Month of the Freezing Moon: The Sand Creek Massacre, November 1864

When Americans hear the term "Civil War," we think first and foremost about the northern-southern conflict between 1861-65. But the other American civil war, the one none of us likes to remember, began before Fort Sumter was fired on and continued until the closing days of 1890 at Wounded Knee. It's the civil war between whites and native Americans. Duane Schultz's excellent Month of the Freezing Moon tells the story of one of that unremembered civil wars ugliest chapters: the 1864 Sand Creek massacre. In 1861, some Cheyenne and Arapaho braves in the Colorado Territory, angered by yet another violation of the latest treaty between their tribes and the U.S. government (in this case the Treaty of Fort Wise), began to steal cattle and horses from white ranchers whom they considered intruders. After a couple of Cheyenne chiefs were gunned down by a nervous militia while they were trying to make peace overtures, the Cheyenne declared war. Territory governor John Evans, hoping to make a name for himself, ordered the 3rd Colorado Volunteers, a rough and rowdy bunch of thugs commanded by Colonel John Chivington, an ex-Methodist preacher, to clean up the mess. On 29 November 1864, Chivington, who was already notorious for his insistence that Indians needed to be killed and scalped, led the 3rd Colorado against a Cheyenne village at Sand Creek. The chief, Black Kettle, was a longtime advocate of peace, and he had an American flag flying outside his teepee. But Chivington nonetheless ordered his men to encircle the village and kill everyone--men, women, and children--in it. Over 125 Cheyenne, most of them women and children, were butchered and their bodies mutilated. A few of Chivington's men were killed and wounded, but most probably from friendly fire in the frenzy of the massacre. The Sand Creek massacre prompted fullscale war between white settlers and the Plains Indians that would last for the next 25 years, and pull in dozens of men who had made a name for themselves in the Civil War (most notably, perhaps, George Armstrong Custer). Public opinion in the east, to its credit, condemned the slaughter. But most people in the west applauded it, and insisted that only "Indian lovers" who'd never seen an Indian could deny that the action was justified. Astoundingly, neither Chivington nor any of his men were ever tried for murder, although he was forced to resign his colonecy and his dreams of a brigadier's star. In fact, a lieutenant who testified against Chivington in a military court of inquiry was subsequently murdered, almost certainly by a Chivington supporter. Schultz's book chronicles the events leading up to the massacre as well as its aftermath. Schultz quotes extensively from the transcripts of official investigatory hearings, and at times the descriptions of the massacre are almost more than the reader can bear. But that's precisely why they need to be read, and why the forgotten civil war needs to be remembered.

November 29, 1864, will always remain a dark day in American history. It was on this day that the 3rd Colorado Volunteers, under Colonel John Chivington ("the Fighting Parson"), attacked a docile and noncombatant village of Cheyenne Indians encamped on Sand Creek in Colorado. The resultant massacre of over 200 Indians, mostly women and children, brought condemnation down on Chivington after a number of investigations were conducted in Washington. Duane Schultz is fair in presenting all sides of the circumstances leading up to the disaster, including establishing the political motivations of Governor Evans in favoring the attack, the fear of residents of Denver and the surrounding area after numerous Indian deprivations were made against ranchers the summer before the attack (many Denverites thought Chivington a hero), and the failure of sympathetic army officials to protect the Indians after offering that protection in the first place. There are a couple of glaring errors in the text - Schultz places Bent's Fort at Pueblo, CO, when it's actually 70 miles to the east and he implies that the slaughter of the buffalo by hunters that was actually a post-1870 phenomenon occurred by 1864 - but basically the book relates a good, straight-forward account of the massacre, the events leading up to it, and the results of the investigations that followed.