Oh What a Slaughter (5 page)

It is well to remember that the Sioux, at Wounded Knee, though surprised and vastly outgunned, still managed to account for a good many soldiers, perhaps as many as thirty-one.

The widest and wildest swings in numbers of estimated dead at the other massacres are to be found in the histories of Sand Creek. Chivington's estimate of five to six hundred is the high figure, and seventy is the low figure. The number of troopers killed is usually put at fourteen, some of whom died off site.

Present-day thinking about Sand Creek, as I have said, is that about 140 Indians died. Only seven prisoners were taken, two women and five children, all of whom were soon left at nearby Fort Lyon.

*   *   *

Lieutenant James Bradley made the first body count of army dead after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in 1876. At the battlefield itself he counted 197 bodies—probably a pretty accurate figure just for the men of Custer's command, though it left out Major Reno's casualty figures, which Lieutenant Bradley was still unaware of. Major Reno lost thirty-two men, with 152 wounded. How many of the wounded later died I don't know.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn was one of the most famous battles ever fought on American soil. There were soon to be recounts and recounts; in a sense the process continues to this day.

What of the Indian losses in that battle? First reports suggested two hundred Indians died, but, over time, this count has been whittled way down. More recent estimates put the number of Indian dead at forty-five. If you add to that the thirty-six warriors that Crazy Horse claimed had been killed at the Battle of the Rosebud, one week earlier, you get some eighty dead Indians, an enormous loss for a hunter-gatherer society; but, of course, these dead died in glorious triumphs—the numbers of the fallen did not dilute the triumph much.

It is well to remember that Fetterman, the Rosebud, and the Little Bighorn were the greatest victories the Plains Indians ever achieved.

Of these, of course, the Battle of the Little Bighorn was the greatest. It was also the last.

It should be remembered too that Fetterman, the Rosebud, and the Little Bighorn were
battles
, warrior against warrior, which sets them off from the massacres I'm considering here. In these massacres many more women and children were killed than fighting men.

At the Camp Grant Massacre, for example, except for one old man and a “well-grown boy,”
no
warriors were killed, only women and children. Throughout the era of the massacres it was, overwhelmingly, women and children who were massacred.

William Fetterman

In the Sacramento River Massacre, Kit Carson said frankly that he had no idea how many were killed, but two other participants in that slaughter tried to guess at the number. Thomas Martin thought the dead numbered between 175 and 250, whereas Thomas Breckenridge thought the dead numbered between 120 and 150.

Our confidence in these counts must be tempered somewhat by the wildly varying guesses these same three men made as to how many Indians were there in the first place. Thomas Martin thought there were between four and five
thousand
, Kit Carson estimated one thousand, and Thomas Breckenridge, whose guess was probably the most accurate, thought there might have been around four hundred, of which perhaps 150 were warriors and the rest women and children.

*   *   *

When one is heading into mortal, no-quarter-given combat, careful counting is the last thing most people would attempt. A more or less normal fear instinct would encourage participants to think they see more Indians than are actually there.

The frequent variation in post-massacre body counts is also explainable. Having just participated in the killing of more than one hundred human beings in an irrational spasm of violence, one would not be likely, while the blood of the living is cooling and the blood of the victims still soaking into the ground, to be able to wander through the meat shop and produce an accurate count.

In the Custer battle, incidentally, there was a good deal of decapitation as well as more routine mutilations. Quite a few limbs were also chopped off—it would not be hard, in such a context, for a counter such as Lieutenant James Bradley to overlook a corpse or two.

Massacres may be many things, but they are never neat—they might be considered the very antithesis of neatness. Not everyone died in a nice countable line; in fact, almost no one did. Some fled, some were chased; many were wounded, often mortally. Many of these last died at some distance from the center of the fight. A few might crawl away and live for days before dying. At Wounded Knee four Sioux babies and one or two women were found alive some days after the massacre, although a blizzard had passed through in the meantime. The resilience of babies, particularly, has been noticed in many such contexts.

It could be too that there are basic psychological reasons why body counts vary so greatly. Counting is a rational activity, requiring at least a little brainpower, whereas slaughtering people is a process during which reason is best negated. In indiscriminate killing reason gets pushed aside: the two modes, slaughtering and counting, are opposed. No one was carving notches while the bullets flew at Sand Creek or Wounded Knee.

*   *   *

Though body counts still meant something in the Vietnam War, most modern military conflicts have spread death on such a vast scale as to render counting irrelevant, and also impossible. In the firebombing of the German cities in World War II the intense heat of the fires left nothing countable, just globules of fat. How many
did
die in Dresden or Hiroshima? The count can only be approximate, as on a smaller scale, it still is for the victims of 9/11.

