“Dear Ned,” Silas Soule began his letter of December 14, 1864. “Ned” was Soule’s military friend, Major Edward Wynkoop.
Soule proceeded to tell Wynkoop about the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers, mostly volunteers, on November 29 at Sand Creek, in what was then the Colorado Territory. He told how one soldier cut a woman’s arm off with a hatchet, then “dashed the hatchet through her brain.” He told how one woman, shot through the leg and facing fire, cut her own children’s throats to save them from additional brutality, then killed herself. He told how children on their knees had their “brains beat out.” He told how soldiers cut off the scalps, ears, and private parts of native victims for souvenirs. He told how soldiers cut the unborn child from a woman’s belly before scalping her.
As for himself, Soule wrote, “I refused to fire and swore that none but a coward would.” None of the men under his command fired. Unfortunately, the cowards ran amuck that day and perpetrated one of the most notorious massacres in American history.
This past Saturday, Nancy Niero, author of “Witness at Sand Creek: The Life and Letters of Silas Soule,” read Soule’s letters to a small crowd in front of Soule’s unassuming grave at Denver’s Riverside Cemetery.
There my son, my wife, and I met Silas, a toddler named by his parents for the Colorado hero. We met a fourth-grade teacher who gives a Silas Soule award to a member of her class who acts courageously. We met Byron Strom, a distant relative of Soule’s who has researched Soule’s story. I saw Kevin Simpson, who has written extensively about Soule for the Colorado Sun.
It was an emotionally heavy morning and a painfully hot one weather-wise. On our drive in on 58th Avenue we passed by two dead horses on the road that we guess had fallen off a truck. That morning the cemetery, now overrun with mowed weeds, was hosting an event in part to discuss the possibility of planting more native grasses. The trains that pass within yards of Soule’s grave periodically drowned out Niero’s voice. The Suncor Refinery belched in the background.
This is not a lovely spot. But it is a sacred spot.
Soule testified before Congress in early 1865 about what he witnessed at Sand Creek. He married Hersa Coberly on April 1. Far away, Abraham Lincoln was shot on April 14; he died the next day. On the evening of April 23, while serving as provost marshal in Denver, Soule, while investigating gunshots, was shot and killed by Charles Squier, who escaped and fled justice.
As Simpson notes, the fact that Squier had served under Col. John Chivington, who led the assault at Sand Creek, fueled speculation that Soule’s murder was a politically-motivated assassination. That’s how Niero described it. It seems likely that Soule was murdered for speaking out against injustice, but the facts may never be conclusively established.
One thing I learned from Niero’s readings from the letters is that Soule and Chivington knew each other very well. They served together for years, went on grueling cross-country marches together, and fought together. So it must have been very difficult and painful for Soule to speak up against a man he had once admired as a brother in arms.
What I cannot figure out is how Chivington, an abolitionist (like Soule), a Civil War hero for the Union Army, and a Methodist minister who once participated in a missionary trip to serve native peoples in Kansas, came to commit such a brutal act.
All I can figure is that eventually Chivington was overcome with hateful bigotry toward native peoples. He reportedly said, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” Even if that quote is not exactly right, if he said anything like that, as it seems he did, that helps explain his mindset.
Another thing I learned from Niero is that Soule was by correspondence a friend of the poet Walt Whitman, and he wrote to Whitman about “Leaves of Grass.” Tragically, Whitman’s letters to Soule do not survive. Soule reported losing papers and letters in flooding, so maybe that explains the absence.
I can imagine Soule sitting around a fire reading Whitman’s words:
“Do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by after all.
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.”
I, on the other hand, will not be content until the whole world becomes aware of Soule’s courage.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
