He had survived one massacre.<\/p>\n
He would not survive the second.<\/p>\n
On the morning of November 29, 1864, soldiers under Colonel John Chivington attacked the Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek in the Colorado Territory.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle, the Cheyenne peace chief, stood outside his lodge and raised the American flag \u2014 the very flag that a Colorado governor had given him as a symbol of protection.<\/p>\n
He raised it because he believed what American officials had told him: that flying this flag would keep his people safe.<\/p>\n
The soldiers attacked anyway.<\/p>\n
Approximately 150 to 200 Cheyenne people were killed at Sand Creek, most of them women, children, and the elderly.<\/p>\n
The attacking force mutilated the dead.<\/p>\n
When the soldiers returned to Denver, they paraded scalps and body parts through the city as trophies.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle survived.<\/p>\n
His wife was shot nine times and left for dead but also survived.<\/p>\n
He would spend the next four years continuing to seek peace, even as other Cheyenne leaders chose war.<\/p>\n
He would sign another treaty.<\/p>\n
He would move his band to a reservation in Indian Territory.<\/p>\n
He would do everything the American government asked.<\/p>\n
On November 27, 1868 \u2014 four years and two days after Sand Creek \u2014 Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the Seventh Cavalry in a surprise dawn attack on Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River in present-day Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
This time, Black Kettle did not survive.<\/p>\n
He was killed while trying to escape across the river.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His wife, who had survived nine bullets at Sand Creek, was killed beside him.<\/p>\n
The man who had done more than any other Cheyenne leader to find a peaceful path for his people died in a dawn attack while his village slept.<\/p>\n
This is the story of Black Kettle \u2014 a story of a man whose commitment to peace was not weakness, whose pursuit of diplomacy was not naivety, and whose death at the hands of the United States military speaks more to the failures of American policy than to any failure of his own.<\/p>\n
It is also one of the most important and least understood stories in the history of the American West.<\/p>\n
The Southern Cheyenne and the World Black Kettle Inhabited<\/p>\n
To understand Black Kettle, you have to understand the world he was navigating \u2014 the Southern Cheyenne of the central plains, their culture, their political structure, and the specific pressures that the mid-nineteenth century was placing on all the plains peoples.<\/p>\n
The Southern Cheyenne, known as Tsitsistas in their own language, occupied the country of the central plains \u2014 the territory that would become Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
They were closely related and allied with the Southern Arapaho, who shared much of the same range.<\/p>\n
Together, these peoples ranged across the vast grasslands between the Arkansas River to the south and the Platte River to the north, following the bison herds that were the foundation of their economy.<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne had acquired horses in the eighteenth century and had by the early nineteenth century become a fully equestrian plains culture.<\/p>\n
They were skilled bison hunters, expert horsemen, and formidable warriors.<\/p>\n
Their social organization centered on the band \u2014 a group of related families that traveled, hunted, and sometimes fought together \u2014 with a broader tribal council that addressed matters affecting the whole nation.<\/p>\n
Cheyenne political structure was genuinely complex.<\/p>\n
There was no single chief who could speak for all the Cheyenne.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Council of Forty-Four, composed of peace chiefs who held their positions for ten years, was the closest thing to a central governing body, but its authority was deliberative and persuasive rather than coercive.<\/p>\n
Military societies, organized separately from the civil chiefs, had their own leaders and their own traditions of independence.<\/p>\n
This political complexity would become one of the most persistent sources of misunderstanding in Cheyenne-American relations.<\/p>\n
American officials consistently assumed that the chiefs they made agreements with could enforce those agreements on all Cheyenne people.<\/p>\n
They could not.<\/p>\n
A peace chief who signed a treaty had no authority to compel the military societies, whose young warriors might have entirely different ideas about how to respond to American encroachment.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle was a peace chief in this tradition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His role was diplomacy, negotiation, and the management of relationships with outside powers.<\/p>\n
He was exceptionally skilled at this role.<\/p>\n
He was also, structurally, limited by the nature of Cheyenne political authority \u2014 he could represent, advocate, and lead by persuasion, but he could not command obedience.<\/p>\n
He was born around 1803, which means he came of age on the central plains during the period of Cheyenne cultural florescence \u2014 the decades when the Cheyenne had established themselves as one of the dominant peoples of the region and when the pressures of American expansion were only beginning to make themselves felt.<\/p>\n
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 and the First Commitments<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The story of American treaty commitments to the Cheyenne begins formally with the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which attempted to establish territorial boundaries between the various nations of the plains and to create a framework for peaceful relations with the United States.<\/p>\n
The 1851 treaty established a broad territory that was recognized as Cheyenne and Arapaho country, centered on the country between the Platte and the Arkansas rivers.<\/p>\n
In exchange for acknowledging American sovereignty and agreeing to allow safe passage for emigrants on the Oregon Trail, the Cheyenne and Arapaho would receive annuity payments in goods for fifty years \u2014 a term that the Senate subsequently reduced to fifteen years without the knowledge or consent of the treaty parties.<\/p>\n
The 1851 treaty was followed almost immediately by violations of its spirit, if not always its letter.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858 and the subsequent rush of American prospectors and settlers into the claimed Cheyenne and Arapaho territory created pressures that the treaty framework was entirely inadequate to manage.<\/p>\n
The Fort Wise Treaty of 1861 attempted to address this by dramatically reducing the territory recognized as Cheyenne and Arapaho.<\/p>\n
The new treaty assigned a much smaller reservation in the southeastern corner of Colorado, on the Sandy Fork of the Arkansas River \u2014 land that was notably poor for the bison hunting that the Cheyenne depended on.<\/p>\n
The 1861 treaty was controversial among the Cheyenne from the moment it was signed.<\/p>\n
A significant number of chiefs refused to sign.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Those who did sign may not have fully understood that they were agreeing to give up most of their territory and to concentrate on the small reservation \u2014 the interpreters and the process itself were inadequate to ensure genuine informed consent.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle was among the chiefs who signed the Fort Wise Treaty.<\/p>\n
His decision to sign reflected his broader commitment to diplomacy and peaceful accommodation with American power, his realistic assessment of the military disparity between the Cheyenne and the United States, and his belief \u2014 however ultimately mistaken \u2014 that the treaty path offered the best protection for his people.<\/p>\n
He would spend the rest of his life trying to make that path work.<\/p>\n
The Colorado Gold Rush and the Pressure on the Plains<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific context that transformed the treaty framework of the early 1850s into the catastrophe of the early 1860s was the Colorado gold rush \u2014 the discovery of gold near what is now Denver in 1858 and the subsequent flood of American prospectors and settlers into Cheyenne and Arapaho country.<\/p>\n
The gold rush was not a slow or gradual process.<\/p>\n
Within a year of the discovery, tens of thousands of prospectors and their supporting population had moved into the region.<\/p>\n
Denver grew from nothing to a substantial town in a matter of months.<\/p>\n
The infrastructure of American settlement \u2014 roads, supply depots, newspaper offices \u2014 appeared almost overnight.<\/p>\n
The people who came with the gold rush did not come to share the country with the Cheyenne and Arapaho.<\/p>\n
They came to get gold, and the existing inhabitants were obstacles to that goal, not partners in a shared economy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The prospectors grazed their livestock on Cheyenne hunting grounds, scared away the game, and simply occupied land that the 1851 treaty had recognized as Cheyenne country.<\/p>\n
The territorial government of Colorado that emerged from this situation was dominated by people who wanted the Cheyenne and Arapaho removed.<\/p>\n
John Evans, the territorial governor appointed by President Lincoln in 1862, and John Chivington, the commanding military officer, were both committed to the view that the Cheyenne and Arapaho needed to be driven from Colorado \u2014 and both were willing to use violence to accomplish this.<\/p>\n
The situation was made more complicated by the Civil War, which drew most of the regular Army away from the frontier and left the defense of the Colorado Territory in the hands of volunteer forces.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These volunteers \u2014 the Chivington forces \u2014 were not subject to the same discipline and legal accountability that regular Army units theoretically carried.<\/p>\n
They were, in some cases, actively hostile to any peaceful accommodation with the plains peoples.<\/p>\n
The combination of a gold rush creating massive pressure on Cheyenne territory, a territorial government determined to remove the Cheyenne, and military forces under commanders who shared this determination with the settlers created the conditions for violence.<\/p>\n
1864: The Year Everything Broke<\/p>\n
The year 1864 was the year the deteriorating situation became catastrophic.<\/p>\n
Conflict had been escalating for several years, with raids and counter-raids, attacks on emigrant parties, and retaliatory operations by military forces.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But 1864 saw the situation descend into full-scale war on the central plains, with violence spreading across a wide area and both American civilians and Cheyenne people dying in increasing numbers.<\/p>\n
In June 1864, Governor Evans issued a proclamation that effectively declared open season on hostile Indians \u2014 inviting citizens to kill “hostile Indians” wherever they could be found, while specifying that friendly Indians could gather at specific points to receive protection.<\/p>\n
The proclamation was ambiguous enough to be dangerous: the distinction between hostile and friendly was in practice determined by the soldiers doing the killing.<\/p>\n
A month later, Evans issued a second proclamation that authorized Colorado citizens to “kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found, all such hostile Indians.” Chivington used this proclamation as authority for what he was planning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Through the summer and fall of 1864, Black Kettle worked through whatever channels were available to negotiate a peaceful resolution.<\/p>\n
He made contact with military commanders, communicated through Fort Lyon, and eventually brought a delegation of chiefs \u2014 including both Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders \u2014 to meet with Governor Evans and General Samuel Curtis in September 1864.<\/p>\n
The council at Camp Weld produced a document signed by Evans and Chivington in which the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs present agreed to report to Fort Lyon to make peace with the military commander there.<\/p>\n
This agreement was a limited one \u2014 it did not fully clarify the terms of peace, did not guarantee protection, and was subsequently interpreted by Evans and Chivington in ways that were not consistent with what Black Kettle and the other chiefs believed they had agreed to.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Black Kettle went to Fort Lyon.<\/p>\n
He reported to the military commander as agreed.<\/p>\n
