Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,773

This is the grave of John Evans.

Born in 1814 outside of Waynesville, Ohio, Evans grew up in a Welsh immigrant family that was pretty well off. His father started as a farmer, but then went into hardware and then real estate investments. He did well enough that John could study to be a doctor at Clermont Academy in Philadelphia and then transfer to Cincinnati College (today the University of Cincinnati), where he graduated with a medicine degree in 1838. He married and moved to Indiana. He was particularly interested in treating those with mental illnesses. He moved to Indianapolis to lobby the state to build a facility for the insane, but this also allowed him to start dabbling in politics, which he enjoyed. He succeeded and was a big fresh food and water reformer too, which he introduced into the new asylum that was approved in 1844 and started construction in 1846.

Evans later moved to Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1848. He was on the ground for the horrible cholera epidemic of 1849 and testified before Congress about it. He also started a medical journal and invented a device to limit the damage to babies extracted from women using forceps during birth. He was involved in the creation of the Northwestern University in 1850 and was the first president of its Board of Trustees. He also donated land for its move to Evanston in 1855. He became an alderman in Chicago in 1853 and served in that role for two years. He helped found the Illinois Republican Party and was a big supporter of Abraham Lincoln’s move toward national prominence.

So Evans seems like a good sort, right? Some important medical discoveries, really into higher education. Well………………no. In fact, Evans is one of the worst people in American history, even when you consider these very real achievements.

Lincoln was happy to pay off his buddy Evans after he became president and in 1862, named him Territorial Governor of Colorado. He had never been there before, but that didn’t matter. He was a big development guy. He pushed for statehood shortly after arrival, which the people of Colorado rejected because they would be subject to military service. They also didn’t have the requisite population yet. He wanted railroads and he used his wealth and political connections to get the railroads connected to Denver, even though the initial transcontinental line would through the easier path of Wyoming.

So here’s the thing–to push this idea of development, an idea absolutely central to the Republican Party, including Lincoln, you had to get the Tribes out of the way. Evans would have no compunction is using mass violence to do so. Thus, Evans actively pushed for genocide. He urged the whites of Colorado to kill Indians. He proclaimed that since the U.S. Army could not protect whites due to the Civil War, they should take it upon themselves to do it. This set up the atmosphere for John Chivington to commit the Sand Creek Massacre against a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado in 1864, people who were under the nominal protection of the American flag, having agreed to stay away from whites. Black Kettle, head of the Cheyenne at Sand Creek had met with Lincoln earlier in 1864 and agreed with a peace policy. Black Kettle had also accepted Evans offer of amnesty in exchange for peace. None of it mattered.

Evans named Chivington, a committed abolitionist himself who had gone to Kansas to fight to make it a free state before going west again, Colonel of Colorado Volunteers. When Chivington and his men decided to make hay for themselves by attacking Black Kettle, Evans was completely supportive of it. Around 230 people, mostly women and children, were massacred on that horrible day in 1864. When Chivington returned to Denver, Evans had him hailed as a hero and decorated him for his bravery and service to the white race.

I want to reiterate, Evans and Chivington weren’t some sort of rogue folks. They were part and parcel of the same Republican Party seeking to free slaves. They, along with William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan and many other major Civil War figures saw freeing slaves and slaughtering indigenous people as the exact same thing in their vision of an American future. Lincoln’s role here is slightly more complicated. but he not only authorized the largest mass execution in American history at the end of the Dakota War, but there is nothing in his background that would have led him to a different result and while he did not exactly approve of the Sand Creek Massacre, the aftermath wasn’t exactly a top priority for him either.

Evans actively participated in the coverup of Sand Creek and when word got out about just how horrible this was, even Republicans who were generally anti-Native were like, whoa, wait a minute, you just massacred women and children, cut off the genitalia of women, and hanged said genitalia from your horses as you paraded through downtown Denver? Evans was forced to resign as territorial governor in 1865 after Congress started looking into this and William Seward used his power to get rid of him. He wanted to be senator, but Andrew Johnson vetoed a Colorado application for statehood and by the time the state did finally get statehood in 1876, his career was long gone.

Much later, Evans continued his dabbling in medicine and inventions, patenting a device to fight seasickness by creating a suspended bed for ships in 1872. He lived in Denver for the rest of his life, mostly engaging in his business interests. He became a major railroad guy in the state, particularly creating the Denver Pacific Railway in 1870. Evans never apologized for Sand Creek. In 1884, he said in an interview, “The benefit to Colorado, of that massacre, as they call it, was very great, for it ridded the plains of the Indians.” Incidentally, through all of this he remained president of the Northwestern University Board of Trustees all the way until 1895. He died in 1897, at the age of 83.

In recent years, Colorado has finally begun to deal with the legacy of this genocidal asshole as Mt. Evans, one of the state’s legendary 14,000 foot peaks, has recently been renamed Mt. Blue Sky. That’s a dumb name, but it’s better than naming it for John Evans.

If you would like this series to visit other people whose names were given to Colorado 14,000 foot peaks, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Stephen Harriman Long is in Alton, Illinois and A.D. Wilson is in Oakland, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.