Chapter 41

“There’s been another massacre. I don’t know if it will stir up the tribes or if it will finally break them.”

“What happened?”

“A Colorado Militia Colonel named John Chivington attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapahoe at Sand Creek, a place where the Indians had permission to camp, by the way. Most of the men were out hunting, but Chivington attacked even though Chief Black Kettle was flying the American flag over his lodge. Word is they wiped out somewhere between two hundred and four hundred non-combatants: women and children and old men. And Chivington’s a Methodist minister, for God’s sake.”

So Jeremiah Berglund wasn’t the only man of God who rode with killers. My stomach fell away as another such murderous raid leapt to mind. “Wiping out the Yanube at Hampton’s Homestead wasn’t the first disaster, and slaughtering Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children at Sand Creek won’t be the last.”