CHAPTER XXXVIII.: The Pike's Peak Country, and a New Sort of Rendezvous at Denver.

THE reader who has followed me through buffalo trails, mountain defiles, and the councils of the village, may wonder what became of the old traveller when the narrative closed, as it did, upon my honest counsel concerning the Western tribes and my farewell to the Indian heroine, in the volume which Mr. Bonner prepared from my dictation and which the house of Harper & Brothers issued in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-six (the edition readers commonly find under the imprint of that New York firm, though dealers’ catalogues sometimes name other partners). I did not expect, when I laid down my pen in that shape, that I should ever again take it up for the public eye; yet the years dragged me, as they drag most men, through episodes I had not foreseen when I reckoned myself a finished story. What follows in this chapter, and the next, is not taken from that original dictation. It is a later continuation—set down in my name for this reader—from memory sharpened by newspapers, gossip along the Platte, and the cold prose of government print: Senate resolutions, War Department letters, and the testimony bound up after the army inquired into the affair on Sand Creek.

The diggings and the double town

When word reached me of gold along Cherry Creek and the feeders of the South Platte, I was far too seasoned to believe every pan that glittered; still I had never been a man to rust in one place when the whole country was in motion. I struck the Pike’s Peak country in eighteen hundred and fifty-nine—the very summer when “Pikes Peak or Bust” was painted on wagon-covers from the Missouri to the mountains.

What I found was not a single camp but a pair of them—Denver City on one bank of Cherry Creek and Auraria on the other—each boasting streets that were little more than furrows in the mud, roofed by canvas and noise. Men staked lots as they had once staked beaver-traps; only now the bait was dirt rumored to carry color. I kept a store, as the records of my neighbors later described it: flour, tools, powder, coffee, nails—whatever an emigrant short of sleep and long on hope would pay dear to obtain. Between measuring calico and weighing lead I was still Jim Beckwourth, the former American Fur Company brigade leader and Crow trader, but in Denver I was counted less often as a war chief than as a grey-headed negotiator who knew how to weigh both silver and insult without letting his hand shake.

Denver was not Bent’s Old Fort, where a man’s word had passed for law beside the Arkansas; nor was it the silent march across Beckwourth Pass, which I had opened for wagons in the time of my western story. Here every third fellow styled himself a colonel of something that would dissolve before the snow flew; the buffalo were thinning on the easy hunting ground; and the iron horse was coming, though its whistle had not yet troubled the Front Range.

Governors, generals, and peace overtures that soured

By eighteen hundred and sixty-four the Civil War in the East had drawn off regular troops and left the Territory of Colorado to improvisations—volunteer regiments raised for a hundred days’ service, rumors of Confederate raids that never came, and a border with the plains tribes increasingly stained with blood. John Evans, our Territorial Governor, issued proclamations inviting friendly bands toward army posts; Fort Lyon on the Arkansas route became both larder and trap. Major Edward W. Wynkoop, then commanding at Lyon, met chiefs who sought parley; later commanders interpreted orders more harshly.

On September twenty-eighth, eighteen hundred and sixty-four, a party of Cheyenne and Arapaho headmen came down to Fort Weld outside Denver to speak with Evans and with military officers. I was not neutral furniture in such councils—my life had been passed between councils—and the words traded that day deserve to be remembered exactly as white men and red men left them on the record.

Governor Evans said plainly to the assembled headmen that whatever peace they might make must lie with the army, not with his civil office. Reporters and treaty-minutes give his meaning in nearly these words:

“Whatever peace you make must be with the soldiers, and not with me.”

Colonel John M. Chivington, who commanded Colorado Volunteers, stood in the council when Evans spoke. To chiefs anxious for protection he indicated Fort Lyon and Wynkoop; yet the same day he left Cheyenne ears ringing with another sort of language. Eyewitness summaries of that September twenty-eighth meeting preserve his brag of unlimited war—and the Secretary of War’s later compilation reprinted such boasts when Congress gathered evidence.

The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War and the western correspondents quoted Chivington’s rule of engagement in forms close to this (I give the sense retained in the standard published extracts):

I am not a big war chief, but all the soldiers in this country are at my command. My rule of fighting white men or Indians is to fight them until they lay down their arms and submit to military authority… They can go to him (Major Wynkoop) when they get ready to do that.

Other phrases attributed to him that bleak season were uglier still—men remembered him promising to kill Indians without mercy, big and little—calculated to unstring any trust won in a smoke-filled lodge. I set those speeches beside Governor Evans’s circulars inviting friendly Indians to posts of safety, and I leave the reader to reckon the contradictions.

Toward the Arkansas

After that September parley, Black Kettle’s band and associated families moved toward Fort Lyon, took what sustenance the post could spare, and were sent—under shifting orders—to camp on Big Sandy Creek near its junction with the plains. They flew the United States flag and a white flag beside it at Black Kettle’s lodge, thinking themselves under the nation’s pledge. Two officers with the First Colorado—Captain Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer—would later swear that attacking such a camp violated every pledge the army had extended; they refused to fire on people their own superiors had called in under protection.

I have not yet told the reader the hardest truth of my own part in those weeks, because honor requires laying the road before the storm: army columns needed guides who knew the water-courses and the short grass. A man famous for fifty years between worlds is too often assumed to know the route. I rode with Colonel Chivington’s column as it set out from Fort Lyon toward that village—an office I performed, as I then justified to myself, because I knew the ground, not because I knew his mind. Whether posterity calls that service wisdom, necessity, or cowardice I leave to harsher judges than I; I record it here because no honorable supplement to my Life can omit what the chronicles already fix upon my name.

The tale of November twenty-ninth, eighteen hundred and sixty-four—the volleys, the howitzers, the slaughter of the peace party—belongs to the chapter that follows; but no man should read it who thinks Denver was merely a muddy camp where old mountaineers sold tobacco. It was the doorway through which orders, fear, and revenge passed from territorial chambers to the creek-bottoms of Colorado, and thence to the Congress and the War Department, where the republic at last printed, in Senate Executive Document form, the evidence taken at Denver and Fort Lyon in answer to what the country had done, and left undone, on Sand Creek.