The Mysterious History Behind the Murders That Led Up to the Sand Creek Massacre

Few things in this world are more attractive to Linda Ketter than a good story.

In 2000, the real estate agent, horse breeder, and novice cattle rancher purchased a parcel of land about 30 miles southeast of Denver that had been part of an early pioneer settlement. Ketter, who was in her early 40s at the time, moved into a ranch-style house at one edge of her 100 acres, near the intersection of two country roads.

The property, located in what is now Elbert County, felt as if it were linked to a different era. A golden carpet of unbroken prairie stretched in every direction. A strip of box elder trees grew thick through the middle of Ketter’s field, marking the banks of Running Creek, a shallow stream that runs strong after heavy rains. Ketter would climb a grass-capped hill out back, stop at the top, and stare at the vastness. “There probably aren’t many places in Colorado where the view hasn’t changed much in 100 years, 150 years,” she told me one morning this past August as we toured the land with Luke Aaron, 34, who cares for Ketter’s dozen or so cows. “You can feel the history out here.”

That history began to reveal itself to Ketter soon after she moved in. The way she remembers it, she arrived home one day to find a card from a University of Colorado Boulder professor on her front door. He was requesting access to her land and mentioned the Hungate murders. Ketter called the professor, who told her the story of the area. “That’s when the obsession began,” she says.

The details of the killings were alarming. On the afternoon of June 11, 1864, a 29-year-old ranch hand named Nathan Hungate, his 25-year-old wife, Ellen, and their two-and-a-half-year-old and five-month-old daughters, Laura and Florence, were murdered somewhere outside the family’s small cabin near Running Creek. Nathan’s face appeared to have been tomahawked. Ellen had been scalped and sexually assaulted. Both children’s throats were slashed. Their cabin had been set on fire and left in ruins.

While the murders remain unsolved to this day, the brutal deaths of the young pioneer family were blamed at the time on a band of Arapaho or Cheyenne Native Americans who roamed the territory and likely had participated in some cattle thefts and skirmishes with U.S. troops that summer. The seemingly unprovoked and random Hungate deaths often are considered an opening salvo in the Colorado War—years of brutal fighting between Native Americans and the U.S. Army that started in 1864 in territory that encompassed the state of Kansas plus lands that would become the states of Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming.

Most important, the murders provided an antecedent to the massacre of more than 200 Indigenous people five months later, on November 29, at Sand Creek, roughly 130 miles away. In time, the Hungate Massacre, as the event would eventually be called, became a rallying cry and a decadeslong justification for the atrocities committed against Native Americans in southeastern Colorado.

Nearly 160 years after the Sand Creek Massacre, Ketter, Aaron, and I took off in a Polaris Ranger utility vehicle and zoomed over the property. We crossed the creek, which was swollen from a storm, and headed for a hillside. Eight head of Ketter’s Angus cattle lazed in the morning sun, swishing their tails while munching on native grass, pasture mix, and brome. Aaron stood on the hill’s highest point, which overlooked a sea of land to the north and east. The Hungate cabin once stood below, about 1,000 yards in the distance, just beyond Ketter’s property line. “I bet Nathan saw the smoke and came riding right through,” Aaron said. He drew a pathway with his right arm through the empty land: “Your mind can just go wild.”

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A few weeks earlier, I had been in Beulah, a community tucked into the Wet Mountains, 25 miles southwest of Pueblo. A rectangle of black cardboard inlaid with a thin layer of white fabric sat on a table in front of me. There was a bullet casing, what appeared to be the heel of a leather shoe, a burned firing plate from an exploded Civil War–era long gun, and other items I couldn’t quite make out. This, Jeff Broome told me, was what remained of the Hungates’ life in Colorado.

To be honest, I was somewhat embarrassed that I hadn’t known about the family, particularly their connection to Sand Creek. I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s on five acres just 12 miles from the Hungate site and loved history. Still, the story had never been told in my classrooms. I also didn’t learn about the 1895 Hunter Act and how it devastated Colorado’s Southern Ute Reservation. I didn’t hear about the desecration of Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings by 19th-century Anglo settlers. I didn’t study the Colorado War. And I don’t remember discussing Sand Creek.

