The Riverside Scout

the wrong Helen Cannon

James Dean Cannon was a Lieutenant in the First New Mexico Infantry when he was assigned to Fort Lyon in Colorado in 1864. He was present at the Sand Creek massacre and afterward testified against Chivington.

Cannon was also a friend of Silas Soule. After Soule was murdered, Cannon was the man who brought the assassin, Charles Squires, into Denver to face court martial. A couple days after his arrival in Denver with Squires, in July of 1865, Cannon was found dead in his room at the Tremont Hotel in Denver. Of course, rumors abounded that he had been murdered.

While I was researching Cannon for my book (Forgotten Heroes and Villains of Sand Creek), I found a lot of information about his role in the massacre and subsequent investigations, along with the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. However, finding biographical information about him was another matter. He turned out to be the most elusive of all my subjects.

In the 1860 census, I did find a James D. Cannon born in 1836 in Kentucky to a large family. Kentucky was a neutral state during the Civil War so it’s conceivable that James Cannon might have left home, headed west and ended up in a Union infantry in New Mexico. However, I have no real proof that the fellow I found is the right Cannon.

There is a single card in his Civil War pension file that mentions the name of a wife, Helen, but I got no hits for a James and Helen Cannon of that period in the ancestry records.

After Cannon was found dead at the Hotel Tremont, he was buried in Denver. Like Silas Soule, he was probably interred at Mount Prospect, which later became City Cemetery.

I was hoping that he might have been moved to Riverside, as Soule was, so I drove out to Riverside on a crisp winter afternoon and took a little walking tour through the Civil War section. I saw a lot of names that I recognized from reading through all the Sand Creek investigations and other sources, but no James Cannon. I headed into the office. Garry O’Hara was there and we searched through the books for James D. Cannon. No hit. My guess is that James Cannon is probably one of the four thousand or so folks who are still buried beneath Cheesman Park.

Garry suggested we have a look in the Riverside books for Helen Cannon. This time we had a hit. I noted the location and walked out to have a look. I found this repaired tombstone but was sorry to see she was noted as the wife of O.R. cannon, and not James. Like James, Helen Cannon remains a mystery. I hope someday that I can find out more about them.

When I attended the Sand Creek healing run ceremony at Riverside a couple years ago, I assumed that Joseph Cramer was buried there as well. The Cheyenne and Arapaho honor Cramer along with Soule — Cramer also wrote a letter about the massacre that is comparable to Soule’s in its details and condemnation of the attack. He also gave a scathing testimony against Chivington and Anthony.

As I later discovered, there is no Joseph Cramer at Riverside. Through sheer luck, I hooked up with another researcher — Vicki Casteel, an archivist at the Indiana State Archives. She had information that Cramer was buried at Prairie Mound Cemetery in Solomon, Kansas. Cramer was a sheriff there when he died at a young age — reportedly of injuries suffered from a riding accident while he was stationed at Fort Lyon.

I mentioned this to Byrom Strom, Silas Soule’s descendant who lives in Iowa. By coincidence, he was soon visiting his father in Kansas. During that visit, he and his father, E. Malcom Strom, drove out to Prairie Mound one day but were unable to find Cramer’s grave. Since the place is a little far away from me, I had resigned myself to not having any really pertinent images for my Joseph Cramer chapter.

Then, Vicki got me in touch with a woman named Sharon Crowder who lived near Prairie Mound. Sharon graciously went out and took a picture of his grave for me. Unfortunately, her photograph did not match the specs required by my publisher so I couldn’t use it.

Luckily for me, E. Malcom Strom decided he just couldn’t stay away from the place and took another trip out there. This time, he found Cramer’s grave and got a nice shot that I was able to use in the book.

I do hope that the folks who live in Solomon, Kansas area recognize that they’ve got a true hero buried in their cemetery.

Click picture to enlarge

The following is an anecdote told by Dr. O.D. Cass to the early Colorado historian, Frank Hall, who published his “History of Colorado” in 1895 ( Vol. III, pg 166-167). As I have mentioned before, Dr. Cass arrived in Denver during its formative years in 1860. He tried to make a go of it as a doctor in his first months here, starting with Dr. J.F. Hamilton the city’s first hospital. Though present Denver General traces its lineage back to this pioneer facility, the business struggled to survive. The two doctors in charge reportedly had to cover expenses out of their own pockets. Having had some experience in evaluating gold dust in San Francisco’s heyday, Dr. Cass turned to banking and opened an office at the corner of Market and Fifteen ( parts of this structure survive to the present), and began buying the findings of Colorado’s many miners. He also profited from “grubstaking” his customers, making loans at 25%- per month!

