Black Kettle National Grassland: The Chief Who Survived Sand Creek and Died at the Washita

The Black Kettle National Grassland is named for a man the United States killed twice.

The first attempt was at Sand Creek, Colorado Territory, on November twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-four. Colonel John Chivington led Colorado militia troops in a dawn attack on a Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment. Black Kettle was a peace chief. He had attended treaty conferences. He flew an American flag and a white flag above his lodge because Army officers had told him these symbols guaranteed protection. Chivington attacked anyway. Between one hundred fifty and two hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed, the majority of them women, children, and elderly people. Black Kettle and his wife survived, though his wife was shot nine times. They fled.

For the next four years, Black Kettle continued attending treaty councils. He signed the Medicine Lodge Treaty of eighteen sixty-seven, agreeing to move his people to a reservation in Indian Territory. He was, by every account including the Army's own records, a man who had chosen accommodation over resistance and paid for it at Sand Creek, and continued choosing it afterward.

On the morning of November twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-eight, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry in a pre-dawn attack on Black Kettle's winter camp on the Washita River. The soldiers came in from four directions. Black Kettle and his wife were killed attempting to cross the river. Custer reported the killing of one hundred three warriors. Cheyenne oral history and subsequent inquiry have consistently disputed that accounting, noting the high proportion of women and children among the dead.

The National Park Service site at Washita Battlefield, three miles east of here, interprets both accounts without adjudicating between them. The grassland is named for Black Kettle. He did not live to see it.