Who was to blame for her death?
by Danita Ross
In early October 1868 Clara Blinn and her two year old son, Willie, were taken captive by Indians along the Santa Fe Trail near the mouth of Sand Creek, not far from present day Lamar, Colorado. Clara and her husband Richard, had decided to leave Colorado Territory where they found it hard to make a living and had joined an eastbound caravan of wagons to return to Clara's family in Franklin County, Kansas.
When the raiders, believed to be mostly Cheyennes, attacked the wagon train, Clara and little Willie hid under a feather mattress in a supply wagon. After a siege of several days, the Indians left, taking the supply wagon with Clara and her young son as part of their booty. The captives were held at the winter camp of the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle on the Washita River in southern Indian Territory (in present Oklahoma). When U.S. Army forces, led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, attacked the Cheyenne encampment on November 27, both Clara and Willie died. The death of Clara and her infant son became part of the controversy surrounding the Battle of the Washita and the reputation of Colonel Custer.
Mary Forrester Moorehead of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a grandniece of Clara Harrington Blinn. The life and death of her grandmother's older sister has haunted her since childhood. In those days, all traces of Clara's story were tucked away in a bundle in an old trunk and carefully ignored by the family. "As a child in Kansas, " Moorehead remembers, " I used to sneak up alone to my grandmother's attic and take out of the large wooden trunk a mysterious parcel. It contained the mementos of my Grandaunt Clara's last days. I would remove the items one at a time and wonder about them and about Clara."
The momentos included: an old clipping from an Ottawa, Kansas, newspaper; a hurriedly penciled letter from Clara in scratchy handwriting dated November 7. 1868; a piece from the hem of a calico dress; a fringed, beaded Arapaho bag; a yellowed letter from Gen. Philip Sheridan; a lock of hair; and two tiny stones.
From the newsclippings and the letters, Moorehead knew that her grandaunt had been a captive in Chief Black Kettle's camp, but she was baffled by her family's silence regarding her grandaunt. "I simply could not understand my family's reluctance to speak of Aunt Clara. My mother had great pride in our family history. Yet she would never, never speak of Aunt Clara when I was young. Neither would my grandmother."
Ironically, in those days, the only information Moorehead was able to get came from the family's Cherokee maid Ada. She knew something of Plains history and had read old news articles about Clara Blinn. Ada also instilled in Moorehead a curiosity about the Indian side of the story. "Only when I reached adulthood did my mother finally relent and tell Clara's story as the family knew it," Moorehead explains.
The old momentos, which Moorehead now owns, trace the narrative. She shows the original handwritten letter, now preserved under glass, that Clara wrote from Black Kettle's camp. The plaintive plea for help from the twenty-one-year-old captive entreats: "Kind Friend....if you could only buy us of the Indians with ponies or anything and let me come and stay with you until I could get word to my friends, they would pay you..." Moorehead notes of the letter: "Family legend claims that a trader smuggled a pencil and paper into Clara in a pan of flour. But no one knows for certain." (The letter was delivered to the military and then released to the press. It appeared in many newspapers.)
During the autumn of 1868 the U.S. Army had embarked upon a resolute campaign against hostile Indians. The plan was to chastise them through swift, surprise attacks on their winter camps. On November 27, 1868, in a bitterly cold dawn assault, Custer surrounded Black Kettle's settlement on the Washita River, carrying out General Sheridan's orders to destroy the village, kill the Indian warriors and their horses, and take prisoner the women and children.
The Cheyenne camp bore the main force of Custer's attack, but the Arapahos and Kiowas were also encamped nearby. Moorehead points out that the various battle accounts show discrepancies as to just where Clara and Willie were found. In whichever camp Clara spent her final hours - whether Cheyenne or Kiowa - we know that she was found shot in the head, and that Willie's skull was crushed. (Reports differ as to whether they had been scalped.) Bread was stuffed into the front of Clara's dress. The surmise was that in the melee, Clara had grabbed food and Willie and was trying to escape when she was accidentally shot by the troopers as she ran toward them.
Some critics of the Battle of the Washita contend that the proper term to describe the encounter is "massacre." They censure Custer and Sheridan for carrying out a massacre of Indians who had agreed to peace and who had been promised rations and security by the army. Critics have also suggested that Custer should have attempted to secure the safety of any captives in Black Kettle's camp, as the military knew that Clara and her little son were being held there.
