Posted on 10/25/2023 12:12:14 PM PDT by Red Badger
DENVER — In a small, dimly lit room on the fourth floor of the History Colorado Center downtown, visitors can get a sense of what it’s like to stand at a spot on the high plains where a massacre helped spark the Indian Wars nearly 160 years ago. In the room, part of a new exhibit about the Sand Creek Massacre, a video panorama of the site in twilight is projected onto the walls and accompanied by the sound of birdsong. It is a peaceful, contemplative spot.
Yet it is also the same field where volunteer cavalrymen – emboldened by a proclamation from territorial Gov. John Evans authorizing citizens to kill “hostile Indians” – took eight hours to slaughter more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864. Many of the victims were women, children or elderly, and all were gathered peacefully.
For Native Americans in Colorado, the massacre isn’t just a museum exhibit. An hour-and-a-half drive away from the museum – and roughly 9,000 feet above it – stands Mount Evans, a popular tourist destination and towering testament to a key figure behind the massacre.
“I feel that the Evans name needs to be out of our Denver metro language,” says MorningStar Jones, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and an activist in a group pushing to rename the peak. “We cannot erase the history here, but we can erase the name. It can be replaced with a name that brings healing.”
Now, yearslong efforts to rename Mount Evans are tantalizingly close to fruition. On Sept. 15, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names is expected to make a final decision about the peak’s new name, ending a chapter that has caused a reckoning with a violent past often whitewashed in history books.
“It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come,” says Rhyia JoyHeart, who is of Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho ancestry and who co-founded a group that uses dance and education to increase cultural awareness about Native Americans. “We don’t want to honor somebody who instigated what was a genocide of Indigenous people.”
Sam Bock, the lead developer of the new Sand Creek Massacre exhibit that opened in the history center late last year, says the renaming discussion shows how past events continue to impact Native Americans in the present. “When talking about Sand Creek, this is not just an event in history for the descendants,” he says. “This is family history for them. This is lasting generational trauma.”
The fact that the history of the massacre isn’t widely taught in Colorado classrooms reinforces that trauma, says Bock, who since 2020 has been getting input from the tribes involved to better represent their viewpoints.
“I remember, while going to school, I was never taught about my historic ties to this area,” says Sarah Ortegon Highwalking, a local member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe with Northern Arapaho ancestry. “The history of the Sand Creek Massacre was glossed over and I wanted to shed light on the maltreatment our Indigenous people were subject to, within this very state.”
To do that, she painted a mural in Denver’s trendy River North Art District showing the mountain with “Evans” crossed out and replaced with the words “Blue Sky,” a reference to one of the names that will be voted on this week.
The push to rename Mount Evans draws roots from the Native self-determination movement that began in the 1960s, says Matthew Makley, history professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, but the effort has gained steam in recent years. In 2020, protesters toppled a statue outside the Capitol building in Denver that listed the Sand Creek Massacre as a “battle,” a word that has rankled tribes, much like the long-closed original massacre exhibit at the museum that explained white-Native clashes as a “collision of cultures.”
In Clear Creek County, where Mount Evans is located, the Board of Commissioners last year voted to support changing the name to Mount Blue Sky, reflecting an Arapaho name for themselves – the Blue Sky People – and an annual Cheyenne ceremony. The county referred the recommendation to a state renaming board, and Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, endorsed that recommendation in a late February letter to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the body housed in the U.S. Interior Department responsible for standardizing geographic names throughout the federal government.
But in March, the board deferred a vote on the name change after the Montana-based Northern Cheyenne tribe requested a consultation on the new name.
Northern Cheyenne tribal administrator William Walks Along says the tribe’s cultural commission doesn’t want the words “Blue Sky” depicted in such a public way because it would water down secret parts of a sacred ceremony. They would rather the name be changed to Mount Cheyenne-Arapaho.
They will just latch on to the next thing and bitch about it until it’s changed..............
And, Indians should not be called upon to comment on slaver/reparation issues, because they owned slaves.
Leftist history is everyone against the Caucasians.
Mount Horseless Carriage To-the-Top?
I guess St Paul, Minn will be up next too.
Squaw has always been a derogatory term when used by the whites.
I am not a “word police” kind of person, but change the name to “Bloody Whore Mountain” and see how that flies.
Those clowns in Colorado would deserve it. These are the same maggots who want to tear down Mount Rushmore.
