The Story of the Massacre Continued
While the Third was girding for warfare, Cheyenne and Arapahoe leaders were suing for peace. During the last weeks of September 1864 a group of Cheyenne and Arapahoe leaders headed by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle gained an audience with Maj. Edward Wynkoop, ranking officer at Fort Lyon, the largest garrison in the vicinity (near present-day Lamar).
The chiefs declared their desire for an end to all hostilities, and Wynkoop was sufficiently convinced of their sincerity to organize another council, this one held just east of Denver at Fort Weld on September 28. Both Evans and Chivington attended; neither was impressed by what he heard. When you are ready to make peace, Chivington told Black Kettle coldly, go and lay your arms down before Major Wynkoop. Five weeks later, in early November, he yanked Wynkoop from his command and gave the new man in charge, Maj. Scott Anthony (a first cousin of women's rights pioneer Susan B.), the following instructions: "The Cheyennes will have to be soundly whipped before they will be quiet. If any of them are caught in your vicinity kill them, as that is the only way."
Coming from a man who'd risked his life to end the sufferings of an enslaved people, such race hatred may seem an unfathomable breach of character. But to Chivington there was no inconsistency. In his mind the Indians were nothing like the slaves. The latter had embraced the Bible and adopted English, whereas the Indians were savages and devils who murdered Christians and consigned them to purgatory by violating their corpses. They were the oppressors, not the oppressed. The minister had confronted evil throughout his life, yet never had he seen it on a scale such as this.
On the eve of the massacre (one of his lieutenants later testified), Chivington steeled his troops with this curse: "Damn any man who is in sympathy with the Indians!" His crusade against the heathens trumped everything else, even the cause of emancipation. In preparation for the attack the colonel had frontiersman Jim Beckwourth—a former slave—rousted from his Denver home and pressed into service (on pain of death) as an involuntary scout. Having fought so passionately against slavery, Chivington now—one year after the Emancipation Proclamation, and with the Civil War still raging—enslaved a free black man in the name of liberty.
The Colorado Third Volunteers heeded Chivington's words during the attack on Sand Creek: they showed no sympathy for their victims. As the cavalry thundered forward, Black Kettle raised an American flag and a white handkerchief to signal the village's friendly disposition. He was answered with gunfire. Most of the camp's best defenders were absent, out on a hunting trip; the population mainly comprised women, children, and aged or infirm men. George and Charles Bent, half-white sons of frontier trader William Bent, were present; so, too, were some of the elderly chiefs whose peace offering the colonel had spurned at Fort Weld in September. Two of them—White Antelope and Yellow Wolf—were killed and scalped this day.
Continue reading The Story of the Massacre.