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He did everything they told him to do. He flew the American flag over his camp, raised a white flag beside it, and believed he was under the Army's protection. At dawn they attacked anyway.Black Kettle was a Southern Cheyenne peace chief who spent years trying to find a way for his people to live alongside the flood of settlers pouring into Colorado Territory. In November 1864 he was camped along Sand Creek with several hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women, children, and the elderly, having been assured by officials that they would be safe there. Over his lodge flew a large United States flag, a symbol he trusted to mark his people as friendly.On the morning of November 29, Colonel John Chivington led around seven hundred volunteer soldiers in a surprise attack on the sleeping camp. What happened was not a battle. It was a massacre, and an estimated one hundred and fifty or more people were killed, many of them defenseless. The reports of atrocities were so severe that even at the time, congressional investigators condemned it in the harshest terms.Black Kettle survived that dawn and kept seeking peace, only to be killed four years later in another attack on another river. His story is one of the hardest reminders that on this frontier, a flag and a promise did not always mean safety. How do you hold onto any faith in peace after living through something like Sand Creek?