The Sand Creek Massacre

The Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864 is the most significant act of organized violence in Colorado's history and one of the defining events in the history of the American West's Indigenous peoples. It occurred on the dry bed of Sand Creek in what is now Kiowa County in the southeastern corner of the state, at a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho people under Chief Black Kettle who had been directed there by Colorado territorial authorities and who believed themselves to be under the protection of the United States government. Colonel John Chivington of the Colorado Third Cavalry attacked the camp at dawn with approximately seven hundred men. The United States flag and a white flag that Black Kettle raised in response to the attack did not stop the assault. Between 150 and 200 people died, the majority of them women, children, and elderly men. The warriors were mostly absent from camp.

Two officers refused Chivington's order to fire: Captain Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, who commanded their companies to stand down and watched the assault without participating. Soule survived the massacre, wrote detailed letters documenting what he had witnessed, testified before the congressional investigation, and was shot dead on a Denver street four months later by a man connected to Chivington's command. The shooter fled Colorado and was never convicted.

The archive presents this record in full because Sand Creek is part of Colorado's history in the most direct sense — it happened on Colorado ground, it was carried out by Colorado soldiers, it was ordered by a Colorado politician, and its consequences shaped everything that followed in the territory's relationship with the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations. The archive also holds, in its dispatches, a letter written by Captain Soule after the massacre — one of the most important primary source documents in the event's record.

Background: Colorado Territory, 1864

By 1864, Colorado Territory had been in formal existence for three years, and the settler population — swollen by the gold rush of 1859 and the subsequent development of Denver and the mountain mining camps — was in a state of sustained conflict with the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples whose territory the settlers were occupying. The conflict expressed itself in raids on wagon trains and settlements, retaliatory militia attacks, the interruption of supply routes, and a general state of war without formal declaration that produced atrocities on both sides and a civilian population in Denver that was genuinely frightened and genuinely calling for resolution.

John Chivington, the commanding officer of the Military District of Colorado, was a Methodist minister turned soldier who had genuine military achievements behind him — his performance at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in 1862 had helped turn back the Confederate invasion of New Mexico — and who believed, stated plainly and in public, that the solution to the conflict with the Cheyenne and Arapaho was their complete extermination. This was not a private opinion. He said it at public meetings. He was planning to run for Congress from Colorado when it achieved statehood, and he calculated that military success against the Cheyenne would advance that ambition.

Chief Black Kettle was among the Cheyenne leaders most committed to a negotiated peace. He had signed the Treaty of Fort Wise in 1861, ceding Cheyenne lands in exchange for a reservation along Sand Creek. The reservation was inadequate — the land was dry and the game was insufficient — but Black Kettle continued to pursue the diplomatic path. In the fall of 1864, he led his band to Fort Lyon, the nearest military post, and was told by the commander there to camp at Sand Creek and consider themselves under military protection. He did so. He flew the American flag that had been given to him at an earlier treaty negotiation. He believed he was safe.

November 29, 1864

Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon on the night of November 28 with his command — approximately seven hundred men of the Colorado Third Cavalry, supplemented by units of the Colorado First — and informed the post commander that he intended to attack the Sand Creek camp at dawn. Several officers at Fort Lyon objected. The post commander, Major Scott Anthony, had explicitly assured Black Kettle and the other leaders that they were under military protection. Chivington brushed the objection aside and ordered his column out before dawn.

The attack began approximately at dawn on November 29. The camp held approximately five hundred people, the majority of them women, children, and elderly. The men of fighting age were largely away on a buffalo hunt. Black Kettle raised the American flag on a pole in the center of camp and then a white flag beneath it. The attack did not stop.

Captain Silas Soule, commanding Company D of the Colorado First Cavalry, ordered his men not to fire. Lieutenant Joseph Cramer did the same with his company. They stood their ground while Chivington's other companies swept through the camp. What followed was not combat in any military sense. The soldiers killed indiscriminately. Mutilations occurred during and after the killing. Approximately 150 to 200 people died; the range in the count reflects the difficulty of establishing a precise number in the aftermath of an event that its perpetrators initially described as a military victory and then, as congressional scrutiny mounted, attempted to minimize or recharacterize.

Black Kettle survived. He escaped in the chaos and would survive for four more years, continuing to advocate for peace despite Sand Creek, before he was killed along with most of his remaining band at the Battle of the Washita in 1868 — another dawn attack on a sleeping camp, this one commanded by George Armstrong Custer in Oklahoma Territory.

Captain Silas Soule

Silas Soule was born in Maine in 1838, grew up in an abolitionist family, and came to Kansas Territory as a young man in the years before the Civil War, where he was active in the anti-slavery movement — he participated in the rescue of a fugitive slave from federal marshals and was briefly imprisoned for it. He enlisted in the Colorado volunteers when the Civil War began, served at Glorieta Pass under Chivington, and by 1864 held the rank of captain. He was, by the testimony of those who knew him, a man of unusual moral seriousness for the frontier military environment.

After Sand Creek, Soule wrote a series of letters to his commanding officer and to a friend named Ned Wynkoop, the former Fort Lyon commander who had negotiated Black Kettle's peaceful surrender and who was now out of the territory. These letters described what he had witnessed in specific, detailed terms that contradicted Chivington's official reports. They became central evidence in the congressional investigation that followed.

Soule testified before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War in 1865. The committee's investigation was extensive, and its final report condemned the Sand Creek attack in clear language — calling it a massacre rather than a battle, finding that the victims were peaceful, and characterizing Chivington's conduct as disgraceful. Military investigators reached similar conclusions. Chivington had already resigned his commission before the investigations concluded, which meant he could not be court-martialed. He was never charged. He returned to civilian life in Colorado and later in other western states and died in 1894, having expressed no recorded remorse.

On April 23, 1865 — four months after the massacre, two weeks after Lincoln's assassination, days after the formal end of the Civil War — Silas Soule was shot and killed on a Denver street. He had recently married. He was twenty-six years old. A man named Charles Squiers was identified as the shooter and arrested, but escaped custody and fled Colorado. He was pursued by Wynkoop and others but never returned to trial. The murder has never been officially solved. The connection between Soule's testimony against Chivington and his murder is not established in the documentary record, and it is difficult to read the sequence of events without noting the proximity.

The Congressional Reckoning

The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War investigation of 1865 produced findings that were unusually direct for a congressional inquiry of the period. The committee found that the camp at Sand Creek was peaceful and under military protection, that the victims were mostly non-combatants, that the attack was unprovoked in any military sense, and that the mutilations performed by Chivington's soldiers constituted acts outside the laws of war. The report named Chivington specifically and condemned his conduct.

Congress did not act beyond the investigation. No criminal charges were filed. The territory of Colorado proceeded toward statehood, which it achieved in 1876. The Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples were expelled from Colorado Territory through a combination of military force and treaty pressure in the years following Sand Creek. Sand Creek itself became a location that appeared on maps and then disappeared from maps and then appeared again, its significance acknowledged and un-acknowledged in cycles that tracked the broader American relationship with its history of violence against Indigenous peoples.

The Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site was established by Congress in 2000 and is managed by the National Park Service in coordination with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. The site is in Kiowa County in southeastern Colorado, on ground that has changed little in the 160 years since the event. Access is limited and managed.