Oh What a Slaughter (13 page)

Bull Bear

Of all the leaders of the southern Cheyenne, Black Kettle seemed the most sincere in his determination to live in peace with the whites. In fact he was sincere to the point of naïveté. He had been given an American flag in 1861 and had acquired a white flag as well, both of which he waved frantically to no effect as Chivington and his men rode down on the camp.

In the weeks before Sand Creek, the routes into Denver came under increasing pressure from roving bands of Indians, and every attack or small conflict merely strengthened Chivington's hand. Soon enough, with Governor John Evans's consent, a poster was printed asking for volunteers to fight the Indians. The volunteers were to serve for one hundred days—Chivington easily raised a sizable force, but, in casting his net wide, he took with him a number of men, such as young Captain Silas Soule, who were not convinced of the necessity of the proceedings. Several such men were opposed to massacre as a method of control. Some of the men, particularly those under Silas Soule, refused to fire when the time came: some, including Soule, testified against Chivington in the rather unhelpful inquiries following the massacre.

Silas Soule

Even so, Chivington had plenty of firepower and an abundance of converts. He was six foot four and his towering presence easily cowed such waverers as dared to question the operation. Chivington was no coward. Twice in his career as a fire-breathing minister he had faced down formidable opposition, sometimes preaching with a loaded revolver on both sides of his pulpit. The
congregation's objection was probably to his Free-Soil, antislavery belief, convictions that are to his credit and which he never abandoned.

Just as intensely as he longed to free the slaves, Chivington also longed to exterminate the Indians, even unto the women and children. Well before Sand Creek he had been quoted as saying “Nits breed lice.” General Sherman, for a time at least, shared this view. And in fact no effort was made to spare the women and children at Sand Creek, at least not by the troops operating directly under Chivington's command.

General William Tecumseh Sherman

As with all massacres, there are puzzling lacunae in the many narratives of the survivors. How far from Sand Creek was Fort Lyon, from which the expedition set out at 8:00
P.M.
on the evening of
November 28? Some thought it was forty miles, some thought thirty, and others said merely “a few.”

The vast company troop, somewhere between seven hundred and one thousand men, left the fort under cover of darkness, so that their movements would not be detected. Of course, had there been any Indians in the vicinity who were not stone-deaf they would not have needed to see much to know that a large body of men was on the move. The troops were traveling with artillery, which by itself would have made a good deal of clatter. The fact that, however far they came, they were in position above Black Kettle's camp at dawn on the 29th suggests that they pressed on at a good clip through the night.

Jim Beckwourth

Controversy lingers about the scouts that led Chivington and his men across that darkling plain. One was the half-breed scout Jack Smith, who so ran afoul of Chivington that he was executed after the battle. Another was the old mountain man Jim
Beckwourth, who lived to testify against Chivington at the inquiry; whether he witnessed the whole battle is disputed. And there was Robert Bent, son of William, who, some think, was forced to lead Chivington to the camp. If so Robert Bent must have been quite uncomfortable with what was happening, since he knew that various of his siblings were likely to be in the camp. All the Bents survived, though George received an ugly wound in the hip.

In the first predawn moments when the troops began thundering toward the camp, some of the Cheyenne women thought a buffalo herd must be nearby. They soon learned better. Chivington and the troopers always maintained that a Cheyenne fired first; if so, it was a lonely effort. About two-thirds of the Cheyenne in camp were women and children—there were perhaps fifty or sixty warriors. What saved the survivors were the steep creek banks, in which the fighters among the Cheyenne at once began to dig shallow rifle pits. The steepness of the banks enabled some to flee southeastward without exposing themselves to a fusillade from the troops. That the surprised Cheyenne managed to put up any resistance at all is a testament to their fighting spirit. Not for nothing did George Bird Grinell call them the “fighting Cheyenne.”

Young Captain Silas Soule immediately infuriated Chivington by refusing to order his men to fire; he even briefly interposed his troops between the Indians and the volunteers. Some say the ensuing battle lasted from dawn until mid-afternoon; others say the mopping-up operation continued all day. The few warriors who survived the first assault dug their rifle pits deeper and fought bravely to cover the retreat of those who fled beneath the creek banks. Black Kettle's wife was shot nine times, and yet, when darkness fell, he carried her to Fort Lyon, where the doctors saved her.

Various stories from this battle exist in so many versions that they have become tropes. One involved a little Indian boy who
stood watching the soldiers. One volunteer shot at him but missed; a second volunteer announced that he would “hit the little son-of-a-bitch,” but he too missed. A third took up the challenge: he didn't miss.

Another often-told story involved a wounded Indian woman who held up her arms beseechingly, hoping to be spared; but, like the old, bloody-eyed woman in the Odessa Steps sequence of
Battleship Potemkin
, she was hacked down.

