The American nation is doomed to destruction,
and no power could save it.
It is decreed
that the measure which they have meted out unto the Saints
shall be meted unto them,
and they are hastening on to their work of desolation, war,
bloodshed and destruction.
And woe, woe is their doom.
The spirit of prophecy would cry, "O Lord, hasten they work.
"Let the wicked slay the wicked
until the whole land is cleansed."
Wilfred Woodruff.
DAYTON DUNCAN: Time after time,
Congress and the people in the East
saw the West as a safety valve, a place where you could go
and escape the problems of where you were.
It was part of the whole myth of the West.
You could escape and be free.
Well, we thought we could escape whatever national tensions
and unresolved problems we had,
but it came back, you know, like a big wind from the prairie,
bigger and bigger each time.
(Native American man chanting)
NARRATOR: From the beginning, the United States had envisioned
an orderly expansion into the West:
treaties were supposed to legitimize settlement;
official surveys were to map the land;
then Americans could spread peacefully across it--
all under the guidance and protection of their government.
But the California Gold Rush and the war with Mexico
changed everything.
Americans were now moving west in ever-larger numbers,
ahead of their government-- searching for new treasure,
clearing land, building towns and cities, starting over.
But the new settlers brought with them their nation's oldest
and most divisive issue-- slavery.
Once seen as the land of hope and new beginnings,
the West became a breeding ground
for the bloodshed that would eventually engulf
the whole country.
And when war finally came, the result in the West was chaos.
Hatred consumed entire communities,
criminals led armies and no one was safe.
The federal government, engaged in a struggle
simply to hold the country together,
could do nothing to stop it.
A pious New Hampshire woman who moved west hoping to keep
the region free of slavery, instead would watch
as her Kansas neighbors wantonly killed one another.
A devout Mormon who had fled west with his people
to avoid persecution would take part in the worst massacre
of innocent pioneers in American history.
A fanatical Methodist parson would transform himself
into a celebrated soldier and then try to build
a political career based on murder.
While a Cheyenne chief, who wanted nothing but peace,
would find no escape as time and again
his unsuspecting village became a battlefield.
PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK: What was supposed to be
this wonderful dream, that the West will unite
the South and the North--
the West will be the kind of new child who brings
this troubled marriage together.
The 1850s carry a different lesson entirely,
which is that this is the child that will blow up the marriage.
That's the most consequential moment of the West
for the nation.
That's where there's no question about how central the West is
to the whole story of the country.
(thunder)
(Native American man chanting)
JULIA LOUISA LOVEJOY (dramatized): A great work
is to be done, and Kansas is the great battlefield
where a mighty conflict is to be waged
with the monster slavery, and he will be routed and slain.
Amen and Amen.
Julia Louisa Lovejoy.
NARRATOR: In the spring of 1855,
the Reverend Charles H. Lovejoy of Croydon, New Hampshire,
his 43-year-old wife, Julia Louisa, and their children
crossed the Missouri River
into the newly created Kansas Territory.
There were thousands of settlers pouring in that year
to stake claims in what had recently been Indian lands.
But the Lovejoys-- and others like them from New England--
were a different kind of American pioneer,
not interested in gold, land or adventure.
They were abolitionists,
part of a grass-roots movement sweeping the North.
They were outraged that in a nation founded
on the ideal of freedom, nearly four million Americans
were still owned by other Americans.
The Lovejoys had come west,
determined to keep the soil of Kansas free from slavery.
For more than half a century,
as the United States expanded westward, Congress had quarreled
again and again over whether the new territories would be
slave or free, each time working out a fragile compromise.
DUNCAN: Every time that they thought that they had
hodge-podged something together, some new land in the West
would become available that Americans were settling,
and wanting to bring into the Union, and it kept bringing it
right back to Congress.
Well, will it be free, or slave,
and will that upset this delicate balance
that was constructed ten years ago or 20 years ago
or thirty years ago?
NARRATOR: In 1854, Congress had created two new territories--
Kansas and Nebraska--
and proposed to hold a special election
which would leave the issue of slavery
up to the settlers who lived there.
Many in Congress believed this new compromise
would hold the nation together.
Instead, it would tear it apart and the West would become
a battleground for the soul of the country.
SEN. DAVID ATCHISON (dramatized): We are playing
for a mighty stake.
The game must be played boldly.
We are organizing.
We will be compelled to shoot, burn and hang,
but the thing will soon be over.
If we win, we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.
Senator David Atchison, Missouri.
SEN. WILLIAM SEWARD (dramatized): Come on, then,
Gentlemen of the Slave States.
Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it
in behalf of the cause of freedom.
We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas,
and God give the victory
to the side which is stronger in numbers
as it is in the right.
Senator William H. Seward, New York.
LIMERICK: To hand the issue to Kansas is to ask
for the most explosive conditions possible.
To take the most unsettled kind of society and throw into that
the issue that made congressmen want to kill each other...
If you wanted to design the worst possible conditions
to dramatize how bitter these fights were,
you couldn't do better than what they designed for Kansas.
NARRATOR: On Election Day,
nearly 5,000 armed pro-slavery men,
led by Senator David Atchison, flooded in from Missouri,
trying to influence the vote and the fate of Kansas.
They seized polling places, cast four times as many ballots
as there were voters in the territory,
and installed a legislature
that made it a crime to even criticize slavery.
Their opponents, called Free Soilers, countered
with their own election.
They drew up a constitution that outlawed slavery--
though it also barred black settlement--
and then applied for admission to the Union as a free state.
Kansas now had two governments,
and its people were about to go to war with one another.
MARTIN RIDGE: Both sides were supplied from the outside.
It was almost as if a civil war were taking place
in a foreign country, with the South providing the arms,
the money and the men on one side,
and the New England,
ideologically-committed abolitionists on the other.
NARRATOR: By the fall of 1855, the Reverend and Mrs. Lovejoy
were living in the anti-slavery stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas.
Julia began writing a stream of letters
to newspapers back east.
LOVEJOY (dramatized): The greatest trouble
in this part of the Territory now
is about our Missourian neighbors,
whose hearts are set on mischief.
We are apprehending trouble if not 'hard fighting'
in our quiet community.
