In late November 1864, as the U.S. Civil War rose to its bloody climax in Georgia and Virginia, a related disaster occurred in what was then the territory of Colorado. For no reason that was easily discernible at the time, a group of about 700 U.S. soldiers led by Colonel John M Chivington attacked a sleeping gathering of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians along the Sand Creek. The true reasons for this senseless massacre were rooted in the passions of secession, politics, and racism. Colorado bordered “bloody Kansas,” and its Union troops feared being attacked by Confederate raiders hoping to turn the territory into a slave state. Colonel Chivington had become a hero fending off the Confederates’ similar efforts to occupy New Mexico, and he was looking for an opportunity to get his name in the newspapers again so he might run for Congress. And in general, new settlers in all of the western territories feared the many ethnic peoples inhabiting the plains; there had been a Dakota “rebellion” in Minnesota two years earlier. All of these factors led Chivington’s men to charge into a peaceable village of people who had been told to shelter in the Sand Creek flying the American flag so they would be recognized as friendly by U.S. troops. Instead of protecting the encampment, most of Chivington’s soldiers savaged it, killing men, women, and children indiscriminately. When the camp’s inhabitants fled into the dry Sand Creek riverbed, the soldiers loosed bullets and cannon on them as they fled in terror. The Sand Creek Massacre lasted for eight hours, not to mention another day U.S. soldiers spent scalping and mutilating Cheyenne and Arapaho corpses for trophies. More than two hundred Native Americans were murdered.