Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site
Details: On November 29th, 1864, Chiefs Black Kettle, White Antelope, Left Hand and others were encamped with around 750 Arapaho and Cheyenne people in a valley by the Big Sandy Creek. A hope for peace, brought forth by Black Kettle was in the balance. It was a tragic day where the blood of the Cheyenne and Arapaho was shed, and a painful memory for generations of Native Americans was made.
Weather conditions at the park vary considerably. Temperatures range from over 100°F in summer to under 20°F in winter. Visitors can expect blowing dust and sand year-round, especially during infrequent storms. Some of these storms produce violent tornadoes or large blizzards, so prepare accordingly, and contact the on-duty Ranger to ask about road conditions at (719)-438-5916
Directions: The Sand Creek Massacre is located in Kiowa County, Colorado. To visit the site, follow Colorado State Highway 96 east off Highway 287 near Eads, or west off Highway 385 at Sheridan Lake. Near Chivington, turn north onto County Road 54/Chief White Antelope Way or at Brandon, turn north onto County Road 59. Follow these roads to their intersections with County Road W. The park entrance is along CR W a mile east (right) of CR 54 or several miles west (left) of CR 59. Eight miles of dirt/sand roads lead to the
Bent's New Fort and Fort Wise/Lyon
Bent's New Fort connects the story of Bent's Old Fort and William Bent's family to the Sand Creek Massacre. The New Fort represented an attempt to continue trading with Plains Tribes following the end of the Mexican War. The operation was shortlived, and William Bent sold the structure to the United States Army, which located a military garrison there under a new name. Both of these forts played a role in the development of the Santa Fe Trail, the destinies of the Plains Indians, and the future of Colorado.
Bent’s New Fort (1853-1869)
William Bent abandoned his old fort (present-day Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site) in 1849. Lacking satisfactory offers to purchase it, Bent is believed to have burnt much of the fort to keep it from falling into the hands of the Army or his competition. To continue his trade with the Plains Tribes, Bent built a new fort of stone in 1853. Based on Cheyenne recommendations, he located this new fort overlooking the Arkansas River at Big Timbers, near present-day Lamar.
The new fort had several advantages over the old fort, including its stone construction, simple rectangular design, and lack of adobe. Bent no longer needed to hire labor to apply adobe every season, and the durable nature of stone added to its protection. With trade no longer profitable and the construction of Fort Wise nearby in 1860, Bent leased his stone fort to the Army, which used it as a post quartermaster & commissary and Indian Agency office.
Fort Wise (1860)
Fort Wise was made possible through the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, which offered Plains Indians annuities and recognition of their land in exchange for allowing uncontested passage along the western trails and the establishment of forts. Named in honor of Virginia Governor Henry A. Wise, Fort Wise served to protect travelers and transportation along the Santa Fe Trail between Fort Larned in Kansas and Pueblo, Colorado.
The Army situated the fort on lands adjacent to the Arkansas River in 1860, just west of Bent’s New Fort. Fort Wise lacked a protective wall or barricade, instead locating numerous barracks and offices in a square around a central parade ground. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Governor Wise led Virginia’s secession from the United States. The U.S. Army renamed the military post Fort Lyon in mid-1862 to honor of General Nathaniel Lyon, the first United States general killed in the Civil War.
Fort Lyon (1860-1867)
Fort Lyon encompassed both the former Fort Wise and Bent’s New Fort, as both offered advantages to the Army. As a way station along the Santa Fe Trail, Fort Lyon served as a base for U.S. Army patrols and a rest stop for travelers. In 1864, Colonel Chivington used the fort and its troops for the attack on Sand Creek. He uttered his infamous outburst, “Damn any man who is in sympathy with Indians!” inside the quartermaster office of Bent’s New Fort.
Detachments of the 1st and 3rd Regiments Cavalry, Colorado (U.S.) Volunteers led by Colonel John Chivington marched overnight from Fort Lyon to reach a village of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek at dawn on November 29, 1864. The 40 mile ride took about 10 hours and allowed the volunteers to attack the village with complete surprise. The attack resulted in the death of approximately 230 men, women and children.