The details surrounding that massacre are known to most of us now. On November 29, 1864, men from Colorado’s volunteer 3rd Cavalry Regiment and 1st Infantry Regiment descended on a peaceful encampment of Arapaho and Cheyenne along Big Sandy Creek, in present-day Kiowa County. Under the command of Colonel John Chivington—a Methodist preacher and Civil War officer responsible for fending off Confederate forces two years earlier at New Mexico’s Battle of Glorieta Pass—an army of about 600 Coloradans attacked the Native Americans, despite the fact that their tribes had been assured U.S. government protection.

Hundreds of Native Americans, most of whom were women, children, and the elderly, were murdered in the ambush. The event is often considered one of America’s worst military atrocities and ended Chivington’s military career. Acts of violence at Sand Creek included murder, rape, dismemberment, genital mutilation, and the desecration of corpses. As details became known over the months, years, and decades, the massacre would come to underscore the brutality of the U.S. government’s policies toward Native Americans.

However, in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the mass murder was hailed as a victory for Anglo settlers in a long-simmering fight over the territory’s future: The decimation and supplication of Native Americans hastened the expansion of the Anglo population as it made an effort for statehood. What’s frequently glossed over today is that the Sand Creek attack was once viewed as retribution for the Hungate murders, which the territorial government used as a pretext for intensified military operations and anti–Native American rhetoric.

Despite a joint Congressional report released in 1865 that condemned both Territorial Governor John Evans and Colonel Chivington and that eventually booted them from their positions, Anglo settlers in the territory used the Hungate murders to justify the massacre and celebrate the colonel. “The immediate cause of the Sand Creek Massacre, in which [Chivington] took such an active part, was the cruel butchery of the Hungate family…,” the Summit County Journal reported in November 1894, one month after Chivington died from cancer. “Their bodies were afterwards found literally ripped to pieces, and…Colonel Chivington swore he would raise an expedition of 1,000 men and clear out the redskins entirely. He kept his word and terribly revenged the massacred family.”

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The property where the Hungate family had lived and died was, in those days, owned by a Denver businessman and absentee rancher named Isaac P. Van Wormer, who’d hired Nathan Hungate to care for the property and its cattle. The land included a well and the cabin near Running Creek. Hungate arrived from Nebraska with his wife and children in April 1864, about two months before their deaths. Hungate’s brother-in-law was a frequent visitor, as were road-weary travelers crossing the Smoky Hill Trail.

Roughly 135 years later, Jeff Broome became one of the few historians to gain direct access to the Hungate site. Broome had learned about the Hungate story during graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder when one of his philosophy professors mentioned the incident. “There seemed to be a real mystery about it,” he told me. Broome then read a retelling of the Hungate story from a July 1935 Colorado Magazine article. In the piece, one of Van Wormer’s children, Ruth V.W. Oettinger, went to Elbert County and recalled the location of the old well, which appeared as a rough, rocky outline in the dirt. She claimed that the Hungate cabin had once stood nearby, perhaps only 15 feet away.

Broome was intrigued, and sometime around 2000, after studying a map of the area, he drove out to the spot where he believed the Hungates had once lived. The owner at that time had subdivided much of the land (selling a portion to Ketter, whose property now overlooks the general vicinity of the old cabin site) but gave Broome access. Broome quickly discovered the site of the cabin, and his metal detector lit up. He dug at that location for weeks. Next, he headed 15 yards east with the metal detector and found the old well.

Among other things, Broome found—and, ultimately, kept—18 melted bullets, seven lead pistol and rifle balls (two of which appeared to have been fired), a fired .44-caliber Henry bullet, a fired .56-caliber Spencer bullet; a fired .44-caliber bullet; a .50-caliber bullet, four fired .32-caliber bullets, 20 Spencer casings for a Warner Carbine long gun, nine .32-caliber pistol casings, eight .44-caliber Henry casings, and a melted 1862 Colt pistol with its serial number still intact. He found evidence of a family, as well. There were horseshoes and thin metal plates—with tiny hearts cut into them—that had once been part of a woman’s shoes. He found burned harmonica reed plates. He found square nails that had likely been used in the cabin’s construction.