The Cheyenne fought gallantly, well into the afternoon—a few of the warriors managed to slip away. When the firing tapered off, the looting began. As at Mountain Meadows, fingers and ears were lopped off, to be stripped of rings and ornaments. Almost every corpse was scalped and many were sexually mutilated. A kind of speciality of Sand Creek was the cutting out of female pudenda, to be dried and used as hatbands.

Chivington and his men returned to Denver, to celebrity and wild acclaim. The scalps—one hundred in number—were exhibited in a Denver theater. Chivington, very much the hero of the hour, claimed to have wiped out the camp.

In fact, though, quite a few Cheyenne and Arapaho survived Sand Creek, including all of William Bent's sons. The Indians hurried off to tell the story to other tribes, while the one-hundred-day volunteers celebrated.

Chivington's most fervent admirer, Colonel George Shoop, confidently announced that Sand Creek had taken care of the Indian problem on the Great Plains—his comment was the prairie equivalent of Neville Chamberlain's famous “peace in our time” speech, after Hitler had outpointed him at Munich. Shoop was every bit as wrong as Chamberlain. Sand Creek, far from persuading the Indians that they should behave, immediately set the prairies ablaze.

It sparked the outrage among the Indian people that led inevitably
to Fetterman and the Little Bighorn. The Indians immediately launched an attack against the big freighting station at Julesburg, in northeastern Colorado. But for another blown ambush by the young braves, they might have wiped out the station. As it was, they killed about forty men. The trails into Denver that had been dangerous enough before Sand Greek became hugely more dangerous.

In the twelve years between Sand Creek and the Little Bighorn there were many pitched battles. Some, like Custer's attack on the Washita in 1868, in which Black Kettle and his tough wife were finally killed, went to the whites; others, such as Fetter-man or the Battle of the Rosebud, went to the Indians. All up and down the prairies, from the Adobe Walls fight in Texas to Platte Bridge in Wyoming, a real war was now in progress. Charles Bent became one of the most feared of all Dog Soldiers, killing and torturing any whites he could catch.

In Denver, Chivington's account of the raid did not go long un-challenged. In this case the power of the dead began to make itself felt almost at once. Stories soon seeped out about the terrible mutilations of women and children. People who had fully approved the attack—people tired of apprehension, of being afraid even to venture out of town for a picnic, were nonetheless troubled by some of the horrors they heard about. Stories about mutilated children—despite the “nits breed lice” doctrine—did not play as well as they had at first.

Reports that the Indians hadn't wanted to fight were shouted down by the Chivington mob, but they kept leaking out. The carnage began to sit heavily on certain consciences, as it usually does after massacres. There had been a few soldiers, like Silas Soule, who refused to shoot down helpless Indian women or their children; in time some of them expressed their disgust at the proceedings. Chivington's supporters were well in the majority,
but there
was
a substantial minority opinion and it did get expressed.

Even as the battle began there had been doubters who informed Chivington that the Indians were trying to surrender; but he brushed this aside. He did not want to hear from Indian sympathizers and was not pleased by the least equivocation on the part of his militia. He had gone on a mission of vengeance and he made no bones about that fact. He frequently reminded the soldiers of what had been done to white women in the recent raids, and he succeeded well enough in keeping most of his troops stirred up.

But even Chivington, forceful as he was, did not succeed in banishing all doubt, all regret. The field of battle was one thing; a formal court of inquiry quite another. The formality inherent in even such a crude judicial procedure is about as far as civilized man gets from the dust, smoke, noise, and blood of a battlefield.

The inquiry was ordered by Congress. Once it got underway, Chivington objected to almost every question that was asked. With his towering presence and his power of denunciation he could intimidate many witnesses, but not all witnesses. Silas Soule held his ground and yielded nothing to Chivington's bluster; the preacher made little headway with old Jim Beckwourth either. In the East the greatly respected General Grant gave it as his opinion that what happened at Sand Creek had been nothing more than murder. (He was equally blunt about what happened at the Little Bighorn twelve years later, declaring at once that the tragedy was Custer's fault, a judgment that cannot have pleased the grieving Libbie Custer.)

Despite Chivington's resistance, the commission of inquiry made it clear that what happened at Sand Creek was an out-and-out massacre. Joseph Holt, the army's judge advocate, called it “cowardly and cold blooded slaughter, sufficient to cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy and the face of every American with shame and indignation.”

In this the judge advocate clearly went too far, because there were plenty of American faces in Denver who expressed neither shame nor indignation. Neither Chivington nor Shoop was charged with anything; to have charged them at that moment in Denver would have led to civil insurrection.

In April 1865, three weeks after he had married, Silas Soule, the officer whose testimony had done Chivington the most harm, was assassinated while taking a stroll on a pleasant evening. His murderer was most likely a man named Squiers, who promptly fled to New Mexico. The army sent Lieutenant James Cannon to apprehend him, which Cannon accomplished without undue difficulty. Squiers was returned to Denver but escaped again and headed west. This time Lieutenant Cannon could not pursue him because Lieutenant Cannon had been found dead in his hotel room, probably poisoned. Squiers was never brought to trial.