Little Raven

The street that winds around Denver's Commons Park is called Little Raven, and it wasn't until this past Sunday that I found out why.  It turns out that Little Raven was a chief of the Arapaho Indians, who once lived where Cheery Creek meets the Plate River, just a short distance from where the plaque in the above photograph is located.  Where once the Arapaho roamed, now hipsters live and play.  The lives of these Indians changed dramatically when gold was discovered in the area in 1858.  The gold panned out, but settlers flocked to Denver, resulting in the relocation of the tribe to Sand Creek, in the eastern part of Colorado, where one morning the Colorado US Volunteer Calvary attacked a settlement made up mostly of women and children and massacred them.  The survivors were forced onto reservations in Oklahoma, one of the more disgraceful episodes in American history.