The Conquest of the New World

Pestilence and Genocide - 2

III

The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed.

Consider the impact of some of the worst instances of modern warfare. In July of 1916, at the stan of the First World War, General Douglas Haig sent his British troops into combat with the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. He lost about 60,000 men the very first day — 21,000 in just the first hour — including half his officers. By the time that battle finally ended, Haig had lost 420,000 men.⁸⁶ And the war continued for two more years. This truly was, far and away, the worst war in Britain's history. To make matters worse, since the start of the decade England had been experiencing significant out—migration, and at the end of the decade it was assaulted by a deadly influenza pandemic. Yet, between 1911 and 1921, Britain's population increased by about two million people.⁸⁷

Or take Japan. Between 1940 and 1950, despite the frenzy of war in the Pacific, capped by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the population of Japan increased by almost 14 percent. Or take Southeast Asia. Between 1960 and 1970, while B-52s were raining destruction from the sky and a horrific ground war was spilling across every national boundary in the region, Southeast Asia's population increased at an average rate of almost 2.5 percent each year.⁸⁸

The reason these populations were able to increase, despite massive military damage, was that a greatly disproportionate ratio of men to women and children was being killed. This, however, is not what happened to the indigenous people in the Caribbean, in Mesoamerica, in South America, or in what are now the United States and Canada during the European assault against them. Neither was this slaughter of innocents anything but intentional in design, nor did it end with the close of the colonial era.

As Richard Drinnon has shown, in his book Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, America's revered founding fathers were themselves activists in the anti-Indian genocide. George Washington, in 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack the Iroquois and "lay waste all the settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed," urging the general not to "listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected." Sullivan did as instructed, he reported back, "destroy[ing] everything that contributes to their support" and turning "the whole of that beautiful region," wrote one early account, "from the character of a garden to a scene of-drear and sickening desolation." The Indians, this writer said, "were hunted like wild beasts" in a "war of extermination," something Washington approved of since, as he was to say in 1783, the Indians, after all, were little different from wolves, "both being beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape."⁸⁹

And since the Indians were mere beasts, it followed that there was no cause for moral outrage when it was learned that, among other atrocities, the victorious troops had amused themselves by skinning the bodies of some Indians "from the hips downward, to make boot tops or leggings." For their part, the surviving Indians later referred to Washington by the nickname "Town Destroyer," for it was under his direct orders that at least 28 out of 30 Seneca towns from Lake Erie to the Mohawk River had been totally obliterated in a period of less than five years, as had all the towns and villages of the Mohawk, the Onondaga, and the Cayuga. As one of the Iroquois told Washington to his face in 1792: "to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children ding dose to the necks of their mothers."⁹⁰

They might well have dung dose to the necks of their mothers when other names were mentioned as well-such as Adams or Monroe or Jackson. Or Jefferson, for example, who in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with "the hatchet." "And . . . if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe," he wrote, "we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi," continuing: "in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them." These were not offhand remarks, for five years later, in 1812, Jefferson again concluded that white Americans were "obliged" to drive the "backward" Indians "with the beasts of the forests into the Stony Mountains"; and one year later still, he added that the American government had no other choice before it than "to pursue [the Indians] to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach." Indeed, Jefferson's writings on Indians are filled with the straightforward assertion that the natives are to be given a simple choice-to be "extirpate[d] from the earth" or to remove themselves out of the Americans' way.91 Had these same words been enunciated by a German leader in 1939, and directed at European Jews, they would be engraved in modern memory. Since they were uttered by one of America's founding fathers, however, the most widely admired of the South's slaveholding philosophers of freedom, they conveniently have become lost to most historians in their insistent celebration of Jefferson's wisdom and humanity.

