This peaceful spot by a creek in present-day Ness County, Kansas, was once a winter village location for generations of Plains tribes.

The burning of a village here in 1867 would spark years of open war and forever change life on the Great Plains.

Well today at Cottonwood Ranch we have Dr. Leo Oliva here and we're going to talk about the burning of a Cheyenne and Sioux Village in April of 1867.

We have an annual event for the Fort Larned Old Guard.

We call it the annual Mess and Muster program and this last April we met part of the day at the village site and had a couple of speakers there and people were able to walk around the site and see what's there.

The theme of our Mess and Muster this year was Rediscovering History and one of the things that we have over in the Fort Larned Museum is this original order issued by General Winfield Hancock.

The order reads Special Field Orders number 13, "As a punishment for the bad faith practiced by the Cheyenne and Sioux who occupied the Indian village at this place and as a chastisement for murder and depredations committed since the arrival of the command at this point by the people of those tribes, the village recently occupied by them which is now in our hands will be entirely destroyed."

So that is the order that was issued by Hancock that led to the burning of the village and a war that lasted more than two years as a result of burning the village of a peaceful camp of Lakota and Cheyenne.

That village site is located in present Ness County.

That's where the Cheyenne dog soldiers moved their village in November of 1866 for their winter camp.

This site with the water and trees and grazing had been a winter camp they found later for at least the indigenous Americans for 400 years or longer.

But this was their winter camp and they were joined there in March of 1867 with a group of Lakota.

Together there were about 300 lodges and an estimated 1500 people living in this village.

For a number of years nobody knew exactly where that site was located and Earl Monger, an amateur archeologist quite talented by the way and George Elmore who was at Fort Larned, the ranger there, they decided 1973 or 74 they were going to try to find this site.

I had studied quite a bit through the history.

I was a student of Dr. Oliva's and of course I knew about the Hancock expedition.

A lot of people living around Burdett said they found artifacts, Indian things.

There was a guy there that even found a cavalry bit.

What we decided to do was start at Burdett and basically talk to the landowners and see if they let us walk the village and if it looked likely do a little shovel testing to see if we could find any artifacts.

In that process they did find some other Indian sites from earlier periods but they didn't find what they were looking for.

We finally got almost to the site after summer or two of walking and doing that and Dr. Oliva was visiting with him.

He said well in the actual general records there's a map.

So we got the map.

In the map we're only about a mile away coming to hit the village site.

He told me they were about two days from finding the site.

You know they had got that far.

When they turned it over to the State Historical Society they had one of their summer digs right there and then on the mesa crossed over and then going north of that one they had a summer dig there too.

On both of those mesas they found teepee rings.

What they found were the remains after the villages burned and the lodges were taken down.

The stakes were pulled or left in the ground.

They burned and if it was a hole when they burned the village the ashes blew across and a windstorm came up and the holes full of ashes.

So you see these ashes in a ring.

The village was burned in April of 1867 but I think you have to go back and start with the Sand Creek Massacre as background for this of November of 1864.

And the year after that the Plains tribes rose up in opposition and we had the Indian War of 1865.

The conclusion of the Indian War of 1865 is the treaties of Little Arkansas.

The treaties assigned reservations to the five southern Plains tribes that were involved here.

That included the Cheyenne, the Arapahoe, the Plains Apache, the Kiowa and the Comaches.

So they assigned these reservations all south of the Arkansas River.

Tribal leaders didn't want to sign that because they said you know much of our buffalo hunting is north of the Arkansas River.

So finally they worked out a compromise to get them to sign and the treaty specified that these tribes did not have to remove to the reservations immediately and that they could hunt bison north of the Arkansas River as long as there were bison to hunt.

And with those assurances they signed.

Now there were a number of leaders in all those tribes who were reluctant to sign and none of the Cheyenne Dog Soldier chiefs would sign that agreement.

And yet that was what brought the peace.