JOHN GIHON (dramatized): Imagine a man standing
in a pair of long boots,
the handle of a large bowie-knife projecting
from one or both boot-tops;
a leather belt buckled around his waist,
on each side of which is fastened a large revolver.
Imagine such a picture of humanity,
who can swear any given number of oaths in any specified time,
drink any quantity of bad whiskey without getting drunk,
and boast of having stolen a half dozen horses
and killed one or more abolitionists--
and you will have a pretty fair conception of a Border Ruffian,
as he appears in Missouri and in Kansas.
John H. Gihon.
NARRATOR: In the spring of 1856,
someone wounded a pro-slavery sheriff,
and 800 armed men bent on revenge stormed into Lawrence,
got drunk, destroyed two newspaper offices,
burned down the hotel and the home of the free-soil governor.
JULIA LOVEJOY: I caught my darling babe from the bed,
moaning as he went.
I rushed to a place of safety out of town
as fast as my feeble limbs could carry me.
The scene that met our gaze beggars description--
women and children fleeing on every hand,
cattle, as though aware that danger was near,
huddling together.
It will never fade from memory's vision.
NARRATOR: When Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner
denounced what he called this "Crime against Kansas,"
a South Carolina Congressman strode onto the Senate floor
and beat him senseless with a cane.
Three days later, on the night of May 24,
a strange, driven man called five unarmed settlers
whom he believed favored slavery
out of their cabins on Pottawotamie Creek.
With the help of his sons,
he hacked them to death with broadswords.
It was a war to the death
between good and evil, John Brown said.
"We must fight fire with fire."
(gunshot)
During the next three months, some 200 more men would die
in what would come to be known as "Bleeding Kansas."
JULIA LOVEJOY: August 25, 1856.
We are in the midst of war-- war of the most bloody kind--
a war of extermination.
Freedom and slavery are interlocked in deadly embrace,
and death is certain for one or the other party.
A crisis is just before us,
and only God knoweth where it will end.
Julia Louisa Lovejoy.
BRIGHAM YOUNG (dramatized): We are gathered here
to build up the Kingdom of God,
to make the wilderness blossom as the rose
and fill these mountains with cities.
My soul feels hallelujah, it exalts in God,
that He has planted this people
in a place that is not desired by the wicked.
Brigham Young.
NARRATOR: It had been ten years since Brigham Young led
his Latter-day Saints west.
And while the rest of the country wrestled
with the question of slavery,
he continued to build his Mormon kingdom in the deserts of Utah.
Salt Lake City, with nearly 10,000 residents,
was now the second-largest city west of Missouri,
eclipsed only by San Francisco.
New colonies stretched for 300 miles
along the Wasatch Mountains.
The Mormons printed their own currency,
drove federal officials out of Utah, and publicly announced
that polygamy-- plural marriage--
was part of church doctrine.
Polygamy was mostly meant for important Mormon leaders.
Brigham Young himself had 27 wives.
Young's chief lieutenant, Heber Kimball, had 43.
Most polygamists had no more than two wives,
and four out of five Mormon men had just one.
Still, the practice turned many Americans against them.
CONGRESSMAN McCLERNAND (dramatized): As to polygamy,
I charge it to be a crying evil;
sapping not only the physical constitution
of the people practicing it,
but at the same time perverting the social virtues
and morals of its victims.
It is a scarlet whore.
It is a reproach to the Christian civilization,
and it deserves to be blotted out.
Congressman John A. McClernand, Illinois.
NARRATOR: In the election of 1856,
the brand-new Republican Party ran on a platform
opposed to what they called the "twin relics of barbarism"--
slavery and polygamy.
The Republicans lost,
but the issues would not go away.
ROBERT TYLER (dramatized): Mr. President, I believe that we
can supercede the Negro-Mania
with the almost universal excitement
of an Anti-Mormon Crusade
and the pipings of Abolitionism will hardly be heard
amidst the thunders of the storm we shall raise.
Robert Tyler.
DUNCAN: And when Democrat James Buchanan won the election,
to sort of take the heat off of this building tension
over slavery, he did a very remarkable thing
that's only happened a few times in our history;
he sent an army out against citizens of the United States.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1857, 2,500 troops headed toward Utah
to reassert federal control.
At the same time the army slowly made its way west,
a lone wagon train entered
the southern part of Mormon territory.
They were settlers mostly,
families traveling with small children,
on their way to California and a better life.
But riding with them were a band of men who called themselves
the "Missouri Wildcats,"
and they were bent on causing trouble
for the Latter-day Saints.
JOHN D. LEE (dramatized): They swore and boasted openly
that Buchanan's whole army was coming right behind them
and would kill every God Damn Mormon in Utah.
They had two bulls
which they called one Heber and the other Brigham,
and whipped 'em through every town, yelling and singing
and blaspheming oaths
that would have made your hair stand on end.
John D. Lee.
NARRATOR: On September 7, 1857, the wagons reached a grassy area
called Mountain Meadows.
There, some 200 Paiute warriors, encouraged by the Mormons,
attacked.
The emigrants drove them back.
The Indians settled in for a siege, then asked the Mormons
to join them in destroying the common enemy.
Elders sent a message to Salt Lake City, asking Brigham Young
what they should do.
Young sent a courier back with orders to let the wagons go.
But before the message arrived, the Mormons at Mountain Meadows
resolved to wipe out the wagon train
and blame it on the Paiutes.
One of the men ordered to lead the fighting was John D. Lee,
a Mormon so loyal that Brigham Young himself had adopted him
as a spiritual son.
Lee was used to following church orders.
He was, as he said, "as clay in the hands of the potter"
when it came to carrying out the wishes of his elders.
But even he was stunned at what he was now being asked to do.
LEE: The orders said to decoy the emigrants
from their position and kill all of them that could talk.
This order was in writing.
I read it, and then dropped it on the ground, saying,
"I cannot do this."
I bowed myself in prayer before God
and my tortured soul was wrung nearly from my body
by the great suffering.
If I had then had a thousand worlds to command,
I would have given them freely to save that company from death.
NARRATOR: But in the end, John D. Lee decided to follow orders.
On the morning of September 11,
he rode out to the besieged wagon train
under a flag of truce.
