book and we are very happy to have him here. [applause]

>> thank you very much for that kind introduction and thank you for all your patience in advance. i woke up this morning quite nervous, more usually -- more nervous than i usually am when i am going to be giving a talk. i noticed that a number of your teachers. is that right? thank you. i appreciate that. i will just look at kevin. kevin is a teacher, in addition to blogging. to being insed front of unruly crowds and you may have some experience with a particularly nerve-racking speaking engagement. where you're not quite sure if the subject matter

of your talk fits with the events at hand, and then you learn, i don't know, maybe that c-span is going to broadcast your event live because live television still happens, apparently. but if you have done any public speaking, you also know that moment when a sense of real calm settles over you. i know that pete does that because i have watched him speak beautifully in the last couple of days. i just want you to know that that is not happening to me right now. ,nd so, without further ado approximately 700 troops from the first and third colorado regiment attacked and arapahoe and cheyenne encampment nestled in a bend of sand creek in southeastern colorado territory.

who 900 native people believed they had recently made peace with wide authorities fled up the dry creek bed that morning. the onslaught left somewhere between 150 and may be as many as 225 of them dead. the overwhelming majority of them were women, children, or the elderly. the surviving troops disgraced themselves by combing the field for what one of them called trophies, scalps, fingers, and the genitalia of their victims. then burn to the village before returning to denver, colorado, where they greeted as heroes. in the weeks after, chin and his men displayed their plunder at a downtown theater. sand creeky of the

massacre national historic site ceremony andts memorial service. colorado's governor at the time, members of congress, leaders of four native american tribes, park politicians and service officials all shared their views of what the historic site might accomplish in the coming years. the speakers for the most part struck an optimistic goes. pose. said, honored victims, long deferred healing the tribes, and a blueprint for cooperation between native americans and federal authorities. they said a sacred site is situated in an appropriate place could heal a rift between cultures.

most of you know this, but memorials are always shaped by politics. reflectrary concerns that. this is especially true of national historic sites. federal officials have long viewed commemoration as a kind of patriotic all to me, as a way of conjuring unity from divisiveness by appealing to shared perceptions of the past. good as a getss for civil war content. i'm kidding. presidentexample, lincoln's first inaugural address. the president suggested that if americans would pay heed to open court the mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hard stone across this land, those courts would once again swell the force of the union."

sites around the united states, sentiments like president lincoln's, sentiments that have been an abiding faith of the nationalizing power of public memory are carved into stone. these monuments are supposed to serve the nation's interest by linking together its peoples and legitimating federal authority. out of common memories, the americans have and will continue to forge common identities. memories of sand creek, speakers at the opening ceremony suggested, would play this role, allowing visitors to the site to heal deep weapons. the justification for collective remembrance in the united states in recent years, from oklahoma city to the 9/11 memorial in lower manhattan, has often rested on a similar premise. the idea is that these memorials will comfort stricken

communities and a grieving nation. the sand creek site was going to be the first unit in the national park system to label an event in which federal troops participated in a massacre. visitors would supposedly be able to transcend their own prejudice. this was predicated on the idea that memorials allow people to heal. this vision diffused most of the speeches early in the ceremony. as some of you may know or already have a sense, sand creek is an unlikely source for these types of utopian sentiments. those ofnting voices, the native people especially, who had participated in a memorialization process, rejected what they saw as a hollow offer of painless reconciliation.

these people feared that the sand creek memorial might the day stalking horse for the federal government's long-standing effort to strip tribal peoples of their distinctive identities. rather than excepting the site as a symbol of federal power, they displayed the as anal is in amblin -- emblem of tribal persistence and determination. protested the memorial because the government was easternr on colorado's plains, especially when it insinuated itself in local land disputes, because of charges of political correctness hovering over what marilyn musgrave, pictured here, called "gratuitous revisionism, go and because the gnawing sense that -- revisionism," and

because of the gnawing sense that the word massacre in guided the u.s. army. the felt that a memorial questions the military's rectitude flirted with anti-americanism. i am going to suggest that the in 2007 echoed a century and a half of memory filled with thorny questions. first of all, who was culpable for the bloodshed at thorne -- at sand creek? the relationship between politics and violence on the american borderlands , and also on the process of continental expansion and the two wars, the plains wars and indian wars spawned by that process. when the sand creek site

sponsors try to answer these questions, they learned that the a historyemained front in an ongoing cultural war. elective memory could rip scabs off just as easily as heal them. within the confines of a pluralistic society like the united states, the case of sand creek proved unusually complicated because competing stories haunted the memorial process. the first of those stories along to a methodist minister named john shillington. chivington saw creek as ae at sand noble part of preserving the union. he used the gallons of blood to depict a masterstroke.

