CHAPTER XXXIX.: The Inquiry: Denver, Fort Lyon, and What the Government Chose to Hear.

ON November twenty-ninth, eighteen hundred and sixty-four, Colonel John M. Chivington led roughly six hundred and seventy-five mounted men of the Third Colorado Cavalry and attached First Colorado companies against a village of Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped under the banks of Big Sandy Creek, a tributary of the Arkansas in what is now Kiowa County. The band chief Black Kettle had flown the United States flag and a white banner above his lodge, believing the post commanders at Fort Lyon had directed him to camp there in peace.

This is the tale I deferred at the end of my last chapter—the volleys, the howitzers, the slaughter of the peace party—and the reckoning that followed it. The doorway I named there, through which orders passed from Denver’s territorial chambers to the creek-bottoms of Colorado and onward to Congress and the War Department, opens here onto ink as well as blood: the republic’s own Senate Executive Document, printed at last with the evidence taken at Denver and Fort Lyon, in answer to what the country had done, and left undone, on Sand Creek.

What the sun saw

Men who wished their names remembered for courage rather than carnage—including Captain Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer of the First Colorado—refused to fire on the village and ordered the soldiers under them to hold their pieces. The rest of Chivington’s command swept in with howitzers and rifles. What followed was not battle in any Cheyenne sense of matched warriors; it was slaughter among lodges. Women, old men, and children fell among the reeds; bodies were mutilated; trophies were taken in a fashion I shall not dignify with the word “victory.”

The interpreter John S. Smith, who had lived long among the Cheyenne, later testified before Congress in language the Joint Committee preserved:

I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces … With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors … By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops …

Witnesses spoke likewise of riders hunting survivors up the dry creek bed, of relics displayed for sale in Denver dram-shops, of scalps ornamenting hats—outrages that soured even hardened frontiersmen.

“A foul and dastardly massacre”

When word reached Washington, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War took testimony alongside the army’s own boards. In their report the congressmen—who were anything but friends of the Confederacy—denounced the affair in terms so plain they deserve quotation entire:

As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find fitting terms to describe his conduct. Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be the emblem of justice and humanity; holding the important position of commander of a military district, and therefore having the honor of the government to that extent in his keeping, he deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty. Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, he took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenceless condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man…

They concluded with a plea for energetic measures to remove officers who had disgraced the uniform—language Congress might have enforced more sternly than it did.

The print that reached the Senate

So much for metaphor; here is the parchment that matched it. Not all evidence ran through Capitol reporters alone. A military commission in Denver, convened in February eighteen sixty-five with Lieutenant Colonel S. F. Tappan presiding, had first taken sworn testimony touching Sand Creek. By order of the Senate and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, that record was later printed entire for senators: February fourteenth, eighteen hundred and sixty-seven—the War Department packet my modern friends catalog beside Library of Congress 2022692068, and which I have held again in facsimile under the old file name GR_4292x—the government’s own type spelling names as the compositors heard them—including mine.

Historians still dispute every head-count; George Bent, who was in the village, wrote of scores of women and children among the dead, while Chivington bragged of hundreds of warriors that winter to newspapers eager for Indian gore. Somewhere between lies the measure of human loss; none diminishes the crime.

The oath with Chivington’s eyes on me

When they called James P. Beckwith to the chair (the transcript’s spelling, not my birth name), Colonel Chivington—whose conduct was under examination—was in the room. Before I could be sworn, he put on a show of piety I reserve the right to call obscene in retrospect:

J.M. Chivington respectfully asks that the witness, James P. Beckwith, may be interrogated as to his belief in the existence of God, who rewards good and punishes evil, before he is sworn.

Question. James P. Beckwith, do you believe in the existence of a Supreme Being, of a God, by whom truth is enjoined and falsehood punished, and do you consider the form of administering an oath as binding upon your conscience
Answer. I do.

There sat the parson-soldier, fresh from Sand Creek, pressing the Almighty into service as a prophylactic against my word. I felt the room divide: white officers measuring whether a man of African and European blood could swear in a way that would sting the very colonel who still sat in the audience wearing his rank. I believed—still believe—but I tasted ash. God was not Chivington’s private field-piece; yet that day Heaven itself was made a weapon pointed at my throat before Truth had a chance to open her mouth.

What I swore under examination

They asked me plainly who I was and where I had been. The record reads:

Question. Your full name, age, and residence ?
Answer. James Pierson Beckwith. I reside in this city at present. I am in my 69th year.

Question. Did you accompany Colonel Chivington's command to Sand creek last November ?
Answer. Yes. I started with Colonel Shoup as guide and interpreter; afterwards Colonel Chivington overtook us, and, I think, assumed command.

Question. What orders did he give, and what remarks did he make to his command ?
Answer. His remark, when he halted us in the middle of Sand creek, was this: "Men, strip for action." He also said, I don't tell you to kill all ages and sex, but look back on the plains of the Platte, where your mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters have been slain, and their blood saturating the sands on the Platte."

Reading those lines today still turns my stomach. I had heard men work themselves into a frenzy before battle; I had never heard hypocrisy so neatly dressed: a caution against “all ages and sex” paired with powder lit by an appeal to vengeance on mothers and children. The contradiction was the sermon—and I was the man who had ridden ahead so his steam-engine of volunteers could find the ford.

They pressed me on the dead. I told them what my eyes saw—women and children among the slain in sickening proportion:

Question. Were those Indians killed on Sand creek, warriors ?
Answer. There were all sexes, warriors, women, and children, and all ages, from one week old to eighty years.
Question. What proportion of those killed were women and children ?
Answer. About two-thirds, as near as I saw.

