Cheif Black Kettle was a legend because he was a Cheyenne leader who unsuccessfully tried to resist white American settlement from Colorado and Kansas territories. Even he survived the Sand Creek Massacre, he died in 1868 at the Battle of Washita River. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Kettle
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Cimone(:
2/2/2010 10:15:53 pm
Chief Black Kettle was the Cheyenne that successfully resisted American settlement in his Kansas and Colorado territories. He died in 1868 in the Battle of Washita River. He was a great peacemaker although the U.S. government usually broke the treaties and agreements. For example, the Sand Creek masacre. American Soldiers attacked the Sand Creek reservation at night, shooting and stabbing to death 63 Cheyenne. Some said that he did nothing to sto raids and masacres but he is a legand to the Native American people.
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Ruben >.<
2/3/2010 10:38:22 pm
To add on to what andrew was saying. Chief Black Kettle was brave enough to stand up to whats right. He wanted his village to be safe, and was willing to go to any extent to do that.
All we ask is that we have peace with the whites. We want to hold you by the hand. You are our father. We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since the war began. These braves who are with me are willing to do what I say. We want to take good tidings home to our people, that they may sleep in peace. I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies. I have not come here with a little wolf bark, but have come to talk plain with you.
-- Motavato (Black Kettle) speaking to Colorado Govornor Evans, Colonel Chivington, Major Wynkoop & others in Denver, autumn, 1864
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Ruben >.<
2/3/2010 10:40:50 pm
He knew what was right and what was wrong, the reservation was unfit to support his village, he was doing what was logical.
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Andrew Murphy
2/3/2010 10:41:16 pm
Cheif Black Kettle fought in The Colorado War. By the summer of 1864, the situation was at boiling point, as Cheyenne hardliners, along with the allied Kiowa and Arapaho tribes continued raiding American settlements, sometimes taking prisoners, including women and children. On 11 July 1864, the Hungate massacre of a family of settlers further inflamed matters, especially after pro-war whites publicly exhibited the bodies in Denver. Colorado governor John Evans believed the attack had been ordered by tribal chiefs and presaged a full-scale war. Evans proclaimed that all "Friendly Indians of the Plains" must report to military posts or be considered hostile. He received authorization from the War Department to establish the Third Colorado Cavalry. The unit, composed of "100-daysers" who had signed on specifically to fight Indians, was led by John Chivington. Black Kettle decided to accept Evans' offer, and entered negotiations. On September 28, he concluded a peace settlement at Fort Weld, outside Denver. The agreement confined the Cheyenne to the Sand Creek reservation and required them to report to Fort Lyon, formerly Fort Wise. Black Kettle believed this agreement would ensure the safety of his people.
Few biographical details are known about the Southern Cheyenne chief Black Kettle, but his repeated efforts to secure a peace with honor for his people, despite broken promises and attacks on his own life, speak of him as a great leader with an almost unique vision of the possiblity for coexistence between white society and the culture of the plains.
Black Kettle lived on the vast territory in western Kansas and eastern Colorado that had been guaranteed to the Cheyenne under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Within less than a decade, however, the 1859 Pikes Peak gold rush sparked an enormous population boom in Colorado, and this led to extensive white encroachments on Cheyenne land. Even the U.S. Indian Commissioner admitted that "We have substantially taken possession of the country and deprived the Indians of their accustomed means of support."
Rather than evict white settlers, the government sought to resolve the situation by demanding that the Southern Cheyenne sign a new treaty ceding all their lands save the small Sand Creek reservation in southeastern Colorado. Black Kettle, fearing that overwhelming U.S. military power might result in an even less favorable settlement, agreed to the treaty in 1861 and did what he could to see that the Cheyenne obeyed its provisions.
As it turned out, however, the Sand Creek reservation could not sustain the Indians forced to live there. All but unfit for agriculture, the barren tract of land was little more than a breeding ground for epidemic diseases which soon swept through the Cheyenne encampments. By 1862 the nearest herd of buffalo was over two hundred miles away. Many Cheyennes, especially young men, began to leave the reservation to prey upon the livestock and goods of nearby settlers and passing wagon trains. One such raid in the spring of 1864 so angered white Coloradans that they dispatched their militia, which opened fire on the first band of Cheyenne they happened to meet. None of the Indians in this band had participated in the raid, however, and their leader was actually approaching the militia for a parlay when the shooting began.
