My Great- Great- Grandfather and an American Indian Tragedy. Some of my relatives cringed when I first told them of my plans to explore Sand Creek.
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I quickly learned, for instance, that William Allen brought back an Indian scalp from Sand Creek. My father and my uncle remember, as small boys, seeing it at family dinners, hanging on the wall of their grandparents’ house between the kitchen and the dining room. Another artifact sat in my dad’s dresser drawer for decades: a tarnished silver amulet in the shape of a bird, with a half crescent dangling precariously from the bottom. A scrawled note signed by one of my great- great- grandfather’s daughters, Laura A. Brown, described it as a “Beaten silver Charm worn to ward off Death. Taken by the late William Allen from the body of an Indian Killed in the battle of Sand Creek.”One day last year I drove into the hills east of Denver, to the modest ranch- style home of David Halaas, Colorado’s former chief historian. He was sitting in his living room with another eminent Sand Creek expert, Gary Roberts.
When I described my mission, both initially tried to reassure me. Many of the soldiers at Sand Creek didn’t take part in war crimes; some merely guarded captured Indian ponies.
Then I pulled the silver charm out of a plastic bag. Halaas, his eyes welling up, fled the room.
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When he recovered his composure, he said, “That’s explosive. To the Cheyenne, that’s a sacred object.” He cleared his throat. Roberts, a retired history professor with an extravagant beard and a courtly southern drawl, was philosophical. Nearly overnight, the territory’s population swelled by 1.
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They quickly transformed a mining camp on the site of a traditional Arapaho camping ground into a boomtown known as Denver. Gold didn’t pan out, so Allen traded a team of oxen for the homestead rights to 1. Rockies. The stage for the Sand Creek tragedy was set by people far above my ancestor’s pay grade. Evans, an early ally of President Lincoln, was determined to bring Colorado into statehood, and that meant settling the land with farmers and lacing it with railroads. The Cheyenne and Arapaho—and the treaty granting them vast swaths of eastern Colorado—stood in the way.
The ownership, control, or occupancy of a thing, most frequently land or Personal Property, by a person.The U.S. Supreme Court has said that 'there is no. Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill, 1829-1913. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (English) (as Translator) Adams, by. Evening at Home The Juvenile Budget.
At the same time, the top Colorado military official, Col. Chivington, was itching to build on his fame as a Civil War hero at the expense of the increasingly restive Indians.
The political future of the “fighting Parson” depended on it. By the summer of 1. Denver. In June, Indian raiders attacked a ranch just 3. They murdered the ranch manager along with his wife and two small daughters. The bodies, scalped and mutilated, were disinterred and paraded through the streets of Denver. Hysteria periodically swept the town as rumors spread of imminent attacks.
Newspapers published accusations of Indian atrocities, warning darkly that there was only one sure way to deal with the menace. His existence is a curse to himself and to us.”Col. Chivington himself argued in a public speech that even Indian children should not be spared. His motto was to “kill and scalp all, little and big,” he was quoted as saying, because “nits make lice.”When the call came from Gov. Evans for volunteers to fight Indians in August 1. For weeks after the Third Cavalry was formed, there seemed to be little sense of urgency. Army bureaucracy slowly assembled horses, uniforms and guns, the volunteers kept themselves entertained in downtown Denver, running up big bar tabs.
Soon they were being ridiculed as the “Bloodless Third.”According to his service record, William Allen was assigned to Company C, otherwise known as “Morgan’s Battery.” Formed under the command of an accountant- turned- artillery- captain named William H. Morgan, the company included two mountain howitzers. Such weapons, which fired explosive cannon balls and rounds akin to giant shotgun shells, had never been used against Indians in Colorado territory before. Not that most of the men of Company C would have actually touched the howitzers. According to records kept by Jeffrey Campbell, a retired criminal investigator who now works for the National Park Service, there weren’t many professional soldiers in the bunch. Instead, among the roughly 1.
Germany. It seems likely that the bulk of them were there as muscle, to provide a protective perimeter on the battlefield. As their 1. 00- day enlistment dragged on without action, there seemed to be plenty of free time. One of his buddies inked a tattoo on William Allen’s left forearm, according to pension records on file at the National Archives. When the orders finally came to move out, a blizzard had roared through. The men rode their first 8. None of the enlisted men had any idea where they were going; they just knew they were miserable. One enlistee from Company C dropped dead on the trail.
