Silas Soule died for refusing to whitewash the Sand Creek Massacre. His actions are more relevant than ever.

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On a windswept day exactly 161 years after his murder, Silas Soule’s white marble headstone attracts few visitors. A small bouquet of artificial flowers adds a splash of color that sets this marker apart from the rows of other military graves, while a couple of patriotic pins lie in the dust at its base. 

By evening, someone has added an unopened can of Coors. 

The date the 26-year-old Soule died — April 23 — doesn’t draw nearly as many people to this section of Denver’s Riverside Cemetery as some other days. In October or November, the annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run brings a crowd to honor the Army officer shot to death in 1865, only a few months after he told Congress the truth about the Nov. 29, 1864 slaughter of about 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mostly older adults, women and children. 

On or around July 26, a minister often marks Soule’s birthday by setting up a lawn chair beneath an umbrella and reading his historic letters aloud, including the one that chronicles his refusal to follow orders from Col. John Chivington, a Methodist minister turned Army officer, to attack the peaceful encampment.

But on any day, Soule can stir introspection.

“A lot of times I’ll drive up behind somebody, and they’ll be standing there with their hands in their pockets, just staring at his grave, kind of contemplating life,” says Mike Warner, general manager of the cemetery just north of downtown. “But some people obviously want to talk and chitchat about him. They leave coins sometimes on his headstone. He gets flowers, especially around Memorial Day. Last year, he got plates of food.”

As Coloradans observe the 150th anniversary of statehood and 250th of the nation’s founding, the figure of Silas Soule once again looms large — primarily for the role he played in pushing back against the instigators of a particularly dark day in territorial history. But Soule also will be remembered for courage that outlived his assassination on the streets of downtown Denver, and for bending what began as Sand Creek’s tragically flawed historical account back toward truth.

His significance has gathered momentum, especially in the last quarter-century, and echoed across the years. 

• Copies of Soule’s correspondence were discovered around 2000, when a Denver-area resident found them among family documents stored in a trunk. Those letters proved instrumental in establishing the location of the massacre as a National Historic Site. Last October, a distant relative of Soule’s donated the originals to the Denver Public Library.

• The controversial “On Guard” statue of a Union soldier at the state Capitol — on which Soule’s name is included among those who kept the territory out of the hands of the Confederacy — was amended in 2002 to clarify that Sand Creek was, in fact, not among the battles fought in the Civil War era, but a massacre. (And in the course of social justice protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the statue was toppled.) 

• In 2010, History Colorado placed a plaque marking the location of Soule’s assassination on a building at 15th and Arapahoe streets. And in 2014, then-Gov. John Hickenlooper issued an official apology to the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes — 150 years after the Sand Creek atrocity.

• The History Colorado Center opened a new Sand Creek exhibit in 2022, assembled with extensive tribal input. The role of Silas Soule figures prominently. And in 2023, federal officials officially renamed Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky, a nod to Cheyenne and Arapaho cultures while erasing territorial governor John Evans for his influence on the Sand Creek Massacre. One of the finalists: Mount Soule.

“There’s just been, I think, a growing recognition of the tragedy and the state’s role in it for decades now,” says Jason Hanson, chief creative officer and director of interpretation and research at History Colorado. “And these were each steps along the way. And as that recognition has grown and become more widely appreciated, Soule’s role at Sand Creek has also become more known.” 

Letters that changed history

Soule’s correspondence, including letters from Lt. Joseph Cramer, a fellow officer in the Colorado Volunteers who also refused to attack the encampment, had far-reaching effects. It triggered two federal investigations and provided a record that kept the horrific events of that day from settling softly into history as simply another battle of the Western Indian wars.

Revelations about the Sand Creek Massacre stood as a stumbling block to Colorado statehood, along with territorial efforts at the time to disenfranchise Black men, who’d had voting rights since 1861. Even though President Abraham Lincoln was trying to fast-track the process to add state and shore up political support at the time, Colorado’s push for statehood wouldn’t find traction for another decade. 

“Counterfactual history is always treacherous,” says William Convery, a former Colorado state historian who spent years with History Colorado and now works as director of research for the Minnesota Historical Society. “But it’s possible that Sand Creek could have been swept under the rug, that the outrageous lies that John Chivington said about what happened there — that they killed 600 Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors — might have stuck. And it could have been a nonissue in terms of Colorado statehood. 

“But once the knowledge of what really happened at Sand Creek became public,” he adds, “Colorado was going to have a very difficult time becoming a state until it cleaned up its act.”

