The Sand Creek Massacre, November 1864: What Happened

A camp under promise of protection

After the Camp Weld Conference near Denver in September 1864, the Arapaho chiefs Little Raven and Spotted Wolf, with about 550 Arapahos and a few Cheyenne lodges, were camped within a couple of miles of Fort Lyon — and in desperate straits. A few issues of "prisoners' rations" and their yearly annuity goods couldn't make up for the lack of fuel, game and forage on the barren land north of the fort.

• In mid-November, after councils with Major Scott Anthony and Major Edward Wynkoop, most of Little Raven's Arapahos moved about 60 miles down the Arkansas River toward the buffalo range, in search of game and forage for their starving animals.
• Other bands went north to a traditional camping place on Sand Creek, on the lodgepole trail from the Big Timbers to the Smoky Hill River — inside the reservation set by an earlier treaty.

The people trusted Wynkoop, whom they called the "Tall Chief." He had ridden to the Smoky Hill in September — "as if through a strong fire," in Black Kettle's words — to meet the tribes when they asked for a council, and had kept his word in taking the chiefs to Denver. No one expected a lasting peace, but they had been assured they were under military protection until Major General Samuel Curtis decided on war or peace, and Governor John Evans — also the territory's superintendent of Indian affairs — had promised peace if they obeyed the soldier chiefs at Fort Lyon. The chiefs did as Evans and Colonel John M. Chivington had instructed them at Camp Weld.

The march

On November 26, 1864, Wynkoop left Fort Lyon for a new command at Fort Riley, Kansas, praised by his officers and more than two dozen Arkansas Valley ranchers and farmers for calming the plains, and trusting his mentor Chivington to support his policies.

Two days later, Captain Silas Soule, out on patrol, met a column of nearly 700 troops under Chivington, equipped for a major fight with artillery. Chivington brushed off Soule's questions and seemed pleased that no one at the fort knew he was coming.

• Many were from the 3rd Colorado Cavalry — 100-day volunteers raised that summer from Denver and some two dozen Front Range towns and mining camps. Mocked in Denver as "the Bloodless Third," they wanted a fight before their enlistments ran out.
• At Fort Lyon, Chivington announced an attack on the Indians nearby, Sand Creek included. Major Anthony, Wynkoop's successor, first resisted, then went along.
• The fort's 1st Colorado officers objected. Many had been on the Smoky Hill expedition and believed Black Kettle had prevented a bloody battle and likely saved their lives; they knew the people camped at the fort and called the plan premeditated murder. One officer resigned rather than go. When Lieutenant Joe Cramer voiced their concerns, Chivington exploded that it was "right and honorable to use any means to kill Indians that would kill women and children," and "damn any man who is in sympathy with Indians."
• Chivington threatened to arrest Soule for his criticism. Anthony then persuaded Soule the real target was the Dog Soldier camps farther north and the Kiowas and Comanches, and Soule reluctantly went along.

After nightfall, about 675 U.S. Volunteers — nearly 250 of the 1st Colorado and 425 of the 3rd under Colonel George Laird Shoup — rode northeast, guided by former mountain man James Beckwourth and about a dozen other scouts, among them Robert Bent, pressed into service and likely unaware he was leading troops against his mother's people. Just before sunrise they halted about a mile south of a camp of 140 to 150 lodges — an estimated 700 to 750 people under 20 chiefs or headmen, with as many as 2,000 horses nearby.

The attack

It was Tuesday morning. Women were rekindling fires and fetching water; teenagers such as Tomahawk, Little Bear and Kingfisher were heading out to the horse herds. Chivington reminded his officers of women and children killed on the Platte River that year and, by later testimony, ordered no prisoners.

• In the dim light the troops were first taken for buffalo, until herders and women gave the alarm. Black Kettle raised the American flag an Indian agent had given him, with a small white flag beneath, as instructed. Many gathered around his lodge; others fled upstream.
• Black Kettle, White Antelope, Stands-in-the-Water and the Arapaho Left Hand walked out to meet the soldiers, thinking they might be General Curtis's messengers. Left Hand was mortally wounded. George Bent later recalled that White Antelope sang his death song — only the earth and the mountains live long — until he was shot down.
• Big Head gathered 20 to 30 men west of the bluffs to try to disrupt the attack; they were killed in the holding action. Artillery fired over the village, and people ran up the creekbed, which soldiers said seemed to "crawl with humanity."
• Soule's and Cramer's 1st Colorado men stayed out of the killing; some said they fired high. For them, their word to these people had been broken by their own commanders.
• About an hour after the attack began, the village was declared "cleared," and the attack moved upstream to sand pits the fleeing Cheyennes had dug. Soldiers surrounded the pits and fired into them, then brought up howitzers at almost point-blank range — a "carnival of carnage," one soldier said. Over 100 men, women and children died there. A dozen or more elders died near the village, among them White Antelope, Stands in the Water, and Lone Bear and his wife.
• The poorly trained 3rd Regiment dissolved into a mob. Soldiers pursued people for 8 to 10 miles, shot wounded women where they lay, and one captain had men shoot into people hiding under the sand. When soldiers brought in two or three women and their children as prisoners, Lieutenant Harry Richmond shot each of them at point-blank range.
• George Bent, Black Kettle, Little Bear and about 100 others dug in 1 to 2 miles farther upstream and held off about 200 troops all day, probably surviving because the artillery ran out of ammunition. Bent was shot through the hip; everyone in the pit but Black Kettle and Little Bear was wounded.

The mutilation of the dead began that day and resumed the next: scalps, ears and sexual organs were cut away and jewelry taken, by officers and soldiers alike. One scalp hung in Denver City Hall for years before passing to the Colorado Historical Society and finally back to tribal representatives. Under cover of darkness, survivors searched for relatives or trudged northeast toward the Smoky Hill camps, which sent help. Black Kettle found his wife, wounded nine times; she lived to show her wounds to treaty commissioners in 1865.

The count, and the truth

On Wednesday, November 30, Chivington had the dead counted. He reported hundreds of warriors killed; his staff gave 300 to 800; other soldiers counted 100 to 150 bodies. The reports denied or played down that women, children and elders had died — yet most of the Cheyenne and Arapaho dead were noncombatants, killed in the pits. At least 16 soldiers were killed and as many as 78 wounded, some possibly by their own crossfire.

The "Bloody Third" paraded through Denver with scalps and body parts, and a string of scalps drew applause in a theater. But the word "massacre" soon spread. Soule wrote to Wynkoop that it had lasted six to eight hours and predicted hard fighting that winter; by late December a Black Hawk newspaper reported that some returning volunteers themselves called Sand Creek a cold-blooded massacre.

The Cheyenne and Arapaho survived. In the Smoky Hill camps, survivors told what had happened on what they called the Little Dry River. They knew what Chivington, Evans and most of white Colorado did not: the war on the plains had not ended at Sand Creek — it had just begun.

Part of a series: The Road to Sand Creek · Legacies of Sand Creek

Sources

Based on "Overview of the Sand Creek Massacre," National Park Service, Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site; a work of the United States government in the public domain.