Plum Creek Massacre - Reflections on the Tragedy

I recently stood at a small cemetery surrounded by Nebraska corn fields.  The modest plaque briefly explained the history of the Plum Creek Station. The day, August 7, 2014, was the 150th anniversary of a massacre of white settlers by northern plains Indians. It occurred early in what are regarded as the Indian Wars of the post-civil war period. Plum Creek is a massacre site but the story begins decades earlier.

By the early 1840s the Oregon-California Trail was a busy highway.  The Indian tribes of the plains had generally been helpful and welcoming to the trappers, traders, and travelers who traipsed across their hunting lands. Two decades later the travelers and traders had become a flood of Anglo Americans who like chickens, "wandered everywhere and roosted where they pleased."  Americans negotiated treaties promised to be respectful of Indian's way of life but broke treaties when convenient, abused natural resources like buffalo and timber, and delivered plagues of smallpox, cholera and typhoid that killed tens of thousands of Indians.

The Cheyenne, Arapaho and Sioux had been willing trading partners but as their way of life became more threatened, traditional, mostly younger warrior elements, driven by desperation, decided to fight back and formed a confederation that simultaneously attacked American interests across the Plains in an effort to drive settlers out of the areas necessary to traditional Indian livelihoods.

          Plum Creek was a tragedy.  Freight wagons were attacked by Indian warriors and their drivers killed. Then settlers at one of the small ranches along the Oregon-California Trail on the Platte River were attacked and unarmed men cutting hay in the fields were killed. A young mother and other unrelated children were taken hostage.  Because telegraph lines to Ft. Kearny were operating from nearby stations, warning of the attacks and word of their aftermath was recorded at the Army post and within weeks shameful retaliation occurred when nearly 200 mostly women and children of the Cheyenne and Arapaho settlement at Sand Creek, not part of the hostile elements responsible for Plum Creek, were massacred by the U.S. Army.

          At the little cemetery, I could only think about all the families, both Indian and white of the Nebraska prairie who, in the 1860’s desired little more than to make a life for themselves and their children.  Settlers wanted land because they did not have any other on which to produce; the Indians were trying to keep land that guaranteed their way of life. Often the greedy and powerful manipulated everyone. Eventually the economically desperate Indians conflicted with establishment and the side with the power of technology won.  It is the history of the world and repeated often by those leaders who do not understand its dynamics.  Human tragedy is always left in the wake. You can stand in a Nebraska cornfield and hear ghostly screams from long ago or turn on CNN and hear those screams only hours old from some other tragedy in the world.