Little wonder that Soule, though remembered in a Rocky Mountain News account of his well-attended funeral for “good discipline and moral courage,” had powerful enemies. It seems likely that his murder could have been retaliation for his actions surrounding Sand Creek. A suspect was arrested but later escaped and the crime went unpunished. 

So while Soule’s story may be having a moment, especially as the state’s sesquicentennial celebration invites Coloradans to turn their gaze to the past, it’s worth noting that, from a historical perspective, he probably remains underappreciated.

“And that’s not by accident,” Hanson points out. “There was a concerted campaign to try and discredit and erase him from our memories.”

Newspaper clippings from the Rocky Mountain News, founded in 1859 by unabashed civic booster and editor William Byers, tell an unvarnished story. 

On the first anniversary of the massacre, the paper lamented that the soldiers “who on that occasion bore arms in our defense have been villified, slandered and maligned” while insisting that “these men, true to every instinct of patriotism, nobly acquitted themselves.”

In 1865, a November headline trumpeted an election-year “Soldier’s Sand Creek Vindication Ticket” of candidates. Even after the turn of the century, the paper reported that the “heroes” of Sand Creek held a reunion, camping out on the prairie described as “the site of the struggle.”

And that “On Guard” statue? The report of its unveiling in 1909, published 44 years to the day after Soule was murdered, featured an accompanying account of Sand Creek from an officer who allowed that, “The men did not go to take prisoners; they were all determined to give the Indians a taste of their own medicine …”

By then, Convery notes, what he calls the “John Chivington school of interpretation” had become the prevailing storyline — that what the soldiers had done at Sand Creek was necessary to protect settlements and, essentially, create Colorado. Additionally, the “pioneer generation” had begun to die off and wanted to be remembered for their hardships and sacrifices, and to secure a place in history as heroes.

“So that meant taking what I believe to be fuzzy memories of the circumstances and really playing up the danger and the threat that many pioneers of the time felt that the Cheyenne and Arapaho communities represented,” Convery says. “Talking about the sacrifice and the duty of Colorado soldiers to establish the state, and to preserve it for the Union, sort of overwhelmed the story of the moral atrocity that took place.”

But in 1995, in an editorial under the headline “Siding with the killers,” the Rocky Mountain News offered something like a historical mea culpa for its failures more than a century earlier, during the run-up to Sand Creek and afterward. It noted that defenders of Byers had argued that he was “merely a man of his time in his lust to clear the plains.”

The editorial also pointed out that other men of their time recognized Chivington’s attack for what it was — the “cold-blooded murder of a largely defenseless village.”

Men like Silas Soule.

A connection and a journey

In the summer of 1983, a 37-year-old community college teacher named Byron Strom and his family boarded the Amtrak train south of their home in Des Moines for a trip to visit relatives in California. They stopped in Denver along the way and Strom, the great-great nephew of Silas Soule, made a sightseeing trip to the state Capitol.

There, he first saw the statue of the Union soldier honoring the Civil War-era men of the 1st Colorado Cavalry. Soule was among those memorialized. His inclusion sparked Strom’s interest in that significant slice of family history.

“I knew about Silas, but I didn’t know very much,” Strom says. “When I saw that marker on the front steps of the Capitol, that’s the place where I started my searches, and started asking questions.”

He eventually found Soule’s grave at Riverside, and as the headstones grew weathered or damaged and needed to be replaced, he asked if he could have one of the discarded markers, which he placed on family farm property he inherited south of Manhattan, Kansas. 

Strom had become much more fluent in family history by 2003, when he learned about the Sand Creek Spiritual Healing Run, the annual 173-mile event from the Sand Creek site near Eads to downtown Denver. Launched by Arapaho and Cheyenne descendants in 1999 to commemorate those who died in the massacre, the run for the first time would include a stop to pay respects at Soule’s grave at Riverside Cemetery. 

Strom attended the ceremony, and carried with him a copy of perhaps the most significant of Soule’s letters — the Dec. 14, 1864, correspondence directed to Maj. Edward Wynkoop. When Strom arrived at Riverside, Otto Braided Hair, a Northern Cheyenne tribal leader, made a request.

“This was not planned, you understand,” Strom recalls. “He asked me to read this letter that describes the terrible atrocities that were happening to these Indians — I mean, in stark terms. And I did that, feeling very uncomfortable.”

It’s not difficult to imagine Strom’s discomfort. The letter spares few details, from the horrific acts of that day to the backlash Soule faced when he rejected the plan to slaughter innocents. 

