2. Robert F. Heizer and Alan F. Almquist, The Other Californians (Berkeley: U. of CA Press, 1971), 170–71; Jack Chen, The Chinese of America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980), 97–101; Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 75–103; AskAsia, “Linking the Past to Present: Asian Americans Then and Now,” www.askasia.org/frclasrm/readings/r000192.htm; Autry Museum exhibit, 10/97; Hyung-Chan Kim, ed., Dictionary of Asian-American History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986), 452; Franklin Odo, In Movement (Los Angeles: Visual Communications, 1977), 39; James D. Hart, A Companion to California (Berkeley: U of CA Press, 1987), 94, 384; Tomas Almaquer, Racial Fault Lines (Berkeley: U of CA Press, 1994), 163; Nancy Wey, “Chinese Americans in California,” in Five Views (Sacramento: California Office of Historic Preservation, 1988), 103–58; Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988); Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 18; Paul Gagnon, Democracy’s Untold Story (DC: American Federation of Teachers, 1987), 19.

6. Killing a Man is Not News

CALIFORNIA Downieville

Downieville, a small town in the Sierra Mountains, is one of two places in California, so far as I know, to have historical markers about lynchings. In 1996 E Clampus Vitas, an organization in the western states whose major function seems to be to mark historic places, put this plaque on the Craycroft Building near the site of the Jersey Bridge in Downieville:

IN MEMORY OF JUANITA

The Spanish woman also known as Josefa, was hung off the Jersey Bridge, July 5, 1851, a short distance downstream from this spot, for the murder of Frederick Alexander Augustus Cannon.

Cannon and his friends were celebrating Independence Day
and after closing of the saloons they passed Jose and Josefa’s cabin.
He broke the door down. However, history did not tell what happened.
The next morning he came back, supposedly to apologize.
An argument ensued and Josefa stabbed Cannon fatally in the heart.

A mob trial was held and she was sentenced to death.
Josefa climbed the scaffold without the least trepidation and placed
the rope around her own neck. Her last words were,
“I would do the same again, if I was so provoked.”

In Women of the Sierra Anne Seagraves includes an entry on the person she calls “First White Woman Lynched in California”: “Juanita (no last name was ever recorded) was considered attractive, with long, lustrous dark hair; delicate features; and passionate black eyes.... She lived with her lover in a small cabin, and although many men sought her favors, Juanita was content with her man, José.” In the early morning hours on the day after Independence Day in 1851, drunken revelers “went down the streets breaking open the doors of houses,” in Seagraves’s words. Jack Cannon was one of these, a big man, popular with his fellows, something of a camp rowdy. He broke into Juanita’s house, and she asked him to leave her alone. He called her a prostitute; she swore back at him. A few hours later he returned, perhaps to apologize, perhaps to continue his pursuit. Jose asked him to have his door repaired. Cannon began once more “to insult both Juanita and Jose. The argument became louder, and a crowd began to form.” What happened next is not clear: either Cannon lunged at her or Juanita simply exploded. In any event she grabbed a bowie knife and plunged it “into Cannon’s chest, instantly killing him. The stunned spectators, realizing their friend was dead, started yelling ‘Lynch them!’”

The mob dragged Juanita to the main plaza of Downieville and placed Cannon’s body, with its ugly wound, nearby. Without delay the crowd set up a mock trial. It was so unfair that when the young man chosen as defense attorney actually defended Juanita, the mob threw him off the barrel he stood on, broke his glasses, and kicked and beat him. The jury found her guilty and sentenced her to hang within the hour. She tossed her straw hat to a spectator in the crowd, and in Seagraves’s words, her “thick dark hair came cascading down around her slender shoulders. She took the noose in her own hands and placed it around her neck.” Within seconds of her hanging Juanita was dead.

