Sand Creek Massacre:
150 Year Remembrance

Good morning. I began my quest to understand Sand Creek 50 years ago this fall in an undergraduate class on the Civil War and Reconstruction. I had no idea then that a half-century later, it would still be the primary focus of my research.

My exploration of Sand Creek began with a premise, and it was very simple: that searching for truth, the historian's role is not to care what the truth is. Father Francis Paul Prucha said, “We must be only concerned with finding it.” For me, that means that my role is simply that of a searcher, seeking to supply enlightenment, understanding, and perspective and to provide sound information upon which balanced judgments can be made.

This perspective, early on, left me unhappy with a debate over Sand Creek. It is all about, or has been all about, justification and condemnation. Those who justified Sand Creek argued that the incident was a response to a bloody summer's war and that the soldiers were decent, hard-working men protecting their families and neighbors, so Sand Creek could not have been a massacre. Those who condemned Sand Creek made the case that it was a massacre, so the soldiers had to have been twisted or sick or mining camp's trash. I wrestled with this for a time before seeing a common link between them. Both interpretations rested on the character of the attackers. They were good men, so it couldn't have been a massacre, or Sand Creek was a massacre so they couldn't have been good men.

Both of these views offered comforting solutions to the moral dilemma posed by Sand Creek. The first by denying that the massacre occurred at all; the second, by dismissing it as the work of social outcasts. Both views vindicated—and some still try to vindicate—good men, uphold American values, and affirm traditional moral standards. Both are briefs concerned with making cases to support predetermined position.

But what if Sand Creek was carried out by rational men, with clear notions of right and wrong; by men with no perceptions of themselves as evil, by men who acted on what they believed to be true, by men who defended themselves afterwards because they believed that their intentions were right, even though they were responsible for one of the worst atrocities in American?

This notion frightened me. Here was a possibility far worse than passing Sand Creek off as the work of sociopaths or barroom scum. Here was a reminder that all human beings are capable of great evil, not just the deviants in our society. How could this be? The Euro-American world is prone to moralism with an insistence that good and evil are opposites, so that the struggle is between what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil, each sharply defined and separate.

It's easy and comforting as a way of seeing, but consider an alternative view which, by the way, is held by more than a few cultural groups including at least some American Indians. In this view, humanity's worst instincts are held in check by a fragile tether within every person. Sometimes it snaps and … good men do horrible things. It may be argued, then, that the process that led Coloradans to that little dried river, and all of the ways they rationalized what happened there, revealed just how human they were. For me, that was more terrifying than the usual interpretations about good guys and bad guys.

There's no doubt that Sand Creek was a massacre. Any interpretation that argues the contrary is rationalization. The violation of plighted faith is unmistakable; the slaughter of women and children is undeniable; the atrocities and mutilations of the dead are beyond dispute; prisoners were systematically killed and these excesses were celebrated both by the soldiers who committed them and by the community they represented.

If the evidence of every source that denounced the attack is disallowed, the most damning evidence remains in the newspapers of the times and the reminiscences of those who praised Sand Creek, well summarized by the Central City Miners Register when it wrote, “The true policy is to give them no quarter but to kill male and female, old and young, that none may be left to tell the tale.” It was only later, after two congressional committees and a military commission investigated Sand Creek, that the history of the massacre began to be rewritten, atrocities denied, and rationalizations formulated to justify what happened.

Frank Hall, who was part of the story, later wrote in his history of Colorado that the most damning aspects of Sand Creek were attacking a village under the protection of the flag and the failure to take prisoners. He wrote, “It was this more than any other stain attaching to the historic tragedy which brought the condemnation of mankind upon the leaders of that terrible day and which, strive as we may efface it, will remain the deliberate judgment of history.”

The atrocity then is plain. Less clear is how such a thing could happen. In searching for causes of the Sand Creek horror, it is easy enough to find hatred and prejudice and arrogance, but we can't overlook the fear and the grief and the rage; the misguided sense of “them and us,” and the twisted sense of self-defense in community, based upon a false understanding of the truth that sustains these sins.

But remember, while truth is the ultimate goal, what men believe to be true is more important because they act upon what they believe. Understanding what happens requires us to set aside our modern way of seeing and to seek to understand the mindset of the participants rather than to judge them by our own.

Euro-Americans had a sense of cultural superiority so deeply embedded that it seemed not only self-evident but right. It was not just the worldview of bad guys; for a thousand years and more, Europeans had embraced views that endorsed both the right of conquest and justification of the dispossession of Indigenous people. The first began with a linear view of life and progress that gave superior rights to those more advanced, by their own definition as that. It was enhanced by the biblical admonition to “multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” This right of conquest worked its way into the law and was accepted as truth.

White rights smugly pointed to their religion, their science, their cities, and their literature to convince themselves that they were right. From the time of the Greeks, there was always a brutal “other” to be overcome, whether Persian, Gaul, Hun, Mongol, Pict Viking, Saxon, Saracen, Scott or Irishman, the savage other was always there, with cultures to be routed out and land to be taken. Race came late to this rationale of conquest. Savagery was the obstacle to be overcome. In practically every environment, the options were those offered by General John Sullivan on the eve of his campaign against the Iroquois in 1779: civilization or death to all American savages.

Ironically, the American ideals of freedom and democracy were forged against the backdrop of particularly brutal Indian warfare. Anti-Indian sentiment was unchallenged on the western fringes of settlement and in a bold literature that depicted all Indians as merciless savages with brutal practices, including the torture of prisoners and the murder of non-combatants. This image took deep root in American consciousness and was still present a century later.

