I'm still struggling with this problem so any additional help would be greatly appreciated.
I just re-tried using elasticsearch_loader to see if maybe it would give me either better/different error messages or some indication of what I needed to resolve. I received this:
JSON file stats:
lines: 160,000
lines that went to HELK stack: 183 (shown in index)
elasticsearch.helpers.errors.BulkIndexError: ('317 document(s) failed to index.', [{u'index': {u'status': 400, u'_type': u'data', u'_index': u'wthisgoingon', u'error': {u'reason': u'Could not dynamically add mapping for field [id.resp_h.name.vals]. Existing mapping for [id.resp_h] must be of type object but found [text].', u'type': u'mapper_parsing_exception'}