According to Seagraves, “this infamous miscarriage of justice was heard around the world,” with newspapers in Europe commenting on American “border justice.” Surely this ugly event deserves a marker. But we must pause a moment and analyze what the hanging and the marker teach us about gender in the United States. Seagraves makes ironic use of Independence Day: “The speeches about equality and liberty for all obviously were not meant to include women, especially of the Mexican race.” Juanita’s status as a Mexican indeed made her vulnerable. White Americans have consistently singled out people of color as lynching victims, beyond the protection of the law. Many other lynchings occurred in California in the 19th century, disproportionately of Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans. But Juanita’s status as a woman did not contribute to her death. The only other marker on lynching in California makes this evident: in Placerville, a city formerly called “Hangtown” because of its many lynchings, a state historical marker states, “In the days of 1849, when this city was called Hangtown, vigilantes executed many men for various crimes.”

Across America, while four of every five lynching victims have been nonwhite, fewer than one in ten has been female.¹ Those numbers suggest that female status is quite different from nonwhite status. Seagraves implies this when she converts Juanita from “of the Mexican race” to “First White Woman Lynched in California” in her title, because to lynch a white or a woman is unusual and sensational. Because African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans have been lynched in numbers far greater than their proportion in the population, social scientists infer (correctly) that these groups have historically had lower status. Because males have been lynched in numbers far greater than their proportion in the population, should we infer that men have historically had lower status?²

The answer, surprisingly, is yes, we should, in certain ways. This is surprising because the women’s movement of the 1970s correctly taught our society that women have been disadvantaged in politics, most occupations, and many different parts of our culture. The lack of a men’s movement has kept us from seeing that men have been disadvantaged in other areas of our culture. One disadvantage has to do with violent death. Not just in frontier California but even today, men are four times more likely than women to be murdered. Men are also 2.6 times as likely to die from accidents. Even nature seems to have it in for men: lightning is seven times as likely to strike men as women! Nature of course doesn’t check sex before sending a bolt; men are more likely to be exposed to storms. Our culture tells men it’s not manly to take shelter or drive sedately on the one hand, and our occupational structure steers men toward dangerous all-weather jobs like telephone lineman and truck driver on the other. Either way the culture has been and still is careless of male lives—most obviously in requiring only men to register for the draft. Consistent with this devaluation, men seek medical care later and less often than women suffering from similar ailments, and are also 4.3 times as likely as women to kill themselves.

Thus although the text of “In Memory of Juanita” is accurate, in a sense the plaque’s very existence implies that women’s lives are more precious than men’s. Lynchings of men, even white men, go unremarked on the American landscape because the victims were male. Newspapers follow this rule every day. Thus wire service reports in the 1990s about “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans frequently emphasized that “women and children” were among the slain. Although male deaths were usually more numerous, they went unremarked so journalists could tap into the outrage that readers are supposed to feel when they learn that these perpetrators would stoop to kill women and children. Killing men is more common and more morally acceptable. In short, killing men is not news. Killing women is.

To single out the lynching of a woman for remarks on a plaque presents a double irony. The first involves women: only fifteen out of almost one thousand California state historical markers treat women. This is because California’s social structure has not allowed women to play an equal part, and California’s historical markers do not recognize many women who nevertheless did make history. This Downieville marker hardly makes up for those omissions.

The second irony involves men. Seagraves calls Juanita’s hanging “one of the most shocking crimes in California history,” but California had at least 59 lynchings between 1875 and 1935, and many more before 1875, almost all of men. None is noted on the landscape, though each was just as shocking in its way as Juanita’s. This Downieville marker hardly makes up for those omissions, either.

The literal unremarkability of violence against men points to how unconscious these gender differences are. They lie deep in our mores, and in this sense “discrimination” is a misleading term to apply to them. Looming behind all these complementary gender disabilities is not a patriarch or a matriarch but a culture, elements of which need to be changed to benefit men as well as women.³

Entry 42 and 30 tell how some states are even worse than California about leaving women off the American landscape.

