EADS, Colo. — Silence and emptiness abound on this great sea of grass stretching to the pale blue horizon. Tumbleweeds spin past, hawks gaze from rusted fence posts.
On mornings like this, when all is still, Indian pilgrims sometimes walk along the crooked course of Sand Creek and listen. They say they can hear screams and sobs.
"There is a small group of us who hear spirits all the time," said Laird Cometsevah, a Cheyenne chief who comes here each year. "Some hear women, I hear children."
Cheyennes and Arapaho have long journeyed to this lonesome prairie to remember the 163 Indians shot and hacked to death by Colorado cavalrymen during the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. The slaughter, initially hailed as a great military victory, set off a dozen years of warfare across the Great Plains.
Investigations later revealed that two-thirds of those killed were women, children and infants. Eyewitness accounts told of fingers and ears lopped off as trophies, babies left to die in freezing fields and women clinging to soldiers' legs begging in vain for mercy.
"You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there," wrote Capt. Silas Soule, a soldier who saw the massacre. "But every word I have told you is the truth that they do not deny."
The Indians have long tried to gain possession of the site and soothe the restless souls they say still wander it. About 20 years ago, the descendants of Sand Creek victims organized and sought ways to buy the land.
In December, a businessman with ties to the tribes bought the massacre site and donated it to them. They in turn leased it to the National Park Service, which is creating the country's first national historic site dedicated solely to a massacre.
"We are making history here," said Alexa Roberts, superintendent of the site. "This has been one of the most controversial episodes in the history of the West. It's like Little Bighorn, and among Indian tribal peoples it's never been forgotten."
Park officials expect 30,000 visitors a year to the site, which they say will encompass 12,500 acres, including an interpretive center and markers detailing the sequence of events. It will probably open within three years.
Sitting about 12 miles from the small ranching town of Eads in southeastern Colorado, Sand Creek has changed little since the massacre. A few cottonwood trees have grown up in the last century, but the sharp bends in the dry creek and the swaying grasslands remain largely as they were.
