The Mammoth Book of the West (42 page)

Chivington was in the field within days of reporting the “theft”. In his pocket he had an order from Governor John Evans, another ruthless Indian-hater, to “burn villages and kill Cheyenne whenever and wherever found.”

By early June, Chivington’s brutal campaign had razed four unsuspecting Cheyenne villages. One of his junior officers had also shot Chief Lean Bear, a peaceful Cheyenne who had walked up to the White man proudly wearing a medal the Great Father in Washington had given him. Arapahoes, who had tried to intercede in a dispute between the Army and some Kiowa, were fired on. Soon half the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Colorado were on the warpath.

The first retaliatory blow was struck at a ranch outside Denver. A family named Hungate was murdered, their bodies mutilated. The corpses were taken to Denver and placed on display. The town went wild with fear and fury. Traffic on the trails was attacked, Cheyenne and Arapaho bands virtually cutting Denver off from the outside world. During three weeks in August, 50 people were killed on the Platte route alone.

With Denver near famine, the War Department authorized Governor Evans to raise a special regiment of Indian fighting volunteers who would serve for 100 days. The 3rd Colorado Regiment (the “Hundred Dazers”) under the command of “the Fighting Parson” Colonel Chivington was still being mustered, however, when peace suddenly broke out.

Some of the Cheyenne chiefs had tired of war; some had never wanted it. Using the offices of George Bent, a half-White living with the Cheyenne, the chiefs sent a letter to Major Edward W. Wynkoop at Fort Lyon offering an end to hostilities:

We held a counsel . . . and all came to the conclusion to make peace with you providing you make peace with the Kiowas, Comences, Arropohoes Apaches and Siouxs. We are going to send a message to the Kiowas . . . about our going to make [peace] with you. We heard that you [have]
some prisoners in Denver. We have seven prisoners of you which we are willing to give up providing you give up yours. There are three war parties out yet, and two of Arropohoes; they have been out some time and expected in soon. When we held this counsel there were few Arropohoes and Siouxs present; we want news from you in return. (That is a letter)

Wynkoop, a decent and able officer, saw a chance to avert bloodshed. He visited Black Kettle, persuaded him to release four prisoners, and encouraged him to go to Denver and consult with the Governor.

On 28 September, the genial and aged Black Kettle rode into Camp Weld near Denver to talk peace. After conceding his inability to control some of his younger warriors, Black Kettle agreed to settle at Fort Lyon with those Cheyenne and Arapaho who would follow him. There he would be protected by Major Wynkoop. The Indian left the meeting believing he had made a peace deal.

Peace was the last thing the Indian-hating Colonel Chivington wanted. If he was to use his hundred-day men he had to use them soon. He complained to General Curtis about Wynkoop’s conciliatory policy and got him replaced at Fort Lyon by Major Scott J. Anthony. In the presence of other officers at Fort Lyon, the newly arrived Anthony told Black Kettle that he would continue to be protected by the Army. Allegedly to enable the surrendered Cheyenne and Arapaho to do some hunting, Anthony directed them to move their village to an almost dry watercourse about 40 miles to the north-east: Sand Creek.

Anthony had moved the Indians to a place where they could be inconspicuously massacred. Chivington and his 3rd Colorado Volunteers reached Fort Lyon on 28
November. Major Anthony and 125 men of his garrison joined them. Some officers protested violently when they learned what Chivington and Anthony intended to do. Chivington cursed them as spies and traitors, no better than Indians.

At daybreak on the clear frosty morning of 29 November 1864, Colonel Chivington and 700 soldiers approached Black Kettle’s camp. When a junior officer again protested that the Cheyenne were at peace, Chivington roared back: “I have come to kill Indians, and believe that it is right and honourable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.” His troops were ordered to “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”

The sleeping Indians were given no warning, no chance for talk. Chivington’s men simply bore down on them, firing their rifles, slashing into the sleeping tents. There was confusion and noise. Black Kettle, unable to comprehend what was happening, ran up the Stars and Stripes outside his tent. Then a white flag of surrender. Still the killing continued.

