“Oh What a Slaughter,” by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $25)
The six massacres included in this slender book make Americans seem a bloody lot. And we are. Larry McMurtry refers over and over again to the massacres as meat shops. Most of the names are familiar – Sand Creek, Mountain Meadows, Wounded Knee, Marias River and Camp Grant. The sixth is Sacramento River, a slaughter so obscure that its site is uncertain.
What is especially tragic about these massacres is that these were not battles with soldiers fighting soldiers, but slaughters in which women and children were murdered. McMurtry blames the inability of Indians to coexist. Both wanted land. But just as important, he says, was a “grinding long sustained apprehension (that) played its part in the ultimate resort to massacre. President George W. Bush has recently revived the doctrine of pre-emptive strike.”
Most of the massacres in “Oh What a Slaughter,” he adds, were “thought by their perpetrators to be pre-emptive strikes, justified by the claim that the attacks were punishment for past harassments by native tribes.”
If the military thought it was making the West safe for white men, it was wrong. The massacres inevitably brought retaliation that lasted for years. Nonetheless, many 19th-century Westerners applauded the killings.
Silas Soule, a soldier at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado in 1864, refused to order his men to fire on helpless Indians. After he testified against Col. John Chivington, who led the carnage, Soule was murdered.
Even today, McMurtry says, there is still controversy over some of the massacres. That is the case with Mountain Meadows, where Paiutes and Mormons killed a train of pioneers passing through southwestern Utah. To this day, no one knows for sure the role played by the Mormon Church in the deaths. McMurtry notes that while the wagon train stopped at Mountain Meadows to let animals graze on the lush grass, little grows at the site today.
“Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West,” by Bill Yenne (Westholme, 325 pages, $26)
The American Indian battles fought in the American West were not isolated fights but rather part of a half-century-long effort on the part of the Army to control the western half of the country. So maintains Bill Yenne in this comprehensive history of the Indian wars.
Col. John Chivington launched the Sand Creek Massacre, for instance, on the assumption he had a War Department mandate to begin an offensive against the Cheyenne and Arapaho, no matter that they were living under a U.S. flag as friendly Indians.
“Indian Wars” includes battles, massacres and some of the most colorful Indian and white figures in American history.
“Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce: The Untold story of an American Tragedy,” by Kent Nerburn (HarperSan Francisco, 448 pages, $24.95)
The Nez Perce were one of the tribes the U.S. government sought to contain, if not to annihilate. Under the leadership of their famed chief, Joseph, the Nez Perce tried to escape to Canada but never made it. Joseph surrendered his rifle short of the border and uttered his famous words, “I will fight no more forever.”
The story has been told many times but not often with as much color as Nerburn provides. Against a background of westward expansion, as well as the Civil War, Nerburn writes of the Indians and the famous white Westerners who came in contact with the tribe.
The pious missionary Henry Spalding, for instance, ordered the Nez Perce to build him a log cabin. Unhappy with the site, he ordered the workers to dismantle the house and move it. When they did not move fast enough, the good reverend, who had gone west to convert the Indians to Christianity, had the Nez Perce whipped.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional nonfiction.