But Strom stood and read the document, which in the immediate wake of the massacre had helped blow an ear-splitting whistle on the actions of Chivington and his soldiers that would eventually resound in the halls of Congress.

It recounts how Soule, having learned of Chivington’s plan to attack the peaceful encampment at Sand Creek, told other officers at Fort Lyon “that any man who would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch.” When his remarks were relayed to Chivington and others, Soule wrote, “you can bet hell was to pay in camp.”

Soule wrote that he told another officer he “would not take part in their intended murder, but if they were going after the Sioux, Kiowa’s or any fighting Indians, I would go as far as any of them. They said that was what they were going for, and I joined them. We arrived at Black Kettles and Left Hand’s Camp at daylight.” 

But when Chivington gave the order to attack, Soule immediately saw the plan for what it was. Both he and Lt. Joseph Cramer, a former gold seeker-turned-officer with the Colorado Volunteers, refused the order. Much of the rest of Soule’s letter to Wynkoop bears witness to the atrocity. 

“You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there,” he wrote, “but every word I have told you is the truth, which they do not deny.”

When Strom finished reading, he nearly cried as the Cheyenne and Arapaho women lined up before him and, each in succession, embraced him. It’s a traditional tribal gesture to show care, concern and respect, especially during a time of mourning. 

The memory still stirs emotions.

“That was quite an eye-opening time for me,” he says.

“It’s necessary for us to hear”

When Otto Braided Hair, a descendant of Sand Creek survivors, first saw Soule’s letter to Wynkoop and tried to read it, he recalls that its unfathomable truth stopped him again and again. 

“It probably took me a whole year or more to read the whole letter,” he says. “I just couldn’t imagine that there was somebody out there that would kill grandmas and grandpas and kids and women like that — and babies. Still, there’s no rhyme or reason, even today, even after this long. Why would somebody go to that extent? Evilness. Evilness.”

And yet, he asked that the letter be read aloud that day — as well as at subsequent gatherings at Soule’s grave over the last 20 years or so — fully understanding how difficult a story it is to tell. And how much harder a story it is to hear.

“It’s necessary,” Braided Hair says. “It’s necessary for us to hear that, and for all people to hear that, because it’s the truth, and it’s something that was almost forgotten.”

By his estimation, if both Soule’s and Cramer’s soldiers had joined the attack on the “chiefs’ camp,” there may have been few, if any, survivors as the Cheyenne and Arapaho desperately tried to elude or outrun the slaughter. He allows that he might not be here himself if not for Soule refusing his orders, setting an example that influenced other well-trained, veteran units. 

“He should be everybody’s hero,” he says of Soule. “Respecting life shouldn’t depend on what color an individual is or where they’re from. A human is a human. So for that reason, he’s heroic.”

As Strom considered his distant relative’s letters, feeling their weight, he  inevitably tried to imagine himself in Soule’s position. He wondered whether he would have that kind of moral courage, under similar circumstances, to do the right thing. And gradually, over the years, the exceptional nature of Soule’s actions sank in — not just his refusal at Sand Creek, but also his short lifetime largely devoted to the abolitionist movement.

“To do the kinds of things he did when he was 18, 19, 20, fighting there in Kansas, moving slaves up into Lawrence, chasing after bushwhackers, all of those kinds of things,” Strom says, “that’s just out of my league.”

A short, impactful life

Mount Prospect Cemetery, later renamed Denver City Cemetery, stood as Denver’s primary burial ground through the latter half of the 19th century, accommodating everyone from paupers to smallpox victims to military veterans. Silas Soule was buried there in a section dedicated to soldiers. 

Technically it was federal land. But the city pushed Congress to redesignate the 160-acre parcel as park land, which it did in 1890. That launched a massive transfer of the dead to Riverside Cemetery. Allegations of abuse of corpses and thousands of bodies left behind tainted the undertaking — circumstances that eventually gave rise to the ghost tours on the present-day sites of Cheesman Park and the Denver Botanic Gardens.

The veterans were moved en masse to Riverside, once a tree-filled setting but ravaged over the years by disease, drought and loss of water rights. Today, manager Warner notes, the cemetery is “embracing our prairie,” his euphemism for the parched, almost treeless landscape of dirt, weeds and native grass.

Still, many historically significant Coloradans are buried here, including Augusta Tabor, philanthropist and wife of silver baron Horace Tabor; Clara Brown, the Black pioneering philanthropist dubbed “Angel of the Rockies”; and John Evans, the territorial governor and superintendent of Indian Affairs who, while he had no part in the planning or execution, has been determined by some studies to have “helped create a situation that made the Sand Creek Massacre possible.”   