1. This ratio is visible in Montgomery, AL, were Maya Lin’s famous Civil Rights Memorial lists “Forty Lives for Freedom”—civil rights martyrs killed by white supremacists. All are male except Viola Liuzzo, killed by Ku Klux Klansmen after the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, and the four little girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham.

2. Most lynchers have been white males who disproportionately victimize people in their racial/ethnic outgroup and their sexual ingroup.

3. Anne Seagraves, Women of the Sierra (Lakeport, CA: WESANNE, 1990), 29 - 31; James D. Hart, A Companion to CA (Berkeley: U. of CA Press, 1987), 292; Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969), 481; Kenneth D. Kochanek and Bettie L. Hudson, “Advance Report of Final Mortality Statistics, 1992” (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, Monthly Vital Statistics Report, 43 no. 6 supplement, 12/8/94), 1 - 4, 8 - 10; Roy U. Schenk, “Statement to the Wisconsin Supreme Court...,” Transitions 13 no. 1 (1/93): 13 - 14; Burlington (VT) Free Press (AP), 11/14/88.

7. Don’t “Discover” ‘Til You See The Eyes of The Whites!

OREGON La Grande

A marker on Interstate 84 just south of La Grande tells how, in 1811: “The Wilson Price Hunt Astoria Expedition, after failing to find a route through Snake River Canyon, obtained the guidance of a Shoshone Indian and discovered the route over the Blue Mountains.” Getting a Shoshone guide made sense—the Blue Mountains were their home after all, so the Shoshones knew their way over them. But even though this marker says that a Native American showed European Americans the way, it still credits the Wilson Price Hunt Astoria Expedition with “discovering the route.”

Bodies of water seem particularly vulnerable to “discovery.” In Iowa, Jean Nicolet “discovered” Okamanpadu Lake according to a marker, which does not explain how the lake got its obviously Indian name. A plaque in Louisiana marks the death of Hernando de Soto, who “was buried in the Mississippi River, which he discovered.” The Spaniards buried their leader furtively in the river because of the presence of earlier discoverers—American Indians whom de Soto had antagonized—lest they notice and take advantage of the now leaderless men.

Ironically, de Soto wasn’t even the first white man to see the Mississippi. Henry R. Schoolcraft wasn’t the first white to “discover” its origin either, but you can’t tell that from the Minnesota marker that credits him unless you read carefully. “The long search [for the source of the Mississippi] came to a close with the discovery of Lake Itasca by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in 1832,” according to the marker. Then the marker ends by admitting that Schoolcraft had merely rechristened Lac la Biche, Lake of the Elk, as “it was known to Indians and traders,” to Itasca, a name he made up.

Other lakes get similar treatment. According to Michigan markers, whites discovered Lake Michigan, Lake St. Clair, and Lake Superior. Lake Erie gets a more complex marker: “Named for the Erie Indians, this was the last of the Great Lakes discovered by white men...” Actually, none of them was discovered by white men, but this marker at least admits that Native Americans existed and implies they knew of Lake Erie.

This discovery problem begins with 1492, of course. All across America, plaques commemorate Christopher Columbus, “discoverer of America.” Historians and educators denounced “discovered” rather thoroughly during 1992, the Columbus Quincentenary. Some commentators denounced the denunciations as mere exercises in political correctness. When historical markers emphasize explorers like Jean Nicolet just because they were white however, they offend people of color. Worse is their effect on whites, who are invited to infer that only when whites see a place has humankind discovered it. The practice literally dehumanizes Native Americans. The plaque at Schroeppel, New York, even has a European discovering people:

KUH-NA-TA-HA

Indian fishing village 1654, known to the Indians as “Place of Tall
Pines.” Discovered by Father Le Moyne.

The Portuguese Explorers Monument in Newport, Rhode Island, put up in 1988, makes the most grandiose discovery claim of all: it celebrates “the discovery by the Portuguese of two thirds of the world.”