in 1864, with cheyenne and arapahoe corpses still pooling to his he bragged superiors that his men had attacked an indian village "bristling with 1000 warriors." he already at that time began a process of exaggerating the accomplishments of his troops. he went on to say that his men had killed several chiefs and hundreds of their followers. he would later increase that later to 500 and lad 700. he justified the attack by pointing to ask he said -- to deprivations he said the men had whipped savages and guilty of desecrating bodies. the remainder of his life, he said that sand creek was a glorious battle.

argument in large measure by pointing to the contextd in a civil war and pointing to the settlers remains his men had recovered there. he testified to federal investigators looking into sand creek that rebel emissaries were sent among the indians to incite them. thathe was saying was white coloradans were facing peril, that the union was facing peril from the indians his men had killed at sand creek. he went on to point to the montana, to cherokee choosing to fight with the consider seeing -- with the confederacy.

john 10 made his enemies not just of white settlers but of the union more broadly. the bloodshed became in triumph, not just in the indian wars, but also in the civil war. finally in 1883 at the end of his life, john shivington spoke publicly for the last time and addressed the colorado heritage organization at its annual banquet. he remained very popular in colorado until he died. he addressed this heritage organization and concluded his i stand by sand creek." sole named captain silas did not. before the massacre, he lived in bleeding, kansas where as an ally of john brown, he earned a reputation as an abolitionist jayhawker. he refused to commit the troops under him to the fight it's an creek and wrote to a friend of

his later. he insisted the slaughter at sand creek has sullied the honorable fight for the union and also the process of settling the west and that native and not white bodies had been desecrated their. a world ofed civilized canyons and savage whites and visited the dead. the bodies of men, women, and children, he said, have all been hacked apart. and he said that he would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there. when he testified to federal exam -- investigators look in 18 625, he recounted how the previous summer he arranged a parlay in denver colorado between a group of peace chiefs including black kettle and also governor john evans. and also governor john evans and colonel john shivington.

shivington said if they wanted peace, they must commit to the post. he was talking about fort lyon and colorado. they must subject themselves to military law. the cheyenne's and arapahoe's complied and he explained that black kettles people as a result of that had believed before sand creek that they were under the protection of federal troops. soule's story about sand creek took on added residence on april 20 3, 1860 five, soldier from the second colorado cavalry murdered him in the streets of denver. here with president lincoln having been assassinated a week earlier and soule's death spawned a number of conspiracy theories including the kernel shivington had paid a subordinate to have them silenced. for some observers, soule's members of sand creek became the

unimpeachable recollections of a martyr, good man who had been killed for stand by his principles and having the courage to speak the truth to power. a federal official looking into isd creek wrote " the barber in the slavery has come unaided assassination of mr. lincoln. the barbarism of centrica is commented in the assassination of captain soule,' this was a statement that foreshadowed some abolitionists decision to gravitate toward the indian reform movement in the years after the passage of the 13th amendment. three federal investigations eventually determined that sand creek had been a bad act and one of them call that a massacre. and othersgton refused to accept those findings. because sand creek are presented and unsettled chapter in the region's history, the fight over its memory continued for years after. hunt79, author helen jackson embraced the cause of

unity death -- of indian reform. letters to newspapers around the united states, she drew on silas soule's recollections of sand creek and use the massacre as a cudgel. creek hads at sand been peaceful and guarantee protection by federal authorities andshivington's troops had desecrated the dead. her charges rankled william byers, the editor of the rocky mountain news in 18 624. he had dismissed claims that sand creek had been a massacre. 1879, he ignored the ongoing indian wars. he replied to jackson that sand creek had pacified the plane strives -- tribes rather than spurring them to buy pretty said jackson was originally from new and couldd a woman not possibly understand the violence at sand creek. fetepossessed ef sensibilities out of place in a rough-and-tumble west.

