The morning had already started to bake the cemetery’s dusty ground when the Rev. Dr. Nancy Niero, in shorts and a sleeveless clerical shirt and collar beneath a green baseball cap, unfolded her chair and leaned a framed portrait of Silas Soule against a headstone.
While about two dozen listeners gathered around her, standing, sitting on blankets or folding chairs while fending off the sun with umbrellas, she began reading a series of letters. They’re the collected correspondence of Soule, the Army captain who in 1864 famously defied the orders of Col. John Chivington to attack a peaceful encampment of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek, where soldiers killed about 230 people, mostly elders, women and children.
Soule’s testimony before Congress about the atrocities that took place during what the military sought to cast as a “battle” literally spoke truth to power and corrected the historical record. For Niero, the letters reflect the life and moral courage of a man who died at just 26, less than a year after he blew the whistle on what now is recognized as the Sand Creek Massacre.
And they also have formed the foundation for years of research and examination — as well as her annual visit to Soule’s grave at Denver’s historic Riverside Cemetery. Although she relocated from Denver to the Pacific Northwest, she returned for what has, for about 10 years, become an annual rite.
“The story never changes, but the community that comes together does bring themselves into this ritual,” Niero said. “And I think that’s such a part of the enduring nature of it for me. There are people here who have had Silas in their lives for a while and had never been here before, had never heard the letters read.
“Some years,” she said, “there’d be two or three people. It’s very organic.”
This year, Niero read from a bound text — her book “Witness at Sand Creek: The Life and Letters of Silas Soule,” which was published last year. She began a little before 9:30 a.m. with a letter that reflected Soule’s roots in the abolitionist movement, a cause dear to his mother and father and which he also shared, long before his heroism at Sand Creek.
She concluded around 12:30 p.m., counting the conversations struck up after she’d finished reading the letters. Visitors came and went, some retreating to their cars to cool off from the blistering heat.
“Everything was wonderful, in spite of the heat, in spite of being outdoors on a very hot, hot day,” Niero said, noting temperatures that reached well into the 90s. “We connected with lots of young people who were there, and with their parents, and lots of families.”
Jacob Rowe, who teaches history at Denver’s Northfield High School, had visited the gravesite a couple of other times. Once he learned about Soule, he began reading more and concluded that his legacy was never fully appreciated.
“I mean, I ask my colleagues, and no one knows who he is,” Rowe said. “He’s kind of been forgotten, and sadly so. I think he’s due for a revival.”
Rowe and his wife, Margaret Horton, brought along their 1-year-old son — Silas Rowe — whose birthday — July 23 — falls just three days before Soule’s.
“We had a couple of names in mind, but we landed on that one,” Rowe said. “And then we read more about Silas Soule and hoped he could keep the spirit of Silas alive.”
Soule’s role in Colorado history has gained momentum, and relevance, over the last few decades. The discovery of his original letters and a reckoning over the historical account of the Sand Creek Massacre contributed to that. So did, most recently, a political conflict that erupted when six Democratic lawmakers, including military veteran and Colorado U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, produced a video advising members of the military to follow their oath to the Constitution and refuse unlawful orders — a move that carried echoes of Soule’s moral stand at Sand Creek.
The event Saturday also drew first-year elementary school teacher Mira Houck, whose fourth-grade class at McElwain Elementary in the Adams-12 district delves into Colorado history. Houck, who grew up in the Thornton area, first learned about Soule from her mentor while she did her student teaching in Grand Junction.
As a result, she says, she became “fixated” on Sand Creek and particularly Soule’s role.
She had already planned to drop off flowers at the gravesite on Soule’s birthday — she had saved the date in her calendar — but when she learned of the graveside event, she brought her mom, dad and brother along with her to the cemetery. And afterward, they visited the historical marker at the downtown Denver intersection, 15th and Arapahoe streets, where Soule was assassinated.
This past school year she even created an award named for Soule, among several that she handed out to students before summer break.