DUNCAN: John D. Lee and some others came to them
and said, "Throw down your arms.
"We've got the Indians under control.
You come out with us, and you'll be safe."
And they were reluctant to do it, but they finally did.
And as they marched out, the order was given,
"Do your duty."
(gunshot)
NARRATOR: The Mormons opened fire, each man assigned to shoot
the emigrant walking next to him.
Lee's task was to kill the sick and wounded
riding in a wagon in front of the others.
Then the Paiutes swept in and finished off the rest.
In less than half an hour,
120 people had been butchered at Mountain Meadows.
Only 17 children were spared,
thought too young ever to tell the horrible story.
The dead were stripped of their clothing and belongings,
which the Mormons sold at auction.
They were hastily buried in shallow graves
and soon dug up again by wild animals.
STEWART UDALL: Well, I'm a great-grandson of John D. Lee.
My middle name is Lee,
and I've studied his life and his tragedies.
I will always believe that it could only have happened
at that particular moment,
that if this wagon train had come through,
as they had before, two weeks earlier, two weeks later,
they might have gone unscathed, so it's almost a Greek tragedy.
NARRATOR: Two days after the massacre,
Brigham Young's messenger finally arrived
at Mountain Meadows
with the orders to let the wagon train pass.
John D. Lee was chosen to ride to Salt Lake City
and tell Brigham Young what had happened.
Precisely how much the Mormon leader was told
of his people's role in the slaughter is unclear.
Publicly, Young blamed it all on the Paiutes.
Meanwhile, winter had stopped Buchanan's army's advance,
and the "Mormon War" ended before it really began.
In a negotiated settlement, the president pardoned Young
and his followers for inciting a rebellion,
and Young in turn resigned as governor.
But he remained in effective control of his people.
The attempt to divert the nation's attention from slavery
had failed.
Four years later, Brigham Young stopped at Mountain Meadows.
Federal troops, outraged at the massacre,
had erected a makeshift monument to those who had been murdered.
On it were the words,
"'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord,
and I will repay."
Young gazed at it for a time,
then ordered the monument torn down.
"Vengeance is mine," he muttered,
"and I have taken a little."
JUAN CORTINA (dramatized): Mexicans!
It would appear that justice had fled from this world,
leaving you to the caprice of your oppressors,
who have become each day more furious toward you.
My part is taken, the voice of revelation whispers
that the Lord will enable me, with powerful arm,
to fight against our enemies.
Juan Cortina.
NARRATOR: The treaty that ended the Mexican War in 1848
had promised all the benefits of United States citizenship
to Mexican-Americans.
But as civil war neared, the federal government proved unable
or unwilling to keep its promises.
In California, New Mexico and Texas,
many Mexican-Americans were denied the right to vote,
lost their lands in court
and often found themselves persecuted,
rather than protected, by officers of the law.
On July 13, 1859, a rancher named Juan Cortina
rode into Brownsville, Texas, to buy supplies.
He was a member of an old, landed Mexican family
that had seen its power and influence decline
with the arrival of the Americans.
On the main street, he saw the city marshall pistol-whipping
a Mexican laborer who had once worked for his family.
When the sheriff refused to stop,
Cortina shot him in the shoulder, swept the prisoner
onto the back of his horse and rode off with him.
A little over two months later, with some 75 armed followers,
he rode into town again, freed 12 prisoners from jail,
seized arms and ammunition,
and shot dead three Americans whom he said
had killed Mexicans while the law looked the other way.
Then, Cortina returned to his ranch and issued a proclamation.
CORTINA: When the State of Texas became part of the Union,
flocks of vampires, in the guise of men,
came with corrupt hearts and the most perverse intentions.
Because your industry excited their vile avarice,
many of you Mexicans have been robbed of your property,
incarcerated, murdered and hunted like wild beasts.
Mexicans!
Is there no remedy for you?
NARRATOR: For several months, despite constant pursuit
by American settlers and Mexican national guardsmen,
Cortina and his men held onto the lower Rio Grande valley.
Sympathetic Mexicans on both sides of the border
secretly provided them with food and supplies.
"Our personal enemies," Cortina vowed,
"shall not possess our lands until they have fattened it
with their gore."
Finally, the state militia, known as the Texas Rangers,
was sent against him.
RICARDO ROMO: Well, Juan Cortina, he was their hero.
To the individuals who were the small ranchers and so forth,
he was the only one that was able to stand up and say,
"You're taking our land and now you take away our dignity,
"and now you mistreat us, you push us around.
We've had it."
The Texas Rangers didn't allow anyone to rise up
as the champion of the people.
When you took on the law, you usually got lynched
in that border region.
And that's exactly what they had intended for him,
just to catch him and lynch him as sort of an example
of how you don't defy the new government.
NARRATOR: The Rangers, now backed by federal troops,
pursued Cortina's men to Rio Grande City
and closed in for the kill.
COLONEL FORD (dramatized): Cortina was the last
to leave the field.
He faced his pursuers, emptied his revolver
and tried to halt his panic-stricken men.
One shot struck the cantle of his saddle,
one cut a lock of hair from his head,
a third cut his bridle rein,
a fourth passed through his horse's ear,
and a fifth struck his belt.
But he galloped off unhurt.
Colonel J. S. Ford.
NARRATOR: Cortina fled across the Rio Grande.
For another 15 years, he and others continued to launch raids
on American settlers
and steal Texas cattle.
The border region remained a "no-man's-land."
As his legend grew, Anglos denounced Cortina
as a murderous rebel,
but to Mexican-Americans he was
"the Robin Hood of the Rio Grande."
ROMO: My grandfather talked about him
and my uncle claims him as a relative,
and I was sort of struck by that.
To every family he was part of us in one way or another.
His legend is passed on.
His life lives on.
JULIA LOVEJOY: Our New England friends
may wonder that the warlike spirit
has taken such hold upon those who, until they came to Kansas,
were as complete pacifists as the most orthodox Quaker.
But sir, such individuals only need a little Kansas experience
to understand the matter.
Julia Louisa Lovejoy.
NARRATOR: On October 16, 1859,
John Brown brought his Kansas brand of abolitionism
east to Harper's Ferry, Virginia,
where he tried to start a slave rebellion.