There were dissenters who warned that generalization and prejudice would fix a stain on the national reputation of America. Despite efforts to restrain the process, and to be fair, well-meaning policymakers were incapable of restraining the flood of settlers into the West. They tried various approaches, but it was always easier to relocate Indians or to kill them than to expel white trespassers on the land. The goal of those who sympathized with the Indian was to make the process of dispossession less painful, not to end it altogether.

Whether viewed as ruthless or noble, the savage was vanishing. White people saw the Indian as a single, backward culture, destined to give way. When the first settlers reached Colorado, they did not know who the Cheyennes were or the Arapahos or the Utes or the Kiowas or the Sioux, but they knew the Indian.

Dispossession accelerated after the Mexican War and a California gold rush, as tens of thousands of settlers rushed westward. By the time of the Colorado gold rush and the Civil War, policymakers were practically unable to restrain the flow or to control interaction. The man chosen to manage Colorado's affairs was John Evans who became governor and superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1862. He was a physician, philanthropist, entrepreneur, a prominent layman in the Methodist Church, a man ambitious for public office, a model American. He also had the particular interest in railroads and a desire to make Denver the next great metropolis by building the transcontinental railroad through the heart of Cheyenne and Arapaho lands.

He had no understanding of, or sympathy for, the tribes never even questioning the treaty system itself. His contempt for the Cheyennes and Arapahos was plain and after a feeble effort to treat with them, in the fall of 1863, he proceeded with a plan to force all of the Cheyennes and Arapahos onto the Sand Creek Reserve created in 1861 by the Treaty of Fort Wise. It was passed to accommodate a few southern bands, but it was never intended to be binding on all Cheyennes and Arapahos. Evans worked to change that.

His partner in Colorado was John Milton Chivington, the commander of the Military District of Colorado. Chivington was a former Methodist minister, a giant of a man with an undeniable charisma, won a measure of glory against the Confederates at the Battle of Glorieta in 1862. His Methodist and Republican credentials made an alliance with Evans that seemed natural. But, contrary to most accounts, their relationship was troubled from the beginning.

Chivington was obsessed with promotion, transfer East to fight Confederates in the political future, and he did not see those things in campaigns against Indians. As Evans grew increasingly convinced that an Indian war was inevitable, Chivington played down the threat of the Cheyennes and Arapahos and insisted that he could handle the Indians and launched raids into Texas against Confederates as well. By mid-summer of 1864, Chivington had diddled and dawdled and neglected his duties so blatantly that General Curtis, his commanding officer, removed a significant portion of his district and created the district of the Upper Arkansas.

Even then, Chivington spent most of his time running for Congress, while a real Indian war developed on the Platte and Arkansas routes. Chivington was blistered in reports by other commanders and eventually Chivington's effective fighting force was reduced from more than 3000 men to a little more than 600. Evans lost confidence in his partner as well. Although he continued to pressure Chivington, he bombarded General Curtis and Secretary of War Stanton with predictions of doom to the point that Curtis said, “Everything from Colorado is sensational.”

When a family was murdered near Denver in June, citizens were terrified. Evans issued a proclamation to the friendly Indians of the Plains, but before any group had time to reasonably respond, he issued a second proclamation authorizing settlers to find and kill hostile Indians and demanded permission from Washington to raise a hundred-day regiment for the explicit purpose of fighting Indians despite the main fact that the major fighting came near the overland routes in Nebraska and Kansas.

The primary effects in Colorado were to interrupt commerce and create hysteria in the mining camps. Evans seemed to have lost control and Chivington declared martial law in Denver. Things careened downhill from there. Statehood was crushed at the polls as a party of Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs were escorted to Denver to seek peace terms. Despite the governor's waffling, and Chivington's tough talk, the chiefs left Denver convinced that terms had been reached to begin the peace process.

The overland routes opened up and commerce resumed. General Patrick Connor showed up in Denver to seek Chivington's cooperation for a winter campaign against the tribes on those Republican and Smoky Hill rivers. Evans was elated; Chivington was stunned. Chivington knew that any campaign under Connor would give him, not Chivington, the glory. Evans left for Washington shortly thereafter. En route, Evans visited General Curtis about another joint campaign against the tribes. In Chicago, he told a friend that all of the Indians in Colorado were hostile except for a band at Fort Lyon.

On the other hand, Chivington was desperate. His term of service was due to expire. He had no stars on his uniform, he had no prospects of fighting Confederates, his bid for Congress had failed, he could not mount an effective campaign with the troops at his disposal. But Evans had left him a loaded gun, the 3rd Colorado Volunteer Cavalry. Chivington's one hope was a dramatic victory, but he did not have time for an extended campaign. It had to be quick and sure. And the only sure target was a gathering of Cheyennes and Arapahos near Fort Lyon.

Mobilizing the hundred days-ers, and a few troops from the 1st, he marched on Sand Creek. So it came down to that: Governor Evans's mismanagement of Indian Affairs that created a panic in the territory and Chivington's ambition. The Sand Creek Massacre was the result.

The men who followed Chivington and committed the atrocities were not unlike other men except in their rationalization that the ends justified the means. Their false sense of community of “us against them,” their fears, their willingness to go along, and their ignorance of the true circumstances. The great victory was celebrated in Denver, and Chivington enjoyed the praise. But it was short-lived. Chivington's victory became his shame in the eyes of the country and Evans rightly shared the blame, as did his men.