In fact, however, to the majority of white Americans by this time the choice was one of expulsion or extermination, although these were by no means mutually exclusive options. Between the time of initial contact with the European invaders and the dose of the seventeenth century, most eastem Indian peoples had suffered near-annihilation levels of destruction; typically, as in Virginia and New England, 95 percent or more of their populations had been eradicated. But even then the carnage did not stop. One recent study of population trends in the southeast, for instance, shows that east of the Appalachians in Virginia the native population declined by 93 percent between 1685 and 1790-that is, after it already had declined by about 95 percent during the preceding century, which itself had followed upon the previous century's whirlwind of massive destruction. In eastern North and South Carolina the decline between 1685 and 1790 was 97 percent-again, following upon two earlier centuries of genocidal devastation. In Louisiana the 1685-1790 figure for population collapse was 91 percent, and in Florida 88 percent. As a result, when the eighteenth century was drawing to its close, less than 5000 native people remained alive in all of eastern Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana combined, while in Florida-which alone . contained more than 700,000 Indians in 1520 — only 2000 survivors could be found.⁹²

Overwhelmingly, these disasters were the result of massively destructive epidemics and genocidal warfare, while a small portion of the loss in numbers derived from forced expulsion from the Indians' traditional homelands. How these deadly phenomena interacted can be seen clearly by examining the case of the Cherokee. After suffering a calamitous measure of ruination during the time of their earliest encounters with Europeans, the Cherokee population continued to decline steadily and precipitously as the years unfolded. During the late seventeenth and major part of the eighteenth century alone, for example, the already devastated Cherokee nation endured the loss of another three-fourths of its population.93 Then, just as the colonies were going to war in their quest for liberation from the British, they turned their murderous attention one more time to the quest for Indian liquidation; the result for the Cherokee was that "their towns is all burned," wrote one contemporary, "their Corn cut down and Themselves drove into the Woods to perish and a great many of them killed." 94 Before long, observed James Mooney, the Cherokee were on "the verge of extinction. Over and over again their towns had been laid in ashes and their fields wasted. Their best warriors had been killed and their women and children had sickened and starved in the mountains."95 Thus, the attempt at straightforward extermination. Next came expulsion.

From the precipice of non-existence, the Cherokee slowly struggled back. But as they did, more and more white settlers were moving into and onto their lands. Then, in 1828 Andrew Jackson was elected President. The same Andrew Jackson who once had written that "the whole Cherokee Nation ought to be scurged." The same Andrew Jackson who had led troops against peaceful Indian encampments, calling the Indians "savage dogs," and boasting that "I have on all occasions preserved the scalps of my killed." The same Andrew Jackson who had supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses-the bodies of men, women, and children that he and his men had massacred-<:utting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins. The same Andrew Jackson who — after his Presidency was over — still was recommending that American troops specifically seek out and systematically kill Indian women and children who were in hiding, in order to complete their extermination: to do otherwise, he wrote, was equivalent to pursuing "a wolf in the hamocks without knowing first where her den and whelps were."⁹⁶

Almost immediately upon Jackson's ascension to the Presidency, the state of Georgia claimed for itself enormous chunks of Cherokee property, employing a fraudulent legal technique that Jackson himself had once used to justify dispossession. The Cherokee and other Indian nations in the region-principally the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Creek-stood fast, even taking their case to the United States Supreme Court. But all the while that they were trying to hold their ground, a flood tide of white immigrants (probably about 40,000 in Cherokee country alone) swarmed over the hills and meadows and woods, their numbers continuing to swell as gold was discovered in one section of the territory.⁹⁷

The white settlers, in fact, were part of the government's plan to drive the Indians off their land. As Michael Paul Ragin has demonstrated, the "intruders entered Indian country only with government encouragement, after the extension of state law." And once on the Indians' land, they overran it. Confiscating the farms of wealthy and poor Indians alike, says Ragin, "they took possession of Indian land, stock, and improvements, forced the Indians to sign leases, drove them into the woods, and acquired a bonanza in cleared land." They then destroyed the game, which had supplemented the Indians' agricultural production, with the result, as intended, that the Indians faced mass starvation.⁹⁸

Still, the Cherokee resisted. And by peaceful means. They won their case before the U.S. Supreme Court, with a ruling written by Justice john Marshall, a ruling that led to Jackson's famous remark: "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." The Court, of course, had no direct means of enforcement, so the drive against the Cherokee and the other Indians of the region continued unabated.