He was told by the Fort Lyon commander, Major Edward Wynkoop, that his band could camp at Sand Creek, about forty miles from the fort, where they would be under military protection.<\/p>\n
They moved to Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
They believed they were safe.<\/p>\n
Sand Creek: November 29, 1864<\/p>\n
The attack at Sand Creek has been examined in extraordinary detail by historians, congressional investigations, and military tribunals.<\/p>\n
The basic facts are not disputed, even though interpretations of those facts were contested from the beginning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s band of Southern Cheyenne, approximately 500 to 600 people, were camped in a bend of Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
With them were a smaller number of Southern Arapaho under the chief Left Hand.<\/p>\n
The camp was in a location that had been designated by the military.<\/p>\n
The people there understood themselves to be under military protection.<\/p>\n
Colonel Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon with his command on the evening of November 28.<\/p>\n
He had marched through the night to prevent news of his approach from reaching the camp.<\/p>\n
The officers at Fort Lyon objected to the proposed attack \u2014 they told Chivington that the camp was friendly, that the people there had placed themselves under military protection, and that attacking them would be a violation of the assurances they had been given.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Chivington dismissed the objections.<\/p>\n
At dawn on November 29, Chivington’s force \u2014 approximately 700 soldiers, including two howitzers \u2014 surrounded the Sand Creek camp.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle raised the American flag over his lodge.<\/p>\n
He also raised a white flag.<\/p>\n
He had been told explicitly that these flags would protect him.<\/p>\n
The soldiers attacked.<\/p>\n
The fight was not a battle in any meaningful sense.<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne had a relatively small number of warriors, and those warriors were surprised at dawn in a camp that they believed was safe.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The majority of the people killed were women, children, and the elderly.<\/p>\n
Many tried to escape by running up the sandy creek bed; some dug into the banks for shelter.<\/p>\n
The soldiers pursued them, killing them in the creek bed.<\/p>\n
Some Cheyenne warriors organized a defense that slowed the attack and allowed some of the camp to escape.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle fled with his wife.<\/p>\n
His wife was shot multiple times as they fled.<\/p>\n
He managed to get her out alive, though she had been shot at least nine times.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The soldiers’ behavior after the fighting was over was reported in subsequent congressional investigations.<\/p>\n
Officers who had refused to participate in the attack documented what they observed.<\/p>\n
The soldiers mutilated the bodies of the dead, taking scalps and other body parts as trophies.<\/p>\n
When they returned to Denver, they displayed these trophies at a theater.<\/p>\n
The crowd cheered.<\/p>\n
The death toll at Sand Creek has been estimated in various ways.<\/p>\n
The most careful modern analyses suggest approximately 150 to 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people were killed, though some estimates are higher.<\/p>\n
The overwhelming majority were non-combatants.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which investigated Sand Creek in 1865, described it as “a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of its fierceness.” The congressional investigation was unsparing in its condemnation of Chivington, Evans, and their command.<\/p>\n
Chivington was never criminally charged.<\/p>\n
He had resigned from the military before the investigation was complete, which meant court-martial was no longer possible.<\/p>\n
Evans was removed as territorial governor but faced no legal consequences.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle survived.<\/p>\n
He would spend the next four years trying to understand what had happened and how to respond to it.<\/p>\n
The Meaning of Sand Creek for the Plains Wars<\/p>\n
Sand Creek’s immediate impact on the plains was the opposite of what Chivington had intended.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rather than breaking Cheyenne resistance and opening Colorado to American settlement, the massacre inflamed resistance across the northern and southern plains.<\/p>\n
The news of what had happened at Sand Creek \u2014 carried by survivors and by the warriors who had been away from the camp \u2014 spread quickly.<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne Dog Soldiers, the most militant of the Cheyenne military societies, responded with raids across a wide area of the central plains.<\/p>\n
The Lakota and Northern Cheyenne joined in.<\/p>\n
The violence of 1865 was substantially more widespread and destructive than the violence of 1864, precisely because Sand Creek had destroyed the credibility of the peace faction within the Cheyenne nation.<\/p>\n
Why would anyone seek peace with a government whose soldiers attacked friendly camps while flying the American flag?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This was the question that Black Kettle’s continued pursuit of diplomacy had to answer.<\/p>\n
And the answer he came to \u2014 that the specific violence at Sand Creek reflected the specific failure of specific leaders, not the permanent policy of the American government, and that pursuing peace remained the best available option for his people \u2014 was not obviously wrong, even though it would ultimately cost him his life.<\/p>\n
The aftermath of Sand Creek also produced one of the most extraordinary moments in the congressional record of the period.<\/p>\n
Multiple military officers who had been at Fort Lyon testified about what they had seen and what they had told Chivington.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their testimony was specific, detailed, and damning.<\/p>\n
The congressional investigations of 1865 produced a record that made the massacre undeniable in the eyes of any fair observer.<\/p>\n
And yet the political consequences for the perpetrators were minimal.<\/p>\n
Chivington emerged from the investigations damaged but not prosecuted.<\/p>\n
Evans lost his governorship but retained his business interests and eventually helped found Northwestern University.<\/p>\n
The basic political structure that had made Sand Creek possible \u2014 a territorial government and military command committed to removing the Cheyenne by whatever means necessary \u2014 continued to operate.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle After Sand Creek: The Path He Chose<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The choices that Black Kettle made after Sand Creek are the most important part of his story, and the ones that have been most misunderstood.<\/p>\n
He could have chosen war.<\/p>\n
The Dog Soldiers and other militant Cheyenne groups were fighting, and his prestige among the Cheyenne \u2014 while complicated by the obvious failure of his policy to protect his people at Sand Creek \u2014 remained significant.<\/p>\n
He had followers who would have gone to war with him.<\/p>\n
He chose not to.<\/p>\n
This choice was not naivety or confusion about what had happened.<\/p>\n
He knew what had happened at Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had seen it.<\/p>\n
He had dragged his wounded wife out of the chaos while soldiers were killing people around him.<\/p>\n
He understood better than almost anyone what the American military was capable of when it chose to use violence against his people.<\/p>\n
He chose peace because he calculated \u2014 correctly, in the strategic sense \u2014 that military resistance was not a path to Cheyenne survival.<\/p>\n
The resources available to the United States were simply too large.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne could win battles.<\/p>\n
They could not win a war of attrition against a nation with virtually unlimited men and material.<\/p>\n
This calculation was not defeatist or cowardly.<\/p>\n
It was a clear-eyed assessment of the military and political reality.<\/p>\n
The challenge was whether the American political system could or would produce the leadership necessary to honor treaty commitments \u2014 whether the government in Washington could control its own military and territorial officials well enough to make peace agreements actually mean something.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle continued to believe, against considerable evidence, that it could.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In October 1865, he signed the Little Arkansas Treaty, which was a new agreement attempting to address the violations of the 1861 Fort Wise Treaty and to provide some recognition of what had happened at Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
The treaty provided for a new reservation and included a provision acknowledging that the Cheyenne had suffered wrong at Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
It was not adequate reparation, but it was a formal acknowledgment of American fault.<\/p>\n
By signing this treaty, Black Kettle was again extending trust to a government that had violated his trust in the most catastrophic way possible.<\/p>\n
His fellow chiefs who had survived Sand Creek had different reactions \u2014 some refused to engage with the American government at all, some were committed to armed resistance.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s position, which required not just personal courage but the continued faith of his followers, was the most difficult one available.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867<\/p>\n
Three years after Sand Creek, the American government made another attempt at a comprehensive settlement of the plains Indian conflict.<\/p>\n
The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 was the most significant peace agreement of the period \u2014 a series of treaties negotiated with the Kiowa, Comanche, Kiowa-Apache, and Cheyenne-Arapaho nations that established reservation boundaries and attempted to end the fighting on the southern plains.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle was present at Medicine Lodge and was one of the principal signatories for the Southern Cheyenne.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The council itself was an extraordinary event \u2014 the largest gathering of treaty commissioners and plains chiefs in the history of the southern plains, attended by journalists whose accounts reached national audiences.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s speech at Medicine Lodge was reported in the newspapers of the time, and fragments of it survive.<\/p>\n
He spoke about the desire for peace, about the suffering his people had endured, and about his hope that the treaty being made would provide genuine security.<\/p>\n
He was clear-eyed about the difficulty of his position within the Cheyenne nation \u2014 he knew that not all Cheyenne were willing to accept the terms being offered, and he said so.<\/p>\n
The Medicine Lodge Treaty assigned the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho a reservation between the Cimarron and Arkansas rivers in Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne were to give up their claims to the wide-ranging territory of the central plains and confine themselves to the reservation.<\/p>\n
The treaty also required the Cheyenne to accept agency services \u2014 to receive government goods and services in exchange for their agreement to settle.<\/p>\n
This provision was meant to address the economic dimension of the transition from hunting to settled life.<\/p>\n
In practice, the goods often didn’t arrive, the agents were often incompetent or corrupt, and the transition to the restricted life of the reservation was far harder than the treaty negotiators had represented.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle moved his band to the reservation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was trying to comply with the terms of the treaty he had signed.<\/p>\n
But other Cheyenne \u2014 particularly the Dog Soldiers under Tall Bull and Roman Nose \u2014 refused to accept the Medicine Lodge terms and continued to raid in Kansas and along the emigrant routes.<\/p>\n
These raids provided the American military with justification for the campaign that would kill Black Kettle.<\/p>\n
The Road to the Washita<\/p>\n
The military campaign of 1868 that culminated in the Battle of the Washita \u2014 the attack on Black Kettle’s camp \u2014 was designed by General Philip Sheridan, who commanded the Military Division of the Missouri.<\/p>\n