Fort Lyon’s low position near the Arkansas River rendered it vulnerable to flooding and disease. A large flood in 1867 undercut many of the buildings. In June 1867, the U.S. Army leased land near Las Animas, Colorado, and transferred the post there, making the new military post the second to bear the name Fort Lyon. By William Bent’s death in 1869, the fort near Lamar lay abandoned and neglected, its stones later scavenged for use in local buildings.
The Site of Bent’s New Fort today
Because of its significance to trade along the Santa Fe Trail and its role in the Sand Creek Massacre, the National Park Service worked with the landowner and other partners to open the site of Bent’s New Fort to the public in 2013. This public-private partnership provides access to the site, where visitors can walk a short trail, read interpretive wayside exhibits, and gaze across the scenic Arkansas River Valley.
Driving Directions
To reach Bent’s New Fort Site, take U.S. 50 to County Road 35, approximately 10 miles west of Lamar or 25 miles east of Las Animas. Turn south on County Road 35 for one mile to County Road JJ (T Junction). Turn east (left) and drive ¼ mile, turning south (right) onto County Road 35.25 for ¼ mile to the Bent’s New Fort parking area. A walking trail and interpretive exhibits are available; however, no public facilities exist at the site.
Boggsville Historic Site
Boggsville, located on the Purgatoire River, was first used as a campsite by the Plains Indians. With the fur trade vanishing, many former mountain men found work raising livestock. Through his wife’s government land grant connections, Thomas Boggs started his ranch near the river on a branch of the Santa Fe Trail. It became known as Boggsville after he and his wife, Rumalda Luna Bent Boggs, built their first home. John Wesley Prowers moved to the Boggs’s ranch in 1867 along with frontiersman Kit Carson and his family. A year later, with Carson in poor health, his wife, Josefa, died from childbirth complications. Kit died several weeks later at nearby Fort Lyon. Thomas Boggs was the executor of Carson's will.
Site Information
Location (two miles south of Las Animas on Colorado Highway 101)
Available Facilities: Today, Boggsville is a renovation project in progress. Seeing the site now, which has just a few buildings and old foundations, it is hard to imagine that here is where the cattle and sheep industries first boomed in Colorado. A lot of the early history of Colorado started here. Slowly, some of the buildings are being restored and more are going to be rebuilt.
Exhibits: A bronze state historical marker is located along Colorado Highway 101, and there are several interpretive markers along an area hiking path.
Safety Considerations
Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site
Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site commemorates the November 29, 1864, attack on a village of about 700 Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people along Sand Creek (Big Sandy Creek and Sand Creek refer to the same drainage and are synonymous terms) in southeastern Colorado Territory, about 170 miles southeast of Denver. At dawn, approximately 675 soldiers of the 1st and 3rd Regiments, Colorado Volunteer (U.S.) Cavalry, killed more than 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho over the course of seven hours.
Colonel John M. Chivington, a Methodist minister, led an unprovoked surprise attack on a peaceful camp using small arms and howitzer fire to kill as many Cheyenne and Arapaho as possible. While many managed to escape the initial onslaught, others, particularly noncombatant women, children, and the elderly, fled into and up the bottom of the dry creek channel. The soldiers followed, shooting them as they struggled through the sandy ground. At a point several hundred yards above the village, the fleeing people frantically dug pits and trenches along either side of the streambed in a desperate attempt to escape the soldiers’ bullets. Some tried to fight back with whatever weapons they had managed to retrieve from camp. At several places along Sand Creek, the soldiers shot from opposite banks in a cross-fire. Finally, the howitzers were brought forward to drive the Indians from their makeshift defenses.
Among the dead were 13 Cheyenne peace chiefs and one Arapaho chief, whose deaths severely disrupted the tribes’ traditional forms of governance for generations. During that afternoon and the following day, soldiers committed atrocities on the dead, including taking human body parts as trophies. They departed the massacre site on December 1, taking 600 captured horses with them
For more than 150 years, the Sand Creek Massacre has maintained its significance as one of the most emotionally charged and controversial events in U.S. history; a tragedy reflective of its time and place. The background of the Sand Creek Massacre lay in a whirlwind of events and issues triggered by the ongoing Civil War in the East and West, overreactions to the 1862–1863 Dakota uprising in Minnesota, the constant undercurrent of threatened Confederate incursions, the political and financial ambitions of Territorial Governor John Evans, and the substantial involvement of the Methodist Church in politics and the military in Colorado Territory. Perhaps most importantly, the causes of the Sand Creek Massacre lay in the irresistible momentum of Manifest Destiny—the U.S. belief in its right to establish dominance over the lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast.
