cometsevah, a Cheyenne chief who comes here each year. “Some hear women, I hear children.”

Cheyennes and Arapaho have long journeyed to this lonesome prairie to remember the 163 Indians shot and hacked to death by Colorado cavalrymen during the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. The slaughter, initially hailed as a great military victory, set off a dozen years of warfare across the Great Plains.

Investigations later revealed that two-thirds of those killed were women, children and infants. Eyewitness accounts told of fingers and ears lopped off as trophies, babies left to die in freezing fields and women clinging to soldiers’ legs begging in vain for mercy.

“You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there,” wrote Capt. Silas Soule, a soldier who saw the massacre. “But every word I have told you is the truth that they do not deny.”

The Indians have long tried to gain possession of the site and soothe the restless souls they say still wander it. About 20 years ago, the descendants of Sand Creek victims organized and sought ways to buy the land.

In December, a businessman with ties to the tribes bought the massacre site and donated it to them. They in turn leased it to the National Park Service, which is creating the country’s first national historic site dedicated solely to a massacre.

“We are making history here,” said Alexa Roberts, superintendent of the site. “This has been one of the most controversial episodes in the history of the West. It’s like Little Bighorn, and among Indian tribal peoples it’s never been forgotten.”

Park officials expect 30,000 visitors a year to the site, which they say will encompass 12,500 acres, including an interpretive center and markers detailing the sequence of events. It will probably open within three years.

Sitting about 12 miles from the small ranching town of Eads in southeastern Colorado, Sand Creek has changed little since the massacre. A few cottonwood trees have grown up in the last century, but the sharp bends in the dry creek and the swaying grasslands remain largely as they were.

Life has changed, though. A place once teeming with cowboys and Indians has just cowboys now, and they’re fading fast. The buffalo are gone, the saloons nearly gone and, of course, the Indians are gone.

Atop a bluff overlooking the creek, a small monument reads, “Sand Creek Battle Ground. Nov. 29 & 30. 1864.”

Historians say it was no battle, it was slaughter.

“The soldiers split into two columns and came up on the tepees,” said Roberts, pointing toward the creek. “It was a running engagement, the people fled up the creek and the killing took place over a five-mile area.”

In the months preceding the massacre, tensions between Indians and whites in the Colorado territory were running high. Soldiers and Indians clashed repeatedly. There were raids, atrocities and retaliation.

Many confrontations were between the U.S. military and renegade Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, highly skilled warriors and horse thieves who operated outside tribal law.

The most notorious incident involved a group of Arapaho who killed a white ranching family near Denver. The father, Ward Hungate, was shot and scalped, the mother raped and repeatedly stabbed and their 4-year-old daughter and baby nearly decapitated. All were mutilated. The Hungate Massacre inflamed public opinion against all Indians, warlike or not.

Theologians openly debated whether Indians had souls.

Into this chaotic world rode Col. John M. Chivington, a tall, burly man running for Congress while simultaneously chasing Indians across the Plains.

David Halaas, a former Colorado state historian and massacre expert, said Chivington promised to go to Sand Creek village and check for hostile Indians before attacking. Black Kettle, the village chief, was told to hoist a white flag of surrender along with an American flag and he would be safe. He did.

Riding all night, Chivington and 725 volunteer cavalrymen arrived at the edge of Sand Creek about 8 a.m. The Indian men were off hunting buffalo, leaving mostly women, children and the elderly behind. Most were Cheyennes mixed with some Arapaho.

“They opened up with howitzers and charged through the village,” Halaas said. “There was no order. About 163 people were killed outright. It was a scene right out of hell.”

Capt. Soule and Lt. Joseph Cramer were serving that day and later wrote to commanding officer Maj. Ned Wynkoop describing the scene. Their unedited letters have been entered into the Congressional Record.

“It was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized,” wrote Soule. “One squaw was wounded and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, she held her arms up to defend her, and he cut one arm off and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain.”

Soule said the massacre lasted six to eight hours.

“I saw two Indians hold one another’s hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together,” he wrote. “One woman was cut open and the child inside of her taken out of her, and scalped.”

Cramer said he was threatened with death for failing to take part.

“I told the colonel that I thought it murder to jump them friendly Indians,” Cramer wrote. “He says in reply: ‘Damn any man who are in sympathy with them.’ ”

Black Kettle survived the massacre; his wife was shot nine times but lived. He was killed four years later along the Washita River in what’s now Oklahoma, during a battle with Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.