“But Silas Soule,” Warner says, “I get the most people asking about him, for sure.”

Born in Maine to strict abolitionist parents, Soule moved with them to Kansas in the 1850s. By age 16, he’d acted as a conductor in the Underground Railroad, doing the dangerous work of guiding escaped slaves to safety. He fought as what was known as a Jayhawker in guerrilla warfare against pro-slavery forces from Missouri. He considered himself an ally of John Brown, and after the abolitionist’s execution in 1859, participated in a dangerous though failed attempt to rescue two of his followers at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.

He also famously corresponded with the poet Walt Whitman. 

But Soule was also a soldier. After a brief foray into the gold fields in the Pikes Peak region, he joined the Army and served with the Colorado 1st Regiment of Voluntary Infantry under the command of Chivington — with whom he fought invading Confederate forces and heroically turned them back at Glorietta Pass in New Mexico.

Chivington promoted him to captain when the regiment was converted to a cavalry unit. Soule dealt with Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs during peace talks, including the Fort Lyon negotiations attended by the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle and the Arapaho chief Left Hand that had produced a truce. His presence and understanding of the tribes’ intentions ultimately informed his decision to refuse the attack order at Sand Creek. 

As he made clear in his correspondence, he had no issue with fighting warriors from combative tribes. But he would not kill innocents.

The backlash to his choice proved severe. Though the federal inquiry into Sand Creek came to little action — Chivington’s success at Glorietta Pass served as a firewall to prosecution —  it did effectively derail his political career. His antipathy for Soule was well known.

Soule wasn’t blind to the danger, and repeatedly predicted his own death.

Three weeks after marrying Hersa Coberly, the daughter of a prominent saloon owner, and less than three months after his testimony at the military inquiry, Soule had left the Army to put Sand Creek behind him. He was working as a provost marshal, a kind of military policeman, in Denver. While walking home with his wife on an April night, gunshots lured him toward a city alleyway near what’s now 15th and Arapahoe streets.

After sending Hersa home, Soule soon found himself the target of an ambush. He fired and injured one attacker, but the return fire, from Charles Squier, struck him in the head and killed him. Speculation swirled that the assailants, who had both served under Chivington, may have acted at his direction. But nothing was proven, and Squier later escaped from custody. Soule’s killer was never brought to justice.

After Soule’s historical role reemerged in the 2000s, the possibility of a memorial near the site of his death gained momentum. Northern Cheyenne tribal leaders like Steve Brady Sr. and LaForce Lonebear wanted something substantial, like a statue. But Convery, then working for History Colorado and exploring the options, recalls that discussions with the city were complicated by a possible competing memorial for a family that had been struck and killed by a vehicle at that intersection. 

Thinking the negotiation could drag on for years, Convery approached managers of a building at the location and directly broached the idea of a small memorial plaque. They quickly agreed, and in 2010 it was installed. Though disappointed that nothing more was done, tribal leaders attended the unveiling. And each year, the Healing Run visits the site after paying respects at Soule’s grave at Riverside.

“I never thought that that would necessarily preclude a longer conversation about a bigger memorial (for Soule),” Convery says, “but I felt that this was sort of the politics of the possible at the moment. In the end, he gave his life for his principles, and I think his example stands out for us today in our current political climate.”

Otto Braided Hair notes that while the current priority is completion of a Sand Creek memorial sculpture later this year at the state Capitol, the importance of a more substantial commemoration of Soule remains an objective.

“I still want to see that,” he says. “It’s trying to carry out what Steve and LaForce and others wanted.”

“I take rituals very seriously”

Nancy Niero initially encountered Silas Soule on her first day working at the Colorado Historical Society in the mid-1990s. She remembers descending a staircase and seeing his portrait positioned next to a tepee. The image of a young man in his Civil War-era uniform reminded her of a young Ron Howard, the actor and director.

She asked who Silas Soule was and heard a compelling synopsis: He disobeyed orders at the Sand Creek Massacre, wrote a letter that forced a congressional inquiry and then was assassinated for speaking truth to power.

From that moment on, he kept popping up in her life. When she worked as a historic preservationist at Riverside Cemetery, there he was. When she attended seminary at the Iliff School of Theology, he surfaced again as the subject of multiple independent study projects — a biography, a theological construction and a social justice play built around him.

