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    Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
    Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
    Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890
    Ebook201 pages3 hours

    Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890

    By Larry McMurtry

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    A brilliant and riveting history of the famous and infamous massacres that marked the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century.

    In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked—and marred—the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today.

    Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres—Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children.

    McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small—Custer's famous defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead—yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

    In Larry McMurtry's own words:
    "I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites—the Sacramento River massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live nearby. None of the massacres were effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River massacre was overlooked for a very long time.

    "But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.

    "The deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary-literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary-literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnap."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateJun 1, 2010
    ISBN9781439141496
    Author

    Larry McMurtry

    Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lonesome Dove, three memoirs, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lived in Archer City, Texas.

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    • 4/5
      McMurtry examines six western massacres, paying particular attention to Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, and Wounded Knee. This book worked well right after reading Dee Brown, McMurtry puts the incidents in a little more context. I found the section about Mountain Meadows the most interesting since somehow I had never heard of it. Current attempts by the Mormans to deny their role in the massacre only increased my interest.
    • 3/5
      Being a huge fan of McMurtry I expected a little more. McMurtry writes about several of the somewhat lesser known Indian massacres with the exception of Wounded Knee. Since the book is fairly thin there is not as much detail as I would have liked but there are still some interesting facts to be learned. At times the book reads like a glorified term paper. However, on the positive side the brief synopsis of each massacre may spurn the reader's interest to further study. While brief in pages McMurty's passion, knowledge and love for the West still shines through.
    • 4/5
      Adopting a conversational tone McMurtry briefly (161 pages) explores six 'big massacres' of the Old West: Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee. He also briefly considers the Fetterman and Custer defeats. McMurtry's treatment is even-handed. That even-handedness allows his observation of the essential fairness of General Crook, which the Indian leaders acknowledged, as demonstrated by his observation that the Sioux should take the money for the Black Hills because the whites were surely going to take them. Evenhandedness also required inclusion of the observation by Red Cloud that the whites had made many promises but only kept one: "They said they would take our land and they took it." He develops the idea that the ever present 'apprehension' of violence was felt both by whites and Indians and that the apprehension all too often led to the actuality. Moreover, in general white frontiersmen wanted the Indians' land and were going to have it. Whites had the numbers and the technology. In all of the massacres with the exception of Wounded Knee the whites set out with the purpose of killing all the Indians they could lay hands on. As McMurtry relates civilized society often quickly disowned these deeds as 'simple murder'. Mountain Meadows stands out an as exception in that Mormons led some Paiutes to attack and virtually wipe out a white wagon train. The stories of these massacres are told in more detail elsewhere, but McMurtry's book is an interesting addition to the Western library that considers all of them within the confines of one short work.
    • 3/5
      Interesting, although it's so short that it's hardly a book and McMurtry's writing is a little drifty at times, as if he'd work on a section and then take a long break before writing the next. Not his best work but a nice introduction to the material.
    • 5/5
      I really love your story, it deserves a lot of audience. If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star. Just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top

    Book preview

    Oh What a Slaughter - Larry McMurtry

    BY LARRY MCMURTRY

    The Colonel and Little Missie

    Loop Group

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    By Sorrow’s River

    The Wandering Hill

    Sin Killer

    Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West

    Paradise

    Boone’s Lick

    Roads

    Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories

    Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

    Duane’s Depressed

    Crazy Horse

    Comanche Moon

    Dead Man’s Walk

    The Late Child

    Streets of Laredo

    The Evening Star

    Buffalo Girls

    Some Can Whistle

    Anything for Billy

    Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

    Texasville

    Lonesome Dove

    The Desert Rose

    Cadillac Jack

    Somebody’s Darling

    Terms of Endearment

    All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

    Moving On

    The Last Picture Show

    In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

    Leaving Cheyenne

    Horseman, Pass By

    BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

    Pretty Boy Floyd

    Zeke and Ned

    LARRY

    McMURTRY

    OH WHAT A

    SLAUGHTER

    Massacres in the American West 1846-1890

    SIMON & SCHUSTER

    Rockefeller Center

    1230 Avenue of the Americas

    New York, NY 10020

    www.SimonandSchuster.com

    Copyright © 2005 by Larry McMurtry

    All rights reserved,

    including the right of reproduction

    in whole or in part in any form.

    SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc

    For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

    please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at

    1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

    Designed by Karolina Harris

    Photography consultant: Kevin Kwan

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    McMurtry, Larry.

    Oh what a slaughter: massacres in the American West, 1846–1890 / Larry McMurtry.

               p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    1. Indians of North America—Wars—West (U.S.) 2. Indians of North America—West (U.S.)—History—19th century. 3. Massacres—West (U.S.)—History—19th century. I. Title.

    E78.W5M35 2005

    978'.02—dc22               2005051849

    ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5077-1

    eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-4149-6

    ISBN:10: 0-7432-5077-X

    Photo credits will be found on page 177.

    Contents

    The Meat Shop

    The Vulnerable Pioneer

    The Big Massacres and Some Others

    The Moral Taint

    Did Kit Regret?

    Counts

    Images, Heroes, Stars

    The Sacramento River Massacre, Spring 1846

    The Mountain Meadows Massacre, September 11, 1857

    Mountain Meadows (II)

    Sand Creek, November 29, 1864

    The Marias River Massacre, January 23, 1870

    The Camp Grant Massacre, April 30, 1871

    The Broken Hoop: 1871-1890

    Wounded Knee, December 29, 1890

    Wounded Knee (II)

    Wounded Knee (III)

    The Waning Moon

    Bibliographical Note

    Index

    Comes the most heartrending tale of all. As I have said Before General Custer with five companies went below the village to cut them off as he supposed but instead he was surrounded and all of them killed to a man 14 officers and 250 men There the bravest general of modder times met his death with his two brothers, brotherinlaw and nephew not 5 yards apart, surrounded by 42 men of E Company. Oh what a slaughter how many homes made desolate by the sad disaster everyone of them were scalped and otherwise mutilated but the General he lay with a smile on his face.

    PRIVATE THOMAS COLEMAN

    I Buried Custer

    OH WHAT A

    SLAUGHTER

    The Meat Shop

    Of massacre (the noun) the OED suggests shambles, butchery, general slaughter, carnage, a definition that would probably work for the great scout Kit Carson, who called the 1846 massacre of an undetermined number of California Indians, in which he took part, a perfect butchery.

    Of massacre (the verb) the same authority offers to violently kill, mutilate, mangle, a fair description of what was done to the victims in the course of the various massacres I intend to consider in this book.

    The Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition, allots the subject a hasty paragraph, concluding that—though the word is very obscure—the etymology suggests something like a meat shop: a very bloody place, a shambles, with discarded and undesirable pieces of meat scattered around.

    The image of a meat shop seems apt to me, since what massacres usually do is reduce human beings to the condition of meat, though the bits of meat will be less tidily arranged than the cuts would normally be in a decent butcher shop.

    If we know anything about man, it’s that he’s not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted. The twentieth century, just passed, more or less began with the million-plus massacre of the Armenians by the Turks, and ended with the terrible low-tech chopping up of some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, an old-style massacre mostly accomplished with hoes and hatchets. When it ended a good deal of Rwanda resembled a meat shop.

    What I want to do in this book is look at several massacres that occurred in the American West during the several decades when the native tribes of our plains and deserts were being displaced from their traditional territories by a vast influx of white immigrants. This process began in the 1830s, but accelerated sharply in the 1840s and 1850s: it was mostly completed, insofar as the native tribes were concerned, by 1890.

    Judged by world-historical perspectives these massacres were tiny. The Custer defeat in 1876, a military encounter that, to the great surprise of the general who was soon to lie dead with a smile on his face, was the only one of these encounters to involve more than two hundred dead, a figure hardly to be counted among the world’s huge cruelties. Though I describe here and there some tiny massacres, involving only a handful of people, I am mainly concerned with the famous massacres, with death tolls over one hundred people.

    But it should be remembered that the body count in the six massacres I’m especially interested in still adds up to fewer than one thousand people, barely one-third of the number who died in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

    But places and contexts differ: in the thinly populated West of the nineteenth century the violent extinction of more than one hundred people was no light thing, though a few of the assailants at first pretended that it was. Massacres are not like vast natural disasters: the Galveston Flood, the San Francisco Earthquake, the eruption of Krakatoa.

