[PEN-L:1326] The American My Lai

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

August 30, 1998

CHIVINGTON JOURNAL

Effort Grows to Unearth Killing Field of Old West

By JAMES BROOKE

CHIVINGTON, Colo. -- One historian calls it the American My Lai. Sen. Ben
Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, the lone American Indian in Congress,
calls it "one of the most disgraceful moments of American history."

But 134 years after 700 U.S. Army volunteers stormed through an Indian
encampment near here on the Big Sandy Creek, slaughtering scores of women
and children, Colorado's killing fields have disappeared into the swirling
dust and endless horizons of big sky country.

William Dawson, a retired judge, says the massacre occurred on what is now
part of his ranch. "The killing was all along here, under the trees,"
Dawson said recently, surveying a swath of leafy cottonwoods that snaked
along the dry bed of Big Sandy Creek.

Pointing to a bluff, he said: "Up there I found U.S. Army jacket buttons,
with the eagles on them. Over there, I found an Indian ax head."

No, says Mike Koury, a military history publisher, this was not the site.
"There were 700 soldiers firing rifles, artillery pieces -- cannonballs
exploding, bullets flying -- tons of metal should be found at the site, not
pounds," Koury said, noting the paltry number of artifacts found on
Dawson's ranch. "The Indians left behind pots, pans, axes, saws. Your metal
detector should go crazy. There is no way that is Sand Creek."

Richard Ellis, a history professor leading an official search for the site
of what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre, said, "When we think of
battle sites on American soil, this is the only major battlefield we can't
find."

New forces are pushing for a solution to this archaeological mystery.
National politics coupled with Indian desires for recognition of their
history are converging on this tiny hamlet in southeastern Colorado, named
after John Chivington, the Methodist minister turned Army colonel who led
the troops in the massacre.

In July, the Senate unanimously passed a bill sponsored by Campbell, a
Northern Cheyenne, ordering the National Park Service to find the massacre
site, a first step to establishing a "Sand Creek Massacre National Historic
Site." Within days, a companion bill was introduced in the House by Rep.
Bob Schaeffer, who represents Colorado's Eastern plains, which includes the
massacre site.

In Oklahoma and Montana, the roughly 5,000 Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants
of massacre survivors are organizing to lobby for reparations promised in
an 1865 treaty.

Campbell, in explaining the interest, said, "It is clearly one of the
darkest pages in Colorado history."

Sand Creek, historians say, explains a cartographic oddity: why eastern
Colorado once teemed with Indians but now has no Indian reservation.
Studying the killings as "ethnic cleansing" helps students understand
atrocities elsewhere in the world, says Thomas Noel, a University of
Colorado history professor.

In the spring of 1864, the Cheyenne dog soldiers, an autonomous military
wing of the Cheyenne tribe, unleashed bloody attacks on whites in
Colorado's eastern plains. They stole horses and mules and butchered
cattle. They wiped out wagon trains, burned stagecoach stations and tore
down telegraph lines.

The economy of the 3-year-old Colorado territory ground to a halt as wagon
trains with gold-mining equipment could not leave St. Louis. Food prices
soared as farmers abandoned crops.

Chivington, a Civil War hero and Colorado's military commander, called for
volunteer "Indian fighters" for 100-day enlistments. On Nov. 29, 1864, the
colonel and his volunteers rode deep inside the Arapaho-Cheyenne
reservation, where Indians led by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle had set
up camp weeks earlier. A white flag and an American flag flew above the
teepee of Black Kettle, whom the colonel had met two months earlier near
Denver in inconclusive peace talks.

The fact that the Cheyenne dog soldiers were not camped with Black Kettle's
group did not stop Chivington from unleashing his attack.

One reason for Chivington's deep hatred of Indians was offered recently by
his 85-year-old great-great-grandson, Laurence Riordan, who lives in
Denver. In 1861, Riordan said, a Ute Indian had raped the colonel's
17-year-old daughter in western Colorado.

At Sand Creek, Chivington exhorted his troops, "Remember our murdered women
and children!"

After emptying wagonloads of anti-personnel cannon fire into the village of
125 teepees, according to historical accounts, the soldiers swept up the
creek bed, killing every Indian they could find, often hunting down fleeing
children. After six hours, about 150 Indians, or one-quarter of the camp's
population, lay dead. The soldiers took three prisoners, all children. A
dozen soldiers were killed, some apparently by friendly fire in the frenzy.

Coloradans hailed the soldiers, who had mutilated Indian bodies for
souvenirs. But news of Sand Creek was poorly received in Washington.
President Lincoln replaced Colorado's territorial governor. A congressional
inquiry condemned the battle as a massacre.

"It's a sad feeling that our ancestors were attacked in that manner," Laird
Cometsevah, president of the Southern Cheyenne Sand Creek Descendants
Association, said from his home in Clinton, Okla. "Black Kettle basically
wanted peace for his people. The Cheyenne trusted the non-Indians -- and
they were betrayed."

A grandson of a survivor, Cometsevah testified this summer at the Senate
hearings on Sand Creek in Denver and Washington. In addition to seeking the
reparations of land and horses specified in the 1865 treaty, Cometsevah
wants the massacre site to be identified and protected.

As for the 20th-century archaeological mystery here, the Park Service plans
this fall to sweep Big Sandy Creek with a new, highly sensitive metal
detector that can detect metal 2 feet below ground, double normal depths.
In addition, a geomorphologist is to take soil-core samples to determine
what was the historical impact of flash floods, whether the creek channel
shifted over the last century, and if there is a charred layer of sediment
consistent with the burning of the Indian village.

Looking at Dawson's ranch, skeptics compare the handful of artifacts
unearthed to the 7,000 found at the Little Big Horn battlefield after a
wildfire swept over that site in 1984.

But Doug Scott, a Park Service archaeologist who has worked at both sites,
noted differences. Custer's last stand was on a hilltop that was preserved
as a memorial three years after the battle. In Sand Creek, fighting was on
a flood plain that was later farmed and picked over for souvenirs.

But even if artifacts are sparse here, the pressure is on to find a site.

"There never has been closure for the Cheyenne people, said David Halaas,
Colorado's chief state historian. "It still is an open wound."

Referring to the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by Army troops, Halaas
said, "Sand Creek was the My Lai of the 19th century."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company




Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)