Finally, a treaty was drawn up, ceding the Cherokee lands to the American government in exchange for money and some land in what had been designated Indian Territory far to the west. Knowing that neither the Cherokee elders, nor the majority of the Cherokee people, would approve the treaty, the U.S. government held the most influential Cherokee leader in jail and shut down the tribal printing press while negotiations took place between American officials and a handful of "cooperative" Indians. Even the American military official who was on hand to register the tribe's members for removal protested to the Secretary of War that "that paper ... called a treaty, is no treaty at all, because not sanctioned by the great body of the Cherokee and made without their participation or assent. I solemnly declare to you that upon its reference to the Cherokee people it would be instantly rejected by nine-tenths of them, and I believe by nineteentwentieths of them."⁹⁹

But the President had what he wanted-someone's signature on a piece of paper. This was what the great French observer of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, was speaking of when he remarked sarcastically that, in contrast with the sixteenth-century Spanish, in the nineteenth centuryand, we might add here, the twentieth-"the conduct of the United States Americans toward the natives was inspired by the most chaste affection for legal formalities. . . . It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity."¹⁰⁰

Soon the forced relocation, what was to become known as the Trail of Tears, began under the direction of General Winfield Scott. In fact, the "relocation" was nothing less than a death march-a Presidentially ordered death march that, in terms of the mortality rate directly attributable to it, was almost as destructive as the Bataan Death March of 1942, the most notorious Japanese atrocity in all of the Second World War.101 About 22,000 Cherokee then remained in existence, 4000 of whom had already broken under the pressures of white oppression and left for Indian Territory. Another thousand or so escaped and hid out in the Carolina hills. The remaining 17,000 were rounded up by the American military and herded into detention camps-holding pens, really-where they waited under wretched and ignominious conditions for months as preparations for their forced exile were completed. James Mooney, who interviewed people who had participated in the operation, described the scene:

Under Scott's orders the troops were disposed at various points throughout the Cherokee country, where stockade forts were erected for gathering in and holding the Indians preparatory to removal. From these, squads of troops were sent to search out with rifle and bayonet every small cabin hidden away in the coves or by the sides of mountain streams, to seize and bring in as prisoners all the occupants, however or wherever they might be found. Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scent that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."¹⁰²

An initial plan to carry the Cherokee off by steamboat, in the hottest part of the summer, was called off when so many of them died from disease and the oppressive conditions. After waiting for the fall season to begin, they were then driven overland, in groups upwards of about a thousand, across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. One white traveler from Maine happened upon several detachments from the death march, all of them "suffering extremely from the fatigue of the journey, and the ill health consequent upon it":

The last detachment which we passed on the 7th embraced rising two thousand Indians. . . . [W]e found the road literally filled with the procession for about three miles in length. The sick and feeble were carried in waggons-about as comfonable for traveling as a New England ox can with a covering over it-a great many ride on horseback and multitudes go on footeven aged females, apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back--on the sometimes frozen ground, and sometimes muddy streets, with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them .... We learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed, that they buried founeen or fifteen at every stopping place, and they make a journey of ten miles per day only on an average.¹⁰³

Like other government-sponsored Indian death marches, this one intentionally took native men, women, and children through areas where it was known that cholera and other epidemic diseases were raging; the government sponsors of this march, again as with the others, fed the Indians spoiled flour and rancid meat, and they drove the native people on through freezing rain and cold. Not a day passed without numerous deaths from the unbearable conditions under which they were forced to travel. And when they arrived in Indian Territory many more succumbed to fatal illness and starvation.

All told, by the time it was over, more than 8000 Cherokee men, women, and children died as a result of their expulsion from their homeland. That is, about half of what then remained of the Cherokee nation was liquidated under Presidential directive, a death rate similar to that of other southeastern peoples who had undergone the same process-the Creeks and the Seminoles in particular. Some others who also had been expelled from the lands of their ancestors, such as the Chickasaw and the Choctaw, fared better, losing only about 15 percent of their populations during their own forced death marches.104 For comparative purposes, however, that "only" 15 percent is the approximate equivalent of the death rate for German combat troops in the closing year of World War Two, when Germany's entire southern front was collapsing and its forces in the field everywhere were being overwhelmed and more than decimated. The higher death rate of the Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokee was equal to that of Jews in Germany, Hungary, and Rumania between 1939 and 1945.105 And all these massacres of Indians took place, of course, only after many years of preliminary slaughter, from disease and military assault, that already had reduced these peoples' populations down to a fragment of what they had been prior to the coming of the Europeans.

