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The staining of the West

By JOHN FREEMAN
Published January 8, 2006

OH WHAT A SLAUGHTER:

Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890

By Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster, $25, 178 pp

Reviewed by JOHN FREEMAN

"If we know anything about man," writes Larry McMurtry in this grim but stirring little book, "it's that he's not pacific." As evidence, the Pulitzer Prize winner points to six famous massacres that took place in the West, beginning with the Sacramento River Massacre of 1846 and ending with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Drawing on his prodigious reading and the memory of growing up in Texas, McMurtry brings these terrible times back to life, gory deathbed scenes and all.

McMurtry's insistence on gritty details can make for grisly reading, but he clearly believes that to leave them out would obscure the true nature of events. "What massacres usually do," he writes straight off, setting the tone, "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."

Oh What a Slaughter bears this description out and then some. The Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred when a wagon train passed through Utah and was ambushed; 140 people, some of them children, were killed. The event recently re-entered the news thanks in part to a flurry of books on the subject, including Sally Denton's American Massacre and Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.

Summarizing his reading, McMurtry writes, "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."

Kick the dirt aside with your boot, McMurtry shows, and the stain of murder is everywhere (and on everyone) in the West. Much of this has to do with the American government's policy of forcibly removing Indians from their land. The Wounded Knee Massacre reveals how the collective guilt and fear of a backlash to this action could lead to wholesale killing.

At the time of the event, there were over 100 warriors camped with the Sioux chief, Big Foot. "Once the soldiers began to fire into the crowd, a frenzy developed that was not much different from the killing frenzies at the other massacres," McMurtry writes. "Fear, nervousness, blind rage all contributed to a force that was soon unstoppable. . . . In situations of high tension it takes only one vague, perhaps accidental, action to start a violent spasm of killing."

As fans of his fiction know, McMurtry always has his eye on the moral tipping point of human behavior. Though this book isn't a comprehensive study, it puts us on this battlefield enough to understand why these events still haunt the Earth and why, sadly, they will probably not be the last of their kind.

- John Freeman lives in New York.

[Last modified January 7, 2006, 09:41:02]