NOVEMBER 27:

1989 St. John's Newfoundland - Congregation of Christian Brothers close their Mount Cashel Orphanage for Boys in St. John's after 90 years. Nine current and former Christian Brothers of the Roman Catholic lay teaching order are charged with child abuse, and a judicial inquiry is under way.

1885 Battleford Saskatchewan - Wandering Spirit hanged outside Fort Battleford with 7 other Crees; for the murders at Frog Lake on April 1; last public execution in Canada; in his statement, Wandering Spirit blamed the CPR as the main cause of his peoples' sufferings because the railway brought many settlers to the region.

November 27, 1864 - Washita Massacre prelude
 

BACKGROUND:
 

the following "intro" is at Jordan Dill's first nations extensive website:

Genocide on the Great Plains
© by James Horsley
http://www.dickshovel.com/was.html

Also, Washita, Part II
   Genocide and its implications on the Great Plains
http://www.tolatsga.org/wasvol1a.html
      Notes:

The author of "Washita," James Horsley, has been gracious enough to allow his "work-in-progress " to be posted at the First Nations site so as to generate comments from those who visit here. Washita has a very definite premise - that Custer's massacre (my term) was an act founded in "genocidal calculation " (my phrase).

Readers are encourgaged to comment on what follows. Your input and reaction will prove invaluable to this work

On this page you will find the Introduction and Chapter One.

So...I present to you Washita, Genocide on the Great Plains.
 

Introduction

On the morning of November 28, 1864, troops commanded by Colonel John M. Chivington attacked a band of Plains Indians of the Cheyenne tribe under Chief Black Kettle while the Indian village was camped on Sand Creek in Colorado Territory. The camp was just outside a reservation established in 1861 by the treaty of Fort Wise. Two months earlier on September 28, 1864, Black Kettle and White Antelope had met with Colorado Governor John Evans and Colonel Chivington at Camp Weld near Denver to discuss peace. While no formal peace arrangement had been made, the Indians had turned in their arms at Fort Lyon, camping along Sand Creek.

When Black Kettle saw the soldiers charging his camp that morning, he raised an American flag plus a white flag in front of his tent to demonstrate his peaceful intent. The United States flag had been given to the Cheyenne by the government during treaty negotiations. White Antelope yelled in English, "Stop! Stop!" then, seeing that they did not stop their charge, stood with his arms folded as the troops galloped toward him, refusing to fight.

The soldiers killed about 150 Indian men, women and children, including White Antelope. It had been an orgy of killing. Many of the victims had been physically mutilated by the soldiers. According to Congressional testimony, White Antelope's scrotum had been cut off, later to be used as a tobacco pouch. Soldiers had cut out the vaginal area from slain Indian women. Clusters of women had been shot trying to surrender. Children had been shot and clubbed to death. Their village was burned and several hundred horses captured. (Hoig, 1981, p. 66) (United States Congress, 1865, p. 96)

On January 10, 1865, the House of Representatives directed the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate the attack, generating a report that charged Chivington of deliberately planning and executing "a foul and dastardly massacre." (Prucha, 1976, p. 12) The attack on Black Kettle's band was officially recognized by the United States government as "gross and wanton outrages" against the Indians. In the treaty with the Cheyenne and Arapaho of 1865 a number of chiefs, including Black Kettle, were individually granted parcels of land in an attempt to repudiate Chivington's actions. Article VI of the treaty read:

The United States being desirous to express its condemnation of, and, as far as may be, repudiate the gross and wanton outrages perpetrated against certain bands of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians by Colonel J.M. Chivington, in command of United States troops, on the twenty-night of November, A.D. 1864, at Sand Creek, in Colorado Territory, while the said Indians were at peace with the United States, and under its flag, whose protection they had by lawful authority been promised and induced to seek, and the government being desirous to make some suitable reparation for the injuries then done, will grant three hundred and twenty acres of land by patent to each of the following named chiefs of said bands, viz: Moke-ta-ve-to, or Black Kettle... (Fay, 1971, p. 19)

Almost four years later to the day on November 27, 1868, the 7th Regiment of United State Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, attacked Black Kettle's band again, but this time while the village was camped on the Washita River in Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma. The village was about 100 miles from Fort Cobb. Black Kettle and Little Robe had just returned from that fort the day before following a meeting with Colonel W.B. Hazen in an attempt to surrender. However, Hazen refused to accept their surrender and the chiefs were told to discuss peace directly with General Philip Sheridan, who, he informed the chiefs, was in the field at that time.

