The Sand Creek Massacre of November 29, 1864, had its roots in events months old at the time it took place. A white family had been murdered outside Denver, and speculation immediately circled around the local Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples living in the area. The governor of the Colorado Territory, John Evans, responded to this paranoia by demanding that all local Native Americans register with the territorial government and place themselves in the protection of the U.S. military. Colonel John Chivington, a local hero who had held off Confederate efforts to occupy New Mexico, was placed in charge of a ragtag group of locals who were hastily trained and sent out on the Colorado plains to find any straggling Native Americans who had “defied” Evans’s order.