Sand Creek Massacre
The Sand Creek Massacre, which occurred on November 29, 1864, was a tragic event in which a U.S. military force attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment in southeastern Colorado. The camp, led by Chief Black Kettle, was believed to be a refuge for peaceful tribes, as they had previously sought protection from military authorities. Despite displaying U.S. and surrender flags, the camp was assaulted by Colonel John Chivington and his troops, resulting in a brutal slaughter of predominantly women and children, with estimates of casualties ranging from 150 to 500. The event was fueled by escalating tensions between White settlers and American Indian tribes, exacerbated by the encroachment of settlers during the Civil War and the devastation of buffalo herds.
The massacre was part of a larger conflict during a period characterized by violent confrontations between American Indians and settlers, reflecting the broader struggles over land and resources. Following the massacre, there was a public outcry, leading to investigations and calls for accountability. In the years that followed, the legacy of Sand Creek continued to resonate, with efforts to recognize and reconcile the injustices faced by Native communities. The massacre site was designated a national historic site in 2007, and in 2014, the Colorado governor offered a formal apology to the affected tribes. Recent movements have aimed to honor and restore the dignity of Indigenous peoples by renaming locations and preserving historic sites associated with such tragedies.
Sand Creek Massacre
Date November 29, 1864
The unprovoked slaughter of Cheyenne women and children by Colorado militia regulars presaged the subjugation of Great Plains Indians over the next three decades.
Locale Sand Creek, southeastern Colorado
Key Figures
Black Kettle (ca. 1803–68), chief of the southern CheyennesJohn Milton Chivington (1821–94), territorial military commanderJohn Evans (1814–97), governor of Colorado Territory
Summary of Event
On August 17, 1862, in the midst of the US Civil War (1861–65), the beleaguered Santee Sioux in Minnesota began an uprising against the continuing encroachment of White settlers that later became known as the Great Sioux War. This bloody fighting touched off general warfare through the length and breadth of the Great Plains and frightened gold seekers in the new mining settlements of Colorado. Governor John Evans of the new Colorado Territory tried to get Cheyennes and Arapahos to give up their hunting ranges for reservations. However, they did not want to leave. In the meantime, the devastation of the buffalo herds by White settlers was reducing the tribes’ hunting ranges, and regular army troops were moving into the region to support the Union as a new influx of settlers swept across the plains, seeking fortune and avoiding Civil War service.
Sporadic raids by American Indian bands made travelers along the California and Santa Fe Trails nervous. White migration and the settlers’ practice of devastating buffalo herds merely for the animals tallow and hides alarmed American Indian societies, which were hampered further by intertribal warfare, a diminishing food supply, and the scourge of smallpox. On November 10, 1863, Robert North, an illiterate White man of dubious credibility who had lived with the Arapahos, gave a statement to Governor John Evans saying that the Comanches, Apaches, Kiowas, Northern Arapahos, Sioux, and all Cheyennes had pledged to one another to go to war with the settlers in the spring of 1864.
On December 14, 1863, Evans wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton asking for military aid and authority to call out the territorial militia. The situation remained relatively quiet in the early spring. Cheyennes and Arapahos were fighting the Utes, the Arapahos were feuding with the Kiowas, and the Sioux bided their time. By April, Colonel John Milton Chivington’s command had begun an aggressive military campaign against American Indian societies in general and against Cheyennes in particular. This campaign provoked a war that lasted well into 1865 and cost the federal government thirty million dollars.
The military commander of Colorado Territory, Chivington had had a minor success against Confederate forces in New Mexico in 1862. He was a former Methodist minister who had been dubbed the Fighting Parson. Zealous and unscrupulous, he harbored political ambitions. Encouraged by Governor Evans, Chivington used scattered incidents to declare that the Cheyennes were at war, and he sent out soldiers to “burn villages and kill Cheyennes wherever and whenever found.” Ominously, he declared that he believed in killing American Indians “little and big.”
The tribes struck back. By the summer of 1864, fighting and atrocities on both sides plagued western Kansas and eastern Colorado. In June, Evans, trying to separate peaceful tribes from warlike bands, urged friendly Kiowas and Comanches to report to Fort Larned on the Arkansas River in Kansas and southern Cheyennes and Arapahos to report to Fort Lyon, 250 miles up the same stream in southeastern Colorado. He ordered the friendly tribes to submit to military authority. A skirmish at Fort Larned rendered this strategy useless, however, and by August, Evans issued a proclamation that could be read as a call for the virtually indiscriminate killing of American Indians. The American Indians retaliated by closing the road to Denver, which stopped the mail and caused prices of staples to skyrocket. White settlers then mobilized for war.
