Oh What a Slaughter (8 page)

Red Cloud

In the 1870s particularly, warring in the West extended over a vast border-to-border territory. In the Southwest were Cochise,
Victorio, Geronimo, Quanah Parker. In the north were Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud. In the vast middle were the southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Osage, Pawnee. All these tribes had constantly to watch their territory shrink: they had to watch the game on which they depended slaughtered. They were up against it and they knew it. They had no reason to hold back: they found their dignity in fighting.

To some extent, perhaps, it is human nature to think the worst about those who are not as we are. Tribalism was an instinct and an organizing principle for so long that it is planted deep in the human psyche. It can rarely be civilized out of us.

General Custer

It is easy to say that the army in the West should have been more particular about which bands of natives they attacked. Right now, in Iraq, we are finding out how difficult it is to hit only the bad guys when we make war. Even the best reconnaissance has its limits. Custer had excellent reconnaissance available to him on that fatal day at the Little Bighorn. He ignored it all. If someone had pointed out to Kit Carson that these Indians dancing by the Sacramento River were only doing their spring Bear Dance would he have let them be? It seems unlikely. The men were by then in a killing mood, and they killed.

Three hours of steady killing produced a well-stocked meat shop on that tongue of land. Only after it ended and tempers cooled did some of the men realize that
this
killing left a bad taste. No doubt they were excited at first, but three hours of steady killing may well have become an unpleasant chore. Some men may have become sated—walked away with their dripping sabers. Some may finally have been repulsed.

In fairness to Frémont's men, though, they were not many, and they were a long way from home. If the threat from these Indians was exaggerated by the panicky settlers, the
general
threat from Indians was real. Frémont always maintained that the only reason he attempted the nearly disastrous winter crossing of the Sierra Nevada in 1844 was because the Indians on the east side of the mountains—the Paiutes, particularly—were nibbling away at their horses and pack animals. His fear of being set afoot and having his men picked off one by one was not unreasonable.

In fact, only a few days after the Sacramento River Massacre, while camped farther north, in Klamath country, various of the party heard, during the night, a disquieting thud. Frémont got up to investigate, but found nothing. The next morning the party discovered that the thud had been the sound an axe made when it split the skull of Basil Lajeunesse, a popular man and one of Frémont's
special favorites. A punitive expedition was launched immediately. Many Klamaths were killed.

Ishi, last of the Yana, desperate, tired, and hungry, only allowed himself to be coaxed into the settlements in 1911, by which time almost all the Maidu and Wintu were gone.

We are unlikely ever to know more about the massacre at the Sacramento River than can be found in
A Newer World
, whose author acknowledges many uncertainties. A bunch of Indians, gathered for what purpose we can only guess, frightened the local whites, who called down death upon an unknown number of them. Kit Carson and some of the men may have regretted it; but they were soon back to killing Klamaths, in revenge for their young friend.

In 1862, Kit Carson, obeying the command of his superior, Major James H. Carleton, reluctantly began to drive the Mescalero Apache and then the Navaho from their homes. They were marched to a prison camp on the Bosque Redondo, in eastern New Mexico. There they died in numbers that far exceeded the death toll in any Western massacre. Their trek was called the Long Walk, the Navaho Trail of Tears. All in all such removals were more deadly than any single fight. The Indians understood fighting, but no people easily accepts exile. Combatants can sometimes reconcile, but unjust exile seems to burn forever.

Kit Carson may not have been as brilliant a pure explorer as the prodigious Jedediah Smith—one of the few explorers who sought geographical knowledge for its own sake—but, for durability, Carson had no equal. He first went to California with Ewing Young in 1828: he beavered and he guided, and he was still doing it thirty-five years later. He led Frémont on three expeditions; he led many others as well. When he was done he could justly claim to have walked the whole West. The only guide who may have been his equal was the Delaware scout Black
Beaver, who guided Captain Randolph Marcy on his explorations of the Red River country.

Saddened by the brutal business with the Apache and the Navaho, Kit Carson spent his last years with his beloved wife, Josefa, “Little Josie.” In photographs he always looks melancholy. Josefa died, and, not long after, Kit died, sad at the end.

Josefa Carson

On the very day, October 12, 2002, when I sat down to begin organizing my notes on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, there appeared in
The New York Times
a long piece by Emily Eakin about that long-ago event and the still continuing controversy it has engendered. Two new books have recently been published (Will Bagley's
Blood of the Prophets
and Sally Denton's
American Massacre
), and a third—which I understand will constitute a Mormon rebuttal—is now in the press.

