Legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre

The Sand Creek Massacre did not end when the shooting stopped. This timeline, from the Park Service's series Understanding Sand Creek, traces what followed.

1864–1865: war on the plains

War broke out across the Great Plains after the massacre. A huge force of Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux warriors wiped out a detachment of U.S. troops, then attacked and destroyed the railroad town of Julesburg in northeastern Colorado, briefly cutting Denver off from the outside world. Congress and the U.S. Army investigated and issued damning condemnations of John Chivington's conduct, and Territorial Governor Evans was allowed to resign. Silas Soule testified about what happened at Sand Creek; a few months later he was shot dead near his home in Denver, and many in Colorado concluded he was killed in revenge for testifying against Chivington.

1865: a treaty admits the wrong

U.S. officials persuaded a handful of Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs to negotiate a new treaty on the Little Arkansas River in Kansas in October 1865. In the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, the United States condemned and repudiated "the gross and wanton outrages perpetrated against certain bands of Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians" at Sand Creek, and in Article 6 it effectively took responsibility by promising to compensate those who lost property there. Members of the Bent family and others received land south of the Arkansas River. Reparations owed to many other descendants have never been paid.

1865–1869: railroads, buffalo and the end of Colorado lands

Fighting continued on and off across Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming. The Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and their allies fought desperately to keep railroad building from destroying their hunting grounds along the Smoky Hill River, while buffalo were killed by the millions over the next two decades, their hides wanted for machinery belts. In 1867, peace factions signed another treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas, giving up claims to land in Kansas, including the Smoky Hill hunting grounds; the warrior factions refused to recognize it.

In late summer 1868 the Dog Soldiers nearly destroyed a force of Army scouts, but the charismatic warrior Roman Nose was killed in the fight on a tributary of the Republican River. On November 27, 1868, almost four years to the day after Sand Creek, Lt. Col. George A. Custer's 7th U.S. Cavalry attacked Chief Black Kettle's village on Washita Creek in what is now Oklahoma. Black Kettle, a steadfast advocate of peace to the end, was killed with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne men, women and children. Gen. Philip Sheridan reportedly said on hearing of his death, "So the old scoundrel is dead at last."

In 1869 the last Dog Soldier bands under Tall Bull headed for Wyoming to join the Northern Cheyenne, but cavalry and Pawnee scouts caught them at Summit Springs in northeastern Colorado, killing dozens of warriors and family members. William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody built his fame partly on the claim that he killed Tall Bull, though tribal tradition holds that Tall Bull survived. Eighteen years after the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty had granted the tribes nearly half of what became Colorado, no Cheyenne or Arapaho people lived there. Their claims had been extinguished by conquest.

1869–1887: reservations and forced assimilation

The Cheyenne and Arapaho fought on alongside the Sioux in Wyoming, Dakota and Montana, and defeated Custer at the Little Bighorn, but were soon overwhelmed; the Cheyenne kept fighting until 1880. With the buffalo nearly gone, Cheyenne resistance leaders were imprisoned in terrible conditions at Fort Marion, Florida, and the peoples of the plains and mountains, from Texas to Canada, were forced onto reservations.

In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Act, splitting reservation land into 160-acre holdings and forcing an end to communal landholding. Tribal religion and cultural practices were outlawed, tribal governments eliminated and reservation lands cut by more than 60%. Thousands of Native children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools in the East to be raised as whites, under the slogan "Kill the Indian and save the man." The Park Service calls the justification of this continued assault on Native culture and identity the lasting legacy of Manifest Destiny.

1870–1920: rewriting memory

Railroads, ranching and farming transformed Colorado, and Denver grew into one of the country's largest cities. On the Civil War monument in front of the State Capitol, Sand Creek was listed as a battle. The massacre faded from public memory, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho were remembered in Colorado mostly as the names of streets and counties on land once theirs.

1900 to the present: keeping the history alive

George Bent gave researchers invaluable information about the Cheyenne and preserved his people's history and culture, including his eyewitness accounts of Sand Creek and the plains wars. The tribes regained political autonomy in the 1930s and pressed for the reparations promised in 1865. Sand Creek descendants stopped Denver from naming a new boulevard after Chivington, and in 1950 the Colorado State Historical Society placed a small stone marker on the bluff above the massacre site.

In the 1950s and 1960s, government policy pushed tribal members off reservations and into cities, where they met the same racism they had faced in reservation border towns. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), in which Sand Creek features prominently, reawakened the nation to injustices against American Indians. Tribal members took control of their own affairs and pressed for a congressional review of treaty interpretation, which led to the American Indian Policy Review Commission and its two-volume report in 1977. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, in Congress, led legislation to address past wrongs: Custer Battlefield became Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and in 2000 Senator Campbell sponsored the bill creating Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. The Park Service took over management in 2007 and, with the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples, began planning its future.

Sources

• National Park Service, Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, "Legacies of Sand Creek," part of the series Understanding Sand Creek. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/sand_sandcreek_legacies.htm
• The Park Service's page spells Chivington "Chlvington" once and Sheridan's first name "Phillip"; this page uses the standard spellings. It also calls Campbell the first Native American member of Congress, a claim this page does not repeat.