helen hunt jackson gave as good as she got. she rebutted his sexism and regionalism with patriotic nationalism. the bloodshed after sand creek, she noted, occupied thousands of federal troops who otherwise might better have spent their time fighting confederates. been aeek had not just massacre, have also detracted from the union war effort. as jackson engaged in this print war with byers, she worked on the book about the nation's history of mistreating its indigenous peoples. it was published in 1881 and argue that only by overhauling federal indian policy could the united states be redeemed in the eyes of god. doc or and the custer massacre just over, some officials in the department of the interior were primed to embrace helen hunt jackson's calls for reform. even as the climate surrounding federal tribal relations was shifting, shivington's

perspective still had adherents in the west including whether -- including editors at another newspaper. infuriated by the sentiments, george bent, son of a borderlands trade tycoon named william bent, his cheyenne wife, weighed in on the history of sand creek. george bent shown here with magpie his wife was a victim and survivor of the ordeal. wounded at sand creek, he fought for years after to keep memories of the massacre alive. around the turn of the 20th century, frederick jackson turner speaking in chicago at the worlds fair fretted over the closing of the frontier. conservationists warned of the impending extinction of the

bison and the native peoples who depended on those animals for survival and readers consumed piles of novels about cowboys and indians. culture and popular public policy stood at the center of debate about the future of united states and george bent worried that native americans had no voice and these conversations. he began relating tribal history to george bird grinnell, a founder of professional anthropology and james mooney. george hyde, relatively obscure hysteria and -- historian. in 1906, george bent and george hyde published six articles in the magazine called " the frontier." they debunked john shivington's

story of sand creek. george bent technologist that he had fought with dickinson -- george bent acknowledged that he had fought with the cavalry, he mocked a man in colorado who talk about rebel plots to ally with the region indians. inveterate foes of texas and the arapahoe zen had no incentive to fight with the south. turning to the massacre, bent related details of shivington's betrayals of the peace chiefs with american and white flags flying over black kettles lodge in the colorado troops butchering. bent understood the civil war as a war of imperialism rather than liberation. hadoncluded that shivington wrought the thing he always claims to have prevented, conflict that threatened if only briefly expansion into the west.

he said their actions and somehow decide the service and an had dared to suggest a white man might be uncivilized. downing responded to george bent in the denver times labeling him a cutthroat and the thief, liar and a scoundrel but worst of all, a halfbreed. he turned his attention to embedding john shivington'sa stories into a civil war narrative that heritage groups were constructing around the united states at the time. it was working, native in denver with the unveiling of a memorial on the state capitol steps in 1909. the monument featured the placards days cataloguing battles and engagements in which coloradans had fought during the war and sand creek was among them. your lower right.

with veterans of the civil war nearing the end of their lives, campaigns took shape how future generations would remember the conflict. andives at the time document collections and published residential histories and cities unveiled monuments and memorials. scholars have argued in recent years that these efforts were often intended to inspire onlookers who embrace a reconciliation narrative of the war. janney is here, i apologize. the root causes, struggles over slavery and competing definitions of federal authority and citizenship and the right to shape an emerging american empire in the trans-mississippi west could and a deed should be set aside in service of an amicable reunion between north and south. in short, upholding patriotic orthodoxy, sometimes demented collective amnesia rather than remembrance.

stewards of the civil war memory in colorado realized that if their state was going to be included in this emerging civil war story, sand creek was going to have to be remembered as a battle or engagement. at the statue dedication, organizers stitched together national unity and pride and seamlessly integrated visions of empire and liberty. a military band balanced the emancipation of spirit of marching through georgia with the nostalgia of dixie. one speaker invoked the spirit of reconciliation suggesting " we are all americans today and we all glory in one flag and one country." couldeneral irving hale gain fame of the spanish-american war and later helped found the veterans of " for making freedom free for all americans." he ignored the impact on native americans.

the memorial sponsors had smoothed away the sand creek massacre's rough edges and cast john shivington's stories of the tragedy in bronze. less than half a century later, coloradans working against the political backdrop worked against course. they began segregating memories of sand creek from those of the civil war and associated the bloodshed exclusively with western expansion. august 6, 1950, the state unveiled two historic markers. the first of those was an ocher marble slab on a rise overlooking the massacre site. for the rest of my talk, alaska that you keep this image in the back of your mind when i refer to the monument overlooked and i will do so a number of additional times. this is what i'm talking about, the rise you see in the distance beyond the trees, that is the monument overlooked at the sand creek site. that marker echoed john shivington.