On the afternoon of Nov. Fort Lyon, an outpost on the Arkansas River manned by members of the veteran First Regiment. Chivington revealed to local officers his plan to attack an encampment of Indians 4. Sand Creek. He was met with a torrent of protest. The officers at Fort Lyon well knew that the Cheyenne and Arapaho at the encampment were led by prominent “peace chiefs.” Obeying the instructions of Gov. Evans, the chiefs had placed themselves under the protection of the fort.
One man in particular, a captain named Silas S. Soule, emerged as a leader of the resistance, sealing his reputation as one of the story’s few clear heroes. Soule, an ardent abolitionist and friend of Walt Whitman, told his fellow officers, “Any man who would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.” The Third, unaware of the controversy, along with elements of the First Regiment, close to 7. Indian camp, with some 1. Chivington himself gave the battle charge, eyewitnesses said in various accounts.
When the bullets started flying, the Indians at first assumed it was some sort of mistake. Black Kettle, one of the chiefs, came out of his tent and raised a pole with an American flag that had been presented to him by the commissioner of Indian Affairs—and a white flag, just in case the meaning of the first was unclear. Greeted with a hail of bullets, he retreated. Another chief, White Antelope, ran toward the commanders, a scout named James Beckwourth later testified, “holding up his hands and saying ! Stop!’ He spoke it in as plain English as I can.” As the firing intensified, according to Cheyenne and Arapaho stories, he folded his arms and calmly began to chant his death song: “Nothing lives long, except the Earth and the mountains.” Shot through with bullets, he died in the creek bed.
Soule declined to participate in the attack and maneuvered his men to one side, as the fighting degenerated into a free- for- all. Over nine hours, the killing field comprised as much as 5. The real carnage was in sand pits in the creek bed, a mile or so upstream from the village.
There men, women and children dug trenches and piled driftwood in front of them. Initially, several cavalrymen were killed as they peered over the bank, cut down by Indians in the pits. That’s when the mountain howitzers of Company C were wheeled into position. From virtually point- blank range, they blasted the sand pits and everyone in them, according to Mr.
Campbell and accounts later obtained through federal investigations. Eyewitnesses documented acts of wanton depravity. Soule wrote to his former commander Edward Wynkoop.
Anthony, in charge of one Fort Lyon battalion, later testified that soldiers used a toddler for target practice as he straggled behind his fleeing family. A third man came up and made a similar remark, and fired and the little fellow dropped.”No such accounts made it into the first reports of Sand Creek in Denver newspapers. The men of the Third returned to Denver for a hero’s welcome, parading their souvenirs. A Denver- area theater displayed the grisly trophies on stage. Lt. Leavitt Bowen, the commander of my great- great- grandfather’s battalion, did them all one better.
He carried White Antelope’s ears in his pocket and produced them in Denver bars to win free drinks. As reports filtered to politicians and newspapers back East, the story morphed.
The Chicago Tribune called it “an act of hideous cruelty garnished with all the accessories of fraud, lying, treachery, bestiality.” A congressional committee later reported: “It is difficult to believe that beings in the form of men, and disgracing the uniform of the United States soldiers and officers, could commit or countenance such acts of cruelty and barbarity as are detailed in the testimony.”As time went on, popular culture reduced the Thirdsters to stereotypes. In his 1. 97. 0 best- seller, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,”. Dee Brown. wrote that the troopers had spent their night ride to Sand Creek engaged in “heavy drinking of whiskey.” They were lost souls in the film “Little Big Man” and psychopaths in “Soldier Blue.”In real life, the troopers of the Third left their marks on the West. The regiment’s commander, Col. George Laird Shoup, largely escaped censure and went on to serve as a U. S. Nichols became Colorado’s lieutenant governor and gave his name to a dormitory at the University of Colorado, until students demanded the name be changed to Cheyenne Arapahoe Hall in 1.
Silas Soule, who blew the whistle on Col. Chivington, was gunned down on the streets of Denver in 1.
Nor were any of the perpetrators of Sand Creek. As for my great- great- grandfather, he went on to build a life in the Denver area, becoming an early investor in an irrigation project that fueled the rise of the Denver suburbs. According to his obituary, he never touched alcohol or tobacco. He remained a tough man, and quick to anger. On a Sunday evening in the summer of 1.
William Allen visited the farm next door to see why his irrigation ditch had dried up. He discovered that his neighbor, Amos S. Sampson, a former Wild West performer who went by the stage name “Rattlesnake Dick,” was stealing the water for his own crops.