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Many of our schools offer classes in Colorado history,
but it might be more instructive if there were courses in
Colorado mythology,
since people seem to pay more
attention to the legends than the facts.
For instance, in this part of the state, it's hard to go
more than a few miles without encountering some reference
to Alferd Packer, the only man in American history to be
convicted of cannibalism.
And there was the judge who
sentenced him with You voracious man-eating son of a
bitch, there was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you
ate five of them.
In truth, Judge Melville B. Gerry told Packer to
close your ears to the blandishments of hope. Listen not
to the flattering promises of life, but prepare for the
dread certainty of death.
And Packer was never
convicted of cannibalism, because cannibalism has never
been a crime in Colorado.
Like many Colorado myths, this one is harmless and it appears to bolster the tourist trade along the Packer corridor: Lake City, Gunnison, Saguache and Cañon City.
But not all myths are like that. One of the most
persistent is that the Cheyenne and Arapaho inhabited the
Great Plains of Colorado for many generations. It comes up
every so often in the marketing material for various New
Age therapeutic sites near Boulder (for centuries, the
Cheyenne and Arapaho considered this a sacred place
),
and last week it surfaced in a proposal to establish a
reservation and build a casino near Interstate 70 east of
Denver.
The Arapaho and Cheyenne have tribal branches with
headquarters in Oklahoma, and the joint tribal council said
it had a claim to 27 million acres of Colorado, part of
their ancestral lands.
Their map ran from Julesberg
and La Junta west to Steamboat Springs and Gunnison.
Two questions arise: How long were the Cheyenne and Arapaho in present-day Colorado? When they were here, what was their territory?
The earliest Spanish and American accounts, bolstered by archeology, show that in the 18th century, the Utes lived in the mountains, from the Front Range on west. There were also Jicarilla Apache in the southern San Luis Valley, and Shoshone in the northwest.
Out on the plains, the Apache had almost everything north of the Arkansas, although there were some Pawnee along the Republican River. South of the Arkansas, the Comanche held sway. That is confirmed by the 1779 journal of Gen. Juan Bautista de Anza, who defeated the Comanche near Pueblo that year.
In 1806, Capt. Zebulon M. Pike led an American expedition across the Colorado plains. He encountered Pawnee and Comanche, but no Arapaho or Cheyenne.
At about that time, though, the Arapaho and Cheyenne began moving into Colorado. Both tribes were originally from the western Great Lakes area, but had been pushed southwest. As they moved west, they displaced the Pawnee and Comanche -- usually by fighting.
Their fighting was not confined to the plains; they often ventured into the mountains, and there were many battles between them and the Utes -- who also ventured out onto the plains for some hunting and a good fight every now and again.
A Ute history book would portray the Cheyenne and Arapaho as violent invaders trying to dispossess the Utes of their ancestral Colorado homeland.
The moral claim of the Cheyenne and Arapaho to any part of Colorado is pretty much the same as the American claim -- the land was taken by force from other people who were there first. And by the time the Cheyenne and Arapaho arrived in the early 1800s, there were already white folks wandering around what would become Colorado.
As for the legal claim, the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie assigned the Cheyenne and Arapaho a big chunk of territory: the land between the North Platte and the Arkansas rivers, with the mountains forming the west boundary.
Denver now sits on that territory. But after the gold rush of 1859, there came the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise. The Cheyenne and Arapaho ended up with a 600-square-mile reservation near the Arkansas River at a place called Sand Creek. They were attacked there in November of 1864; the Sand Creek Massacre ignited three years of hard war on the Plains. In the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, the Cheyenne and Arapaho formally ceded any claims to Colorado and moved to Oklahoma. Not everyone went then; there were major plains battles at Beecher Island and Summit Springs in 1868 and '69.
At any rate, their legal claim would depend on which treaty you deemed valid, and even at that, no treaty was as expansive as the claim now being put forward.
But why bother with the facts when mythology can expand your acreage?
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