it read " sand creek battleground." obelisknd marker, and sponsored by the state historical society included the mixed message " sand creek battle or massacre." and labeled the bloodshed a regrettable tragedy of the conquest of the west. this is an interpretation born of the need to placate historical society donors and local people, some of whom did not relish being told at a massacre site in their backyard. was the chief historian and over so both dedication ceremonies and said some of called a battle while others say it is a massacre. he ducked the fight over naming. he described the violence as a tragic engagement, an outgrowth of manifest destiny of contact between the incompatible cultures of red and white men. eluded way, he

responsibility for centrica divorce the massacre from its civil war context. this made good sense of the start of the cold war. for more than a decade, federal authorities have drummed up support for internationalism by encouraging americans to recall the civil war as an emblem of the nation's commitment to ironclad freedom. an -- ank bathed in increasingly strange light did not ally with the civil war. by the 1960's, more changes the nation's culture -- culture and political climate had another reappraisal of sentry. late in the decade, group of tribal activists formed aim - the american indian movement and a year later and 96 to nine, some of that organization's members help to take over alcatraz island in san francisco bay, signaling the arrival of what was being called red power on the national stage. a week before the alcatraz

occupation, a journalist named seymour hersh had broken the story of atrocities committed by u.s. troops in the vietnamese hamlet of my lai. publisheden e. brown "bury my heart at wounded knee," civil rights movement was focusing on racial inequality and many white americans, part of the so-called new age, were fascinated by traditional indigenous cultures and americans had once again confronted the capacity of u.s. soldiers sometimes to slaughter innocent civilians. brown's book found an audience eager to learn more about native people and keen to embrace critiques of american militarism and racism. for much of his adult life, e. brown worked at the university of illinois library. at night he wrote books. can you imagine someone more historic than a historian or a librarian? -- and a librarian? [laughter]

he wrote books including "bury my heart at wounded knee." of his authorial voice, brown said " i'm a very old indian and i'm her numbering the past." those memories include sand creek for which he adopted a narrative arc and interpretive frame, focusing on the whites and american flags flying over black nettles village, on chief white antelope falling in a hell of bullets while singing his death song and on shivington's men slicing genitalia from their victims. professional historians agreed -- a greeted the publication of skepticism that bordered on contempt. scholarlyad a few balance and had not interrogated his native sources and he distorted evidence and made errors of fact. reviewers outside the academy heaped praise on brown.

"the new york times" described the book is both impossible to read and impossible to put down. the public agreed. the book and spent more than a year on the new york times bestseller list and has since sold more than 5 million copies. that is even better than pete's books have done, i think. [laughter] it also had a huge impact on readers including a rising generation of scholars who self identified as new western historians. said we all went to bed thinking about the indian wars and indians one way and woke up the next morning after that book was published and whenever thought the same way again. the impact can still be felt in 1990 eight when congress created the sand creek massacre national the stork site. even then, after nearly a century and a half of struggles over the massacres memory, the park service learned the question remained unanswered.

service beganark planning for this site and it discovered there was a new question that caught off guard. where precisely had sentry taken place? it turned out in 1998, the sand creek had to be found. the search that ensued became disagreementsen over how to interpret the historical record divided the people looking for the site. native american descendents of sand creek victims typically based their understanding of the episodes history and geography of what they described as traditional tribal methods also one oral history and written records including stories and maps produced by george bent around the turn of the 20th century. for decades, the sand creek descendents had used george benson maps and writings as a guide. they had made pilgrimages to a spot near the monument

overlooked or they perform sacred ceremonies and honored their arrogant -- their ancestors. i don't should go should leave the podium but if you look at the bend you see here in this sly, the monument overlooked is just below the creek. i will give you a better sense of this in a moment. the park service by contrast tried to solve the mystery of the killing fields location by looking at other materials especially records produced by troops who had fought at sand creek and then by consulting a map made by a soldier named who visited the site after the massacre with william tecumseh sherman in 1869. using that map, officials believed they pinpointed black kettles village located less than a mile upstream from the monument overlooked. you can see on the map on the lower center, it says,

shivington's massacre. they looked at this and they thought they had found the exact location of black kettles village which was located less than a mile upstream from the monument overlooked. the park service then did an archaeological investigation and unearthed a huge band of artifacts which seems to confirm the hypothesis. i thinkook at this map, it says existing marker -- that is the monument overlooked -- you can see the few dots nestled in that band and if you go up you canek3/5 of a mile, see a number of dots indicating the plume of artifacts that the park service unearthed. many of the descendents were outraged by these discoveries. they were especially outraged because the nps was relying on sources furnished by the

