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Colonel John Chivington ( 1821- 1894), born in Lebanon, Ohio, was the hero of Glorietta Pass and the man responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre. After being drawn toward Methodism, Chivington decided to become a minister and was ordained in 1844.
During 1853, he worked in a Methodist missionary expedition to the Wyandot Indians in Kansas. Because of his outspoken hatred of slavery, in 1856, Chivington received a threatening letter from pro-slavery members in his congregation. As a result, the Methodist Church transferred Chivington to a parish in Omaha, Nebraska.
In 1860, when he was made the presiding elder of the Rocky Mountain District of the Methodist Church, Chivington and his family moved to Denver, ColoradoFor other cities named Denver see Denver (disambiguation). Denver is the largest city and capital of the state of Colorado, United States of America. It is the largest city along the Front Range and forms the heart of the Denver Metropolitan Area. The cit.
While he received fierce loyalty from his men, one man, Silas SouleSilas Stillman Soule ( 1838- 1865) was a Massachusetts abolitionist, Kansas Jayhawker, and a Volunteer in the Colorado Infantry. Silas Soule was born into a family of abolitionists in Bath, Maine on July 26, 1838. He was raised in Maine and Massachusetts, refused his orders to attack the CheyenneThis article is about the Native American tribe; Cheyenne is also the name of a Colorado mountain and military complex, the capital of Wyoming, a Western television series and a small town in Oklahoma. buffalo meat drying, 1870 The Cheyennes are a Native settlement at Sand Creek . Soule commanded his men to hold their fire, and watched with horror as Chivington's forces attacked.
The nation was shocked, even though the massacre occurred during the Civil War, at the brutality of the attack. Soule testified, along with some of the men Soule commanded, against Chivington during an Army investigation of the incident. Soule was murdered a short while afterwords, and Chivington has been believed to have a hand in the matter.
The investigation found no wrong-doing on Chivington's part, but the US Congress refused the Army's request to exterminate the Native population based on the testimony against Chivington.