Trapped Between Two Worlds — Part I

It flat sucked to be a “halfbreed” in 19^th Century America.

In a nation obsessed with race, being a halfbreed meant you were a man without a country. You might be useful to the military or to reservation agents as an interpreter, but useful didn’t mean welcome. And if you tried to walk the crooked and shifting line between the cultures, your native relations probably didn’t trust you either.

There were many such “marginal men” on America’s frontiers. Some were white children taken as captives when young, who came to cleave to the Indian way of life. Others were mixed-bloods, the progeny of traders and trappers and their native wives or concubines. Their stories are often tragic.

Such is the story of George Bent.

He was the son of the great empire-building trader William Bent, who built Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River along the Santa Fe Trail in what is now southeast Colorado. Bent married into the Cheyenne nation. It was a smart business move, but one done in honest affection, and it helped him become the preeminent man of the Southern Plains.

George was reared by his mother’s people in the vicinity of the fort, and also mingled with the colorful traders, trappers and hunters who roamed the plains of the buffalo, men of legend, like Kit Carson. When he was 10, his father sent him east to St. Louis for a white man’s education. He was a young man in college when the Civil War broke out. Bent joined Confederate forces in Missouri and fought at Wilson’s Creek and other engagements before being captured (some say he deserted). He was paroled, a common practice in the early stages of the War, and he headed back West to his mother’s people.

Despite years among the whites, it seems that George truly preferred the ways of the Cheyenne.

Unfortunately for George, the Colorado Territory was in a volatile state. Unionist sentiment ran high, and Bent was suspected of being a Confederate agent. And the Cheyenne were restless, with militant Dog Soldier warriors conducting periodic raids on outlying ranches, stage lines and traveling caravans.  The murderous raiding along the Platte River inflamed the white population, which tended to vent its rage on the most accessible Indians — who were usually the ones who were seeking some level of peaceful coexistence.

Enter one of the nastiest pieces of work in all of frontier history: Col. John Chivington.

A fire-and-brimstone religious zealot, the flamboyant Methodist preacher was known to drape himself in mountain lion skins and wear a pair of Colt revolvers strapped around his waist, fit weapons for a 19^th Century Warrior for God. His rank was with territorial volunteers, and he carried a good record, having been instrumental in whipping a Confederate force in the Battle of Glorieta Pass in New Mexico. That victory kept the Rebs out of the Colorado goldfields and made Chivington a hero.

Raging with ambition, Chivington wanted another victory —Rebs or Redskins, didn’t matter — to secure him a general’s star and the inside track on a congressional or Senate seat when Colorado became a state. He led the Colorado Volunteers out to punish the Cheyenne, who were encamped with Chief Black Kettle under the supposed protection of the U.S. Army in the elbow of a small watercourse called Sand Creek. George Bent and his younger brother Charley were at Sand Creek. It was November of 1864, and a dreadful doom was riding down upon Black Kettle’s people.