The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre Will Be Forgotten No More
That’s now changed, with the opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. “We’re the only unit in the National Park Service that has ‘massacre’ in its name,” says the site’s superintendent, Alexa Roberts. Usually, she notes, signs for national historic sites lead to a presidential birthplace or patriotic monument. “So a lot of people are startled by what they find here.”
Visitors are also surprised to learn that the massacre occurred during the Civil War, which most Americans associate with Eastern battles between blue and gray, not cavalry killing Indians on the Western plains. But the two conflicts were closely related, says Ari Kelman, a historian at Penn State University and author of A Misplaced Massacre, a Bancroft Prize-winning book about Sand Creek.
The Civil War, he observes, was rooted in westward expansion and strife over whether new territories would join the nation as free states or slave states. Slavery, however, wasn’t the only obstacle to free white settlement of the West; another was Plains Indians, many of whom staunchly resisted encroachment on their lands.
DEC14_H99_SandCreek-map.jpg When the Park Service and tribal leaders clashed over the exact location of the tragedy, Campbell concluded both were right: the massacre spread out over an area of 12,500 acres. (Jamie Simon )
“We remember the Civil War as a war of liberation that freed four million slaves,” Kelman says. “But it also became a war of conquest to destroy and dispossess Native Americans.” Sand Creek, he adds, “is a bloody and mostly forgotten link” between the Civil War and the Plains Indian Wars that continued for 25 years after Appomattox.
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I wish the real history of this country was taught in our schools.
truly a reflection of the american mindset and viciousness that has continued to this day amongst many americans, especially republicans.
The section on Sand Creek is almost unbearable.
I was teaching a class on Current American History..I had the students read, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown..I had not read the book myself, but knew it was a terrific history of how the Native Americans were treated. I read way ahead of the students, engulfed in the story of how one tribe after another, (there are over 400 tribes Native Americans.) was treated worse than the next. The book gradually increases the level torture and death. Sand Creek is in the middle to two thirds thru the book. I read the chapter, then reread the chapter. And I couldn't read any more. I was horrified and so sad ..that book was done, and I couldn't even get to the end.
I composed 30 or 40 questions for the students to answer and left it. Our history is full of events of hatred and killing like Sand Creek. I regret that I never finished this book, but I do not regret that I read as much as I did. It is what it is. If you want to know about many of those instances of total betrayal, read Dee Brown, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"...if you can......
I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces ... With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors ... By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops ...
- John S. Smith, Congressional Testimony of Mr. John S. Smith, 1865
Fingers and ears were cut off the bodies for the jewelry they carried. The body of White Antelope, lying solitarily in the creek bed, was a prime target. Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles-the last for a tobacco pouch ...
- Stan Hoig
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
