EADS — Standing under cottonwood trees with conservationists and tribal leaders, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Wednesday announced an expansion of Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre site — marking one of the nation’s bloodiest assaults on native people — more than doubling the size to protect 6,503 acres of shortgrass prairie.
“Women begged for the lives of their children,” said Haaland, the first Native American cabinet member, touting this expansion as part of Biden administration efforts “to help tell a more complete history of America.”
The massacre in 1864 that left 230 dead “forever changed the course of the Northern Cheyenne, Northern Arapaho, and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes,” she said. “We will never forget the hundreds of lives that were brutally taken here — men, women and children murdered in an unprovoked attack. Stories like the Sand Creek Massacre are not easy to tell but it is my duty — our duty — to ensure that they are told.”
Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, state government officials, and National Park Service director Chuck Sams joined Haaland here at the site in southeastern Colorado. NPS teams will manage expanded interpretive areas, which Sams said will include use of native languages. Part of achieving a White House goal of revitalizing native languages, Sams said, “is making sure they are seen.”
Descendants of massacre survivors, who once struggled to gain access when the area was privately owned, drove from around the West this week to help lead ceremonies that included songs and prayers.
“Humans can be cruel and do horrific things to other humans,” Northern Cheyenne tribal administrator William Walks Along said. His mother’s family came from this land, he said, and visiting it helps him “on a path of forgiveness.”
Persistent efforts by Colorado-based Conservation Fund officials brokered a deal “with a willing seller” that added 3,478 acres to enable the expansion, aided by money from the nation’s $900 million-a-year Land and Water Conservation Fund. The National Parks Foundation and other conservation groups also played key roles.
For the Northern and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, this land, about 170 miles southeast of Denver near Eads, is sacred. Expanding the protected acreage builds on broader efforts in southeastern Colorado to preserve multi-species ecosystems and prairie.
Federal authorities in 2007 established the historic site, where interpretive signs commemorate the attack by U.S. soldiers on November 29, 1864 — an unprovoked assault over seven hours on an encampment of about 750 native people, mostly women and children because men at the time were out hunting. Some horses remained at the site.
It was “a mass murder atrocity,” Bennet said. And it has “left every American with a responsibility to grapple with what happened.”
During the attack, the native people scrambled for shelter in the high banks along Sand Creek. As they fled, soldiers killed and wounded many. More than half of the estimated 230 dead were women and children.
U.S. Army Cavalry Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister, led the attack involving about 675 soldiers.
The soldiers fired small arms and large howitzer guns for the purpose of killing as many Cheyenne and Arapaho people as possible. While many escaped the initial attack, soldiers followed others along the dry creek bed. The soldiers shot them — women, children and the elderly — as they struggled through sandy terrain.
At one point, according to park service documents, fleeing people frantically dug pits and trenches along the sides of the creek bed, trying to avoid bullets. Some tried to fight back. Along the creek, soldiers fired from opposite banks and brought forward howitzers to drive villagers from their cover.
Soldiers committed atrocities, taking body parts as trophies, before leaving the massacre site two days later with 600 captured horses. The dead included 13 Cheyenne peace chiefs and one Arapaho chief — deaths that disrupted tribal governance for generations.
At the scene Wednesday, Cheyenne tribal member Michael Bearcomesout, who drove from Montana, told how his great grandmother survived, drawing on accounts passed down through his family. Fleeing villagers put her on one of the horses. She clung to its mane, Bearcomesout said. “If she didn’t get on that horse, I wouldn’t be here.”
Before delivering a prayer for healing, Bearcomesout suggested discussions of history should include the matter of reparations, “payback” from the United States for what happened. “I would like to see the Cheyenne and Arapaho people living here. This was their land,” he said.
“Maybe we could have a university here, or maybe an old-age home.”
