The Indians of the Pike's Peak Region: Including an Account of the Battle of Sand Creek, and of Occurrences in El Paso County, Colorado, During the War with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, in 1864 and 1868

A firsthand account of one of the American frontier's most tragic chapters, written by a man who witnessed the violence that reshaped Colorado. Irving Howbert arrived in the Pike's Peak region as a young man in the 1860s, and his memoir documents the collisions between settlers and Indigenous peoples that defined this era. The book provides rare primary source detail on the Utes, Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes who called this region home, while offering an eyewitness perspective on the Battle of Sand Creek in 1864, where Colorado militia slaughtered hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapahoe people, most of them women and children. Howbert writes with the immediacy of someone who lived through raids, skirmishes, and the slow displacement of tribal nations, offering a complicated but invaluable window into a period of profound injustice. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the violent birth of the American West and the real people caught in its wake.