Chivington had managed to offend the sensibilities of Americans locked in the bloodiest war in their history. Sand Creek became an emblem of a failed Indian policy in the decades that followed. What the reformers could not do, however, was to break with their mindset enough to see any alternative but assimilation. And so, once again, tribal interests were sacrificed on the altar of good intentions.

Given the times and the attitudes, I do not know that it could have been under otherwise. But to ignore the shared humanity of the conflict with easy labels merely rearranges the stereotypes and oversimplifies a cultural conflict that victimized the conquered and, in a strange way, the conquerors as well. Something central to the shared humanity of victims and victimizers was involved. And that something does not mean excusing the horrors or justifying wrong.

It does mean exploring intent as well as outcome. It does mean looking at the chilling ways that good men lost their way in their treatment of others and denied reality and led generations, even the most recent ones, to deal with what happened in ways that rationalized rather than explained. So we're left in a terrible place, rightly outraged by what happened but aware, too, that we are cut from the same human cloth as they.

I have a deeper understanding of prejudice, fear, and character as a result of my study and I am more aware of the danger of the “them and us” worldview. Peace, not peace in the sense of the absence of conflict, but in the ancient sense of that wholeness and unity that is true good, is the outcome we should seek. That is a way that heals and makes right. That is a way of reconciliation that the old ones understood and a truth that even a historian can care about. And so, with tears, I continue my search. Thank you.

Thank you. Before I make my comments, and I will have to abbreviate those because so many speakers have already said some things I would have liked to have touched on, but coming from Colorado, I’m very appreciative of the people of Colorado that elected me to office so many times. But I think sometimes, too, it’s kind of poetic justice that a descendant of Sand Creek could be elected in the state where it happened. And that, I suppose, is part of the healing process, and I was very grateful to represent Indian Country and our state at the same time.

And I think I might also tell you, since nobody has spoken very much about this wonderful venue that we’re in today. I think it was the first bill I introduced when I first was elected to Congress years and years ago. And Senator Dan Inouye, who was the prime sponsor on the Senate side, needed a House sponsor. I became that House sponsor. And right from the beginning, we didn’t want it to be a place that simply stored old baskets and pots in glass cases. We wanted it to be an interactive building. And if you saw all those children outside during our lunch break, we’ve certainly accomplished that goal. Not just Native American kids, but kids from every walk of life and many foreign countries as well as the United States. And this wonderful institution, as you know, they give lectures on song and dance and crafts. They have the food here, they give rotating displays, they have people from all over the world that come to study the American Indian, us. But Dan Inouye used to say years ago that this city, Washington, DC, is a city of monuments. But as Dan said, there’s not one monument to the American Indian. We think this is our monument. And the proximity to the Capitol itself gives it terrific access to the crowds of people that come to Washington. And we’re delighted to have them come here and learn about our ways.

I am often very envious of Norma and Henrietta and Dick Little Bear, having been raised at home where they could spend time with their grandmothers and grandfathers and learn the language. I didn’t have that option because my dad left the rez to go into World War I and didn’t go back. And I used to ask him why he left. He said, “I got tired of being hungry.” And he didn’t want to talk about it very much. So things must have been really difficult. They’re difficult right now on some of the northern reservations that have a high suicide rate among teenagers or a high high school dropout rate or sometimes a 70 percent unemployment rate. I don’t need to tell my Indian relatives in here all those things that we face, I mean, almost as a daily existence on many of the reservations in the North. But still, when I hear them speak our language and know I can’t, I’m envious of that. And every two weeks when I get our little tribal newspaper and there’s a story in there about Cheyenne language by Dr. Little Bear, I try desperately to pronounce some of those words. And I’ll tell you, unless you’re raised by a grandmother, it’s a darn difficult thing to do.

Well, in any event, we call this our house. And I was honored to be the House sponsor to build it, and I got an awful lot of help. Norma mentioned Lee Lonebear and a number of other people, Steve Brady and Laird Cometsevah from the Southern Cheyenne—and so many others helped me and gave me advice when I was going to introduce the first bill that they had written a draft for. But my personal interaction with the Sand Creek Massacre site goes back before that. First time I visited it was about 1978, something like that, about, in the late ’70s. And I remember at the time, I almost couldn’t find it because there was just a little dirt road going into a ranch. And on that dirt road, after you left the main highway, I think it was County Road 96 over there by Eads, Colorado, there was a stone monument, maybe two or three feet square. And that was all there was at the time. And I thought about it then that there had to be some better way to commemorate that terrible tragedy.

When I was elected to the state legislature in 1982, I went to the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs, and I asked them if they would head up an effort to put a sign there so people that drove down that road could read at least the Cheyenne and Arapaho story about what happened. And so with their help, we did that. We contacted Northern Cheyenne and Arapahos and the Southern Cheyenne and Arapahos, and we got some tentative language that they would have wanted on that sign. That sign was erected on the highway and stood for, I think it was probably there for 20 or more years before it finally rotted away. And so I guess I was kind of a latecomer to some of the efforts. But then when I got elected to Congress, it was one of the first things on my mind to try to make some kind of a permanent place there where Cheyenne people could go and the rest of the world could learn about the Sand Creek Massacre.

