To travel to the Sand Creek Massacre site in eastern Colorado from Colorado Springs, as I did in the summer of 1997, requires a drive of nearly 3 hours and 140 miles over a good two lane state road. During that time I saw perhaps a total of five cars in the vast expanse of open rolling prairie country. The only exception was when I passed through a handful of small towns, usually with only one main street and several boarded up buildings. These towns were beginning to go through the process of depopulation, their numbers are shrinking every year as the young people continue to move away. Some day, some of these towns will cease to exist--and they are dying a slow death as we speak. I had three different maps to point me to the site, but with one anticipated problem. All of the maps showed the massacre site to be in a different place. The only constant on all of the maps was that the site was near a town named Chivington--the namesake of John Chivington, the commander of the Denver militia that was organized to attack and drive the Indians from their proximity to Denver (if 150 miles can be considered a proximity). Chivington allowed his men to become drunk on the night before they arrived at the Cheyenne village of Black Kettle . His men were out of control and mutilated the bodies of the Indians they killed when the battle was over. Some of the men rode back to Denver with the body parts draped over their saddles like trophies. When Abraham Lincoln, who was president at the time, heard of this atrocity, he removed the governor of Colorado Territory. I anticipated that there might be direction signs in the town to guide me to the battle site--there weren’t. History is full of strange ironies--the town of Chivington can barely qualify as such. Most of the buildings in the town are in various stages of disrepair or collapse and are uninhabited. There is one small store that wouldn’t even qualify as a poor version of a 7-11, and a few residences. The only building in town that looked viable and well maintained is a true irony--it is an American Friends Society church--(the Quakers). A town commemorating a commander of a brutal massacre has a church belonging to one of the most peaceful, anti-war peoples in the world!! For the next two hours I thrashed around the dirt roads and quiet farms of the area trying to find the massacre site,unsuccessfully, There were no markers, no monuments, no visitor’s centers, no signs, no nothing. I went to the various locations on all three of the maps, but there were only similar amounts of dirt roads, small farms, cattle grazing on the open fields and the intense summer heat. Finally I gave up and headed north for the rest of the trip that would take me to a variety of western museums, the Pine Ridge (Sioux) Indian Reservation, the Wounded Knee Battle site, Mount Rushmore, The Little Big Horn Battlefield, and Cody, Wyoming, (named after Buffalo Bill Cody) which has an extensive museum of the Plains Indians. It was only several months later that I came across an article that explained that the Sand Creek massacre site was not really known. It was thought to be on a private farm--one of the many farms I drove past, but even that was not certain. The state of Colorado is not proud of what happened there, and had never allocated any money for an archaeological dig to find the site. However.. the Cheyenne Tribe pressured congress to appropriate money to find and purchase the site and got it. Archaeologists looked for arrow heads, spent bullet shell casings, bits of clothing, bones of skeletons, etc. The site was found and purchased, and the Cheyennes have erected a visitor’s center including some teepees to symbolize the large village. They will conduct regular historical tours of the battlefield and present various displays. They do not want this story to be forgotten. The state of Colorado was not ecstatic about this movement, but the federal government was supportive. The Sand Creek Massacre site opened up to the public, with Cheyenne Indians performing various ceremonies, on April 28, 2007.