Sand Creek

On the morning of November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four, a force of roughly seven hundred men of the Colorado cavalry, led by Colonel John Chivington, attacked a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory. The people in that camp believed they were at peace. Their leaders, including the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, had brought them there in accordance with instructions from the territorial governor, and they were camped under a United States flag and a white flag of truce.

The soldiers attacked anyway. Most estimates place the number killed at around one hundred fifty, and roughly two thirds of the dead were women, children, and the elderly. The aftermath was so brutal that it drew condemnation in Congress and in military investigations, which described it not as a battle but as a massacre.

The event deepened decades of conflict on the plains and remains one of the darkest chapters in the state's history. Today the ground is preserved as the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service and opened in two thousand seven, a place established in consultation with the descendant Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes so that what happened there is remembered, and not erased.