Inspired by such examples, Adam Nordwall, an Ojibwe, led a group of Native Americans to Rome in 1973 and “discovered” Italy! They demanded an audience with the Pope and otherwise comported themselves as explorers are wont to do. So far as I know however, no plaque marks the spot at the Rome airport where they first set foot on Italian soil.

A museum in Capetown, South Africa, changed its account for Dr. David Livingston from “discovered Victoria Falls in 1855” to “visited Victoria Falls in 1855.” Immediately we realize that “visited” is accurate while “discovered” was Eurocentric. Eurocentrism similarly distorts all the “discover” markers in the United States.¹

Entry 1 tells how Native Americans are removing from the American landscape some of the names European “discoverers” have imposed. Entries 2.1, 24, 35, 68, and 93 lament other Eurocentric terms on markers and monuments across America.

1. “Indians Claim Italy By Right of Discovery,” NY Times, 9/24/73; Loewen, The Truth About Columbus (NY: New Press, 1992), 5; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters (London: Methuen, 1986), 1.

8. No Communists Here!

WASHINGTON Cowlitz County

In the last half of the 1800s and the first three decades of the 1900s, many socialists, anarchists, and communists were among the Europeans coming to the United States. Fleeing persecution in Europe, they sought better opportunities here. After they became citizens, these people elected socialist mayors and legislators, most prominently the long-term mayor of Milwaukee. They set up self-help organizations and cooperative stores to get better prices from wholesalers and pass the savings on to their members. They also influenced to some degree the social programs of both political parties.

Today the memory of this history of left-wing politics is almost invisible. Among all immigrant groups, Finns were probably the most radical.¹ “Finn Hall,” a historical marker in Cowlitz County in southwest Washington, shows the cover-up in action. The association that built Finn Hall was communist; its official name translated as “Comrades Society.” But the Washington state historical marker disguises this:

FINN HALL

In 1916 Finnish immigrants constructed a hall near the site under the name of a literary association (Kirjallisuus Seura), forming a lending library. Although they brought their diet, language, and saunas with them, some old country beliefs were left behind. These people found it necessary to meet where they could study the social customs of their new country, challenge and question partisan politics, and reflect on new technological insights. At this cultural center were held language classes, meetings, athletic activities, wedding dances, funerals, and programs with oratory, drama, poetry, vocal and instrumental music. Steaming kettles of coffee and the warmth of dignified waltzes, pulsating polkas, and schottisches brought togetherness to these rugged individualists. Life to them was involvement.

The state put up this marker in October 1976. Writing twenty years later about her role, Helmi Kortes-Erkkila, who chaired the local marker committee, admitted that leaving out the name of the organization in English “was a factual omission.” Members did not think saying “Comrades Society” would be prudent in 1976, when the United States was locked in struggle with the Soviet Union. “Memories of the McCarthy years were still influencing the sons and daughters of the former sympathizers of Socialists, Communists, and iww’s,” Kortes-Erkkila explained, “so we resorted to the popular and non-controversial term that was inscribed on the historical marker.”

Passionate political debates and intellectual controversies raged in this hall, especially in its early years when the Woodrow Wilson administration had declared war on all leftists. “Life to them was involvement”—well, yes. But involvement in what? In a communist society in rural southwest Washington? No one would envision that without help, and this historical marker hardly provides the necessary assistance.²

Entry 51 is another example of how Historic sites mystify left-wing politics all across America. So is the next entry.

1. In 1915, Finns helped organize the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota, which dominated state government by 1918. In 1919 Finns helped form the Farmer-Labor Party, which was strong in Washington, Montana, and South Dakota; a related group won the governorship in Minnesota in the 1920s.

2. Helmi Kortes-Erkkila, “The Finn Hall Historical Marker” (Vancouver, WA: typescript, 1996).

9. Using Nationalism to Redefine a Troublesome Statue

WASHINGTON Centralia

In Washington Park (see 82), the town square of Centralia, stands a statue that looks like all the other “doughboys”—lone infantrymen in helmets that honor World War I soldiers all across America. The American Legion put it up in 1924. On the front it reads:

THE SENTINEL

It was their destiny—rather it was their duty—the highest of us is but a sentry at his post.

