A Misplaced Massacre

by Ari Kelman

Overview

On November 29, 1864, over 150 Native Americans, mostly women, children, and elderly, were slaughtered in one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in U.S. history. Kelman examines how generations of Americans have struggled with the question of whether the nation’s crimes, as well as its achievements, should be memorialized.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674071032
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/11/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	237,172
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ari Kelman is McCabe Greer Professor of the American Civil War Era at Pennsylvania State University.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter Two: Looters

In late summer 1993, two amateur artifact collectors traveled to southeastern Colorado, headed for a parcel of land owned by a rancher named William Dawson. Variously described by people familiar with the effort to memorialize the massacre as “history buffs,” “treasure hunters,” or, with tongue in cheek, “looters,” the men drew attention to themselves in Eads, a Ford pickup kind of town, by arriving in a luxury car. Passionate about Western history, they wanted to return home with a small part of the past, to own a piece of one of the region’s greatest tragedies. They came looking for arrowheads, minié balls, regimental pins, or any other materials associated with the Sand Creek massacre. And they chose Dawson’s land because conventional wisdom dictated that Black Kettle’s and Left Hand’s people had, on the night of November 28, 1864, camped in a large bend in the creek there. The next morning the massacre reputedly had begun at that spot, before continuing upstream, a running engagement, for several miles. Oddly, though, no matter how hard the two men scoured the ground, systematically working a series of grids with their metal detectors, they found none of the relics that should have been spread across a site where more than a thousand people had fought for their lives during a daylong slaughter. The absence of artifacts made no sense. Unless there was a simple explanation: the men were prospecting in the wrong place.

Puzzled, the two collectors traveled to Denver, where they contacted David Halaas, then the chief historian at the Colorado Historical Society (CHS). They told Halaas that, “the ground was completely sterile, there wasn’t any evidence at all that a massacre happened there,” and suggested that maybe the slaughter had taken place in another creek bend, eight miles to the north of the Dawson ranch. Halaas, a native Coloradan and one of the leading experts on the massacre’s history, at the time was almost finished writing a book about George Bent. Although he found the prospect that the site had been misplaced “potentially earthshaking,” akin, in his words, to “suddenly losing track of the Gettysburg battlefield,” he remained uncertain about the story’s credibility. Still, he approached his co-author on the Bent book, Andy Masich, who, as vice president of the Historical Society, also served as Halaas’s boss at the time. Together, they began the initial search for the Sand Creek massacre site.

Their hunt ultimately would prove significant not for its results but for the interdisciplinary methodology it introduced, for bringing a disparate cast of characters together, and for touching off a series of nettlesome controversies. All of which would later shape the National Park Service’s effort to create the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. Still, even if Halaas and Masich’s search would end in anti-climax, it began cinematically. The two historians convinced the Colorado National Guard to take them up in Huey helicopters during a training exercise on September 1, 1993. Halaas recalling the film Apocalypse Now, noted how much he regretted not bringing along a recording of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” for background music. The gunships took off from Buckley Field, near Denver, and headed southeast before flying over Dawson’s property and then further upstream to a second large bend in the creek. After spending nearly a full day in the air and poking around on land, Halaas, Masich, and the colleagues they brought along found no compelling evidence of the massacre at all. Still, they believed that Dawson’s ranch might have hosted the bloodshed. “It looks right, feels right, and meets all contemporary descriptions,” Masich wrote after their fieldtrip. But he also cited “an archeological rule of thumb”: “no battle-related artifacts, probably no battlefield.” The two men decided that the search was “way too big of a project for a weekend kind of thing.” So they turned for help to the Colorado State Historical Fund (SHF), one of the nation’s most ambitious historic preservation initiatives.

Table of Contents

Contents List of Maps and Illustrations Preface 1. A Perfect Mob 2. Looters 3. The Smoking Gun 4. Accurate but Not Precise 5. Indelible Infamy 6. You Can’t Carve Things in Stone Epilogue: When Is Enough Enough? Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

A profound and sympathetic book. Kelman artfully weaves together multiple storylines across time, including the Sand Creek Massacre, the efforts of the National Park Service to memorialize the event, and the Indian struggle to make oral history stick as a legitimate form of knowledge. I could not put it down because of the power of the storytelling—including a fantastic plot twist—as well as the clarity of the writing and the compelling nature of the lessons it offers about history, memory, and the meaning of the past.