I described White Antelope—peace chief—running with his hands up, shouting Stop! stop! in English plain enough for any Christian to heed, then folding his arms until shot down “only to shoot him, as I saw,” while rifle-smoke and whooping drowned the command to mercy. The commissioners set that down in clerkly calm, as if describing hogs at slaughter. For me it was watching a brother erased because the column could not hear anything over its own joy.

What the Cheyenne said to me afterward—and how Chivington tried to strike it from the record

When I journeyed to White Man’s fork that winter and entered Leg-in-the-Water’s lodge, grief and rage met me like a cold wind. The printed page preserves the council better than my old memory alone. I had come, foolish with hope, to talk peace; the headman raised on his elbow and asked why I had brought the white man again:

I told them I had come to persuade them to make peace with the whites, as there was not enough of them to fight the whites, as they were as numerous as the leaves of the trees. "We know it," was the general response of the council. But what do we want to live for? The white man has taken our country, killed all of our game; was not satisfied with that, but killed our wives and children. Now no peace. We want to go and meet our families in the spirit land.

They asked me then why I had come to Sand creek with the soldiers to show them the country. I told them if I had not come the white chief would have hung me. "Go and stay with your white brothers. but we are going to fight till death."

I write that sentence in full because it is the hardest I ever swore in any court: if I had not come the white chief would have hung me. It was terror speaking—terror clothed as duty—for a man of my blood does not refuse a colonel’s order and expect a scaffold any less than a rope on the frontier. I knew even as I said it that honor between me and the people I had traded with half a lifetime was cracked past mending. The transcript shows me pleading the orders I followed; it cannot show the weight that settled in my chest—a stone for every lodge still smoking in memory.

When the commissioners asked for more of that council, Chivington rose with legal contempt for Indian speech. Hearsay, he cried; not evidence under Anglo rules; Indians could not be witnesses in his cosmology unless Congress—years prior—had inked some narrow statute. The board overruled him in part, then hedged, then sliced my answers: he wanted silence where Indian voices named his cruelty. The room was a lesson in how empire keeps its archives clean: admit the man on the stand, then rule out what he heard in a language you refuse to treat as human testimony.

Cross-fire

When cross-examination came, Chivington had no more use for piety—only position. He pushed me to admit I rode “with the foremost” beside him in the charge, his horse fleeter than mine; he measured White Antelope’s distance in feet as if yards of conscience could be triangulated that way; he asked whether I bore enmity toward him—I answered none, so help me God, though my hands shook on the oath. Then he reached for the lowest weapon he had left:

Question. To what race do you belong—the white, black, or Indian ?
(Objection to the question by Lieutenant Colonel Samuel F. Tappan, president of the commission. Objection sustained by the commission.)

You see? Even Tappan, no friend of the Cheyenne council-fire, judged that barb beneath the dignity of the board. I sat breathing through my teeth, grateful once for a Yankee colonel’s intercession, sick that my standing as a witness hung on whether white men would permit race to be spoken aloud in a room where I had already sworn before God and country. Chivington wanted a label pinned to my hide—white, black, or Indian—not to know me, but to cheapen whatever fell from my lips afterward. He could not quite get away with it that day. Other days, in other chambers—the Republic asked the same question in quieter ways.

What that felt like, for me

I will not dress it in romance. Shame: for riding when I might have laid my body across the trail and been ridden down for it. Fury: at a system that could call massacre by a battle’s name, then lecture me on evidence while it pocketed trophies in Denver saloons. Loneliness: when Leg-in-the-Water told me to go back to “your white brothers.” I had none, not in the sense he meant; I had only the habits of survival I had learned since a boy—speak their English, wear their cloth, carry their rifles sometimes against people whose lodges I had supped in. And fear—fear that the next order, the next oath, the next printed transcript with my name misspelled, would be all that survived of what I tried to tell.

Soldiers who told the truth paid prices. Captain Soule, who refused the massacre order, was murdered on the streets of Denver—some said by men tied to Chivington’s allies. His assassination hangs beside the creek in any honest tally of revenge.

What remains to the historian

Between John S. Smith’s sworn horror, the Joint Committee’s moral verdict, the Tappan commission’s pages where my answers sit beside Chivington’s objections, and the Senate Executive volumes of ’sixty-seven, the historian need not lean on my memory alone for the spine of fact. I who had lived as Negro, French Creole, free man, trader, and Crow chief, who had once boasted of Beckwourth Pass and a life sold on Harper’s tables, ended this chapter of my existence with government type printing me Beckwith—a printer’s slip worth more than many lies, for it shows how easily a man between worlds becomes a stranger in his own name.

If my Chapter XXXVII pleaded for justice on the open prairie, let this chapter plead for justice in print—for every page the government finally yielded up, and for every page it tried to smother, and for every Indian sentence it first called barbarous hearsay, then reluctantly allowed, line by line, into the cold record.

And so I leave the reader with two layers of one life: the narrative prepared for the book whilst I was yet hale enough to hunt buffalo on horseback, and this afterward—set down when Denver had cabins enough to hold both a commission room and a killer’s boasts, when Colorado had blood on its hands and ink on its hands alike, and when those who come after may judge whether James P. Beckwourth—Beckwith in the government’s columns—told the truth as plainly as a flawed mortal may, both for the Red people and for the Republic that claimed them.