Oh What a Slaughter (20 page)

So it may have been at Wounded Knee. But for Black Coyote's perhaps unintentional shot the old sick chief and his people might merely have grumbled a bit about the disarming and then trundled harmlessly off to Nebraska. But when that shot sounded, the soldiers on the ridge went off like my cows, and, once more, slaughter was unleased.

*   *   *

A final point about these homely little massacres and the even more terrible ones that keep occurring throughout the world: women and children are almost never exempted. A small anthology could be assembled just of quotations about the desirability of killing the women and children while one is killing undesirables. There one would find John Chivington's “nits breed lice” remarks, and General Sherman's famous grim one-liner.

A star item certainly would be Heinrich Himmler's famous speech delivered in Posen in October of 1943, in which he informed the Nazi hierarchy of the program to exterminate the Jewish people; Himmler himself raises the question of women and children and concludes, after only the briefest pause, that they had better be killed too.

And they were.

This is an old conclusion, many times restated by those inclined to massacre. The earliest statement I have been able to find comes from the prophet Ezekiel, who wrote about 600
B. C.
:

Go yet after him through the city and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: slaughter old and young, both maids and little children.

Ezekiel 9:5–6

Time and time across history, Ezekiel's advice has been followed to the letter. The making of meat shops seemingly has no end.

The literature on the massacres of the American West is not really vast, though it certainly might swell in size if one included all the memoirs in which one or another of the massacres is mentioned. This would include the often homespun recollections of pioneers, travelers, soldiers, administrators, local historians, newspapermen, (and women), miners, ministers, railroad men, cowboys, and the like.

Virtually any of the memoirs might contain a line or two that throws new light on some aspect of some massacre: perhaps only a memory, probably inaccurate, passed down to them from parent or grandparent.

The genius of Evan Connell's great book on Custer,
Son of the Morning Star
, is that he mined just such memoir literature brilliantly, constructing around Custer's defeat a kind of mosaic of local memory, white, Native American, military, journalistic, and so forth. William Coleman, in
Voices of Wounded Knee
, has done something of the same thing for that encounter.

There is nothing so comprehensive about any of the other massacres in this book. The one study that attempted comprehensiveness, J. P. Dunn's
Massacres of the Mountains
, was published too soon to include Wounded Knee.

The most solid facts about any of these massacres are the
dates on which they occurred. All other statements need to be regarded with caution. Will Bagley cheerfully restates this principle in
Blood of the Prophets
, his recent book about Mountain Meadows. The principal fact, in each case, is that a lot of people turned up dead.

How many exactly, and why, is, in almost every case, still disputed.

These are the books I've worked from:

Backus, Anna Jean.
Mountain Meadows Witness: The Life and Times of Bishop Philip Klingensmith
. Arthur H. Clark, 1996.

Bagley, Will.
Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows
. University of Oklahoma Press, 2002.

Brooks, Juanita.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
. University of Oklahoma Press, 1962. The classic account.

Brown, Dee.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

Coleman, William.
Voices of Wounded Knee
. University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Connell, Evan S.
Son of the Morning Star
. Promontory Press, 1993. The illustrated edition.

Cutler, Bruce.
The Massacre at Sand Creek
. University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

Denton, Sally.
American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857
. Knopf, 2003.

Dunn, J. P.
Massacres of the Mountains
. Archer House, 1965.

Hoig, Stan.
The Sand Creek Massacre
. University of Oklahoma Press, 1961.

Jackson, Helen Hunt.
A Century of Dishonor
. Boston, 1881.

Lamar, Howard (ed).
The New Yale Encyclopedia of the American West
. Yale University Press, 1998.

Mendoza, Patrick.
Song of Sorrow: Massacre at Sand Creek
. Willow Wind, 1993.

Mooney, James.
The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890
. Bureau of American Ethnology, Fourteenth Annual Report, Part II, Washington D.C., 1896.

Roberts, David.
A Newer World: Kit Carson, John Charles Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West
. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Schellie, Don.
Vast Domain of Blood
. Westernlore, 1968.

Scott, Bob.
Blood at Sand Creek
. Caxton, 1994.

Wilson, James.
The Earth Shall Weep
. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999.

Wise, William.
Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Legend and a Monumental Crime
. Crowell, 1976.

Page numbers in
italics
refer to illustrations.

