It's good that they have agreed to rename this popular peak to recognize the Cheyenne and Arapaho people who lived in that region. As usual, a little history lesson may help people understand what happened and why it was so contemptible to name this peak for someone who instigated such a heinous massacre of peaceful people.

First I will post a first-hand account of the massacre from a letter written by a courageous officer who held his men back and did not participate in the slaughter, Captain Silas Soule [0].

As noted in the post above, Capt. Soule was murdered a few months after giving testimony against Col Chivington and others involved in the massacre. His murderer(s) though known, were never punished.

One name you see mentioned in his letter is George Bent. George was the mixed race (Cheyenne mother/Anglo father) son of William Bent who along with his brother Charles and a French-Canadian trapper Ceran St. Vrain established Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe trail. [1] These men established a trading empire where anyone could procure supplies to outfit their expeditions whether they were Anglo, Mexican, or Native American. It was a frontier hub and the Bents were well-known all over the region. A little of George Bent's life is related in this link [2]. You can visit Bent's Fort today if you are in the area and it is worth the effort.

Black Kettle, [3] the Southern Cheyenne chief who thought that he had negotiated a plan for his people to live in peace, escaped this massacre at Sand Creek only to die in the massacre of Southern Cheyenne people in Oklahoma at the Battle of the Washita River, or the Washita Massacre [4], conducted by Lt. Col. George A. Custer's 7th US Cavalry in 1868.

This massacre of Black Kettle and his people followed by Custer's 1874 violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie which established the protected area of the Black Hills in perpetuity where no whites could settle. These acts against the tribes kept Custer in native eyes as a sworn enemy and in 1876 when he was cornered with his men of the 7th Cavalry at the Greasy Grass [5] (known by Anglos as Little Bighorn [6]) in Montana, allowed the assembled tribes (Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho) to take their revenge as they left no survivors from his troop. This was a fitting end for a narcissist who saw slaughtering Native Americans as an easy path to personal fame and fortune.

One of the most disgusting things about the Sand Creek Massacre is mentioned in Soule's letter, the fact that the soldiers under Chivington spent the afternoon of the day of the massacre and the following day mutilating the bodies of those they had massacred and they wore those body parts proudly on their hats and belts as souvenirs when they paraded triumphantly through the streets on their return. This account gives a little more detail taken from survivor and witness accounts of the massacre and the aftermath. [7] The three-part series of which it is the second part fills in a lot of details about this event and is worth reading for context.

Man's inhumanity to other men should not be commemorated by naming peaks after those who inspire or commit mass murder. Changing the name of this peak does not undo any of the terrible history but, in the same way that we do not name terrestrial features or streets after school shooters or other mass murderers, it may help put Evans and those inspired to violence by him back into the most fetid, rancid part of history's dustbin by erasing his name.

The location of the Sand Creek Massacre was finally found and can be visited today [8]. It is near the town of Eads, Colorado, a area where years ago I briefly worked with a wheat-whacking crew. Since the original site was lost to history, it took a significant collaborative effort between the National Park Service and tribal historians to locate the site so that boundaries could be defined for it. This was completed between 1998-2000 and the National Historic Site designated in 2007.[9]

[0] https://www.nps.gov/sand/learn/historyculture/the-life-of-si...

[1] https://www.nps.gov/beol/learn/historyculture/index.htm

[2] https://history.denverlibrary.org/colorado-biographies/georg...

[3] https://history.denverlibrary.org/colorado-biographies/black...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Washita_River]

[5] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2020/06/the-battle-of-greasy-grass...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn

[7] https://www.denverlibrary.org/blog/cultural-inclusivity-rese...

[8] https://www.nps.gov/sand/index.htm

[9] https://www.nps.gov/articles/searching-for-sand-creek.htm