City of Lafayette - Chief Niwot

The primary tribe of Native Americans who inhabited the Front Range when the European settlers arrived was the Arapaho. The name Arapaho may come from the Pawnee word for trader, as the Arapaho were great traders. Lakota Sioux called the Arapaho the Blue Sky People, while other tribes called them the Tattooed People, because Arapaho scratched designs into their skin using yucca leaf needles, then colored the wound with wood ashes to make an indelible tattoo. The Arapaho called themselves Our People or The Bison Path People.

   The Arapaho moved with the seasons – spending spring on the high plains hunting bison, moving north and west as the summer heat intensified, and returning each winter to the cottonwood groves along the banks of Boulder Creek, north of Lafayette, that protected them from the heavy snows that blasted the mountains and plains.

   Sometime in the 1820’s a baby boy was born to the Arapaho people. When he reached for his mother with his left hand, he was given the name Niwot, the Arapaho word for Left Handed. Although no picture survives of Niwot, he was described in adulthood as “the finest looking Indian I have ever seen. He was over six feet tall, of muscular build, and much more intelligent than the average Indian. He did not braid his hair; it hung loosely over his shoulders. When wearing his war bonnet and full warrior’s regalia he looked every inch a chief.”

   Niwot learned to speak English from his sister’s husband, trader John Poisal. He was inquisitive and outgoing, and while many of his people hid from the white settlers, Niwot sought them out, visiting their trading posts to watch them and listen to them talk.

   By the 1850’s the Arapaho population had been devastated by disease and violence at the hands of white settlers. By the time Niwot was made the Boulder band’s chief, the tribe consisted of only a few thousand survivors. Once Boulder was founded in 1859 Niwot moved his band away from Boulder Creek in an effort to avoid clashes with the whites. Despite this, trouble followed the Arapaho. In April 1860, while Chief Niwot and the other warriors were out hunting, a group of drunken whites led by Charles Gardner attacked the Arapaho camp on the bank of the St. Vrain. They raped females of all ages. Gardner was well known to the Arapaho as an unsavory character. He had killed and eaten his Arapaho wife during a blizzard one winter.

   Despite repeated efforts to live peacefully with the whites, by the winter of 1861-1862 Niwot’s people were desperately poor, hungry and diseased. Whites illegally settled on land promised to the Arapaho by the Treaty of Fort Laramie, decimating the supply of game upon which the Arapaho depended. As violence against his band increased, Chief Niwot reluctantly moved his people onto the plains. Major Scott Anthony of Fort Lyon guaranteed the Arapaho’s safety if they camped near the fort on Sand Creek. Instead of the promised safety the Indians received a surprise attack in the dark and freezing pre-dawn hours of November 29, 1864.

   Colonel John Chivington and 550 troops surprised the sleeping village. White traders within the camp tried to stop the attack. Indians raised both a white flag and the American flag as signs of peace, but to no avail. By the end of the day 163 Indians, mainly women, children and old men, had been slaughtered.