The story of the southeastern Indians, like that of the northeastern tribes, was repeated across the entire expanse of the North American continent, as far south as Mexico, as far north as Canada and the Arctic, as far west as the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California. Just as we have had to overlook many native peoples in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and elsewhere, who regularly suffered depopulation rates of 90 to 95 percent and more-as well as numerous New England and southern tribes who passed into total extinction with less drama than did those we have surveyed here--our references to the holocaust that swept the rest of the continent can be little more than suggestive of the devastation that occurred.

We can speak of small but illustrative incidents. For example, the total destruction in 1792 of a far northwest coast Nootka Indian village called Opitsatah, half a mile in diameter and containing more than 200 elaborately carved homes (and many times that number of people) under the command of a man who later said he "was in no ways tenacious of" carrying out such mass murder, and that he "was grieved to think" that his commander "should let his passions go so far." But he did it anyway, because he was ordered to. Every door the American killers entered, he said, "was in resemblance to a human and beasts head, the passage being through the mouth, besides which there was much more rude carved work about the dwellings, some of which by no means inelegant. This fine village, the work of ages, was in a short time totally destroyed."¹⁰⁶ Or there is the case of the Moravian Delaware Indians who had converted to Christianity, as demanded by their white conquerors, in order to save their lives. It didn't matter. After destroying their corn and reducing them to starving scavengers, American troops under Colonel David Williamson rounded up those tribal members who were still clinging to life and, as reported after the events,

assured them of sympathy in their great hunger and their intention to escort them to food and safety. Without suspicion . . . the Christians agreed to go with them and after consultations, hastened to the Salem fields to bring in their friends. The militia relieved the Indians of their guns and knives, promising to restore them later. The Christians felt safe with these friendly men whose interest in their welfare seemed genuine. Too late they discovered the Americans' treachery. Once defenseless, they were bound and charged with being warriors, murderers, enemies and thieves . . . . After a short night of prayer and hymns . . . twenty-nine men, twenty-seven women, and thirty-four children were ruthlessly murdered. Pleas, in excellent English, from some of the kneeling Christians, failed to stop the massacre. Only two escaped by feigning death before the butchers had completed their work of scalping.¹⁰⁷

Massacres of this sort were so numerous and routine that recounting them eventually becomes numbing — and, of course, far more carnage of this sort occurred than ever was recorded. So no matter how numbed — or even, shamefully, bored — we might become at hearing story after story after story of the mass murder, pillage, rape, and torture of America's native peoples, we can be assured that, however much we hear, we have heard only a small fragment of what there was to tell.

The tale of the slaughter at Wounded Knee in South Dakota is another example too well known to require detailed repeating here, but what is less well known about that massacre is that, a week and a half before it happened, the editor of South Dakota's Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer — a gentle soul named L. Frank Baum, who later became famous as the author of The Wizard of Oz-urged the wholesale extermination of all America's native peoples:

The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they should die than live the miserable wretches that they are.¹⁰⁸

Baum reflected well the attitudes of his time and place, for ten days later, after hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee had been killed by the powerful Hotchkiss guns (breech-loading cannons that fired an explosive shell) of the Seventh Cavalry, the survivors were tracked down for miles around and summarily executed — because, and only because, the blood running in their veins was Indian. "Fully three miles from the scene of the massacre we found the body of a woman completely covered with a blanket of snow," wrote one eyewitness to the butchery, "and from this point on we found them scattered along as they had been relentlessly hunted down and slaughtered while fleeing for their lives. . . . When we reached the spot where the Indian camp had stood, among the fragments of burned tents and other belongings we saw the frozen bodies lying dose together or piled one upon another!'¹⁰⁹ Other women were found alive, but left for dead in the snow. They died after being brought under cover, as did babies who "were found alive under the snow, wrapped in shawls and lying beside their dead mothers."¹¹⁰ Women and children accounted for more than two-thirds of the Indian dead. As one of the Indian witnesses — a man named American Horse, who had been friendly to the American troops for years-recalled:

