Battle Looms and A Dream Brings Initial Peace
Aikins and his men refused to leave and prepared to do battle against the Arapaho. At some point, Bear Head and Many Whips headed back to the Arapaho encampment to raise a War Party while the Chief lingered.
While they were away, Aikins and his group took steps to avoid hostilities by focusing personal attention on Chief Niwot, plying him with canned beans and salt pork, and getting him drunk. As a result, when Bear Head and Many Whips and the War Party returned, Niwot was advocating peace with the gold seeking Caucasians, yet tension reigned.
After three tense days, the threat of battle remained in the air. Then, abruptly, Niwot rode into Aikins’ camp once more. He had come to tell them one of his Arapaho shamans had received a dream from the Great Spirit the night before. In the dream, a flood covered the earth and swallowed the Arapaho people, 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.
Starting then, Niwot and his fellow chief Little Raven, who had recently welcomed white settlers to the Denver gold camps, maintained their stance of peaceful coexistence with the newly arrived Europeans, at least for the time being. He was killed shortly there after in the notorious Sand Creek massacre.
Read more about this topic: Curse Of The Boulder Valley
Famous quotes containing the words battle, looms, dream, brings, initial and/or peace:
“War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“that warm metamorphosis of snow
as gentle as the sort that woodsmen know
who, lost in the white circle, fall at last
and dream their way to death.”
—Patricia K. Page (b. 1916)
“There is a time when even justice brings harm.”
—Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.)
“Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital.”
—Henry George (1839–1897)
“Mrs. Finney: Can’t we have some peace in this house, even on New Year’s Eve?
Sadie: You got it mixed up with Christmas. New Year’s Eve is when people go back to killing each other.”
—Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993)