Oh What a Slaughter (2 page)

But it should be remembered that the body count in the six massacres I'm especially interested in still adds up to fewer than one thousand people, barely one-third of the number who died in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

But places and contexts differ: in the thinly populated West of the nineteenth century the violent extinction of more than one hundred people was no light thing, though a few of the assailants at first pretended that it was. Massacres are not like vast natural disasters: the Galveston Flood, the San Francisco Earthquake, the eruption of Krakatoa.

Massacres require human volition, and the extremes that result
not infrequently produce trauma and, sometimes, guilt. Though in most cases the men who did the killings I describe escaped legal retribution, they did not escape the trauma that followed on the terror they inflicted.

Nephi Johnson, one of the participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, died crying “Blood, blood, blood!”

Nephi Johnson

Though more than a century has passed since Wounded Knee, the most recent of these massacres, bitterness has yet to leach out of the descendants of those massacred. Very probably one of the reasons The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) continues to deny complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre—although an abundance of evidence makes clear that they led it—is because there are in Arkansas and elsewhere descendants of the 121 people killed on that September day in
1857. Many of those descendants might not be averse to suing this now very prosperous church.

I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites—the Sacramento River Massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers, and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live in the area. None of the massacres was effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River Massacre was overlooked for a very long time.

But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.

*   *   *

J. P. Dunn

In 1886 the historian and journalist J. P. Dunn published a pioneering study of Western massacres. He called his book
Massacres of the Mountains
, though few of the massacres he described actually took place in mountainous country; none of those that I am concerned with do.

The 1864 massacre at Sand Creek, in eastern Colorado, occurred in vast and still almost empty plains country. Dunn's book was a very popular account of the long and bloody war between whites and Indians (and, occasionally, Hispanics) during the long struggle for control of our Western lands. Dunn's title was catchy and his material vivid, to say the least.

Though overwritten and overlong, Dunn's book is a Black Book, of a sort that was only to become common after World War I. He had initially intended to stop his story in 1875, just before the Custer battle, but found that he could not resist following the Apache campaigns in the Southwest, which were still proceeding.

Nor, in the end, could he resist doing the Little Bighorn and the subsequent troubles with the Nez Percé and the Utes. Geronimo and his eighteen warriors didn't surrender to General Nelson Miles until 1886, the year Dunn's book was published.

The Ghost Dance troubles among the Dakota Sioux, Sitting Bull's controversial death, and the final tragic slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek were still four years ahead. After 1890 there continued to be plenty of white-Indian conflict—
The New York Times
as recently as October 29, 2002, reported that there was yet again trouble at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, not far from where the Wounded Knee Massacre took place. Plenty of troubles there have been, but no more massacres on the one-hundred-victim scale.

Massacres of the Mountains
is still in print; it remains interesting today not merely for what J. P. Dunn reported—often in prose more than a little purple-tinted, as we shall see—but also for what he himself
felt
about these bloody troubles. He knew
well, and repeats over and over again, that the Indians were commonly the victims of massive and cruel injustices—systematic injustices at that. He knew and insists that the agency system, which put the Indians on the public dole, was, time and time again, used as a personal piggy bank by corrupt administrators. The Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862 would not have occurred had the agents just given the starving Indians the food that was both available and theirs by right.

J. P. Dunn knew that many of the Indian grievances were just ones. By the time he wrote his book it was clear that the Indians were beaten—which is not to say that they were pacified. The personal element that lends his graphic text its tension is that J. P. Dunn was close enough to the frontier experience to have felt, himself, some of the apprehension about Indian attack that was, from the early seventeenth century until almost the end of the nineteenth, a constant presence for pioneers as they strove to expand the Western frontier.

Similarly, apprehension about what the well-armed whites might do was something Indians in the line of advance seldom felt free to ignore.

This deep, constant
apprehension
, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnapping.

In my opinion this grinding, long-sustained apprehension played its part in the ultimate resort to massacre. President George W. Bush has recently revived the doctrine of the preemptive strike, a doctrine far from new in military or quasi-military practice. Most of the massacres I want to consider were thought by their perpetrators to be preemptive strikes, justified by the claim that the attacks were punishment for past harassments by the native tribes.

*   *   *

It is as well to say at the outset of this inquiry that all the massacres I want to write about are subjects of controversy; in most cases the only undisputed fact about a given massacre is the date on which it occurred—almost everything else remains arguable, including body counts. What I have to say, after having spent some months with the books about these bloody events, is often opinion, conjecture, or surmise—or just a best guess.

My own grandparents were vulnerable pioneers, which is perhaps one reason I began this inquiry. They left violence-torn western Missouri in the 1870s, looking for a safer place in which to raise a family. In their first travels westward I suspect they felt the apprehension regarding Indian attack that I mentioned in the previous chapter. The power of the Comanches and the Kiowa had been broken by 1875; and yet my grandparents, like many pioneers, must have wondered in their first Texas years if these formidable people were really going to
stay
broken.

As luck would have it they found in Archer County a nice piece of prairie with a good flowing spring on it, and they settled—the family seat, as it happened, was only a few miles from where one of the last small massacres on the southern plains had taken place. This was the Warren Wagon Train Raid, in which some Kiowa, including two famous chiefs, Satank and Satanta, had drifted well south of their reservation—they fell on a luckless little convoy of teamsters hauling goods between two forts. A few teamsters escaped but seven were caught, hacked up, and burned in the traditional way. General William Tecumseh Sherman was in the area, on an inspection tour of some of the Texas forts, but the Kiowa managed to miss Sherman, who, in any case, was traveling with a well-armed escort.

Satanta

Satank

General Sherman had the good luck to be “missed” more than once by formidable Indians. In 1877, while visiting Yellowstone, he narrowly avoided riding into the path of the fleeing Nez Percé, who were mopping up on all and sundry as they made their dramatic dash for Canada.

Sherman, while at Fort Richardson, near the town of Jacksboro, heard about the attack and at once instigated a pursuit that in time resulted in the arrest of the principal participants.