On the morning of November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington led roughly 700 U.S. volunteer troops toward a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at Sand Creek, in Colorado Territory.

The camp, led by Chief Black Kettle, was flying both a white flag and an American flag, signals the people there believed placed them under military protection.

Captain Silas Soule commanded Company D of the First Colorado Cavalry. He was part of the force Chivington brought to the camp that morning.

When the order came to attack, Soule told his men not to fire.

Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, commanding a separate company, made the same call. Neither Company D nor Cramer's men took part in what followed.

The rest of Chivington's force opened fire on the camp. More than two hundred people were killed, most of them women, children, and the elderly.

Soule did not stop the attack. He stopped his own company from joining it, in the middle of a chain of command that expected obedience and offered no cover for refusal.

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In the weeks after, Soule wrote to Major Edward Wynkoop, a former commander who had dealt fairly with the Cheyenne and Arapaho, describing in detail what Chivington's men had done. He called it what it was rather than what the official reports were calling it.

He later gave sworn testimony to a military commission investigating the attack, testimony that helped establish it in the official record as a massacre rather than a battle.

Chivington was never court-martialed. He had left the volunteer service by the time the investigations concluded, which placed him outside military jurisdiction.

On April 23, 1865, five months after Sand Creek, Soule was shot and killed on a street in Denver. He was 26.

His killer was a former soldier from Chivington's command. The man was arrested, escaped custody, and was later killed himself before the full circumstances of the shooting were ever settled in court.

Soule is buried in Denver's Riverside Cemetery. Congress later established the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site, and Soule and Cramer are named among the few men who refused to take part.

He did not have the authority to stop Chivington. He had only the authority over his own company, and he used every bit of it he had.

Most men will never stand in a chain of command that asks them to do something they cannot undo. Soule's did, on one morning, with no higher officer backing his refusal and no guarantee of what it would cost him.

If refusing to fire meant you might be the one who paid for it later, would you still have kept your company's weapons down?