THE swift expansion of the nation to the Pacific combined with the swarming of gold seekers to California and of Mormons to Utah shattered the peace of the Colorado empire that the Bents had ruled from their two posts on the Arkansas and the South Platte. The resident Indians felt the change most—several thousand Utes scattered through the lower valleys of the highest Rockies, and the more numerous Cheyennes and Arapahoes on the bordering plains below Longs Peak.
When the California gold rush began, the Cheyennes and Arapahoes were disturbed by the commotion along the Oregon Trail. The hordes of travelers and their animals ruined grazing and hunting along the North Platte, and spread disease and alcoholism among the Indian natives. To alleviate these evils, Tom Fitzpatrick, who had become an Indian Bureau agent, called a meeting of nine Plains tribes near Fort Laramie in September 1851.
Fitzpatrick told some thousands of these Indians that each tribe was a nation in its own right, but the highest authority was the Great White Father in Washington who worked for everybody, white, red, and black. Then he presented a Senate treaty, which twenty-one chiefs signed. By the treaty the government agreed to give the nine tribes fifty thousand dollars worth of trade goods annually for the next fifty years in exchange for the right to build roads and army forts within the nine nations. In setting boundaries for each nation, the treaty assigned to the Cheyennes and Arapahoes the land lying between the North Platte and Arkansas rivers—mainly the plains of eastern Colorado and what is now southern Wyoming.
The Colorado Utes did not attend the Fitzpatrick assembly. They were spared Oregon Trail problems because of their isolation. If anything, their supply of wild game increased as elk, deer, antelope, and bear moved into their Rockies to get out of the paths of westward migration. There were six bands of these short, stocky Utes who behaved like Plains Indians but were related linguistically to the Aztecs of Old Mexico. The six bands had little tribal unity and they were only mildly martial, lacking the fierceness of the Comanches and Kiowas of eastern New Mexico and the Cheyennes of the Colorado plains. Still, they could be dangerous. They continued to claim the San Luis Valley as their hunting ground after it became American in 1848, and they were quick to attack New Mexican emigrants arriving from the Santa Fe region. As a result, the U. S. Army built, in 1852, near the west foot of Sangre de Cristo Pass, the first military base in Colorado, Fort Massachusetts (relocated and named Fort Garland in 1858) to protect these new American citizens. Among them were six New Mexican families sent by Charles Beaubien to colonize the northern half—called Trinchera—of the million-acre Sangre de Cristo grant, which Governor Armijo had approved in 1843. The six families founded the pioneer Colorado town of San Luis in 1851. Three years later another group from New Mexico founded Conejos on the Continental Divide side of the valley.
These San Luis Valley New Mexicans were ancestors of the largest ethnic minority in today’s Colorado—some two hundred thousand of them. Through the past century they have been described by various names—Spanish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, “Spanish surnamed,” Hispanos—winding up finally in the popular designation of 1976, Chicanos. Like the state’s predominant Anglos—“Anglos” meaning the white population of whatever European origin—they are a complicated blend of many ethnic groups. The blend, predominantly Indian with Spanish overtones, has evolved through the centuries of their residence in Mexico and New Mexico after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521. The blend has resulted in a distinctive and fascinating culture, which has resisted change and has clung to old traditions, the Catholic religion mixed with Indian beliefs, and the Spanish language. Life in Colorado today owes a great deal to the color, artistry, and emotional depth of this Chicano culture in contrast to the materialistic and relatively drab culture of the Anglos.
The hostility of the Utes to the northward advance of the New Mexicans had applied also to the Forty-Niners, California bound, who had found it wise to pass around their mountains instead of through them. The unpredictable weather was another good reason for avoiding the Colorado Rockies.
Travelers recalled how the Oregon missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman nearly lost his life during a winter crossing in 1842 of Cochetopa Pass on his way from Fort Hall in present Idaho to Santa Fe. Six years later, a bitter John Charles Frémont, temporarily out of the army for doing things too much his own way in California, came to San Luis Valley to find a railroad passage through the mountains for his father-in-law, Thomas Hart Benton. Fremont’s party of thirty-five was caught in a blizzard while searching for Cochetopa Pass. Eleven men died of starvation or freezing, and a few of the dead were eaten by survivors. In 1853, Captain John W. Gunnison, also hunting a rail route by way of Cochetopa, had endless grief trying to pass through the impassable Black Canyon of the Gunnison and across the rugged Cerro Summit to the Uncompahgre valley. Some weeks later, Gunnison met his death in Utah when he was shot full of arrows by Paiute Indians. His euphonious name came to be applied to town, county, and river in a Colorado mountain setting of special beauty.
