A Northern Colorado group is looking to take the Pingree name out of Northern Colorado and replace it with another.
The No Pingree Task Force, according to a recent release, is working to change the name of some geographic features in Larimer County that bear the name of George Pingree due to his connection to the atrocities of the Sand Creek Massacre.
John Gascoyne, spokesperson for the task force, said the group is hoping that they can take Pingree’s name out of the area and replace it with the name of a man more fitting of remembrance: Silas Soule.
“(This) is trying to make up for a wrong that was done a long time ago,” he said.
The group is looking to change the Pingree in areas across Northern Colorado, including Pingree Park Road, Pingree Hill and the Pingree Park area. However, this would take a good deal of work, Gascoyne said.
Gascoyne said the process to get the name changed would take work between state and federal agencies with the support of local government, since much of the lands the task force are looking at are Forest Service lands.
“Our task is not to hone the public opinion, it is to try and report on it as accurately as we can,” he said.
According to the task force release, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has formally established a process to remove names from federal lands. A said the creation of the Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force will include representatives from federal land management agencies alongside diversity, equity and inclusion experts to find and rename these areas.
Gascoyne said according to federal guidelines they must coordinate with the federal government as well as the local U.S. Forest Service to see if a name change can be accepted and agreed upon and, if the change is accepted, a naming commission will choose the new name.
Gascoyne said the task force, which currently has around a dozen people involved, is looking to try and do something about a horrific piece of Colorado history.
“You cant make it go away, but you can try and do remedial efforts,” he said. “You can sit there and look at it and ignore it or you can try and do something about it.”
The Sand Creek Massacre and George Pingree
The Sand Creek Massacre took place Nov. 29, 1864 in southeastern Colorado territory, according to an Approximately 675 U.S. volunteer soldiers, at the command of Col. John Chivington, launched an attack on a village of around 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho people living along South Creek.
“Using small arms and howitzer fire, the troops drove the people out of their camp,” the parks service wrote. “While many managed to escape the initial onslaught, others, particularly noncombatant women, children and the elderly fled into and up the bottom of the dry stream bed. The soldiers followed, shooting at them as they struggled through the sandy earth.”
Over roughly eight hours, troops killed around 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, primarily women and children. In the afternoon and day following the killing, soldiers “wandered over the field committing atrocities on the dead before departing the scene on Dec.1 …,” according to NPS.
According to the task force, Pingree —a volunteer scout — was “among the most vicious and least remorseful of those who assaulted the peaceful villagers.” By his own account, the task force said, Pingree took 13 scalps and traded them to a Denver barber for two years of haircuts.
After his time in the army, Pingree moved to Northern Colorado. According to the , Pingree traveled to the area in search of trees to log for railroad ties to be used on the transcontinental railroad and, by 1868, had established a tie camp in the valley that would eventually bear his name: the Pingree Park area.
The CSU mountain campus was created in 1914 by Colorado Agricultural College (which would eventually become CSU) President Charles E. Lory and Colorado Governor E.M. Ammons, who placed the campus on the selected 1,600-acre parcel that comprises the present–day campus.
While it held the name Pingree Park Mountain campus for around 100 years, the campus was officially renamed the Colorado State University Mountain Campus in 2015, according to CSU.
“The new name aligns the field education and research campus more closely with CSU’s mission as a land-grant institution and removed association with the person of George Pingree, who played a self-proclaimed role in the Sand Creek Massacre,” the CSU Mountain Campus history page reads. “Despite the surrounding valley still bearing the USGS designation of ‘Pingree Park,’ now the CSU Mountain Campus itself, and the affection many visitors develop for the place, can better reflect CSU’s Principles of Community.”
Who was Silas Soule?
While Soule was present at the Sand Creek Massacre, his story is unlike that of Pingree.
According to an , he was born in Maine to an abolitionist family. He moved to Kansas in the late 1850s with his family being one of the founding families of Lawrence, Kansas and very active in the Underground Railroad.
In 1860, Soule joined the rush to the Pike’s Peak region in Colorado Territory, according to NPS, where he mined for gold and worked as a blacksmith.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he left to join the Army and eventually rose to the rank as lieutenant in Company K of the Colorado 1st Regiment of Volunteer Infantry. After his regiment was converted to a cavalry unit and stationed throughout the Colorado Territory, Soule was promoted to captain and assigned to Fort Lyon along the Santa Fe Trail.
During the fall of 1864, Soule was part of several peace talks with native people, including the Smoky Hills peace talks with the Cheyenne and Arapaho peace chiefs. His presence at peace talks, NPS states, played an important role in his decisions during the massacre where he showed “extraordinary courage in refusing to participate in the massacre of the peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho.”
Soule and his company of soldiers refused to fight during the attack and, following the massacre, he wrote “chilling and explicit letters” about what he saw; he eventually testified against Chivington during the Army’s investigation in January of 1865.
“You would think it impossible for white men to butcher and mutilate human beings as they did there, but every word I have told you is the truth, which they do not deny,” Soule wrote in a December 1864 letter. “It was almost impossible to save any of them.”
In April of 1865, Soule married Hersa Coberly and the two moved to Denver. However, less than 80 days following his testimony against Chivington, Soule was shot and killed on a Denver street while performing his duties as provost marshal.
According to the task force, this spot now sits at the intersection of 15th and Arapaho streets in downtown Denver.
