SAND CREEK MASSACRE NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, Colo. — Craig Moore knows that Sand Creek can be a hard sell, especially to a group of teenagers.
Groggy from the 2 1/2-hour drive from Denver, they pile out of two Chevy Suburbans and stand, almost bored, in the shade of junipers growing beside a picnic table.
“This is no Disneyland, no Grand Canyon,” Moore says by way of introduction. “This is a sacred place where horrible things, unspeakable acts took place.”
Moore talks slowly as if he hasn’t said this before, but he has. Words just don’t come easily when talking about the enormity of Sand Creek.
“One hundred and fifty two years ago, what happened here left an indelible mark on the land.”
Twitchy adolescence in check, the teens start to pay attention. Moore, who recently retired from the National Park Service, started working as a ranger at Sand Creek in 2004. There are few better guides.
He tells a story as dark as Sand Creek, where, in 1864, federal soldiers stormed a peaceful camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho, killing more than 200.
Moore leads the group on a half-mile walk to an overlook with commanding views north to a distant stand of cottonwoods.
“Spread out before you,” he says, “as far as you can see, is where the massacre took place, nearly 30 square miles.”
The students squint in the bright sun as if trying to look back in time and see the soldiers and horses fanning across these plains, hear the rattle of equipment, the crack of carbine fire and the screams that followed.
“There is no sound worse than the sound of babies crying,” Moore says.
Almost 180 miles southeast of Denver, Sand Creek is an unusual property for the park service. Its visitors center is a double-wide trailer that also serves as office space. Its primary feature is a one-mile trail on a bluff that overlooks the killing field where no one is allowed.
Nearly a dozen interpretive signs along the bluff trail lay out the history. Beyond that, though, there is little more than the land stretching to the far-away horizon, a stark canvas that seems to compete with the sky for emptiness.
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NO PRISONERS TAKEN
A phone rings in Fort Washakie, Wyo., and Norma Gourneau answers. She is willing to talk about her family’s experience at Sand Creek.
“Yes,” she says. “I don’t mind.”
Gourneau is Northern Cheyenne and superintendent of the Wind River Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As a little girl, she listened to her great-grandmother, May Woman, born in 1880, share memories of that day at Heseovo’eo’he’e, as Sand Creek was known. Her older brothers and sisters survived the massacre.
“We all lived under the same roof,” Gourneau says. “There was my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother. We heard a lot of stories and didn’t realize how significant they would be until later in life.”
Gourneau remembers the tears and how they scared her. She could not understand how someone so strong could cry over something that occurred so long ago.
When Chivington’s soldiers arrived at the bluffs overlooking the Big Sandy the morning of Nov. 29, they saw about 140 lodges staked out for nearly a half a mile. Any questions the soldiers had about the purpose of their mission were quickly answered.
Under Chivington’s orders, troops began firing into the camp. Black Kettle, one of the Cheyenne chiefs, stepped out from his lodge where an American flag and a white flag flew.
Although renegade factions had attacked white settlers in previous months, the tribes at Sand Creek wanted peace. Their chiefs saw the futility of fighting. They walked toward the mounted soldiers, hoping to understand what was happening, but they were quickly overwhelmed.
All but Black Kettle were killed.
Women and children were fleeing up the creek, trying to hide, trying to escape. They crawled into tree trunks; they hid beneath the sand of the river bank. The soldiers followed.
Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors tried to stand against them but bullets, coming from carbines and four mountain howitzers, struck the lodges “like a hard rain or a heavy storm,” according to one survivor.
The massacre lasted eight hours. No prisoners were taken. Trophies — body parts, jewelry — were cut from corpses, and two days later the village was burned.
In the end an estimated 230 Indians were killed, says Moore; no one knows how many died of their wounds. When the soldiers dug for water, the sand ran red with blood.
Why Chivington attacked is not a simple question. Propagandists at the time claimed the tribes might align themselves with the Confederacy. Racists demonized the Native Americans and their culture.
Campbell looks to the outcome for his answer. Within six years, the Kansas Pacific Railroad had laid tracks, just north of Sand Creek, to Denver. The Cheyenne and Arapaho had abandoned their land in Colorado Territory.
Today the tribes live in Oklahoma, Wyoming and Montana.
May Woman died when Gorneau was 6, and the tears didn’t stop. Only the fear changed to anger, anger over the butchery, over the parading of trophies through the streets of Denver, over the betrayal of trust.
Rather than deny these feelings, Gourneau confronted them. She visited Sand Creek in 1996 for the first time and stood on the bluffs where a knee-high memorial had been placed in 1950.
“Sand Creek Battle Ground,” it read, using a century-old description of the site that was both inaccurate and exculpating. The truth — Sand Creek as a massacre — had to be spoken.
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