Sheridan’s strategy was a winter campaign \u2014 a deliberate decision to attack plains Indians during the winter, when they were concentrated in their camps and when their horses were weakened by the cold and the lack of grass.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The strategy was designed to find and destroy the camps, capture women and children, kill horses, and generally destroy the material foundation of the plains way of life.<\/p>\n
Sheridan’s approach reflected a specific philosophy about how to end the plains Indian conflict \u2014 not through negotiation but through the destruction of the capacity for resistance.<\/p>\n
It was a strategy that did not distinguish between hostile and peaceful camps, because Sheridan believed the distinction was meaningless.<\/p>\n
In his view, an Indian who was peaceful in winter would be raiding in summer, and the only permanent solution was the elimination of the capacity for resistance.<\/p>\n
This philosophy was applied to the Washita operation without regard to the specific character of Black Kettle’s band.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was assigned to lead the strike force.<\/p>\n
Custer was a complex figure whose military career was characterized by both genuine tactical skill and a recklessness about the lives of those under his command.<\/p>\n
He had been court-martialed in 1867 for various offenses, including leaving his post without permission, and was serving under a suspension when Sheridan restored him to command for the winter campaign.<\/p>\n
Custer’s Seventh Cavalry tracked a trail from the site of a Cheyenne raid in Kansas southward toward the Washita River.<\/p>\n
The trail led to Black Kettle’s camp.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There is a specific historical question about whether Custer and his commanders knew or should have known that the camp they were about to attack was Black Kettle’s \u2014 a peace chief who had moved his band to the assigned reservation area and who had just returned from Fort Cobb, where he had been meeting with military officials to discuss his band’s safety.<\/p>\n
In November 1868, just before the Washita attack, Black Kettle had been at Fort Cobb.<\/p>\n
He had met with Colonel William Hazen, the Indian superintendent for the southern plains, to ask for protection for his band.<\/p>\n
Hazen told him that the matter of protection was beyond his authority \u2014 that he didn’t have the authority to offer the kind of guarantee Black Kettle was asking for, and that Black Kettle’s band would need to go to General Sheridan to seek terms.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle returned to his camp on the Washita without the protection he had sought.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was in the assigned reservation area.<\/p>\n
He had been trying to comply with treaty terms.<\/p>\n
He had just been told by an American official that he couldn’t get a guarantee of safety.<\/p>\n
Three days later, Custer attacked at dawn.<\/p>\n
The Battle of the Washita: November 27, 1868<\/p>\n
The attack on Black Kettle’s camp at the Washita River followed the same basic pattern as the attack at Sand Creek: a dawn assault on a sleeping camp, a military force with overwhelming firepower attacking people who had no warning.<\/p>\n
There were differences.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Washita was a military operation authorized by the commanding general, conducted by regular Army troops under formal military orders, not a volunteer militia acting on a territorial governor’s proclamation.<\/p>\n
Custer’s force attacked in ways that had the character of military operations \u2014 capturing women and children rather than simply killing everyone.<\/p>\n
But the similarities were more important than the differences: Black Kettle and his wife were killed as they tried to cross the river.<\/p>\n
The village was destroyed.<\/p>\n
The horses were killed.<\/p>\n
The camp’s material goods were burned.<\/p>\n
The casualty numbers at the Washita are disputed.<\/p>\n
Custer claimed 103 Cheyenne warriors killed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
More careful analyses, based on survivor accounts and later investigations, suggest the actual number was considerably lower \u2014 probably between 20 and 40 Cheyenne were killed at the Washita, including a significant number of women and children.<\/p>\n
Among the dead were Black Kettle and his wife.<\/p>\n
One of the controversies of the Washita engagement is what happened to other Cheyenne camps that were downstream from Black Kettle’s village.<\/p>\n
A significant Cheyenne encampment, much larger than Black Kettle’s village, was located a short distance away.<\/p>\n
Custer chose to withdraw rather than attack this larger force, and a separate unit of the Seventh Cavalry under Major Joel Elliott \u2014 who had pursued escaping Cheyenne downstream \u2014 was surrounded and killed by warriors from the other camps.<\/p>\n
Custer’s decision to withdraw without attempting to rescue Elliott and his men generated enormous controversy within the military.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The treatment of the Washita operation in American popular culture and military history has varied considerably over time.<\/p>\n
Custer portrayed it as a great victory.<\/p>\n
The Seventh Cavalry’s regimental song, “Garryowen,” was played as they attacked Black Kettle’s sleeping camp.<\/p>\n
Later historians, particularly in the post-civil-rights era, have been more critical of both the specific operation and the broader strategy it represented.<\/p>\n
The Question of Blame: Who Was Responsible?<\/p>\n
The deaths of Black Kettle and his wife at the Washita, following their survival of Sand Creek, raise a specific and important historical question: who was responsible?<\/p>\n
The simplest answer locates responsibility with the immediate perpetrators \u2014 Chivington at Sand Creek, Custer at the Washita.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This answer is not wrong.<\/p>\n
Both men made choices that resulted in attacks on camps they had reason to believe were peaceful, and those attacks produced deaths that were preventable.<\/p>\n
But the simplest answer is also inadequate, because it personalizes a systemic problem in ways that obscure the deeper issue.<\/p>\n
The deeper issue was the structure of American Indian policy in this period \u2014 a structure that simultaneously asked for peace agreements and then failed to enforce them, that created military commands with the power and the will to attack peaceful camps, and that consistently prioritized the interests of settlers and territorial governments over the rights of Indigenous peoples.<\/p>\n
Governor Evans and Colonel Chivington shared responsibility for Sand Creek, but so did the broader failure of federal oversight that left Colorado territorial officials free to pursue violent removal policies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The congressional investigations that followed Sand Creek were scathing in their condemnation \u2014 but they did not prevent similar attacks, because they did not change the underlying policy framework.<\/p>\n
General Sheridan’s winter campaign strategy that led to the Washita represented a deliberate choice to use violence against all plains camps, without distinguishing between those who were raiding and those who were complying with treaty terms.<\/p>\n
This strategy was authorized by the commanding general and implicitly endorsed by the Grant administration.<\/p>\n
Custer was an instrument of this strategy, but the strategy itself was the product of decisions made at a much higher level.<\/p>\n
The framework that produced Sand Creek and the Washita was a framework in which the promises made to peaceful chiefs like Black Kettle were understood, by many of the American officials who made them, as tactical concessions rather than genuine commitments.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The objective was always the clearing of the plains for American settlement.<\/p>\n
The question was only about the method.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle understood this, at some level, by the end.<\/p>\n
His statement at Medicine Lodge, that he wanted peace and that he was doing everything he could to keep his people peaceful, was also an acknowledgment that he could not guarantee peace on behalf of all the Cheyenne \u2014 that the Dog Soldiers and other militant groups operated outside his authority.<\/p>\n
The American military’s decision to attack Black Kettle’s camp rather than the camps of the actual raiders reflected a failure of intelligence, of policy, and of commitment to the treaty process that the government itself had initiated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What Black Kettle Believed and Why It Mattered<\/p>\n
To understand Black Kettle’s significance, you have to take seriously what he believed \u2014 not dismiss it as naivety or accommodation or collaboration with colonialism, but understand it as a coherent position developed through years of experience and genuine strategic reasoning.<\/p>\n
He believed that the Cheyenne could not win a war against the United States.<\/p>\n
This belief was correct.<\/p>\n
The War of 1812 had demonstrated American military reach.<\/p>\n
The Mexican-American War had demonstrated American capacity for conquest at continental scale.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Civil War, which was just concluding in the years of Black Kettle’s post-Sand Creek peace efforts, had demonstrated that the American military could mobilize resources at a scale that no plains nation could match.<\/p>\n
He believed that some American political leaders genuinely wanted peaceful resolution, and that the violence of people like Chivington and Custer reflected the failure of those leaders to control their own military and territorial officials, not the permanent position of the American government.<\/p>\n
This belief was partially correct \u2014 there was a significant peace faction within American politics, represented by figures like Senator James Doolittle, who genuinely opposed the violent approach and who worked to expose and condemn Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
The problem was that the peace faction was not strong enough to impose its approach consistently.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He believed that the practical alternative to peace negotiations \u2014 armed resistance \u2014 would produce far more Cheyenne deaths than the peace path, even taking Sand Creek into account.<\/p>\n
This belief was also correct.<\/p>\n
The military campaigns of the 1870s, conducted after many Cheyenne had chosen armed resistance, did in fact produce far more Cheyenne deaths than the Sand Creek massacre.<\/p>\n
None of these beliefs were wrong.<\/p>\n
What was wrong was the conclusion Black Kettle drew from them \u2014 that persistent diplomacy and treaty compliance would eventually produce a stable peace.<\/p>\n
What the historical record shows is that the American political system, in the 1860s, was not capable of producing the consistent, good-faith implementation of treaty agreements that genuine peace required.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s strategy was sound in its underlying logic.<\/p>\n
It failed because the other party to the negotiation was not capable of keeping its commitments.<\/p>\n
The Peace Faction Within Cheyenne Society<\/p>\n
Black Kettle was not alone among Cheyenne leaders in seeking peaceful accommodation, though he was the most prominent and most persistent of the peace chiefs.<\/p>\n
Understanding the broader peace faction within Cheyenne society helps clarify both the political context in which he operated and the significance of his choices.<\/p>\n
The Council of Forty-Four, the traditional Cheyenne governing body, was composed entirely of peace chiefs \u2014 men whose institutional role was diplomacy and the management of external relations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The military societies, with their own leadership and traditions of autonomy, operated outside the council’s formal authority.<\/p>\n
This structural division between civil peace authority and military capacity was a permanent feature of Cheyenne political life.<\/p>\n
In the 1860s, this division became a fault line.<\/p>\n
The peace chiefs, led by Black Kettle, advocated for negotiation and treaty compliance.<\/p>\n
The military societies, particularly the Dog Soldiers under leaders like Tall Bull, advocated for armed resistance and continued raiding.<\/p>\n
The division was not simply between cowards and warriors, as some popular accounts have implied.<\/p>\n
It was a genuine strategic debate between people who held different views about what path offered the best chance of Cheyenne survival.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The peace chiefs were not wrong in their analysis of the military situation.<\/p>\n
They were wrong in their assessment of the American government’s ability and willingness to deliver on its promises.<\/p>\n