This incident touched off an uncoordinated Indian uprising across the Great Plains, as Indian peoples from the Comanche in the South to the Lakota in the North took advantage of the army's involvement in the Civil War by striking back at those who had encroached upon their lands. Black Kettle, however, understood white military supremacy too well to support the cause of war. He spoke with the local military commander at Fort Weld in Colorado and believed he had secured a promise of safety in exchange for leading his band back to the Sand Creek reservation.
But Colonel John Chivington, leader of the Third Colorado Volunteers, had no intention of honoring such a promise. His troops had been unsuccessful in finding a Cheyenne band to fight, so when he learned that Black Kettle had returned to Sand Creek, he attacked the unsuspecting encampment at dawn on November 29, 1864. Some two hundred Cheyenne died in the ensuing massacre, many of them women and children, and after the slaughter, Chivington's men sexually mutilated and scalped many of the dead, later exhibiting their trophies to cheering crowds in Denver.
Black Kettle miraculously escaped harm at the Sand Creek Massacre, even when he returned to rescue his seriously injured wife. And perhaps more miraculously, he continued to counsel peace when the Cheyenne attempted to strike back with isolated raids on wagon trains and nearby ranches. By October 1865, he and other Indian leaders had arranged an uneasy truce on the plains, signing a new treaty that exchanged the Sand Creek reservation for reservations in southwestern Kansas but deprived the Cheyenne of access to most of their coveted Kansas hunting grounds.
Only a part of the Southern Cheyenne nation followed Black Kettle and the others to these new reservations. Some instead headed north to join the Northern Cheyenne in Lakota territory. Many simply ignored the treaty and continued to range over their ancestral lands. This latter group, consisting mainly of young warriors allied with a Cheyenne war chief named Roman Nose, angered the government by their refusal to obey a treaty they had not signed, and General William Tecumseh Sherman launched a campaign to force them onto their assigned lands. Roman Nose and his followers struck back furiously, and the resulting standoff halted all traffic across western Kansas for a time.
At this point, government negotiators sought to move the Cheyenne once again, this time onto two smaller reservations in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) where they would receive annual provisions of food and supplies. Black Kettle was again among the chiefs who signed this treaty, the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, but after his people had settled on their new reservation, they did not receive the provisions they had been promised, and by year's end, more and more
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Andrew Murphy
2/3/2010 10:43:49 pm
of them were driven to join Roman Nose and his band.
In August 1868, Roman Nose led a series of raids on Kansas farms that provoked another full-scale military response. Under General Philip Sheridan, three columns of troops converged to launch a winter campaign against Cheyenne encampments, with the Seventh Cavalry commanded by George Armstrong Custer selected to take the lead. Setting out in a snowstorm, Custer followed the tracks of a small raiding party to a Cheyenne village on the Washita River, where he ordered an attack at dawn.
It was Black Kettle's village, well within the boundaries of the Cheyenne reservation and with a white flag flying above the chief's own tipi. Nonetheless, on November 27, 1868, nearly four years to the day after Sand Creek, Custer's troops charged, and this time Black Kettle could not escape: "Both the chief and his wife fell at the river bank riddled with bullets," one witness reported, "the soldiers rode right over Black Kettle and his wife and their horse as they lay dead on the ground, and their bodies were all splashed with mud by the charging soldiers." Custer later reported that an Osage guide took Black Kettle's scalp.
On the Washita, the Cheyenne's hopes of sustaining themselves as an independent people died as well; by 1869, they had been driven from the plains and confined to reservations.
My opinion on this legendary hero is that I think he is kind of a role model. He was a brave soldier who fought in the Colorado War. He had mighty fighting skills and fought for his land.
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Ruben >.<
2/3/2010 10:47:54 pm
Agreed, i believe he was a brave man who only wanted right for his family, culture, and life.
