Early on the morning of 29 November 1864, Chivington and several hundred men attacked Black Kettle's camp at Sand Creek. According to Cheyenne oral tradition:

As soon as he saw the soldiers coming, early in the morning, Black Kettle called out to them and tried to talk, and raised an American flag up on a pole and moved it back and forth hoping the soldiers would stop. But they did not. The soldiers charged in and started shooting women and small ones as well as warriors. They spared no one, and they cut up and scalped all the dead afterwards. All the tribes heard about it. Gray Blanket told later how some of them grabbed three children and took them back to some officers, the oldest eight and the youngest four or five, and a lieutenant said, 'Orders are to kill small and big' And he shot one in the head with his pistol and then the other two, though they cried and begged for mercy. He said his own little boy came out of a tepee crying and one officer aimed and missed him twice but another set his gun on his knee and knocked him over at the second shot.

Old man Three Fingers' mother put her baby on her back and grabbed Three Fingers' hand-he was just a little boy-and ran for the creek. The soldiers kept firing at her and one hit her in the shoulder, but she made it down below a bank to a safe place. Then she took the baby off her back and it was dead, shot through the body. Her husband was killed at the same time. Afterwards she lived with the Northern Cheyennes for many years, and she never stopped talking about it.

Another woman, Black Bear's wife, had a scar where she had been shot. They called her One Eye Comes Together because of it. She told terrible things about the soldiers killing children, and carrying some of the women away and mistreating them. They shot most of them afterwards, but a few lived to tell about it.

The following day US Lieutenant James Connor rode through the massacre site:

I did not see a body of a man, woman or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner-men, women and children's privates cut out. I heard one man say that he cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick.

I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over their saddle bags and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.

 
Quoted in Wilson, James. The Earth Shall Weep. (Atlantic Monthly, 1999).