The military societies were not wrong in their assessment that the American government could not be trusted.<\/p>\n
They were wrong in their assessment that armed resistance could produce a better outcome than the peace path.<\/p>\n
Both factions were navigating an impossible situation \u2014 a situation created not by Cheyenne choices but by American policy decisions that were going to produce catastrophic outcomes for the Cheyenne regardless of how the Cheyenne responded.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle deserves recognition not for having found the right answer to an impossible question but for the genuine moral courage he showed in pursuing the path he believed was best for his people, even after Sand Creek, even at the cost of his own credibility among the warriors who thought he should choose war.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Little Rock and the Question of Black Kettle’s Legacy<\/p>\n
Among Black Kettle’s children and grandchildren and among the descendants of the survivors of Sand Creek and the Washita, the memory of Black Kettle has been preserved and honored across generations.<\/p>\n
His name and his story are part of the living history of the Cheyenne-Arapaho people, who maintain their tribal identity and government in Oklahoma.<\/p>\n
The Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma \u2014 the descendants of the people Black Kettle led and the people who survived Sand Creek and the Washita \u2014 have maintained a complex and nuanced relationship with his memory.<\/p>\n
He is honored as a leader who gave everything for his people’s survival, even knowing that his approach might not work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He is also understood, within the community, in the full complexity of what he faced \u2014 the impossible choices, the limited options, the consistent betrayals.<\/p>\n
The National Historic Site at Sand Creek, established in 2000 after decades of advocacy by descendants of the victims and historical researchers, is one of the most significant acknowledgments of what happened at Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
The site is managed collaboratively by the National Park Service and the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants, a model of shared stewardship that reflects the community’s ongoing relationship with that tragedy.<\/p>\n
The Battle of the Washita National Historic Site, established in 1996, marks the site of the Washita attack.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The site’s interpretation has evolved over time, moving from an uncritical celebration of Custer’s “victory” to a more complex acknowledgment of what happened to Black Kettle and his band.<\/p>\n
These commemorations represent a form of historical reckoning that has been partial and delayed but that is genuine.<\/p>\n
The American government’s formal acknowledgment that Sand Creek was a massacre \u2014 embedded in the National Historic Site’s founding legislation \u2014 was a significant step from the position held by Chivington’s defenders in the immediate aftermath.<\/p>\n
The Larger Pattern: Black Kettle Among the Peace Chiefs<\/p>\n
Black Kettle was not the only Indigenous leader of his era to pursue diplomatic accommodation with American expansion, and understanding him requires some appreciation of the broader pattern he was part of.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Across the plains and the West, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, different Indigenous leaders made different choices about how to respond to American expansion.<\/p>\n
Some chose armed resistance from the beginning.<\/p>\n
Some, like Black Kettle, chose diplomacy and treaty negotiation.<\/p>\n
Some, like the Crow leadership that eventually allied with the U.S. military against the Lakota, made still different calculations about where strategic interest lay.<\/p>\n
The peace chiefs \u2014 as a category \u2014 have sometimes been dismissed in popular history as weak, as accommodationists, as people who failed to understand the stakes of what they were agreeing to.<\/p>\n
This dismissal is incorrect on multiple levels.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
First, the peace chiefs typically understood the stakes better than any outsider observer.<\/p>\n
They had direct experience of what military conflict with the United States looked like.<\/p>\n
They were making an informed calculation, not a naive one.<\/p>\n
Second, the argument that resistance produced better outcomes than accommodation is not obviously supported by the historical record.<\/p>\n
The nations that chose sustained armed resistance \u2014 including the Lakota, whose brilliant military campaign of 1876 was followed by the permanent destruction of their political autonomy \u2014 did not achieve better outcomes for their people than the nations that chose negotiation.<\/p>\n
The outcomes were uniformly bad; the question was how bad, and on what terms.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Third, the peace chiefs who chose diplomacy were often doing so with genuine moral conviction \u2014 they believed that violence was wrong in itself, not only strategically counterproductive.<\/p>\n
This conviction was consistent with the traditions of the Cheyenne civil chiefs, who were specifically the non-military leadership of the nation and who understood their role as the preservation of peace.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle exemplified this tradition at its best.<\/p>\n
He pursued peace not because he was afraid of war but because he believed peace was right and because he calculated that it offered the best available chance for his people’s survival.<\/p>\n
He was wrong in the second belief \u2014 not because his calculation was flawed, but because the people he was negotiating with were not operating in good faith.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Winter Camp Strategy and Its Logic<\/p>\n
Understanding why Black Kettle’s band was at the Washita in November 1868 requires understanding the specific logic of the winter camp strategy that the Cheyenne used \u2014 and why that strategy, which had worked for generations, was now being turned against them by American military planners.<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne, like all plains peoples, wintered in protected valleys where their horses could find forage and where their camps were sheltered from the worst weather.<\/p>\n
The winter camp was not a vulnerable position \u2014 in the traditional context of plains warfare, it was actually a relatively safe time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Raiders and war parties didn’t operate in deep winter because the conditions made long-distance travel too difficult and dangerous.<\/p>\n
The American military’s winter campaign strategy, developed by Sheridan, was specifically designed to exploit this vulnerability.<\/p>\n
By attacking in winter, when the plains peoples were concentrated and immobile, when their horses were weakened, and when they had no mobility to escape, the Army could achieve the comprehensive destruction of entire communities that was the point of the campaign.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s band was in exactly the kind of winter camp location that made sense for plains peoples in November.<\/p>\n
They were in a river valley, sheltered from the weather, with grass available for their horses.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were in the general area of the reservation that had been assigned to them by the Medicine Lodge Treaty.<\/p>\n
The specific choice of the Washita valley was not random or suspicious.<\/p>\n
It was exactly where a compliant band would be expected to be in November \u2014 in the assigned area, wintering in a location that made logistical sense.<\/p>\n
The fact that other, non-compliant Cheyenne groups \u2014 including some who had been raiding in Kansas \u2014 were also in the general area of the Washita River valley is one of the complicating factors in the historical assessment of the Washita attack.<\/p>\n
Custer’s tracking of a raid trail had led him to the general area.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His decision to attack the first large camp he found, without determining whether that camp was the source of the raids, was the specific decision that placed Black Kettle in the line of fire.<\/p>\n
The Personal Costs of Leadership<\/p>\n
Black Kettle paid extraordinary personal costs for the path he chose.<\/p>\n
It is important to name these costs clearly, because they are part of what makes his story more than an abstract political history.<\/p>\n
At Sand Creek, he watched soldiers attack and kill the people he was responsible for protecting while he was flying the flag he had been told would protect them.<\/p>\n
His wife, Medicine Woman Later, was shot nine times.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had to drag her, bleeding and barely alive, out of the chaos while soldiers were killing people around them.<\/p>\n
He survived, and she survived, but the experience of Sand Creek was as traumatic as any combat veteran’s worst experience \u2014 the betrayal was complete, the violence was total, and the personal connection to the victims was absolute.<\/p>\n
He survived Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
He continued to lead.<\/p>\n
He continued to seek peace.<\/p>\n
He brought his wounded wife with him as he resumed the diplomatic work that he believed was his responsibility.<\/p>\n
The personal costs continued.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He faced criticism from other Cheyenne leaders who thought he was naive or collaborationist.<\/p>\n
He saw his policy fail again and again as American officials violated commitments and as military forces attacked peaceful camps.<\/p>\n
He knew that his continued pursuit of diplomacy was not producing the protection he had been promised.<\/p>\n
He kept going.<\/p>\n
Not because he was oblivious to the failures, but because he could not see a better path.<\/p>\n
The death at the Washita came as he was trying to escape across the river \u2014 not fighting, not surrendering, but trying to get away with his wife at his side, on a horse, in the dawn darkness when soldiers were attacking on all sides.<\/p>\n
He did not die with his boots on, in the heroic stance of western mythology.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He died in the river, trying to live.<\/p>\n
Medicine Woman Later died with him.<\/p>\n
The woman who had survived nine bullets at Sand Creek did not survive the Washita.<\/p>\n
Custer’s Account and Its Problems<\/p>\n
Custer’s account of the Washita engagement, published in his 1874 memoir My Life on the Plains, presents the attack as an unambiguous military success \u2014 the destruction of a hostile camp that had been raiding American settlers in Kansas.<\/p>\n
The problems with this account are multiple and significant.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
First, the characterization of Black Kettle’s camp as the source of the Kansas raids is contradicted by the specific evidence available at the time.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle had just been at Fort Cobb, trying to arrange protection for his band.<\/p>\n
His camp was in the assigned reservation area.<\/p>\n
The Dog Soldiers who were actually conducting the raids were in different camps.<\/p>\n
Second, Custer’s casualty claims were significantly inflated.<\/p>\n
His claim of 103 warriors killed is contradicted by survivor accounts and by the physical evidence of the battlefield, which subsequent investigators found inconsistent with the casualty numbers he reported.<\/p>\n
Third, Custer’s account does not address the question of Black Kettle’s identity and his status as a peace chief who had been seeking American protection.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It presents the Washita simply as a successful engagement against a hostile camp, without acknowledging the specific character of who was killed and under what circumstances.<\/p>\n
Fourth, the abandonment of Major Elliott and his men \u2014 the separate unit that was surrounded and killed while Custer withdrew \u2014 was the subject of intense controversy within the military that Custer’s account does not honestly address.<\/p>\n
Custer’s version of the Washita became the dominant popular narrative for much of the following century, partly because of his celebrity and partly because it was convenient for the broader narrative of American expansion.<\/p>\n
The fuller story \u2014 in which a peace chief who had been trying to comply with treaty terms was killed in a dawn attack \u2014 was harder to incorporate into the triumphalist history of the West.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Government’s Response and Its Meaning<\/p>\n
The American government’s response to the Washita engagement was very different from its response to Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
