Sand Creek: The Colorado War, 1851-1865

A dog could drag eighty pounds. A horse could drag three hundred and cover twenty miles before breakfast. For a century the Tsitsistas, the Cheyenne, and their Arapaho allies had been remaking their lives around that difference, and by the 1840s the country between the Platte and the Arkansas was theirs: camps of hundreds strung along the Smoky Hill, horse herds in the thousands, and buffalo robes dressed by women's hands and weighed at the counter at Bent's Fort.

In 1851 a great treaty council near Fort Laramie recognized that country as theirs. Then gold was found at the foot of the Rockies in 1858, and within a few years Colorado had a territorial governor, John Evans, towns full of miners, and Cheyenne and Arapaho bands pressed onto shrinking ground and short of food. When the Hungate family was killed near Denver in June 1864 and their bodies were displayed in the town, panic swept the territory. Governor Evans raised a regiment of hundred-day volunteers, and Colonel John Chivington, the district's commander and a man with political ambitions, took it into the field.

That autumn Black Kettle's Cheyenne and a smaller Arapaho band camped on Sand Creek, believing they were under the Army's protection, with an American flag flying over the lodges. At dawn on November 29, 1864, Chivington's seven hundred men attacked. More than a hundred and fifty people were killed, most of them women, children and old people, and soldiers carried trophies from the bodies back to Denver.

The war on the plains widened after it. In 1865 a congressional committee condemned the attack, but Chivington had already left the Army, and he was never tried.