Ten people were killed.
Brown was captured, tried and sentenced to hang.
As he was led to the gallows, he handed a guard a slip of paper.
"I am now quite certain," it read,
"that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away
but by blood."
The whole country was now beginning to experience the fear
that had gripped Kansas for so long.
In 1860, the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln
was elected president,
pledged to halt slavery's further spread in the West.
One by one, southern slave states left the Union.
And on April 12, 1861, rebel guns fired on Fort Sumter.
The Civil War that had already begun in the West
now exploded in the East.
(gunshots)
MAN (dramatized): July 15, 1861, washday in camp.
We went to Dempsey's ranch after two cows
and borrowed a small fragment of a newspaper
that Tolman and Jackson brought
from Fort Owen on the Bitter Root.
Bad news from the states.
The North and South are fighting.
NARRATOR: In Colorado, regiments of Union volunteers
were recruited to protect the rich mining districts
from the Confederates.
One of the first to step forward
was a big, bearish Methodist minister
named John M. Chivington.
He was six and a half feet tall, weighed 250 pounds,
and sometimes delivered sermons
with a revolver resting on the pulpit.
Chivington, one acquaintance in Denver said,
"is a crazy preacher who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte."
Offered a chaplain's commission, Chivington refused.
He wanted to fight for the Union, he said,
not just pray for it.
Meanwhile, in January of 1862,
a confident rebel army of 3,500 soldiers had marched west
out of Texas into New Mexico, where it defeated Union forces
at Valverde, seized Albuquerque,
plundered Santa Fe and moved north toward Colorado.
Their plan was to capture Denver
and the Rocky Mountain gold fields,
then sweep all the way west to take California
and its mother lode of mineral wealth.
Their motto was "On to San Francisco,"
but they hadn't counted on Chivington.
ALVIN JOSEPHY: Here's this army of Texans thinking they can live
off the land and they move through New Mexico territory
winning their battles, and they get up there
to northern New Mexico and they have no idea
that there's another army coming at them.
NARRATOR: Chivington was now a major
with the 1st Colorado Volunteers,
hard-drinking miners, eager for a fight.
They had marched 40 miles a day through ice and snow
and freezing winds to stop the Texans.
They met in a place called Apache Canyon.
Chivington sent some of his men scurrying up the canyon sides.
"They were up on the walls on both sides of us,"
one Confederate remembered, "shooting us down like sheep."
Then Chivington himself led the charge.
OVANDO HOLLISTER (dramatized): Major Chivington
with a pistol in each hand
chawed his lips with only less energy
than he gave his orders.
Of commanding presence, dressed in full regimentals,
he was a conspicuous mark for the Texan sharpshooters.
But as if possessed of a charmed life, he galloped unhurt
through the storm of bullets.
Ovando J. Hollister.
NARRATOR: The rebels fell back.
The two armies met two days later at Glorieta Pass,
and for five bloody hours they slammed away at each other
amidst the boulders.
But while the battle raged on, Chivington and some of his men
slipped 16 miles behind the Confederate lines,
to a cliff that overlooked the Texans' supply wagons.
There, they lowered themselves by ropes, drove off the guards,
burned 85 wagons filled with provisions
and bayoneted 500 horses and mules.
The Confederates, who had seemed so close to victory,
now faced starvation and thirst, as well as a hostile enemy.
JOSEPHY: And they had to turn around and retreat,
get out of there.
And they panicked.
There they were, hundreds of miles from their base
in San Antonio in Texas.
Nothing but deserts and mountains between them
and their homes.
NARRATOR: Columns got lost.
Boots wore out.
Men had to stagger through searing sand in bare feet.
Soldiers abandoned their weapons,
collapsed from exhaustion, dehydration, sunstroke.
3,500 men had marched out of Texas
to conquer the Southwest.
1,500 of them never returned.
The dream of a Confederate West was dead.
Glorieta Pass would become known
as "the Gettsyburg of the West."
And John Chivington-- the "fighting Parson"--
was a Union hero.
JULIA LOVEJOY: Baldwin City, Kansas, Oct. 8, 1862.
Our camp meeting in this place was a glorious success.
Reverend Chivington, who with his command
has accomplished such wonders of late in New Mexico,
was present and preached from the stand in his regimentals.
His persuasive eloquence, and clear, ringing stentorian voice
swayed the multitude like a Western tornado,
as it bends its massive oaks.
The work of God is still going on.
Julia Louisa Lovejoy.
DUNCAN: The federal government really didn't have
much of a grasp and control of the West before the Civil War.
But once the war started, they were concentrating
on all those battles in the East,
and whatever control they had, they lost it entirely.
RICHARD WHITE: The Civil War does create more of a vacuum
in the West.
And the result is there's going to be far more violence.
It's going to be far harder to mediate things.
Things are going to be much more out of control in the 1860s
than they ever would have been otherwise.
NARRATOR: By the summer of 1863,
the North seemed to be winning the Civil War.
Robert E. Lee's advance into Pennsylvania had been stopped
at Gettysburg,
and Ulysses S. Grant had split the Confederacy in two
by taking the Mississippi River town of Vicksburg.
Yet for all the fighting back east,
there had been few civilian casualties.
In the West, it was a very different war.
LOVEJOY: Guerrilla parties are making dreadful slaughter
upon the Union men in Missouri
and stealing and destroying their property.
The entire route across the State
bears the marks of the ravages of war.
Anarchy reigns in Missouri.
Julia Louisa Lovejoy.
NARRATOR: In Kansas and Missouri, both sides waged
relentless guerrilla warfare on innocent civilians,
as well as rival armies.
Union forces were led by James H. Lane,
a cadaverous former senator from Kansas
who wanted to see pro-slavery Missourians
"cast into a burning hell."
He did his best to do just that,
haunting the trail of rebel armies, ravaging the homes
of anyone who dared help them,
then sacking and burning whole towns.
Confederate guerrillas responded in kind.
Their most celebrated leader was a former schoolteacher from Ohio
with limitless enthusiasm for looting and killing
named William Quantrill.
Union farmers, he warned, should not bother to plant crops;
they would not live to harvest them.
