The Sand Creek Massacre

The discovery of gold in the Territory of Colorado in 1858 attracted thousands of prospectors and miners whom settlers called "Pike's Peakers." The sudden influx and blatant encroachment of such a large number of whites during the early 1860s irritated and troubled Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders. It also widened the gap between Indians who favored peace and those who favored war. Meanwhile, Governor John Evans was aware of events unfolding in Minnesota and Dakota Territory. When Indian leaders in eastern Colorado refused to cede land, Evans viewed their decision as veiled hostility. When the governor decreed that all Indians were to remain in their villages, Arapahos and Cheyennes mostly complied. Still, anxiety among Evans's constituents about a growing alliance of hostile Indians, all evidence in Colorado to the contrary, made preemptive war seem attractive. Cheyenne leader Black Kettle, an advocate of peace, clearly understood the stakes and did what he could to calm white fears. But by the late summer of 1864, there was nothing more he might have done. Colorado had already called up a special Third Cavalry whose members would serve for just one hundred days and whose only mission was to fight Indians. Their commanding officer was the former Methodist minister Colonel John M. Chivington, "the Fighting Parson" (pictured here). Given the relatively peaceful conditions in Colorado, Chivington's first challenge was to find something to do. As weeks turned into months, and with the end of a hundred days drawing closer, the local press ridiculed the idle Third Cavalry and their commander. With pressure growing, Chivington brought his troops to Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado, from which he staged an attack.[1] 

In the early morning of November 29, 1864, the Third Cavalry and new enlistees of the First Cavalry, seven hundred men in all, charged into Black Kettle's camp at Sand Creek. The night before, five hundred Cheyenne men, women, and children had fallen asleep, confident they were safe. Yet they were attacked without warning and without mercy. Upon spotting the approaching troops, Black Kettle quickly raised an American flag and a white flag at his tent. White Antelope, another peace chief, "stood with his arms folded in a peaceful gesture as the whites advanced, but to no avail."[2] He was shot down in the opening volley. The panicked Cheyennes scattered and looked for cover, while cavalrymen killed men, women, and children, sometimes scalping and mutilating the victims. By the end of the day, between one hundred and fifty and two hundred Cheyennes, most of them women and children, lay dead in the valley of Sand Creek. The residents of Denver celebrated and the Rocky Mountain News announced, "Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory."[3]

Notes

[1] Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 1:457-59; Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890, rev. ed. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 85-92; Roger L. Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 134-35.

[2] Prucha, The Great Father, 1:459.

[3] Ibid. Prucha estimates the number of victims at "about one hundred and fifty." Utley, The Indian Frontier, 92, says "some two hundred."