I wanted to, before I read an editorial from the Rocky Mountain News, I’ve often asked myself, how could a Cheyenne and Arapaho group, which were warrior societies, how could they be taken by surprise when normally they had camp guards, normally they were very alert. It just surprised me that they had sort of been snuck up on, you might say, by Chivington’s men. One of the reasons, of course, was the picture behind me that emissaries from General Wynkoop had told Black Kettle if he flew the American flag and a white flag, that he wouldn’t be attacked. So I think that sort of lulled them into complacency. Maybe the second reason was that already—and somebody gave me this book a little while ago—already American Indians were serving in the U.S. military. This was about the ones that were clear back in the Civil War. But, in fact, American Indians were, you know, helping feed General Washington when he was stranded by Valley Forge. They were with Teddy Roosevelt when he stormed San Juan Hill. And everybody’s heard about the code talkers, the Navaho code talkers, the Comanche code talkers, the Sioux code talkers, and so on. So maybe there was some feeling of, let your guard down a little bit because Indian people in those days, many of them knew others were in the military. And I think the third reason they might have been somewhat complacent because some Cheyennes had wives. Some white settlers also had Cheyenne wives. Prowers County, Colorado, is named for a well-known rancher in those days who had a Cheyenne wife. And, of course, everybody knows about William Bent, the founder of what is called Bent’s Fort near La Junta, Colorado, whose Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman, had five children, as I remember, four boys and a girl. Two of those boys were at Sand Creek. One, I think it was Charles, managed to escape with his life, and as I, some accounts say that the other boy was killed at Sand Creek. I think that because they had white relatives, there might have been some letting their guard down or thinking that those people understand us or something. Maybe nobody will know the complete truth about why they were taken by surprise, but it certainly did happen.

Well, much of the language of the bill, of course, was written by the descendants group. And Steve Brady, Otto Braided Hair, and Laird Cometsevah from Oklahoma came to testify for us. But there is also unsung heroes, you might say, whenever you pass any bill. The guy carrying the bill, i.e. the Congressman or the Senator, often gets credit for doing it. But so many other people make it work. And in my case, I had a terrific staff. And many of the staff themselves, James Doyle, who now works for the Park Service in Colorado for the National Park Service, represented me at all of the meetings between the Northern and the Southern tribes and the park officials, too. And James Dean, who was on my staff here in Congress, he did much of the kind of networking with other offices to get co-sponsors and to try and make sure the bill moved. So a lot of people that deserve the credit are kind of unsung heroes.

Let me skip around a little bit since a lot of the things I had wanted to say have already been covered. But let me read the editorial that was written just a couple days after November the 29th of 1864 by the largest newspaper in the whole Rocky Mountain region, which was the Rocky Mountain News. It was before the Denver Post came along. The Rocky Mountain News was absorbed by the Denver Post a few years ago, but in those years, that was the most widely read newspaper. And I’ll just read the first couple paragraphs. And I quote, “Among the brilliant feats in arms in Indian warfare, the recent campaign of our Colorado volunteers will stand in history with few rivals and none to exceed it in final results. Whether viewed as a march or a battle, the exploits have few, if any, parallels. All acquitted themselves well, and the Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory.” The word should have probably been gory, but it was glory. No mention, of course, of the number of soldiers that were literally twice the number, if not more, than all of the Cheyennes that had been camped there and probably four times the number of the ones that were actually in camp since some of the warriors had been out hunting and were not in camp. And the ones remaining were women and children and some of the elders and just a few warriors. At no time, no mention at all of the conditions that they were there in the first place, which was really because of General Wynkoop’s directions. So a lot of the things that they could have said positively, they did not.

It’s already been said that the two people that finally broke the true news, which was Silas Soule and Lieutenant Cramer—Silas Soule it was mentioned that he was killed. Those people were never brought to justice, never even tried, and were clearly supporters of Chivington who wanted to shut up any alternative comments being made to the investigating committees. The Department of Army had an inquiry, and I think there was something like three or four different congressional hearings in the Senate and the House. But those things were never implemented. And sometimes I wonder, How come they were not brought to trial, some kind of a military tribunal or something? Because I’m old enough to remember what happened in Southeast Asia when what was called the My Lai Massacre. And when they find out some Americans murdered people in Vietnam, well, killed them and depending on how you phrase it, they were brought to justice years later. And it seemed to me that there should have been something in retrospect to bring those people to justice. They weren’t. They got off, they got off scot-free. And I don’t exactly know why, except I know in those days, when people were brought in the military, it was usually for a hundred days. It wasn’t for a long duration like it is now, two years to four years if you join the air force or navy, it’s four years. It was a hundred days. By the time, I think, people began to focus on what ought to be done, these guys were gone. Most of them were gone. A lot of them had been brought in on this hundred-day enlistment, had mustered out, they were gone off to new gold fields or they were buffalo hunters traveling and finding the final buffalo they hadn’t been able to kill or something. They were simply gone. And so they never were brought to justice. But in my view, I imagine the perpetrators of those terrible crimes are still burning somewhere where they ought to be burning. And nothing is written about why they weren’t brought to justice. In fact, nothing is written except with the exception of a few people that, like, brought it out today that repatriations were never, ever paid to the Cheyennes for those terrible deeds. They pretty much got away scot-free.