And he swore he would burn Jim Lane at the stake.
And of course, if you're a guerrilla fighter
and you fight under the flag of the Confederacy,
they impart to you legitimacy.
From the Union point of view, these were sheer criminals.
NARRATOR: One of Quantrill's raiders was
an accused horse thief known as "Bloody Bill" Anderson.
He wore a necklace of Yankee scalps into battle,
laughed as unarmed prisoners were gunned down,
then ordered his men to mutilate their corpses.
"I will kill you,"
he wrote to the readers of one anti-slavery newspaper.
"I will hunt you down like wolves and murder you."
On the morning of August 21, 1863,
Quantrill, Anderson and 450 men
rode towards the anti-slavery stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas,
home of Jim Lane.
With her husband serving in the Union army,
Julia Louisa Lovejoy and her children now lived
in a little house just outside of town.
LOVEJOY: At an early hour Friday morning,
I rushed out and I could then see
every house this side of Lawrence,
with a volume of dense smoke arising from them
as they advanced, firing every house in their march of death.
NARRATOR: The raiders surrounded a downtown hotel.
A guest hung a white sheet from the window
and asked Quantrill what he wanted.
"Plunder!" he answered.
The guests were ordered out and robbed.
The hotel was set afire.
Quantrill, waving two of the six pistols he carried,
rose in his stirrups and shouted, "Kill! Kill!
"Lawrence must be cleansed,
and the only way to cleanse it is to kill!"
Then, while Quantrill demanded that the terrified staff
of another hotel cook him a big breakfast,
Anderson and his men began to carry out Quantrill's orders.
(gunshots)
LOVEJOY: All the business houses, banks, stores
in the city were robbed and burned save one,
and most of the businessmen killed.
Mrs. Reed put out the fire six times to save her house,
and they would fire it anew,
but she, by almost superhuman exertion, saved it.
One lady threw her arms around her husband
and begged of them to spare his life.
They rested the pistol on her arm as it was around his body
and shot him dead,
and the fire from the pistol burnt the sleeve of her dress.
NARRATOR: 183 men and boys were killed--
fewer than 20 had been soldiers--
and 185 homes were burned
before Quantrill and his men rode out of Lawrence,
leaving behind 80 widows, 250 fatherless children.
Jim Lane, the principal target of the raid,
had managed to escape through a cornfield in his nightshirt.
LOVEJOY: The fires were still glowing in the cellars.
Here and there among the embers could be seen the bones
of those who had perished.
The sickening odor of burned flesh was oppressive.
NARRATOR: To avenge the Lawrence Massacre,
Federal troops forced from their homes every man, woman and child
living in three Missouri border counties and half of a fourth.
They drove thousands of people onto the open prairie,
while Union guerrillas followed in their wake,
burning and looting the empty houses they left behind,
raiding the refugee columns, stealing even wedding rings.
LOVEJOY: The very air seems charged
with blood and death.
Pandemonium itself seems to have broken loose
and death runs riot over the country.
NARRATOR: During the course of the Civil War,
no civilians would suffer more
than the people of Kansas and Missouri.
SAM CLEMENS (dramatized): We jumped into the stage,
the driver cracked his whip and we bowled away
and left "the States" behind us.
There was a freshness and breeziness
and an exhilarating sense of emancipation
that almost made us feel that the years we had spent
in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving,
had been wasted and thrown away.
Sam Clemens.
NARRATOR: Back in the spring of 1861,
24-year-old Sam Clemens and his elder brother left Missouri
for the newly created Nevada Territory.
Two weeks in the Confederate militia had convinced Sam
that he was not cut out for combat.
Like thousands of other young men, North and South,
he preferred to go west rather than to war.
And so he skedaddled.
CLEMENS: Ham and eggs and scenery,
a "down grade," a flying coach,
a fragrant pipe and a contented heart.
It is what all the ages have struggled for.
NARRATOR: They made eight to ten miles an hour
through an unbroken sea of grass.
A pony express rider galloped past.
Coyotes howled.
They saw buffalo, encountered their first Indians,
talked with a real-life outlaw.
Sam Clemens loved it all.
It took them 20 days to reach Carson City, the small town
that was the capital of Nevada Territory.
CLEMENS: Dear Mother,
Our city lies in the midst of a desert
of the purest, most unadulterated
and uncompromising sand-- in which infernal soil
nothing but the fag-end of vegetable creation,
"sage-brush," is mean enough to grow.
Nevada Territory is fabulously rich in gold, silver, lead,
coal, iron, quicksilver,
thieves, murderers, desperadoes,
lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen, Spaniards, gamblers,
sharpers, coyotes, poets, preachers and jackass rabbits.
NARRATOR: Still, there was little to do in Carson City,
so Clemens set out on his own.
CLEMENS: By and by I was smitten with silver fever.
"Prospecting parties" were leaving for the mountains
every day.
Plainly this was the road to fortune.
NARRATOR: He spent six months with three partners
in a ten-by-twelve-foot cabin, panning, digging, drinking,
going more and more heavily into debt.
CLEMENS: We were stark mad with excitement,
drunk with happiness,
smothered under mountains of prospective wealth,
arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions
who knew not our marvelous canyon,
but our credit was not good at the grocer's.
NARRATOR: Clemens would later boast that he became
a multimillionaire for just ten days
until 14 armed men jumped his claim.
Next he tried his luck in Virginia City, Nevada.
It was a tiny mining town that had grown
to a full-fledged industrial city in less than two years.
15,000 people lived there.
They had put in gas lights, built stock exchanges,
three theaters, four churches and 42 saloons.
And there was a newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.
Sam Clemens talked himself into a job as a reporter.
CLEMENS: Dear Mother...
I have just heard five pistol shots down the street.
As such things are in my line, I will go and see about it.
P.S. The pistol did its work well.
One man, a Jackson County, Missourian,
shot two of my friends (police officers) through the heart.
Both died within three minutes.
Murderer's name is John Campbell.
NARRATOR: Soon, he was covering everything from Indian attacks
to theatrical performances,
always in his own distinctive style.
"I have had a 'call' to literature of a low order--
i.e., humorous," he told his mother.
