Sand Creek, November Twenty-Ninth, Eighteen Sixty-Four

The camp was flying an American flag and a white truce flag when the soldiers came.

Chief Black Kettle of the Southern Cheyenne had been told by United States Army officers that his people were safe. He had led his band of several hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women, children, and old men, to winter camp on Sand Creek in the eastern Colorado Territory. The warriors were away hunting. Black Kettle had been given the flags himself, by the commander at Fort Lyon, as tokens of United States protection.

On the morning of November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four, Colonel John Chivington led approximately seven hundred Colorado Territory Volunteer Cavalry soldiers in a dawn attack on that camp. Chivington was a Methodist minister who had said publicly that he wished to kill and scalp all Indians. The soldiers rode through the camp. Between one hundred fifty and two hundred thirty Cheyenne and Arapaho people were killed. The Congressional record documents what soldiers did afterward. Chivington's own men, in sworn testimony before Congress, described it.

The Colorado Territory celebrated. Newspapers praised Chivington. The scalps of Cheyenne women were displayed on a Denver theater stage.

Congress investigated. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War issued a report in eighteen sixty-five calling Sand Creek a massacre and condemning Chivington. No criminal charges were ever filed. Chivington was out of the Army and could not be court-martialed. He spent the rest of his life defending what he had done.

Black Kettle survived Sand Creek. He was still flying the American flag four years later, in November of eighteen sixty-eight, when Lieutenant Colonel George Custer attacked his camp again on the Washita River in Indian Territory. Black Kettle and his wife were killed crossing the river.

The state of Colorado did not formally apologize for Sand Creek until twenty fourteen. The National Historic Site was authorized by Congress in two thousand and opened to the public in two thousand seven. The Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana, the descendant nations, participated in designing how that ground would be remembered.

The creek still runs there. It is quiet, and flat, and the sky is very wide.