In 1993, Centralia added a “Freedom Walk” to connect the statue with the street. Next to the walk a granite tablet declares the walk to be a memorial to the men and women who died in all American wars since World War I. It looks as if Centralia intended “The Sentinel” to take care of World War I and the “Freedom Walk” and granite tablet to memorialize World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and our smaller interventions.

Closer inspection reveals that “The Sentinel” has nothing to do with World War I, however. On its backside are the words: “To the memory of Ben Casagranda, Warren O. Grimm, Earnest Dale Hubbard, Arthur McElfresh, slain on the streets of Centralia, Washington, Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1919, while on peaceful parade wearing the uniform of the country they loyally and faithfully served.” But why would anyone be slain “while on peaceful parade”? The answer is simple: that isn’t what happened.

On Armistice Day, November 11, 1919, a year after the end of World War I, Centralia witnessed probably the most tragic event in its history. An armed confrontation between members of the American Legion and the Industrial Workers of the World—the iww or “Wobblies”—ended with victims killed on both sides. Anti-labor writers dubbed the affair “the Centralia Massacre” and used it to destroy support for the iww throughout the Northwest.

The iww was a militant left-wing union especially strong in the West among loggers and miners. The American Legion had formed only recently, started by Teddy Roosevelt Jr. and by United States officers in Western Europe alarmed by growing support for leftist ideas among our victorious troops. Composed of veterans, its purpose according to its constitution was “to maintain law and order” and “to foster and perpetuate a 100 percent Americanism.” Its ideology also matched the outburst of nativism and anticommunism whipped up by the Woodrow Wilson administration. Within months it had a million members.

In 1918 an anti-Wobbly mob had burned down the Wobbly union hall and beaten up union members. According to historian Robert Weyeneth, in 1919 “Centralia’s American Legion post scheduled an Armistice Day parade with an unusual agenda: destruction of the [new] local IWW hall. The plan was an open secret in town for several weeks, but unbeknownst to Legion organizers, the IWW decided not to be intimidated and to defend the hall when attacked.” Warren Grimm was a Centralia Legionnaire who had recently helped invade Siberia with the U.S. Army (see 78) and therefore considered himself an expert on Communism. He called the Wobblies “the American Bolsheviki” and led the Legion against them. As the parade neared the hall, some Legionnaires rushed the building. Armed Wobblies opened fire from inside as well as from an adjacent boardinghouse and nearby hilltop. The gunfire killed Grimm, Casagranda, and McElfresh and wounded almost a dozen others, but did not drive off the Legion, who broke into the building. The Wobblies scattered, and the Legion dragged the contents of the hall into the street and set them on fire. Wesley Everest, an IWW organizer, fled north towards the Skookumchuck River. Cornered at the river, he shot and killed Earnest Dale Hubbard, one of his pursuers. Everest was captured, beaten, and put in jail. Some IWW members may also have been killed during the day; historians differ.

That evening a mob dragged Everest from the city jail and took him to the edge of town. There they may have cut off his testicles, then his penis.¹ The men hanged him from a bridge and then shot him.

Eleven union members were tried for killing the Legionnaires. Eight were convicted and served prison terms of more than ten years. Some jurors later filed an affidavit saying they had wrongly convicted the men, believing that if they did not sentence them to prison, Legionnaires were likely to kill them in the streets. No one was ever charged with lynching Wesley Everest.

For decades the union was ignored on the Centralia landscape. Other than Everest’s tombstone in a paupers’ cemetery at the edge of town, nothing told the IWW’s side of the story. In 1990 historian Weyeneth went to Centralia to see how the town remembered the 1919 event. He found silence. The nearby county historical museum had nothing about it. No plaques marked the sites of either IWW hall or Everest’s lynching. After some difficulty Weyeneth got “The Sentinel” and Wesley Everest’s grave listed in the National Register of Historic Places, deliberately choosing one site from each side. Nominating them spurred useful civic discussion within Centralia and led to coverage by the Associated Press and National Public Radio in 1991.

