“Sand Creek” by Francée Covington

On my way to visit the Denver Art Museum, I encounter an art installation composed of a series of nine-foot-tall bright red Y-shaped towers with writing on them. The lettering lets me know that this isn’t just any shade of red, but blood red, because the installation is an homage to the Native American tribes all but wiped out as a result of American Imperialism.

 

I stand under one and then another. The words on the second Y go from top to bottom and read:

Gold
WARS
STARVE
SUFFER

 

1858
YUTAHS
8000

 

1878
YUTAHS
4000

 

1920
YUTAHS
2000

RENEW

 

One of the last monuments I view has four simple lines—one date, three
words. I stand on my toes and crane my neck to read:

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1864
SAND
CREEK
MASSACRE

​

I think because it’s so stark, the wording so succinct, that this event must have been so horrendous that it stands alone in the annals of local history or because most local people viewing the installation will already be familiar with the event and therefore nothing more needs to be said. On this day, I don’t know anything about Sand Creek. Days later, when I return home, I discover through research that I am right on both counts. In the bloody history of U.S.  government and Native American relations, the Sand Creek Massacre is a singular monstrosity, a crime against humanity which makes it difficult for me to keep a dry eye as I read about the history.

 

In 1851 the land holdings of the Cheyenne and Arapaho were vast, and this was recognized through a formal treaty with some Indian Nations, including the Cheyenne and Arapaho. But the discovery of gold in 1858 precipitated the Pikes Peak Gold Rush and the flood of whites to the territories. In 1861, in an effort to bring peace to their people, ten chiefs agreed to cede the majority of their land to the United States government because the Treaty of Fort Wise was to last “as long as grass shall grow and the waters flow.” In other words, forever. The land holdings of Native Americans were redefined and they were left with territory one-thirteenth the size of the reserve they’d been allotted by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

The first time I see the name of the man responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre, I’m confused. It seems to be the name of a close relative, John Covington. I look again, and am relieved to have misread it. It’s John Chivington. In April 1864, soldiers under the command of Colonel Chivington and territorial governor John Evans started attacking and destroying Cheyenne camps, including their summer buffalo-hunting camp.

Chivington said, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.” Eight hundred to one thousand troops left Fort Lyon, Colorado under the leadership of Chivington with a single goal—to wipe out the Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek. On the morning of November 29, 1864, they attacked.

When the Cheyenne and Arapaho realized that troops were descending upon them, they raised the American flag and a white flag as signs of peace and that they were under the protection of the federal government. Seeing the flags, two officers ordered their men to stand down. Those pieces of cloth meant nothing to the majority of soldiers. Chivington had set the tone weeks earlier with his admonition to the troops that every Indian should be dispatched: “Kill and scalp all big and little; nits make lice.” The great chief White Antelope, who’d been one of the proponents of signing the peace at Fort Wise, ran out yelling “Stop! Stop!” Realizing too late what was happening, he sang his death
song:

Nothing lives long
Only the earth and the mountains. 

​

Many eyewitnesses, including scouts who had been forced to take
the military to the hunting camp, came forward to tell the truth about what
happened that awful day.

​

Jis to think of that dog Chivington and his dirty hounds, up
thar at San Creek. His men shot down squaws, and blew the
brain out of little innocent children. You call sich soldiers
Christians, so ye? And Indians savages? What der yer ’spose
our Heavenly Father, who made both them and us, thinks of
these things?
—Kit Carson, Frontiersman,
Indian Agent, and Army officer

 

In going over the battleground the next day, I did not see the
body of a man, woman or child but was scalped, and in many
instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible
manner—men, women, and children’s privates cut out… I also
heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the
private parts of females and stretched them over the saddlebows

and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.
 

—Lieutenant James Connor,
eyewitness testimony to Congress, 1865

 

 

Slaughtered: 133 Native Americans, including 105 women and children. Most of the Indians were killed by the four twelve-pound cannon balls fired upon them. The night before the attack, the soldiers had been drinking heavily and this resulted in many of them being killed by “friendly fire” during the Massacre.

Some Cheyenne were able to escape and walked day and night, fifty miles to the Cheyenne winter hunting camp. A number of investigations were launched, outrage was expressed, but no charges were ever brought against Chivington and his men.

My walk among the monuments lasts a somber fifteen or twenty minutes. At that time, I suspected Sand Creek was some sort of seminal event in our nation’s life, but on that day, I was ignorant about the details. I take a few photos and sit on a bench facing the monuments. My suspicions will be confirmed later when I return home and do some reading on Sand Creek. I sit on the viewing bench close by and try to sort my thoughts. As the descendent of a Cherokee great-grandfather, I’m familiar with our people’s Trail of Tears, the  forced march and migration from our ancestral lands—thousands of lives lost, our lands gone, our future bleak. No journey was ever more aptly named.

I close my eyes and ask God to give us more wisdom and care as a nation. That we be more diplomatic in our dealings with other people and less warlike, that we learn from past atrocities. But, of course, we have to be taught the history in order to learn from it, and Native American history isn’t taught in our schools. Only the victor gets to write and disseminate the official version of what happened.

In 2007, Sand Creek was named a National Historic Site and is now preserved by the National Park Service. No matter how many times I return to Denver, it is a site I will never visit.