I’d been told by various historians that Broome was an amateur, an apologist—Colorado’s version of the lost-cause Confederate revisionists who once tried to explain away the roots of the Civil War. His research interests regularly put him at odds with his counterparts, who offer post-Colonial criticisms of borderlands life that often revolve around the abuse of Native Americans—namely, the stories of broken treaties, massacres, mass starvation, and boarding schools—and dominate historical scholarship today.

Broome, who is now 72 and a retired Arapahoe Community College professor who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, has taken what might be considered an all-lives-matter approach to settler–Indigenous peoples relations. (Tom Noel, the famed Colorado historian, told me Broome was the “bad boy” of the state’s historical researchers.) Throughout his career, Broome has focused on the overarching violence and no-holds-barred attitudes that permeated the frontier and has written books about Native American raids, George Armstrong Custer’s tour of the West, and the abduction and 1869 murder of a white settler named Susanna Alderdice by Cheyenne Dog Soldiers.

His house is just up the road from Beulah’s small downtown and is a monument to his work. In his basement, there are thousands of old books, neatly packaged files he dug up and copied from the National Archives, and a personal microfiche reader. On the day I visited, Broome’s French-made Deus II metal detector rested in a protective plastic case on the family room floor upstairs. Relics he’d discovered during his metal-detecting trips cover the walls: bullets from Sand Creek, horseshoes from two vanished stagecoach stops near Sterling, and battlefield ephemera from Kansas’ Kidder Fight.

Broome is particularly taken, though, with a hunk of metal he found at the Hungate site. He handed it to me as we stood in his kitchen. “I couldn’t believe my luck,” he said. It was a pitted, brass firing plate from a long gun.

To Broome, it appeared the firing plate had burned. It had a wisp of green-tinted oxidization and was partially flayed—peeled open like a banana—as if it had exploded. Broome said he took the plate to a friend, a frontier archaeologist, who confirmed that it was part of an 1864 Warner Carbine and that it had fired .50-caliber bullets like the one found at the site.

Broome took the artifact from my hands and placed it on his kitchen table. Then he began to explain what he thought really happened to the Hungates on that afternoon 160 years ago.

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On June 15, 1864, bells at the newly opened Methodist Seminary rang out over Denver, announcing that residents could finally view the four Hungates’ mutilated corpses. The family had been buried in a makeshift gravesite, possibly behind a sawmill in present-day Elbert County, but the bodies were dug up a day or two later, placed in an ox wagon, and transported to the city. News stories from the time offer conflicting reports about the viewing’s location. Some say the family was displayed at a downtown store, while others report they were in a shed, at the post office, near Denver’s current City and County Building, on present-day Market Street, or somewhere in the center of downtown.

The murders couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous moment for Territorial Governor Evans, who’d spent much of the previous year agitating for federal troops to fight Native American tribes on the Eastern Plains. In the years leading up to the Hungate killings, thousands of Native Americans had been moved to reservations on the east end of the Colorado Territory, where hunting grounds were quickly eroded and Anglo settlers encroached on sacred lands.

Over time, as tribes struggled to survive, they turned to cattle theft to feed their people. Days before the Hungates were killed, Native Americans made off with 150 head of cattle from a territorial ranch. A soldier’s horses were also stolen. A settler’s mules were stampeded. Those were all property crimes, though. The Hungate murders were something else entirely.

For years, Evans’ concerns about Native Americans had mostly been dismissed at the federal level. The nation was in the midst of the Civil War, and deploying troops into the Colorado Territory would have been a grave misuse of desperately needed resources. With a dead family of settlers, however, the governor saw a renewed opportunity. A day before the viewing, Evans announced in a telegraph to Secretary of War E.M. Stanton that the Hungates’ “murdered and scalped bodies” had arrived in the city. The governor reminded Stanton of the recurring “Indian hostilities” and again asked for reinforcements. Might Stanton authorize a 100-day militia to defend the territory? the governor wondered.

Evans understood a secured territory would both boost his popularity among voters and open the door to statehood, which could eventually lead to his ultimate goal: a seat in the U.S. Senate. If he failed to defend white settlements that had expanded since gold was discovered along Cherry Creek in the late 1850s, Evans knew he could forget about a political future in Washington, D.C.

