Sand Creek site in Colorado recalls massacre of innocents.
Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, Colo. — Craig Moore knows that Sand Creek can be a hard sell, especially to a group of teenagers on spring break.
Groggy from the 2½-hour drive from Denver, they pile out of two Chevy Suburbans and stand, almost bored, in the shade of junipers growing beside a picnic table.
“This is no Disneyland, no Grand Canyon,” Moore says by way of introduction. “This is a sacred place where horrible things, unspeakable acts took place.”
Moore talks slowly as if he hasn’t said this before, but he has. Words just don’t come easily when talking about the enormity of Sand Creek.
“One-hundred-and-fiftytwo years ago, what happened here left an indelible mark on the land.”
Twitchy adolescence in check, the teens start to pay attention. Moore, who recently retired from the National Park Service, started working as a ranger at Sand Creek in 2004. There are few better guides.
The park service manages 412 properties, each a chapter of America’s storied past. Some make grand pronouncements on the merits of their landscape. Others commemorate lives and moments that have shaped the national identity.
None, however, tells a story as dark as Sand Creek, where, in 1864, federal soldiers stormed a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho, killing more than 200.
Moore leads the group on a half-mile walk to an overlook with commanding views north to a distant stand of cottonwoods.
“Spread out before you,” he says, “as far as you can see, is where the massacre took place, nearly 30 square miles.”
The students squint in the bright sun as if trying to look back in time and see the soldiers and horses fanning across these plains, hear the rattle of equipment, the crack of carbine fire and the screams that followed.
“There is no sound worse than the sound of babies crying,” Moore says.
Almost 180 miles southeast of Denver, Sand Creek is an unusual property for the park service. Its visitors center is a double-wide trailer that also serves as office space. Its primary feature is a one-mile trail on a bluff that overlooks the killing field where no one is allowed.
Sand Creek is mostly a place of the imagination, where visitors are asked to consider a time in America when mean circumstances or greed drove people to the gold fields and cities of the West and to a hatred of anything different from themselves.
Nearly a dozen interpretive signs along the bluff trail lay out the history. Beyond that, though, there is little more than the land stretching to the far-away horizon.
But in emptiness, Sand Creek is most eloquent. Some visitors claim to hear children’s voices in the windwhistling quiet. A cold case
Eads, Colo., could be called the gateway to Sand Creek, which wouldn’t be too bad. The small town, population 650, nearly blew away during the recession, and the recovery still seems to be lagging. But appearances are deceiving.
On the road to Sand Creek, the Cobblestone Inn is giving the weary-looking Travelors Lodge a run for its money (to say nothing about its spelling).
Jeff Campbell, sporting a white cowboy hat, stands in the inn’s parking lot beside a white pickup. The wind has kicked up this morning, and he’s more than happy to step inside.
He carries two rolled-up maps of Sand Creek and lays them out on a breakfast table. Measuring 2 by 4 feet, they are meticulously annotated with the movement of soldiers and Cheyenne and Arapaho across these grasslands in the fall of 1864.
Campbell, retired from the New Mexico attorney general’s office, sees Sand Creek as a cold case, an unindicted homicide, perhaps the most complicated he has known.
“It is hard to tell this kind of story,” he says. "It is like recording what took place at Dachau or Auschwitz or Darfur or Rwanda. "
The facts are well-documented. A 8 p.m. Nov. 28, nearly 700 soldiers rode at out of Fort Lyon on the Arkansas River. Guided by the pole star, they headed north under the command of Col. John Chivington.
“They were not militia, part-time soldiers," Campbell says. “They were U.S. Army
volunteers employed by the War Department. President Abraham Lincoln was their commander.
“All this,” Campbell says, “goes to the matter of culpability.”
The night was clear and starlit. Forty miles away was a temporary camp of about 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho on the north bank of the Big Sandy Creek and within a reserve that had been established for them by a treaty four years earlier.