I’ve been to the summit of Mt. Evans. Getting up and down is quite the drive, and not for the inexperienced or the feint of heart. Had to stop at the bottom to let my brakes cool off. The rangers measure your brake temp with an infrared thermometer when you get to the bottom.
There are half-tame mountain goats up there that just hang around and will almost but not quite let you get close enough to touch them. Could be because a couple of the nanny goats had kids running around at the time.
The view is awe-inspiring. It was a very clear day when we were up there and we could see for many miles. It makes you feel like the king of the world, while at the same time humbling you by showing how small you are compared to the majesty of earth.
The left has to ruin everything, so I would suggest that the new name for Mt Evans should be Mount(ain) Goat, in honor of the critters that live up there.
Bullcrap. They act like Sand Creek just fell out of the sky one day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungate_massacre#External_links
These same murderers wiped out a family of settlers, including a young mother and her two daughters. They were murdering people coming west in wagons. And they were doing it during the Civil War when they thought they could get away with it.
Same with the Santee Sioux uprising.
It gets old constantly hearing about Sand Creek with zero context that it was the result of some young Arapaho “warriors” doing things that were fun to them but a true horror to innocent people alone in a cabin or wagon.
Yes those words do apply to settlers as well.
“On June 11, Nathan rode out with a hired hand, Mr. Miller, looking for stray heads of cattle. Several miles from the ranch, they saw smoke coming from the area of Hungate’s cabin and suspected an attack by American Indians. Miller said that he was riding for Denver and advised Hungate that his family was likely dead and if he went back to the cabin he would be killed, too. Hungate rode back to find that his cabin was on fire and his family had been killed and badly mutilated. He was captured and was similarly killed. The couple was in their twenties, Laura was 2 1⁄2 years of age, and Florence was a 6 month-old infant.
Miller made it to Denver and gave news of the attack to Van Wormer, who rode to the ranch to find the Hungate family dead. Nathan Hungate’s body was badly mutilated with 80 bullets, and was found a distance from the house. The bodies of Ellen and the two girls were found mutilated, bound together, and thrown into a shallow well. All of the family’s stock had been taken and the buildings were burned down.”
Plains Indians are like Palestinians. They could visit the most evil butchery, rape and terror on women, children, or a man tending a crop... but oh the sackcloth and ashes when anyone dares strike back hard.
The fact is, wars are won by breaking the hearts of the enemy so they no longer want to fight.
As an edit to my previous post a few minutes ago:
I just decided to google map Mt Evans to see if any of the goats showed up in the satellite image of the summit. They didn’t, but it looked like it must have been closed when the image was taken, because the place was deserted.
But, Google has the name of the mountain already shown as “Mt Blue Sky”. But the road leading up to it still shows as “Mt Evans Road (Closed Winters)”.
Mt. Blue Sky. Pathetic.
Getting to the top of Mt. Evans was a white knuckle drive for me, who’s from flatter parts. There is no guardrail that I recall. And if people behind you get impatient with your slower driving, I invite them to use the passing lane (pure open sky). At the summit, the view is, of course, spectacular. Prairie falcons and other raptors skim the skies. Driving down was a bit of a relief, but it was quite a wonderful experience. I will not let libtards with their asinine word games ruin my memory of an extraordinary experience.
How about “Mt. Don’t Screw With White Man” to make sure that the lesson is remembered.
Doesn’t matter what the name is.
In a hundred years it will be something else..........
If you want a real expose of the Sand Creek Massacre you might look at the old rare book Massacred of the mountains by Dunn Jr. There were two tribal members who had been members of the Confederate army and were now believed to be agents to keep them fighting the next.
Not long before, the Osages wiped out a band of Confederate soldiers heading for Colorado.
Upon their persons were found instructions to.....
1. Meet with Southern sympathizers and encourage them to join the Confederate.
2. Stir up the plains tribes and get them to attacking settlers in the Colorado-Kansas area.
This band were all killed by Pro-Union Osages. How many other bands of Confederates actually got through with the same instructions.
The tribes that made or were negotiating treaties with the Confederacy.
Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Comanches, Wachitas, Kiowas, Pottawattamies, Chickasaws, Osages,
Seminoles, Senecas, Shawnees, Quawpaws.