The vast Unorganized Territory of the Louisiana Purchase did not begin to break up into pieces until 1850, when the Forty-Niners won statehood for California and the Mormons persuaded Congress to create the Territory of Utah, bounded in the Colorado Rockies partly by the Continental Divide. At the same time Texas gave up its Colorado stovepipe, and the Territory of New Mexico was formed with a north boundary along the Arkansas as in Louisiana Purchase days. New Mexico’s east boundary was put at the 103rd meridian.
Then came the tragic struggle over whether slavery should be permitted west of Missouri. Kansas Territory was formed in 1854 with the slavery question left up to the Kansans, causing a rush of settlers pro and con to squat on lands beyond the Missouri. The north boundary of Kansas Territory was at the fortieth parallel running west to the Continental Divide. That line put the sites of present Boulder and Greeley, Colorado, and most of the South Platte valley in the new Nebraska Territory. The south boundary of Kansas Territory ran along the thirty-seventh parallel until it hit New Mexico’s east boundary, where it swung north a degree to the Arkansas at present Las Animas, Colorado, and west again to the divide. This swing north left in New Mexico Territory the historically Spanish region between Raton Pass and Bent’s Fort.
One of the counties in Kansas Territory set up in 1855 was called Arapahoe, starting at the 103rd meridian just barely in sight of Pikes Peak and running on west to Utah Territory at the crest of the Rockies. Since this huge wilderness was nearly empty of white settlers and belonged by treaty to the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, no officials were appointed to run it.
But events conspired to populate Arapahoe County. The gold of California sparked a nationwide business expansion, which led millions of otherwise normal people to dream of becoming filthy rich overnight by finding gold or by speculation in gold stocks back East. Financial recklessness ensued, causing the panic of 1857. Before the panic ended, a number of gold seekers rode up the Arkansas from the Missouri and into the wilds of Arapahoe County to escape their creditors and the fratricide of “bleeding Kansas.” Some of them joined men from Georgia in the summer of 1858 and found bits of gold in sands near the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte (downtown Denver today) not far from the boundary of Nebraska Territory. They sent glowing tales back home about fortunes to be picked up “at Pikes Peak.” Though that massive pile was eighty miles south of their placer diggings, it was the best landmark to guide newcomers. As a result, the Pikes Peak label came to be applied to the entire Front Range region from the Arkansas northward two hundred miles to Longs Peak and the Cache la Poudre.
One of these pioneer parties of 1858, numbering forty-nine people from Lawrence, Kansas, came to achieve a very special distinction. The party included two wives on a rugged adventure, which was regarded widely as suitable for males only. One of these wives, a twenty-year-old bride named Julia Archibald Holmes, made her position clear at the start by wearing what she called her “reform dress“—a calico dress to the knee, and pants called “bloomers,” named for Amelia Bloomer, the militant editor of the woman’s rights publication, The Lily. When told that the men thought she looked queer in this costume, Julia replied, “I cannot afford to dress to please their taste. I couldn’t positively enjoy a moment’s happiness with long skirts on to confine me to the wagon.”1 While the Lawrence party was camped at the foot of Pikes Peak, Julia learned that no woman, and very few men, had managed to reach the summit. The challenge to be first of her sex was irresistible. She made it easily to the top on August 5, 1858, with her husband and two other men.
News of Julia’s feat spread far and wide and was thrilling to American women everywhere. In retrospect, historians have found in it a sharp reminder that women in the West, as everywhere else, have always performed as well as men—women pioneering, suffering, challenging, creating, adapting, enduring. They have performed well even though their roles have been underplayed because of the custom, persistent until recent decades, of assigning to men alone most positions of leadership. It would be interesting to know just how many of the male heroes described in this Colorado story owe their triumphs to the wisdom and drive and courage of Colorado women directing their lives from behind the scenes.