Scarcely two weeks later the
New York Review of Books
carried a thoughtful essay by Caroline Fraser about this same, much studied massacre. The Mormon historians who are doing the rebuttal will argue, yet again, that Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, did not order this massacre.

Mountain Meadows was again very much in the news, reinforcing my point that massacres, once exposed, just won't go away. Of the six massacres I propose to study, Mountain Meadows is much the most complicated, and it is the only one in which there may have been a theocratic motive. Things just keep coming to light—2,605 bones and bone fragments accidentally uncovered at the monument site in 1999, for example—suggesting that we are probably still a long way from having heard the last word about Mountain Meadows.

Juanita Brooks

The cornerstone of Mountain Meadows studies is Juanita Brooks's classic—and, considering that she is a devout Mormon, heroic—book,
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
, first published by Stanford in 1950 and kept in print now by the University of Oklahoma. There is a lengthy shelf of related studies, some of them by Juanita Brooks herself—the most substantial of these are listed in my bibliography.

All these books attempt to describe what happened on that dreadful September day in 1857, when a large wagon train on its way from Arkansas to California was massacred by a force composed of local Mormons and Paiute Indians. (Even here body counts differ: I thought 121 people were killed, but Sally Denton puts the count at 140.)

These various studies also attempt to determine
why
the massacre happened, and—biggest and most intractable question—
who, if anyone, in the Mormon hierarchy ordered the killing. For nearly 150 years the finger of inquiry has been pointed at Brigham Young; it's an issue still very much in debate.

The final, comprehensive truth about Mountain Meadows may have remained elusive, but in fact we do know a great deal about this massacre, and evidence such as the 2,605 bone fragments just keeps appearing. (A lead scroll purporting to be John Doyle Lee's confession turned up as recently as 2002, but its authenticity seems questionable.) Talk about a massacre that won't go away.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) has hoped from the first day to the present that if they just stuck together, hunkered down, and kept quiet, time would pass and people would forget.

Time did pass, but people have not even begun to forget.

When in 1999 the president of the Mormon Church, Gordon B. Hinckley, journeyed to southern Utah to dedicate the most recent of the various unsatisfactory monuments at the Mountain Meadows site, he not only declared that the truth about Mountain Meadows could never be known, but he also read a disclaimer from the church's legal team which affirmed that nothing said at the memorial service in any way implied Mormon complicity in these long-ago murders. (In less guarded moments President Hinckley has said that he suspected the local people did it.)

In suggesting that Mountain Meadows is an impenetrable mystery, President Hinckley has swung well wide of the truth. Juanita Brooks, a devout Mormon and fine historian, clearly and professionally penetrated many of these mysteries more than half a century ago, in
The Mountain Meadows Massacre
, a model of clarity. Will Bagley, Sally Denton, William Wise, and others have extended the valuable inquiry that she began.

*   *   *

Mountain Meadows would make a good opera. It is an American tragedy of blood. Billy the Kid's story has yielded a ballet; perhaps someday something operatic will emerge from this tragic story.

The uniqueness of Mountain Meadows for this study is that on this then grassy plain whites killed whites—or, to be more precise, whites with the help of Indians killed whites. Both Mormons and Paiutes have downplayed their part in the killing. It had long been supposed that the whites killed mostly men, and the Paiutes mainly women and children, but the bones in the mass grave uncovered in 1999 have complicated this picture—of which more later.

The immigrant train in question, the so-called Fancher party, was well armed and well equipped. There were some thirty wagons and they had made it all the way from Arkansas through dangerous territory. It is unlikely that the Paiutes alone could have overrun them. The Paiutes might have nibbled at them, as they nibbled at Frémont, but they were not temperamentally inclined to long sieges or lengthy battles.

Everyone who has written about Mountain Meadows has been at pains to point out that the massacre occurred at a moment of high tension in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City. The tension was due to the fact that the United States Army was on its way to Utah, to address many reports of Mormon excesses. The U.S. government meant to subdue this unruly province once and for all. They also meant to replace Brigham Young, a full-fledged theocrat, with a civil governor. At that time Brigham Young was governor of Utah
and
the head of the Mormon church. President James Buchanan was fed up, both with the Mormons in general and Brigham Young in particular. He sent the army to forcefully put matters right.