Chief Niwot - A Curse, A Dream, and An Ill-fated Peace

A Curse, A Dream, and An Ill-fated Peace

Chief Niwot is said to have first stated at this meeting his legendary Curse of the Boulder Valley. According to the chief, the curse was its breathtaking landscape: "People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty."

When Niwot threatened the gold seekers, they refused to leave and flattered Chief Niwot, plying him with exotic fare like canned beans and salt pork, and getting him drunk. Meantime, Bear Head and Many Whips returned to the Arapaho camp to raise a war party, but when they returned Niwot had made an uneasy peace with the gold seekers.

After three tense days, with the threat of a battle hanging palpably in the air, Niwot rode into Aikins’ camp once more. One of the Arapaho shamans, he told the Captain, had received a dream from the Great Spirit the night before. In the dream, the holy man saw a great flood covering the earth and swallowing the Arapahos, while the whites survived. Niwot interpreted this to mean that gold seekers would flood his homeland, and he could do nothing to stop it. Peace with the whites, Niwot realized, was the only way his people would avoid being swept away by the flood.

Thereafter, Niwot and his neighboring chief, Little Raven, who had recently welcomed white settlers to the Denver gold camp, maintained their stance of peaceful coexistence with the whites. The Arapaho chiefs were so welcoming that the newcomers named the first county in the territory after the tribe, as well as streets in both Denver and Boulder.

The initial peace did not hold. As whites continued to encroach on Arapaho land, a rash of settlements broke out along the Front Range. An 1862 Sioux uprising in the northern plains states made frontier settlements like Boulder jittery and suspicious of the Arapahos they initially thought were friends.

By 1864, a fateful year along the Front Range, tension between whites and Arapaho warriors was at a boiling point. Raids by tribes other than Niwot's people on wagon trains and outlying settlements intensified, culminating on June 11 with the brutal murder of the Hungate family on their ranch 25 mi (40 km) southeast of Denver.

Territorial Governor John Evans, convinced all the Native tribes were equally responsible, decided to be rid of the "Indian problem" once and for all. He ordered the peaceful Arapaho and Cheyenne to camp near Fort Lyons, on Sand Creek in a remote part of eastern Colorado on the plains. The governor then raised the Third Colorado Cavalry, led by Colonel John Chivington with orders to patrol the prairies for hostile Indians. Chief Niwot, along with Chiefs Little Raven and Black Kettle, did as they were told, camping peacefully at Sand Creek and continuing to refuse to make war on their white neighbors.