"It is nothing to be proud of but it is my strongest suit."
In the West, while sitting out the war, Sam Clemens had found
a new calling.
And he began to sign his articles
with a new name, "Mark Twain."
CLEMENS: It is by the goodness of God
that in our country we have
those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech,
freedom of conscience
and the prudence never to practice either of them.
SWEET MEDICINE (dramatized): Listen to me carefully
and truthfully follow up my instructions.
You chiefs are peacemakers.
Though your son might be killed in front of your tepee,
you should take a peace pipe and smoke.
Then you would be an honest chief.
Sweet Medicine.
HENRIETTA MANN: A peace chief assumed the role of a father
to all members of the tribe.
He was selected because of his goodness, his generosity,
his bravery, his courage,
his concern for the well-being of others.
He never acquired wealth for himself.
He acquired wealth to give to those less fortunate.
So that you got a father, a spiritual leader,
a true servant of the people-- a person that had to live
a morally upright life in every respect.
NARRATOR: One of the most respected peace chiefs
of the southern Cheyenne was Black Kettle.
As a young man, he had proved himself as a warrior.
Now, he had come to believe
that maintaining peace with the whites was the best way
for his people to survive.
In 1861, Black Kettle and other peace chiefs had signed a treaty
and agreed to move onto a small reservation along Sand Creek,
southeast of Denver.
But the reservation was empty of game.
Whites trespassed on it.
Some Cheyenne were reduced to begging settlers for food.
Soon, even Black Kettle left for the old hunting grounds.
And young Cheyenne warriors began attacking stage coaches
and destroying outlying ranches.
BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL: The young men's exuberance
sometimes would get out of hand
and some of the old chiefs just simply couldn't control them.
You have to remember that before the coming of the white soldiers
and before the reservation days, boys had a way to become men.
And the way boys became men was
through proving themselves in hunt
or proving themselves in battle.
And so, when things began to change
and some of the old chiefs began to go the peaceful way and say,
"We can't keep on with this.
"We've got to find a peaceful way of resolving differences"
and so on, sometimes the young men felt left out.
They felt that they were being denied manhood.
MAN (dramatized): The Denver Commonwealth, June 15, 1864.
The bodies were brought to town this morning.
It was a most solemn sight indeed
to see the mutilated corpses
stretched in the stiffness of death, upon that wagon-bed.
The general remark of the hundreds of spectators
was that those that perpetrate
such unnatural, brutal butchery as this
ought to be hunted to the farthest bounds
of these broad plains and burned at the stake alive.
NARRATOR: The governor of Colorado Territory
asked Washington for troops, but with the Civil War still raging,
there were none to spare.
He then called for civilian volunteers
and hundreds signed up.
In command once again would be the fighting parson--
John Chivington, the hero of Glorieta Pass.
Now a Colonel, he burned with political ambition
and saw a winning issue in ridding his region
of its Indians.
Meanwhile, an old trader named William Bent
desperately tried to make peace.
He had been living among the Cheyenne
for nearly four decades;
four of his children had Cheyenne mothers.
He told Chivington that the chiefs wanted to be friendly.
Chivington replied that he was not authorized to make peace.
In September of 1864,
Black Kettle and six other Cheyenne chiefs
came to Fort Weld, near Denver, to talk.
As evidence of their good faith, they brought with them
four white captives they had ransomed from other bands.
BLACK KETTLE (dramatized): We have been traveling
through a cloud;
the sky has been dark ever since the war began.
We want to take good tidings home to our people,
that they may sleep in peace.
I want all the chiefs of the soldiers here
to understand that we are for peace
and that we have made peace,
that we may not be mistaken for enemies.
Black Kettle.
NARRATOR: When Black Kettle agreed to return to Sand Creek,
on the reservation,
regular Army officers led him to believe
his people would be safe.
But Chivington was not an officer in the regular Army.
His new command, the Third Colorado volunteers,
had yet to fight a major battle.
Scornful Denver newspapers were calling them
"the Bloodless Third,"
and their enlistments were about to run out.
One way or another, Chivington was determined to have his war.
At dawn on November 29, 1864, he and 700 men reached the edge
of Black Kettle's camp on the banks of Sand Creek.
Many of them were drunk from the whiskey they had swallowed
to warm them during an icy all-night ride.
One of William Bent's sons, Robert,
was riding with Chivington,
commandeered at gunpoint to show the way to the Cheyenne camp.
Bent's other children-- Charles, Julia and George--
were all inside the camp.
Some regular army officers protested
that to attack the peaceable village would betray
the army's pledge of safety.
Chivington ignored them.
"Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians," he said.
"Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice."
He ordered the attack.
GEORGE BENT (dramatized): From down the creek,
a large body of troops was advancing at a rapid trot.
In the camps, all was confusion and noise--
men, women and children rushing out of the lodges
partly dressed;
women and children screaming at the sight of the troops;
men running back into the lodges for their arms.
Black Kettle had a large American flag tied
to the end of a long lodgepole and kept calling out
not to be frightened--
that the camp was under protection
and there was no danger.
Then suddenly the troops opened fire
on this mass of men, women and children
and all began to scatter and run.
White Antelope, when he saw the soldiers shooting
into the lodges, made up his mind not to live any longer.
He stood in front of his lodge with his arms folded
across his breast, singing the death-song:
"Nothing lives long," he sang,
"only the earth and the mountains."
George Bent.
MAJOR SCOTT ANTHONY (dramatized): I never saw
more bravery displayed by any set of people
on the face of the earth than by these Indians.
They would charge on the whole company singly,
determined to kill someone before being killed themselves.
We, of course, took no prisoners.
BENT: After the firing,
the warriors put the squaws and children together
and surrounded them to protect them.
I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter.
When the troops came up to them, they ran out
and showed their persons to let the soldiers know
they were squaws and begged for mercy,
but the soldiers shot them all.
(gunshots)
Robert Bent.
MANN: My great-grandmother was in the band of Black Kettle
when they were attacked.
There's one little child that was walking up the creek bed,
and there was a soldier there that was using the little boy
as target practice.
He took one shot, aimed, missed him.
A second came along, tried and missed him, and a third said,
"Let me kill the little devil," and the little boy dropped dead.
