Opinion: Sand Creek and the Hidden Costs of Conquest

On July 11, Professor Gary Roberts, one of the foremost experts on the Sand Creek Massacre, will speak at History Colorado on the massacre, its causes and its outcomes, and its resonance today. The nightmare at Sand Creek has seared the collective consciousness of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations for over a century and a half. While they have, for the most part, escaped notice, the events at Sand Creek and countless other events in the history of Native Americans in what became the United States intersect in a fundamental way with the 1619 Project and the narrative of slavery in America.

In the book edition of the project, the authors ask: “What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?” That’s when the first transport of African slaves to Virginia in 1619 signaled “the country’s very origin.”

Having just celebrated the nation’s 246th birthday, it seems fitting to reflect on the events and actions that led to the nation’s formation, as well as the consequences of those actions. While the importance of slavery’s role in the history, formation and evolution of the United States cannot be overstated, there is another American origin story that predates that of slavery, one that the nation has failed to fully confront. This narrative is of equal significance to the story of slavery in the creation of the United States. Its residual effects continue to shape millions of lives, but the harsh reality of that story remains substantially hidden.

In the year 1610, nearly a decade before the arrival of that first slave ship in Virginia, the English residents of that colony became engaged in the first of a series of three wars against the Powhatan Indian Confederacy of the Chesapeake Bay region. The fighting in the Virginia colony was notable for its brutality even in the context of later so-called “Indian Wars,” and resulted in the complete defeat of the Powhatan nation. The victory secured the English hold on what became the colony of Virginia.

The war in the Chesapeake represented the first conflict in a nearly unbroken string of warfare between the European and indigenous populations in what ultimately became the United States. The war in Virginia was followed closely by warfare in New England against the Pequots, who were nearly obliterated by the English colonists and their Narragansett allies. The Narragansetts, in turn, were subjugated by the English decades later.

In the eighteenth century, Indians in western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley found themselves leveraged between the empires of Great Britain and France in a series of wars over control of Canada and the vast region drained by the Ohio River. The Indian allies of the defeated French faced an aggressive American migration that defied British directives not to cross the Proclamation Line of 1763, which the British crown set in place to prevent American expansion into the Ohio Valley and encroachment on Indian lands.

Fighting reignited in this area during the American Revolution as the British and Americans fought for control of the region west of the Appalachian Crest. Among the many grievances the Americans lodged against the British in the Declaration of Independence, one in particular summarizes the hostile viewpoint of the American colonists toward the Native Americans — who, by that point, had intermittently opposed British and American expansion for nearly 150 years. “He [King George III] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

While the British surrendered their hold over this country to the United States in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the real losers were the numerous tribes that were forced from the region by the United States Army and the waves of settlers that overran the Ohio Valley. Exactly twenty years later, the United States secured a “legitimate” claim from the French over the vast Indian lands of what was known as Louisiana in a transaction that had essentially the same degree of legitimacy as the sale and purchase of a stolen car.

This preceded by a few decades the calculated provocation of a war of aggression against the Republic of Mexico. The war concluded in 1848 with a ruthless appropriation of over half of the territory claimed by Mexico. This confirmed the establishment of Texas as yet another slave state in the United States. The fact that those claims of Mexican sovereignty north of the Rio Grande included the traditional lands of numerous Indian tribes was of little or no consequence to the Americans who migrated by the tens of thousands into the newly conquered territory.

The defeat of Mexico and the American expansion to the Pacific set into motion the final conquest of the West. The Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River found themselves at the mercy of relentless aggression by a rapidly industrializing United States. This invasion was marked by a series of massacres, including those at Sand Creek in Colorado, Bear River in Idaho, and Wounded Knee in South Dakota. All of these events were characterized by the “undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions” so abhorred by the founders. American expansion also triggered a renewed round of ethnic cleansings, including the Long Walk of the Navajo from Arizona to New Mexico and the expulsion of the Utes from Colorado.

When the Treaty of Paris ending the American Revolutionary War was signed in 1783, Native Americans of dozens of tribes and confederacies effectively controlled nearly two million square miles within what is now the United States, American land claims notwithstanding. Most of those lands were west of the Appalachians, though some tribes still had extensive holdings in the original thirteen states. By 1893, Indian land holdings were limited to dozens of reservations scattered largely across the western United States. Today, these lands combined are slightly larger than the state of Idaho, the tenth-largest state in the Union. Interspersed with the military campaigns against Native Americans were efforts to undermine Native American culture, language and traditions. This assimilation policy had devastating impacts on tribal politics and social structure that continued well into the twentieth century.

This dismal narrative in no way obscures or diminishes the importance or impact of slavery, Jim Crow and other elements of racism in our nation’s history. To the contrary, the histories of conquest, slavery and other chapters of discrimination and oppression underscore a fundamental truth about the American experience over the first three centuries of our history. The nation was born as a white man’s country, and for over two centuries all the peoples and groups who did not match that description either in color, gender or national origin found themselves marginalized to one degree or another.

The conflicts in America today are rooted in struggles that began over 400 years ago. Like the history of slavery and Jim Crow, the legacy of conquest shaped our country in ways that endure today. Martin Luther King said that we are made by history. And to a far greater degree than we care to admit, our history of conquest made us.

Gary Roberts will be discuss “The Racial and Cultural Context of the Sand Creek Massacre — Then and Now,” at 1 p.m. Monday, July 11 at History Colorado Center, 1200 Broadway; get tickets here.

Tom Thomas is a retired historian for the National Park Service and was an instructor in history at the University of Colorado for over ten years.

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