Oh What a Slaughter (4 page)

Ulysses S. Grant

These belated repentings didn't change the terrible killings, but the fact that civilized human judgment finally rejects massacre is a hopeful sign.

Even the scout and Indian fighter Kit Carson, who had a strong stomach when it came to killing Indians, may have turned a little, conscience-wise, after taking part in the “perfect butchery” at the Sacramento River in 1846. This turning,
if it occurred, didn't prevent him from effecting the dreadful removal of the Navaho and the Mescalero Apache from their homelands in the 1860s. Kit invariably did what his superiors told him to do, whether he liked it or not; but, in these last instances, it is clear that he
didn't
like what he had been ordered to do. He was nearing the end of his life, and, by this time, knew as much about Indians as any Westerner—more, certainly, than any of his superiors knew. It may be that he finally came to understand what a tragic undertaking these removals were—in fact they were slow massacres, people dying and dying as they struggled to keep up in what the Navaho call the Long Walk.

Kit Carson

Did Kit Carson wonder, at the end, if the whole enterprise of exploration and settlement, in which he had been perhaps the preeminent guide, or, at least, the guide who lasted the longest, had been worth it? Had it been, after all, a good thing? The right thing? What he felt we will never know. Except for a brief, dictated autobiography, Kit Carson, for forty years a scout in the dangerous West, kept his conclusions, if any, to himself.

John Chivington, long before he organized the attack at Sand Creek, had come to believe that he had an absolute right to kill Indians. He made it clear, when the time came to ride, that he didn't want to hear from anyone who harbored sympathy for the Cheyenne and the Arapaho. Reportedly he even told one volunteer that he longed to “wade in gore.”

At the Sacramento River, Kit Carson actually did wade in gore—it doesn't seem that he enjoyed the experience.

John Milton Chivington never turned; he defended the action at Sand Creek to the very end of his life. Carson, who remained loyal to John Charles Frémont despite the Pathfinder's many moral lapses, expressed no fondness for Chivington. Kit Carson took part in many, many Indian fights. It's possible that, at the end, he would have welcomed peace.

John C. Frémont

*   *   *

A decent bibliography of the literature relating to these massacres would run to at least sixty or seventy volumes: and that would not include the hundreds of books that deal with Custer and the Little Bighorn. And yet it was Kit Carson—an illiterate scout—who produced the best phrase about the business of massacre when he referred to “a perfect butchery.”

All these massacres produced abundant butchery, fits of violence so extreme that they quite drove out reason. The few survivors and the many perpetrators alike were stunned by what had occurred. They were stunned to such a degree that it makes it difficult to judge the reliability of their comments, some of which were not delivered until months or years after the event. Some refused to speak of the massacre at all, while others, Ancient Mariner–like, seemed compelled to reveal the worst, and
reveal it over and over again. Others made stumbling, rambling efforts to make it all seem less bad than it had been.

Only the hardest cases, the true believers, display absolute conviction. Those less firm often try to construct self-exculpatory defenses. It is not always easy for the chronicler to decide what testimony, if any, can be relied upon, though, in my opinion, people who lie about the massacres have a value to the record too. The lies people make up about extreme actions may be as revelatory as the few truths they manage to cough up.

After several of these massacres, even the most hardened of the perpetrators gave vent to wild exaggerations, particularly where body counts were concerned. Chivington, after Sand Creek, at first reported that he had killed between five and six hundred Indians, or rather more than had been in the camp to begin with—the actual figure was around 140, the same number the historian Sally Denton gives for the Mountain Meadows dead, and very close to the count at Wounded Knee (146).

The most difficult thing for the historian of these massacres to judge is tone of voice. We may know what someone said, but how did he or she say it? Take Kit Carson's “perfect butchery” remark. He said it, but in what tone: happily, matter-of-factly, wearily, with an element of sadness or disgust in his tone? Did he sound resigned? Kit Carson had seen much Western death. He had killed Indians and scalped them, but most of his battles had been small-scale endeavors, a few Indians versus a few mountain men; they were bloody fights, to be sure, but still on a very different scale from what happened on the Sacramento River.

Chivington's tone we may guess at; he was almost always angry, even when he was not killing Indians. But what about Brigham Young's tone, or tones, during the years when he was trying to cover up Mountain Meadows? At the time the massacre occurred the U.S. Army was on its way to Utah, to curb Mormon excesses. As it happened, the army didn't get there until the following year, but at this juncture Brigham Young would have been careful not to say anything too inflammatory. But he was thunderous and fiery when he demanded that the Mormons of southern Utah hew to the official line, which was that the Paiute Indians did the killing. Brigham Young was a politician as well as a church leader; he had more than one oratorical instrument in his orchestra and he shifted skillfully from one to another. Today we'd see him on television and be able to judge for ourselves, but as it is we have to base our judgment on letters, diary entries, speeches, sermons, depositions, and records whose provenance is not always well established.

Brigham Young

In the case of most of these massacres, the tones in the reports seem to vary between jeremiad and lament—battle reports through the ages often do much the same. Few observers of what happened at Sand Creek or Wounded Knee were impartial. The
participants in the massacres were either trying to kill people, or trying to avoid being killed by people, a circumstance that doesn't enhance one's objectivity.

Everyone who has written about these massacres admits at some point that they are required to make judgments on the basis of very quivery evidence. The ground is rarely firm or the truth plain.

Nothing illustrates this better than the vexed question of body counts, which is where I'd like to begin my inquiry.

The very first thing one notices when sifting through these reports of massacres—whether personal, official, or journalistic—is that the body counts vary widely from report to report. As good an example as any are the body counts from Wounded Knee.

When I first began to rummage around in this literature I went first to
The New Encyclopedia of the American West
, published
by Yale, an invaluable reference book that I use virtually every day. I looked up Wounded Knee first, where I found what I already knew: that the reason the U.S. Army decided, on that fateful day in 1890, to arrest Chief Big Foot and remove his people to a different, distant agency was part of a broad effort to suppress the Ghost Dance, a recently arrived religious phenomenon that—puzzlingly in my view—made both the military and civil authorities in South Dakota extremely nervous. (I will return to the matter of official anxiety before we are done.)

Chief Big Foot

Before reading the whole of the long Wounded Knee entry, I flipped back to the Ghost Dance entry, where I read that “almost three hundred Indian men, women, and children were massacred by the 7th Cavalry.”

That figure was higher than any I had previously seen for this massacre; other sources had put the dead at between two hundred and 230.

But when I flipped back again in my big reference book to the entry on Wounded Knee and read on through the article, the figure given there was 146 Indian dead; 146 also happens to be the figure given on the big historical marker at the site itself.

Time, and patient counting, had whittled down the figure given in the Ghost Dance entry by more than half.