Although Colonel Chivington’s memories shifted in certain respects, he was more consistent regarding the number of Indians he believed were killed at Sand Creek.
In his initial report he prepared after the fight, written on November 29, 1864, Chivington claimed that his attack killed 500 Indians. Chivington added some information in a letter to Governor Evans a little more than one week later (December 7) when he noted that 500 Indians had been killed and his own losses were nine killed and 38 wounded. In a report written a little more than one week after that letter (December 16), Chivington upped the number of Indians killed from 500 to between 500 and 600, and added that he had not taken any prisoners. He also reported his own losses as eight killed instead of nine, and 40 wounded (with two having since died) instead of 38. In this report he also claimed to have seen the scalp of one white man in the camp, and that it was not more than two or three days old.
His account changed in several respects by the time he prepared his written testimony for the inquiry. On April 26, 1865, Colonel Chivington reported that his losses were seven soldiers killed, 47 wounded, and one missing. He still claimed between 500 and 600 Indians had been killed, and explained that officers had informed him that only a few women and children were among the dead at Sand Creek. Previously, he had written that no prisoners had been taken, and that he had seen but one white scalp, but his latest testimony claimed that eight Indians had been captured, and had found 19 white scalps in the Indian camp.1
Why did Chivington hold to the outrageously high number of Indian dead? He may have believed it enhanced his image as an Indian fighter and thus he was worthy of promotion. Perhaps for the same reasons, he undercounted his own casualties. Once again our own biases come into play. Some historians will rightly dismiss Chivington’s estimate of Indians killed as nonsense, but readily accept as accurate the low estimate of his own casualties. Chivington shift in memory that increased the count of white scalps discovered in the village made the Indians look more like savage murderers, which in turn served his own personal interests. Did he purposely lie? We don’t know, but we do know that he stuck to his position better than some other participants.
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Stress profoundly influences memory. It is hard enough to accurately remember the mundane details of day-to-day events, but what if the memories are of traumatic events like a crime, accident, or war? Stress can impair or enhance memory, but there is a high correlation between increased stress and false memories. People perform worse at most tasks that involve memory when under stress, such as in battle or testifying as a witness. Trauma can and often does enhance initial memory consolidation, but impairs later memory retrieval.2
“Eyewitness testimony,” explained an article in the Journal of Neuroscience, “often proves untrustworthy” with more false positives while under stress. Stress can enhance generalized processing, “such as extracting the central thematic information (gist) at the cost of specificity.” In other words, the stressful event is remembered longer, but at the expense of accuracy.3
How true is this concerning the participants at Sand Creek? Each soldier knew something happened there, and something terrible, but what, exactly? The chaos and stress of battle took a toll on their perceptions and memories, and the leading questions and suggestions during the investigations dragged at least some of them down a preset path. Yet, most of the witnesses were certain their memories were accurate. As noted, in everyday situations, people have different conceptions of distance, depth, direction, and numbers. Traumatic events like battle distort perception. Many men in combat, for example, consistently underestimate distances and believe danger to be much closer than it was in fact.4
Believing something is a threat further increases stress and impacts accurate assessment. Most men are not killers and avoid personal confrontations. In war, this might be considered cowardice, but most men in combat will show signs of neuroses—the “shell-shock” of the Great War, the “combat fatigue” of World War II, or the “thousand-yard stare” of soldiers from all eras who have been in battle too long. Stress and fear are constant companions in war, but the psychiatric, emotional, and memory-altering dynamics that accompany battle stress have not been understood until relatively recently. Stages of mental stress may include difficulty of concentration and response, apprehensiveness, confusion, and impaired judgment. All five senses can be impacted, ranging from hyper-sensitivities to insensitivities. Soldiers might hallucinate, receiving sensory perceptions without environmental input, or they might become delusional and misinterpret incoming sensory data. Environmental, temporal, and spatial dimensions may become distorted.5
Fear-induced stress can alter perceptions and those altered states can remain long after the fighting ends. Many of the men who fought in campaigns during the Indian Wars of the 19th century may have experienced symptoms, undiagnosed or incorrectly diagnosed at the time, that have been given a name in the 20th century: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Many survivors with PTSD suffer from “survivor guilt,” or suffer because of what they had to do in order to survive, or about killing another human being, or even because they enjoying the killing. There may be a “psychogenic amnesia” of the trauma, selective perceptions, and constriction or inflexibility of thought. Memories can be altered or even invented as coping mechanisms.6
Behavioral research of combat veterans found that regardless of their “duty” to kill the enemy, many men simply cannot pull the trigger. After the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, many thousands of weapons were found loaded with three to 10 rounds, and one weapon had 23 rounds still in the barrel. One World War II study calculated that 75 percent or more infantrymen would not fire their guns in combat. A high percentage of men simply did not want to kill the enemy, but acted as if they were doing so by going through the motions. Since human nature has not changed, it is very likely that only a comparatively small percentage of the 500 men actively engaged at Sand Creek took part in the killing.
