Washita Battlefield: Two Versions of the Same Morning

Black Kettle had survived the Sand Creek Massacre. That was in November of eighteen sixty-four, when Colonel John Chivington led Colorado militia troops in an attack on a Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho village on Sand Creek in Colorado Territory while the men were away hunting. Black Kettle had been camped there under an American flag, having been told by Army officers that the flag meant protection. He survived, and his wife survived, and for the next four years he continued to pursue peace with the United States government despite what had happened at Sand Creek.

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. Black Kettle and his wife were killed while attempting to cross the river to flee. Custer reported the attack as a great military victory, writing of one hundred three warriors killed.

Cheyenne oral history and subsequent scholarly inquiry present a more complicated account. Black Kettle was a peace chief. He had attended treaty conferences. He had been, by every measure available, attempting to prevent exactly the kind of conflict that killed him. The breakdown between the Custer account and the Cheyenne account centers not on whether the attack happened, but on who was there and what it meant.

The National Park Service site at Washita Battlefield presents both. The interpretive materials include Custer's reports and the Cheyenne oral tradition passed down through the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. The site does not adjudicate between them. That is an honest decision, because the record does not adjudicate between them either.

What the record confirms is this: Black Kettle had survived Sand Creek, kept faith with the United States, and was killed in a surprise attack four years later, on the Washita River, a mile from where you are now.