Sand Creek had produced congressional investigations, military tribunals, and widespread public condemnation.<\/p>\n
Chivington had been driven from public life in disgrace, though not prosecuted.<\/p>\n
Evans had been removed from his governorship.<\/p>\n
The political cost of Sand Creek had been significant.<\/p>\n
The Washita produced no similar reckoning.<\/p>\n
Sheridan praised Custer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The operation was treated as a successful military engagement.<\/p>\n
The distinction between Sand Creek and the Washita, in the eyes of the government, was that Sand Creek had happened without orders (or rather, with orders from territorial officials who had exceeded their authority), while the Washita was the authorized product of a deliberate strategic decision made by the Army’s senior leadership.<\/p>\n
This distinction illuminates something important about what had changed between 1864 and 1868.<\/p>\n
The destruction of Black Kettle’s camp was not a rogue operation conducted by a reckless colonel acting outside his authority.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was the authorized implementation of a deliberate strategy approved at the highest levels of the military command.<\/p>\n
This authorization makes the Washita more damning as a reflection of American policy, not less.<\/p>\n
Sheridan’s winter campaign strategy, which targeted all plains camps regardless of whether they were specifically associated with raids, was a decision made with full awareness of what it would produce.<\/p>\n
The killing of Black Kettle \u2014 a known peace chief who had just been at Fort Cobb seeking protection \u2014 was a foreseeable consequence of a strategy that did not distinguish between peaceful and hostile camps.<\/p>\n
The Archaeological Record and Its Testimony<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In recent decades, archaeological investigations at both Sand Creek and the Washita have added physical evidence to the documentary record of what happened at these sites.<\/p>\n
At Sand Creek, archaeological surveys conducted in preparation for the establishment of the National Historic Site identified physical evidence consistent with the documentary accounts of the massacre.<\/p>\n
The distribution of cartridge cases and artifacts across the site was consistent with the survivors’ accounts of how the attack unfolded and how people fled.<\/p>\n
At the Washita, similar archaeological work has helped clarify the physical layout of Black Kettle’s camp and the pattern of the attack.<\/p>\n
The archaeological evidence is broadly consistent with the historical accounts but adds spatial specificity that documentation alone cannot provide.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The physical evidence at both sites is not merely antiquarian.<\/p>\n
It contributes to the ongoing process of historical reckoning \u2014 the effort to understand what happened with as much precision as possible, as a foundation for the moral and political accounting that the events demand.<\/p>\n
The establishment of both sites as National Historic Sites, with the involvement of descendant communities in their management, represents one form of this reckoning.<\/p>\n
The language of the founding legislation \u2014 which explicitly uses the word “massacre” for Sand Creek \u2014 is a formal acknowledgment of what the events represented.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s Speeches and Their Significance<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Several of Black Kettle’s speeches have been preserved in fragmentary form through the records of treaty negotiations and of council meetings with American officials.<\/p>\n
These fragments are among the most direct evidence of his thinking and his character.<\/p>\n
At Medicine Lodge in 1867, he spoke about his desire for peace and about the difficulty of his position.<\/p>\n
He acknowledged that he could not control all the Cheyenne \u2014 that the young men who chose to raid were acting outside his authority.<\/p>\n
He was essentially doing something that peace chiefs rarely did in public: acknowledging the limits of his own power while still maintaining that the peace path was the right one.<\/p>\n
The courage this required is easy to underestimate.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Cheyenne society, a leader’s authority depended on his followers’ confidence in his judgment.<\/p>\n
Publicly acknowledging that you could not control your own people was a political risk as well as a strategic statement.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle made this acknowledgment because he believed that honest communication with American officials was necessary for genuine peace, and because he knew that American officials consistently overestimated how much authority Cheyenne peace chiefs actually had.<\/p>\n
In his last known contact with American officials \u2014 his meeting with Colonel Hazen at Fort Cobb in November 1868, just before the Washita \u2014 he asked for protection for his band.<\/p>\n
He was told he couldn’t have it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific language of that conversation, preserved in Hazen’s account, shows a man who was trying to do everything right and who was being told, in effect, that doing everything right wasn’t enough.<\/p>\n
He went back to his camp on the Washita.<\/p>\n
Three days later, he was dead.<\/p>\n
The Historical Debate About Black Kettle<\/p>\n
Historical assessments of Black Kettle have varied considerably, reflecting the broader debates about how to understand Indigenous leaders who pursued accommodation with American expansion.<\/p>\n
An older tradition, particularly prevalent in popular accounts of the frontier era, treated peace chiefs like Black Kettle as naive or as pawns of American officials who manipulated them to serve colonial objectives.<\/p>\n
This tradition sometimes shaded into explicit contempt \u2014 a view that a “real” Indian chief would have fought rather than sought peace.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This tradition reflects deep misunderstandings of both Black Kettle’s political sophistication and the genuine complexity of the choices he faced.<\/p>\n
He was not naive.<\/p>\n
He was making strategic calculations under conditions of extreme information asymmetry and limited options.<\/p>\n
A second tradition, influenced by the post-civil-rights reconsideration of the Indian Wars, has been more sympathetic but sometimes equally distorting in a different direction.<\/p>\n
In this tradition, Black Kettle becomes a pure victim \u2014 a peaceful man destroyed by American violence, without political agency of his own.<\/p>\n
This tradition acknowledges the American failures better than the older tradition does, but it still doesn’t quite see Black Kettle as a political actor with his own strategy and his own reasons.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The most sophisticated historical assessments treat him as both \u2014 as someone who made genuine strategic choices based on genuine analysis of his situation, and as someone who was ultimately destroyed by the specific failures of the American political system to honor its commitments.<\/p>\n
He was not simply a victim.<\/p>\n
He was an agent who made choices.<\/p>\n
Those choices were made in impossible circumstances, and the fact that they didn’t ultimately protect his people reflects the limits of what any choice could have achieved in those circumstances, not the failure of his judgment.<\/p>\n
What His Story Reveals About American History<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s story is important not only for what it reveals about him but for what it reveals about the American political system in the 1860s and about the specific mechanisms through which American expansion was accomplished.<\/p>\n
The story reveals a pattern that recurred across the plains and across the continent: American officials made genuine-seeming commitments to peace, and those commitments were then violated by other American officials \u2014 military commanders, territorial governors, prospectors and settlers \u2014 who had different interests.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The mechanisms for holding violators accountable were inadequate, and the political will to enforce treaty commitments consistently was absent.<\/p>\n
Sand Creek happened because a territorial governor and a military commander, acting with the implicit authorization of a broader political culture that wanted the Cheyenne removed, used military force against a camp that had placed itself under military protection.<\/p>\n
The subsequent investigation was thorough and the condemnation was real, but the consequences were minimal.<\/p>\n
The political culture that had made Sand Creek possible did not change.<\/p>\n
The Washita happened because the same dynamic \u2014 this time with the explicit authorization of the senior military command \u2014 produced another attack on a peaceful camp.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But this time, there was no congressional investigation, no widespread condemnation, no removal of the responsible commanders.<\/p>\n
The political culture had decided that winter attacks on plains camps, regardless of the specific character of the camp, were acceptable military strategy.<\/p>\n
The difference between Sand Creek and the Washita reflects the evolution of American policy from unofficial violence to official policy.<\/p>\n
By 1868, the destruction of plains camps was not a rogue operation.<\/p>\n
It was the plan.<\/p>\n
The Legacy That Deserves Recognition<\/p>\n
Black Kettle deserves recognition not only as a victim of American violence but as one of the most principled and determined leaders in the history of the southern plains \u2014 a man who pursued a course of action that he believed was right, under conditions of extraordinary difficulty, and paid the ultimate price for it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His commitment to peace was not weakness.<\/p>\n
It was a strategic and moral choice made by a man who understood his situation with clarity.<\/p>\n
He knew the disparity between Cheyenne and American military power.<\/p>\n
He knew the history of what had happened to other peoples who had chosen sustained armed resistance.<\/p>\n
He knew that the path he was choosing offered no guarantees and that many of his own people doubted it.<\/p>\n
He chose it anyway, because he believed it was the best available chance for his people’s survival, and because he believed that violence was wrong in itself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fact that his strategy ultimately failed tells us more about the American political system’s inability to honor its commitments than about any failure of Black Kettle’s judgment or character.<\/p>\n
He survived one massacre.<\/p>\n
He tried harder to make peace after it.<\/p>\n
He was killed in a second.<\/p>\n
The arc of his life is one of the most powerful indictments of American Indian policy in the nineteenth century \u2014 not because he failed, but because he did everything right and was still killed.<\/p>\n
The flags he raised \u2014 the American flag over his lodge at Sand Creek, the white flag of surrender that was also ignored \u2014 were not symbols of naivety.<\/p>\n
They were rational signals within a diplomatic framework that he was trying to make work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fact that they didn’t work reflects the failure of the framework, not the failure of his use of it.<\/p>\n
The Washita Today<\/p>\n
The Battle of the Washita National Historic Site in western Oklahoma marks the site of the attack on Black Kettle’s camp.<\/p>\n
The interpretive approach at the site has changed significantly since its establishment in 1996, moving from a presentation centered on Custer’s “victory” to a more complex acknowledgment of what the attack represented.<\/p>\n
The site’s interpretation now includes the perspective of the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants \u2014 the people whose relatives were killed at the Washita.<\/p>\n
Their presence in the site’s interpretive program is a genuine change from the site’s earlier history, when the battle was presented primarily from the perspective of the U.S. military.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s specific role in the story \u2014 as a peace chief who had just been at Fort Cobb seeking protection, who was killed in his own camp along the reservation boundary \u2014 is now part of the site’s official interpretation.<\/p>\n
The acknowledgment of this specific context represents a significant evolution in how the American government represents this history.<\/p>\n
The Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma maintain their tribal sovereignty and their cultural traditions in the area that was assigned to them by the Medicine Lodge Treaty \u2014 the territory that Black Kettle signed away his people’s broader claims to receive, and in which his descendants continue to live.<\/p>\n