Some of the Indians ran into the sand hills and frantically dug pits in the banks in which to hide. The troops pursued them, and shot into the pits. To prevent an escape, the Americans cut off the horse herd. Nevertheless, a few Indians ran as far as five miles to escape the slaughter – and were still cut down. A lost child crying for its family was used for target practice.

There was little chance for the dazed Cheyenne and Arapaho to fight back. They had surrendered most of their guns to Wynkoop days before. Those warriors who had arms and could use them fought desperately. Major Anthony himself said: “I never saw such bravery displayed by any set of people on the face of the earth than by these Indians. They would charge on the whole company singly, determined to kill someone before being killed
themselves” Chief White Antelope refused to flee or fight. He stood in front of his tipi and sang his death song, “Nothing lives long / Except the earth and the mountains,” until he was killed.

A few soldiers, almost all from the 1st Colorado, refused to join the slaughter, or the mutilation of the Indians’ bodies which occurred afterwards. “It looked too hard for me,” Captain Silas Soule wrote, “to see little children on their knees begging for their lives, having their brains beaten out like dogs.”

Another soldier, Lieutenant James Connor, recorded:

In going over the battleground, I did not see a body of a man, woman or child but was scalped, and in many instances, their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner. I heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddlebows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.

By the end of the day, 28 men and 105 women and children lay dead at Sand Creek. Among those who escaped was Black Kettle, his badly injured wife on his back.

When the soldiers returned to Denver the town went into a delirium of joy. “Colorado soldiers”, the
Rocky Mountain News
declared, “have again covered themselves with glory . . . the Colonel [Chivington] is a credit to Colorado and the West.” Cheyenne scalps were strung across the stage of the Denver Opera House during intermission, to standing applause.

On the Great Plains, the shock waves from Sand Creek rolled westwards. Already agitated by the Minnesota Sioux uprising, the tribes fell to anger and a desperate revenge. Plains Indians rarely fought in winter, but now they made an exception. In January 1865, a combined military expedition
of Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho, Oglala and Brulé Sioux – 1,600 picked warriors and one of the greatest cavalry forces the world had ever seen – whipped into Colorado. Fort Rankin suffered severe losses. The town of Julesburg was sacked twice, the outskirts of Denver threatened. Seventy-five miles of the South Platte Trail was wrecked. Ranches and stations were burnt, wagon trains captured and more people killed than Chivington had slain at Sand Creek.

The Sand Creek massacre caused outrage in the East, and bolstered the movement for Indian reform. A Military Investigation Commission condemned Chivington and his soldiers, but the colonel escaped punishment because he had left the army. (The most damaging witness, Captain Silas Soule, was murdered before the Commission finished its business, probably with Chivington’s connivance.) Congress approved the report, and added more testimony to it.

In July 1865, Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin went out to Denver to argue the case for a peaceful solution to the Indian problem. The choice, he told a capacity crowd at the Denver Opera House, was to put the Indians on adequate reservations where they might support themselves, or to exterminate them. The audience, Doolittle later wrote, gave “a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof of the Opera House – ‘Exterminate them! Exterminate them! Exterminate them!’”

Three months before Senator Doolittle had the roof of the Denver Opera House raised on him, the Civil War had come to an end. On 9 April 1865, in the front parlour of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse at Appomattox, Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Now the
North versus South conflict was over, Union officers turned their faces towards the land of the setting sun to unite the nation East and West.

Top of their agenda was “punishment” of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho, whose rampage through Colorado had been followed by a mass raid on the great overland trail on the Platte and North Platte. In July 1865 3,000 warriors had fallen on the Platte Bridge (now Casper, Wyoming), wiping out a train of dismounted cavalry.

