1.
Mid-morning drive to Bent’s Fort,
founded in 1833 for the buffalo skin trade with the Cheyenne and Arapaho,
before the Kansas slavery troubles,
and before the Pike’s Peak gold rush obliterated the Plains Indian treaties.
Big friendly adobe stockade:
rooms, livestock, services, liquor storage. Checking out the gift shop,
I find The Massacre at Sand Creek Narrative Voices,
poem by Bruce Cutler, based on letters of Silas Soule,
who refused to order his men to take part. A Woman
behind the counter gives me a direction sheet to the site:
County 14 thirty miles to Haswell, then thirty-eight miles Highway 96,
and two miles past Eads to Chivington—
2.
few trailer homes among scattered car and truck guts,
no public establishments. Finally, the 8-mile Chief
White Antelope dirt road north to Sand Creek.
Most of the dead were women and children, all scalped.
General William Tecumseh Sherman toured the site in 1866
and ordered the remains to be gathered up and sent to Washington.
Tried for murder in an army court,
Colonel Chivington would have been court-marshalled, except
his commission had expired by the time he led the attack,
so finally couldn't be prosecuted by the army. No point
trying him in a civil court, as Governor Evans
and nearly all the white people in Colorado supported him.
3.
After Governor Evans’s virtual
sanctification of Indian murder—extermination by any means—
anyone who killed an Indian in Colorado was free from the law,
especially in the south-east, where troops
armed to fight the confederates went after the Cheyenne and Arapaho,
like crusaders to Jerusalem taking detours to kill Jews.
Terrified childen
seized, outraged, mutilated—
head-hides with black hair hanging
taken and kept for years
in closets behind the boots and leather belts—
sewn into tit-bags for gold nuggets.
4.
Two small buildings, weathered picnic tables.
A half-mile path toward a bending line of trees.
The guide comes out to inform me there are still
remains under the sand,
so I’m forbidden to walk to the site itself.
But from a little hill above Sand Creek
I can see the level areas where the tipis were pitched
on that hospitable ground by the water,
with those five Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs
who believed they had arranged a peaceful enclave.
A stretch of green with tire tracks running behind it,
a little mossy earth under the cottonwoods.