The story below occurred while he still had a physician’s office on Blake street, sometime in 1860.

“ One evening while sitting in my office, the door opened, and in stalked a man about five feet nine inches in height, ‘bearded like the pard’*, trousers in boot legs, his dark hair covered by a black slouch hat, beneath which I saw a pair of glittering black eyes.

“’ See here, Doctor. I’ve taken a notion to you. There’s a good many rough fellows about town, who drink and fight and make trouble for honest people. If any of ‘ em ever interfere with you, you send for me. My name’s Charley Harrison.’”

Charley Harrison was a local thug who ran his criminal activities out of his saloon on Larimer Street, the Criterion, known as a notorious den of cutthroats and thieves. He had some standards of decency though, as Dr. Cass attested above. In a similar incident, William Byers, editor of the Rocky Mountain News, was kidnapped at gunpoint by some of Harrison’s goons after the newsman criticized him in print for gunning down an innocent black man. Charley freed Byers quickly, sending him back to his office with the warning, “arm yourself for protection against these sonsofbitches” ( as told by Bill Brenneman in his Miracle on Cherry Creek).

* a phrase from Shakespeare’s As You Like It., pard meaning leopard.

Carol Turner writes in a recent e-mail to the “Scout”:

A few years ago, I went on a Halloween night tour of Riverside Cemetery. The tour guide took us into the Civil War section and showed us the nondescript grave of Silas Soule and told us about his actions at Sand Creek and afterward. From that night on, I developed a bit of an obsession with Silas Soule, along with Wynkoop, Cramer, Cannon, Left Hand, Black Kettle, Downing, Chivington and the whole cast of characters who were involved in Sand Creek. The result is my new book, “Forgotten Heroes and Villains of Sand Creek,” just released from The History Press.

Here is an excerpt from her book, informing us of fascinating new details of Silas Soule’s life before he was shot down in the streets of Denver. It describes his involvement with the Underground Railroad during the “Bloody Kansas” period of that state’s history and quotations from his unusual correspondence with the poet, Walt Whitman. Ms. Turner will be making presentations of her book at the Boulder Book Store on August 3rd, and at the Louisville library in Louisville, CO.on August 9th.

Captain Silas Soule

On New Years Day 1865, Captain Silas S. Soule (pronounced “sole”) and his men walked their horses along a bend in Big Sandy Creek, also known as Sand Creek, counting Arapaho and Cheyenne bodies. Most of the corpses, or what was left of them, were women and children. They had lain in the winter grass for over a month. By then, the work of the elements, wolves, coyotes and the hundred or so dogs living in the former camp had disguised the mutilations, but Soule wrote to his mother a few days later that all had been scalped. He did not mention the other things that had been done to the bodies. “I hope the authorities at Washington will investigate the killing of those Indians,” he wrote. “I think they will be apt to hoist some of our high officials. I would not fire on the Indians with my Co and the Col said he would have me cashiered but he is out of the service before me and I think I stand better than he does in regard to his great Indian fight.”

Twenty-six-year-old Silas Soule was no stranger to violence and death. He was a hardened frontiersman and cavalry officer without qualms about killing warriors in battle. He was also handsome, funny and well loved by friends and family. He was known as a wag, a wit, a mischief, popular with ladies, fond of playacting and imitation—he specialized in Irish and German accents. He was highly skilled at the art of persuasion. The Denver and Central City papers reported frequently on his doings—a broad canvas of snippet reportage, ranging from fact to rumor to inexplicable remarks with the tone of inside jokes. Even during his tense Sand Creek testimony in front of John Chivington, Soule joked about a fellow officer being “excited” when Chivington objected to his use of the word “drunk.”

Soule came from extraordinary beginnings and had a gift for taking part in important historical events. He was born in Maine in an abolitionist family descended from George Soule, a passenger on the Mayflower. His father, Amasa Soule, was a cooper with a taste for politics. The Soule family’s reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin inspired them to uproot and move to Kansas in the late 1850s. The race was on at the time between abolitionists and proslavery advocates to populate the fledgling frontier territory with voters. The Emigrant Aid Society of Massachusetts sponsored the relocation of half a dozen parties of abolitionists—some of them more suited to life on the frontier than others. The Soules were among the hardy founding families of Lawrence, Kansas, who stayed on.

