Copyright © 1998 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

A vivid reminder of the historic depth of American racism surfaced in April when the United Methodist Church, at its national convention in Denver, formally apologized to the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indian tribes for the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, which was planned and led against a peaceful and unsuspecting Indian village by a Methodist lay preacher and U.S. Cavalry officer, Col. John M. Chivington. Over 200 victims, mostly women and children, were slaughtered in this unprovoked attack.

Long forgotten by most whites, including the Methodists, it has remained a bitter memory among the present-day descendants of the Arapahos and Cheyennes. A Native American Methodist pastor, Alvin Deer, who currently serves the two tribes, now located in Oklahoma, brought the grievance to the Methodist convention. "Working with people on a daily basis, I learned how intense this is in their memory," he noted. "An elderly woman told me this is one of the first things they teach their children." They also kept alive the memory that the assault was led by a Christian minister.

The massacre was a result of economic factors and political ambitions that had spawned widespread racism among the white immigrants flooding into the western Indian homelands. The 1858 gold rush into the Colorado region brought in hordes of fortune seekers who soon built towns and became permanent residents, squatting on Indian lands. The newcomers, with their growing population, farming, ranching, merchant economy and permanently settled villages, would soon clash with the Native Americans' vastly different hunting economy, which required an extensive territory and freedom of movement to follow the bison and other game.

Although initially Indians came and went freely in the growing city of Denver, and at William Bent's fortified trading post along the Arkansas River, most whites began to resent the Native Americans as a growing nuisance and as inhibitors to white "progress," i.e., ownership of the entire territory. Except for those white men, like Bent, who had Indian wives, many others looked down upon the Native American as "different" and therefore inferior.

As whites started to infringe upon Indian hunting grounds and unruly gangs began to steal Indian horses and rape Indian women, the Indians were forced into smaller and smaller areas and began to face starvation. Their frequent seizure and butchery of cattle to fend off the threat of starvation aroused the ire of ranchers. Indians also sometimes robbed wagon trains of food but did not harm the passengers.

For governmental authorities there was no "white problem," but only an "Indian problem." And clearly something had to be done to relieve tensions. What was done by the U.S. government through the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise was to pressure the Arapahos and Cheyennes to give up most of their land and to restrict them to an even smaller territory called a reservation, with promise of government annuities worth $30,000 annually for 15 years, including assistance to make the transition to farming.

According to historian Stan Hoig (THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE, 1961), the spot picked out for the reservation was "a gameless, arid section of southeastern Colorado," an area useless to whites. Hoig has aptly described the treaty negotiations: "The whites in Colorado now legally own the land they had invaded, bought for them at a price that would never be paid. Before that, the Indians would be driven to war." The treaty was a swindle.

Hostilities broke out in 1864 when a cavalry unit of 40 men attempted to disarm some Cheyennes who had cattle with them, despite the fact that the Indians were friendly and were willing to give up the cattle peacefully. Seizing a Plains Indian's gun was a deliberately hostile act, and the Cheyennes successfully fought back.

In another major instance that enraged the Cheyennes, soldiers approached the village of Chief Lean Bear, staunch friend of the whites, and shot him dead when he came forward to parley with them, holding the papers he had received from the president on a previous trip to Washington. This unprovoked killing, as Stan Hoig has noted, "exploded the wrath" of the Indian warriors "beyond the control of the chiefs," and brought about the Cheyenne war in the summer of 1864 until chiefs such as Black Kettle could calm their warriors and bring about peace.

In November of 1864, after the chiefs had secured peace, Col. John M. Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon, Colo., determined to mount a massive expedition against any available Indian encampment, no matter how peaceful, and would not be dissuaded by those officers who protested such a betrayal. "Damn any man who is in sympathy with an Indian!" he exploded.

On Nov. 29, 1864, Chivington's command reached the Cheyenne encampment of Chief Black Kettle at Sand Creek and began the attack immediately. Capt. Silas Soule, a severe critic of the attack, forbade his men to fire. Black Kettle, friend of the whites, hoisted a large American flag with a white flag beneath it to indicate a friendly village. It was useless. The soldiers slaughtered indiscriminately; and after the battle, scalped, bashed in the skulls and otherwise mutilated the dead. Many officers and enlisted men alike cut off the private parts of men, women and children and kept them as souvenirs. Others cut off fingers to obtain rings. One soldier claimed to have cut out a woman's heart. After the battle, women and children prisoners were killed and scalped. Black Kettle and a number of his people had fought their way to freedom.

Back in Denver after the massacre, Chivington was received as a hero.

A congressional inquiry, which took extensive testimony on the horrors of the Sand Creek campaign, was a fact-finding enterprise only, and no one was ever prosecuted for the outrage. Denver residents were incensed over this congressional "meddling."

Four years later, while encamped along the Washita River in Oklahoma Territory, Black Kettle and his people became victims of Gen. Phil Sheridan's Indian extermination policy. In the early morning of Nov. 27, 1868, Lt. Col. George A. Custer and more than 800 members of the 7th Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's sleeping village, killing more than 100, including Chief Black Kettle, the champion of peace.

The romantic notions that have grown up around the movement of whites into the American West conveniently ignore the often sordid and crass materialism of the bourgeois destruction of both the environment and the original human inhabitants. A nascent capitalism ruthlessly crushes every impediment in its road to dominance in order to establish the institution of private property and the exploitation of land. The Native Americans, with their far different economy and their communal societies, had lived in the West for thousands of years. They were destroyed by the capitalist juggernaut and its military vanguard in less than 50 years.

--B.G.