The Cheyenne chief Black Kettle urgently wanted peace. Accordingly, he and other Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders met with Evans and Chivington at Camp Weld near Denver on September 28, 1864. The talks were confusing, because Evans tried to distinguish between surrendering to the military authorities and securing peace by treaty. The tribal leaders did not understand, and they received no clear promise of peace. Clearly, the settlers were spoiling for a fight. In fact, Chivington had recruited men for his Third Colorado Volunteer Regiment from among mining camps with a promise that they would kill American Indians. The stage was set for a pointless tragedy.
After submitting themselves to military authorities at Fort Lyon in early November, Black Kettle’s band of approximately six hundred American Indians were sent to make camp to hunt buffalo in the broad, barren valley of Sand Creek, a tributary of the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado, about forty miles north of Fort Lyon. The younger American Indian men drifted north to listen to the war drums at a council on the Smoky Hill River, so Black Kettle’s group consisted mostly of old men, women, and children. They were mostly Cheyennes, with a few dozen Arapahos, who believed they were safe.
Chivington’s views were unequivocal. He would take no prisoners and “damn any man that was in sympathy with the Indians.” After a bitter night march over rolling prairie, Chivington deployed approximately seven hundred men and four howitzers around Black Kettle’s village at daybreak on November 29, 1864. In addition to his Third Colorado Volunteer Regiment, Chivington had 175 soldiers of the First Colorado Cavalry and a small contingent of New Mexico infantry.
Mounted troops and foot soldiers swept across the dry creekbed into the Cheyenne camp. Black Kettle ran up a US flag and a White surrender flag over his tipi at the center of the camp, but his signals were ignored. Panic ensued as American Indians were butchered where they stood. One of the first killed was White Antelope, a seventy-five-year-old man. The Arapaho chief Left Hand fell quickly. Small groups of American Indians fought from sand pits, but most fled in panic. Black Kettle miraculously escaped. Atrocities followed the slaughter. Eyewitness testimony later recalled
They [the Indians] were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word.
A Lieutenant Richmond of the notorious Third Colorado shot and scalped three women and five children as they screamed for mercy. Estimates of the number of American Indian dead ranged from 150 to 500 people. Three-quarters of those killed were women and children. Chivington’s report said of his troops, “All did nobly.”
Chivington returned to Denver in triumph, with his men brandishing the scalps of one hundred murdered American Indians. Their triumph would, however, be short-lived. A letter from American Indian agent S. G. Colley printed in the Missouri Intelligencer on January 6, 1865, mentioned the atrocities and stirred public opinion in the states. General Halleck, the army chief of staff, ordered Chivington investigated, and the district commander, General Curtis, attempted to have him court-martialed. Instead, Chivington was simply mustered out of the service.
Following the Sand Creek Massacre, Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Sioux ravaged the South Platte River Valley. They killed approximately fifty White people, burned stage stations, destroyed telegraph lines, and twice sacked the town of Julesburg in northeast Colorado.
On March 3, 1865, with the Civil War drawing to a close, a joint resolution of Congress created a joint committee to study the “Indian problem.” A shifty and temporary treaty in October 1865 made peace on the plains but inexplicably contradicted itself and forbade some tribes any legal home. On January 26, 1867, the final report of the joint committee released testimony about the Sand Creek Massacre and traced many American Indian wars to “lawless white men always to be found upon the frontier or boundary lines between savage and civilized life.”
Significance
The American Indian wars lasted until the closing of the frontier during the 1890s. The constant pressure of White people moving westward across North America had produced constant conflict with American Indians. Special circumstances surrounding the Civil War, the Colorado gold rush, and the decline of the buffalo herds led to the tragedy of Sand Creek. The pent-up forces of expansion released in the aftermath of these events ensured that the Sand Creek Massacre would not be an isolated tragedy. The site of the massacre was made a national historic site in 2007. In 2014, on the 150th anniversary of the massacre, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper offered a formal apology to members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. As part of his apology he stated, "We should not be afraid to criticize and condemn that which is inexcusable."
By the 2010s and 2020s, many activists had launched campaigns to reconcile, in part, the injustice of such racial atrocities as the Sand Creek Massacre by changing site names deemed offensive and insensitive. In 2023, years of effort to rename Colorado's Mount Evans resulted in the US Board on Geographic Names voting to rename the prominent peak Mount Blue Sky, which activists argued instead positively symbolized the Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples. Meanwhile, in 2022 it had been announced that the National Park Service had purchased several more acres of land around the Sand Creek Massacre site, expanding the preserved area to almost two times its previous size.
Bibliography
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