CHIVINGTON, Colo. — Tribal elders swear they can hear the murdered children crying.
No signs mark the U.S. cavalry massacre that took place here 136 years ago on the banks of Sand Creek, amid the gently rolling hills dotted with sagebrush and yucca. But some historians consider it a pivot point of Western history.
It was here that a unit led by Col. John M. Chivington--fresh from a victory over Confederates and hoping to boost a congressional bid--led an unprovoked early-morning raid Nov. 29, 1864, on an Indian village, killing more than 150 Cheyennes and Arapahoes, mostly women, children and elderly men.
To Indians it is the My Lai of the 19th century. Most Americans have never heard of it.
That's a disgrace, said Steve Brady, president of the Northern Cheyenne Descendants of Sand Creek.
"More than 135 years later, they're still fumbling around trying to decide what to do about Sand Creek," he said. "The remains of my people are scattered over that area. The killing fields of Colorado must be preserved."
"This tragedy affected every Cheyenne clan," said Laird Cometsevah, president of Southern Cheyenne Descendants of Sand Creek. "A memorial would leave an everlasting memory and show that it should never happen again to any certain tribe or even the non-Indian."
Legislation recently passed in Congress that will make the location, about 160 miles southeast of Denver, a national historic site. The measure was introduced by Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), a Northern Cheyenne whose great-grandfather's second wife survived the attack.
Approval of the measure, Campbell said, was an "overwhelming acknowledgment by Americans that we are better than our past."
Chilling eyewitness accounts contained in letters by two cavalry officers were read at a hearing on the bill in September.
"A squaw ripped open and a child taken from her. Little children shot while begging for their lives," wrote Lt. Joseph Cranmer.
"Hundreds of women and children were coming toward us and getting on their knees for mercy. Most of the Indians yielded four or five scalps," wrote Capt. Silas Soule.
"It was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized," wrote Soule, who was assassinated in Denver by a friend of Chivington's shortly after testifying at a congressional inquiry.