Not surprisingly, Lawrence quickly became a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Soule and his father both worked as “conductors.” According to Annie Soule, one of his two sisters, Silas worked with John Brown, who was later arrested and executed after the raid on Harpers Ferry.

“My brother, Silas, and Brown were close friends,” Annie said in a 1929 interview.

Silas was out on many a foray with him. I recall well when Brown came to our cabin one night with thirteen slaves, men, women and children. He had run them away from Missouri. Brown left them with us. Father would always take in all the Negroes he could. Silas took the whole thirteen from our home eight miles to Mr. Grover’s stone barn, two miles west of where the Haskell Indian school is now. The Negroes stayed there, hidden in the barn for several days, when a chance offered and they were taken still further toward freedom by another agent of the Underground.

In January 1859, Dr. John Doy and his son, Charles, both of Lawrence, were escorting a group of free blacks north out of Kansas when they were captured. The would-be escapees were most certainly absorbed into the slave system, Charles was later released and Dr. Doy was taken to Missouri and tried twice. At the second trial, he was found guilty of abducting slaves and given a five-year prison term. A group of friends from Kansas, including Silas Soule, planned a rescue. In an affidavit, Doy describes how this rescue was initiated by a visit from a man later identified as Silas Soule:

Towards dark the outer door of the cell was opened, and a young man with a carpet bag…came to the grated door and informed me that he had recently seen my wife and son, that they were well, and hoped to see me within two weeks. He was quite curious about the jail, looking around a good deal, and as he stood with his back close to the grated door talking with the jailer, whose attention he directed to some means of ventilation outside, I, expecting something, saw a small slip of paper in the hand which he held behind him, and took it…

After the outer door was again closed…I read from it aloud: “Be ready at midnight.”

Midnight brought with it a storm and an arrested horse thief, escorted into the cell by two men. As soon as the jailer opened the cell door, the “horse thief” and his “captors” announced they had come to rescue Dr. Doy. They held a gun on Doy’s jailer, headed out with their prize and ran on foot to the Missouri River, where several boats waited to spirit them across the heavy current back to the relative safety of Kansas. This rescue group soon became known throughout the region as the Jayhawker Ten.

After the Doy affair, Soule headed east to help rescue his old friend, John Brown, who had been captured at Harpers Ferry and was due to be hanged. Soule reportedly visited Brown in jail, but the rescue attempt was aborted, due either to snow or to Brown’s refusal to participate. After Brown was hanged, Soule was involved in another plot to rescue two men from Brown’s group, but that plan was also abandoned.

During his travels, Soule met and befriended Walt Whitman in Boston, along with men from the “Black String Society,” a secret abolitionist group whose members identified each other by wearing black ribbons around their necks. These included the book publishers William Thayer and Charley Eldridge, who published the expanded third edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and James Redpath’s Life of John Brown.

When Soule returned to Kansas, he discovered that his brother, William, and many of their friends were heading west to join the Pike’s Peak gold rush. In a move typical of the adventuresome, impulsive Silas, he took off for Pike’s Peak. As he wrote to his new friends in Boston, “Now I must tell you something that will surprise you. When I arrived here I found a party waiting for me to go to pikes peak. My Brother and cousin were in the gang going with a quartz machine belonging to Solomon and Parker of Lawrence and there was no way but I must go.”

In Colorado, he spent a couple years mining and blacksmithing, ending up broke and restless in Central City. By the middle of 1861, he was already “getting D–n sick of this God forsaken place.”

When the Civil War started, he joined the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers as a first lieutenant. The exuberant Soule wrote to Walt Whitman:

Perhaps you think I am writing very familiar for almost a stranger and writing to a distinguished Poet but I think I have made a sufficient apology when I tell you I have been in the Rocky Mountains for almost two years where every man is an old acquaintance if you never saw him before. When I left Boston I came to Kansas and from there out here among Grizzly bears, Indians, yankees and almost every species of man and beast that inhabit the globe. I have lived on venison and I have lived on bread. I have gone hungry for many a day and have had plenty to eat for many more. And for all the hard ships I have seen, it suits me. I like it. I enjoy myself hugely, and I think you would do the same.

In March 1862, when an army of Confederates from Texas invaded New Mexico, the Colorado Cavalry was called in to help. Soule described the famous march of the First Colorado in a letter to Whitman:

As soon as we heard of the battle we made a forced march to the rescue. We marched a Reg of men 350 miles in 14 days. We marched 120 miles in three days and 80 miles in 24 hours. I think we made the biggest march on record. We understood that Sibley was making an attact [sic] on Fort Union. The word came to us about sundown after the men had marched 40 miles and had not had their supper and they threw their hats in the air and swore they would march 40 miles farther before they slept and they did. They started off singing the Star spangled banner, Red white and Blue and yankee doodle, so you can imagine what kind of material this Reg is composed of.