The railroad of course is building westward at this time and there's Indian resistance to that.

The settlers are starting to move into the central Kansas area and there were Indian raids in central and western Kansas.

We have all of these rumors of war coming in late 1866, early 1867 that the Indians are going to rise up.

Then we have a new department commander of the Department of the Missouri, Winfield Scott Hancock.

He was the hero, one of the heroes for the Union at the Battle of Gettysburg, 1863.

But he was sent west to command the military department of the Missouri.

He had no understanding of Indian culture and he just thought that they were all bad.

In fact he wrote to the Indian agent and he wrote to his superior William Sherman in Chicago that he thought it would be good if we had a war with the Cheyenne and defeated them, drove them to the reservations because that would help get the other tribes there.

One of the ways that he hoped to do that was to create a military force that was so overwhelming and so he raises this force of 1,400 troops to intimidate them and then he said also if that doesn't intimidate them I'll have enough to defeat them and drive them to the reservations.

He was also from his Civil War experience an advocate of total war.

So I think that explains, partly explains his decision to burn or to destroy entirely the village site.

So he puts together a force of 1,400 troops, cavalry, infantry, artillery and they're organized at Fort Riley.

Then he picks up more troops as he travels along the way.

He picks up some troops at Fort Harker and at Fort Larned.

And he's headed out to engage with the Indians.

He wants to have a conference with them and if they don't agree to go to the reservation in present Oklahoma he's ready to move them there by force.

Among his troops are eight companies of 7th Cavalry who are commanded on the expedition by Lieutenant Colonel George Custer.

So this is Custer's first engagement with Plains Indians in his career.

And Hancock was determined that he was going to march his troops from Fort Larned to that village site to intimidate them and to encourage them, force them if necessary to go to the reservation.

He had ordered the agent, Ned Wynkoop, to bring the Cheyenne to Fort Larned soon after he arrived there.

He arrived there on April 7th.

On the 9th of that month there was a big snowstorm, dumped about 8 to 10 inches of snow, a lot of wind, a real blizzard.

And Hancock had ordered that they be there on the 10th to meet with him and they didn't show up because of that blizzard and he was very upset.

There must be something going on that they didn't show up.

He didn't realize that it was impossible for them to travel.

They arrived on the evening of April 12th and Hancock had a meal prepared for them and then he wanted to have a conference.

The leaders were reluctant.

They didn't conference at night.

Some people have speculated they thought that people might be less willing to tell the truth in the dark than in the light, but they were offended that he wanted to have a council around a fire at night.

Then as one of the newspaper reporters said, he treated them like children.

There were two newspaper reporters embedded with the Hancock expedition, Henry Stanley and the other was Theodore Davis.

They're present and recording a lot of what's going on and what Hancock tells them is that he is ready for war and if they want war he will make it and he threatens them that if they don't go to the reservations that he will force them to go to the reservations.

And then he berates them for not showing up two days earlier as he expected and he said I'm going to march my troops to your site tomorrow.

They begged him not to bring his 1,400 troops to this village because there were a number of survivors of the Sand Creek battle or massacre that were in this camp.

So after that conference the leaders of the Cheyenne Lakota, they head back to their village and the next day Hancock organizes his expedition and they march, they follow the south bank of the Pawnee until they get to the present town of Burdett.

They go into camp and after they camp two of the leaders of the village show up and Whitehorse, one of the Dog Soldier chiefs and Pawnee Killer of the Lakota meet with Hancock and they said if he would just stay there and not bring his troops any closer to the village, they would bring the leaders from the village to visit with Hancock the following morning and they could have a conference there.

But Hancock tentatively agreed to that.

Pawnee Killer says that he will go to the village and he'll bring the leaders.

Time goes on and he sees no one coming from the village site and he decides well maybe they're not coming, we better move on.

There is a ridge and we call it confrontation ridge today.

We have signs there marking the site.

About 11 o'clock in the morning they start moving out and they get word of what's in front of them.