We often talk about healing wounds, and we use the word “healing” quite often after terrible tragedies. And I believe that. I think time takes care of a lot of that. In most cases, wounds are healed, but, you know, scars are never forgotten. And in my view, the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, for time immemorial, from now on, will always bear those scars and will always hear those stories. It’s one of the first stories you hear. I remember after we passed the legislation, it took seven years. You know, sometimes people think, well, if you introduce a bill it gets done and there’s no problem and, you know, you pass it and it’s signed into law the next day or a few days later. It’s not. It takes a lot of negotiating, and there was a lot of negotiating done. We had to involve the Park Service. We had to involve all four of the tribes. We had to involve the state of Colorado. We had to involve many, many other agencies. And so the first bill really turned out to be a study bill to study if it should be done at all. To get that bill passed and kind of networked, it took almost two years. And then we had to introduce the second bill. As Norma mentioned, there were three bills. We had to introduce the second one would actually do it. And during that time, there was a lot of negotiations, and there had to be environmental impact statements done. There had to be everything you can think about. And one of the problems that arose during these times of negotiating with all the different people who had a vested interest or a seat at the table, as you might say, was the fact that oral tradition did not jive with written documentation by the government. And a lot of people thought, well, you could pinpoint where the killing was. And it must have been right over here by those campfires or right over here. When, in fact, we later found out, it wasn’t. It was a total of about six miles long. There were people running and hiding and trying to bury themselves by cutting, by caving earth in on top of them on the banks of the creek, any number of things. And so what we finally decided to do was, rather than trying to focus on exactly where it was, this campfire or that teepee ring or so on, we’d take in a larger area and try to encompass the whole thing and then later decide exactly what happened where. And that’s basically what happened with the final bill. That’s the way it was done.

There were really three landowners involved, and the largest number of acreage, about 1400 acres or a little more, was owned by a family by the name of Dawson. Years before, when I was elected to the state legislature and I wanted to do something about that land, we approached the Dawson family to see if they would sell that land to the state so we could make some kind of a state commemorative park out of it for the Cheyenne and Arapaho. But the Dawson family did not want to sell it in those early ’80s. And I’ve never been a big believer of condemning private land for government use, so I didn’t pursue it after that. But this time around, there was a little more interest by the Dawson family. But some of the battle site, the killing fields, as I think we ought to call them, was on other landowners’ places, too. The federal government, when they buy land, they can only buy at what is called fair market value. They take a survey of other land around it, and they find out what it was sold for and, by law, all they can offer you for your land if it happens to be in the proximity of the land that’s already sold. Well, a couple of the other landowners—at least one of the other landowners—said that would be okay. And we managed to get that land bought, the Park Service did, but the Dawson family felt that since theirs was the primary location of most of the terrible tragic killings, their land should be worth more, and he was probably right. From an historic standpoint, it was probably worth more. And so the federal government couldn’t pay all the money that he wanted for that land, but thanks to—I forgot his first name—Mr. Druck who’s really a principle behind some of the business concern, the South Cheyenne and Arapaho, they came to our aid and came up with the extra money that we needed to buy that land from the Dawson family.

And so it’s an ongoing thing. There’s an interpretive center there now, as you probably know. And I remember visiting Bent’s Fort, which is, I think, about an hour away from the Sand Creek massacre site some years ago. And I asked him if many people came through there and asked about Sand Creek. And they said it was the single thing most of their visitors asked for. Where is Sand Creek? People had read about it, didn’t know a thing about it, they wanted to know where Sand Creek is. And now they know. When we went there for, you might say, the ribbon cutting a few years ago, there was a huge contingent, as you might guess, of Indian people. And if you’ve gone there, it’s about 10 miles away from a small farming town by the name of Eads, E-a-d-s, Eads, Colorado. We went into Eads to get lunch one of the days we were there, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see the reception the people in that county in Eads gave to the Cheyenne and Arapaho people that came back for the, you might say, the ribbon cutting and the ceremony opening it to the public. There were signs and writing on the windows of the stores that said, “Welcome back Cheyennes,” “Welcome back Arapahos.” And it was in English, but it was also in Cheyenne and Arapaho. And what interested me, one of my Cheyenne friends was kind of laughing at one of the signs in the window. And I said, “Why?” And they said, “Well, because whoever told them welcome back, they misspelled it.” So they had it wrong, but at least their heart was in the right place and their intention was in the right place. They also did a big barbeque, and the tribes provided the buffalo, but they invited everybody from the area to come to that. And it was, it was a really a welcome sight to see the non-Indian people of that area that were so open-hearted. And many of them came up to me, and I know many of them came up to my Cheyenne relatives, to thank us for coming back and thank us for doing what we did in establishing that as a national historic monument.

Now, when I introduced those bills, we got the first, well, we got all three of them passed after seven years, actually six years in my side. But after we got it past the Senate, the final version of it, it was not signed into law yet. It still had to go by the House. Bills have to go through both houses. There was a congresslady that only did, I think, one or two terms from southeast Colorado. And since I had already announced I was not going to run again, I thought a lot of my job was pretty well done with this magnificent structure and introducing that Sand Creek bill and getting it passed. I had announced I was going to retire. Nobody had to throw me out, I knew the way home, and I was getting pretty homesick after 22 years. And so we got it past the Senate, and I announced I was not going to run again. And darned if our House counterpart didn’t drop the ball and didn’t even pursue getting the bill passed on the outside. And so it died. Fortunately, Senator Wayne Allard, who was my colleague when I was in and was still serving after I left, picked up the ball, took our language, and since the hearings had already been done, he reintroduced it, and it literally flew through that time. And the congresswoman who was on the other side, she had kind of got scolded by her local press and by some of the towns in southeast Colorado for not pursuing that bill and not getting it passed. And so she did then, and it was signed into law. So I’m just very proud of the fact that so many people worked so hard on that to get it passed, and particularly all those unsung heroes that you don’t read about very much that were really instrumental.