Immediately following the chiefs' return to their band, Sheridan's troops, under the command of Custer, charged the Cheyenne village at dawn, killing more than a hundred men, women and children of the tribe, including Chiefs Black Kettle and Little Rock. The village was burned and 800 of the Indian horses shot. (Hoig, 1976)

[Quote by Evan S. Connell, inserted by JS Dill:

"The fight in the village lasted only a few minutes, although several hours were required to finish off isolated warriors who hid in gullies and underbrush. Custer's tally listed 103 fighting men killed. In truth, only 11 could be so classified... The other 92 were squaws, children, old men. A New York Tribune story by an unidentified witness compared the devastated camp to a slaughter pen littered with the bodies of animal and Indians smeared with mud, lying one on top of another in holes and ditches. It sounds as though Black Kettle's [Washita] camp lay in the path of Ghengis Khan.

"Custer [then] turned to the herd of mules and ponies. Officers and scouts were allowed to keep any they wanted, after which fifty-three captive women and children were instructed through interpreter Romero - known inevitably as Romeo - to choose mounts so they would not have to walk sixty or seventy miles to the base camp. Custer next detailed Lt. Godfrey with four companies to kill the remaining animals because he did not want the Cheyennes to recover them and it would have been difficult or impossible to drive such a herd. Godfrey's executioners at first tried to cut their throats, but this turned out to be increasingly difficult because they [the horses] could not abide the odor of white men and struggled desperately whenever a soldier approached. After a while, says Godfrey, his men were getting tired, so he sent for reinforcements and the creatures were shot. Even with extra men it took some time because there were about eight hundred ponies and mules, and when the job was done the snowy Oklahoma field bloomed with dark flowers."

Son of the Morning Star, Evan S. Connell]

to begin chapter one please go to this URL:
http://www.dickshovel.com/was.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

from:
Treachery and Dishonor
http://www.turtlehill.org/shel1/bkmn.html

The following text is engraved on a large grave style stone which is at Black Kettle National Grasslands, the site of the Washita Massacre in western Oklahoma. The pictures above and below were photographed from the same stone. Red on red may be a little hard to read so go slow; it is written in blood.

-Shiloh

The Battle of the Washita, a major engagement in the Plains Indian War which established the western expansion of the United States was fought on this site. Col. George A. Custer's command of 500 troopers from the 7th cavalry, and a detachment of scouts including the famed Ben Clark and the Osage, Hardrope, destroyed Chief Black Kettle's Cheyenne village here on Nov. 27, 1868.

Black Kettle, peace leader of the Southern Cheyennes, had sought military assurance that he would not be attacked here. There were in his camp, however, young men who had taken part in war parties raiding in Kansas.

Custer's command left Camp Supply on November 23. His scouts located the Cheyenne village on the night of November 26, after a forced march through a bitterly cold blizzard and deep snow. Custer deployed his command to surround the village, and at dawn, with the regimental band playing "Gary Owen," swept in to attack the sleeping Cheyennes.

The number of Indians killed in the fighting is a point of controversy. Custer claimed 103 warriors. In the report to the secretary of the interior (1869 - 70) Cheyennes set the total at 13 men, 16 women, and 9 children, including Black Kettle and his wife.

Captain Louis Hamilton, grandson of Alexander Hamilton, was one of two officers killed. Major Joel Elliott and a squad of troopers in pursuit of fleeing Cheyennes were trapped on Sergeant Major Creek beyond a mile from the village and killed to the last man.

The Cheyenne lodges and winter supplies of food and buffalo robes were burned, while 875 of their horses were slaughtered. At nightfall, the cavalry returned toward Camp Supply, with 53 women and children captives.
 

Washita Massacre: Map http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/places/states/oklahoma/ok_washita.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
CHIEF BLACK KETTLE
http://home.earthlink.net/~dawise/bkettle.htm

Few biographical details are known about the Southern Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, but his repeated efforts to secure a peace with honor for his people, despite broken promises and attacks on his own life, speak of him as a great leader with an almost unique vision of the possiblity for coexistence between white society and the culture of the plains.

Black Kettle lived on the vast territory in western Kansas and eastern Colorado that had been guaranteed to the Cheyenne under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Within less than a decade, however, the 1859 Pikes Peak gold rush sparked an enormous population boom in Colorado, and this led to extensive white encroachments on Cheyenne land. Even the U.S.

Indian Commissioner admitted that "We have substantially taken possession of the country and deprived the Indians of their accustomed means of support."

