Home > Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity > Sand Creek Massacre

During the summer of 1864 an Indian war erupted over the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Colorado Territory following the murder of Cheyenne Chief Lean Bear. Lean Bear, a leading peacemaker who had previously met with President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., was shot from his horse without warning by U.S. troops during a Kansas buffalo hunt. The troops were acting under orders from Colonel John M. Chivington who commanded the military district of Colorado: "Find Indians wherever you can and kill them" (The War of the Rebellion, 1880–1881, pp. 403–404).

In September 1864 the principal chief of the Cheyenne, Black Kettle, and other Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders hazarded a visit to Denver to hold peace talks with Chivington and Governor John Evans. The chiefs were assured that they would be safe from attack if they made the trip to Fort Lyon on the Arkansas River. When Black Kettle arrived there, however, post commander Major Scott J. Anthony turned him away, ordering the Cheyenne leader to remain in camp on Sand Creek, forty miles north of the fort (Hoig, 1961, p.125).

In Denver, meanwhile, Chivington gathered his military forces for a strike against the Cheyenne. He and his command arrived at Fort Lyon at noon on November 28 and prepared for an assault on the Indian camp. With his Colorado First Cavalry, Anthony joined Chivington. But other officers, who had helped escort Black Kettle to Denver, attempted to dissuade Chivington from such an attack. Chivington, a former Methodist minister, threatened to put them in chains, ranting, "Damn any man who is in sympathy with an Indian!" (U.S. Senate, 1867, p. 47).

Chivington's army of nearly seven hundred men with four mule-drawn mountain howitzers arrived at the bend of Sand Creek at the break of dawn, November 29. Even as the cavalry began its charge and howitzers shelled the village, Black Kettle hoisted a U.S. flag over his lodge. Chief White Antelope, who had visited Washington, D.C., in 1851, pressed forward to meet the soldiers, insisting that the village was peaceful and posed no threat. He was cut down midstream.

Indian villagers fled from their lodges only to be pursued in every direction and killed by the mounted troops. A number of women and children took refuge in a cattail pond. Soldiers surrounded it and began shooting them at will. The atrocities did not end when the battle was over. Witnesses described the horrific aftermath. John Simpson Smith, a long-time Cheyenne associate who was in the camp and whose half-blood son was murdered by Chivington's men, with his body dragged behind a horse, testified as follows: "They [the Indians] were terribly mutilated, lying there in the water and sand, dead and dying, making many struggles. They were badly mutilated" (U.S. House of Representatives, 1865, p. 8).

Chivington and his Colorado Third troops returned to Denver and proudly displayed Cheyenne scalps and other body parts they had removed from men, women, and even children. Newspapers and citizens alike exulted in the soldiers' victory. The intensity of hatred became apparent when Senator Benjamin Doolittle later addressed a Denver crowd regarding Indian policy. His audience shouted him down, exclaiming, "Exterminate them! Exterminate them!" (Scott, 1994, p. 168).

Chivington's massacre at Sand Creek raised a fire-storm of protest nationally and led to investigations by both the U.S. Army and Congress. The embattled Indian tribes of the Plains saw the U.S. military action as strong evidence of the white man's perfidy. Black Kettle, who had somehow survived, felt he had betrayed his people in trying to make peace. "My shame is as big as the earth," he said. "I once thought that I was the only man that persevered to be the friend of the white man, but it is hard for me to believe the white man any more" (Annual Report, 1865, p. 704).

SEE ALSO Indigenous Peoples; Massacres; Native Americans; Trail of Tears

Stan Hoig