Ms. Moorehead displays the Arapaho bag that carried General Sheridan's condolence letter to the family. Sheridan also sent the hem piece cut from Clara's mulberry-colored calico dress. He did this, Moorehead explains, to show the family that Clara had not been made to work too terribly hard, as the hem was still tight and unfrayed after Clara had been in captivity for more than a month and a half.
The lock of Willie's hair that Sheridan ordered clipped before burial of the bodies at Fort Arbuckle came back to the family through Richard Blinn. He had survived the attack in Colorado Territory, but his lone search for his wife and child had taken three months. He arrived at Fort Arbuckle in January of 1869, where at last he learned their sad fate. Blinn built a sturdy fence around the gravesites of Clara and Willie and took a small stone from each grave to carry with him - the two small stones Moorehead keeps today.
Moorehead's search to understand not only Clara's story but how it fit into the context of the times has taken years of investigation. At Stanford University library she pored over records of Indian allotments of food and supplies set by treaties with the U.S. government. She was particularly interested in discovering the disbursements of allotments for Black Kettle's Cheyennes. She was not surprised to find that the actual allotments fell short of the agreed-upon provisions.
"I have come to realize," she says, "that even the most respected Indians, like Black Kettle, who had signed for peace and tried to live up to it, might hold a white captive to secure more supplies in the wake of inadequate allotments and brutal winters."
Moorehead had also retraced her grandaunt's journey from capture in Colorado, south to Oklahoma, o stand at the battle site on the Washita River in November. "I wanted to feel, as much as I could, what it might have been like for Clara," she says.
Somewhat sadly, she has come to understand her family's early reluctance to talk of her grandmother's older sister. "Reflecting the mentality of the day, Clara was considered a loser in the family. If she had escaped and tried to re-enter the Anglo culture of 1868, she would have been considered sullied, an outcast." For it was naturally assumed that she had met "the fate worse than death," as one cavalry lieutenant remarked on the presumed sexual abuse by the Indians.
General Sheridan, himself, exemplified this same attitude, evidently discouraged efforts to ransom Clara Blinn. In his best-selling Son of the Morning Star (1984), Evan Connell reports a purported conversation between Sheridan and Gen. W B. Hazen, obviously before Sheridan knew of Richard Blinn's survival. Connell quotes Sheridan: "After having her husband & friends murdered, and her own person subjected to the fearful bestiality of perhaps the whole tribe, it is mock humanity to secure what is left of her [Clara Blinn] for the consideration of 5 ponies." (page 181)
"While many women broke from the strain of just trying to exist on the Plains," points out Ms. Moorehead, "Clara's remarkable fortitude kept her struggling for freedom to the very end of her ordeal. To me, Clara was a heroine. She was a young, bright, brave woman. And as much a source of pride as the English colonists in our family. It is a shame to have kept her in an attic so long."
Bibliographic note
Some of the material in this piece comes from remembrances of the family of Clara Blinn. However, the main events in her captivity were described in many newspapers of the time. Various authors have mentioned the Blinn tragedy in works relating to the Battle of the Washita or the career of George Armstrong Custer. For examples, consult the indexes of the following books for information about Clara and little Willie. The Battle of the Washita: The Sheridan-Custer Indian Campaign of 1867-69 by Stan Hoig (1976). Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell (1984). Warpath and Council Fire: The Plains' Indians' Struggle for survival in War and in Diplomacy 1851-1891 by Stanley Vestal (1948).
Sir/Madam,
I've been moved by your website, because I deeply admire Clara Blinn and fight for her recognition by the Washita Battlefield Site and America.
Clara Blinn was brutally treated and murdered by Cheyennes Indians in 1868. However, her martyrdom is still denied by many official institutions because of dirty politics and political correctness.
140 years after her death, I hope the Blinn family will act to halt the outrage of Clara Blinn's memory and to properly condemn Black Kettle's Cheyennes and honor the memory of this heroine.
http://custer.over-blog.com/article-15893298.html : Black Kettle, Clara's oppressor
http://custer.over-blog.com/article-11053875.html : The story of Clara Blinn (+ VIDEO)
http://custer.over-blog.com/article-12361307.html : Finding the Blinns in Black Kettle's village
Best regards,
David
http://www.custerwest.org
- www.custerwest.org -
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