The effect of the tales about Pikes Peak in 1858 was like fireworks on the Fourth of July—each burst more spectacular than the last. Soon the whole nation was gasping with wonder over the new El Dorado. Pikes Peak was only seven hundred miles from the Missouri—a fortnight’s journey compared to three or four months of travel that the Forty-Niners had endured to reach California. Any Missouri farm boy, eyes shining with visions of freedom from poverty, could get to Pikes Peak with his mule, sack of flour, coffee pot, and slab of bacon. Eastern presses poured out guidebooks full of nonsense. The trails west filled with “Pikes Peak or Bust” young people, mounted and in wagons, buggies, and stagecoaches, or on foot pushing wheelbarrows. There was even a sail cart that worked for half a mile. Merchant caravans carried machinery, furniture, saloon equipment, and everything else needed in a mining camp.
The surface (placer) gold of Cherry Creek played out quickly, but the prospectors plunged deep into the mountains that winter, spurred by the same mystic challenge of altitude—the urge to see and conquer—that had inspired Pike and Frémont. Here in these unexplored ranges, folding westward one after another, the Continental Divide came closest to the eastern plains. Agreement was general that the granite spine of the divide was where the gold was. A rich placer strike was made on a branch of Clear Creek near the site of what would be Idaho Springs. And then a gold-bearing quartz vein was found, which was bound to extend into its mountain for miles. The success of this Gregory Gulch bonanza led to the founding of Central City.
Some fifty thousand people hurried to the Pikes Peak region during the following summer of 1859. Most of them were the usual American-melting-pot mix—young farmers of English and Irish extraction from Kansas and Iowa, Scotch-Irish from the Kentucky hills, Scotch and Welsh and Germans and Italians from Pennsylvania. There were many blacks—some of them slaves with their masters from Tennessee and Texas, some free men from the eastern states. “Aunt Clara” Brown opened a laundry in Central City and won celebrity both as the first black woman there and as the only nurse in Gilpin County. Barney Ford, who had been a slave in Virginia, came to Denver and went on across the Continental Divide to strike it rich at Breckenridge and to be elected to the territorial legislature.
These eager argonauts filled the highlands with their frenzy as they crawled up every gulch and over the divide into South Park, into the Arkansas Valley below Fremont’s crossing of 1845, which they named Tennessee Pass, and over the divide to Pacific waters, to Middle Park, and the canyons of the Colorado River. The drama and beauty of the Rockies enthralled some of them, and they had a rapt audience—marmots and ptarmigan above timberline, soaring ravens staring down on them in sullen amazement. These prospectors brought business along the belt of their swarming—crude road construction, rest stations with feed for mules, blacksmith shops, tent saloons with faro tables, lean-to taverns—primitive havens which evolved into log towns like Tarryall and Fairplay on South Platte drainage, Breckenridge on the Blue River branch of the Colorado, and Oro City on the Arkansas.
Traces of law and order appeared in the shape of two villages on opposite banks of Cherry Creek. One was called Auraria, after a gold camp in Georgia. The other was St. Charles, recalling King Charles III of Spain who had owned Cherry Creek in Father Escalante’s day, though its modern claimants chose that name with St. Charles, Missouri, in mind. As winter approached in 1858, General William Larimer arrived with authority from officials of Kansas Territory to give government to Arapahoe County. Larimer found St. Charles reduced to a population of one armed guard. Legend has it that he distracted the guard with a bottle of bourbon. While the guard was consuming the gift, the general and his aides took possession of St. Charles and renamed it Denver. General James W. Denver, a Virginian, served briefly as governor of Kansas Territory before sinking out of history in contrast to his municipal namesake, which he did not manage to visit until 1874.
The Pikes Peakers yearned for more government than County Commissioner Larimer could provide. During 1859, volunteers set up dozens of mining districts in the foothills with officers to record mining claims. Crime was punished by people’s courts. Farmers squatting on plots along the streams registered their land with claim clubs. These informal institutions, pending government sanction, were patterned on those which had worked in California, and in New England two centuries before that. Some pioneers were aware that the region had been assigned by treaty to the Cheyennes and Araphoes in 1851, and were prompted to send agents to the legislature in Kansas and to Congress to have these Indian claims extinguished.