Across America and Asia
(Pumpelly),
124–25

Adams, Cassilly,
37
,
38

Adobe Walls, Battle of,
106

Alamo, Battle of the,
15

American Horse,
155

American Massacre
(Denton),
63

Anheuser-Busch Company,
37

Apaches,
5
,
24
,
60
,
61
,
129
,
135

Camp Grant Massacre and,
119–27

Papagos and,
119
,
120
,
124

Arapaho,
24
,
58
,
94
,
105
,
135
,
157

Aravaipa Apaches,
119
,
120
,
125

Aravaipa Massacre,
see
Camp Grant Massacre (1871)

Armenians,
2

Army, U.S.,
30
,
158

Big Foot's death and,
149–50

Camp Grant Massacre and,
119–20
,
121
,
122–24
,
125

Frémont and,
50

Marias River Massacre and,
115
,
118

Mormons and,
26
,
66–67
,
69
,
70
,
71
,
82

Red Cloud's War and,
109–10

Sand Creek Massacre and,
95
,
99
,
104

Sitting Bull's death and,
145–47

Wounded Knee Massacre and,
140
,
143–44
,
149–52
,
155

Army Corps of Topographical Engineers,
50

Arnold, Lucy,
154

Badlands,
144
,
147

Bagley, Will,
63
,
65
,
89
,
164

Baker, E. M.,
115
,
118

Barbie, Klaus,
21

Baskin, Leonard,
40

Battleship Potemkin
,
105

Bear Dance,
53
,
59

Bear Flag Revolt,
50

Becker, Otto,
37

Beckwourth, Jim,
103–4
,
103
,
107

Bent, Charles,
91

Bent, Charles (son of William Bent),
91
,
106

Bent, George,
91
,
104

Bent, John,
91

Bent, Robert,
91
,
104

Bent, William,
91
,
92
,
105

Bent's Fort,
91

Berger, Thomas,
40
,
111

Big Foot,
29
,
147
,
149–50
,
151

death of,
150

Black Beaver,
60–61

Black Coyote (Black Fox),
150
,
151–52
,
155
,
160

Black Elk,
153–54
,
154
,
159

Blackfeet,
115–18
,
118

Black Hills,
140
,
143

Black Kettle,
54–55
,
55
,
56
,
99
,
100
,
109

death of,
106
,
111

at Sand Creek Massacre,
103
,
104
,
111

Blood of the Prophets
(Bagley),
63
,
164

Bloody Point,
111

Blue Whirlwind,
152
,
154

Bodmer, Karl,
117
,
118

Bonney, William (Billy the Kid),
41
,
42
,
44
,
66

Bosnia,
21

Bosque Redondo, N. Mex.,
60

Bosse,
55

Bourke, John Gregory,
122–23

Boxer movement,
137

Bozeman Trail,
109

Bradley, James,
31
,
33

Brand, Dewey,
150

Breckenridge, Thomas,
32

Bridger Plateau,
69

Brooks, Juanita,
64
,
64
,
65

Brown, Dee,
140
,
147

Brulé Sioux,
94–95
,
129
,
130

Buchanan, James,
66

buffalo,
97
,
132

Buffalo, Connie,
92

Bull Bear,
55
,
100
,
100

Bullhead,
145
,
146

Bureau of American Ethnology,
135

Bureau of Indian Affairs,
122
,
123

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
(Brown),
140

Caddos,
135
,
157

California:

Frémont in,
50–53

Indian tribes of,
47–48
,
53–56
,
59–60

see also
gold rushes, in California; Sacramento River Massacre (1846)

Camp Grant Massacre (1871),
15
,
119–27

children abducted after,
121
,
125

effect of,
122–23

Grant's condemnation of,
21
,
121

Indian decline following,
129–34

investigation and trial after,
121–22

women and children as sole victims of,
31–32

Wounded Knee compared with,
152

Captain Jack,
47
,
48
,
129

Carleton, James H.,
60
,
84

Carrington, Henry,
112

Carson, Christopher “Kit,”
23–26
,
23
,
32

Frémont expeditions and,
47
,
60

Long Walk and,
60

“perfect butchery” comment of,
1
,
23
,
25
,
26
,
53

at Sacramento River Massacre,
51–52
,
53
,
59
,
60

as Western icon,
41

Carson, Josefa,
61
,
61

Catch-the-Bear,
145–47

Catlin, George,
117

Chamberlain, Neville,
105

Cherokees,
98
,
111

Cheyenne,
24
,
34
,
58
,
94
,
100
,
104
,
105
,
112
,
124–125
,
132
,
141
,
157
,
158

see also
Sand Creek Massacre (1864)

Cheyenne Autumn
(Sandoz),
141

Chivington, Colo.,
21
,
91

Chivington, John Milton,
20–21
,
20

blood lust of,
24

in Civil War,
98

Dunn's defense of,
109–11

as Free-Soiler,
93
,
102

Frémont compared with,
52

intimidating presence of,
101
,
107