She figured that would be the end of it. But when she returned to school in 2019 for her doctorate of ministry, she found him (or, she allows, perhaps he found her) once again — this time as she worked on her thesis around racial justice.

Now, as an ordained clergywoman in the United Church of Christ, racial justice theologian, and  author, Rev. Dr. Nancy Niero marvels at how someone from the past can “make such a profound connection in lots of different ways. It’s been a journey.”

For many years, around his July 26 birthday, she has read aloud the entire collection of Soule’s letters at his grave. Despite moving to the Pacific Northwest, she continues to honor that commitment, and has planned this summer’s observance for 9 a.m. on July 25. It takes her about two and a half hours to read the letters.

“I take rituals very seriously,” Niero says, “and I wasn’t going to let a move get in the way of me continuing to show up on that day, for whoever gathers with me. It’s a very public event, because it’s a public cemetery, and so people bring chairs, water bottles, umbrellas. It’s quite the thing.”

Her fascination and regard for Soule resulted in what she terms “a divine intervention moment” that prompted her to write a book, “Witness at Sand Creek: The Life and Letters of Silas Soule.” Niero paired a personal essay with each of 25 letters Soule wrote from 1860 to 1865, and also combines historical detail that adds to what she describes as “a contemporary call to moral clarity.” 

Niero recently sent a copy of her book to the Aurora office of Colorado’s U.S. Rep. Jason Crow. He, along with five other Democratic lawmakers with military or intelligence backgrounds, produced a video last November titled “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” advising members of the military to follow their oath to the Constitution and refuse unlawful orders. The Justice Department’s attempt to indict Crow and the others for their remarks failed.

“I was captured by that video,” Niero says, “but I’ve also been sitting with how we get to the place where we understand an order is illegal. And does it begin with: Is it immoral?”

Crow, who grew up in Wisconsin before migrating to Colorado, didn’t learn about Soule until shortly after the controversial video, when he read an article that drew the contemporary parallel.

“Obviously it’s not lost on me, the comparisons,” Crow said, noting not only Soule’s refusal to follow unlawful orders and the consequences, but also how history has treated him. 

In April, Crow spoke to students at Harvard University about what he termed a “new American patriotism” that can bring people together, protect democracy and ensure leaders’ accountability.

More broadly, he says, there’s a need to “rebalance the net rhetoric” between rights and responsibilities.

“Deciding to take a stand on principle when you go against those around you is one of the hardest things you can do, and that requires a tremendous amount of courage,” Crow says. “And I think this current moment in our politics right now shows maybe more than anything else, what we’re lacking is not necessarily an understanding of what the right thing to do is, but courage by folks to do it.”

Strom, now 79, has long been aware of the fraught nature of Soule’s decision to defy orders. As a Vietnam veteran, he recalls the My Lai Massacre of 1968, and the helicopter pilot who intervened and reported the murder of villagers — and felt backlash before eventually being awarded the highest citation for bravery not involving direct contact with the enemy. 

The modern accounting of Silas Soule, the sea change that has cast him now as a man of moral conviction, owes much to the way social justice movements have steered the nation toward a more expansive view of history, says Convery, the former state historian. He points to the Civil Rights Movement and parallel recognition of Native American and Chicano rights as igniting a historical reconsideration and a resolve to include voices previously silenced.

“These movements,” he says, “all taking place at the same time, really brought these marginalized voices back to say, ‘Hey, we need to reassess what was seen as a heroic westward expansion, a peaceful westward expansion, and see it for what it really was.’”

Chris Tall Bear, a Sand Creek Massacre descendant and Sand Creek Massacre Memorial Committee member representing the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, agrees with that assessment and describes Soule as “a vital counternarrative to the ‘war exploits’ and colonialist rhetoric that often sanitize our shared past.”

“​While Colonel Chivington weaponized religious nationalism to justify a massacre,” Tall Bear wrote in an email, “Soule understood that true duty is bound by the laws of humanity, not just the commands of a superior. By ordering his men to hold their fire while a peaceful village was decimated, he did more than save lives; he preserved the integrity of the law against a tide of state-sanctioned annihilation.”

Hearing the echoes of those fraught circumstances in our more recent past makes Soule’s courage feel “strikingly contemporary,” he adds. Today he hears some equate that kind of courage with a lack of loyalty. 

“Soule reminds us that the military’s soul is found in its conscience, not its kill count,” Tall Bear wrote. “He was a whistleblower who sacrificed his life to ensure the truth of Sand Creek could never be buried by the ‘Great American’ myth.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.