Research also found that soldiers unable to kill rationalized their inability to do so, or become fixated and traumatized by it. Some men who passed through the “killing barrier” and actually took another life reached the exhilaration stage; killing became easier the more it was done, and the act itself provided an intense satisfaction. For some of these men, the war experience was described as “fun.” Others felt intense remorse at having taken another life—a realization that brought on waves of revulsion and disgust. Regardless, the last stage was always the rationalization and acceptance process, an often life-long struggle that usually involved changing the conception of the enemy from a human being to an evil demon, an animal-like “other” who could be killed with as little regret as stepping on an ant. In addition to morphing the enemy into a savage beast, soldiers could rationalize that they weren’t really killing, but were only following orders. Or, perhaps they had no choice, since it was either “him or me.”7
Before Sand Creek, most of the troopers had expressed a desire to kill Indians. Later, when the affair began to be called a massacre and public opinion turned against them, many began distancing themselves from it and claimed they had not fired their weapons at all, had never approved of attacking the Indians, and/or were disgusted by the atrocities others had committed there.
The whites and the Indians who battled each other during the wars of the 19th century were compelled by the same psychological pressures, and reacted to them in all the various ways noted above. Most and perhaps all of them had one thing in common: They all justified their actions by reshaping and altering their memories, whether consciously or not.
1 “Massacre of Cheyenne Indians,” 48–49, 102–04.
2 Jessica D. Payne, et al., “Stress administered prior to encoding impairs neutral but enhances emotional long-term episodic memories,” Learning & Memory, 14 (12), December, 2007: 861–868. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2151024/, accessed February 6, 2014.
3 Shaozheng Qin, et al., “Understanding Low Reliability of Memories for Neural Information Encoded Under Stress: Alterations in Memory-Related Activation in the Hippocampus and Midbrain,” Journal of Neuroscience, 32 (12), March 21, 2012: 4032–4041. Http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/12/4032.full, accessed January 20, 2014.
4 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (Middlesex, UK, 1976), 166.
5 Richard A. Gabriel, The Painful Field The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (Westport, CT, 1988), 9, 22; George L. Engel, Psychological Development in Health and Disease (Philadelphia, PA, 1962), 284, 327; Gregory Michno, The Mystery of E Troop Custer’s Gray Horse Company at the Little Bighorn (Missoula, MT, 1994), 287–89.
6 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders DSM III-R (Washington, D. C., 1987), 236–37, 248–50; Eva Kahana et al., “Coping with Extreme Trauma,” in Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress from the Holocaust to Vietnam, John P. Wilson, Zev Harel, and Boaz Kahana, eds. (New York, 1988), 62–67, 70.
7 Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston MS, 1995), 21–22, 119, 231–232, 233–240; S. L. A. Marshall, Men Against Fire The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester, MA, 1978), 50. Some of Marshall’s methodologies and statistics have been questioned.