An inquest was held over the Hungates’ remains shortly after their arrival in the city. In his brief report, coroner James M. Broadwell echoed the prevailing narrative at the time: The family was “feloniously killed by some person or persons to the jury unknown, but supposed to be Indians….” There’s no account that the Hungates’ bodies were photographed or that there was a larger investigation. Troops scoured the prairie immediately after news of the Hungate killings reached Denver, but no Native Americans were found. The family was eventually buried at Mount Prospect Cemetery, which is now Cheesman Park.

At the June 15 viewing, Nathan was situated near his wife, Ellen. Laura Hungate and her sister, Florence, were placed in each of their mother’s arms, for dramatic effect. The Denver residents’ hysteria baffled Nathaniel P. Hill, a Brown University chemistry professor who’d arrived in town the same day as the Hungates’ bodies. He’d spent time traversing the Great Plains and wrote to his sister that he’d passed “a good many Indians” on his trip. He’d initially been worried about being attacked, but he noticed that Anglo settlements in Colorado were mostly undefended and easily could be taken by groups of Native Americans.

Why weren’t killings like the Hungates’ more prevalent? he wondered. “[A]s I learn the facts and begin to understand the relation of the Indians to the whites, my fear subsides,” Hill wrote. The viewing, as he witnessed it, was nothing more than propaganda. The bodies were “exposed in the streets” as a way to “convince the incredulous of the fact of the murder,” he wrote. Hill left the city disgusted. “So fond are these Westerners of excitement,” he wrote, “that all the people of the town, with a few honorable exceptions, went to see” the Hungates.

A year later, a report from the U.S. Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the Civil War condemned the Hungate display as it related to the Sand Creek Massacre. The report said the viewing was a political trick designed to provoke “hatred of the whites to the Indians” and that the Hungates’ bodies were “exposed to the public gaze for the purpose of inflaming still more the already excited feeling of the people.”

After being notified of the Hungate killings, Chivington had left his post at Fort Lyon—near Sand Creek—and headed to Denver to take advantage of the fear he knew had gripped the city. Months after Sand Creek, in testimony to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the Civil War, the colonel recalled the Hungate display to defend his decisions during the massacre. “[A]ny person who could, for a moment, believe that these Indians were friendly…must have strange ideas of their habits,” Chivington told the committee. “We could not see it in that light.”

The impact of the Hungate exhibition was immediate. That night, word arrived that around 1,000 Native Americans were heading toward the city, prepared to overtake its residents. Citizens rushed into the streets and took refuge inside the Denver Mint and a building on Ferry Street. Over the next several hours, city residents awaited an attack that never came. The Native Americans bearing down on the city, it turned out, were a herd of cattle kicking up dust in the distance.

It’s uncertain where Evans was at this time, but the governor’s ultimate plan was clear. Fewer than two weeks after the Hungate bodies had been displayed in Denver, the governor issued a proclamation that “friendly Indians of the Plains” were to report to military outposts for safety and protection. In time, his message would change. An ultimatum was released that August. The territory’s citizens, the governor declared, were to “kill and destroy, as enemies of the country, wherever they may be found…hostile Indians.”

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Roughly 15 years before Broome excavated the Hungate site, another historian had visited. In 1985, Robert Akerley, a research author writing for the Aurora History Museum, spent three days at the site and was the first person to record a systematic modern search there. With the help of several organizations, including the Eureka Metal Detector Club and the Cherry Creek Valley and Elbert County historical societies, Akerley and his crew set up a grid in the alfalfa field and began probing for the burned cabin, the well, and the outhouse.

Writing an assessment of the work in November 1986, Akerley recorded minor discoveries, including a burned thimble, buckles, a mule shoe, window-glass fragments, and other items. He reported that a rod was repeatedly plunged into the earth but failed to turn up the well or the cabin’s foundation.

Ed Miller, one of Broome’s CU philosophy professors, also spent time at the property. About a year after Akerley’s search, he took another inventory of the site. Miller, who died earlier this year, also recorded the property’s convoluted history in his manuscripts.