But in 1859 Kansas was a battlefield, the Civil War was brewing, and politicians had no time for the Pikes Peakers. To meet the impasse, a group of Denver residents met in the fall and created their own appendage of the United States—called Jefferson Territory by some, Jefferson State by others. It had its own government, following specifications drawn from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 for admitting new parts of the public domain into the Union. But Jefferson Territory fizzled out before the summer of 1860, partly because of its unpopular poll tax. Its name was resented also, since Thomas Jefferson had been a slaveholding Democrat and most Pikes Peakers were Abraham Lincoln Republicans.
Agents for the majority of settlers got busy in Washington to urge Congress to approve their own version of a territory under a gamut of names such as the Indian “Yampa,” the Spanish “Colorado” and “San Juan,” and the amorous “Lula” (some miner’s sweetheart). “Colorado” won out, and the whole matter was resolved by the rush of eastern events. Lincoln was elected president in November 1860. Kansas, with its present boundaries, was admitted as a free state. Secession of seven Southern states cleared Congress of anti-Colorado Democrats. The Republicans in Washington were eager now to please those influential owners of world-famous gold mines by creating Colorado Territory. That occurred by presidential proclamation on February 28, 1861.
The Pikes Peakers and their friends in Congress wasted no time enlarging the territory by stealing everything in sight. They acquired a strip of western Kansas sixty miles wide. From Utah Territory of the Mormons they took the Colorado Plateau west of the Continental Divide, which contained what is now Dinosaur National Monument and the prehistoric cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park. From Nebraska Territory they snatched the richest part of South Platte valley and the future Rocky Mountain National Park below Longs Peak. They got all of New Mexico north of Raton Pass including the fertile farmlands of San Luis Valley and those along Huerfano River below the Spanish Peaks. These farmlands had special value. They lay within Governor Armijo’s vast grants of the 1840s, which the U. S. Senate had agreed to honor in its treaty with Mexico. The agreement made the grants private land, open to legal purchase from the grantees, whereas the rest of the Pikes Peak region was in the public domain—federal land, which could not be acquired with clear titles until Indian claims were quieted and government surveys completed.
The Colorado Territory of 1861 was the same huge rectangle that the state of Colorado is now—nearly four hundred miles from east to west, three hundred from north to south. That came to a total of 66,718,000 acres. The Pikes Peakers created it, propelled by faith, greed, ambition, and zest for achieving the impossible. Few of them were serious thinkers, but some had gifts of leadership and foresight. There was, for example, William M. Byers, aged twenty-seven, a small dynamo with a flashing eye for pretty women and a mind abrasive enough to sharpen knives on. Byers hurried with a handpress from Omaha to Cherry Creek in April 1859, and began printing The Rocky Mountain News. For two decades thereafter his inflammatory editorials would blast away at “murderous, thieving Indians” and “idiot Democrats.” Quieter paragraphs would promote his credo that Colorado’s future lay in farming, manufacturing, scenery, and climate—not gold.
Though William Gilpin was not a Cherry Creek pioneer, he was a most effective booster working out of his home in Independence, Missouri. Much had happened to him since he headed for Oregon on Old Flash in 1843. After serving as a major in the Mexican War and fighting Comanches on the Santa Fe Trail, he returned to Independence to combine his law practice with real estate ventures and opposition to slavery.
But he spent most of his time spreading news about the wonders of the West. As his oratory improved, he grew handsomer and more impressive. His lanky six-foot frame filled out to nearly one hundred and fifty pounds. Throughout the Missouri Valley spellbound audiences came to regard him as a modern Demosthenes whose stately rhetoric lifted them above the day’s pettiness and into the wisdom of the ages. The absurdity of some of his ideas was submerged by the tidal wave of his idealism. People were thrilled when he rose on tiptoe to castigate Major Long’s report on the “great American desert.” Western farmers, he declared, were blessed by crop yields richer than those of the Vale of Kashmir or the Holy Land. The westerners were the healthiest of men because of the tonic climate—mild winters, cool summers, and perennial sunshine.