In late March, Soule’s Company K of the Colorado Cavalry fought in the Battle of Glorieta Pass. After Union troops destroyed their supply train, the Rebels headed back to Texas.

For much of the following year, Soule served as acting assistant adjutant general to Colonel John Chivington. Soule had written to Whitman about his affection for the “Fighting Parson”: “Our Colonel Chivington was a methodist Preacher, ‘Presiding’ elder in Colorado. He is about six feet four inches high and built in proportion, a first rate fellow and liked by his Regament [sic].” Four months before Sand Creek, he also wrote fondly of Chivington to his sister: “Our Col is a Methodist Preacher and whenever he sees me drinking, gambling, stealing or murdering he says he will write to Mother or my sister Annie so I have to go straight.”

That September, news reached Colorado of the August 21 attack on Lawrence, Kansas, by William Quantrill and three to four hundred proslavery “bushwhackers.” At the time, Soule’s brother William was marshal of Lawrence, and their mother and two sisters also lived there. Soule’s father, Amasa Soule, had died in 1860. During Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence, the bushwhackers destroyed a quarter of the houses and murdered over two hundred men and boys. They sacked and burned the Soule family home, but all family members escaped. On September 4, Soule wrote to his sister, Emily:

I sympathize with the sufferers at Lawrence and wish I was able to help them. Tell Mother to be brave and not fret over our loss. We will come out all right. Tell me in your next how much we lost there and where the house was and all the particulars. I will write more next time. I have no time now as the mail will close soon.

During 1864, he was stationed mainly in Fort Lyon but also wrote letters from Fort Garland; Conejos, Colorado; and Fort Fillmore in New Mexico. This was a period of increased skirmishes with bands of Cheyenne, Arapaho and Kiowa, and Soule was involved in several fruitless chases across the plains. In August, he wrote to his sister, Annie: “I am still at Fort Lyon and perhaps you had better direct your next here. I presume I shall be here some time yet. We have considerable trouble with the Indians. They would like to scalp us all. We have been chasing them for two weeks but only killed two. It is hard to get into a fight with them, they scatter so.”

During September, Soule accompanied Major Edward Wynkoop to Smoky Hill and the Camp Weld Council in Denver. After Camp Weld, he returned to Fort Lyon with Major Wynkoop and the chiefs. On October 17, his relations with Colonel Chivington were still friendly, as he wrote to discuss issues about his company being mustered out, which was due to occur on January 26. He also mentioned the presence nearby of Arapaho chief Left Hand:

Colonel—
I arrived here with Major Wynkoop on saturday. The command has not arrived yet but we expect them today. There is no news of importance here. There are about two hundred Indians camped fifteen miles from here awaiting the return of the chiefs. Left Hand is here with about twenty Indians. Today he says if all the rest go to war he will with his band lay down their arms and come in for protection, or fight even against his own tribe rather than take up arms against the whites.

Shortly after Major Wynkoop left Fort Lyon for Kansas, Soule was out on patrol when he met Colonel Chivington and the hundred days’ men. During this unexpected encounter, Chivington quizzed Soule about nearby Indian camps. Soule reiterated that those camped at Sand Creek were the chiefs who had recently met with Chivington to talk peace, that they were considered prisoners and that they were waiting to hear from General Curtis about the next course of action. He later testified that “some one made answer that they wouldn’t be prisoners after they got there.” Soule soon realized what Chivington’s intentions were, and he and other Fort Lyon officers tried to stop it. Soule later wrote to Ned Wynkoop:

As soon as I knew of their movement I was indignant as you would have been were you here and went to Cannon’s room, where a number of officers of the 1st and 3rd were congregated and told them that any man who would take part in the murders, knowing the circumstances as we did, was a low lived cowardly son of a bitch. Capt. Y.J. Johnson and Lieut. Hardin went to camp and reported to Chiv, Downing and the whole outfit what I had said, and you can bet hell was to pay in camp.

Soule approached Major Anthony, who had previously assured Black Kettle and the others that he would maintain Wynkoop’s policies until given further instructions. Anthony informed Soule that he had only been “acting friendly with them until he could get a force large enough to go out and kill all of them—‘all the Indians,’ or words to that effect.”

