The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army in the West, 1783-1900 by Robert Wooster

Author:Robert Wooster
Format: epub

FIG. 37. Robert McGee scalped. Though the origins of scalping are disputed, by the eighteenth century both Indians and non-Indians had embraced the practice. Robert McGee was scalped by the Brulés outside Fort Larned in 1864. This photograph was taken about 1890 by E. E. Henry. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, USZ62-105942.

Into the breech stepped the Coloradans, alarmed by tales of Indian depredations and the very real murder of five persons just ten miles outside of Denver. In late June, Governor John Evans instructed “the friendly Indians of the plains” to seek shelter near military posts, to prevent their “being killed through mistake.” As raiding continued, an increasingly belligerent Evans raised a new regiment of hundred-day volunteers (the Third Colorado Cavalry). To the governor’s surprise Black Kettle’s band turned over four white prisoners and presented themselves at Fort Lyon, where Major Edward Wynkoop provided food and arranged a meeting with Evans and Chivington. Wynkoop and the Indians emerged from the talks believing that peace was at hand, but Evans, suspicious of an Indian-Confederate alliance, charged that “the great body of them are yet hostile.” Any doubts that Chivington, described by one contemporary as “a crazy preacher who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte,” might seek peace were dispelled by the words and deeds of his superior, Curtis, who recalled Wynkoop in favor of the more malleable Major Scott J. Anthony.³⁵

Anxious to further his political fortunes and to use the new recruits before their enlistments expired, Colonel Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon on November 28 intent on attacking Black Kettle’s camp of about 550 Southern Cheyennes and Arapahoes. During a rancorous conference, several officers objected to Chivington’s upcoming assault, arguing that it would be “murder” and “a disgrace to the United States uniform.” Chivington reportedly responded “that he believed it to be right or honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians that would kill women and children.”³⁶

That evening, Chivington rode out of Fort Lyon with 700 volunteers (including Major Anthony and 125 members of the garrison) and four mountain howitzers. As dawn broke on the twenty-ninth, they deployed into assault formations outside the Indian encampment at Sand Creek. An incredulous Black Kettle raised both a U.S. flag and a white flag above his tepee, but gunfire from the soldiers quickly disabused the Indians of the idea that further talks were possible. A few Indians made a brief stand in a creek bed above the village; elsewhere, with it “generally understood among the officers and men, that no prisoners would be taken,” the volunteers indiscriminately slaughtered men, women, and children. The rabble of the Third Colorado then set about mutilating the corpses. “The bodies were horribly cut up,” testified Sergeant Lucien Palmer, of the First Colorado Cavalry, “skulls broken in a good many. . . . I do not think I saw any but what was scalped; saw fingers cut off, saw several bodies with privates cut off, women as well as men.” At a cost of nine men killed, thirty-eight

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