I remember Lee Lonebear telling me many times—in fact, one of the last times that he talked to me a little bit about it was the morning when we had kind of the ribbon cutting of Sand Creek, and he was doing an early morning sweat and prayer ceremony. And afterwards I talked to him a little bit, and Lee, of course, was a direct descendant of Black Kettle. And he told me a little bit about some of the old chiefs that were killed there. As you know, Black Kettle wasn’t, but was surprised on the Washita some years later by General Custer. That story’s already been told by an earlier speaker. But a number of others, Chief War Bonnet, just two years before, according to Lee, he had been in Washington, DC, with a delegation and met with either the president or some of the emissaries of the president to try to work out some kind of an equitable peace agreement. But, of course, in those peace agreements in those days, they didn’t last too long, and the federal government simply couldn’t enforce them. When you had a western part of the United States that was growing so fast with a huge influx of gold seekers—gold was discovered in 1851 in Denver—and, of course, the people really came in there. It was after the California Gold Rush. And they were from all over the world looking for their fortunes there. There were the hide hunters, the trappers, you know, name it, the people that wanted to farm. Some didn’t speak English, just got off the boat, wanted to move west. They heard Horace Greeley’s words about “Go West, young man,” and they did. There wasn’t any way the federal government could control that. And certainly the territory of Colorado under then-Governor Evans and the principals like Chivington, they were out from the very beginning to kill some Indians. I mean, they both said it several times over. There’s never, ever been any proof at all that I know of that some of the depredations that were done by somebody were by that band of Cheyenne, let alone any Cheyenne or any other tribe. There was one family that was called the Hungate family that was killed a few months before the Sand Creek Massacre, and it has never been proven by anybody that people that killed that family were even Indian, let alone Cheyenne Indians. And yet around the streets of Denver, it was bandied around, particularly among the unwashed that it must have been a Cheyenne. And so they had this terrific hype and this negative stereotyping and this anger and hate built up by frustrated people that hadn’t found gold or couldn’t kill enough buffalo or something to lash out at somebody. And, of course, we’ve seen that happen in other parts of the world at other times. I mean, that’s what Adolf Hitler was all about. And as Norma said, you know, now’s the time we focus on trying to make sure something that could never happen again. But in fact, my friends, it not only could happen again, it is happening again. Look what’s happening right now in Iraq and Afghanistan and some other places with the rise of ISIS and some of these other hate groups that are simply out to kill anybody that does not believe their ideology. It can happen again. Not so easy in this country, I think, because I think most Americans now think pretty independently, but it’s just tragic that not enough people learned from those terrible tragedies. And, of course, that’s what the bills were supposed to be all about, and that’s what this forum is all about, too, I think, to try to carry that message a little bit further. Thank you.

Thanks. Before I begin, I want to say thanks again to Karen, to Alexa, for inviting me here today. It’s really an extraordinary honor to be with you all, and it’s also wonderful, as Norma said, to be with a lot of friends that I’ve made over the past—how long has it been—decade-and-a-half or so. What I’m going to try and do over the next maybe 15 or 20 minutes is talk about how the process that we’re engaged in today memorializing, remembering collectively, is a historical process, that this is something that’s been going on now for 150 years, and if I’ve got it right, I’m going to do 150 years in 15 minutes, so I’m going to talk really fast.

As Gary Roberts mentioned this morning, John Chivington was a relentlessly political figure. He had a strong interest in furthering his career, and so in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, John Chivington understood that he needed to control the spin around what had happened at Sand Creek, and he, I would say, lobbed the first volleys in what would ultimately become protracted fights over the memory of Sand Creek. Chivington sent dispatches to his commander, explaining to his commander that his men had—that Chivington’s men, excuse me, had attacked a village that he said had been bristling with warriors. In retrospect, that obviously wasn’t true. He went on to insist that the Native people in that village had been responsible for those depredations that Senator Campbell just mentioned a moment ago. He said that his men had recovered the remains of white settlers that had been murdered by the Native people in that camp. Later that day Chivington sent a note to the press in Denver, again, trying very, very hard to control how this event would be remembered in its immediate aftermath. So as the bodies of his victims were still cooling nearby, John Chivington already had his eye on posterity.

It’s an interesting question to consider whether or not Chivington’s perspective on Sand Creek simply would have become part of the historical record unchallenged if Silas Soule and Joe Cramer hadn’t written the letters that David Halaas spoke about this morning, but they did. Soule and Cramer, among others, refused to commit the soldiers under them at Sand Creek to the fight and, in its aftermath, understood that John Chivington was going to try and characterize their actions at Sand Creek as cowardice. They were very eager to make sure that the record reflected accurately what had happened at Sand Creek, and so I won’t go into the details of those letters because David did a great job of that this morning. But those letters were crucial because what they did is they prompted officials in Washington to begin a number of different investigations into Sand Creek.

John Chivington never testified in person at those investigations, but he did send a long and very detailed account of precisely what he claimed his men had done at Sand Creek, and also what he believed his goals had been there, and Chivington articulated in this written testimony twin goals. First of all, to try and pacify the Plains. Chivington and Governor John Evans both had been engaged in a long process of trying to convince federal officials that white settlers in Colorado territory were facing mortal peril because there was a grand confederation, a huge alliance of tribal peoples in the fall of 1864, and so in the aftermath of Sand Creek, when Chivington testified about what had happened there, he continued this story. And again, in that testimony Chivington pointed back, in this case, to human remains that he said his men had recovered there, suggesting once again that the Native peoples at Sand Creek had been guilty of depredations, had been guilty of committing atrocities against white settlers in Colorado territory.

