Finding Indian massacre site
By James Brooke
NEW YORK TIMES
CHIVINGTON, Colo. -- One historian calls it the American My Lai. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the lone American Indian in Congress, calls it "one of the most disgraceful moments of American history."
But 134 years after 700 U.S. Army volunteers stormed through an Indian encampment near here on the Big Sandy Creek, slaughtering scores of women and children, Colorado's killing fields have disappeared into the swirling dust and endless horizons of big sky country.
William Dawson, a retired judge, says the massacre occurred on what is now part of his ranch. "The killing was all along here, under the trees," Dawson said recently, surveying a swath of leafy cottonwoods that snaked along the dry bed of Big Sandy Creek.
Pointing to a bluff, he said, "Up there I found U.S. Army jacket buttons, with the eagles on them. Over there, I found an Indian ax head."
No, says Mike Koury, a military history publisher, this was not the site.
"There were 700 soldiers firing rifles, artillery pieces -- cannonballs exploding, bullets flying -- tons of metal should be found at the site, not pounds," Koury said, noting the paltry number of artifacts found on Dawson's ranch.
"The Indians left behind pots, pans, axes, saws. Your metal detector should go crazy. There is no way that is Sand Creek."
Richard Ellis, a history professor leading an official search for the site of what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre, said, "When we think of battle sites on American soil, this is the only major battlefield we can't find."
New forces are pushing for a solution to this archaeological mystery.
National politics coupled with Indian desires for recognition of their history are converging on this tiny hamlet in southeastern Colorado, named after John Chivington, the Methodist minister turned Army colonel who led the troops in the massacre.
In July, the Senate unanimously passed a bill sponsored by Campbell, a Northern Cheyenne, ordering the National Park Service to find the massacre site, a first step to establishing a Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site.
Within days, a companion bill was introduced in the House by Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Schaeffer, who represents Colorado's Eastern plains, which includes the massacre site.
In Oklahoma and Montana, the roughly 5,000 Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants of massacre survivors are organizing to lobby for reparations promised in an 1865 treaty.
Campbell, in explaining the interest, said, "It is clearly one of the darkest pages in Colorado history."
Sand Creek, historians say, explains a cartographic oddity: why eastern Colorado once teemed with Indians but now has no Indian reservation.
Studying the killings as "ethnic cleansing" helps students understand atrocities elsewhere in the world, says Thomas Noel, a University of Colorado history professor.
In the spring of 1864, the Cheyenne dog soldiers, an autonomous military wing of the Cheyenne tribe, unleashed bloody attacks on whites in Colorado's eastern plains.
They stole horses and mules and butchered cattle.
They wiped out wagon trains, burned stagecoach stations and tore down telegraph lines.
The economy of the 3-year-old Colorado territory ground to a halt as wagon trains with gold-mining equipment could not leave St. Louis. Food prices soared as farmers abandoned crops.
Chivington, a Civil War hero and Colorado's military commander, called for volunteer "Indian fighters" for 100-day enlistments. On Nov. 29, 1864, the colonel and his volunteers rode deep inside the Arapaho-Cheyenne reservation, where Indians led by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle had set up camp weeks earlier.
A white flag and an American flag flew above the tepee of Black Kettle, whom the colonel had met two months earlier near Denver in inconclusive peace talks.
The fact that the Cheyenne dog soldiers were not camped with Black Kettle's group did not stop Chivington from unleashing his attack.
One reason for Chivington's deep hatred of Indians was offered recently by his 85-year-old great-great-grandson, Laurence Riordan, who lives in Denver.
In 1861, Riordan said, a Ute Indian had raped the colonel's 17-year-old daughter in western Colorado.
At Sand Creek, Chivington exhorted his troops, "Remember our murdered women and children!"
After emptying wagonloads of cannon fire into the village of 125 tepees, the soldiers swept up the creek bed, killing every Indian they could find, often hunting down fleeing children.
After six hours, about 150 Indians, or one-quarter of the camp's population, lay dead. The soldiers took three prisoners, all children. A dozen soldiers were killed, some apparently by friendly fire in the frenzy.
Coloradans hailed the soldiers, who had mutilated Indian bodies for souvenirs. But news of Sand Creek was poorly received in Washington. President Lincoln replaced Colorado's territorial governor.
A congressional inquiry condemned the battle as a massacre.
"It's a sad feeling that our ancestors were attacked in that manner," Laird Cometsevah, president of the Southern Cheyenne Sand Creek Descendants Association, said from his home in Clinton, Okla.
"Black Kettle basically wanted peace for his people. The Cheyenne trusted the non-Indians -- and they were betrayed."
Edition: WCT, Section: A, Page: 8
Link to: California's Modern Indian War
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