After the killings, Miller wrote, Van Wormer had allowed his land to revert to the government. In 1874, the land was deeded to the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and two years later, it was sold to a private landowner. Miller explained that there was “some slight evidence” that a landowner rebuilt on the same site as the Hungates’ cabin. At some point, Miller wrote, the old well and cabin site were turned into dumping grounds for neighbors.

Miller’s work, to that point, had been the most complete at the site. The philosophy professor went even further with his investigation, though. He visited sites where Nathan Hungate had lived in Nebraska and Illinois and attempted to give insight into the Hungate family’s brief life in Colorado. Using the evidence he’d gathered, Miller came to his own conclusions about the attack, which he attributed to a feud between Van Wormer and Native Americans who’d stolen 40 head of cattle from the land a year earlier. From Miller’s viewpoint, the Hungates had been caught up in something beyond their control.

At best, Miller’s conclusions form a hypothesis of what happened at the Hungate cabin—but it’s still more complete than many of the news reports that were published in 1864. “It’s very difficult to believe anything that was written” at that time, says Jeff Campbell, a former New Mexico cold-case investigator who spent more than two decades reconstructing the mass murder at Sand Creek and spent years investigating the Hungate killings. “The facts don’t add up neatly in any retelling, and lots of post-Hungate recollections are used to excuse what Chivington did, so you’re going to have this reimagining of events.”

Campbell says there is a high likelihood of gross misrepresentation in 1864 accounts, in large part because of the anti–Native American sentiment in the Denver media. The pro-settlement Rocky Mountain News publisher was William Byers, a close friend of Evans whose newspaper advocated for citizen militias to punish “the merciless savages.” A Weekly Commonwealth story published in the Hungate aftermath reported that “Moccasins, arrows, and other Indian signs were found in the vicinity,” but there’s no proof that those things had actually been found. They were not brought as evidence to the coroner in Denver. “You’d think those items would be kept, as direct evidence, to prove what was done to that family,” Campbell says. “If you’re looking for a smoking gun, that would be it. But none of this exists, outside the newspaper.”

In a September 1864 meeting with tribal chiefs at Camp Weld—in what’s now southwest Denver—Evans questioned Arapaho Chief Neva about the Hungates. Neva said several Native Americans were likely responsible for the killings, including men named Roman Nose and Medicine Man. Still, even this information was suspect. It’s possible Neva simply wanted to offer something to territorial officials in an attempt to show cooperation and ensure his tribe’s survival. (“All we ask is that we may have peace with the whites,” Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle said at the meeting, according to a transcript of the event that was published in the Rocky. “We must live near the buffalo or starve.”) There are other issues with the admission Evans got from Neva: There were at least two men who went by the name Roman Nose in the Great Plains, and an Army official noted that Medicine Man had been outside of the Colorado Territory on June 11.

Over time, the Kiowa, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux tribes would all be blamed for the Hungate killings. After Sand Creek, the Rocky Mountain News reported, without evidence, that White Antelope—a 75-year-old Southern Cheyenne chief who’d been at Camp Weld with Black Kettle and was well-known for advocating for peace with settlers—was “one of the murderers of the Hungate family” and had been the first person killed at the Sand Creek Massacre.

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In a lot of archaeological work, grids are set and workers meticulously and methodically cover an area—placing pins to mark locations and recording depths and positions of their findings. “It’s pretty basic-level stuff, because the goal is to put together a story that is supported by evidence, and you have to know where that evidence was found or you can’t put together the correct story,” says Ray Sumner, a Colorado State University doctoral student who is researching a post–Sand Creek battle site in Julesburg. “You can’t just say, ‘I found something cool,’ and leave it at that, because every bit of what you find needs context.”

In his 2000s excavations at the Hungate site, Broome found hundreds of artifacts, but none pointed directly to Native Americans. Despite the dozens of bullets and spent casings, he never found a single metal arrowhead that would have been commonplace among Native Americans of the Great Plains at the time. Perhaps more important, Broome didn’t follow basic best practices of archaeology in his work at the site. He says he made his searches over several years but didn’t keep detailed records—a failing that leaves his findings, no matter how compelling, open to criticism. “I can walk you around where the cabin is and show you about where I found this and that,” he says. “It’s all right there. What difference does it make if [something] was found four feet over there, or eight feet here?”