You had pregnant women whose bodies were being cut open
and the fetuses being taken from them.
The private body parts of men and women were cut from them,
and some of them used as saddle horns, hat bands,
tobacco pouches,
and put on public display in Denver City
in such a way that you would begin to ask,
"Who is savage in this case?"
It certainly was not the Cheyenne.
NARRATOR: When the killing stopped, nearly 200 Cheyenne,
most of them women and children, lay dead at Sand Creek.
Black Kettle was among those who had managed to get away.
Regular Army officers were appalled
by what Chivington's volunteers had done.
General Grant himself privately declared the massacre
nothing less than murder.
The Congress and the Army
launched separate investigations.
MAN: The Committee on the Conduct of the War:
As to Colonel Chivington, your committee can hardly find
fitting terms to describe his conduct.
Wearing the uniform of the United States, which should be
the emblem of justice and humanity,
he deliberately planned and executed a foul
and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced
the veriest savage among those
who were the victims of his cruelty.
NARRATOR: But by the time the tribunals reached their verdict,
Chivington was a civilian again
and beyond the reach of military justice.
In the end, no one was ever punished.
Nor did Chivington ever admit he had done anything wrong.
Speaking before a reunion of Colorado pioneers
nearly 20 years later, he declared,
"I stand by Sand Creek."
BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL: One time I went
to the Sand Creek site years ago to put a sign up
to commemorate where that massacre happened.
And I was alone there.
It was about six in the morning, just as the sun was coming up.
And it was very, very quiet, and I swear I heard babies crying.
And it was such a strong emotional experience for me,
I left there.
But I've talked to several of my cousins who have also gone there
really early in the morning.
They say the same thing.
NARRATOR: All of William Bent's children
had survived the massacre.
Robert, who had been forced to show Chivington the way
to Black Kettle's village, testified against him.
Charles joined the Dog Soldiers,
the society made up of the Cheyennes' most feared warriors,
and went on a rampage of torture and killing.
All whites, he now believed, were his enemy.
He even tried to kill his own father.
HENRIETTA MANN: After the massacre,
there were many Cheyennes that wanted to take revenge
and join the Lakota and conduct raids along the Platte.
Black Kettle instead chose to take his band south,
into safer territory.
BLACK KETTLE: Although wrongs have
been done me, I live in hopes.
I have not got two hearts.
I once thought that I was the only man that persevered
to be the friend of the white man, but since they have come
and cleaned out our lodges, horses, and everything else,
it is hard for me to believe white men anymore.
Black Kettle.
SAM WATKINS (dramatized): America has no North, no South,
no East, no West.
The sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains.
The compass just points up and down,
and we can laugh now at the absurd notion
of there being a North and a South.
We are one and undivided.
Sam Watkins.
NARRATOR: On April 9, 1865,
four bloody years of Civil War finally ended
when Robert E. Lee surrendered his army
at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia.
JULIA LOVEJOY: Baldwin City, the state of Kansas.
Mr. Editor:
Towns are starting up as by magic all along the valley
and the sound of the hammer is heard on every hand.
I wish to say to our friends in New Hampshire, one and all,
we have never regretted coming to Kansas.
We have never wavered, never flinched,
not even when three times in 24 hours we were compelled to flee
from our house.
I tell you all, though we have felt the horrors of war,
if we were not in Kansas already, we would come
as soon as steam could bring us.
Yours respectfully, Julia Louisa Lovejoy.
NARRATOR: The newly reunited nation now turned its attention
to the West as never before.
Hundreds of thousands of settlers,
many of them war veterans,
rushed west to start new lives.
WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN (dramatized): At the end
of the Civil War, most of the troops were mustered out,
nearly a million strong, vigorous men
who had imbibed the somewhat erratic habits of the soldier.
They naturally looked for new homes to the great west.
These men flocked to the Plains
and were stimulated by the danger of an Indian war.
William Tecumseh Sherman.
NARRATOR: In the winter of 1866, troops of the 18th Infantry--
the regular army unit that had suffered more casualties
than any other in the Civil War--
occupied a brand-new post in Dakota Territory
called Fort Phil Kearny.
But a Lakota leader named Red Cloud and other warriors
were determined to drive the soldiers away.
RED CLOUD (dramatized): Whose voice was first sounded
on this land?
The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows.
When the white man comes in my country
he leaves a trail of blood behind him.
I have two mountains in that country.
I want the Great Father to make no roads through them.
Red Cloud.
NARRATOR: Four days before Christmas,
the Lakota and their allies attacked a wagon train
bringing firewood back to the post.
Many inside the fort feared for their lives,
but a 33-year-old lieutenant named William J. Fetterman
saw his chance.
He asked to lead a rescue mission.
"Give me 80 good men," he boasted,
"and I can ride through the whole Sioux nation."
N. SCOTT MOMADAY: Fetterman went out with 80 men
and there's a ridge just near.
You can see the top, you can see it there, from the fort.
And his commanding officer, Carrington, gave him orders
not to go beyond that ridge.
What happened was that the Indians under Red Cloud
had amassed 2,000 soldiers on the other side of the ridge.
They were all hidden in gullies and ravines,
the Sioux, the Arapahoe, and the Cheyenne.
And from these three groups,
two men were chosen from each to be decoys.
This is a very dangerous, but a very honorable thing.
So the decoys rode up on the ridge in sight of the fort.
NARRATOR: The Indians began taunting Fetterman
from horseback, even getting off their ponies
and adjusting their bridles
despite the army bullets buzzing all around them.
When they raced over the ridge,
Fetterman hurried in pursuit... and disappeared.
MRS. FRANCES DRUMMOND (dramatized): A few shots
were heard, followed up by increasing rapidity.
A desperate fight was going on in the valley below the ridge,
in the very place where the command was forbidden to go.
Then followed a few quick volleys, then scattering shots,
and then, dead silence.
Less than half an hour had passed,
and the silence was dreadful.
Mrs. Frances Drummond.
NARRATOR: A nervous search party found Fetterman and his command
late that afternoon.
They were all dead.
JOHN GUTHRIE (dramatized): We packed them
on top of the ammunition boxes in the wagons.
