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Listener note this episode contains references to violence and harm to children. Listener discretion is advised. It's November 29, 1864, high on the windswept plains of eastern Colorado. A Native American chief, White Antelope of the Southern Cheyenne, sits slumped behind a boulder, bleeding. In the distance, he can hear the terrified screams of his people as they are gunned down by the United States Army's howitzers. He can hear the murder of fleeing women and children. He loads his weapon and prepares to defend against the coming onslaught. Earlier that morning, as dawn broke over the prairie, some 700 U.S. army soldiers rode into White Antelope's village on the banks of Sand Creek in southeast Colorado and started shooting. They claimed it was in retaliation for recent attacks on white settlers in the area, but that was a mere excuse. White Antelope knows the men were thirsty for Native the slaughter was frenzied and indiscriminate. Sand Creek is home mainly to women and children, and the soldiers dragged those innocents from their teepees and butchered them like animals. Survivors attempted to flee up the dry creek bed, led by White Antelope and several other tribal leaders. The few warriors that remained stayed behind to fight, but ill equipped and unprepared, these warriors were quickly overpowered by the soldiers, who mutilated their dead bodies. Then they turned to those fleeing up the creek. As the hoofbeats of the soldiers horses grew louder and louder, White Antelope told the others to go on without him. He stayed sheltered behind a boulder and began shooting into the cavalry's irrepressible charge. But then a bullet struck him, and White Antelope's last stand came to an abrupt end. Now the chief struggles to reload his weapon, but the pain's too great. He drops his rifle and slumps over in the dust, his blood soaking into the soil. Soon a figure looms over him, blotting out the sun, a soldier in a blue uniform. He raises his rifle.
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An estimated 150 Native Americans from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes are massacred at.
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Sand Creek, a third of them women and children. When word of the attack reaches the east, an outraged President Abraham Lincoln will publicly condemn the attackers and strip them of their military rank for the survivors, though this is not punishment enough. They will spread news of the atrocity.