perpetrators rather than the victims. they toured -- they pointed back to george bent's map assuring that he had clearly placed black kettles village inside a croak of sand creek. if you look at number two here, and then if you look at this close-up of the key, you can see black kettles cap in it places the camp clearly inside this crook of the creek. they then produce their own map of the massacre site including lack handles village with a located precisely where they believed george bent had placed it a century earlier. here you can see two different maps, one is the national park service map and the other is a the northernby cheyenne, the southern cheyenne, and the southern arapahoe descendents of sand creek victims. the park service was caught off guard by this dispute over competing cartography. eventually, they floated an elegant compromise. haved a site that

boundaries that are capacious enough to encompass all of the different interpretations of exactly where sentry cap and. map, then look at this monument overlooking is included within the park as is that site further upstream or their effects were found. after a number of additional twists and turns including a casino corporation stepping in to broker a deal that secure the property for the memorial, the park service was ready to cut the ribbon on the sand creek site, all of which leads back to april 28, 2007, when the first unit of the national park system to label american soldiers as perpetrators rather than heroes are victims opened its doors. although the site name answer the question of what sand creek would be called, how to interpret the massacre remained unresolved. ironically as the united states celebrates the civil war sesquicentennial, the sand creek site name challenges visitors

not because the park service asks them a new whether the bloodshed was a battle or a massacre but because that question seems to have been answered by the park's name. the stories americans tell themselves about the civil war suggests president lincoln died so that the united states might live. redeemed for having liberated south -- slaves -- the the slaves of the south, the nation was reborn to resurrection story that fits neatly within christian narratives. in this way, we transfigure the civil war's history of violence in one of virtue and its tragedies into triumphs. sand creek depicted as a massacre at the historic site bucks the reconciliation currents that run through most national historic sites. we typically favor neat depictions of our history is marked by steady progress, punctuated by the occasional righteous war, vision that rationalizes and often chaotic

and fractured past. the sand creek site visitors that as much as they might wish that history had proceeded in a regimental fashion, the past cannot be so easily thrilled to fall into line. the massacre story indicts characters usually cast as heroes in the american imagination, citizen soldiers come overland pioneers, union officials, and reflects a darker vision of the civil war's causes and consequences. expansion into the american west touched off a war that destroyed save hillary -- that destroyed slavery but brought about wars with the plains tribes. service is still grappling with how to interpret sand creek, and irredeemable tragedy that cast doubt on the enduring notion that united states enjoys a special destiny as an exceptional nation favored by god. the question of whether visitors to the san creekside are ready

to broach these very difficult topics, to reassess their homeland character and perhaps sj remains unanswered. in the end, the story of memorializing sand creek suggests that history and memory are both malleable if not always bidabla and the people of the notices are so various that they should not be able to share a single tale of a common past. sometimes our stories couple met one another and sometimes they clash and sometimes they intersect and sometimes they diverge. depending on new tells a, the story of centric suggests the civil war more broadly midwifed a new birth of freedom but also that it delivers the indian wars and was a moment of national redemption for some but of dispossession and subjugation for others. it was said the civil war was a war of liberation and also of empire. the park service and tribal defendants will never concur on every element of sand creek's interpretation but they may agree that the historic site

should challenge visitors to grapple with completing narratives of u.s. history. --o struggle how the shot how the past is shelter with ironies. will not the massacre longer be misplaced in the landscape of national memory. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] i can just go ahead -- 1971,, right around hollywood made a movie about this called "soldier blue." showedcall, the movie that the native americans did not have any weapons. so it wasn't really a battle.

i'm under the impression that it was a massacre and the dozen atrocious things and one of the soldiers approached the kernel and said to them you need to stop doing this and not allow this to happen when they were doing these things to the bodies and everything. the colonel said to the soldier, you are insane. the guy that was trying to stop this atrocity was: same. anyway -- was called insane. anyway, the thing i was wondering about is how many women were killed, how may children were killed, and how many men were killed? i was under the impression that there weren't very many men there in the first place. thank you. , first of all "soldier blue" is part of this cultural constellation in the early a70's "little big man,"

number of other texts that come out, all of which are very much a byproduct of critiques of the war in vietnam. it allows for reappraisal of the indian wars. i think of as being very much of a piece with dee brown's work. as to how many women and children were killed there, we don't have exact numbers. be very clear -- is not to the best of my ability. i should stop and say that i am by no means the leading authority on the massacre itself. i read about the way this event was remembered so i draw on other people when i talk about the massacre. the historians of the massacre itself think somewhere between 150-as many as 225 or 250 native

americans were killed at sand creek. of those, something like 90% probably were women and children. a couple of reasons for that on the most important is that most of the men in black kettle scamp -- black chattels camp were out hunting. cap are outtle's hunting. they thought they were part of a peace camp in the camp is being protected by federal soldiers. they thought they'd nothing to fear so warriors were away at the time of the attack. they're just weren't very many which accounts for why so few of them were killed. that that said, one other point very quickly, the native people there were armed. they were not very well armed.