The massacres of the American West were intimate affairs compared to the vast impersonal slaughters that modern weaponry makes possible now.

The vocabulary of atrocity has always been rather limited. There are at most a couple of dozen ways in which deadly violence can be visited quickly on a human body, even a human community: these few are repeated endlessly, almost inescapably in every massacre. You can burn a body, hack it up, decapitate it, cut off—or out—its genitalia, smash its skull, tear fetuses out of pregnant women, shoot arrows or bullets into it, maybe rip out its heart or other organs; and, really, that is more or less the whole menu.

Usually most of the above can be accomplished by expert warriors in a very short time, as was proven at the Fetterman Massacre when eighty men were killed and thoroughly mutilated in only about half an hour.

What remained on that field was a meat shop, a deathscape out of Brueghel.

At the Little Bighorn the women of the Sioux and Cheyenne walked amid the pale white corpses and added a touch or two of their own—puncturing Custer's eardrums with awls, for example. He was not otherwise mutilated, but the women of the Sioux and Cheyenne did not want Long Hair (Custer) arriving in the spirit world fully intact.

In the grisly massacre at Sand Creek, where a battle of sorts raged for hours, scope was found for some inventiveness on the part of Chivington's more hardened Indian-haters. One hundred scalps were collected later to be exhibited in a Denver theater. The audience cheered wildly, and might have cheered even more wildly had there been two hundred scalps. At Sand Creek, mutilation of the dead was so common that it is commented on in virtually every account. Scrotums became tobacco pouches; the pudenda of the women were removed and used as hatbands or saddle horn covers.

And yet there does seem to be a human hunger for accuracy when it comes to keeping count of the dead. In almost all massacres there are, at first, conflicting sets of figures, a high and a low. Almost always patient investigation revises the figure downward: from six hundred to 140 at Sand Creek, from three hundred to 146 at Wounded Knee. People confronted with massacres at first want to know how many died—a little later some of them begin to want to know why.

When Paul Andrew Hutton produced his
Custer Reader
in 1992, he estimated that there existed at least 967 graphic representations—paintings, prints, drawings, sketches in newspapers—of Custer's Last Stand.

The two most famous representations of this event are paintings: John Mulvany's
Custer's Last Rally
, and Cassilly Adams's
Custer's Last Fight
. The latter, updated a bit by Otto Becker and published in a wide variety of formats—trays, calendars, hand outs—by the Anheuser-Busch Company of St. Louis, was probably the one picture most Americans had seen. A copy of it hung in the barbershop in Archer City in my youth.

Custer's Last Fight
, as Paul Andrew Hutton points out, is a wholly imaginary rendering of the famous encounter at the Little Bighorn. No white witness survived the battle. Many Indians—thousands—did survive it, and quite a few of them later had something to say about the deaths of Long Hair and his men; but it seems highly unlikely that either Mulvany or Adams attempted to reconcile their personal visions with those of actual witnesses to the battle.

Custer's Last Fight

Besides—as I point out in my short biography of Crazy Horse—the dust that would have been thrown up by those thousands of charging horses would have made any synoptic look at
the battle quite impossible. Dust and horses and a glimpse now and then of a charging warrior or a weary doomed soldier are about as much as anyone could have seen.

Unquestionably, though, the two paintings helped shape a national myth, more or less as the many cheap pictures of Roland holding off the Saracens at the pass of Roncevaux have become part of the French national myth.

For Custer the stream of images continues to flow. Leonard Baskin's somber frontispiece to Evan Connell's
Son of the Morning Star
is a notable example—it catches something of the darkness that was in the man. Many films have featured Custer, one of the most notable being Arthur Penn's fine adaptation of Thomas Berger's
Little Big Man
.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look—historical ignorance remains a national characteristic. When it comes to the Old West, subject of thousands of books and almost as many thousands of movies, most Americans now know only the broadest generalizations. They know that the settling of the West involved crossing vast plains and high mountains, sometimes in covered wagons. Most know that there was a gold rush or two; most know, also, that there were Indians there before us, most of whom did not want us taking their land—or land that they considered to be theirs. We, of course, considered that it ought to be ours, so we took it. There were many battles, and the Indians were defeated.

Now there are excellent histories covering almost every aspect of our successful conquest of the West—a complex often confusing process—but not many Americans read them. Their
knowledge of the winning of the West is mostly arrived at iconographically, from movies, and the movie images possess enormous power. Regarded collectively, movie Westerns have done more to determine our idea of the West than all the books ever written about it, good or bad. If Custer's Last Stand could only have taken place in Monument Valley, the single most powerful landscape could have framed the single most powerful story; and that, so far as most people were concerned, would be quite enough to know about the Old West, thank you.