    Massacres require human volition, and the extremes that result not infrequently produce trauma and, sometimes, guilt. Though in most cases the men who did the killings I describe escaped legal retribution, they did not escape the trauma that followed on the terror they inflicted.

    Nephi Johnson, one of the participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, died crying Blood, blood, blood!

    Nephi Johnson

    Though more than a century has passed since Wounded Knee, the most recent of these massacres, bitterness has yet to leach out of the descendants of those massacred. Very probably one of the reasons The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) continues to deny complicity in the Mountain Meadows Massacre—although an abundance of evidence makes clear that they led it—is because there are in Arkansas and elsewhere descendants of the 121 people killed on that September day in 1857. Many of those descendants might not be averse to suing this now very prosperous church.

    I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites—the Sacramento River Massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers, and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live in the area. None of the massacres was effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River Massacre was overlooked for a very long time.

    But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.

    *   *   *

    J. P. Dunn

    In 1886 the historian and journalist J. P. Dunn published a pioneering study of Western massacres. He called his book Massacres of the Mountains, though few of the massacres he described actually took place in mountainous country; none of those that I am concerned with do.

    The 1864 massacre at Sand Creek, in eastern Colorado, occurred in vast and still almost empty plains country. Dunn’s book was a very popular account of the long and bloody war between whites and Indians (and, occasionally, Hispanics) during the long struggle for control of our Western lands. Dunn’s title was catchy and his material vivid, to say the least.

    Though overwritten and overlong, Dunn’s book is a Black Book, of a sort that was only to become common after World War I. He had initially intended to stop his story in 1875, just before the Custer battle, but found that he could not resist following the Apache campaigns in the Southwest, which were still proceeding.

    Nor, in the end, could he resist doing the Little Bighorn and the subsequent troubles with the Nez Percé and the Utes. Geronimo and his eighteen warriors didn’t surrender to General Nelson Miles until 1886, the year Dunn’s book was published.

    The Ghost Dance troubles among the Dakota Sioux, Sitting Bull’s controversial death, and the final tragic slaughter at Wounded Knee Creek were still four years ahead. After 1890 there continued to be plenty of white-Indian conflict—The New York Times as recently as October 29, 2002, reported that there was yet again trouble at the Pine Ridge Agency in South Dakota, not far from where the Wounded Knee Massacre took place. Plenty of troubles there have been, but no more massacres on the one-hundred-victim scale.

    Massacres of the Mountains is still in print; it remains interesting today not merely for what J. P. Dunn reported—often in prose more than a little purple-tinted, as we shall see—but also for what he himself felt about these bloody troubles. He knew well, and repeats over and over again, that the Indians were commonly the victims of massive and cruel injustices—systematic injustices at that. He knew and insists that the agency system, which put the Indians on the public dole, was, time and time again, used as a personal piggy bank by corrupt administrators. The Great Sioux Uprising in Minnesota in 1862 would not have occurred had the agents just given the starving Indians the food that was both available and theirs by right.

    J. P. Dunn knew that many of the Indian grievances were just ones. By the time he wrote his book it was clear that the Indians were beaten—which is not to say that they were pacified. The personal element that lends his graphic text its tension is that J. P. Dunn was close enough to the frontier experience to have felt, himself, some of the apprehension about Indian attack that was, from the early seventeenth century until almost the end of the nineteenth, a constant presence for pioneers as they strove to expand the Western frontier.

    Similarly, apprehension about what the well-armed whites might do was something Indians in the line of advance seldom felt free to ignore.

    This deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnapping.

    In my opinion this grinding, long-sustained apprehension played its part in the ultimate resort to massacre. President George W. Bush has recently revived the doctrine of the preemptive strike, a doctrine far from new in military or quasi-military practice. Most of the massacres I want to consider were thought by their perpetrators to be preemptive strikes, justified by the claim that the attacks were punishment for past harassments by the native tribes.

    *   *   *

    It is as well to say at the outset of this inquiry that all the massacres I want to write about are subjects of controversy; in most cases the only undisputed fact

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