By Mike Bowen, co-author, We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site
The most important artifact Chuck Bowen found at the Lost Sand Creek Site is the cannonball fragments. It is the piece that undeniably ties everything together with Bowen’s Indian village site and battle area discovery being the real 1864 Sand Creek event location.
Bowen’s discovery of over 4,000 battle and village artifacts were all made on his family’s cattle ranch, starting nearly two miles up the creek from the bluff at the National Park Service Sand Creek site, where the NPS claims the Cheyenne and Arapaho were camped and attacked by soldiers. However, no period artifacts have ever been found at the NPS’ alleged site.
All of the cannonball fragments Bowen found were on the other side of the creek of the village site. The soldiers had a small window of time to fire the cannons as they are only effective when there’s a large number of the enemy in a congested area. Firing the cannons would have been the first event at Sand Creek, and they were fired just as the sun was coming up. According to Little Bear, a warrior at Sand Creek, he saw the soldiers coming from the south, as a long black line, and silhouetted on the horizon (Bent to Hyde 4-14-1906). For soldiers on a horse to appear as a long black line they would have to be several miles away. The Indians then began fleeing the village.
Little Bear’s account lines up with Indians fleeing and running across the creek, which is where the cannonball pieces were found at the Lost Sand Creek Site. Once the Indians had scattered from the village, the cannons were no longer effective.
The cannons were fired about a ½ mile from the target and the exploding pieces went in multiple directions and landed in some instances about a football field’s length apart. Learn more about the cannons in chapter eight of our book, We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site, and read Joe’s account about finding cannonball fragments in chapter ten.
One of the misunderstandings with Sand Creek is the idea that cannons were fired from the top of the bluff at what is now the NPS Sand Creek site. Not only is this not true, shooting down from the bluff would have placed soldiers in a position where they could get hit. The alleged tipis were claimed to only be about 100 yards or less from the bluff, and shooting down from that close, the exploding shells would easily hit soldiers. There’s also no documentation of soldiers being hit by shell fragments. The mountain howitzers were fired with a slight arc and from about a ½ mile away from the target. Firing the howitzers with a slight arc, from the top of that bluff, would also pass over the alleged village site and miss it completely.
Another misunderstanding is the claim all of the Indians were mutilated after the battle. Some testified in the hearings to seeing Indians cut up afterwards but didn’t see any soldiers committing that act. It’s probable much of that was the result of cannon fire. The cannons were fired when it was still fairly dark and from a distance the soldiers could not tell the age or gender of the Indians.
From the testimony of David Louderback, a Sand Creek soldier:
“Did any of the Indians escape?” the commission said.
“Yes; a large number of the Indians got away,” Louderback said.
“How many Indians were killed?”
“That I cannot say, as I did not go up above to count them. I saw only eight. I could not stand it; they were cut up too much.”
“By whom were they scalped and mutilated?”
“By the soldiers; I could not say what regiment they belonged to, or what their names are.”
“Did you see them scalping and mutilating?”
“I did not.” (Report on the Conduct of the War, 38 Congress, 2nd session, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1865).
In May of ‘99, the NPS conducted a search at the traditional Sand Creek site and a few neighboring properties. There is a trail road nearly 1 ½ miles up the creek from the bluff where the Sand Creek Battle Ground monument sat, and four cannonball pieces were found in a line near that road. Cannonball pieces don’t land like that—they would have landed a long ways apart, like the matching fragments Bowen found that were 100 yards apart. The NPS didn’t find any .69 caliber lead balls that filled the cannonballs and they also didn’t find a single Bormann fuse, the timing device for the cannonballs. There were numbers on the fuses from one to five and each number represented the number of seconds the cannonball would explode after leaving the barrel. If the hole was cut at #2 then it would explode two seconds after leaving the barrel. See our map on page 161 of our book.
It bears the question, how did four cannonball fragments end up by that trail road? One possibility is when the Boy Scouts held a reenactment of the Sand Creek battle at the traditional site in 1937, someone found the fragments on the Bowen ranch and then tossed them by the trail road. Chuck Bowen asked the NPS Sand Creek leadership in ‘99 that he wanted to compare the four fragments found by their trail road with the fragments he found—if they matched, then it would be known if they were initially found on the Bowen ranch. His request has yet to be accepted.
Bowen didn’t just find matching cannonball fragments, he found hundreds of the .69 caliber lead balls and a number of Bormann fuses. All of those pieces go together. The Bormann fuses and .69 caliber lead balls are just as important as the fragments—they are definitive of being from the Sand Creek battle.
The NPS had nearly 30 people searching with metal detectors at what was the Dawson property, now the NPS Sand Creek site, with metal detectors in May of ‘99, and they didn’t find a single .69 caliber lead ball or Bormann fuse. That property was also extensively searched in the 80s and early 90s by Fred Werner and some of his colleagues. One colleague, Larry Finnell, was quite experienced with a metal detector. He discovered hundreds of artifacts at the Summit Springs site near Sterling, CO. Werner wrote a book about his experience searching for artifacts below the bluff—he stated he never found a single 1860s period artifact there.
If cannons were fired from the top of the bluff at the NPS site, they also would have found friction primers.
Concerning friction primers: “They’re a small metal tube about a ¼ inch in diameter filled with musket powder—when the powder ignited, it would shoot up in the air and land near the cannon” (We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site, page 143).
Friction primers would have fallen near the spot the cannons fired from, and with a team of nearly 30 people, it’s quite telling that they didn’t find any.
The cannons were fired from about a ½ mile from the target, and we know from the location Bowen found cannonball fragments, the cannons didn’t fire from anywhere close to that bluff. His cannonball field discovery is nearly two miles up the creek from that bluff.
When any cannonball fragments would be found, the immediate area would then be meticulously searched with metal detectors to look for any of the lead balls, Bormann fuses, or friction primers. None of those were found at the NPS site. Those items are not artifacts that would have been picked up over the years—they are items that were buried about 2-3 inches deep and could only be found with a metal detector.
There’s zero physical evidence to support the idea that the howitzers were fired from the ridge or bluff—the area below would have been littered with cannonball fragments, .69 caliber lead balls, and Bormann fuses.
The physical evidence wasn’t picked up over the years at the NPS site, it’s simply the wrong location. The physical evidence was discovered by Chuck Bowen starting nearly two miles up the creek from the NPS bluff on the Bowen family ranch. It took years of meticulous research and searching, to discover the Lost Sand Creek Site—Chuck grew up on that part of Sand Creek and knew the land like the back of his hand which proved invaluable to his discovery. His wife Sheri assisted with research, also spending countless hours studying eyewitness accounts looking for descriptions of the land.
Bowen didn’t find an extended fight area—he found the cannonball field and he also found the village site.
We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site:
“I found a brass kettle that appeared to have the imprint of the heel of a soldier’s boot where he turned it over and stomped on it. I also found fragments of broken cast-iron kettles. Soldiers went through the camp and destroyed kettles, coffee grinders, and other items so they couldn’t be used again.
I found tin cans, the type heavily soldered with a small hole in the center of the top of the can that had been filled with lead. There were also several sardine cans. The tin cans had been opened with a knife—can openers hadn’t been invented.
The most poignant discovery was the…” (the rest of the excerpt is continued in chapter seven of our book).
We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site details Bowen’s discovery of running battle locations, all starting on the opposite side of the creek from the village. This discovery shows there was very little fighting or action in the village. Sand Creek was a running battle that extended for several miles up the creek from the village.
Learn the truth about Sand Creek from eyewitnesses and from the one thing that cannot lie: the artifacts. They weren’t picked up by scavengers—they were always there at the real location waiting for their story to be told.
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