The Cheyenne and Lakota have came over from the village.

They came up on top of that ridge and on the other side there were about 300 Cheyenne and Lakota warriors lined up prepared for war.

And when they got up on top of this hill, the army looks out and all these Indians are in front of them, they deploy into battle formation.

The 7th Cav were put on the two flanks, the infantrymen for a long line up here and the artillery they have with them is brought up to the rear.

So they were preparing for battle.

Nobody knows really what's going to happen.

Indian agent Wynkoop intervenes, they have some talk.

And nobody really wanted to have a major battle right up here.

These young guys had never even fired a gun, the army didn't do target practice at the time and so they agreed to have a parlay.

They agreed the Cheyenne and Lakota would all return to the village and Hancock would march his troops and he would camp about a mile away from the village.

He would not bring them into the village.

So that was the agreement that was made.

It was a great delaying tactics on the part of the Indians.

What they were doing was basically gaining time to flee the village as the ladies and the kids were taking off.

And Hancock takes his force and he sets up his camp about a mile southeast of the village.

And he's met there by leaders from the village and he also hears reports that the people that are living in the village are escaping.

One of the scouts and the interpreter for this expedition is Edmund Gourier.

And Gourier is, his father was a Frenchman and his mother was a Cheyenne.

So he knows the language, he knows the people.

Hancock tells Gourier, he said, "Why don't you go into the camp and see if you can stop these people from leaving?"

And he goes to the village and he sees that everybody's just packing up and high-tailing it as fast as they can.

And he doesn't return to report to Hancock until 9.30 at night.

A lot of speculation he delays to allow people that he knows to get away from that village site.

Word got to Hancock, the village was deserted and then he orders the 7th Cavalry to ring it and this is where Custer crawled in on his hands and knees.

I like to think that was right here in the middle, but where he really did, who knows.

But he crawls into it and then he finds an old man in the lodge that he was in.

They find a couple of ladies, young girls left behind and a couple of elderly ladies and they, the village has been deserted.

They were able to delay the army long enough through Confrontation Ridge and to get here for everybody to flee the village.

So nobody died here, there wasn't any gunshots exchanged.

So Hancock, he gets a report from Custer that they're gone and so he takes possession of the village and he sends Custer in pursuit of those that had escaped.

The expedition that Custer led, he just sort of fiddled around, he went buffalo hunting, he shot his own horse in the process.

He finally reached the Smoky Hill Trail near Downer Station and that's where he learned that there had been some Indian attacks along the Smoky Hill Trail.

He starts east on the trail and he finds more evidence of attacks on stage stations and on stage coaches.

Supposedly Custer got word back that the station had been burned up in Smoky Hill and basically the station master had been pinned to the wall with arrows and it had to be the Indians fleeing from this village.

That was never proved, nobody knows.

But that's what he claims was the main reason for destroying the village, that they proved that they were at war, not at peace.

And it's at this point that Hancock makes his decision that he's going to burn that village.

They have fled but if he burns the village and everything that they have, he's put them in a bad spot.

They will be forced to come in, is his thinking, and he can move them to the reservation in present Oklahoma.

Now if you stop and you think the average buffalo lodge, hide lodge, or all buffalo hide lodges, you take anywhere from 12 to 15 buffalo hides to make a lodge.

It takes a long time to get enough buffalo hides sewn together to make a lodge.

So it would be just like burning your home today and then trying to buy another one.

The lodges were passed down from mother to daughter.

They actually belonged to the female in the family and they would last for years.

Even the Poles were inherited by the daughter.

All of the officers that are still there with Hancock and the Indian agent, they advise against this.

They said every time the army has burned an Indian village, it has led to a major uprising of other tribes as well as those that you burn.

And they said, "You will create an Indian war were none exists."

Hancock went ahead and issued the order.

What didn't burn.