They turned their guns, Hotchkiss guns, etc., upon the women who were in the lodges standing there under a flag of truce, and of course as soon as they were fired upon they fled. . . . There was a woman with an infant in her arms who was killed as she almost touched the flag of truce, and the women and children of course were strewn all along the circular village until they were dispatched. Right near the flag of truce a mother was shot down with her infant; the child not knowing that its mother was dead was still nursing, and that especially was a very sad sight. The women as they were fleeing with their babes were killed together, shot right through, and the women who were very heavy with child were also killed .... After most all of them had been killed a cry was made that all those who were not killed or wounded should come forth and they would be safe. Little boys who were not wounded came out of their places of refuge, and as soon as they came in sight a number of soldiers surrounded them and butchered them there. . . . Of course it would have been all right if only the men were killed; we would feel almost grateful for it. But the fact of the killing of the women, and more especially the killing of the young boys and girls who ar,: to go to make up the future strength of the Indian people, is the saddest part of the whole affair and we feel it very sorely.¹¹¹

Four days after this piece of work the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer's editor Baum sounded his approval, asserting that "we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up . . . . and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."¹¹²

Some native people did survive at Wounded Knee, however, including "a baby of about a year old warmly wrapped and entirely unhurt," recalled an Indian witness to the carnage. "I brought her in, and she was afterward adopted and educated by an army officer."¹¹³ This was the child named Zintka Lanuni — or Lost Bird — who in fact was taken by General William Colby against the other survivors' objections, not to educate her but to display her thereafter for profit as a genuine Indian "war curio." When Colby first showed off "his newly acquired possession," reported his home town newspaper, "not less than 500 persons called at his house to see it." Finally put on display in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Lost Bird died at age twenty-nine in Los Angeles. In July 1991, the Lakota had her remains moved from Los Angeles back to Wounded Knee, where she was interred, a hundred years after the massacre, next to the mass grave that still marks the killing field where the rest of her family lies buried.¹¹⁴

Sometimes it was raw slaughter, sometimes it was the raging fire of exotic introduced disease. But, year in and year out, in countless places across the length and breadth of the continent, the "scene of desolation" described by one observer of events in western Canada was repeated over and over again:

In whatever direction you turn, nothing but sad wrecks of mortality meet the eye; lodges standing on every hill, but not a streak of smoke rising from them. Not a sound can be heard to break the awful stillness, save the ominous croak of ravens, and the mournful howl of wolves fattening on the human carcasses that lie strewed around. It seems as if the very genius of desolation had stalked through the prairies, and wreaked his vengeance on everything bearing the shape of humanity.¹¹⁵

Or we can speak of statistics. They are, on the surface, less emotional evidence, and are simple to enumerate. Take Illinois, for example. Between the late seventeenth and late eighteenth century the number of Illinois Indians fell by about 96 percent; that is, for every one hundred Illinois Indians alive in 1680, only four were alive a century later. That massive destruction was the result of war, disease, and despair--despair in the face of apparently imminent extinction from a siege the likes of which cannot be imagined by those who have not endured it. A fragmentary selection of examples from every corner of the continent — in addition to the instances already discussed-tells the same depressing tale over and over again. The Kansa people of northeast Kansas suffered about the same level of devastation as the Illinois, though stretched over a somewhat longer period of time: it took a bit more than a century and a half — from the early eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century for the Kansa population to fall to 4 percent of its former size. A higher rate of collapse has been calculated for the ten tribes of Kalapuya Indians of Oregon's Willamette Valley: for every hundred Kalapuya alive prior to Western contact, about 25 or 30 remained alive in the late eighteenth century; only five were left by the late 1830s; and only one was left at the close of the nineteenth century. In Baja, California up to 60,000 Indians were alive at the end of the seventeenth century; by the middle of the nineteenth century there were none. Further north in California, the Tolowa peoples' population had collapsed by 92 percent after fifty years of Western contact. In less than half a century, between 1591 and 1638, two out of three people in northwestern Mexico died. In western Arizona and eastern New Mexico, within fifty years following European contact at least half of the Zuni, two-thirds of the Acoma, and 80 percent of the Hopi people had been liquidated. In Delaware, half the Munsee tribe was wiped out in . the thirty-five years between 1680 and 1715. Two-thirds of New York's Huron nation were killed in a single decade. In Oklahoma, 50 percent of the Kiowa people died in a period of just two years. Ninety percent of the Upper Missouri River Mandan died in less than a year. From a population of up to 20,000 in 1682, the Quapaw people of the lower Mississippi and Arkansas River valleys were reduced in number to 265 by 1865 — a 99 percent destruction rate. In Alaska, in part because of its vastness and the relative remoteness of its population centers, statistics are less clear. However, as a detailed recent study shows, from the earliest days of Western contact Aleut and other native peoples were "systematically exterminated"-first by Russians, later by Americans — when they weren't being destroyed by introduced epidemics of smallpox, typhoid, measles, or influenza (which carried away as much as a third of the region's population in individual assaults), and by the lethal gifts of syphilis and tuberculosis, which rotted away more slowly from within.¹¹⁶

