Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site

By the late twentieth century nobody could say for certain where on Big Sandy Creek the massacre of November 29, 1864, had happened. The soldiers' accounts disagreed, the creek had shifted, and the land had passed through homesteads and ranches. The descendants of those who survived carried the event in family memory but had lost the exact ground. An earlier search by a state historical group had looked at two places in Kiowa County and could confirm neither.

In 1998 Congress, at the urging of Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, directed the National Park Service to find the site in consultation with the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the Northern Arapaho Tribe. The tribes gathered their own oral histories, carried out by descendants of survivors and tribal leaders. Historians worked through maps, diaries, testimony, homestead files and an 1868 army map; archaeologists swept the ground with metal detectors in May 1999 and found the debris of a camp, howitzer fragments and the domestic objects of Cheyenne and Arapaho families. The study, completed that year, placed the village along the creek north of a bend, though some tribal traditions place parts of the events elsewhere within the boundary, and the difference has been honestly left open.

Congress authorized the historic site in 2000 and it opened in 2007; it has since more than doubled in size. A short road leads to an overlook above the creek and a monument on the hill above it. Every November, Cheyenne and Arapaho runners carry the Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run from this ground to Denver. It is a place of mourning, and visitors are asked to treat it as one.