Philip J. Deloria

With wit, insight, and always with sympathy, A Misplaced Massacre chronicles the torturous drive to memorialize the horrors perpetrated at Sand Creek in 1864. This is a detective story, a page-turner, and a poignant, multidimensional exploration of history's enduring power over the present. A smart and humane book.

Brian Delay

Joining a historian's gift for thorough research and interpretive nuance with a journalist's flair for vivid reportage and telling interviews, Kelman tracks the ghosts of Sand Creek through the borderlands of history and memory. Anyone who cares about Colorado, the North American West, the legacies of the Civil War, and Native American peoples must read A Misplaced Massacre and meditate upon the unsettling lessons of the story it tells.

Thomas G. Andrews

A Misplaced Massacre places indigenous peoples at the center of an expansive vision of the American West. More nuanced and less assured, western history remains alive and well in Kelman's sobering account of the unresolved legacies of Sand Creek.

Ned Blackhawk

This innovative book offers a balanced assessment of the 1864 confrontation as well as a richly nuanced detective story about the use and misuse of historical events to satisfy present-day agendas.

Choice - M.L. Tate

This innovative book offers a balanced assessment of the 1864 confrontation as well as a richly nuanced detective story about the use and misuse of historical events to satisfy present-day agendas.

Choice - M. L. Tate

A Misplaced Massacre…recounts and analyses the ways in which generations of Americans, both white and Native American, have struggled—and as the book’s subtitle intimates, still struggle—to come to terms with the meaning of the attack. It is an important book, and its most brilliant chapter, which follows the order of events at the opening ceremonies, in April 2007, of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, shows that positions taken by the various speakers on that day still echoed the differing views expressed a hundred years earlier by Chivington, Soule and Bent… Kelman provides a nuanced and virtually complete account of each of the chronological phases and of the eddying currents of opinion in the movement towards the opening of the Historic Site… The book functions as an instructive lesson in public history, and Kelman shows how the massacre positively intersects with its legacy.

Times Literary Supplement - Mick Gidley

With wit, insight, and always with sympathy, A Misplaced Massacre chronicles the torturous drive to memorialize the horrors perpetrated at Sand Creek in 1864. This is a detective story, a page-turner, and a poignant, multidimensional exploration of history's enduring power over the present. A smart and humane book.

Brian DeLay

Brilliant and beautifully written—a powerful meditation on the long shadows that the past continues to cast into the present. I know of no other book quite like it.

Karl Jacoby

Kelman has the rare ability to blend the rigor of a scholar with the storytelling talent of the best novelist. With exquisite detail, he brings alive the fascinating cast of characters—historical and contemporary—that shaped the story of Sand Creek. A Misplaced Massacre is a very important book that does justice to one of the searing stories of our history and one of the most potent sites on our historic landscape.

Edward T. Linenthal

A historian unravels the tangled story behind the establishment of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. On November 29, 1864, with almost six months of bloody fighting remaining in the Civil War, U.S. Army Col. John Chivington and a force of Colorado militia attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village about 40 miles from Fort Lyon. For Chivington, the engagement was heroic, a defeat of likely Confederate sympathizers, Indians who had terrorized the frontier. For his subordinate, Silas Soule, the "battle" was a slaughter of defenseless women and children, and he ordered his men not to fire or take part in the atrocities that ensued. For George Bent, witness and survivor, the massacre at Sand Creek constituted a cultural catastrophe. These three competing narratives developed in the immediate wake of Sand Creek, and they persist more than 140 years later. Kelman (History/Univ. of California, Davis; A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, 2003) frequently harks back to them as he recounts the effort to bring the site under the supervision of the National Park Service. Instead of the much-wished-for "healing" and "reconciliation," in publications, in public meetings and on the Internet, old conflicts were renewed among constituencies--private landowners, the tribes and the federal government--jostling to seize control of the Sand Creek narrative. Notwithstanding broad agreement on the geographical dimensions of the site, interpreting events proved remarkably contentious. Traditional historians, ethnographers, archaeologists and cartographers all figured into the effort to memorialize Sand Creek. While Kelman makes his sympathies clear, he mostly plays it straight in presenting the various clashing viewpoints. The Sand Creek Massacre, he notes, had its origins in the fight for control of the West. The tortured cultural and political struggle to properly remember it resulted in the 391st unit of the National Park Service. Vividly captures the controversy and pain that accompanied this reopening of a dark chapter in American history.

Kirkus Reviews