The Story of the Massacre Continued
The returning volunteers were hailed as heroes in Denver, but Washington D.C. took a less favorable view of their actions. Chagrined by reports from Wynkoop and Capt. Silas Soule (who not only ordered his men to stop shooting at Sand Creek but actually placed them between the attackers and the retreating Indians), Congress and the U.S. Army launched separate investigations. Though both entities deplored the massacre, neither sought punitive measures against those who'd carried it out. The two ranking officers of the U.S. force—Chivington and George L. Shoup—both left the Army for good in early 1865, though they did so voluntarily and with full honors.
Warfare between the United States and the Plains Indians continued for another generation, by which time the Sand Creek massacre was but a faded memory.
It wasn't until 1993 that anyone noticed the Sand Creek battle site missing. That year two hobbyists went there, to what had always been recognized as the killing ground, hoping to find some souvenirs for their collection of 19th-century military artifacts. But their metal detectors stood mute, registering nothing. They reported this oddity to the Colorado Historical Society, which decided to look into the matter. Surely the collectors had made some mistake. Battlegrounds do not simply vanish into thin air.
A series of investigations ensued. Historians sifted through the archives while geologists sifted through the soil. The Army sent its experts out to Colorado; so did the Arapahoes and Cheyennes, whose oral history of the Sand Creek massacre has come down through the generations. Aerial photographs were taken and matched against old military maps; tribal prayers were invoked, that they might bring spiritual guidance. Taken together, these lines of inquiry pointed to one very specific location, not far from where Rush Creek meets Sand Creek.
On May 24, 1999, volunteers swept the area with metal detectors and confirmed the investigators' guess: this was the place. Bullets, flint stones, buckles, latch springs—the scatter had lain there all those years, as thick as the bodies that littered the prairie the day after the massacre. This was no stone monument, no tidy atonement for long-ago sins; it was an immediate and open wound, the weapons that caused it still palpable, the flesh that received it still torn. Finding Sand Creek reawakened the pain of it, much as frozen fingers throb when they finally start to thaw. But better to ache than be numb. For more than a century the reality of Sand Creek was hiding in plain sight—there for us to look at, if only we would. After 133 years, at last we see what really happened. It is an ugly vision; but that's how it often goes with history.
So what are we to do with this recovered memory? The misplacement of the massacre site is easily corrected—but how to correct the massacre itself? It can't be done in any remedial sense; we can rewrite history, but not the past. The Sand Creek massacre happened; we can't take it back, however badly we might wish to. Nor, as a practical matter, can we give back all the land assigned to the Cheyennes and Arapahoes in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1851— not without displacing three million people.
But we might give them back Sand Creek.
Continue reading The Story of the Massacre.