Chivington, meanwhile, was hailed as a hero in Denver. Indian body parts were displayed in a local theater. But a few months later, as news of the slaughter spread, Congress launched an investigation. In a rare act of contrition, the U.S. government described the killings as a massacre and promised reparations. The Indians were never paid.

“The massacre was a turning point. People began to understand why white people were here and that was to take everything,” said Steve Brady, president of the Northern Cheyenne Sand Creek Descendants in Lame Deer, Mont.

The Cheyenne allied themselves with the Lakota, Kiowa, Arapaho and Comanche. They attacked on a 100-mile front, knocking out every ranch, wagon train and telegraph station they found, Halaas said.

Years of war culminated in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn in southeastern Montana, where Custer and his 197 men were wiped out by a coalition of Indians -- Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux and Arapaho.

The glory and freedom were fleeting. In the early 1880s, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were moved to reservations in Montana, Wyoming and Oklahoma.

With the Indians gone, the memory of Sand Creek faded. The site became a favorite place to shoot rabbits, scavenge artifacts and have Sunday picnics.

“I remember when I was a Boy Scout we used to camp out there at night,” said Monte Richardson, 43, of Eads. “We used to hunt for arrowheads.”

In 1964, William Dawson, a rancher, bought the land. It wasn’t long before Indians came knocking at his door.

“They were always very polite. They would say they had relatives who died here and could they go look at the site,” he recalled. “I never said no to an Indian.”

The tribal members held ceremonies atop the bluff.

“I had one come up to me and say, ‘Did you hear that scream?’ ” said 63-year-old Dawson. “I said I didn’t, but I won’t say they didn’t hear it.”

Cometsevah, the Cheyenne chief, came each year on the anniversary of the massacre. He would fly colorful cloths, hold forth a child’s moccasin, offer food and sing.

The chief’s great-grandfather escaped the massacre.

“When he went back he found his peace pipe, and he couldn’t save anything else,” Cometsevah said. “He saw people cut up, lots of blood here and there. He said all he could do was say a prayer and sing a chief song. Then he left.”

Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) also visited.

“I have been there six or eight times,” said Campbell, who is part Cheyenne. “You go because your blood and thoughts are there. You can’t not go.”

Dawson eventually sold the 1,465-acre site for $1.5 million to James Druck, who turned the land over to the Indians. Druck, a 62-year-old lawyer and owner of Minnesota-based Southwest Entertainment Inc., manages three casinos in Oklahoma with the Cheyenne and Arapaho.

“I owe my company to these tribes,” Druck said. “I know how they feel when they go to Sand Creek. I watched their faces and it made me feel the way I did when I visited Dachau 10 years ago. I felt crushed, overwhelmed and saddened that people could do this to other people.”

For tiny Eads, population 747, a major historic site in their backyard has raised both hope for a better economy and fear of being flooded with tourists.

The threadbare prairie town, 130 miles east of Pueblo, could use a break. A three-year drought has devastated ranching and agriculture, leaving just a school, a small hospital and city hall as the major employers.

“There is a right way and a wrong way to adapt to a national historic site coming in,” said Rod Johnson, chairman of the Kiowa County Economic Development Foundation. “We don’t want to be profiting off the Sand Creek Massacre, which has a sort of negative connotation. People out here on the Plains also like their small-town atmosphere. It’s not something we want to lose.”

Mayor Larry Michael, owner of a truck stop and diner, rolled some tires into his shop.

“It will probably be popular with history buffs,” he said. “There has always been a lot of interest, but access was difficult. Thirty thousand people would certainly impact local businesses and motels.”

For many, Sand Creek is part of the landscape, something they rarely think about. The neighboring, nearly deserted hamlet of Chivington was named shortly after the massacre in honor of the colonel who perpetrated the killings.

Dana Brown, 43, spent 20 years there before moving to Eads.

“I learned the site was in our backyard in junior high school,” she said. “I have never seen it.”

Thomas Davis, 52, a local pharmacist, also learned of Sand Creek in history class.

“It amazes me that people will take their vacations through here just to see the site,” he said. “I’m surprised by all the attention it’s getting; maybe it’s some kind of closure for the Indians.”

Cometsevah believes it is, one long overdue.

“Now we will take care of the spirits there so they can no longer be disturbed,” he said. “Now they can rest.”