Congress designated Sand Creek Massacre as a national historic site in 2000, and the site was dedicated and formally opened to the public on April 27, 2007. The site is on the grassland plains of southeast Colorado and remains largely undeveloped, but offers a visitor picnic area and visitor contact station with bookstore. Visitors can access the national historic site via a county road off Colorado State Highway 96. The Monument Hill area includes an overlook above Big Sandy Creek, a shade structure, and the Repatriation Area. A primitive trail continues along the bluff beyond the Monument Hill overlook, overlooking the creek bed and following the course of the massacre as tribal members fled along the creek with soldiers in pursuit. A number of interim interpretive wayside exhibits provide visitors with information about the massacre. Visitor information is also provided by a ranger-led interpretive program, a park brochure, site bulletins, and other printed material.
Wayside: A Chief's Village
Chief’s Village at Sand Creek
The Cheyenne and Arapaho Village at Sand Creek was a Chief’s village with 33 chiefs and headmen present. To be a chief in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes is to undertake
a responsibility so vast only the greatest and most morally restrained are considered. Chiefs were advised above all else to be peace makers. The Chiefs gathered here believed they
brought their people to a place of safety.
Several of the lodges display flags – gifts from American envoys, who desired peace with the Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1860. On the morning of November 29, 1864, as soldiers
approached the village and fear spread through the camps, Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle tied a white flag of truce beneath his American flag and held it aloft – a sign that those gathered here were peaceful. Despite this gesture, the soldiers opened
fire.
Many Chiefs were killed at Sand Creek, some of whom include Yellow Wolf, Little Robe Sr., White Antelope, Big Man, Two Thighs, Lone Bear (One Eye), Warbonnet, Niwot (Left Hand),
and Bear Robe. Some of the chiefs who survived the massacre include Black Kettle, Whirlwind, Seven Bulls, Sandhill and Little Wolf (Big Jake).
Wayside: Cheyenne and Arapaho Village at Sand Creek
A Camp at Sand Creek
Along the northern edge of the Pónoeo ‘hé’e (Dry River) or Sand Creek, sit about 156 lodges or tipis, with hoóxé’e or tipi poles rising into the sky. Traditionally positioned with
their entrances open toward the east, the tipis form a crescent, with each tribal family occupying traditional spots within it. The individual tribal camps which made up the village were scattered over an area of around 1.5 square miles.
This Cheyenne and Arapaho village was a temporary home to about 750 people. Some camps had 10 or 15 people, others more than 50. Most here were Heéváhetane (Southern
Cheyenne), while others referred to themselves as kindred, but separate bands.
Scattered nearby were herds of horses, perhaps 1,400 or more, creatures that enabled these plains people to excel as hunters, warriors, travelers, and traders. Horses were the lifeblood of this community. These animals were the first target of the soldiers during their attack on the village – leaving most of the inhabitants foot-bound and at the mercy of the pursuers. Sand Creek temporarily became the center of the universe – here the course of history and the identity of the Tsétsėhéståhese (Cheyenne) and Hinóno’éí-no’ (Arapaho) was changed forever.
Wayside: Conscience and Courage
Captain Silas S. Soule and Lieutenant Joseph A. Cramer of the 1st Colorado (U.S.) volunteer Cavalry put their military careers - and lives – at risk by refusing to fire during the attack against a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village at Sand Creek, November 29, 1864.
With their companies backing them up, they purposely took little or no part in the massacre of people they knew. Afterward, both men wrote letters to their former commander Major Edward “Ned” Wynkoop, describing the horrors they had witnessed and condemning the leadership of Colonel John M. Chivington, the expedition’s commander. These letters led to investigations by two congressional committees and an army commission, which changed history’s judgment of Sand Creek from a battle to a massacre of men, women, and children.
Several weeks after Soule testified before the commission, he was shot in the streets of Denver. His murderers, although known, were never brought to justice.
These graphic and disturbing letters disappeared, only to resurface in 2000 in time to help convince the U.S. Congress to pass legislation establishing the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. The power of these letters, then and now, lies in their simple honesty, their moral courage and the determination of two soldiers who wanted to see justice done.
