On November 29, 1864, approximately 450 Southern Cheyennes following Black Kettle, and 40 Southern Arapahos under Left Hand, camped on Sand Creek, about fifty miles north of present-day Lamar, Colorado. At dawn, Colonel John M. Chivington's 700 Colorado volunteers, along with Major Scot Anthony's command of 125 regular army troops, attacked the unsuspecting villagers. These Plains Indian peoples thought themselves under U.S. Army protection, but the deaths of over 70 Indians, and the horrible mutilation of many of their bodies, proved otherwise.
This unwarranted attack came after mounting numbers of freighters, overlanders, and military personnel had, with their thousands of stock animals, destroyed the bison economy of the Plains Indians. Recently arrived farmers and ranchers had little regard for the Indians' plight. Retaliatory raids launched by a few Plains warriors inflamed the settlers' irrational fears and sparked demands for the eradication of all Indian peoples in the region.
After the Sand Creek Massacre, Black Kettle and his people abandoned the Colorado plains, and white Coloradans hailed Chivington as a hero. But when detailed news of the attack reached the East, many reacted with disgust. Both an army and a congressional commission investigated Chivington's actions, but no official censure resulted.
In the summer of 1993, as a result of federal legislation passed in 1989 directing the Smithsonian Institution to repatriate its Indian remains, a delegation of Southern Cheyennes traveled to Washington, D.C., and retrieved the remains of six Sand Creek victims for a ceremonial burial at Concho, Oklahoma.