Controlled studies of tribal populations across the Lower Mississippi Valley, Central New York, and the Middle Missouri region replicate these patterns: drastic and often catastrophic population crashes, occasionally plunging to extinction levels, occurred repeatedly.117 In all these casesand in literally hundreds more of equal magnitude — the observed population collapses occurred after previous population declines that are known to have happened, but whose numbers went unrecorded. Thus, even figures of 95 and 98 and 99 percent destruction may time and again be too low. For this same reason, many entire tribes will never even be mentioned in lists of Indian population decline because they disappeared before any whites were around to record their existence for posterity. In 1828, for example, the French biologist Jean Louis Berlandier traveled through Texas and noted that of fifty-two Indian nations recorded by members of the La Salle expedition a century and a half earlier only three or four nations remained. But we will never know how many of Texas's native peoples or tribes were wiped out by the swarms of violence and deadly infectious disease that arrived from Europe, by way of Spanish troops, before La Salle's expedition appeared upon the scene. For when he was in Louisiana in 1682, LaSalle repeatedly questioned whether the maps and chronicles he had inherited from the earlier De Soto expedition were accurate, since they referred to the presence of large numbers of Indian peoples and populations that LaSalle could not find, because they already had long since been destroyed.¹¹⁸

Among all these instances of horror visited upon America's native peoples, however, one episode perhaps stands out. It occurred in eastern Colorado in November of 1864, at a small and unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho village known as Sand Creek. It is not that so many Indians died there. Rather, it is how they died — and the political and cultural atmosphere in which they died — that is so historically revealing. It is, moreover, representative in its savagery of innumerable other events that differ from it only because they left behind less visible traces.

Colorado at this time was the quintessence of the frontier west. Various incidents had earlier raised tensions between the Indians there and the seemingly endless flow of white settlers who came as squatters on Cheyenne and Arapaho lands. As tempers flared, so did the settlers' rhetoric, which became inflamed with genocidal threats and promises. During the year preceding the incident that has come to be known as the Sand Creek Massacre, a local newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, launched an incendiary campaign that urged the Indians' extermination. "They are a dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race, and ought to be wiped from the face of the earth," wrote the News's editor in March of 1863. In that year, of twenry-seven stories having anything at all to do with Indians, ten went out of their way to urge extermination.¹¹⁹

The following year was election time in Colorado. In addition to political offices that were up for grabs, a constitution was on the ballot that would have opened the door for statehood — something that was not especially popular with most settlers. The faction allied with the Rocky Mountain News (which included the incumbent governor) supported statehood and apparently perceived political gain to be had in whipping up hatred for the Indians. As a rival newspaper put it, the pro-statehood forces believed that if they "cooked up" enough settler fear of the Indians they would be able to "prove [to the voters] that only as a state could Colorado get sufficient troops to control her Indians." While the election year wore on, stories in the News continued to stir those fears: wild rumors of Indian conspiracies were heralded as fact; any violence at all between whites and Indians was reported as an Indian "massacre."¹²⁰

The public and the military began taking up the chant. After a skirmish between Indians and soldiers in which two soldiers died, the military replied by killing twenry-five Indians. "Though I think we have punished them pretry severely in this affair," stated the troops' commander, "yet I believe now is but the commencement of war with this tribe, which must result in exterminating them." More skirmishes followed. Groups of Indians, including women and children, were killed here and there by soldiers and bands of vigilantes. To many whites it had become abundantly clear, as the News proclaimed in August of 1864, that the time was at hand when the settlers and troops must "go for them, their lodges, squaw's and all.,¹²¹

