Oh What a Slaughter by Larry McMurtry

of this conflict: it agreed to abandon three forts that had foolishly been thrown up along the Bozeman Trail. They had been supposed to protect miners and other travelers to Montana but happened to have been erected right in the heart of Sioux country. With what meager manpower the army had at the time they could not be defended.
    The army had, for once, truly overreached—it had underestimated the power of the tribes. Custer was to make the same mistake at the Little Bighorn.
    Once the forts were abandoned, the Indians burned them.
    Part of J. P. Dunn’s admiration for Chivington stems from the fact that the fighting parson never gave ground. He never tried to shift the blame for Sand Creek to anyone else, or to pretend that he had intended to do anything other than what he did do: kill as many Indians as possible. Dunn’s argument is that at this stage of the fighting nothing but merciless cruelty would impress the Indians. He even argued that the mutilations had the same purpose: to convince the Indians that white men could deal in terror as effectively as they themselves could. He felt that the Indians did not respect gentle treatment, though he himself knew that they did respect
fair
treatment.
    Dunn ends his defense with one of those purple perorations of which he was so fond:
    Was it right for the English to shoot back the Sepoy ambassador from their cannon? Was it right for the North to refuse to exchange prisoners while our boys were dying in Libby and Andersonville? I do not undertake to answer these questions, but I do say that Sand Creek is far from being the “climax” of American outrages to the Indian, as it has been called. Lay not that unflattering unction on your souls, people of the East, while the names of Pequod and Conestoga Indians exist in your books; nor you of the Mississippi Valley while the blood of Logan’s family and the Moravian Indians of the Muskingum stainyour records; nor you of the South, while a Cherokee or a Seminole remains to tell the wrongs of his fathers; nor yet you of the Pacific Slope while the murdered family of Spencer or the victims of Bloody Point and Nome Cult have a place in the memory of men—your ancestors and predecessors were guilty of worse things than the Sand Creek massacre.
    That summary is hard to dispute. The burned-alive Pequots probably did have it worse. The reason Sand Creek gets highlighted is because some of those killed were prominent peace Indians. Black Kettle’s peaceful position had been well known for many years, but Chivington didn’t care. He attacked the largest encampment he could find—the more militant bands would not have been so easily found, and it’s doubtful that they could have been surprised. Black Kettle’s band was easy pickings precisely because they believed they were safe. To some extent Black Kettle compounded this lapse when he was attacked and killed on the Washita.
    Arthur Penn’s rendering of Thomas Berger’s
Little Big Man
contains at least three massacres. The first might loosely represent Sand Creek, the second the Washita, and the third the Little Bighorn. If Americans—or even Westerners—remember anything about Sand Creek it is that Black Kettle was frantically waving his American flag as the troopers charged in. Some say his companion White Antelope was holding up a peace certificate when he was shot dead; it is more probable that he was merely making some gesture of surrender. From the point of view of poorly trained or wholly untrained cavalry, that there were a lot of peace Indians in this camp might not have been obvious. Most of theattackers were probably more frightened than enraged, though rage or at least adrenaline arrived quickly enough once the shooting started.
    The mutilations the victors performed were horrible, though not nearly as encyclopedic as those the Sioux and Cheyenne managed to visit on Fetterman’s men two years later, in a battle