Colorado peak linked to 1864 atrocity has been renamed Mount Blue Sky

Apparently a large group of Indians - men, women, children, were told they could safely settle in a designated area in the vicinity (~30 miles) of Fort Lyon. Then one day this guy Colonel John Chivington, rolled up with his cavalry regiment.

Despite seeing the flags of "no hostility" and being approached by a known American liaison who had been living in the Indian camp (he basically told the liaison to fuck off), Chivington ordered his men to open fire on the Indians.

They killed somewhere between 150 and 750 Indians. Two-thirds of which turned out to be women and children. It was pretty much just cold blooded murder, done on what was promised to be safe land.

There was intense public outrage over the massacre, which led to congressional inquiry. Ultimately they found Chivington had acted "wrongly", but as far I as can tell, he was never charged with anything. He did resign from the military shortly afterwards though. It is also noted that he could never pursue his political aspirations, because the public had such a dim view of him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Blue_Sky

Is this an oversight?

https://www.14ers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=63361

"Why do we care so much about the opinions of people we conquered over a hundred years ago?"

First I will post a first-hand account of the massacre from a letter written by a courageous officer who held his men back and did not participate in the slaughter, Captain Silas Soule [0].

As noted in the post above, Capt. Soule was murdered a few months after giving testimony against Col Chivington and others involved in the massacre. His murderer(s) though known, were never punished.

One name you see mentioned in his letter is George Bent. George was the mixed race (Cheyenne mother/Anglo father) son of William Bent who along with his brother Charles and a French-Canadian trapper Ceran St. Vrain established Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe trail. [1] These men established a trading empire where anyone could procure supplies to outfit their expeditions whether they were Anglo, Mexican, or Native American. It was a frontier hub and the Bents were well-known all over the region. A little of George Bent's life is related in this link [2]. You can visit Bent's Fort today if you are in the area and it is worth the effort.

Black Kettle, [3] the Southern Cheyenne chief who thought that he had negotiated a plan for his people to live in peace, escaped this massacre at Sand Creek only to die in the massacre of Southern Cheyenne people in Oklahoma at the Battle of the Washita River, or the Washita Massacre [4], conducted by Lt. Col. George A. Custer's 7th US Cavalry in 1868.

This massacre of Black Kettle and his people followed by Custer's 1874 violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie which established the protected area of the Black Hills in perpetuity where no whites could settle. These acts against the tribes kept Custer in native eyes as a sworn enemy and in 1876 when he was cornered with his men of the 7th Cavalry at the Greasy Grass [5] (known by Anglos as Little Bighorn [6]) in Montana, allowed the assembled tribes (Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho) to take their revenge as they left no survivors from his troop. This was a fitting end for a narcissist who saw slaughtering Native Americans as an easy path to personal fame and fortune.

One of the most disgusting things about the Sand Creek Massacre is mentioned in Soule's letter, the fact that the soldiers under Chivington spent the afternoon of the day of the massacre and the following day mutilating the bodies of those they had massacred and they wore those body parts proudly on their hats and belts as souvenirs when they paraded triumphantly through the streets on their return. This account gives a little more detail taken from survivor and witness accounts of the massacre and the aftermath. [7] The three-part series of which it is the second part fills in a lot of details about this event and is worth reading for context.

Man's inhumanity to other men should not be commemorated by naming peaks after those who inspire or commit mass murder. Changing the name of this peak does not undo any of the terrible history but, in the same way that we do not name terrestrial features or streets after school shooters or other mass murderers, it may help put Evans and those inspired to violence by him back into the most fetid, rancid part of history's dustbin by erasing his name.

The location of the Sand Creek Massacre was finally found and can be visited today [8]. It is near the town of Eads, Colorado, a area where years ago I briefly worked with a wheat-whacking crew. Since the original site was lost to history, it took a significant collaborative effort between the National Park Service and tribal historians to locate the site so that boundaries could be defined for it. This was completed between 1998-2000 and the National Historic Site designated in 2007.[9]

[0] https://www.nps.gov/sand/learn/historyculture/the-life-of-si...

[1] https://www.nps.gov/beol/learn/historyculture/index.htm

[2] https://history.denverlibrary.org/colorado-biographies/georg...

[3] https://history.denverlibrary.org/colorado-biographies/black...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Washita_River]

[5] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2020/06/the-battle-of-greasy-grass...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn

[7] https://www.denverlibrary.org/blog/cultural-inclusivity-rese...

[8] https://www.nps.gov/sand/index.htm

[9] https://www.nps.gov/articles/searching-for-sand-creek.htm