The Attack

A barrage of gunfire struck the Cheyenne and Arapaho as soldiers saw people in the village moving away slowly in a dazed and confused manner. Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, Volunteers pursued the Indians up Sand Creek and across the nearby plains and bluffs, and the fighting grew chaotic as troops advanced on both sides of the creek. A member of the 3rd Colorado recalled that after a short dash his group halted and dismounted, and events then came so rapidly that no one could look about much to see what the other companies did. The people’s bloody retreat northward continued for miles as women and children stopped only long enough to dig pits along the stream’s dry banks and channel. White Horse, the mother of Chief Kias, was shot in the calf, first rushed toward the flag, then fled when soldiers began firing, fell when the bullet struck her leg, rose again, and made her way toward Sand Creek, passing many dead people, from babies upward, a woman carrying a child, and Cheyennes digging trenches, one of which saved her. By evening, Volunteers returned to the village, where some lodges were used to doctor the wounded while buffalo robes and other abandoned possessions were taken for bedding and souvenirs, and later the village was burned and its contents destroyed. A Cheyenne eyewitness said that about 53 men and 110 women and children were killed, 163 in all, and that many men, women, and children were wounded. Accounts also say that two Cheyenne women with their children and one Arapaho woman with her grandson were taken prisoner, along with Measure Woman with her child, Mrs. White Frog, White Girl with her son White Eyes, an old Arapaho woman, and Tom White Shirt taken from a hole near the village. George Bent, son of Owl Woman, a Cheyenne, and frontiersman William Bent, was in the Cheyenne village at Sand Creek with his younger brother Charles, later wrote hundreds of letters on Southern Cheyenne history, and died at Colony, Oklahoma, in 1918; in the photograph with him is his wife Mapgie, whose father Cut Lip Bear was killed at Sand Creek, whose mother was called Nis-ti-nah, and who died on May 10, 1886.

Brandon, Colorado · United States