As much an adventurer as anyone else from out east, Silas Soule went west when what was back home just wouldn't cut it anymore, not when what he knew was, out there, challenged spirit and truth. His father was an abolitionist, and not just in name. Amassa Soule grabbed his family and headed west when the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) ruled popular sovereignty, the popular vote, would determine whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as slave or free.
Like other members of the anti-slavery Emigrant Aid Society, Amassa Soule didn't know what he was in for when he left Massachusetts. He assumed they'd arrived close to Kansas when they came to St. Louis, only to find, he said later, that the hardest passage was ahead, on the Missouri, "that river of mud, crooks and shoals." The Soules came to Kansas, the frontier, under the moral imperative to stuff the ballot box, so soul-deep was their hatred of slavery.
When Si Soule was just a kid--maybe 15 years old--he was leading runaway slaves up the Underground Railroad in midnight darkness in eastern Kansas. Blessed with an endearing personality, he shined up to a Missouri jailer and thereby helped spring an abolitionist doctor from a Missouri jail in one of the era's most famous and defiant acts of freedom. Si Soles' father was as doggedly religious as his friend John Brown. In fact, after the Harpers Ferry slave rebellion went down, son Silas worked hard at creating yet another jail break, a plot Brown himself ended because in the end, Soule was told, John Brown sought martyrdom.
Somewhat disillusioned, Si Soles went farther west with a fervent case of gold fever, worked the mines for a year or so, then joined the Union Army out west and fought, hard, hand-to hand, at Glorietta Pass, New Mexico, part of Colorado's First Regiment, where his valor was noted by the preacher turned Union's field commander John Chivington.
He was one of several officers in the command of Major Edward Wynkoop who brokered a peace deal with Broken Kettle and the other Cheyenne and Arapaho headman, and led to their coming into frontier Denver, where someone with a camera got this historic and wonderful shot. Once a deal had been determined, the Calvary escorted the Indians into town to ratify the peace.
And this--the U. S. military and those chiefs at the historic peace conference. Si Soule, hat and pipeless, is front and center.
And that's why Lieutenant Silas Soule told his troops not to fire on the Cheyenne village on Sand Creek, told them he'd shoot them if they went along with the carnage. Just about all of the rest of the Colorado cavalry butchered, literally, Native men, women, and children that day.
Chivington too wanted peace too, but he wanted to punish the Indians for the violence they'd perpetrated on the whites who'd homesteaded or were simply travelling through the west. Chivington was the boss. That's how it was Lieutenant Silas Soule came to Sand Creek on November 29, 1864. The night before, he'd made perfectly clear that he didn't intend to have anything to do with the slaughter, claimed anyone who did to be "a low-lived cowardly son-of-a-bitch."
And that's why Lieutenant Silas Soule told his troops not to fire on the Cheyenne village on Sand Creek, told them he'd shoot them if they went along with the carnage. Just about all of the rest of the Colorado cavalry butchered, literally, Native men, women, and children that day.
On the next, Soule wrote a letter to Major Wynkoop, telling him everything he'd seen. Inquiries were held both in Colorado and Washington, Soule was a major witness, despite death threats.
When he came back to Colorado, he became a town marshal. Just two weeks after getting marryied, he was gunned down in the streets. Back then--and even today--people can't help but believe that the gunslinger responsible for Silas Soule's death was one of Col. John Chivington's many, many supporters. Silas Soule's own moral courage, it seems, didn't create many friends.
He died at just 26 years old.
He's not disappeared from history. You can google him--I did. You can read his biography, and Sand Creek and Chivington will most certainly turn up in any recitation of the long and painful history of the Plains Indians. They didn't forget.
Didn't take long, and we did.
But someone asked about heroes. To me and many others, Silas Soule should be on the list.
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