Oh What a Slaughter (3 page)

Norfolk, Nebraska

My grandparents' homeplace was only about a dozen miles from the site of this massacre: they can scarcely have failed to have felt some apprehension. Even fifteen years after the event it was still possible for renegade Indians to drift off the Oklahoma reservations; some probably wouldn't have sniffed at the chance to chop up a few of the settlers, who had, after all, taken their country. Small attacks
did
occur all over the West in the transition
period between 1875 and the turn of the century. Had a few last diehards decided to drift south from Fort Sill my grandparents would have been their natural prey. Fear of attack was a worry shared by virtually every frontier family, and it was a worry slow to fade.

Complete safety has probably always been chimerical everywhere. As I was driving up the Nebraska-Colorado border, after visiting Sand Creek, three would-be bank robbers, on the other side of Nebraska, stormed into a bank in the small town of Norfolk just as the bank opened—probably before the cashiers had even gotten the money in their drawers. Perhaps the would-be robbers, who were Hispanic, didn't realize that in a small plains town it's apt to take an hour or so for the banks to get up-to-speed. These three men were only in the bank forty seconds, but that was time enough to kill five people stone dead. They effected a kind of small massacre of the sort that occurs frequently in America. At the same time, far to the east, two snipers were terrorizing the D.C. suburbs: they killed ten people and wounded three, a kind of mini-massacre of randomly chosen victims.

Just as arbitrarily, a few years back, a loner named George Hennard strolled into a packed cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and quickly blew away twenty-four diners—a reminder, as was what happened on 9/11, 2001, that though we are no longer pioneers we're always vulnerable.

Still, while the arrival of homicidal violence may be impossible to predict, the ways in which it arrives differ from place to place and century to century. Fifty to one hundred (or more) armed men are not now likely to race onto an Indian reservation and shoot or hack down anyone and anything they see (for raiders sometimes killed Indian horses too). These sorts of doings were chapters in the long and successful effort at dispossession
that went on in the American West through the second half of the nineteenth century.

Near the end of his life the tenacious Sioux chief Red Cloud remarked that while the whites had made his people many promises, more than he could remember, they had only kept one: “They said they would take our land and they took it.”

The bloody work that taking it required is the subject of this book.

The massacres I want to look at closely in this inquiry are six:

The Sacramento River Massacre: Spring 1846

The Mountain Meadows Massacre: September 11, 1857

The Sand Creek Massacre: November 29, 1864

The Marias River Massacre: January 23, 1870

The Camp Grant Massacre: April 30, 1871

The Wounded Knee Massacre: December 29, 1890

In addition I want to consider two well-known and much studied military massacres, Fetterman and Custer, where something occurred that is rather rare in military history: the total wipeout, a battle in which one side succeeds in annihilating the other to the last man. This happened at Fort Phil Kearny in 1866 and at the Little Bighorn a decade later. (It also happened at the Alamo, which is outside my scope.)

These six massacres were dreadful events, leaving scar tissue that will always be a part of our history. But they were not without precedent. Patricia Nelson Limerick and others have reminded us forcefully that massacres of Indians did not start in the
West. The whole continent was strongly contested: the Indians yielded up none of it easily. But, first or last, East or West, the Indians were up against people with better equipment; as the whites continued to push westward, many massacres, large and small, occurred. The elimination of some seven hundred Pequots, many of them burned alive in a stockade, is one of the most frequently mentioned Eastern massacres.

Some years ago I wrote a screenplay about one interesting frontier encounter, a small massacre that occurred in what is now Indiana, in 1824. I was adapting a novel based on this massacre, Jessamyn West's
The Massacre at Fall Creek;
my adaption has yet to reach the screen, though it still might.

In the Fall Creek incident, records of which are scanty indeed, settlers on what was then the very edge of the advancing frontier made a preemptive strike against a small band of Indians who were foraging, fishing, picking berries. Nine Indians were killed in the attack—most of the bodies were thrown down a well. Like many such attackers, the settlers near Fall Creek considered that they had merely been taking protective measures; in this case, though, instead of reducing the threat to their families, they increased it. The powerful tribes to the north and to the west were outraged—suddenly the whole frontier came under threat. The Indians were thought to be planning a massive, coordinated attack.

Up to this point in time, according to Jessamyn West, it had not, as a matter of law, been a crime to kill Indians; but the government, headed by President James Monroe, became fearful of a widespread revolt. The hastily arrived at solution to the crisis was to make Indian-killing a crime retroactively. A show trial was rapidly convened: able attorneys were provided both for the prosecution and the defense. The Indians, in all their power and majesty, came to witness this strange instance of white man's justice.
In the end three white men were hanged by their own neighbors; one boy was spared. The Indians stayed off the warpath for a time, though plenty of war was to follow.

The massacre at Fall Creek was a very obscure incident—how much of what Jessamyn West wrote was based on historical research and how much on her imagination is now difficult to say.

To me the most interesting aspect is that (if this hastily created “law” was actually put in place) it didn't work. Many more Indians were killed, by many more whites; it was to be a good long time in America before white men were judicially punished for killing Indians.

It is clear from the records that moral opprobrium did in time attach itself to many of the men who planned and executed the murders described in this book; but, in most cases, that was as far as matters went. The exception to this is John Doyle Lee, who—twenty years after the killing—was offered up
by the Mormon church and made to take the blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. He was justly outraged at this turn of events, but the higher-ups in the Mormon church had decided to give the public a sacrifice, in the hopes that then the whole matter would be forgotten. (They were wrong about that; two books about Mountain Meadows have been published within the last year.)

John Doyle Lee

John Doyle Lee, outraged or not, was duly executed.

The sharpest contradiction to my point about the moral taint is surely John Milton Chivington, the fighting parson who organized and led the attack at Sand Creek in 1864. Chivington
neither relented nor repented; he weathered the controversy with his head unbowed. Though he resigned from the army, he was never charged or punished. There were critics, but, in general, Chivington remained a hero to his fellow Coloradans—to many he is a hero to this day. There is even a town named for him in southeastern Colorado, only a few miles from the massacre site—Chivington, Colorado, a kind of ghost hamlet, not far north of the Arkansas River.

John Milton Chivington

Be as that may, there are yet those dead human beings—young, old, and in-between—who died in the massacres. They lost their lives, but not their moral potency. Hard as the men were who carried out these slaughters, conscience did, in time, stir in many of them. Long after the bodies had become merely bones, there were men who felt compelled to describe the horror they had participated in. Blame was imperfectly assessed, but guilt and outrage did make itself felt even in these small, vulnerable frontier communities. In most cases official inquiries were held, at the end of which the massacres were condemned. General Ulysses S. Grant himself called Sand Creek “murder,” and he later said the same about the killings at Camp Grant. This may not seem like much but it was important: Grant was a well-respected man. Even now inquiries are going on about the more recent massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda.
Mass murder doesn't go unnoticed!
The repugnance decent people feel when faced with the slaughter of innocents eventually finds expression, though in many cases, no doubt, the worst killers, the really evil ones, entirely escape judicial reckoning. They probably sleep soundly and die un-molested in their beds. Only occasionally is an Eichmann or a Barbie brought to the bar.

During these massacres in the American West there were those who wished, as the killing went on and the blood spurted, that they had had the good sense not to saddle up that day. A
good many of these eventually expressed rather dazed regrets; they had failed to anticipate that the reduction of one hundred or more human beings to the condition of meat in a meat shop would be as terrible as it turned out to be.