Wayside: Fort Lyon Reservation
The Fort Lyon Reservation
Created in 1861 by the Treaty of Fort Wise, the Upper Arkansas Agency Reservation, known later as the Fort Lyon Reservation, was established for those Cheyenne and Arapaho living below the South Platte River. Sand Creek
formed its northern boundary. The reservation was never fully developed. The Agency headquarters at Point of Rocks was never completed, forcing the Indian Agent to work at Fort Lyon. For months there was confusion over who was in charge; Albert Boone, who oversaw the treaty and set up the agency, or Samuel Colley, a presidential appointee that no one in Colorado knew about until he showed up. Even after Colley took control of the agency, conditions on the reservation continued to decline.
Worsening Conditions
The Treaty of Fort Wise promised government assistance with teaching the Cheyenne and Arapaho how to farm; however, instructors were never sent. Those Cheyenne and Arapaho that did move to the reservation were dependent on government annuities to survive, which were delivered once yearly. Buffalo rarely ventured close, leaving tribal members with little to eat. Diseases like cholera, pneumonia, and influenza infected reservation villages. Most Cheyenne and Arapaho who resettled on the reservation eventually abandoned it, joining those bands that refused to have anything to do with the reservation.
Wayside: Sacred Memory
Sacred Memory
Sand Creek is a place where culture and history are at the center of controversy, trauma, anger, and forgiveness. A place to reflect on the past as well as the future, the Sand
Creek Massacre teaches powerful lessons about sacrifices and hardships endured by all of our ancestors.
We remember places of unspeakable horror in many ways. The site of the massacre, for descendants in particular, is honored in private and public ceremonies. Spiritual remembrance is deeply embedded in prayer, offerings, and song.
For many, their emotions about the massacre intensify with the knowledge that the majority of people in the village were women, children, and elderly. As many as 375 females may have been present during the massacre. Imagery of women and children - their panic, flight and suffering is overwhelming.
Today, Sand Creek is a place of healing, where spirits of those killed continue to be a part of the living landscape. A place where all people can gather to learn about the past, reflect on the present, and work together to prevent such tragedies in the future.
Wayside: Sand Creek as a Camp Site
Camp Site Along the Smoky Hill Lodgepole Trail
In the 1800’s Plains tribes like the Cheyenne and Arapaho moved their camps using travois to carry their possessions. Made by securing lodge poles to a horse, the ends of the
travois dragged along the ground, creating trails across the prairie. These trails came to be known as lodge pole trails.
When moving to a different camp, the tribes would go from
one water source to the next, generally within the distance a person could walk in a day. Rivers, creeks, small lakes, and springs were favorable camping areas. The Smoky Hill Lodge Pole Trail had many such areas along it, including Sand Creek. The Cheyenne, Arapaho, and the other plains tribes used these trails and camped by water sources near them.
In October, 1864, the Cheyenne and Arapaho chose Sand Creek as their camp site while they waited for news on peace talks. There were many reasons to choose Sand Creek. Even when water wasn’t present in the creek, a trench could be dug into the creek bed and the water that pooled into it supplied camp livestock. Fresh water springs nearby provided water for drinking and cooking.
Wayside: Why a 33 Star Flag
The flag before you represents the flag that flew from Chief Black Kettle’s lodge on the morning of November 29, 1864, when his encampment of friendly Cheyenne and Arapaho was brutally attacked by the Colorado Volunteer Cavalry. The 33-stars represent the extent of the young United States in the year 1860, the same year Chief Black Kettle received his flag as a token of peace from the United States.
Black Kettle was told the flag would provide protection for the peaceful village, sending a clear sign to all that the Cheyenne and Arapaho people were friends to the United States, but his belief in the power of the flag proved short lived - the soldiers attacked the village at dawn, indiscriminately killing men, women and children.
“As I ran by Black Kettle’s lodge [at Sand Creek] he had a flag tied to lodgeple and was holding it...”
Little Bear, April 14, 1906
“Black Kettle ran...American flag up to the top of his lodge [at Sand Creek]...as he had been advised to do in case he should meet with any troops out on the prairies.”
John Smith, sworn testimony, 1865
“I looked towards Black Kettle’s lodge and he had a flag on lodgepole in front of his lodge.”
George Bent, March 15, 1905