In the mid-2010s, the landowner revoked Broome’s access to the site after he’d left the dug-out well exposed for too long and some of his students he’d taken to the property began trespassing on the site and taking, and keeping, artifacts. (The current landowner, the third since Broome’s work began, did not return a call seeking comment and has told Luke Aaron that she does not believe the Hungate cabin was on her land.) Still, Broome takes credit for keeping the cabin’s location safe. In the 2010s, he said, new landowners were contemplating building a larger home on the property. Broome said he visited the couple and walked them into a field on their property. “I said, ‘Hey, this is the site,’ ” Broome recalls of the conversation. “ ‘You probably don’t want to build on this.’ ” They didn’t.

Regardless of the effort, Philip J. Deloria, a Harvard University history professor who studies Native American histories across the Great Plains, said Broome’s work likely complicated further investigations and might have actually damaged the historical record at the site. Broome “is like a true-crime person in a way,” Deloria said. “It’s like, I’m going to figure this thing out. I got my metal detector and I’m going to go out, and I’m going to find these things, and I’m going to take them out of the public realm. It’s rife with a jump to the spectacular.”

In this case, any archaeological work at the cabin would also need interpretation, likely from multiple sources, some of whom should have Indigenous backgrounds. “This is a set of killings, and it’s also an ideological structure,” Deloria said. In a sense, the site is “not only a public history; it’s also a Native history that belongs, in some ways, to some Native people.”

At his place in Beulah, everything Broome found at the Hungate site is either on his kitchen table, hanging on walls, or stacked in a shed out back. The most intriguing find, in Broome’s mind, is the flayed brass firing plate, because he believes Nathan Hungate used the gun during the attack. Broome postulates that Hungate repeatedly fired it until “black powder made that barrel so hot, you couldn’t touch it.” At some point, Broome thinks, the weapon must have exploded in Hungate’s face.

Broome says his own investigations prove there’d been heightened tensions in the days before the Hungate killings on June 11, but none in the area had ended with a deadly interaction. There’d been a documented event on June 7 of an interaction between settlers and Native Americans, though no shots were fired and no one was injured. According to a report, there was a cattle theft the same day as the attack on the Hungate cabin.

Two other notable events occurred as well, Broome says, which he’d culled from research at the National Archives: On June 9 or June 10, Native Americans stole seven horses and were chased for three miles by a settler. “They didn’t kill her,” Broome says. Around the same time, possibly on June 10, seven freight wagons stopped in a camp outside Denver to allow roughly 40 oxen to graze and rest. At some point, four Native Americans surprised the group and chased off its animals. Three members of the party had pistols, according to Broome’s research, but no one fired a shot. “The Indians could have killed those people,” Broome says. “They didn’t.”

Which brought him to the Hungate attack. Reports at the time said Hungate had been in the field with another hired hand when he saw his cabin burning in the distance and rode his horse into a fight with the attackers. By then, it’s assumed, his wife and children were already dead. Hungate’s body was found near the creek. A whip was also recovered at the site, according to a report.

But none of that story makes sense to Broome: “Why the hell would the Indians kill this family when everything shows they were doing nothing but stealing stock that day?” He ticks through the list of items he found in the remains of what he says is the old cabin: bullets, casings, the pistol, the firing plate. There’d been obvious violence at the site, but to Broome, much of it appears to have been directed from the inside out.

Broome developed his own hypothesis. There had been an attack, that was clear, but it didn’t happen as it had been reported at the time. Native American depredations had been happening around the area, and Broome believes Hungate had possibly gotten caught up in the excitement. Perhaps because Hungate was a new hire who didn’t want to be responsible for his boss’ cattle being stolen—and he didn’t understand the way in which Native Americans and settlers interacted in the area—Broome thinks there may have been an encounter in which Hungate caught Native Americans stealing Van Wormer’s cattle.

Unlike the woman who’d seen thefts of her own horses and tried to chase the culprits, Broome thinks that perhaps Hungate had shot at the Native Americans, wounding or killing one of them. Hungate, Broome says, should have understood that the loss of the animals was not worth killing a thief and any resultant violence against him or his family.