He had embellished his dream of a railroad running by way of South Pass and Bering Strait to Moscow and London. To achieve global harmony—what he called “the immortal fire of civilization”—branch lines would be built up to it from Shanghai and Bombay, Cairo and Rome and Mexico City, so that all nations could share in this rail-induced prosperity of the favored “isothermal zodiac.” But, Gilpin would conclude, there was a threat to his western Utopia. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had encouraged slave-owning Democrats to hope that they could win the West and its golden treasures in the course of the impending War Between the States. Passage of this evil act, he said, had caused ex-Senator Benton to die of a broken heart. Gilpin himself had quit the Democrats and joined the Republican party even though he had been threatened with hanging in 1860 when he had cast, in Independence, the sole vote for Lincoln out of a total vote of 1,200.
Gilpin had voted for Lincoln as much by design as by idealism. He observed that the Pikes Peakers were about to get their Colorado Territory, which meant that President-elect Lincoln must be looking for a governor, preferably from a slave state like Missouri. He was sure of his strength in the North. So Gilpin appealed to Republican leaders in St. Louis, and things began to move. He had competition, a Dr. John Evans of Chicago who had platted a town, which he called Oreapolis, at the mouth of the Platte River, as a rival to Omaha. In this venture, which died in the panic of 1857, Evans had the help of a young Nebraska politician Samuel Elbert. Gilpin counted Evans out because he was from Republican Illinois where Lincoln needed no support. And Gilpin was, of course, better qualified, having risked his life riding to Oregon and back on the bony spine of Old Flash whereas the effete Evans had never been west of Oreapolis.
Word came early in February 1861 that Lincoln wanted Colonel Gilpin along as a bodyguard on his train trip from Springfield to Washington, and in the White House through the inauguration. The Colorado candidate must have guarded the president well. Lincoln gave him the territorial governorship just before the Civil War began at Fort Sumter. On a crisp evening in May, Gilpin stood in dignified triumph on the lamplit balcony of the Tremont House in Denver overlooking Cherry Creek. Cannon boomed a welcome and, William Byers reported, “Denver’s fairest maidens beamed” and wondered if this hazel-eyed bachelor of forty-five years could be plucked out of celibacy. (He couldn’t. Gilpin resisted marrying for thirteen more years.) Colorado’s first governor gave a grandiloquent speech about “the plateau of America”—narrowed now to the Colorado Rockies—“up which civilization will ascend to plant the sacred fires over its expanse and shine upon the world with renewed refulgence.” Byers thought that the speech was good, if a bit long. His comment: “Colonel Gilpin is a very peculiar man.”2
The Governor discovered that his government was a shadow regime, consisting for most of that summer only of himself, a U. S. marshal, and a secretary, Lewis Ledyard Weld. The Colorado capitol consisted of three small rooms above a Larimer Street harness shop. The legislature could not decide where and when to meet, or how many counties to create. There was no money in the treasury—which was Gilpin’s wallet—because Congress had failed to appropriate any.
But what worried Gilpin most was lack of troops to defend the Central City gold mines. All the regulars had been called east, except a handful at Fort Garland in San Luis Valley and at Fort Wise down the Arkansas. Rebel flags had been raised in Denver, and there were rumors that Confederates in the area were joining the Plains Indians to attack the town.
When Gilpin learned from people in Santa Fe that a Rebel force was forming in Texas under an ex-U. S. Army general Henry H. Sibley, he called the Pikes Peak region to arms. He may have exaggerated the danger, but he knew what was involved better than anyone else. He had battled Plains Indians. He had fought Mexicans along the road between Texas and Raton Pass—the ancient El Camino Real of the Spanish conquest. He knew that Sibley was a first-class officer, a West Pointer like himself. Sibley had been in charge of building Fort Union south of Raton Pass as the supply center for New Mexico’s army posts. It was obvious to Gilpin that Sibley planned to capture Fort Union, which would give him all the military supplies he would need to seize the Denver region.