violent encounter. the military lost about two dozen of its men. it was a pretty grim scene. about theou just talk ouachital men -- the men. if you look at how the battle was fought, it was very similar. and you could even see -- say that custer's approach to the talk --k -- the watch and even too little bighorn.

it has been labeled a battlefield. the trouble defendant to leave it, too, was a masters -- a massacre site. mixedstory is far more than it is about san creek. the overwhelming majority of historians now call san creek a massacre. there are some that still insist it is -- it was a battle. that is not true of watch talk --ouachita. his reputation suffered very badly within the cheyenne community, or communities, andly, because of san creek he remained a piece kicker -- a peacemaker, but he was killed at the ouachita. and that is why it is likely to

be reinterpreted a massacre site. but for now, at least, that is not happening. how did the lincoln ministration -- administration labeled the policies with the sand creek massacre? two, will this affect the interpreting of other tragedies that occurred in the united states? >> those are really good question, but they are not really quick. [laughter] >> sorry. how indianirst one, polity -- federal indian policy figure into san creek. i am writing a book about that right now. that is a really obnoxious

history and answer -- you have to read the next book. which probably will not come out for another 10 years because i'm very slow. but i will give you the very short answer and just say that i think the civil war, as i indicated in the talk, was both -- or i should say became both a war of liberation, but emerged from the get-go as a war of empire. the 1860 election, which tends to be remembered popularly, and also to some extent by historians, as an election that was fought over the fate of slavery was an election that was fought over the fate of slavery in the american west. the question was whether or not slavery would move into territory that had been conquered in the united states-mexican war. -- i'm going to speak in the past tense. two happened is there are competing visions for how to settle the west. the 1860 election was, in

addition to a referendum on the fate of slavery, it was also a referendum on the -- on american empire. nobody thought -- i should not say nobody. very few people in the electorate in 1860 believe that the united states should not move into the west. the question was how it was going to do it. the republican party wins the 1860 election, so you have a centralized division of american empire -- centralized vision of american empire, which will be driven by the pacific railroad act, the homestead act, the land and college act, all of which are passed by the second in 1862. the second congress of 1862? i'm looking like a real historian now. all of these emerge out of the move into the west, because that will collide with the people who already live there. your second question about what

sand creek means for the park service interpreting, memorializing additional massacres, honestly, i don't know. you if you read the book -- again, totally obnoxious answer and i apologize. you should buy like, eight copies, though. [laughter] but if you read the book, you will discover that the park service went into the effort to memorialize sand creek with the extraordinarily high hopes that this would be a way to burnish the multicultural credentials, to reach out to native american trinity, and to insert more interpretive american -- native american sites. but the process was really difficult and a number of people in the end ended up feeling like they made a lot more enemies than friends. i don't know what will come of it. i really do not. >> dennis, hagerstown maryland.

you mentioned the discrepancy for where the village was located. is there any archaeological excavation done at the location where the descendents of the victims claim it was that might prove their point cap the -- their point? >> yes, archaeological dig have happened up and down the creek, and in other areas as well. spotswere 45 different where the parks -- four or five different spots where the parks service doug, one of them right in the crook of the band. dug, re the parks service one of them right in the crook of the bend. given for whyn there were no artifacts thatvered there was through the years, collectors had come through that location,

which people in that county in southeastern colorado understood to be the proper sand creek site, also called the traditional site, and they had picked that cycling over the course of decades -- that site clean over the course of decades. he pointed to a number of dust bowl years in the 1950's when most of the topsoil blew away and his father or grandfather, i forget right now, had owned the property and literally hundreds hadrtifacts coming he says, been exposed, and people came and collected them by the wagonload. that was his explanation. and the trouble defendant believe that was accurate for why there were so few artifacts still found in that location. but the dig came up with almost nothing in that precise spot. i will not reveal to you the end of the book, because it's got kind of a surprise ending, but