“It’s given to a student who really does the right thing when nobody’s watching, or does the right thing even when it’s difficult,” Houck said. “Because I feel like Silas Soule really embodied that.”
The white marble headstone among rows honoring soldiers from as far back as the 19th century ranks among the more visited locations at Riverside. Soule’s grave, often adorned by visitors with anything from flags to food to unopened cans of beer, attracts a bit of attention around the April 23 date of his death. In the fall, usually November, the Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run generates a more robust gathering at the site to honor Soule.
On Saturday, Soule’s marker featured an American flag and other patriotic trappings. Two small stones had been placed on top — a traditional Jewish gesture of remembrance and respect.
Niero always schedules her reading on or around Soule’s July 26 birthday. This year she also worked in appearances before various local groups to talk about her book, in which Soule’s letters from 1860-1865 serve as the scaffolding for essays and personal accounts of the research that took her to several locations from his past.
(The Sun’s book section, SunLit, featured the book with an excerpt and author Q&A last week.)
Niero’s interest in Soule was triggered in the early 1990s, on the first day of her job with what was then the Colorado History Museum. She recalls seeing his portrait — she thought he looked like a younger version of the present day actor and director Ron Howard — and asking one of her new coworkers who he was.
That marked the start of a recurring intersection with Soule’s legacy. When she left the museum to work as a historic preservationist at Riverside, she discovered his final resting place. Later, when she attended the Iliff School of Theology, she made him the subject for no fewer than four independent study projects: a biography, a theological construction and a social justice play that she wrote and, as a separate project, performed.
Soule wasn’t done with her. When Niero went back to school in 2019 to pursue a doctorate of ministry, she built her dissertation around Soule and the broader topic of racial justice. When she pitched her dissertation to a publisher, she also happened to mention details about Soule’s backstory.
The publisher turned down the dissertation, but launched her on the book that became “Witness at Sand Creek.” Niero calls it “divine intervention.”
One of Soule’s descendants, great-great nephew Byron Strom, attended Saturday’s reading after traveling from his home in Iowa to participate in a panel discussion on Soule. As people arrived at the cemetery and struck up conversations, Strom found another, much more distant relative — Denver librarian Jackie Composanto.
“I was looking through this genealogy book that we had in the family, and I was researching different people in it,” Composanto said. “And eventually I got to him. So to find out that there was someone broadly in the family who was part of that was a big deal.”
The Rev. Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, a United Methodist minister from Minneapolis, had connected with Niero via Zoom during an adult education class that was reading her book. At the height of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge in her city, Soule’s story and moral clarity struck a chord.
She flew to Denver, rented a car and visited the Sand Creek Massacre site on the Eastern Plains on Friday before arriving at Saturday’s event.
“Nancy’s a storyteller, a natural,” Victorin-Vangerud said. “She’s able to communicate Silas’s story through his letters in ways that connect with today and are really still with us, and we can learn from him.”
Soule’s remains didn’t always reside at Riverside. After his death in 1865, he was interred at Mount Prospect Cemetery, later known as Denver City Cemetery, in an area that’s now Cheesman Park and the Denver Botanic Gardens. When the land was redesigned as park land in 1890, a massive project to transfer remains to the Riverside location began.
The transfer was beset by allegations of abused and abandoned remains. But many of the veterans buried at Mount Prospect were moved en masse to the section of Riverside dedicated to the military, while many other significant figures from Colorado history — silver baron Horace Tabor, pioneering Black philanthropist Clara Brown and territorial governor John Evans, to name a few.
For years, the cemetery by the South Platte River stood as a heavily wooded sanctuary before losing water rights in 2001. Saturday’s observers of Nieto’s ritual reading watched from a mostly barren, treeless portion of the cemetery, in the shadow of the raised light rail tracks that run alongside its eastern edge.
But they came for the words, and the remembrance, more than the landscape.
“The breadth of every year, the community who gathers changes, but that is so part of the enriching part of ritual, right?” Niero said. “We all return back and bring something of ourselves to it, and that changes everything when we gather together every year.”