Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway by Louis Kraft

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway by Louis Kraft Pierre M. Atlas Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway. By Louis Kraft. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. ix + 413 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95, cloth. The November 1864 murder and mutilation of over 200 peaceful Southern Cheyenne (Tsistsistas) and Arapaho (Hinono'eino') at Sand Creek by Colorado volunteer cavalrymen was one of the great atrocities in American history. The attack was intended to be a slaughter. Its architect, Colonel John Chivington, told another officer that he "had come to kill Indians, and believed it to be honorable to kill Indians under any and all circumstances" (206). Independent scholar Louis Kraft uses contemporary sources to reconstruct this horrific event down to the minutest of details (including his own maps), but Sand Creek really serves as the lynchpin for a broader project. In an impressively detailed and nuanced work, Kraft presents the context and backstory leading to Sand Creek as well as its aftermath, including the duplicitous Medicine Lodge Treaty, retaliatory warfare, and Custer's Washita River massacre (where Cheyenne peace chief and Sand Creek survivor Black Kettle was killed). Utilizing [End Page 156] a wealth of contemporary, archival, and scholarly sources, Kraft presents a rich portrait of white-indigenous relations spanning several decades in what would become the states of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. In an epilogue, he notes the massacre's devastating cultural legacy for Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. Kraft presents compelling portraits of major and minor characters and describes the social dynamics within both settler and indigenous Great Plains communities of the 1860s, including political tensions in Colorado Territory between Union and Confederate sympathizers. One of the book's major takeaways is that local relationships between whites and Indians were not purely conflictual: there were people on both sides who tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to foster cooperation and coexistence. The book includes fascinating tidbits such as an 1861 meeting between Arapaho and Colorado leaders that culminated with them attending a play at a Denver theater. Kraft spotlights people who lived "in between," such as William Bent, who married Owl Woman (Cheyenne), and his biracial sons, Charley and George, who lived with the Cheyenne and witnessed Sand Creek. Kraft meticulously recreates the negotiations between government officials and Indian leaders; parsing the contemporary records, he identifies where negotiators' words were—tragically—mistranslated. There is a quirkiness to Kraft's writing style, with an overuse of colloquialisms, and occasions where the author abandons his role as detached historian and jarringly engages the reader directly. Kraft covers the various investigatory commissions following Sand Creek but does not discuss the reports' conclusions, making their detailed chronicling seem anticlimactic. One thing becomes clear after reading Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway: not only was the conflict between Plains Indians and the United States asymmetrical in terms of capacities, but it was also asymmetrical in intent. The Cheyenne and Arapaho wanted to maintain their way of life on some part of their traditional lands—and many were even willing to adapt to "white ways" on their land—whereas the US government and American settlers had no intention whatsoever of allowing that to happen; they wanted the land, and nothing would stop them from taking it. Pierre M. Atlas Paul H. O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis Copyright © 2022 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln