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Battle At Sand Creek: The Military Perspective
Michno, Gregory F.
329 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 2004
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September 9, 2023
Although I have poked at some of his books trying to research a particular incident, this is the first book by Gregory Michno I’ve read through. I enjoyed it. He does not fall into the Indian good guys/whites bad guys trap; he treats historic people as quirky and sometimes inexplicable individuals instead of types; and, most important of all, he doesn’t scold Native Americans for “siding with the whites” against their ancient enemies as if this is a “betrayal of their brethren” – or just plain stupid. Which is to say, Michno does not apply twentieth (or twenty-first) century sensibilities to people living in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Obviously Michno himself understands that the Plains Indian way of life was doomed as soon as the Federal government decided to eliminate it, but he also recognizes that the people of that time and place didn’t see it that way. Until about the mid-eighteen-sixties the white settlers in the area (and the Pawnee, according to Mark van der Logt’s War Party in Blue) saw the Federal government as being far more interested in trying to bribe the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux into good behavior than it was in punishing them for killing and stealing. The whites were particularly outraged over the fact that the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux right regularly stole horses once it got warm and might keep at it until it started cooling down – stealing a horse was a hanging offense when a white man did it -- and that the Indians were then “rewarded” for coming to the military to “make peace” in the fall so as to get goods that would tide them over the winter, only to go right back to their raiding once it warmed up again.
The Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux, meanwhile, thought they had a good deal going, and few of them understood that there were great armies in the east that could flatten them. Going on the evidence, Black Kettle looks to me to have been for peace less because he was an inherently peaceful man, and more because he had been out east and was intelligent enough to get a deeper understanding of what the Cheyenne would be up against, should the federal government decide to get serious about making them behave by white standards. The fact that the federal government – or, more precisely, those the government trusted to do its will – was rife with corruption and often reneged on promises of food and goods didn’t help Black Kettle’s position any.
All of which I knew before I picked up this book. When I was waffling on kicking out the cash for Battle at Sand Creek, I was a bit unnerved to read Tom Bensing’s comment that, “when the sources he cites are cross-referenced, [Michno] repeatedly mis-quotes, twists, and even, in at least one case, completely mis-identifies the person in a source.” I had just been looking something up in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and ran across the sentence, “The four captives, all children, appeared to be unharmed; in fact, when a soldier asked eight-year-old Ambrose Archer how the Indians had treated him, the boy replied that he ‘would just as lief stay with the Indians as not.’”
Which all sounds very nice, however first off Brown gets the kid’s name wrong, and secondly I knew going in that Ambrose Asher hadn’t said any such thing. His fellow prisoner Danny Marble was chipper and talkative, but Asher had been so traumatized by the experience he didn’t speak to the soldiers, nor to anyone else, for something like six months. And I remembered that one of the other kids, the younger girl, was covered with scars where she had been tortured and was tormented with horrific nightmares until she died a few months later. So I went looking for primary documents on that incident, and pulling on that one thread of a sentence revealed a whole skein of lies in Dee Brown’s book.
I didn’t care to read another book equally slanted, just in the other direction. But I had used Michno books a couple of times, looking into this or that, and when I’d checked the primary documents he referenced I hadn’t caught him in any lies (although, like Dee Brown in the quote above, I did catch him once mixing up two people involved in the same event). So I gave this book a chance, checking things now and again, but best I can tell, Michno does not misrepresent the facts of the case. In fact, he right regularly points out that it is often impossible to know the facts of the case, because there is so much contradictory testimony. And then he explains why he believes things went the way he suggests – or, sometimes, why he suspects they didn’t (his footnotes sometimes offer an alternative he prefers to the version in the text).
I did not think Michno makes John Chivington a hero. His Chivington is a difficult, complex man who tends to be narrowminded and militaristic. And I wouldn’t say Michno makes Wynkoop a villain, either, but he does make it clear he sees Wynkoop as a weak man whose grasp on reality was iffy. For example, at one point Michno quotes Wynkoop’s congressional testimony, where Wynkoop says his men “did not threaten in my presence to return to Fort Lyon,” then he points out that Wynkoop changed his story in his autobiography, saying there that “a large number of my men. demanded to be immediately led back to Fort Lyon” and that “These demands assumed the shape of a mutiny, which required extreme measures to quell.”
If Wynkoop needed to resort to “extreme measures,” then his men’s feelings about the situation were not the non-issue he claimed in his testimony. Michno does not mention it, but Wynkoop, in his autobiography, goes on to say, “With a mutiny in camp, and surrounded by thousands of fierce barbarians; whether hostile or not an open question, my feelings that long and sleepness night were not to be envied.” Wynkoop was either an inveterate liar, or he had an awfully convenient memory.
For the most part, it is not that hard to verify what Michno says in his book – the government documents are on the Internet, as are many of the books he cites, and even some of the books that aren’t on the internet can often be searched through google books if you just want to verify a quote, like Wynkoop’s unfinished autobiography (which is also reasonably priced if you want a hard copy). And there are sites devoted to the various characters mentioned. This one on Wynkoop is a treasure trove of articles from the time:
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wynko...
Some historical articles there you can easily verify, once you get time and date and original publication, and some not, depending on your location (the Denver library system is another treasure trove on the subject...).
Getting a feeling for the times and the attitudes and beliefs of the people living then is considerably more tricky than pinning down the accuracy of a quote, particularly when it comes to the people of multiple clashing cultures. While I still haven’t finished the book, I think the authors of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous are correct in arguing that white westerners tend to assume everyone thinks as they do – and also correct in their claim that this presumption is profoundly inaccurate.
I believe in this book Michno does a pretty good job of getting into the heads of the people of the time and presenting a good variety of beliefs at the time (particularly when it comes to what they thought of Indians, the whites were not nearly so unified in their opinions as some historians imply – people tended to unify after some particular event or reporting, uniting on one side or the other for a few months as the media vilified either white or Indian atrocities, then would drift apart again, so even the generally held assumptions changed according to date and location).
I think Michno does present the military perspective, but, like some in the military, he has some sympathy for the Cheyenne perspective as well, and he understands that the military perspective included the perspective of the Indian scouts. The military perspective was as varied as that of the general population, and Michno tries to give the reader a feeling for that variety.
Obviously Michno himself understands that the Plains Indian way of life was doomed as soon as the Federal government decided to eliminate it, but he also recognizes that the people of that time and place didn’t see it that way. Until about the mid-eighteen-sixties the white settlers in the area (and the Pawnee, according to Mark van der Logt’s War Party in Blue) saw the Federal government as being far more interested in trying to bribe the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux into good behavior than it was in punishing them for killing and stealing. The whites were particularly outraged over the fact that the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux right regularly stole horses once it got warm and might keep at it until it started cooling down – stealing a horse was a hanging offense when a white man did it -- and that the Indians were then “rewarded” for coming to the military to “make peace” in the fall so as to get goods that would tide them over the winter, only to go right back to their raiding once it warmed up again.
The Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux, meanwhile, thought they had a good deal going, and few of them understood that there were great armies in the east that could flatten them. Going on the evidence, Black Kettle looks to me to have been for peace less because he was an inherently peaceful man, and more because he had been out east and was intelligent enough to get a deeper understanding of what the Cheyenne would be up against, should the federal government decide to get serious about making them behave by white standards. The fact that the federal government – or, more precisely, those the government trusted to do its will – was rife with corruption and often reneged on promises of food and goods didn’t help Black Kettle’s position any.
All of which I knew before I picked up this book. When I was waffling on kicking out the cash for Battle at Sand Creek, I was a bit unnerved to read Tom Bensing’s comment that, “when the sources he cites are cross-referenced, [Michno] repeatedly mis-quotes, twists, and even, in at least one case, completely mis-identifies the person in a source.” I had just been looking something up in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and ran across the sentence, “The four captives, all children, appeared to be unharmed; in fact, when a soldier asked eight-year-old Ambrose Archer how the Indians had treated him, the boy replied that he ‘would just as lief stay with the Indians as not.’”
Which all sounds very nice, however first off Brown gets the kid’s name wrong, and secondly I knew going in that Ambrose Asher hadn’t said any such thing. His fellow prisoner Danny Marble was chipper and talkative, but Asher had been so traumatized by the experience he didn’t speak to the soldiers, nor to anyone else, for something like six months. And I remembered that one of the other kids, the younger girl, was covered with scars where she had been tortured and was tormented with horrific nightmares until she died a few months later. So I went looking for primary documents on that incident, and pulling on that one thread of a sentence revealed a whole skein of lies in Dee Brown’s book.