Could not tell Cavalry from the Infantry.
All dead bodies stripped naked, crushed skulls, with war clubs,
ears, nose and legs had been cut off,
scalps torn away and the bodies pierced with bullets and arrows,
wrists, feet and ankles leaving each attached by a tendon.
We walked on their internals
and did not know it in the high grass.
Picked them up-- that is, their internals.
Did not know the soldier they belonged to,
so you see the cavalry man got an infantry man's guts
and an infantry man got a cavalry man's guts.
Private John Guthrie.
MOMADAY: There was a bugler whose name was Adolf Metzger,
and he was pinned down, and he expended all of his ammunition,
and then he took his bugle
and started fighting with it fiercely.
And his body was the only one that was not defiled there.
And indeed, the Indians placed a buffalo cloak over it,
because he fought with such bravery.
And they paid him homage for that.
WOMAN: The ladies clustered
in Mrs. Wan's cabin as night drew on.
All speechless from absolute stagnation and terror.
Then the crunching of wagon wheels startled us to our feet.
The gates opened.
Wagons were slowly driven within,
bearing their dead, the precious harvest from the field of blood,
and carrying the lifeless bodies to the hospital.
The heartrending news, almost tenderly whispered
by the soldiers themselves, that no more were to come in.
PHILIP SHERIDAN (dramatized): Dear General Sherman,
In taking the offensive,
I have to select that season when I can catch the fiends;
and if a village is attacked and women and children killed,
the responsibility is not with the soldiers,
but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack.
General Philip Sheridan.
SHERMAN: Dear General Sheridan,
I will back you with my whole authority.
I will say nothing and do nothing to restrain our troops
from doing what they deem proper on the spot
and will allow no mere vague general charges of cruelty
and inhumanity to tie their hands,
but will use all the powers confided to me
to the end that these Indians, the enemies of our race
and of our civilization,
shall not again be able to begin and carry out
their barbarous warfare.
General William Tecumseh Sherman.
NARRATOR: For three years, the federal government wavered
between a policy of negotiation or war
with the Indians of the Plains.
But in 1868, the problem was turned over
to two of the men whose military strategy had brought
the South to its knees.
During the Civil War,
Philip Sheridan had so thoroughly stripped
the bountiful Shenandoah Valley, he liked to claim
that a crow wishing to fly over the valley
had to carry its own rations.
And William Tecumseh Sherman had cut a swath
from Atlanta to the sea, leaving the blackened chimneys
of hundreds of homes
as testimony to the effectiveness of his methods.
Together, they would try to do to the Indians
what they had done to the South.
And they would start with the Cheyenne on the southern Plains.
The campaign they devised would be waged in the winter,
when the Indians were most vulnerable.
It called for three separate columns to force the Cheyenne
back onto their reservation.
The soldier meant to do the real fighting
was Sheridan's favorite officer,
one of the Union's most celebrated generals--
George Armstrong Custer,
who had built his reputation leading daring cavalry charges
against the Confederates.
Custer leaped at the chance.
EDWARD S. GODFREY (dramatized): November 23, 1868.
Reveille at 3 o'clock.
Snowed all night and still snowing very heavily.
Daylight found us on the march.
All landmarks were invisible.
Then General Custer, with compass in hand, took the lead
and became our guide.
Second Lieutenant Edward S. Godfrey, 7th Cavalry.
NARRATOR: Custer drove his men relentlessly, until one night
his Indian scouts reported they had found a Cheyenne village
of some 50 lodges.
He ordered his men to prepare for a dawn attack,
though he didn't know how many Indians were there
or whose village it was.
As it happened, it was Black Kettle's.
He and his band were now encamped
along the banks of the Washita River in what is now Oklahoma.
A white flag flew above his tepee.
BLACK KETTLE (dramatized): I have always done my best
to keep my young men quiet, but some will not listen,
and since the fighting began,
I have not been able to keep them all at home.
But we want peace, and I would be glad to move all my people
down this way.
I could then keep them all quietly near camp.
Black Kettle.
NARRATOR: Some of his young men had slipped away
to steal livestock and raid settlers.
There were four white captives being held in the village.
It was the pony tracks of one of the war parties that had led
Custer's scouts to the edge of the camp.
November 27, 1868, dawned.
Two days short of the fourth anniversary
of the slaughter at Sand Creek.
HENRIETTA MANN: My great-grandmother
was among about 400 individuals that followed Black Kettle
and were camped along the Washita,
when the soldiers came in from the four directions
to the tune of the military band playing "Garry Owen"
on such a bitterly cold morning that the instruments of the men
froze to their lips as they went about the slaughter.
NARRATOR: Custer and more than 600 soldiers
charged through Black Kettle's camp.
KATE BIGHEAD (dramatized): It was early in the morning
when the soldiers began the shooting.
All of us jumped from our beds,
and all of us started running to get away.
I was barefooted, as were almost all of the others.
Kate Bighead.
NARRATOR: The killing went on for half an hour.
The survivors hid in the tall grass.
MANN: My great-grandmother escaped, again, fortunately,
but Black Kettle and his wife did not.
He brought his pony up alongside of her and told her
to get behind him.
She climbed up behind him
and as they started to ride across the Washita,
were killed.
He died fighting for what he believed in; that was peace.
NARRATOR: In the spring, the last Cheyenne holdouts
from the relentless winter campaign began to surrender.
One band was led by a chief named Rock Forehead.
Custer decided to try to talk him into giving up
rather than risk an attack.
He entered the village with only an interpreter
and was taken to the chief's tepee.
There, seated under the sacred arrows,
the Cheyennes' most honored and powerful medicine,
the Indians passed along a ceremonial pipe
for Custer to smoke.
He told them if they returned to the reservation,
no one would be harmed and peace would be restored.
Eventually, Rock Forehead would agree to give up.
But on that day,
he was not convinced that Custer was trustworthy.
And he tapped out the pipe's ashes on the general's boots,
to bring Custer bad luck and to drive home a warning.
KATE BIGHEAD (dramatized): They told him then
that if ever afterward he should break that peace promise
and should fight the Cheyennes,
the Everywhere Spirit surely would cause him to be killed.