The memory of Black Kettle is preserved within that community in the ways that community memory works \u2014 in stories told across generations, in ceremonial contexts, in the naming of places and the keeping of specific traditions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His legacy is not primarily in the monuments and the national historic sites, though those matter.<\/p>\n
It is in the survival of the community he spent his life trying to protect.<\/p>\n
The Question That Remains<\/p>\n
The question that Black Kettle’s story forces us to confront is a direct one: what obligation did the United States government have to honor the commitments it made to him and to his people?<\/p>\n
The answer is clear.<\/p>\n
The commitments were clear.<\/p>\n
They were made in formal treaty negotiations, ratified by the Senate, and represented by American officials as genuine obligations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The violations of those commitments \u2014 at Sand Creek, at the Washita, and in the years between \u2014 were not accidents or misunderstandings.<\/p>\n
They were the product of deliberate choices made by American officials who prioritized the interests of settlers and the ideology of expansion over the legal and moral obligations of the treaty system.<\/p>\n
The recognition that this was wrong \u2014 embedded in the congressional investigations of 1865, in the Supreme Court’s recognition in later decades that Indian treaties created genuine legal obligations, and in the contemporary acknowledgments of sites like Sand Creek National Historic Site \u2014 is genuine.<\/p>\n
It is also incomplete.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The full accounting would require acknowledging not only what happened at Sand Creek and the Washita but the systemic failures that produced them \u2014 the political culture, the economic interests, the ideological commitments that made Sand Creek and the Washita not anomalies but examples of a pattern.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle made peace as often as he could.<\/p>\n
He extended trust as many times as he had to.<\/p>\n
He was rewarded with massacre, and then with massacre again.<\/p>\n
His story is not a tragedy of his making.<\/p>\n
It is a tragedy of American making, and the obligation to understand it honestly is part of what his legacy demands.<\/p>\n
\u2014 EXTENDED SECTIONS \u2014<\/p>\n
Colonel Chivington and the Making of Sand Creek<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
John Milton Chivington deserves specific examination, because understanding him helps explain how Sand Creek was possible within the institutional frameworks of the time.<\/p>\n
Chivington was a Methodist minister who had served as a military chaplain before receiving a military commission.<\/p>\n
He had performed well at the Battle of Glorieta Pass in New Mexico in 1862, an engagement that helped prevent Confederate forces from controlling the Southwest.<\/p>\n
This military success had given him political standing in Colorado and a military reputation that translated into authority.<\/p>\n
He was also a man who had publicly stated, in a speech before the attack, that he believed the appropriate response to the “Indian problem” was extermination.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He said it explicitly: he came to kill Indians, and he believed that killing was justified.<\/p>\n
This was not a private view held secretly \u2014 it was publicly stated and was apparently not disqualifying in the political culture of territorial Colorado in 1864.<\/p>\n
The specific decision-making at Sand Creek \u2014 the arrival at Fort Lyon, the dismissal of the objections from the fort’s officers, the overnight march, the dawn attack \u2014 reflects a man who had made up his mind before he arrived and who treated the professional objections of officers who knew the situation better than he did as irrelevant.<\/p>\n
The officers who objected deserve recognition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Captain Silas Soule refused to order his troops to fire and testified about what he saw at the subsequent investigation.<\/p>\n
He was assassinated in Denver three months after the investigation \u2014 the perpetrators were believed to be connected to Chivington’s circle.<\/p>\n
The assassination was never prosecuted.<\/p>\n
Soule’s willingness to tell the truth about what happened at Sand Creek, and the price he paid for it, is one of the most significant details of the entire episode.<\/p>\n
Chivington returned to Denver after Sand Creek to a hero’s welcome.<\/p>\n
The city theater that displayed the scalps and body parts his soldiers had brought back from the camp was celebrating what most Coloradans, in November 1864, understood as a great victory over savage enemies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The subsequent congressional investigation changed the public narrative, but it did not change the underlying political culture that had enabled Chivington.<\/p>\n
The territorial elite that had supported the attack retained its political power.<\/p>\n
Denver continued to grow.<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne were removed.<\/p>\n
The Role of the Indian Peace Commission<\/p>\n
The congressional response to the escalating plains Indian conflict of the 1860s included the creation of the Indian Peace Commission in 1867, a body charged with negotiating the comprehensive peace agreements that became the Medicine Lodge Treaty and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.<\/p>\n
The Peace Commission represented the peace faction within American politics \u2014 people like Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel Taylor and Senator James Doolittle who genuinely believed that negotiated settlements were both morally preferable and practically more effective than military campaigns.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Commission’s work at Medicine Lodge was a serious effort to create a lasting framework for the coexistence of plains nations and the expanding American state.<\/p>\n
The fundamental problem with the Commission’s work was that it operated in a political system where it did not have the authority to enforce what it negotiated.<\/p>\n
The military, under Sheridan’s command, had its own strategy and its own timeline, and Sheridan was not particularly interested in what the civilian peace commissioners thought.<\/p>\n
The Commission had negotiated the Medicine Lodge Treaty in October 1867.<\/p>\n
By November 1868 \u2014 thirteen months later \u2014 Custer was attacking Black Kettle’s camp with Sheridan’s authorization.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The peace framework and the military framework were in direct conflict, and the military framework had the guns.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle had placed his trust in the peace faction and in the treaty process.<\/p>\n
The peace faction was sincere in its commitments.<\/p>\n
It simply did not control the military.<\/p>\n
The Role of the Press and Public Opinion<\/p>\n
The American press of the 1860s played a significant role in both the events at Sand Creek and their aftermath, and the press response to the Washita was notably different from the press response to Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
Sand Creek was initially presented in the eastern press as a military victory.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The early reports, based on Chivington’s own dispatches, described a successful operation against hostile Indians.<\/p>\n
It was only when officers who had refused to participate began providing their own accounts, and when the congressional investigation began, that the full picture emerged.<\/p>\n
The shift in press coverage of Sand Creek \u2014 from military victory to civilian massacre \u2014 reflected the genuine capacity of American democratic institutions to produce reckoning when the institutions were functioning properly.<\/p>\n
Congressional investigation, newspaper reporting, and public testimony by military officers who had witnessed the attack produced a public understanding of Sand Creek as a crime within roughly six months of its occurrence.<\/p>\n
The Washita generated no similar reckoning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Custer’s accounts presented it as a military success, and the press largely accepted this framing.<\/p>\n
The differences in coverage reflected the differences in the two events: Sand Creek was clearly unauthorized by any legitimate military authority and was clearly directed at a camp under military protection; the Washita was an authorized military operation that could be defended, however unconvincingly, as a legitimate engagement against a camp associated with raiders.<\/p>\n
The contrast illuminates the limits of the accountability mechanisms available at the time.<\/p>\n
When an attack was clearly and obviously a crime, the democratic institutions could produce investigation and condemnation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When an attack was authorized by military command and could be dressed in the language of legitimate military operation, those institutions were less effective.<\/p>\n
The Medicine Lodge Treaty’s Broken Promises<\/p>\n
The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, despite the good faith of some of its negotiators, was broken almost immediately in ways that illustrate the systemic failures of American Indian policy.<\/p>\n
The treaty promised rations and annuities to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho in exchange for their agreement to the reservation.<\/p>\n
The goods consistently failed to arrive on schedule, were often inadequate when they did arrive, and were sometimes stolen by corrupt agents before reaching the communities they were intended for.<\/p>\n
The reservation itself was in territory that was ill-suited to the plains hunting economy that the Cheyenne had developed over generations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The bison herds that made the plains economy viable were already being reduced by commercial hunting and were being eliminated from the reservation area.<\/p>\n
The alternative \u2014 farming \u2014 required a completely different set of skills, equipment, and cultural knowledge, and the government support for that transition was insufficient.<\/p>\n
The Indian agents who administered the reservation had enormous discretionary authority and limited oversight.<\/p>\n
Corruption was common.<\/p>\n
The specific agents assigned to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho were of varying competence and integrity, and the result was a reservation experience that consistently fell short of what the treaty had promised.<\/p>\n
The young warriors who continued raiding in Kansas were, in part, responding to the failure of the reservation system to provide adequate food and material security.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This does not justify the raids, which killed American civilians.<\/p>\n
But it complicates the simple narrative of hostile Indians attacking peaceful settlers \u2014 a narrative that was used to justify attacks like the Washita without acknowledging the systemic failures that had contributed to the raiding.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle understood this dynamic.<\/p>\n
He was constantly trying to navigate between the American military’s demand for Cheyenne compliance with the treaty terms and the reality that the treaty terms were not being honored on the American side.<\/p>\n
It was an impossible position.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Survivors and Their Lives<\/p>\n
Among the most important dimensions of the Sand Creek and Washita stories are the experiences of the survivors \u2014 the people who lived through both attacks and who had to rebuild their lives in the aftermath.<\/p>\n
Medicine Woman Later, Black Kettle’s wife, is the most striking of these survivors.<\/p>\n
She survived nine bullet wounds at Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
She lived through the subsequent years of difficulty, traveling with her husband as he continued his diplomatic efforts.<\/p>\n
She was killed at the Washita.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Her story \u2014 surviving the unsurvivable, living years in the shadow of that survival, and ultimately being killed in the same kind of attack \u2014 is one of the most heart-rending in the entire history of the southern plains.<\/p>\n
Other survivors of Sand Creek went on to tell the story of what happened through congressional testimony, oral accounts, and later interviews with historians.<\/p>\n
Their testimony is among the most important primary sources for understanding Sand Creek \u2014 eyewitness accounts from people who had experienced the attack directly.<\/p>\n
