If you're interested, there's a great deal about the self-aggrandizing and self-protecting lies told about the Sand Creek Massacre, both in books and the public record. One of the key figures in the Army was Silas Soule, a Captain who refused to play along: he wrote agitating letters to friends in Denver and to the War Dept., and then testified before the Army commission on the topic that winter -- and was assassinated in the street before he could testify before a similar civilian commission in the spring.
Soule's letter to his friend Ned Wynkoop and circulated therefrom, written a few days after the massacre and detailing what he witnessed, was much referred to in the Army records and was probably the thing that got commissions moving. (It was remarkably blunt, i.e. it attests the fact that "snatch" was a slang word for a woman's privates already in 1864.) That letter and another one by a Lieutenant named Cramer were lost at some point, before the commissions so they could not be read into the record. A woman in Colorado found copies of those letters in her attic in 2000, and brought them to the Colorado Historical Society, which published them in full. And you know what, 150 years later, those letters were as alive with anger as the day they'd been written.
(In contrast to Breakenridge and Bursdal's remembrances, the commission testimony includes the live white people who were in the Cheyenne camp when attacked, who would certainly have been killed had Soule's company not protected them. They were US soldiers and Army-affiliated civilians, who'd received Army permission to trade in the village only a few weeks before the massacre. Even if it hadn't been a cynical genocide, the Sand Creek Masssacre would still have been a huge fuckup.)
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2010-04-16 05:31 pm (UTC)Soule's letter to his friend Ned Wynkoop and circulated therefrom, written a few days after the massacre and detailing what he witnessed, was much referred to in the Army records and was probably the thing that got commissions moving. (It was remarkably blunt, i.e. it attests the fact that "snatch" was a slang word for a woman's privates already in 1864.) That letter and another one by a Lieutenant named Cramer were lost at some point, before the commissions so they could not be read into the record. A woman in Colorado found copies of those letters in her attic in 2000, and brought them to the Colorado Historical Society, which published them in full. And you know what, 150 years later, those letters were as alive with anger as the day they'd been written.
(In contrast to Breakenridge and Bursdal's remembrances, the commission testimony includes the live white people who were in the Cheyenne camp when attacked, who would certainly have been killed had Soule's company not protected them. They were US soldiers and Army-affiliated civilians, who'd received Army permission to trade in the village only a few weeks before the massacre. Even if it hadn't been a cynical genocide, the Sand Creek Masssacre would still have been a huge fuckup.)