“Some of the soldiers didn’t know the purpose of their ride,” Campbell says.
The soldiers rode fast. They wanted to get to the camp by dawn. By midnight, they reached a few small lakes on the prairie, almost halfway.
An hour later, they shifted their course 45 degrees to the northeast. By 6 a.m. they were nearly three miles out and exhausted.
The sky was lightening. The women had risen and were collecting firewood and water. They thought they heard buffalo running nearby, hoofs heavy on the plain.
But three young men — King Fisher, Tomahawk and Little Bear, who were rounding up the pony herds to the west and had a clearer vantage — knew differently.
“They were the first to realize that the cavalry was coming,” Campbell says.
No prisoners taken
A phone rings in Fort Washakie, Wyo., and Norma Gourneau answers. She is willing to talk about her family’s experience at Sand Creek.
“Yes,” she says. “I don’t mind.”
Gourneau is Northern Cheyenne and superintendent of the Wind River Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As a little girl, she listened to her great-grandmother, May Woman, born in 1880, share memories of that day at Heseovo’eo’he’e, as Sand Creek was known. Her older brothers and sisters survived the massacre.
“We all lived under the same roof,” Gourneau says. “There was my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother. We heard a lot of stories and didn’t realize how significant they would be until later in life.”
Gourneau remembers the tears and how they scared her. She could not understand how someone so strong could cry over something that occurred so long ago.
When Chivington’s soldiers arrived at the bluffs overlooking the Big Sandy the morning of Nov. 29, they saw about 140 lodges staked out for nearly a half a mile. Any questions the soldiers had about the purpose of their mission were quickly answered.
Under Chivington’s orders, troops began firing into the camp.
Black Kettle, one of the Cheyenne chiefs, stepped out from his lodge where an American flag and a white flag flew.
Although renegade factions had attacked white settlers in previous months, the tribes at Sand Creek wanted peace.
Their chiefs saw the futility of fighting. They walked toward the mounted soldiers, hoping to understand what was happening, but they were quickly overwhelmed.
All but Black Kettle were killed.
Women and children were fleeing up the creek, trying to hide, trying to escape. They crawled into tree trunks; they hid beneath the sand of the river bank. The soldiers followed.
Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors tried to stand against them but bullets, coming from carbines and four mountain howitzers, struck the lodges “like a hard rain or a heavy storm,” according to one survivor.
The massacre lasted eight hours. No prisoners were taken. Two days later, the village was burned.
In the end an estimated 230 Indians were killed, says Moore; no one knows how many died of their wounds. When the soldiers dug for water, the sand ran red with blood.
Why Chivington attacked is not a simple question. Propagandists at the time claimed the tribes might align themselves with the Confederacy. Racists demonized the Native Americans and their culture.
Campbell looks to the outcome for his answer. Within six years, the Kansas Pacific Railroad had laid tracks, just north of Sand Creek, to Denver. The Cheyenne and Arapaho had abandoned their land in Colorado Territory.
Today the tribes live in Oklahoma, Wyoming and Montana.
May Woman died when Gorneau was 6, and the tears didn’t stop. Only the fear changed to anger, over the butchery, over the betrayal of trust.
Rather than deny these feelings, Gourneau confronted them. She visited Sand Creek in 1996 for the first time and stood on the bluffs where a knee-high memorial had been placed in 1950.
“Sand Creek Battle Ground,” it read, using a century-old description of the site that was both inaccurate and exculpating. The truth — Sand Creek as a massacre — had to be spoken.
In 1998 Gorneau joined representatives from other Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes to petition Congress for funding to locate the site, lost after a century of ranching, dust storms and seasonal floods.
The tribes, working with historians and archaeologists, identified an area five miles long and two miles wide, which was later enlarged by Congress to 12,500 acres. The park service manages a quarter of that property.
In 2000 Congress ordered the secretary of the Interior to protect and preserve the site and “assist in minimizing the chances of similar incidents in the future.”