Digging Up Massacres
Jerome A. Greene on Sand Creek to the Nez Perce War.
By: Candy Moulton 01/01/2007
Since the day it happened, Sand Creek Massacre has maintained its station as one of the most emotionally charged and controversial events in American history, a seemingly senseless frontier tragedy reflective of its time and place.... [T]he seeds of Sand Creek lay in the presence of two historically discordant cultures within a geographical area that both societies coveted for disparate reasons, a situation designed to ensure conflict.
As he has done with other books, Jerome Greene, National Park Service (NPS) historian, lays bare the events of the attack at Colorado’s Sand Creek on November 29, 1864, in Finding Sand Creek: History, Archeology and the 1864 Massacre Site, cowritten with Douglas Scott, Great Plains team leader for the NPS Midwest Archeological Center. Their team study led to the establishment of Sand Creek as a National Historic Site in 2000.
These authors uncovered previously unknown documents and maps, as well as artifacts from that fateful autumn day when Col. John Chivington’s troops changed their nickname from “Bloodless Third” to “Bloody Third.”
TW: How does working with the archaeological record of a site—such as Sand Creek—change your perspective as a writer/historian?
Greene: In the case of Sand Creek, there existed no strong archaeological record because prior archaeology had failed to disclose the site of the village. The archaeological record was built only after historical research indicated the likely place where the village stood on November 29, 1864, and after the site of the sand pits (where the worst part of the massacre occurred) could thus be successfully projected. So in this instance, the archaeology confirmed what the written record indicated.
Does on-the-ground work often support or refute oral Indian history?
In the case of the Sand Creek Massacre locational project, the Indian oral history was something of a mixed bag, with some transgenerational (largely modern) accounts indeed specifying (and thus supporting) the projected location based on historical research and archaeological reconnaissance, and with some completely off the mark. Most of the oral histories stated nothing specific about the site. I believe that the real value of the modern Indian statements lies in their conveying the gravity and emotion that the people today still feel about the event as it affected them as Cheyennes and Arapahos. That, to me as an historian, is a vital and the most important attribute of the modern statements.
Finding Sand Creek is not the first Greene book to detail the story of Black Kettle and the Southern Cheyenne people. He earlier wrote Washita, a history of the November 27, 1868, attack on the Southern Cheyenne camp where troops under command of Lt. Col. George A. Custer encircled and attacked the winter camp, killing the chief, his wife and 30 or more other Cheyennes.
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