I didn’t care to read another book equally slanted, just in the other direction. But I had used Michno books a couple of times, looking into this or that, and when I’d checked the primary documents he referenced I hadn’t caught him in any lies (although, like Dee Brown in the quote above, I did catch him once mixing up two people involved in the same event). So I gave this book a chance, checking things now and again, but best I can tell, Michno does not misrepresent the facts of the case. In fact, he right regularly points out that it is often impossible to know the facts of the case, because there is so much contradictory testimony. And then he explains why he believes things went the way he suggests – or, sometimes, why he suspects they didn’t (his footnotes sometimes offer an alternative he prefers to the version in the text).
I did not think Michno makes John Chivington a hero. His Chivington is a difficult, complex man who tends to be narrowminded and militaristic. And I wouldn’t say Michno makes Wynkoop a villain, either, but he does make it clear he sees Wynkoop as a weak man whose grasp on reality was iffy. For example, at one point Michno quotes Wynkoop’s congressional testimony, where Wynkoop says his men “did not threaten in my presence to return to Fort Lyon,” then he points out that Wynkoop changed his story in his autobiography, saying there that “a large number of my men. demanded to be immediately led back to Fort Lyon” and that “These demands assumed the shape of a mutiny, which required extreme measures to quell.”
If Wynkoop needed to resort to “extreme measures,” then his men’s feelings about the situation were not the non-issue he claimed in his testimony. Michno does not mention it, but Wynkoop, in his autobiography, goes on to say, “With a mutiny in camp, and surrounded by thousands of fierce barbarians; whether hostile or not an open question, my feelings that long and sleepness night were not to be envied.” Wynkoop was either an inveterate liar, or he had an awfully convenient memory.
For the most part, it is not that hard to verify what Michno says in his book – the government documents are on the Internet, as are many of the books he cites, and even some of the books that aren’t on the internet can often be searched through google books if you just want to verify a quote, like Wynkoop’s unfinished autobiography (which is also reasonably priced if you want a hard copy). And there are sites devoted to the various characters mentioned. This one on Wynkoop is a treasure trove of articles from the time:
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wynko...
Some historical articles there you can easily verify, once you get time and date and original publication, and some not, depending on your location (the Denver library system is another treasure trove on the subject...).
Getting a feeling for the times and the attitudes and beliefs of the people living then is considerably more tricky than pinning down the accuracy of a quote, particularly when it comes to the people of multiple clashing cultures. While I still haven’t finished the book, I think the authors of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous are correct in arguing that white westerners tend to assume everyone thinks as they do – and also correct in their claim that this presumption is profoundly inaccurate.
I believe in this book Michno does a pretty good job of getting into the heads of the people of the time and presenting a good variety of beliefs at the time (particularly when it comes to what they thought of Indians, the whites were not nearly so unified in their opinions as some historians imply – people tended to unify after some particular event or reporting, uniting on one side or the other for a few months as the media vilified either white or Indian atrocities, then would drift apart again, so even the generally held assumptions changed according to date and location).
I think Michno does present the military perspective, but, like some in the military, he has some sympathy for the Cheyenne perspective as well, and he understands that the military perspective included the perspective of the Indian scouts. The military perspective was as varied as that of the general population, and Michno tries to give the reader a feeling for that variety.
January 25, 2013
Frustratingly written book. The author does a very good job giving the background and lead-up to Sand Ceek, and uses the available resources to recreate what he chooses to call a battle. However, the book then descends into an attempt to stir controversy by labeling John Chivington a hero and men such as Ned Wynkoop and Silas Soule, the two men who tried to avoid bloodshed, as villians. In theory, if he could properly back up his claims, this would be an acceptable reinterpretation of history. The reality is that, when the sources he cites are cross-referenced, he repeatedly mis-quotes, twists, and even, in at least one case, completely mis-identifies the person in a source. This puts the rest of an otherwise good retelling of a dark event in American history in a questionable light.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews