The Sand Creek Massacre — An atrocity committed by John Chivington and the “Spider People”

This article first appeared in slightly different form in the Broomfield Enterprise September 18, 2007.

A couple years ago I went on a “tree tour” of Fairmount Cemetery in Denver. As we strolled around the pleasant grounds our guide named the various trees and explained their biology. At one point, as we gazed up at a beautiful white oak, a large memorial marker right in front of me caught my eye. I realized with a jolt it was the grave of

Chief Left Hand: Renaissance Man of the Arapaho

Excerpts from my book, Forgotten Heroes and Villains of Sand Creek (June 11, 2010).

Gifted in languages and marked by a rich curiosity about the white world, Left Hand was a man ahead of his time. He possessed a clarity of foresight that few around him shared, and an unrelenting pragmatism that informed every action he took.

Chief Left-Hand of the Arapaho — Iconic figure and a martyr for peace

This article first appeared in the Broomfield Enterprise (4/13/08).

We live on mysterious lands. The history of our region has been on record for less than 200 years and we have only sketchy details about what was going on before the mid -1800s.

Captain Silas S. Soule: Paid with his life to do the right thing

This article first appeared in the Broomfield Enterprise in 2008.

Early on a snowy November morning, about 70 people gathered around a soldier’s grave in the Civil War section of Denver’s Riverside Cemetery. The date was November 29, 2008, and the grave belonged to Silas S. Soule, who died from an assassin’s bullet on April 23, 1865.