<P> After hiding all day above the camp, in holes dug beneath the bank of Sand Creek, the survivors there, many of whom were wounded, moved up the stream and spent the night on the prairie . Trips were made to the site of the camp but very few survivors were found there . After a cold night without shelter, the survivors set out toward the Cheyenne camp on the headwaters of the Smoky Hill River . They soon met up with other survivors who had escaped with part of the horse herd, some returning from the Smoky Hill camp where they had fled during the attack . They then proceeded to the camp, where they received assistance . </P> <P> The massacre disrupted the traditional Cheyenne power structure, because of the deaths of eight members of the Council of Forty - Four . White Antelope, One Eye, Yellow Wolf, Big Man, Bear Man, War Bonnet, Spotted Crow, and Bear Robe were all killed, as were the headmen of some of the Cheyenne military societies . Among the chiefs killed were most of those who had advocated peace with white settlers and the U.S. government . The net effect of the murders and ensuing weakening of the peace faction exacerbated the developing social and political rift . Traditional council chiefs, mature men who sought consensus and looked to the future of their people, and their followers, were opposed by the younger and more militaristic Dog Soldiers . </P> <P> Beginning in the 1830s, the Dog Soldiers had evolved from a Cheyenne military society of that name into a separate band of Cheyenne and Lakota warriors . They took as their territory the area around the headwaters of the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers in southern Nebraska, northern Kansas, and the northeastern Colorado Territory . By the 1860s, as conflict between Indians and encroaching whites intensified, the Dog Soldiers and military societies within other Cheyenne bands countered the influence of the traditional Council of Forty - Four chiefs who, as more mature men, took a larger view and were more likely to favor peace with the whites . To the Dog Soldiers, the Sand Creek massacre illustrated the folly of the peace chiefs' policy of accommodating the whites through treaties such as the first Treaty of Fort Laramie and the Treaty of Fort Wise . They believed their militant position toward the whites was justified by the massacre . </P> <P> The events at Sand Creek dealt a fatal blow to the traditional Cheyenne clan system and the authority of its Council of Chiefs . It had already been weakened by the numerous deaths due to the 1849 cholera epidemic, which killed perhaps half the Southern Cheyenne population, especially the Masikota and Oktoguna bands . It was further weakened by the emergence of the separate Dog Soldiers band . </P>

The sand creek massacre of 1864 and the battle at wounded knee in 1890