Witness to Infamy: Sand Creek Massacre Site Memorialized by the National Park Service

The National Park System became one park richer this past April with the designation of the Sand Creek Massacre battlefield as a national historic site. “The massacre was a defining event in both tribal and western history,” says former superintendent Alexa Roberts, now in charge of nearby Bent’s Old Fort and the Southeast Colorado Group. “Its untold story is long overdue.” Roberts, who recently won a National Park Service Appleman-Judd-Lewis Cultural Resource Stewardship award for her work at the massacre site, says that turning the land into the 391st unit of the National Park System was not an easy task. “Sand Creek took the effort of a lot of people.”

The tumultuous journey began in 1999 when former Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell sponsored legislation to get the site recognized. A Cheyenne himself, it was something he had wanted for decades. “The massacre is a real black eye in Colorado history,” he says.

Located on the rural southeastern plains of Colorado, the infamous field, bordered by a dried up streambed and a number of “witness trees,” is where Colonel John Chivington and his 700 volunteer soldiers, acting on tensions between settlers and Native Americans, ignored a waving white flag and brutally attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village on November 29, 1864. Taken by surprise, the Indians were defenseless against weapons such as 12-pounder mountain howitzers, and over 160 people, most of them women, children, and the elderly, lost their lives. The soldiers lost 16.

Most of the indians never realized the impending danger, partly because they had received word from the government to await instructions for peace negotiations. “They were placid, peaceful, and unsuspecting,” Campbell says. One Cheyenne chief, White Antelope, stoically repeated a death chant, “Nothing lives long except the earth and the mountains,” as bullets tore into him.

After mutilating the corpses and burning the village, Chivington and his men were paraded as heroes until the ugly truth led to three federal investigations. No one ever spent a day in jail, however, and the only justice was a U.S. Army condemnation calling the attack “a cowardly and cold-blooded slaughter, sufficient to cover its perpetrators with indelible infamy, and the face of every American with shame and indignation.”

Before the field could be memorialized its location had to be identified. For decades people thought the massacre was in a bend in Sand Creek. But its boundaries had never been definitively recorded, and a metal detector search turned up little. “It wasn’t a place you could point to, like a tree or a rock–it was a running massacre that stretched miles,” Campbell says. The area was finally pinpointed three quarters of a mile away, through oral histories and old maps, confirmed by the metal detector discovery of Indian village artifacts and the remnants of the ammunition used against them. Most telling were fragments of the howitzer cannonballs.

But then came the challenge of working with the 17 owners of the 12,488-acre patch, as well as the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, the Conservation Fund, Kiowa County, and the Colorado Historical Society–all key to acquiring the site.

Given the unfulfilled treaty to repay the Indians, it’s probably too late for justice, but not for awareness. Roberts is using her award as seed money for an archives and research center in the park’s gateway community. “I hope it’s a place where people can reflect on the relevance of the massacre to the timeless issues of fear, territorialism, and genocide that afflict people all over the world throughout history,” she says. With the site’s new designation, that’s just as the Cheyenne would want it, Campbell says. “It’s now a sanctuary and a place to pray.”

Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site is on the web at www.nps.gov/sand.