there ends up being an explanation for why all of these theories may be true. but it is a little convoluted for right now. is kind of a memory question. when you talked about the soldiers conduct, how much of that actually makes a difference with how we remember a battle versus -- remember it as a battle versus a massacre? >> that is a really good question, and not as easy an answer as i thought, so i'm not going to be glib faux stop -- to be glib. the remains of the indians and now look backs on san creek and say it was a massacre because it was a surprise attack, and the people were not well armed and believed

they were at peace with the aggressing party. from bob's perspective, sand creek was a massacre, and it does not happen -- have anything to do with whether or not ton'sing to and -- shiving men slaughtered. we in terms of the way remember this event, i think it is critical that we understand shipping to and --shivington's troops to have committed these acts, to have mutilated the corpses, especially women and children. you will note that my talk was quite careful to stay away from some of these descriptions, but they are extraordinarily graphic, a pregnant woman eviscerated -- and so, those play a very important

role in understanding this as a massacre, because they speak to the motivations of the soldiers there, and they suggest a kind whichrst for vengeance might lead to a massacre. >> richard from alexandria, virginia. men not shivington and his present at glorietta pass? >> he was present there and that is where he gained his arbitration. he was promoted as a result of his very likely honorable service at glorietta pass. historians now look back and wonder whether or not shivington may have inflated his importance at glorietta pass. but in the wake of glorietta pass, he was promoted, but then his career stalled. he very much wanted to be a united states senator and get

into politics. one of the excavations for why something like stand creek might and creekned -- s might happen is that shivington might've been trying to use the civil war as mobility for his career, and this was a latch did effort -- a last-ditch effort on his part to recapitulate glorietta pass. >> and from oxford, ohio, an older graduate student in anthropology. servicea national park application, perhaps, of resources question. you mentioned the early comanche through texas, and byis well documented separate historians that the same depredations were committed on the comanche by the park service. -- by the rangers.

does the park service ever intend to document that kind of activity on the native americans, and conversely turn that into the same kind of national park? >> i'm sort of back to the same place i was earlier, where i can't eat exactly to what the park service is going to do. >> do you think they would ever have the political courage to do that? >> [laughs] i would say at the sand creek site, there was a fair amount of documentation of what is known as the hunt eight murders. this is a family that was slaughtered on the plains east of denver very likely by arapaho's, though people do not know for certain, in the summer of 1864. these were native people who were not part of black kettle's band and they were not part of stand creek. but white authorities in the used theserritories

murders as a pretext for drumming up some of the outrage that led to stand creek -- sand creek. the park service does document what happened to them. the family was butchered and their corpses were brought to denver where they were displayed. as tothe broader question whether or not there will be a national memorial or an historic site devoted specifically to the victims of native americans, i don't know the answer to that. i really don't. i would say broadly speaking, again, that we have a number of monuments and memorials throughout the american west to white settlers, but not specifically to these sorts of atrocities. this is the last question. about how we categorize historical events. shivington's comments could be

safely called self-serving. that aside, can we really consider this to be an event of the american civil war? it may have happened during the years of the civil war, but was it that connected to the civil war? >> yes. [laughter] >> and how so? [applause] again, as i mentioned earlier , in my view, the civil war is both a war of empire and a war that becomes a war of liberation over time. that war of empire plays itself out in colorado territory and in in arans-mississippi west number of different engagements, battles, massacres with other , becauseerican groups

the united states is going to move into the west. is one of the cornerstones of the republican party's vision for the american people, that the federal government will sponsor the move into the west. again, with the pacific railroad act, the homestead act, the land act and others, department of agriculture, on and on. all of these are part of the red states civil war. all these pieces of legislation were passed, at least in significant measure, because senators absented themselves from the united states congress. and again, because american people voted republicans into office in 1860. creek part of the civil war? it is an outgrowth of the civil war. it is an outgrowth of the same mechanisms and processes that -- that burst --birthed the civil war, but also features civil war

soldiers. united states soldiers on the payroll, who are mustered into the union army. again, i wasn't being entirely glib when i said "yes, i think t is." is it as central a part of the civil war story as some of the events that others will be talking about here? no, i don't think it is. i don't want to overstate my claim. that is not the kind of historian that i am. but i do think it is a very important story and it's worth telling. thank you all again very much. [applause]