Rather than evict white settlers, the government sought to resolve the situation by demanding that the Southern Cheyenne sign a new treaty ceding all their lands save the small Sand Creek reservation in southeastern Colorado. Black Kettle, fearing that overwhelming U.S. military power might result in an even less favorable settlement, agreed to the treaty in 1861 and did what he could to see that the Cheyenne obeyed its provisions.

As it turned out, however, the Sand Creek reservation could not sustain the Indians forced to live there. All but unfit for agriculture, the barren tract of land was little more than a breeding ground for epidemic diseases which soon swept through the Cheyenne encampments. By 1862 the nearest herd of buffalo was over two hundred miles away. Many Cheyennes, especially young men, began to leave the reservation to prey upon the livestock and goods of nearby settlers and passing wagon trains. One such raid in the spring of 1864 so angered white Coloradans that they dispatched their militia, which opened fire on the first band of Cheyenne they happened to meet. None of the Indians in this band had participated in the raid, however, and their leader was actually approaching the militia for a parlay when the shooting began.

This incident touched off an uncoordinated Indian uprising across the Great Plains, as Indian peoples from the Comanche in the South to the Lakota in the North took advantage of the army's involvement in the Civil War by striking back at those who had encroached upon their lands. Black Kettle, however, understood white military supremacy too well to support the cause of war. He spoke with the local military commander at Fort Weld in Colorado and believed he had secured a promise of safety in exchange for leading his band back to the Sand Creek reservation.

But Colonel John Chivington, leader of the Third Colorado Volunteers, had no intention of honoring such a promise. His troops had been unsuccessful in finding a Cheyenne band to fight, so when he learned that Black Kettle had returned to Sand Creek, he attacked the unsuspecting encampment at dawn on November 29, 1864. Some two hundred Cheyenne died in the ensuing massacre, many of them women and children, and after the slaughter, Chivington's men sexually mutilated and scalped many of the dead, later exhibiting their trophies to cheering crowds in Denver.

Black Kettle miraculously escaped harm at the Sand Creek Massacre, even when he returned to rescue his seriously injured wife. And perhaps more miraculously, he continued to counsel peace when the Cheyenne attempted to strike back with isolated raids on wagon trains and nearby ranches. By October 1865, he and other Indian leaders had arranged an uneasy truce on the plains, signing a new treaty that exchanged the Sand Creek reservation for reservations in southwestern Kansas but deprived the Cheyenne of access to most of their coveted Kansas hunting grounds.

Only a part of the Southern Cheyenne nation followed Black Kettle and the others to these new reservations. Some instead headed north to join the Northern Cheyenne in Lakota territory. Many simply ignored the treaty and continued to range over their ancestral lands. This latter group, consisting mainly of young warriors allied with a Cheyenne war chief named Roman Nose, angered the government by their refusal to obey a treaty they had not signed, and General William Tecumseh Sherman launched a campaign to force them onto their assigned lands. Roman Nose and his followers struck back furiously, and the resulting standoff halted all traffic across western Kansas for a time.

At this point, government negotiators sought to move the Cheyenne once again, this time onto two smaller reservations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) where they would receive annual provisions of food and supplies. Black Kettle was again among the chiefs who signed this treaty, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, but after his people had settled on their new reservation, they did not receive the provisions they had been promised, and by year's end, more and more of them were driven to join Roman Nose and his band.

In August 1868, Roman Nose led a series of raids on Kansas farms that provoked another full-scale military response. Under General Philip Sheridan, three columns of troops converged to launch a winter campaign against Cheyenne encampments, with the Seventh Cavalry commanded by George Armstrong Custer selected to take the lead. Setting out in a snowstorm, Custer followed the tracks of a small raiding party to a Cheyenne village on the Washita River, where he ordered an attack at dawn.

It was Black Kettle's village, well within the boundaries of the Cheyenne reservation and with a white flag flying above the chief's own tipi. Nonetheless, on November 27, 1868, nearly four years to the day after Sand Creek, Custer's troops charged, and this time Black Kettle could not escape: "Both the chief and his wife fell at the river bank riddled with bullets," one witness reported, "the soldiers rode right over Black Kettle and his wife and their horse as they lay dead on the ground, and their bodies were all splashed with mud by the charging soldiers." Custer later reported that an Osage guide took Black Kettle's scalp.

On the Washita, the Cheyenne's hopes of sustaining themselves as an independent people died as well; by 1869, they had been driven from the plains and confined to reservations.