Broome believes that at some point, Hungate and his family took cover in the cabin. Nathan Hungate would have been shooting the long gun, which exploded during the firefight. It was then, Broome surmises, that the Native Americans set fire to the cabin. His wife and children fled and were caught and killed. “This was a raid that turned violent, and it was caused by Nathan Hungate,” Broome says. “He caused the death of his own family.”

If this were true—and we will likely never know, in part because of Broome’s disorganized work at the site—then it’s fair to wonder if the Hungate family would’ve lived if Hungate had let the Native Americans take off with the cattle. It’s also fair to ponder if, perhaps, the tragedy at Sand Creek wouldn’t have happened, either.

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On a bright afternoon this past August, Sumner, the CSU doctoral student, met me in Julesburg, where he and his team of undergraduate students, graduate students, and volunteers were investigating a battle site just outside of town. I’d been invited because I wanted to get a sense of what rigorous archaeological study of a Hungate-era site really looked like.

I followed Sumner as he drove his red Hyundai Sonata across a stretch of sandy road a few hundred yards from I-76, near the Nebraska border. There were farms with tractors parked out front and occasional fields of corn and millet. We pulled off the road along a section of unfarmed land that bordered a ditch. Beyond the barbed-wire fence directly in front of us, a flagpole rose in the middle distance. “There it is,” Sumner, 52, said.

On January 7, 1865, a small army of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and two bands of Lakota attacked a mail coach and then a wagon train here. The plan was to draw out forces from nearby Camp Rankin and ambush them. The incident, which later was named the Battle of Julesburg, was the first of many post–Sand Creek fights across Colorado and the Eastern Plains that have been categorized as part of the Colorado War.

Old Julesburg (the present-day town is about nine miles to the northeast) had been a prominent Overland Trail way station that connected the Kansas Territory to the Oregon Trail. Before the attack—which left 15 American soldiers and four citizens dead—Old Julesburg had been an important strategic point on the Great Plains. There was a town with a military encampment, a stagecoach station, a large frontier store, and a telegraph office that connected Old Julesburg to Denver. “This was the Walmart of the Old West,” Sumner told me.

A retired Army officer originally from Iowa, Sumner served in Iraq, Korea, and Saudi Arabia and moved to Colorado in 2016 with his family to pursue his doctorate in anthropology. The idea of digging up the past appealed to Sumner, whose ancestors include Elizabeth Minerva Sumner, whose husband was William Byers, the Rocky Mountain News founder and publisher who helped stir up post-Hungate chaos. In 2018, Sumner and one of his professors took a trip to Old Julesburg to check out the site, which appeared to be nothing more than an unfarmed field next to a house and some outbuildings.

Sumner began doing research on the January 1865 battle. He learned that Native Americans had returned a month later to resupply and ultimately burned the town. Many of the Arapaho and Cheyenne who’d participated in the raid had previously fled north after the massacre at Sand Creek. They’d survived on limited supplies in the first months in the wilderness, but an already bleak situation grew worse. “They were just trying to figure out how to make it out alive,” he said. “And you had a little town with all this stuff. Where do you think you’re going to go if you’re worried you might starve to death?”

A few months after seeing the Battle of Julesburg site for the first time, Sumner returned. He spoke to the landowner, who gave Sumner and his team access to the property. Sumner divvied the land into a grid and led multiple metal detectorists across the field. “There was stuff everywhere,” said Sumner, who had a salt-and-pepper beard and was wearing an Indiana Jones T-shirt when we met.

In time, the search area stretched beyond the area where the town had been and included about three miles of land to the southeast, from which the Native Americans had launched their surprise attack. On the site of the former town, Sumner and his group discovered thousands of artifacts—from bullets and pieces of cannonballs used in battle to everyday items such as buttons and belt buckles. Each item was meticulously preserved and catalogued; their locations in the earth and their relations to other nearby artifacts were precisely recorded.

Detailed records “allow you to put together a narrative of real people doing real things,” Sumner said. At one point during their work, the CSU team discovered a cannonball near the old telegraph station, which Sumner believes was launched by soldiers as they tried to clear a path back to Camp Rankin. “That’s when the history comes alive,” Sumner told me.