If Sibley took Denver and controlled the Santa Fe Trail and Oregon Trail, California was bound to fall to the Rebels. That thought gave Gilpin, the geopolitician, bad dreams in which he watched a jubilant Confederate envoy in London signing papers with the Chancellor of the Exchequer for huge loans, with the rich gold mines of Central City as security. The loans would pay for a great Rebel navy to drive Union ships from the Seven Seas and insure the delivery of Southern cotton to the mills of England.
Gilpin’s call to arms was received with enthusiasm, resulting in the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers, nicknamed “Gilpin’s Lambs.” The force consisted of 1,342 young miners, bartenders, lawyers, preachers, con men, shoe clerks, pimps, faro dealers, actors, and mule skinners. They received some slight training at a barracks on the South Platte near Denver, Camp Weld. One of their instructors was a three-hundred-pound giant, as bearded and oracular as Moses, the Reverend John M. Chivington, who had been serving the region as presiding elder of the Methodist Church. Having no territorial funds, the governor issued scrip on the U. S. Treasury worth $375,000 to buy guns and equipment and to pay for building Camp Weld. He had no authority to issue such scrip on his own, but he had seen Frémont do it in 1843, and he believed that he was saving the Union.
The merchants of Denver were happy to accept the scrip for supplies that summer, though their joy turned to rage in the fall when the U. S. Treasury refused to redeem the scrip that they had sent in. As the city sank into financial chaos, Gilpin took the long trail east to ask the Treasury to settle up with the merchants and to pay arrears on his own salary. His pleas failed. President Lincoln, absorbed in General Grant’s campaign, had no time to study Gilpin’s case, though he delayed until March 18, 1862, before removing him from the governorship.
Great irony here. As Lincoln made his decision, Gilpin’s Lambs were tramping through a blizzard across Raton Pass to Fort Union and on south to block Sibley’s regulars camped in Glorieta Pass short of Santa Fe, which they had just taken. On March 28, the confident Texans, their red state flag flying, advanced with cannon booming and grapeshot rattling on the weary Lambs crouched in an arroyo near Pigeon’s Ranch. After two hours of combat, the Lambs had to retreat, leaving behind fifty dead and sixty-five injured.
The Texans had won a tremendous victory. Before them was the wide-open road to Denver. Or was it open? As Sibley prepared to continue north, word came to him that a bull-voiced preacher named Major Chivington and four hundred and thirty Lambs had dropped off the cliffs of Apache Canyon to capture his rear guard and set fire to his supply train—half a million dollars worth of vital ammunition, saddles, food, clothes, medicine, maps, wagons. As the supplies burned, the Lambs worked in relays shooting down six hundred spare horses and mules, the blood of which made a red creek flowing down the canyon.
That ended the Civil War in the West. Without arms or food, Sibley had no choice but to flee south—to try to get his men back to Texas before soldiers from the New Mexican forts could join the Lambs and hunt them down.
Back in Denver, Gilpin showed no bitterness over his removal from office as he welcomed the second governor of Colorado Territory in a brief ceremony at the Tremont House on May 16. Most of the applause went to “the Hero of Glorieta,” Major John M. Chivington, who planned to run for Congress. The new governor, John Evans, got a spatter. William Gilpin got none.
John Evans was forty-eight years old when he reached Denver to take over as head of the territory, superintendent of Indian affairs, and commander-in-chief of militia. He was a blocky, slow-speaking man, solemn as a pontiff and careful to maintain his dignity as the most eminent Methodist in the middle west, and one of the wealthiest. He was born a Quaker in Ohio, got his medical degree in Cincinnati, and practiced for some years as an obstetrician in Indiana. He quit the Quakers and joined the Methodist Church because of its greater discipline and the solidarity of its members in matters spiritual and material. In 1846 he founded the Indiana Hospital for the Insane and invented a sort of mechanical hand with eleven-inch steel fingers for extracting babies during their birth. He never understood why the mothers were not enamored of the device.
After moving to Chicago in 1848, he gave up medicine for what really interested him—the pursuit of wealth and of power through business and politics. He dabbled in the latter while building a railroad from Chicago to Fort Wayne and founding Northwestern University and its town of Evanston, Illinois. In 1860 he coached his protegé Sam Elbert when the latter worked for Lincoln as a Nebraska delegate at the Republican national convention. Thereafter, Evans put in a bid for the governorship of Nebraska Territory or of Colorado. He felt that either of them would put him in line for his heart’s desire, the U. S. Senate, since these territories were expected to achieve statehood soon. But President Lincoln could only offer Washington Territory—too far away. When Evans heard of Gilpin’s scrip problems, he went after Lincoln again. This time he got the Colorado job.