They tried to destroy, for example, when they did archaeological work at the site, they would find canteens that had bullet holes in them so they couldn't be used again.

When they destroyed the village here, they stacked everything up.

They put it in great big piles and they burned it.

You can kind of tell by where piles were almost, like how behind us on this little slope we found a lot of tin cups and parts of tin cups, handles.

But everything's smashed.

Everything's destroyed.

He orders Custer to outfit at Fort Hays and to pursue the Lakota.

Meanwhile, Hancock goes to Fort Dodge.

I think he meets with some of the Kiowa there.

He also meets with the Arapaho.

And he comes back to Fort Larnard and he meets with some other plains tribes, encouraging all of them to go to the reservations.

Of course, he has created an uprising.

The attacks on transportation and other places increase rapidly.

The Cheyenne attack troops just on the edge of Fort Wallace.

There is the Battle of the Saline River.

There were other battles that extended over a large area and it became called Hancock's War.

The U.S. Congress said, "We've got to stop this."

And they created another peace commission, similar to that that had negotiated the treaties of the Little Arkansas in 1865.

And this was the Medicine Lodge Treaty's design, quote, quote, "to end the war."

And the terms of the new treaty were very similar to the 1865 treaty.

There are two exceptions.

The size of the reservations was reduced and they were moved farther south.

And they also removed that agreement that they could hunt north of the Arkansas River.

The leaders of the five tribes that were at the Medicine Lodge negotiation said they wouldn't sign.

So Senator John Henderson from Missouri, who was a member of the peace commission, he promised them that they would change the treaty that they could hunt north of the river as long as there were buffalo.

He had no intention of making that change.

It was duplicity rather than diplomacy.

And the following year, when the members of these five tribes were found north of the Arkansas River, even though the treaty had not been yet approved or funded by Congress, they were declared to be in violation of the treaty and the warfare continued.

Phil Sheridan is placed in charge of what he organizes as a winter campaign to chase the Indians into their winter camps and to attack them there.

General Hancock had this theory.

We're going to impress these Indians with 1,400 soldiers, the band, you know, infantry, artillery, cavalry, everything.

They're going to say, "Wow, we can't fight that."

We're going to use Civil War tactics?

We're going to come out and win the West."

Didn't work.

With that massive army, you see them coming.

The Indians knew where they were miles away.

They flee, they run, you know.

It's not a good day to fight.

Just take off.

So it changes the military thinking.

If it doesn't work in the summer and the spring, how about the dead of winter?

What campaign happens then?

The Washita So this really is a first chapter into the Washita Campaign.

And that warfare continues on through the winter of 68, 69 and it continues until really July of 1869 when Chief Tall Bull, who was the major chief at the village site when it was burned in 1867, was killed at the Battle of Summit Springs in Colorado.

And we kind of consider that to be the end of Hancock's War that had raged for two years.

And of course, at that point, these tribes were already moved to the reservation.

But Hancock was criticized severely for the way he had handled everything and for creating this war.

He was removed from his command on the plains.

His order and the destruction of that village created an Indian war where none existed, to his discredit.

And he was much criticized for what he had done.

It's interesting today, after the United States moved into Afghanistan several years ago, the graduate school for officers at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Staff and Command College, they started teaching a unit on Hancock's War and said how important it is that you understand your enemy before you take action.

And then they would bring staff rides out.

And so we had, I think, three different times I met staff rides at the village site so that they could see this site and we would visit about it.

But I think it shows how important Hancock's War was to even the military today that they see there's lessons there to be learned.

But by burning that village, he created, you know, not just an uprising from the Cheyenne or the Lakota, but all the plains tribes.

I mean, the Comanche and the Kiowa and the Arapaho were much involved in that series of warfare.

We call Hancock's War.

I mean, these were human beings.

We need to know this story and we need to understand that not everything that we called Manifest Destiny was so great that we didn't, you know, we didn't preserve these cultures that were already here.

So I think it's just part of... We need to know our history.