Trapped Between Two Worlds — Part II

The Colorado Volunteers hit the Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek as the first fingers of a cold dawn pulled apart the veil of night on November 29, 1864. They had been up late the night before, drinking and celebrating in anticipation of a victory over the “hostiles.”

But there were few, if any, committed militants in Black Kettle’s village. The Dog Soldiers who had been raising hell in the Smoky Hill country of Kansas were not there. Most of the men who camped with Black Kettle were absent hunting buffalo. That mattered not at all to the Col. John Chivington. For him, the Cheyenne were enemies of the state and he was an instrument of God ordained to scourge them from the Earth.

The attack was disorderly. To start with, only a portion of Chivington’s command obeyed the order to attack. Captain Silas Soule and Lt. Joseph Kramer, who each commanded a company of the First Colorado Cavalry, refused to attack. The troops who did, the Third Colorado Volunteers, carried out the assault with gusto. Indiscriminant gusto. They shot down women and children and stopped to mutilate the bodies.

George Bent, wounded in the hip, escaped into the sand hill bluffs above the camp, where the Cheyenne put up a fight and kept the soldiers at bay. The warriors managed to kill 24 soldiers and wound 52 more (some of the dead and wounded may have been victims of friendly fire). George Bent later tallied the Cheyenne dead at an estimated 53 men and 110 women and children.

Calling the Sand Creek attack an atrocity is no revisionist rant pandering to delicate modern-day sensibilities. Men who were there named it for what it was.

Captain Soule denounced the Third Colorado Volunteers, who carried out most of the atrocities as “a perfect mob.” He decried behavior beneath the dignity of any savage:

“White Antelope, War Bonnet and a number of others had Ears and Privates cut off. Squaws snatches were cut out for trophies. You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did.”

The plains of eastern Colorado and western Kansas exploded. Confirmed in their suspicion and hatred of the whites, the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers went on a rampage, joined by their close Arapaho allies and many Lakota who were outraged at the soldiers’ actions and who were anyway spoiling for a fight.

George Bent joined the revenge raids, including an attack on the stagecoach station at Julesburg in January 1865, where 15 whites were killed and thousands of dollars worth of livestock and property were captured or destroyed. Bent recalled warriors throwing fistfuls of greenbacks into the wind, not knowing or caring about money. Bent knew its value; he grabbed up as much as he could stuff in his pockets.

George had fought in the white man’s Civil War. He had no expectation that the Cheyenne and their allies could win a war against the whites. But he believed they must be punished for Sand Creek and he wanted to slake his thirst for vengeance.

His brother Charley… his thirst could never be slaked. To use modern parlance, Sand Creek radicalized the young halfbreed and he became the most hardened of militants. He grew to be a terror, credited with leading savage, slashing raids against soldiers, teamsters and railroad workers across the Colorado/Kansas Plains. He wasn’t a leader in any real sense; because of his white blood, Americans assumed he must be in charge — a fallacy that dates back at least to the days of Simon Girty. He did, however, have some useful knowledge: He showed his Dog Soldier brothers how to derail a train, and he was uniquely talented at taunting soldiers — in good if profane and scatological English — into chasing decoys into ambush.

Charley was a nasty piece of work. His rage was so deep that he sought to assassinate his own father because the old trader sought accommodation with the whites. In one raid, he and his comrades captured a teamster and cut out his tongue, slashed off his penis and stuck it in his mouth — all in plain view of the man’s friends, who were holed up in a buffalo wallow. Atrocity was not a one-sided affair in the wars on the Plains.

Charley’s campaign of terror was short-lived. He met his end in 1867 after being wounded in the hip during a skirmish with soldiers. He died of fever weeks later.

George rode with his brother for a time, but his blood cooled and he drifted away from the warpath. He was never the militant Charley was anyway. He became a valued interpreter in negotiations that finally brought a measure of peace to the Cheyenne.

When his people were settled on a reservation, he tried to help them adapt. He became embroiled in tribal politics and became a kind of broker for white ranchers seeking grazing allotments on tribal lands. It seems his efforts were a sincere attempt to gain an economic foothold for his mother’s people, but the allotments were not popular among more traditional Cheyenne and Bent came to be viewed with suspicion by at least a faction of his tribe.

The pressures of his life overcame him and he fell into alcoholism, which ruined his reputation among both whites and Indians.

But Bent redeemed himself late in life, while serving as an interpreter at an Indian school in Oklahoma. He began to work, mostly through written correspondence, with anthropologists George Bird Grinnell and George E. Hyde. The white scholars saw Bent as an accessible mine of cultural information they might otherwise never penetrate. In turn, Bent was obsessed with using these white writers to preserve the traditions and heritage of the Cheyenne. At times, he despaired of their work ever seeing the light of day, but in the end, Bent was vindicated. Through works such as Grinnell’s “The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Lifeways” and “The Fighting Cheyennes,” and Hyde’s “Life of George Bent,” the heritage of a proud people lives on today.

Note: The bulk of this account is drawn from the excellent, highly-readable “Halfbreed,” by David Fridtjof Hallas & Andrew E. Masich. Highly recommended.