Evans was a generous contributor to the Methodist Church and its educational projects. He was compassionate, after attending to first things first—wealth, power, political advancement. As a business administrator he was extraordinarily gifted. But as the chief executive of a vast untamed wilderness he had limitations. He was not a rugged pioneer type like Gilpin or Fremont. He had a distaste for any outdoors at all. He went fishing in Illinois once, got bitten by mosquitos, and was seldom seen again away from the inside of his home or office, except to hurry from one to the other.
Upon arriving in Denver, Evans found people leaving the Pikes Peak region in droves because of the money pinch brought on by Gilpin’s depreciated scrip and because the gold boom was waning. The placers had played out and lode miners were having trouble with their gold veins as their shaft holes deepened. Near the surface the veins gave up their gold because the rock enclosing them was softened by erosion. Lower in the shaft, the gold resisted separation by any known process. The new governor restored some confidence by issuing optimistic statements on the economy and on the imminence of statehood—statements that he hoped would help him later when he would need the support of the legislature to put him in the Senate.
Evans was at home with these economic and political matters. But his big problem was the Indians, whose stubborn refusal to give up their savage ways and behave like white men baffled him completely. He knew that Tom Fitzpatrick’s treaty of 1851 with the Plains tribes had turned out to be a sham, that none of its terms had been lived up to by the U. S. government. Many thousands of whites had dispossessed the Cheyennes and Arapahoes of the entire Pikes Peak region, which had been guaranteed them by the U. S. Senate. This injustice, Evans felt, had been corrected in 1861 when the Indian Bureau persuaded four chiefs to sign a new treaty at Fort Wise (Fort Lyon after 1862) down on the Arkansas. By its terms, the four chiefs exchanged the Cheyenne-Arapahoe lands of the 1851 treaty for five million acres bounded by the Arkansas on the south and by Sand Creek on the northeast. It was a huge chunk of high plains containing what is now the richest irrigated farmland of the Arkansas Valley between present Fowler and Lamar, with Fort Lyon in the middle.
But it was just a bleak and arid prairie in 1861. Here the members of the two tribes were ordered by the Indian Bureau to give up hunting buffalo for subsistence, as they had been doing since time out of mind, and learn instead how to farm on forty-acre plots. Many of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes did move to the Arkansas reservation to draw moldy rations—when they were available at all—from the Fort Lyon agency until somebody arrived from Washington to show them how to plow and build a house. But many remained nomads, explaining that they had to hunt or starve because the agency officials stole their annuities. They added that the four chiefs had no right to sign a treaty binding them.
Residents in Denver who knew something about Indians tried to explain to Evans why the Cheyennes and Arapahoes could not become farmers overnight—why their lives were dedicated to survival in a boundless environment, why they loved their hard way of living and found fulfillment and pride in it. The governor was sympathetic but insisted that these savages could not continue to block Christian progress by their extravagant and inefficient use of land. His opinion had the strong support of his fellow Methodist John A. Chivington, who had just been placed in charge of the Pikes Peak military district by the U. S. Army’s commander in Leavenworth, General S. R. Curtis. Colonel Chivington argued that the promotion of progress was the governorships top responsibility and God’s will, even if the intransigeance of the savages forced the whites to destroy them, including their children. As Chivington pointed out, “Nits make lice.” 3
Chivington was a comfort to Evans through 1862 and 1863 as conflict increased between the Pikes Peakers and the Indians roaming illegally—in Evans’s opinion, at least—over their old hunting grounds. The colonel’s cavalry matched raid for raid, pillage for pillage, rape for rape, and sometimes a bit more. At Chivington’s request, Evans bombarded the War Department with telegrams for funds to recruit more men to meet a rumored uprising of all the Plains Indians. Then word came in mid-June 1864 that four Arapahoes had stopped at the Van Wormer ranch twenty-five miles southeast of Denver and had murdered the tenant, Nathan Hungate, his wife, Ellen, and their two small daughters, Florence, six, and Laura, three. The mutilated bodies were found stuffed in a well. The governor did not feel it politic to intervene when Van Wormer carted the four corpses to Larimer Street and put them on display for anyone with the stomach to look at them.