Chivington also, though, in that testimony suggested that at Sand Creek he and his men had served nobly as part of the federal government’s effort during the United States Civil War. He suggested that George Bent, especially, had been acting as a Confederate agent and had been working with the Cheyennes and trying to foment insurrection among the Cheyennes, to try and have the Cheyennes join the Confederacy, to join the rebellion against the federal government. And so for Chivington these two processes, first of pacifying the Plains and also of trying to put down the Confederate insurrection, were intertwined. He saw these as being very similar processes. As, again, David talked about this morning, he did a much better job than I’d be able to do. Silas Soule disagreed with this rather vehemently, as did other people. Soule actually thought that what happened at Sand Creek reflected very badly on the service of Civil War soldiers. He was very upset that somehow what had happened at Sand Creek dishonored the otherwise honorable service of men who had been fighting to preserve the Union, and he believed that it cast doubt on the United States’ manifest destiny, as it was described at the time, the so-called God given right of the United States to settle the West as it saw fit.

Soule, as David talked about, testified in person, but then shortly after testifying before federal investigators looking into Sand Creek, Soule was murdered in the streets of Denver. Soule’s assassination, his murder, call it what you want, was an extraordinarily important moment in terms of the way that we remember Sand Creek, and it was important because of the context in which it happened. It wasn’t just a matter that Soule had testified very recently. It was also that President Lincoln had been assassinated approximately a week earlier, and Lincoln’s assassination and Soule’s assassination were, in the minds of many, many observers, part and parcel of the same process. One of the federal investigators looking into Sand Creek said as much, that Soule’s murder was a by-product of Sand Creek in the same way that President Lincoln’s assassination had been a by-product of the fight against slavery. The result of this was that Silas Soule’s memories of Sand Creek, his depiction of what had happened at the massacre, persisted. These became extraordinarily important memories. In some instances they were sort of unassailable. These were the recollections of a man who had been martyred for speaking truth to power, and so people clung to these memories in many cases.

One example of that is a so-called Indian reformer. In 1879 a woman named Helen Hunt Jackson, who went on to write a book called “Century of Dishonor,” Helen Hunt Jackson, in 1879, began writing what we would think of today as op eds or editorials, letters to editors around the United States. In those letters she characterized Sand Creek as a massacre. She drew on Silas Soule’s testimony before federal investigators. She talked about a number of the same details, the white flag flying over Black Kettle’s Lodge, the fact that John Chivington’s men had desecrated their fallen victims, had desecrated the bodies of women and of children, including infants. Helen Hunt Jackson, the way in which she engaged with memories of Sand Creek didn’t sit well for a number of different people, including William Byers, who, again, we heard about this morning, had been the editor of the Rocky Mountain News. And Byers began saying that Helen Hunt Jackson, not surprisingly, as he had in 1864 and 1865, he suggested that she was sort of out of place in the West. First of all, that she was an easterner and so she couldn’t possibly understand the necessity of an event like Sand Creek, couldn’t understand how this had been a noble battle. He also used what we would call today sexist language, suggesting that she was a woman and so she was just entirely, he said, “out of place in the rough and tumble West.” Now, Helen Hunt Jackson, for those of you who know anything about her, she was no shrinking violet and she gave as good as she got. And so they entered into what we would look back today and describe as a print war. They went back and forth over a period of weeks, increasing, upping the ante over time.

As Helen Hunt Jackson was writing, she had one particular goal in mind. She was known, as I said earlier, as an Indian reformer because she wanted to reform the federal government’s policy toward Native peoples. Jackson wanted to see Indian Affairs in the hands of the Department of the Interior exclusively. And there were a number of people in the Interior Department at that time who were prime to accept this message for a variety of different reasons, not least because the so-called Great Sioux War had just taken place, including the Little Bighorn. And so there were a number of people in the federal government who recognized, in the late 1870s, that Indian Affairs weren’t being handled properly. At the same time though, many westerners still adhered to John Chivington’s depiction of Sand Creek. In 1880, I believe it was, editors at the Gunnison Democrat, which was a newspaper published out of Gunnison, Colorado, called for—the language they used was “another Sand Creek,” that’s a quote. What they were asking for was a war of extermination in the aftermath of the Ute uprising, and so the fights over Sand Creek were continuing.

Now, George Bent, who, as David Halaas would tell you in his extraordinary biography of Bent, David has laid all of this out very, very well, George Bent was a keen observer of western history and also of politics. Bent knew what was happening in Colorado. Bent also understood that as the 19th century neared its close, that the American West stood at the center of discussions about the future of the United States; that historians like Frederick Jackson Turner at the Chicago World’s Fair were talking about the closing of the frontier and what that meant for the United States. Conservationists were talking about the impending extinction of the bison, what that might mean for the Indigenous people who relied on those animals for their survival in many instances; that readers were consuming piles and piles of dime novels in these years. In other words, again, in popular culture and in public policy, the American West was very much at the center of conversations about where the United States would head in its future.

George Bent was dismayed that Native people seemed to have no voice in these ongoing discussions, and so at the end of the 19th century he began working with a group of scholars. Ultimately he struck a partnership with a historian named George Hyde, and he and Hyde produced a number of different documents in which Bent, with the assistance of Hyde, talked about Sand Creek. In 1906, just to give you one example, they published six articles in a magazine that at the time was called the Frontier, and in those articles George Bent talked about Sand Creek as having been a massacre. He very explicitly rebutted John Chivington’s portrayal of what had happened in November of 1864, again, pointing back to the way in which the Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek had believed that they had struck a—perhaps a fragile, but nevertheless peace with white authorities in Colorado territory, the way in John Chivington’s men had butchered their victims, and on and on.