Then, at last, the excuse was at hand. A family of settlers was killed by a group of Indians — which Indians, no one knew, nor did anyone care. The governor issued an emergency proclamation: regiments of citizen soldiers were authorized to form and to kill any and all hostile Indians they could find. Their compensation would be "whatever horses and other properry they may capture, and, in addition, [the Governor] promises to use his influence to procure their payment by the general government." In effect, this was an official government license to kill any and all Indians on sight, to seize their horses and other property, and then — after the factto claim they had been "hostiles." In the event that this point might be missed by some, the governor's journalistic ally, the News, urged all out "extermination against the red devils," making no distinction between those Indians who were friendly and those who were not. With identical intent the governor issued another proclamation — a clarification: the evidence was now "conclusive," he declared, that "most" of the Indians on the Plains were indeed "hostile"; it was, therefore, the citizens' and the military's right and obligation — for which they would be duly paid — to "pursue, kill, and destroy" them all.¹²²

This, then, was the mood and the officially sanctioned setting when about 700 heavily armed soldiers, under the command of a former Methodist missionary (and still an elder in the church), Colonel John Chivington, rode into Sand Creek village. Several months earlier Chivington, who that year was also a candidate for Congress, had announced in a speech that his policy was to "kill and scalp all, little and big." "Nits make lice," he was fond of saying-indeed, the phrase became a rallying cry of his troops; since Indians were lice, their children were nits-and the only way to get rid of lice was to kill the nits as well. Clearly, Colonel Chivington was a man ahead of his time. It would be more than half a century, after all, before Heinrich Himmler would think to describe the extermination of another people as "the same thing as delousing."¹²³

The air was cold and crisp, the early morning darkness just beginning to lift, when they entered the snowy village on November 29. The creek was almost dry, the little water in it crusted over with ice, untouched yet by the dawn's first rays of sun. The cavalrymen paused and counted well over a hundred lodges in the encampment. Within them, the native people were just stirring; as had been the case with the Pequots in Connecticut, more than 200 years earlier — and with countless other native peoples across the continent since then — the village was filled almost entirely with women and children who had no inkling of what was about to happen. Most of the men were away on a buffalo hunt. One of the colonel's guides, Robert Bent, later reported that there were about 600 Indians in camp that morning, including no more than "thirty-five braves and some old men, about sixty in all." The rest were women and children.¹²⁴

A few days before riding into the Indian camp Colonel Chivington had been informed that the village at Sand Creek could be taken with a small fraction of the troops at his command, not only because most of the Chey· enne men were away on the hunt, but because the people had voluntarily disarmed themselves to demonstrate that they were not hostile. They had turned in all but their essential hunting weapons to the commander at nearby Fort Lyon. Technically, the colonel was informed, the government considered the Indians at Sand Creek to be harmless and disarmed prisoners of war. Witnesses later reported that Chivington — who just then had been going on at length about his desire for taking Indian scalps — dismissed this news, drew himself up in his chair, and replied: "Well, I long to be wading in gore."¹²⁵

His wish was soon fulfilled. As Chivington and his five battalions moved into the village that morning, two whites who were visiting the camp tied a tanned buffalo hide to a pole and waved it to signal the troops that this was a friendly town. They were met with a fusillade of gunfire. Then old chief Black Kettle, the principal leader of the Cheyenne, tied a white flag to a lodge pole, and above that he tied an American flag that had been given him by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He gathered his family around him and he held the pole high-again, in an effort to show the American soldiers that his was not a hostile camp. He "kept calling out" to his people "not to be frightened," Robert Bent's brother George recalled, "that the camp was under protection and there was no danger. Then suddenly the troops opened fire on this mass of men, women, and children, and all began to scatter and run."¹²⁶

The massacre was on. Chivington ordered that cannons be fired into the panicked groups of Indians first; then the troops charged on horseback and on foot. There was nowhere for the native people to hide. The few Cheyenne and Arapaho men in camp tried to fight back, and Robert Bent says they "all fought well," but by his own count they were outnumbered twenty to one and had virtually no weapons at their disposal. Some women ran to the riverbank and clawed at the dirt and sand, frantically and hopelessly digging holes in which to conceal themselves or their children.