Soule later described what happened next:

I was warned by Major Anthony, Lieutenant Cramer, and some others not to go to the camp where Colonel Chivington was; that he had made threats against me for language I had used that day against Colonel Chivington’s command going out to kill those Indians on Sand Creek.

In a letter to General Curtis two weeks after the massacre, Chivington boasted that hundreds of warriors were killed and commended the “bravery and effectiveness” of his troops but added that he “cannot conclude this report without saying that the conduct of Capt. Silas S. Soule, Company D, First Cavalry of Colorado, was at least ill-advised, he saying that he thanked God that he had killed no Indians, and like expressions, proving him more in sympathy with those Indians than with the whites.”

In the days and weeks after the massacre, while Chivington and the hundred days’ men returned to victory celebrations in Denver, Soule and the other Fort Lyon officers who had opposed the attack wrote letters to military and Congressional leaders. By January, most of the troops involved were mustered out of the cavalry, and in early February, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Tappan began his investigation of the Sand Creek massacre.

Soule was the first witness called in for questioning. His testimony began on February 15 and lasted nearly a week. He declared that the people they attacked understood that “they were to be protected by the troops there until the messenger returned from General Curtis” and that Major Anthony had told them to move their camp to Sand Creek.

After leaving Fort Lyon, Soule reenlisted and became the Denver provost marshal. In the months after the massacre, Soule told friends that several attempts had been made on his life. Despite these worries, on April 1, 1865, he married Hersa Coberly, a beautiful and clever young woman whose family ran a well-known stage stop called the Half Way House near today’s Larkspur. Cavalry troops traveling between Camp Weld near Denver and the forts in southern Colorado often stopped at Coberly’s. In his Sand Creek testimony, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer mentioned a visit to Coberly’s after the Camp Weld Council. Silas had likely gotten to know the popular Hersa during such holdovers.

After the wedding, the couple made their home in Denver. On a quiet April night, less than a month after they married (and ten days after the assassination of President Lincoln), Silas and Hersa were returning home after an evening with friends. They heard gunshots out in the streets, so he escorted Hersa home and went back out to check on it. As he walked down Lawrence Street approaching Fifteenth, a figure appeared out of the darkness and shot him in the face. At age twenty-six, the newlywed Silas Soule was dead.

Soule’s friends were shocked and angered by his murder, and all of them believed that he had been assassinated at the behest of Chivington. He was buried with great honors, though undoubtedly Chivington’s supporters stayed away. The killer was captured and brought back to Denver by a friend of Soule’s, Lieutenant James Cannon, but the man escaped and Cannon died mysteriously.

That summer, Major and Mrs. Wynkoop, along with Samuel Tappan—all good friends of Silas Soule, probably as far back as their Kansas days—escorted his widow Hersa to Lawrence to stay with William Soule, Silas’s brother. In August, Hersa described her grief to Silas’s sister, Annie:

I like Will and Mary very very much but I don’t think that Will is much like Silie, he is not so full of fun, but his eyes and hair are very much like My Silie’s and I have no doubt but he is as good and I love him dearly but oh dear Annie no one can feel as I do, he was my future hope and sometime when I look at Will and see the very same eyes, I think oh, can it be, I want to throw my arms around his neck and say ’tis true you are with me yet my own dear Silie. The thought is almost maddening to me sometimes and I go to my room and stay for hours and read to get it off of my mind. Oh, I am afraid I shall make them unhappy. I would rather die than to. I think because it is fate to be unhappy it is not right that I should make others unhappy on my account.

Five years later, Hersa was back in Denver, living with her brother, William Coberly. She later married a Boulder miner, Alfred Lea, with whom she had several children. Their son, Homer Lea, grew up to become a noted author of political books, an advisor to the Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen and a famous general in the Chinese army. Hersa Lea died in 1879 and is buried at Riverside Cemetery in Denver.

Silas Soule is buried in the Civil War section of Riverside. Every year on the anniversary of the Sand Creek massacre, members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations hold a Healing Run ceremony. Youngsters run from the Sand Creek site up to Denver, where they honor Silas Soule and Joseph Cramer at Soule’s grave. They then march to the capitol, where they read aloud the letters written to Wynkoop by Soule and Cramer, telling the world what really happened.

Excerpted from Carol Turner’s new book, Forgotten Heroes and Villains of Sand Creek, published by The History Press.

Back when there was grass, live trees, and even flowers at Riverside!

Compare this photo with the one of the monument on the home page.