Once again, though, this sort of revisionist history of Sand Creek met with some resistance. Coloradans, and especially John Chivington’s surviving troops, were not at all happy that George Bent was suggesting that they had engaged in a massacre, that they had massacred women and children and the elderly. Jacob Downing, especially, was very, very upset by these characterizations, particularly upset that a Native American man was calling white men uncivilized. And so Downing followed the lead of Byers and others and wrote letters to local papers in which he called George Bent all manner of names and said that Bent was lying, that John Chivington’s characterization of Sand Creek remained as true at the beginning of the 20th century as it had in 1864 and 1865. Downing then worked with a number of other people in Colorado, local heritage organizations, to try and memorialize the service of Coloradans in the United States Civil War; service that it’s important to understand for the most part overwhelmingly was very, very noble. That effort culminated in Denver in 1909 with the unveiling of a memorial on the State Capitol steps, a memorial that’s still there. That memorial lists the battles and engagements in which Coloradans had fought during the Civil War, and it includes on its base Sand Creek as a battle or an engagement, rather than as a massacre. And so it’s possible to look at Downing’s work, at the work of those other heritage organizations in Colorado at that time and see that what they really did is they smoothed away the rough edges of Sand Creek and they cast John Chivington’s story of the massacre in bronze. That memorial, by the way, was reinterpreted, what, about a decade ago. Nevertheless, it is still there.

Flashing forward pretty quickly here to the era of World War II and the Cold War, in 1950 the state of Colorado and Kiowa County unveiled two memorials: one that Senator Campbell mentioned a moment ago, and another that was quite nearby. The first of those memorials said, “Sand Creek Battleground.” That memorial is still there today. It’s on the so-called monument overlook. It overlooks the killing field at Sand Creek. Again, this was Sand Creek Battleground. It was a way of trying to make sure that John Chivington’s perspective on Sand Creek would remain vibrant into the future. But at the same time, in that same year, in fact, unveiled on the same day, the Colorado Historical Society put up another monument, and that one said, “Sand Creek Battle or Massacre,” which was obviously equivocal language, suggesting that the way in which people recalled Sand Creek had begun to change over time. Context matters in this case, and from my perspective what had happened is that by 1950, which was the year in which that memorial was unveiled, the federal government, for about a decade-and-a-half, had been rather aggressively engaged in its own memorialization efforts looking back to the United States Civil War as an emblem of the United States’ longstanding commitment to freedom and liberty. The federal government had used memories of the Civil War, which, up until the 1930s, were very much contested, had tried to use memories of the Civil War as a way to drum up support for internationalism, for the United States’ involvement first in World War II and then in the Cold War. And so in 1950 it made sense for Coloradans to begin to divorce memories of Sand Creek from memories of the Civil War, and also to begin to think about this tragedy in a more ambiguous light.

That ambiguity shifted over time. By the late 1960s the United States, again, pointing to something that Senator Campbell mentioned a moment ago, had again confronted the capacity of American soldiers occasionally to murder innocent civilians, as in the case of the My Lai massacre. By the late 1960s the so-called modern Civil Rights Movement was also underway, and so people around the United States were becoming more and more familiar with critiques of racial injustice in this country. And at the same time it was the beginning of the New Age, and so many whites had become fascinated with traditional Indigenous ways of understanding the past and Indigenous cultures. It was in that cultural moment that Dee Brown wrote “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” a book that perhaps many of you have read. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” draws on Silas Soule’s characterizations of Sand Creek, draws on the memories and the writing of Helen Hunt Jackson. It is a very, very hard-hitting depiction of Sand Creek. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” has sold to date more than five million copies. That’s even a little bit better than the book that I’ve written, I’ll say, in terms of sales, and it’s had an immense influence on American culture. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” is, I would say, the bestselling and the most popular, the best read history of the American West and it influenced a generation of American readers, but also of United States historians and historians of the U.S. West. And it’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” that created, I would say, a cultural climate in which the National Park Service, in which Senator Campbell, could create a Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, with no need to equivocate about what had happened at Sand Creek, but instead to use appropriate language to describe the massacre that happened there.

I’m going to wrap up by suggesting a couple of things. First of all, that the process that we’re engaged in today, this process of memorialization, once again, is simply part of a very, very long tradition. I would say though that what’s happening today is unusual, perhaps extraordinary, and to my mind, really very, very hopeful and I say that because we’re speaking today in a space, and again, credit to Senator Campbell, to Senator Inouye, who’s no longer with us, and to many, many other people, we’re speaking in a space that is both federal and Indigenous. This is an extraordinary place to be having these kinds of discussions. I can’t think of a more appropriate place. And then I’ll conclude by saying that the people who created the National Museum of the American Indian drew on an idea that was first articulated, I believe, by a Native scholar, writer and activist, Gerald Vizenor. That was the idea of surviving. Not simply survival, but survival and resistance working together. And I think that what you’re seeing today is very much an articulation of that, and so I want to conclude, and you may have heard some of these names, but I just want to remember, because that is our function at this point, is memorialization, I do want to remember some people who aren’t here today. Luke Brady, Colleen Cometsevah, Laird Cometsevah, Lee Lonebear, Lee Pedro, Eugene Ridgely Jr., and Alonzo Sankey. All of these were representatives to the Sand Creek memorialization effort. They’re not with us today, but they’re very, very much in our memories, and for that reason I’d like to believe that—well, as I’m getting choked up, I’ll just say thank you very much.