The survival of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people as communities, despite everything they endured in the 1860s and in the subsequent decades, is itself a form of testimony.<\/p>\n
The Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma maintain tribal sovereignty and cultural traditions today.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their survival is not separate from Black Kettle’s story \u2014 it is the continuation of the community he spent his life trying to protect.<\/p>\n
The Historical Recognition of Black Kettle<\/p>\n
The public recognition of Black Kettle as a significant historical figure has grown in recent decades, driven both by the broader reconsideration of the Indian Wars in American historical scholarship and by the advocacy of Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants.<\/p>\n
A number of communities in Oklahoma \u2014 in the territory assigned to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho by the Medicine Lodge Treaty \u2014 have monuments and commemorations associated with Black Kettle and the events at Sand Creek and the Washita.<\/p>\n
The National Park Service’s management of both Sand Creek National Historic Site and the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site has evolved significantly in recent years, with both sites developing interpretive programs that acknowledge the perspective of the Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants and that place the events in their proper historical context.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
These commemorations are not complete reckoning.<\/p>\n
A complete reckoning would require not only acknowledging what happened but addressing the ongoing consequences \u2014 the treaty obligations that were never fulfilled, the land that was taken and never returned, the cultural disruptions that extended across generations.<\/p>\n
The National Historic Sites are steps toward historical honesty, not substitutes for it.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle himself, if he could see the trajectory of the 150 years since his death, would probably recognize both the progress and the inadequacy.<\/p>\n
He was a man who understood the difference between symbolic gestures and substantive commitments.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He spent his life trying to get the American government to make substantive commitments and keep them.<\/p>\n
The work is not finished.<\/p>\n
The Full Length of His Achievement<\/p>\n
What is the full measure of what Black Kettle accomplished in his life?<\/p>\n
He maintained a commitment to peace across more than two decades of deteriorating relations between the Cheyenne and the United States.<\/p>\n
He survived Sand Creek \u2014 an event that would have broken anyone’s faith in the peace process \u2014 and continued to seek diplomatic solutions.<\/p>\n
He signed treaties that his fellow chiefs refused to sign, accepting terms that reduced Cheyenne territory and autonomy because he calculated that the alternative was worse.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He brought his band to the reservation area assigned by the Medicine Lodge Treaty and tried to comply with the terms he had agreed to.<\/p>\n
He sought protection from military officials in the weeks before his death.<\/p>\n
He was killed while trying to escape, not while fighting.<\/p>\n
None of this protected his people from the violence that came.<\/p>\n
The failure of his strategy \u2014 measured in the deaths at Sand Creek and the Washita \u2014 does not diminish the moral and strategic coherence of what he attempted.<\/p>\n
He was, in the language of military history, fighting on the losing side.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the losing side was not wrong.<\/p>\n
The commitments made to him were real.<\/p>\n
The violations of those commitments were real.<\/p>\n
The killing of peace-seeking Cheyenne people was real.<\/p>\n
He was right to seek peace.<\/p>\n
He was right to trust, provisionally and with clear eyes, that the American political system had the capacity to honor its commitments.<\/p>\n
He was wrong in his assessment of whether that capacity would actually be exercised when it mattered.<\/p>\n
That error reflects the specific failures of the American system, not the failure of his judgment.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Black Kettle.<\/p>\n
Cheyenne peace chief.<\/p>\n
Survivor of Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
Killed at the Washita.<\/p>\n
The flags he raised should not have needed to be raised.<\/p>\n
But he raised them, because he believed in the possibility of peace even after it had proved deadly.<\/p>\n
He deserves to be remembered for what he was: one of the most courageous and principled leaders in the history of the southern plains.<\/p>\n
A man who sought peace at the cost of his own safety and ultimately his life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A man whose death was a consequence of American failure, not his own.<\/p>\n
Remember him.<\/p>\n
\u2014 FINAL END \u2014<\/p>\n
\u2014 ADDITIONAL EXTENDED SECTIONS \u2014<\/p>\n
The Council of Forty-Four and the Structure of Cheyenne Leadership<\/p>\n
Understanding how power worked among the Cheyenne is essential to understanding both Black Kettle’s role and the persistent American misunderstanding of what he could and could not deliver.<\/p>\n
The Council of Forty-Four was the central governing institution of the Cheyenne nation.<\/p>\n
It was composed of forty-four chiefs \u2014 four from each of the ten Cheyenne bands, plus four principal chiefs who served in a senior advisory capacity.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The chiefs held their positions for ten years, after which they could be renewed or replaced by their band’s decision.<\/p>\n
The forty-four chiefs were civil leaders \u2014 peace chiefs in the specific sense that their institutional role was the maintenance of peace, the resolution of disputes, and the management of external relations.<\/p>\n
The Cheyenne cultural tradition explicitly separated civil and military authority.<\/p>\n
The civil chiefs did not lead war parties, did not command military societies, and did not carry weapons in their official capacity.<\/p>\n
This structural distinction between civil and military authority was deeply embedded in Cheyenne political philosophy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The civil chiefs were understood as the caretakers of the people \u2014 the people, including women, children, and the elderly who were the majority of any community, not just the warriors.<\/p>\n
Their responsibility was to the survival and well-being of the entire community, and that responsibility required prioritizing peace when peace was possible.<\/p>\n
The military societies \u2014 the Dog Soldiers, the Kit Foxes, the Bowstrings, the Elk Warriors \u2014 had their own leaders and their own traditions of autonomy.<\/p>\n
The military society leaders were not subject to the civil chiefs’ authority in any direct sense.<\/p>\n
A civil chief could not order a military leader to stop raiding.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He could reason with him, appeal to his sense of communal responsibility, use whatever social pressure was available.<\/p>\n
He could not command.<\/p>\n
American treaty negotiators consistently failed to understand this distinction.<\/p>\n
When they made agreements with civil chiefs like Black Kettle, they believed \u2014 or chose to believe \u2014 that those agreements bound the entire Cheyenne nation, including the military societies.<\/p>\n
When the military societies then continued raiding, the Americans concluded that the civil chiefs had been duplicitous.<\/p>\n
The more accurate conclusion was that the civil chiefs had delivered what they could \u2014 their own compliance and the compliance of their followers \u2014 but could not deliver compliance from institutions that were not under their authority.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle, at Medicine Lodge and in other contexts, tried to explain this distinction to American officials.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He told them explicitly that he could not guarantee what the Dog Soldiers would do.<\/p>\n
This was not an admission of weakness or lack of authority.<\/p>\n
It was an accurate description of how Cheyenne political institutions actually worked.<\/p>\n
The Americans preferred to treat the civil chiefs as if they had total authority, because that made the treaty-making process simpler.<\/p>\n
The consequence of this preference was that Black Kettle was held responsible \u2014 in effect, punished \u2014 for the actions of people he had no authority over.<\/p>\n
The Dog Soldiers and the Limits of Peace<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Dog Soldiers \u2014 Hotam\u00e9taneo’o in Cheyenne \u2014 were the most feared and most independent of the Cheyenne military societies.<\/p>\n
They occupied a specific social and military niche: their warrior members lived somewhat apart from the rest of the Cheyenne bands, more mobile and more exclusively focused on warfare than the family-centered bands of the civil chiefs.<\/p>\n
By the 1860s, the Dog Soldiers had become the primary vehicle for armed resistance to American expansion among the Southern Cheyenne.<\/p>\n
Their leaders in this period included Tall Bull, White Horse, and Roman Nose \u2014 warriors of exceptional ability and fierce commitment to maintaining Cheyenne territorial claims through force.<\/p>\n
Roman Nose, who died at the Battle of Beecher Island in 1868, was perhaps the most famous of the Dog Soldier warriors \u2014 a man whose reputation for courage in battle was extraordinary even by the demanding standards of plains warrior culture.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was not a chief in the council sense, but his influence among the Dog Soldiers was decisive.<\/p>\n
The Dog Soldiers’ continued raiding in Kansas and along the emigrant routes was the immediate justification for the campaigns that led to both Sand Creek and the Washita.<\/p>\n
From the American military’s perspective, the Cheyenne were raiders who used the peace process as cover for continued hostile activity.<\/p>\n
From Black Kettle’s perspective, the Dog Soldiers were independent actors whose behavior he could not control, and he was being punished for their choices.<\/p>\n
The historical complexity here is real.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Dog Soldiers were raiding and killing American civilians.<\/p>\n
Those raids were genuine crimes by any standard.<\/p>\n
The victims \u2014 settlers, travelers, soldiers \u2014 had genuine grievances.<\/p>\n
The American military’s desire to end the raiding was legitimate.<\/p>\n
The problem was the method.<\/p>\n
Rather than pursuing the specific raiders and the specific camps associated with raiding, the American military strategy targeted all plains camps in the winter \u2014 regardless of whether those camps were actually associated with the raids.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s camp was targeted not because his people had been raiding but because finding his camp was easier than finding the Dog Soldiers’ camp.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The distinction between Black Kettle’s band and the Dog Soldiers was not invisible to American officials.<\/p>\n
It was known.<\/p>\n
It was simply not acted upon.<\/p>\n
The winter campaign strategy did not make that distinction, and the consequences fell on Black Kettle’s people.<\/p>\n
The Treaty System: How It Was Supposed to Work and Why It Didn’t<\/p>\n
The American treaty system with Indigenous nations was not, in its formal legal conception, a mechanism for dispossession.<\/p>\n
It was supposed to be a mechanism for negotiated relations between the United States and sovereign nations \u2014 relations that would establish territorial boundaries, create trade frameworks, and address conflicts through diplomatic rather than military means.<\/p>\n
The treaties of the mid-nineteenth century \u2014 Fort Laramie 1851, Fort Wise 1861, Little Arkansas 1865, Medicine Lodge 1867 \u2014 were all formally ratified by the Senate and carried the full legal force of international agreements.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court had established in a series of decisions that Indian nations had recognized sovereignty, that treaty rights were real, and that the federal government had trust responsibilities to Indigenous nations.<\/p>\n
In theory, this legal framework meant that the commitments made to Black Kettle and his people were genuine legal obligations.<\/p>\n
In theory, violations of those commitments should have been addressed through the same legal mechanisms that would address violations of any other treaty obligation.<\/p>\n
In practice, the system didn’t work that way.<\/p>\n
The political will to enforce treaty obligations consistently was absent.<\/p>\n
