Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

My preliminary response was inadequate, Loki, here are a few more equally repugnant thoughts...

One and one half centuries later, it is difficult to understand their local acts of violence, unless they were taking revenge in return for previous attacks upon their own families and communities, and that could not be legally justified.

Being Colorado Militia, those fighters would be local, and could be less concerned and less knowledgeable about the Civil War than would be regular United States Military, for they would have joined their state militia with the expectation of defending their own communities, immediate families and extended relatives...

Those who slaughtered Native American men, women and children who had not attacked them, however, were reprehensibly criminal for their action, and for their inaction in failing to contribute to the preservation of their own national government when their country was at war with itself, or to improve the plight of enslaved black men, women and children in the South.

It is also possible that receiving orders from a remote Washington D.C. was as diagreeable to those living in the western U.S. then, as it is today, to many disaffected Americans living in fly-over country.

Loki Loc: Georgia

Loki Loc: Georgia

Chivington was a commissioned officer in the US Army. His "command" at the time were a group of volunteers.The following link gives a little more insight into the character, or rather, lack of it, of John Chivington.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chivington

pafret Loc: Northeast

Read your link on Chivington -- as my British neighbor used to say "He was a right proper bastard". I found it amusing that he gravitated to the church -- like many other sanctimonious leeches before him. He was useless there and had to be moved out of state because of his bad behavior. It reminds me of the Catholic Church shuffling pederast priests around.

He considered himself fit to become a political leader -- another set of useless leeches. There is some demon that protects such people and prevents their getting the treatment they deserve, a short rope and a long drop. Instead they reach the pinnacles of power; it confirms my belief that you have to be a sociopath to hold public office.