The Army began a determined effort to defeat the Indians of the North Plains, sending General Patrick E. Connor and 3,000 troops to destroy the Indians in their Powder River camps. Connor instructed his junior officers not to “receive overtures of peace or submission” but “to kill every male Indian over 12 years of age.” Connor was a seasoned Indian fighter, having defeated the trail-harassing Shoshonis at Bear River (Idaho) in 1863, but he would not have his way in the Powder River country. All summer the Indians harried his columns, took his horses and vanished into the buttes before they could be engaged. Some of his detachments got hopelessly lost, the men died of scurvy and were lamed by cactus spines. Already exhausted by the Civil War, soldiers deserted by the drove.

General Connor was deprived of his command for failing to punish the elusive Indians. But before he left the northern plains he built a fort, Fort Reno, on a road which had recently been blazed to the goldfields of Montana by John M. Bozeman. The Bozeman Trail would be the subject of the next great fight between the Whites and the Cheyenne, Arapaho and their Sioux allies. A fight the Indians would win.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.

Fort Phil Kearny was established amid hostilities. No disaster other than the usual incidents to border warfare occurred, until gross disobedience of orders sacrificed nearly eighty of the choice men of my command . . . In the grave I bury disobedience.

The Fort Laramie council held in June 1866 was a magnificent spectacle. To either side of the fort, set between the Laramie and Platte rivers in the heart of Sioux country, tipis stretched for a mile or more, smoke wisping out of their tops into the sunshine. Hundreds of ponies were corralled, knots of Indians came and went, and from a staff at the corner of the sod parade ground the Stars and Stripes flapped languidly in the breeze. On a temporary platform sat officials of the federal government and the leading chiefs of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and the Brulé, Miniconjou and Oglala sub-bands of the Teton Sioux.
Prominent on the platform was the 44-year-old Oglala chief Red Cloud (Makhpiya-Luta), a warrior with 80 coups to his name. For three years “Bad Faces” led by Red Cloud had been attacking parties of Whites travelling the Bozeman Trail to the Montana goldfields. The Trail ran through the heart of the Powder River country, the last unviolated buffalo range of the Sioux and their allies. The Laramie council had been called to bribe Red Cloud and the other warring bands into selling the road.

The talks began promisingly. In return for the safe passage of Whites on the Bozeman Trail, the government promised the Indians $75,000 a year and an assurance that their land would never be taken by force. Then Colonel Henry Beebe Carrington rolled into the fort at the head of a long column of wagons and men. When a chief asked where he was going, Carrington explained that he was to construct two more forts on the trail, both deep into Teton Sioux country. At this news, Red Cloud exploded with anger: “The Great Father sends us presents and wants us to sell him the road, but White chief goes with soldiers to steal the road before Indians say Yes or No! I will talk with you no more! I will go now, and I will fight you! As long as I live I will fight you for the last hunting grounds of my people!”

With that, Red Cloud stormed off the platform. Within days, the Army would realize the truth of Red Cloud’s words.

On 22 June, Colonel Carrington and the 700-strong Eighteenth Infantry, plus assorted civilian woodchoppers and a number of wives and children, marched out of Fort Laramie for the Powder River country. On the 28th, Carrington reached Fort Reno on the Bozeman Trail. The
next afternoon Indians ran off nearly all the fort’s horses and mules.

Security was tightened. The expedition went on, through a heat so profound that it caused the wheels of the wagons to shrink and fall apart. At Crazy Woman’s Creek nine men deserted for the Montana goldfields. A detail sent after them was stopped on the Trail by a band of Cheyenne who refused to let them pass.

Still Carrington pressed on. At the fork to the Little Piney he pitched camp and started to build Fort Phil Kearny. The scout Jim Bridger, accompanying the expedition, argued against it: the hills on all sides shut out any view, and the nearest wood was five miles away. He was overruled by the military.

While Fort Phil Kearny was being built, Carrington dispatched two companies north to build a smaller stockade, Fort C.F. Smith, on the Bighorn. With Fort Reno, Carrington then had three forts to guard the Bozeman Trail. But his men were spread terribly thin.

Red Cloud used a familiar Indian strategy. There were no full frontal attacks. There were ambushes, lightning raids, and constant sniping. A steady attrition of White men and morale.