Day Sixty

5/31

The Book: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

ISBN: 0-8050-6669-1

Suggested By: Sissy Vaughn

Where: Home

When: 5:45-6:30P

Music: None

Company: Alone

Pages: 69-124 (55)

The Lead In: Ah, the Sand Creek Massacre. I’ve heard references to this before. But more on that later.

The 411 on the 55: The Cheyenne Black Kettle has perhaps the most depressing story in this book. As an important chief, he went to Washington and met Abraham Lincoln. To honor the event, he was given a medal and a large American flag. Told that no Army soldier would fire on him with this flag flying, Black Kettle believed that he could live at peace with the Americans.

As the American immigration movement expanded, more and more of Black Kettle’s lands were eaten up, yet he refused to go to war. Half of his tribe split off to fight and yet he did not fight. It was his tribe that was attacked during the Sand Creek Massacre, and, worst of all, Black Kettle and many of his people stood beneath their large American flag while they were fired on by the US army.

Line of the Day: “I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them.” pg 90

The Fact on the Fiction: A first hand account by John S. Smith of Sand Creek “By the time I got up with the battery to the place where these Indians were surrounded there had been some considerable firing. Four or five soldiers had been killed, some with arrows and some with bullets. The soldiers continued firing on these Indians, who numbered about a hundred, until they had almost completely destroyed them. I think I saw altogether some seventy dead bodies lying there; the greater portion women and children. There may have been thirty warriors, old and young; the rest were women and small children of different ages and sizes.” PBS