By Mike Bowen, co-author, We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site
Arapaho Indians were raiding about five miles east of Kiowa, Colorado August 25, 1868 when they killed thirty-one-year-old Henrietta Dietemann and her five-year-old son, John, while he was running to his mother. Mr. Dietemann was not at home. Kiowa is about 50 miles southeast of Denver.
Only two days after the attack, the story was covered by the Rocky Mountain News.
Mrs. Dietemann “evidently believed the Indians were near, for she hurriedly started with her sister-in-law and the two children for a neighbor’s house some distance away. After having gone a few hundred yards she remembered that she had left a considerable sum of money in the house, and with her small son went back to get it. They reached the house, got the money, and started away again, but had gone only a short distance when they were overtaken by the Indians, who at once shot and killed both of them. The savages shot the boy repeatedly and finally broke his neck. The mother was shot through the body, stabbed, and scalped, and the bodies of both were dreadfully mutilated. Those who afterwards saw the victims said that it was one of the most horrible sights they had ever looked upon. Meanwhile, the sister-in law and daughter ran to where the German (farmhand) was working in the field near by. He stood the Indians off by pointing the handle of his hoe at them, making them believe it was a gun” (Rocky Mountain News August 27, 1868).
This took place nearly four years after Sand Creek. If the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians were peaceful, as it’s claimed in the Sand Creek massacre story, why would Arapaho Indians murder a defenseless mother and young child? What happened to the Dietemanns wasn’t any sort of retaliation. It was murder, in cold blood. Those are not the actions of peaceful people.
Sand Creek was not a starting point.
Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians were raiding and killing settlers before and after Sand Creek. No Indian raids after Sand Creek were the acts of retaliation.
Indians attacked settlers as they traveled west. Many believed it was a divine right to expand across America, what is called Manifest Destiny. The National Park Service recently claimed on their Sand Creek Facebook page that Manifest Destiny was essentially evil. In reality, settlers moved west to create a better life for their families. The Indians didn’t own any land, they were nomadic. Western expansion included land that was part of the Louisiana Purchase, and the location of the 1864 Sand Creek event was part of that territory.
As controversial as it sounds, the Indians didn’t have any more right to that land than white settlers did. And the Homestead Act of 1862 gave the settlers the right to acquire land. And the Cheyenne weren’t from the United States, per George Bent. See our blog on that here: PlumCreekBlog. It seems the term Native American needs defined. My Bowen ancestor, Moses Bowen, led his family to the colonies from Wales in 1698, well before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Cheyenne, who came from Canada, long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, are considered native. What is the qualification for being a native? Doesn’t one have to be born somewhere to be a native? By definition, the Bowens are certainly natives of the United States.
The Dietemanns were innocent people, looking to make a better life. Some believe Black Kettle’s village was also innocent people. We’re transparent in our book about a couple of soldiers that killed a child. There are other claims that many children were intentionally killed, but those claims are not verified. Some children could have been killed by collateral damage from cannon fire which was the case in many Civil War battles. And those battles aren’t called massacres. But we’ve learned through discovery that it wasn’t a village of defenseless women, children and elderly—there were warriors in the camp, and per George Bent, those warriors committed horrible atrocities in Colorado Territory in the summer of 1864. We go into detail about that in our book.
We don’t have a narrative or a dog in this fight. But the Sand Creek site discovery by Chuck and Sheri Bowen has been lied about and minimized. We’re just following the evidence from 4,000+ battle and village artifacts and are basing our conclusions on where artifacts were found. The massacre story claims the Indians were camped clustered together below the bluff at the NPS Sand Creek site. However, no period artifacts have been found there. That area should be littered with bullets, arrowheads, cannonball shell fragments, kettle fragments, knives, and many other artifacts.
As pointed out in this blog, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were raiding, killing and scalping white settlers before Sand Creek. Most of our information on this comes from George Bent who was a Cheyenne Dog Soldier (warrior). He wrote letters to historians many years after Sand Creek while he worked as an Indian agent in Oklahoma. The historians asked him about his Cheyenne life and time at Sand Creek. He went on many of the raids he wrote about. Chuck has over 400 pages of Bent’s letters in his archives.
Not only was Sand Creek not a starting point, it was a provoked attack. See our blog here: GeneralCurtis.
The Dietemann murders is one of many accounts of innocent setters killed by Indians.
One of the leading causes of Sand Creek was the Hungate murders. See chapter four of our book, We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site.
Our book includes over 100 photos of artifacts and maps detailing the artifacts and where they were found.
The truth about Sand Creek needs to be known.
Truth matters. Truth wins.
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