Thereafter horror mounted in the Denver area as stories of Indian atrocities circulated. Food prices rose with the disruption of supply trains and mail service along the South Platte. In August Chivington got an order from the War Department to raise a regiment of one-hundred-day soldiers, the Third Colorado Cavalry. The governor issued a proclamation authorizing all citizens to “kill and destroy” hostile Indians on sight. He did not explain how to distinguish “hostiles” from “friendlies.” He advised the “friendlies” to go to their reservation on the Arkansas so that they would not be shot at inadvertently. In late September a conference was held at Camp Weld, Evans and Chivington on one side, seven Indian chiefs on the other. It was a collision of frustrations, and it came to nothing. Chivington produced a telegram from General Curtis instructing him not to make peace “till the Indians suffer more.” Evans expressed doubt about the sincerity of the chiefs and construed the general’s telegram as relieving his office of authority in the crisis.4
After that conference the Cheyenne chief, Black Kettle, returned to the Arkansas reservation, which was his impression of what the governor had asked him to do. During October he collected several hundred Cheyennes and Arapahoes in families and installed them for the winter in a prairie village of tepees on Sand Creek forty miles northeast of the Fort Lyon agency. Over his tepee, the chief raised an American flag with a white flag beneath it to show that this was a village of “friendliest” At this point, Governor Evans packed up his wife and children and left Denver for a two-month visit to Washington.
The rest of the Sand Creek tragedy, told and retold in a thousand variations, occurred a fortnight later. At sunrise on a clear, cold November 29, 1864, Colonel Chivington and his Third Colorado Cavalry of nine hundred mounted men topped a ridge and saw on a bend of Sand Creek the many tepees of Black Kettle’s village with Old Glory flying above them. The soldiers had ridden all night from Fort Lyon, nibbling on maggoty hardtack. They were miserably cold, unkempt, resentful, and near exhaustion, but sustained by Chivington’s promise that they would be heroes like Gilpin’s Lambs because they were about to wipe out this vile nest of murdering savages and end Colorado’s Indian troubles forever.
A few Indians sighted the troops and made for their nearby herd of some six hundred horses. Chivington ordered the soldiers forward, shooting. Artillerymen on a bluff manned their four twelve-pound howitzers. As the tepees began to shrivel and collapse under cannon fire, men, women, and children, disheveled and bewildered, poured out, some with guns and bows and arrows, some with hands raised in surrender. The Indians ran toward the creek bank for protection, but the space between the village and the bank was soon covered with bodies, dead and dying. Throughout the morning the one-sided carnage continued as the soldiers cleared Sand Creek for two or three miles of its defenders and completed the destruction of the village.
According to the testimony of witnesses later before two congressional committees, a madness seemed to possess some of the soldiers as they took to scalping fallen bodies, male and female, cutting off fingers, breasts, genitals for souvenirs, raping dead squaws in relays, using toddling children for target practice. By 4 P.M. the horror had ended—the village a flat litter, the flag purloined, the area gruesome with blood and torn corpses. Black Kettle was among those who escaped northward. There were no other survivors. Chivington allowed no prisoners to be taken. He forbade burial. The Third Colorado Cavalry simply rode away, leaving the dead to the coyotes and vultures.
The Third Colorado lost eight men killed, some of them in their own crossfire, and forty wounded. A “credible” estimate put the Indian dead at “something under two hundred.” Two-thirds of the bodies counted later were women and children.5
1. Julia Archibald Holmes, A Bloomer Girl on Pikes Peak—1858 (Denver: Western History Department, 1949), pp. 16–17.
2. Robert L. Perkin, The First Hundred Years (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1959), pp. 233–234.
3. Perkin, First Hundred Years, p. 269.
4. Perkin, First Hundred Years, p. 208, 268.
5. Perkin, First Hundred Years, p. 272.