Boulder's history includes a hard link to the Sand Creek Massacre

Part of Boulder’s history is painful, and the city itself does not hide from it. It is worth knowing as you learn the place.

The Boulder Valley was home to Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples long before settlers arrived, and the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie recognized this region as their territory. After gold drew settlers in 1859, those nations were pushed from the area. The City of Boulder also documents that in 1864 a local company trained at a site called Fort Chambers along Boulder Creek and then took part in the Sand Creek Massacre, in which U.S. forces killed many Arapaho and Cheyenne people, including leaders who had been seeking peace.

For years a public marker described those events inaccurately. The city has since worked with Arapaho and Cheyenne tribal representatives to correct the record, including removing that older marker and developing a management plan for the Fort Chambers site.

This note is only a respectful pointer, not a full telling. The honest history of Indigenous peoples here belongs first to the Arapaho and Cheyenne nations and to careful official accounts. The City of Boulder’s pages on Fort Chambers and on its land acknowledgment are good starting places to learn more with the care this history deserves.