Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,981

This is the grave of Silas Soule.

Born in 1838 in Bath, Maine, Soule grew up in the abolitionist world of New England reformers. His parents hated slavery. By the time Soule was a teenager, Kansas was becoming a political issue. Thanks to Stephen Douglas deciding to blow up the Missouri Compromise in order to promote his own ambitions in the Democratic Party, throwing open Kansas and future territories to potential slavery by talking about “popular sovereignty,” a bill that Democrats happily signed on to and which Franklin Pierce signed as president, people started flooding into Kansas to fight over whether it would be free or slave. John Brown was among them and he had a solution–rounding up slave owners and butchering them to death. Well, Silas Soule wasn’t quite that aggressive. But he did want to go to Kansas to participate in the anti-slavery crusade there. His father and older brother wrapped up the family business and moved to Lawrence in 1854, with Silas and his mother following the next summer.

Upon establishing themselves in Kansas–the family had a cabin a few miles outside of Lawrence, their home became a known stop on the Underground Railroad, as slaves taken into Kansas were encouraged by abolitionists to escape. Silas personally escorted escape slaves out of Missouri and into the north that summer he arrived. In 1859, the anti-slavery activist John Doy, who was a doctor in Lawrence, was arrested with a bunch of slaves he was helping to escape. The slaves were taken back to Missouri and Doy was held on charges of stealing slaves. Now, by this time, it was clear that Kansas would eventually be a free state. The Buchanan administration’s attempt to force through Kansas as a slave state after the Lecompton Constitution has failed. But the violence and contested status still meant things were up in the air so long it was still a territory. In any case, Soule was part of a group that sprung Doy from prison in Missouri, overpowering the guards, and getting him to safety in Kansas. These guys became known as The Immortal Ten in abolitionist propaganda. Soule became the most famous of these men, though not because of anything he did in Kansas.

Soule was a big fan of using armed forces to bust abolitionists out of prison. He wanted to try this to free John Brown too. He approached some of Brown’s followers through quite a method. He went to Virginia, did an imitation of a drunken Irishman and started a fight. I like how he couldn’t just go start a fight. Nope, gotta pretend to be Irish. The idea was to be put in prison with Brown’s followers. It worked too. He got thrown in the clink with Brown’s followers. He told them of the idea. But they said no, they wanted to be martyrs to the cause. And this was true–Brown did not want to be released. He was more than ready to go all the way and of course did so with his head held high. The fact that he was grievously wounded after the Harpers Ferry raid and by no means close to recovery probably didn’t help him want to get out either. And yes this scheme isn’t why we remember Soule today either.

Nope, after this, gold was discovered in Colorado and Soule decided to go west. He wanted to mine gold like so many others. He volunteered for the Army during the Civil War and was involved at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, where Union armies pushed back the Confederate attempt to take Colorado and its gold, which was actually an important moment in the war. He became a captain in the 1st Colorado Cavalry, in charge of his company.

There were lots of abolitionists in Colorado. Plenty of men involved in the fight to keep Kansas a free state then moved one state west to mine gold. But how they responded to Native Americans was a completely different question than how they responded to the abolitionist question. It was no stretch for many of them–perhaps over half–to be extremely anti-slavery and believe that Indians should be wiped from the face of the Earth. One of them was a man named John Chivington, Soule’s superior in the Colorado militia. Chivington decided he would rise in Colorado society through open genocide. He ordered the militia to attack Black Kettle’s peaceful group of Cheyenne and Arapaho on Sand Creek, in southeastern Colorado. Black Kettle’s people were under a peace agreement with the U.S. Army that guaranteed them peace so long as they stayed out there. Chivington had no interest in this. Neither did John Evans, Colorado’s governor and a man also committed to genocide for personal gain.

By late November 1864, most of Black Kettle’s warriors were out hunting. There were about 60 adult aged men in the camp and several hundred older men, women, and children. 675 men under Chivington’s command wanted nothing but genocide. On the morning of November 29, they attacked. Black Kettle and the camping Cheyenne and Arapaho had no idea why this was happening. They were doing everything they agreed to do in the earlier peace agreement. They ran up an American flag and a white flag immediately. Chivington did not care. The Colorado forces lost about 15 dead, mostly due to soldiers shooting each other. The number of Cheyenne and Arapaho who died remains unclear, probably 150-200. The Colorado troops went to raping and mutilating people before killing them. Said Robert Bent, who witnessed the attack:

I saw one squaw lying on the bank, whose leg had been broken. A soldier came up to her with a drawn sabre. She raised her arm to protect herself; he struck, breaking her arm. She rolled over, and raised her other arm; he struck, breaking that, and then left her with out killing her. I saw one squaw cut open, with an unborn child lying by her side.

Stan Hoig:

Fingers and ears were cut off the bodies for the jewelry they carried. The body of White Antelope, lying solitarily in the creek bed, was a prime target. Besides scalping him the soldiers cut off his nose, ears, and testicles-the last for a tobacco pouch …

Major Anthony:

There was one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was behind, following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked, travelling in the sand. I saw one man get off his horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, ‘let me try the son of a b-. I can hit him.’ He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.

When Chivington and his men returned to Denver, they were greeted with a parade. Seen as conquering heroes, with the body parts of the Cheyenne and Arapaho, including fetuses and both male and female genitalia, hanging from their horses and decorating their hats, young women ran up and kissed the soldiers. But the revelry did not last long.

But not everyone would be involved in Chivington’s schemes. Soule was furious. He stated, “any man who would take part in [such] murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.” Soule and others reported Chivington before the fact, but they couldn’t stop him. Soule told his men not to take part. They stood and watched the slaughter. Chivington taunted as an Indian-lover. So Soule went to Congress and told them what happened. A lot of Congress was furious with Chivington–do you think that it 1864, Congress or the Lincoln administration wanted to deal with this shit? They were a little preoccupied with Virginia! So Chivington was raked over the coals and dishonored.

In response, two months after his testimony in Washington, Soule, working as a provost marshal in Denver. Someone was firing guns. He went out to see what was up. It was a man named Charles Squier. Squier knew who walked up to him. So hating him for betraying the white race by telling the truth about Sand Creek, he shot Soule in the face and killed him. Squier eventually escaped to Central America, where he was run over by a train and died of gangrene, in 1869. Many in Denver saw him as a hero for killing the race traitor. Meanwhile, Soule was all of 26 years old when he was killed.

Silas Soule is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. He was originally in a different cemetery that was later developed and the bodies moved to Riverside.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with Sand Creek, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. James Beckwourth is in Laramie, Wyoming and George Bent is in Colony, Oklahoma. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.