the massacre, was that the Indians made them do it. The authorities tried to argue that the Indians would have killed the Mormons had they not helped in the attack. This lacks even the semblance of probability: the Indians lacked the weaponry to do anything of the sort.
The authors of the most recent studies of this dread event offer different theories as to why the wagon train was attacked. Sally Denton thinks the principal motive was greedâno wagon train that rich had ever passed that way; the money to be made, the loot to be collected, drew the locals into action. Will Bagley argues that it was not greed but creed: the blood atonement creed.
The participants themselves may have remained defiant for twenty years, but many Mormons were so repelled by what they heard that they left the church. Neither Brigham Young nor anyone else could hold them, a fact that tells us much about the common horror at massive bloodletting.
If one contrasts the amount of commentary on the Sacramento River Massacre with the flood of commentary about Mountain Meadows, one might suspect a racial element in the accounting: whites killing whites attracted more attention than whites killing Indians. There are a dozen books and many historical commentaries on Mountain Meadows and yet Iâm not sure that the racial point is valid. Probably the most written about massacre of the nineteenth century was Sand Creek, where, once again, whites were killing Indians. Mountain Meadows involved atheocracy that, due to a resort to terror, had been put on the defensive, whereas Sand Creek involved trade routes, settlement issues, and racial hatred. Mountain Meadows and Sand Creek both produced more than one official trial or inquiry. Like great battles, big massacres seem to demand repeated reassessments. Why the killing? How many died? Who was to blame? There is always much to be decided, but the way to a sound decision is never very clear.
Sand Creek, November 29, 1864
The Sand Creek Massacre site is now on land owned by a Colorado rancher named Bill Dawsonâor at least it is unless heâs recently sold his holdings. The site is just north of the hamlet of Chivington, Colorado: the town is named, of course, for John Milton Chivington, the man who planned and led the massacre.
The Arkansas River is a little distance to the south, flowing through expensive irrigated agricultural country. Not far upriver is the reconstructed Bentâs Fort; it had been the first great trading post on the Santa Fe Trail, visited by everybody who traveled this famous trail. William Bent, who, with his brother Charles and the trader Ceran St. Vrain, built the original fort, which had initially been farther west, had a number of half-breed children by two Cheyenne sisters: first Owl Woman, who died, and then Yellow Woman.
At least four of William Bentâs children were camped with their Cheyenne cousins on the day of the Sand Creek attack: Robert, George, Charles, and John. What happened that day turned one of these sonsâCharlesâinto a half-crazed, white-hating Dog Soldier, a torturer and killer who at one point even went south meaning to kill his own father. Fortunately William Bent was away at the time.
William Bent
Bill Dawson, the rancher who owns the land where the massacre occurred, is, by all accounts, a reasonable and likable man who, while holding his own views on Sand Creek, has nonetheless been generous with Indian groups who want to hold prayer services there. In the 1990s he allowed Connie Buffalo, an Ojibwa woman who had come into possession of two scalps taken at Sand Creek to bury them at the site, with appropriate ceremonials. Connie Buffalo had been given the scalps by the owner of a small motel near the site. They had been in the manâs family for years but the owner seemed to feel that Connie Buffalo had a better right to them: he offered them to her with tears in his eyes.
I mention this exchange because it suggests that