Remembering the Massacres of the Great West

The start of the massacre at Wounded Knee, as sketched by Frederic Remington.

(Library of Congress)

Williams Carlos Williams starts out his idiosyncratic book on America, In the American Grain, “History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery.” From Christopher Columbus’s inaugural cruelty to Indians to the shipping of millions Africans on a deadly journey across the Atlantic, America’s birth is inextricably tied to death. The drive into the frontier was predicated on the slaughter of Native Americans, not only in battle but also in the extermination of largely peaceful settlements—people cut down while worshiping, sleeping, or even while dying of smallpox. The facts of these incidents are discomforting, but Larry McMurtry, the celebrated novelist of the American West, isn’t content to let them be forgotten.

In his spare and haunting new book, Oh What a Slaughter, he tells the story of six massacres that took place between 1846 and 1890 as white settlement pushed increasingly west. These episodes have faded from the national consciousness—some lack even the simplest of memorials—but as McMurtry writes, “these six massacres were dreadful events, leaving scar tissue that will always be a part of our history.”

The details are obscure, buried as quickly as the bodies. It is nearly impossible to figure out who did what to whom and why. Getting an accurate sense of how many people were killed is challenging. As McMurtry writes, “In indiscriminate killing reason gets pushed aside: two modes, slaughtering and counting, are opposed. No one was carving notches while the bullets flew at Sand Creek or Wounded Knee.” In the companionable, looping prose that has made his 26 novels sparkle, McMurtry ably pits different accounts of the incidents against one another.

Perhaps the most controversial episode in the book is the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. It is also the only one of the six events McMurtry singles out that involves the slaughter of whites. The other five, including Wounded Knee, all have whites attacking friendly Indians, including “Peace Indians,” Native Americans who had agreed to treaties and were given a symbol such as an American flag or a peace certificate meant to ensure their safety.

In 1857 a group of pioneers were taking cattle from Arkansas to California and made the mistake of stopping to let their herd graze in Utah, where the Mormons had settled after being forced from the East. A group of Mormons and Paiute Indians surrounded the party and, after offering to ferry them to safety in exchange for their guns, killed some 140 people—everyone except for a few children under the age of seven. Shortly before the massacre President James Buchanan sent the U.S. Army, because the sect was forming an independent government, and McMurtry surmises that this left the Mormons feeling particularly vulnerable. They were also probably eager to get their hands on the Arkansans’ valuable cattle. The victims’ bodies were left in a pile, stripped of their clothes and jewelry, and the cattle were divided. But as McMurtry’s writes, “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.”

A group of men passing through the meadow a few weeks later found the bodies, and news quickly spread. The Mormons concocted a story to blame the carnage on the Indians, but an investigation by the superintendent of the Utah territory found that tale to be flimsy at best. The survivors, children now in the custody of Mormon families, began telling their version of events. Eventually the church offered up a scapegoat, John Doyle Lee, to deal with the mounting public pressure. Lee was sentenced to die, and he requested to be shot, by firing squad, on the site of the massacre.

The taint of the murders has remained on the Mormon church ever since. As recently as 1999 bones were uncovered at the site of a Mountain Meadows memorial, and forensic scientists were able to disprove the Mormons’ claim that the Paiutes alone were responsible for the deaths of women and children.

The public reacted with outrage not only at Mountain Meadows, but also to some of the massacres that involved jittery settlers butchering Native Americans. But the outcry did little to prevent further violence. The final chapters of the book cover Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, which took place in the surprisingly late year of 1890. There the United States Calvary opened fired on a group of bedraggled Sioux, killing 146 of them. Violence, it seems, is an inevitable part of history, and mass slaughter all too common. As McMurtry writes, “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.”

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.