The institutions that might have enforced those obligations \u2014 the courts, the Congress, the executive branch \u2014 were all susceptible to the political pressure from settlers, territorial governments, and economic interests that wanted the Indigenous peoples removed regardless of what treaties said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The failure of the treaty system was not primarily a legal failure.<\/p>\n
The law was reasonably clear.<\/p>\n
It was a political failure \u2014 the failure of the political system to honor commitments made in its own name.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle understood this failure, at least partially.<\/p>\n
His continued pursuit of treaty-based solutions even after the failure of every previous treaty reflects not ignorance of the pattern but the absence of any better alternative.<\/p>\n
If the treaty system couldn’t be made to work, the alternatives were worse.<\/p>\n
George Armstrong Custer: Hero and Villain<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
George Armstrong Custer is one of the most written-about figures in American history, and the Battle of the Washita \u2014 the attack on Black Kettle’s camp \u2014 occupies a specific place in the long debate about his character and his legacy.<\/p>\n
Custer was, by most accounts, a man of genuine military ability and extraordinary personal courage.<\/p>\n
His record in the Civil War \u2014 in which he rose from second lieutenant to brevet major general in four years \u2014 reflected both his personal bravery and his tactical skill as a cavalry commander.<\/p>\n
He was also reckless, arrogant, and willing to sacrifice subordinates for his own advantage.<\/p>\n
Both of these things were true simultaneously.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At the Washita, his tactical planning was competent.<\/p>\n
He divided his force for a coordinated four-direction approach to the camp, used the terrain to conceal his approach, and struck at dawn with a coordinated assault from multiple directions.<\/p>\n
As a purely tactical matter, the attack was well-executed.<\/p>\n
The moral dimension of that tactical competence is where the assessment becomes more complex.<\/p>\n
He was attacking a camp that was, by any reasonable standard, not the source of the raids he was supposedly punishing.<\/p>\n
He was attacking at dawn, when the camp was sleeping, in a manner that maximized casualties among civilians \u2014 the women and children who were always the majority of a winter camp.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was attacking the camp of a chief who had just been at Fort Cobb seeking protection.<\/p>\n
Custer’s behavior after the attack added further complications.<\/p>\n
His abandonment of Major Elliott’s unit \u2014 men who had pursued escaping Cheyenne and been surrounded and killed while Custer withdrew \u2014 was viewed by many of his fellow officers as cowardly and dishonorable.<\/p>\n
The subsequent cover-up of Elliott’s fate in Custer’s official reports added dishonesty to the charge.<\/p>\n
Custer’s later death at the Little Bighorn in 1876, along with 268 of his men, has shaped how he is remembered in ways that have sometimes obscured the specific character of his actions at the Washita.<\/p>\n
The romantic mythology of Custer’s Last Stand \u2014 the brave commander dying with his men on a hilltop \u2014 has been used to rehabilitate his reputation across multiple generations of popular history.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The reality is more complex.<\/p>\n
Custer was both a man of genuine military ability and a man who made choices at the Washita \u2014 and at the Little Bighorn, with his characteristic disregard for reconnaissance and his division of his force in the face of a much larger enemy \u2014 that produced avoidable deaths, including his own.<\/p>\n
For Black Kettle, the relevant fact is simple: Custer attacked his camp at dawn, killed him and his wife, and destroyed his village.<\/p>\n
Whether Custer was ordered to do this, whether he knew specifically who he was attacking, and whether he had other options are all legitimate historical questions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fact that Black Kettle is dead because of Custer’s attack is not in question.<\/p>\n
Philip Sheridan and the Winter Campaign<\/p>\n
Philip Sheridan, who authorized the winter campaign that produced the Washita attack, deserves specific examination as the architect of the strategy that killed Black Kettle.<\/p>\n
Sheridan was a major figure of the Civil War, associated with the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864 in which Union forces systematically destroyed the economic infrastructure of the Valley \u2014 barns, crops, livestock \u2014 to deny Confederate forces the resources they needed to continue fighting.<\/p>\n
This “hard war” approach was controversial but effective in the specific context of the Civil War.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sheridan applied the same logic to the plains Indian campaign.<\/p>\n
His winter campaign strategy was a direct extension of the hard war approach: destroy the material foundation of resistance, not just the capacity to fight directly.<\/p>\n
Attack the camps rather than just the warriors.<\/p>\n
Kill the horses.<\/p>\n
Burn the food supply.<\/p>\n
Capture the women and children.<\/p>\n
The logic was militarily coherent, if morally troubling.<\/p>\n
Plains peoples were mobile; their warriors could evade pursuit indefinitely in the summer.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But in winter, when they were concentrated in camps and their horses were weakened, they were vulnerable in ways they were not in other seasons.<\/p>\n
The winter campaign exploited this vulnerability.<\/p>\n
What made the strategy specifically unjust as applied in November 1868 was the failure to distinguish between camps associated with raiding and camps that were in the assigned reservation area and had been seeking American protection.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s camp was the latter category.<\/p>\n
Attacking it was not a necessary consequence of the winter campaign strategy \u2014 it was a consequence of the failure to gather and use intelligence that would have allowed the Army to target the actual raiders.<\/p>\n
Sheridan’s famous remark \u2014 “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” \u2014 is attributed to him from this period, though the specific origin of the quote is disputed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whether or not he said exactly those words, the sentiment was consistent with his approach to the plains campaign.<\/p>\n
He was not trying to distinguish between friendly and hostile Indians.<\/p>\n
He was trying to break the capacity for plains Indian life in general.<\/p>\n
This philosophy produced the winter campaign.<\/p>\n
The winter campaign produced the Washita.<\/p>\n
The Washita killed Black Kettle.<\/p>\n
The Photographers and the Paper Trail<\/p>\n
The visual record of Black Kettle’s world is fragmentary but not absent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Several photographs taken in the 1860s show Cheyenne leaders at treaty councils and in Washington, and some of these photographs may include Black Kettle, though identification is uncertain in several cases.<\/p>\n
The documentary record of his life \u2014 the treaty texts, the council minutes, the military reports, the congressional testimony \u2014 is more substantial.<\/p>\n
This paper trail is one of the reasons his story is recoverable in the level of detail that it is.<\/p>\n
The treaty of Medicine Lodge, for example, was covered by journalists who attended the council.<\/p>\n
Their dispatches, published in eastern newspapers, included extensive accounts of the proceedings and specific quotes from the chiefs who spoke.<\/p>\n
The fragment of Black Kettle’s speech that survives comes from this journalistic record.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The congressional investigation of Sand Creek produced extensive sworn testimony from military officers, some of whom had participated and some of whom had refused to participate.<\/p>\n
This testimony, preserved in the official record, is among the most important primary sources for what happened at Sand Creek and for the specific decisions that produced it.<\/p>\n
Fort Lyon’s correspondence records include communications from the weeks before Sand Creek \u2014 letters and dispatches that document both the Cheyenne leaders’ efforts to seek protection and the military commanders’ responses.<\/p>\n
These records make clear what promises were made and how they were violated.<\/p>\n
The paper trail that Black Kettle’s efforts generated \u2014 through his attendance at treaty councils, his visits to military posts, his meetings with commissioners and generals \u2014 is one of the most detailed records of any Indigenous leader’s diplomatic activity in this period.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He left a documentary trail precisely because he was actively engaging with the American governmental system on its own terms.<\/p>\n
The Question of Blame: Revisited<\/p>\n
Having explored the specific decisions and specific actors involved in both Sand Creek and the Washita, it is worth returning to the question of blame with a more nuanced framework.<\/p>\n
Immediate responsibility: Colonel Chivington ordered the Sand Creek attack; Lieutenant Colonel Custer executed the Washita attack; General Sheridan authorized the winter campaign strategy.<\/p>\n
These men bear immediate responsibility for the specific decisions that led to specific deaths.<\/p>\n
Institutional responsibility: The Colorado territorial government under Governor Evans created the political context that enabled Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Army’s high command under Sheridan created the strategic context that enabled the Washita.<\/p>\n
The failure of federal oversight to prevent both reflects institutional failures at multiple levels.<\/p>\n
Systemic responsibility: The broader American political culture that prioritized settler interests over treaty obligations, that created insufficient accountability for violations of Indigenous rights, and that failed to maintain the political will necessary to honor the commitments made in its own name \u2014 this systemic failure created the conditions in which Sand Creek and the Washita were possible.<\/p>\n
None of these levels of responsibility are mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Chivington’s personal responsibility for Sand Creek does not diminish Evans’s institutional responsibility, which does not diminish the systemic failures of American Indian policy.<\/p>\n
Black Kettle’s death is the product of all three levels simultaneously.<\/p>\n
The immediate cause was Custer’s dawn attack.<\/p>\n
The enabling cause was Sheridan’s winter campaign strategy.<\/p>\n
The underlying cause was a political system that consistently failed to honor its commitments to the people with whom it made those commitments.<\/p>\n
What the Flags He Raised Meant<\/p>\n
The most powerful image in Black Kettle’s story \u2014 the American flag raised over his lodge at Sand Creek \u2014 deserves extended reflection, because it encapsulates everything that his story represents.<\/p>\n
The flag had been given to him by Governor John Evans at the council in Denver that preceded Sand Creek.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had been told, in terms specific enough to be credible, that flying this flag would protect his camp.<\/p>\n
The flag was not merely symbolic.<\/p>\n
It was a specific diplomatic instrument \u2014 a visible signal within a framework of meaning that both parties to the communication were supposed to understand.<\/p>\n
He raised the flag because he understood the framework.<\/p>\n
He believed that the framework was real \u2014 that flying an American flag over a Cheyenne camp would communicate to American soldiers what it was supposed to communicate: that this camp was friendly, that these people had placed themselves under American protection, that attacking them would violate a specific commitment made by American officials.<\/p>\n
The soldiers attacked anyway.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is the core of the betrayal.<\/p>\n
Not just that Americans attacked a Cheyenne camp \u2014 that happened repeatedly.<\/p>\n
But that Americans attacked a Cheyenne camp that was flying the specific signal that Americans themselves had designated as the marker of safety.<\/p>\n
The white flag he also raised \u2014 the universal signal of peaceful intent \u2014 was equally ignored.<\/p>\n
What the flags’ failure meant, for Black Kettle and for anyone who tried to follow the peace path after Sand Creek, was that the communicative framework of diplomatic signals had been shown to be empty.<\/p>\n
The symbols that were supposed to carry meaning didn’t carry meaning.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The American military would attack regardless.<\/p>\n