From this point on it is best simply to let the soldiers and other witnesses tell what they did and what they saw, beginning with the testimony of Robert Bent:¹²⁷

After the firing the warriors put the squaws and children together, and surrounded them to protect them. I saw five squaws under a bank for shelter. When the troops came up to them they ran out and showed their persons, to let the soldiers know they were squaws and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. . . . There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no resistance. Every one I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side. Captain Soule afterwards told me that such was the fact. . . . I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.

I went over the ground soon after the battle [reported Asbury Bird, a soldier with Company D of the First Colorado Cavalry]. I should judge there were between 400 and 500 Indians killed .... Nearly all, men, women, and children were scalped. I saw one woman whose privates had been mutilated.

The bodies were horribly cut up [testified Lucien Palmer, a Sergeant with the First Cavalry's Company C] skulls broken in a good many; I judge they were broken in after they were killed, as they were shot besides. I do not think I saw any but what was scalped; saw fingers cut off [to get the rings off them], saw several bodies with privates cut off, women as well as men.

Next morning after the battle [said Corporal Amos C. Miksch, also of Company C], I saw a little boy covered up among the Indians in a trench, still alive. I saw a major in the 3rd regiment take out his pistol and blow off the top of his head. I saw some men unjointing fingers to get rings off, and cutting off ears to get silver ornaments. I saw a party with the same major take up bodies that had been buried in the night to scalp them and take off ornaments. I saw a squaw with her head smashed in before she was killed. Next morning, after they were dead and stiff, these men pulled out the bodies of the squaws and pulled them open in an indecent manner. I heard men say they had cut out the privates, but did not see it myself.

I saw some Indians that had been scalped, and the ears were cut off of the body of White Antelope [said Captain L. Wilson of the First Colorado Cavalry]. One Indian who had been scalped had also his skull all smashed in, and I heard that the privates of White Antelope had been cut off to make a tobacco bag out of. I heard some of the men say that the privates of one of the squaws had been cut out and put on a stick.

The dead bodies of women and children were afterwards mutilated in the most horrible manner [testified David Louderback, a First Cavalry Private] . I saw only eight. I could not stand it; they were cut up too much . . . they were scalped and cut up in an awful manner .... White Antelope's nose, ears, and privates were cut off.

All manner of depredations were inflicted on their persons [said John S. Smith, an interpreter], they were scalped, their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word . . . worse mutilated than any I ever saw before, the women all cut to pieces .... [C]hildren two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors.

In going over the battle-ground the next day I did not see a body of man, woman, or child but was scalped, and in many instances their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner — men, women, and children's privates cut out, &c. [reported First Lieutenant James D. Cannon of the New Mexico Volunteers]. I heard one man say that he had cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition on a stick; I heard another man say that he had cut the fingers off an Indian to get the rings on the hand. . . . I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows, and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks. . . . I heard one man say that he had cut a squaw's heart out, and he had it stuck up on a stick.

Once the carnage was over, and the silence of death had descended on the killing-field, Colonel Chivington sent messages to the press that he and his men had just successfully concluded "one of the most bloody Indian battles ever fought" in which "one of the most powerful villages in the Cheyenne nation" was destroyed. There was exultation in the land. "Cheyenne scalps are getting as thick here now as toads in Egypt," joked the Rocky Mountain News. "Everybody has got one and is anxious to get another to send east."¹²⁸

Outside of Colorado, however, not everyone was pleased. Congressional investigations were ordered, and some among the investigators were shocked at what they found. One of them, a senator who visited the site of the massacre and "picked up skulls of infants whose milk-teeth had not yet been shed," later reported that the concerned men of Congress had decided to confront Colorado's governor and Colonel Chivington openly on the matter, and so assembled their committee and the invited general public in the Denver Opera House. During the course of discussion and debate, someone raised a question: Would it be best, henceforward, to try to "civilize" the Indians or simply to exterminate them? Whereupon, the senator wrote in a letter to a friend, "there suddenly arose such a shout as is never heard unless upon some battlefield — a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof of the opera house-'EXTERMINA TE THEM! EXTERMINATE THEM!' "¹²⁹

The committee, apparently, was impressed. Nothing ever was done to Chivington, who took his fame and exploits on the road as an after-dinner speaker. After all, as President Theodore Roosevelt said later, the Sand Creek Massacre was "as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier."¹³⁰