Eventually, Sumner hopes he can place specific groups of Army soldiers and Native Americans on the land. He wants to understand where they were fighting, where they had come from, and what they might have been doing at a singular moment in time. Similar work has been done at the Battle of Little Bighorn, where an archaeological team linked weapons and ammunition to specific individuals, recording where they fought and died. Sumner believes advanced work in Julesburg could eventually open the property to formal status as a protected U.S. battlefield. The federal designation, he said, would help preserve the land for future generations. Just as important, it would keep the area sacred.

And that’s where Broome’s work on the Hungate property has fallen short. Sumner knows Broome and considers him to be a good historian, but his lack of cataloging, his failure to record specific locations of artifacts, and his use of untrained students searching without true supervision likely ruined the Hungate site for further, serious exploration. “I would never say anything bad about Jeff, but things might have been done differently,” Sumner said. “I think the book is pretty much closed there.”

Sumner stood behind a fence of barbed wire that helped guard the Julesburg property and scratched his beard. “It’s too important to lose this historical record,” he said. “If we’re not out here responsibly researching this site, who’s going to do it?”

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Back near the Hungate site, Aaron hopped in the driver’s side of the Polaris with Ketter in the back and headed past the cattle and down the hill. One of the heifers had given birth a couple of days before, and Aaron said he hadn’t seen the calf all morning. “You don’t think it’s dead, do you, Luke?” Ketter asked.

Aaron shook his head. “I’m sure it’s bedded down somewhere,” he said as we trekked across the field. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”

The land outside this rural bubble was beginning to take on characteristics that Ed Miller, the college professor who searched the Hungate site nearly 40 years earlier, had feared when he asked to dig on the land. Back in the 1980s, the area was entirely rural. There were dirt roads, and it seemed everyone had horses or cattle or farms on properties that stretched 200 acres or more. Elbert County eventually allowed plots to be subdivided into smaller parcels, which brought more development. Roads were improved, and cars sped across miles of now-unbroken pavement. A subdivision west of Ketter’s property seemed to materialize overnight.

Even the land that had once belonged to Isaac P. Van Wormer has been part of the change: The property owners Broome dissuaded from clearing the former cabin’s site eventually built a sizable house. A driveway now runs perpendicular to Running Creek, near where Nathan Hungate’s body was reportedly discovered.

Aaron rents the ranch house where Ketter used to live and is a country singer-songwriter. He played a show recently in nearby Elizabeth, and then returned to the house. Aaron opened the garage door, cracked open some beers, and hung out with his buddies. Deep into the night, Aaron said, people started telling stories. The subject of the Hungates came up. “Murder and mayhem,” Aaron said as we zipped around in the UTV, looking for the missing calf. “You can’t escape it.”

He and Ketter went quiet for a moment. “A family lost their lives out here, for whatever reason,” Ketter hollered over the engine’s whine. “You have to respect that history. Those people came from a long way away to start a life here, and it didn’t work out for them. In some way, maybe we can be some of the people who hold onto that memory.”

After a few minutes of speeding around the field, Ketter was thinking about her missing calf again. “Luke, I’m scared,” she said. “Do you think a coyote got to it?”

“It’s fine; it’s fine,” Aaron said, trying to reassure her. “That momma wouldn’t let that happen to her calf. They can get real mean, charge right at you.” Aaron weaved the Polaris as he drove toward the creek. He watched the mother cow, to see if she showed interest in where we were going.

“C’mon, Momma,” Aaron said.

Nothing.

It went like this for the next several minutes. We checked another trail across the river. We investigated a brushy nest of outgrowth next to a couple of massive cottonwoods. Aaron finally said he needed to drop me off. “I’ve gotta find this thing,” he said, and we headed back to the house. He’d find the calf later that day.

The moment wasn’t lost on him. Aaron had moved in and helped Ketter with her cow operation and was managing the rest of the property, much like Nathan Hungate did 160 years earlier. How many times did Hungate go searching for missing cattle? Aaron wondered.

He stopped on the dirt drive and let me out. Before he and Ketter left me, Aaron said some of the animals would soon be sent to slaughter. The meat would be sold across the state. Ketter said she already had a name for it: Hungate Beef.