The South also had Indian agents operating all throughout the High Plains and mountain region stirring up other tribes such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Navajo and Apaches to make war on the Union at that time.
Their traditional enemies, Pawnee, Kaw, Osage (well, most of them) remained loyal to the Union.
The pro-Union Osages wiped out a party of Confederate officers heading for Colorado. On them were found instructions to...
#1, encourage southerners in Colorado to join the Confederate army.....and
#2, ENCOURAGE THE INDIAN TRIBES TO ATTACK SETTLERS IN THE KANSAS-COLORADO AREA.
That party was wiped out. Who knows how many other Confederate parties made it through with the same instructions.
“There is little doubt that the recent outbreak in the Northwest (Minnesota Uprising) has resulted from the efforts of secession agents operating through Canadian Indians and fur-traders.”—Mr Giddings, US Counsul-general in Canada
He was a Union officer in the Civil War and helped stop the Confederate advance into New Mexico.
After the tribes began to raid ranches and farms he believed they had been influenced by Confederate agents and considered the tribes as RED REBELS as the entire plains from Canada to Mexico were on the warpath.
It was believed the tribe wanted to make peace in the winter, live on Union subsides then in the spring when the grass got tall enough to support a war pony they would start the killing.
He found fresh white men’s scalps and a blanket fringed with the hair of white women in the village.
The fight was so so fierce the Northern tribes and Comanches in Texas that the White Man was now fighting their wars exactly the same way the tribes had always fought. No prisoners
Chivington never backed down from what he did. At an Old Timer’s convention years later he was a guest speaker.
He told of the massacres of families, scalps he found in the camp and ended with the words “I STAND BY SAND CREEK!”
The audience went wild with applause.
Sometimes I think the Israelies should do the same, Kill the all. Nits make lice.”
Did he do less than Sherman’s March to the sea or other cities destroyed by Union artillery?
“The Indians brought this upon themselves the same as the Palestianians have with their actions. Liberals need to STOP trying to rewrite history.”
Hell it’s probably no coincidence that a story such as this with a lot of Christian Honky violence in it appears so soon after Hamas’s outrages.
“There is little doubt that the recent outbreak in the Northwest (Minnesota Uprising) has resulted from the efforts of secession agents operating through Canadian Indians and fur-traders.”—Mr Giddings, US Counsul-general in Canada
You can’t seriously compare Chivington with Sherman. Sand Creek was butchery, a slaughter of a Southern Cheyene camp, most of whose fighting men were off causing mischief; Serman’s march into Georgia was a sound military move, and did not involve the barbarism and slaughter of Sand Creek. Hell, Black Kettle thought his camp was under the protection of the US government, pursuant to the 1861 treaty (granted, some of his camp disavowed that treaty); and the camp prominently displayed the American flag. So, when Chivington attacked, Black Kettle thought it was a mistake.
I got just the list for you! Indian atrocities before the White Man showed up...
I agree with you. Indian atrocities were rarely mentioned as it might upset the Eastern family at dinner.
How the tribes treated each other before the white Man arrived....
http://wkfl.asn.au/bk/crow_creek_history.htm
https://ournativeamericans.blogspot.com/2018/07/1300s-crow-creek-massacre-in-south.html
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/massacre-sacred-ridge
https://bonesdontlie.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/basketmaker-ii-cave-7-massacre-or-cemetery/
https://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/1991/12/01/scalping-victim/
https://prezi.com/z9ioohxrdgat/anasazi-cannibalism/?fallback=1
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39268873
https://www.historynet.com/when-the-sioux-ambushed-pawnee-hunters-at-massacre-canyon/
http://www.dickshovel.com/scalp.html
https://lostworlds.org/ancient-massacre-discovered-in-new-mexico-was-it-genocide/
https://www.archaeology.org/news/2269-140630-colorado-torture-evidence
https://lostworlds.org/ancient-massacre-discovered-in-new-mexico-was-it-genocide/
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/sacrifice-victims-cahokia-were-locals-not-foreign-captives-003685
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1593823
https://archive.archaeology.org/9709/newsbriefs/anasazi.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexico-skulls-not-crime-scene-human-sacrifice-ad-900/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexican-site-reveals-brutal-sacrifice-of-spanish-conquistadors/
https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=SL002
http://blogoklahoma.us/place/117/kiowa/cutthroat-gap-massacre
https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=CU012
https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=CL003
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