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Andrew Bates
2/3/2010 10:47:57 pm
In late summer of middle age, he was a widely recognized Chief of the Southern Cheyenne. Accompanied by Lean Bear, another leader of the Cheyenne, he had recently been to Washington and shook hands with Father Lincoln. Lean Bear and Black Kettle had been friends since they were babies; it must have blown their minds to visit the Capitol City. It is not hard to imagine them walking amidst all the bustle and building thinking,, just what are these white folks trying to do? President Lincoln presented them with pretty medals to wear and papers stating that they were good friends of the United States. But since then, things had been getting more confusing on the plains. There was talk of soldiers attacking Cheyenne. One morning Lean Bear rode out to meet the Bluecoats as they approached the Cheyenne camp on Ash Creek. He wore the medal and brought the papers to show the soldiers that he was peaceful. When he was close enough, they opened fired and killed him. Black Kettle did not understand this. He and Lean Bear tried to avoid conflicts and steered their people away from the unforseen dangers encountered through too much contact with buffalo hunters, stage roads, white man's forts and railroads. The warriors of the Southern Cheyenne, the young men who comprised the Dog Soldiers, were more attracted to leaders like Roman Nose who loved a good fight, especially if there seemed to be a noble cause. As things got crazier on the plains, indiscriminate attacks became mutual fare. The Dog Soldiers believed that they could realize their ends through armed struggle and conducted a guerrila war along the Platte, launching many bloody raids against the inexorable advance of the whites across the Great Plains. In 1864, officials in Colorado issued an ultimatum; all friendly Indians should surrender by reporting to the local forts where they would be instructed on what to do and be protected. Hostile Indians and those not complying with this form of surrender would be hunted down and killed. The soldiers who killed Lean Bear had been instructed to kill Indians, period.
On November 29, 1864, troops under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington, attacked and destroyed the Cheyenne camp of Chief Black Kettle and Chief White Antelope by Sand Creek, on the plains of eastern Colorado. Upon hearing the approaching soldiers in the early morning light, White Antelope went out to meet them. The Bluecoats raised their rifles and White Antelope sang a death song as the bullets tore through him. Black Kettle stood in the middle of the camp and raised his American flag as well as a white flag in case anyone thought the first one was just a souvenir. The previous year in Washington, Colonel Greenwood, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, had presented Black Kettle with this huge 34 star flag, saying that soldiers would not fire upon anyone standing under the Stars and Stripes. Black Kettle always mounted it above his tipi in the middle of the village when he stayed in one place for any length of time. He and the other chiefs in his camp had already declared themselves at peace and were led to believe they had done what they were told to do. They were now under the military protection of Fort Lyon. So the Chief held up the poles in the early November air and his breath condensed into mist as he called to his people and with prayerful confidence, told them not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them. Chivington's troops then opened fire from both sides of the camp, shooting directly into the crowd around Black Kettle and scattering them.
In the mid-1800s white settlers came to the West in great numbers, claiming lands where Native Americans lived. Some Indian chiefs like Crazy Horse, Geronimo and Sitting Bull led their tribes to try to stop the settlers. But Black Kettle, a Cheyenne chief, knew that the Indians would not be able to militarily defeat the white man. He tried to avoid bloodshed by urging the Indian tribes not to fight the settlers and gathered chiefs to sign peace treaties with the white leaders. As more settlers flooded into Colorado, the American government broke the treaties, demanding the Indians give up the land guaranteed in earlier treaties and live on smaller and smaller reservations. Even when one military leader broke his promise in 1864 and massacred two hundred mostly women and children in his tribe, nearly killing him as well, Chief Black Kettle continued to try to get the Cheyenne tribes to agree not to retaliate. Indians throughout the west were revolting as Indian lands were being taken everywhere with the surviving Indians forced to live on small reservations, but still Chief Black Kettle tried to find ways for Indians and white man to live peacefully. In 1868, Black Kettle's village was again attacked, this time by General Custer's troops and the chief and his wife were among those massacred. Chief Black Kettle's heroic story is a tragic reminder of how inhumane people can be and how difficult it often is to work for peace.
1st Paragraph: Not a lot of stuff is known about Cheif Black Kettle. But since he was a great fighter and honored his country, we can tell that he is a great leader.
2nd Paragraph: He lived in western Kansas and eastern Colorado. Within less than a decade, the Pikes Peak gold rush made a huge population growth in Colorado. This led to the extensive white population in the area.
3rd Paragraph: The government sought to fix the problem by making the Southern Cheyenne sign a new treaty giving up all of their land except for a small reservation in southeastern Colorado. Black Kettle signed the treaty and did what he was told.
4th Paragraph: As it turned out, the reservation that they had could not sustain the Indians to live there. There were many diseases, bad agriculture, and many people were already leaving. The people were very angry. The Indians decided to go on a raid. It was such a terrible raid that the white Colorodans dispatched their military. They open fired on the first Cheyenne band that they saw. None of the Indians in this band had participated in the raid, however, and their leader was actually approaching the militia for a parlay when the shooting began.
