On 29 November 1864 about 675 Colorado volunteer troops under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp on Big Sandy Creek that was flying a white flag and a United States flag; the National Park Service records roughly 230 people killed over eight hours, most of them women, children and the elderly, with mutilation of the dead afterwards. Manuscript letters by Captain Silas Soule and Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, rediscovered in 2000, record that about a hundred soldiers refused the order. Chivington was initially acclaimed and then discredited when the character of the attack became known, and the massacre precipitated the Cheyenne and Arapaho war that followed. On 29 December 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, US Army troops disarming a Lakota band during the suppression of the Ghost Dance killed, by Britannica's estimate, between 150 and 300 Lakota; Britannica describes it as the climax of the army's efforts to repress the Plains Indians. Congress passed a resolution of deep regret for Wounded Knee on its centenary in 1990.
United States volunteer and regular troops attacked and killed Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek in 1864 and Lakota people at Wounded Knee in 1890
No single denominator is defensible: the two massacres struck different peoples twenty-six years apart. The Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho bands attacked at Sand Creek in 1864 numbered a few thousand in all, and the Lakota of the Sioux agencies counted roughly 25,000 people at the time of Wounded Knee in 1890. Combining them would imply a population that never existed as a single group.
The range combines the two events. For Sand Creek the National Park Service and Britannica agree on approximately 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho killed, including some 150 women, children and elderly people, and thirteen Cheyenne chiefs and one Arapaho chief; the figure derives from survivor testimony and the later federal inquiries. For Wounded Knee Britannica gives 150 to 300 Lakota killed, the spread reflecting the difference between bodies buried in the mass grave and the wounded who died later or were never recovered.
The National Park Service and Britannica document the killing of non-combatants, the mutilation of the dead at Sand Creek and the destruction of the camps, drawing on survivor testimony, the Soule and Cramer letters and the 1865 federal inquiries.
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