Irving Howbert

Indian Fights in Colorado: a History and Personal Experience of the Conflict with the Plains Indians During the 19th Century Irving Howbert

The bloody Plains Indian War-by one who fought

This book was originally misleadingly titled The Indians of the Pikes Peak Region, which may have led the uninitiated to believe it is a work of ethnology. The author, Irving Howbert gives a short description of the country and its fauna around Pikes Peak, Colorado (named after the famous explorer Zebulon Pike) and also a brief insight into the indigenous Indian tribes that occupied the region-which was the home of the Utes who were bitter foes of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes, the warriors of which would make forays into Ute country to wage their traditional warfare. However, the principal subject matter of Howbert's text is focussed on the Indian Wars of the 1860s from the perspective of a pioneer, settler, Indian fighter and volunteer in the Third Colorado Cavalry who took part in them. Howbert's membership of the Third Colorado put him in position to take part in one of the most notorious and controversial episodes in American frontier history, the Battle of Sand Creek, which if only to underline the point is also known as the Massacre of Sand Creek. On November 29th, 1864 a 700 strong force of Colorado and New Mexico troops, under Colonel John Chivington, destroyed the village of Black Kettle of the Northern Cheyenne killing many of the inhabitants. Perhaps predictably Howbert's account reads like a pitched battle not a one sided affair of unprovoked slaughter and it is clear he does not share the often accepted appraisal of the event. Controversy about the affair was already widespread before the publication of his book and Howbert examines it in some detail. The book concludes with an account of the Indian War of 1868.
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