The next year a project taking a pro-labor view of the Armistice Day confrontation was a statewide winner of “History Day,” a national contest for high school students. The winning student received a marble marker, which she proposed to give to the city for placement next to “The Sentinel.” The marker featured a noose and a hammer and a long text suggesting “Incidents like the Centralia Massacre” helped bring about “an eight-hour day, Social Security, Worker’s Compensation, Occupational Health and Safety, and job security.”

Months of controversy followed. Residents pointed out inaccuracies in the student’s text. The local newspaper suggested a plaque “carefully and diplomatically worded, limited to known facts only.” Instead the town resorted to bland nationalism and added the “Freedom Walk” and granite tablet. Implicitly these additions conflated “The Sentinel” with conventional World War I doughboys, despite the words to the contrary on its base. Clearly in 1993 Centralia was still not ready to address the events of eight decades earlier.

The sites of many important events in labor history are well marked across the United States, especially by the United Mine Workers of America. In Ludlow, Colorado, the UMWA put up an inspiring monument to the thirteen children and seven adults killed there on April 20, 1914, when company police and the Colorado National Guard burned the striking miners’ camp. Michigan has accurate historical markers for the General Motors sit-down strike of 1936 - 37. Two plaques mark the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 women in New York City, and there is an annual remembrance at the site. Indeed, disasters of all kinds, but especially mine fires and explosions, are memorialized all across America.

The Centralia event is more problematic. Afterward, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, led raids and legal attacks that broke the back of the iww nationally. Today it exists only as a shell, hardly strong enough to underwrite a historical marker let alone win the public support needed to put it up. The rest of the labor movement might not want to honor such a left-wing union. And labor did draw the first blood that Armistice Day.

What difference does it make that Centralia took the easy way out? Why not simply forget about it all, as some of Robert Weyeneth’s interviewees suggested ? A labor historian described how a recent union march in Centralia, unconnected with the Armistice Day events, met a very different reception than in nearby towns. “While neighboring towns had been warm and friendly... in Centralia the marchers were greeted by plain clothes police and warnings to get off the main street.” Weyeneth concluded, “The new Freedom Walk suggests that the journey toward historical reconciliation remains unfinished.” Resorting to nationalism to camouflage a one-sided statue is no substitute for honest history on the landscape and in the minds of the town.

On December 14, 1997, the owner of a Centralia antiques mall dedicated a dramatic mural about the Armistice Day confrontation that showed Wesley Everest rising from his grave. This work by New Jersey artist Mike Alewitz provoked condemnation from the American Legion’s national convention. Ironically, some iww members outside Centralia also attacked the mural at first. Within Centralia, Alewitz’s project did spur the formation of a Centralia a Union Mural Project Committee and may yet prompt a civic dialogue that could result in historical accuracy, memory recovery, and even reconciliation.²

1. Writers differ: John M. Barry says they did; Tom Copeland says they didn’t.

2. Robert R. Weyeneth, “History, He Wrote: Murder, Politics, and the Challenges of Public History in a Community with a Secret,” Public Historian 16 no. 2 (spring 1994): 51-73; John Helmer, The Deadly Simple Mechanics of Society (NY: Seabury, 1974), 2.2.3; John M. Barry, Rising Tide (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 139; Tom Copeland, The Centralia Tragedy of 1919 (Seattle: U. of WA Press, 1993); William Pencak, For God and Country (Northeastern UP, 1989), 49-53; Julia Stein, “Thomas Churchill’s Centralia Dead March and The Repression of Working Class Memory, Part I,” e-mail 11/96; Scott Sunde, “Thanks to Mural, No Pushing Aside Centralia Conflict,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/13/97, and http://www.jgc.apc.org/laborart, 4/98.

10. What We Know And What We Don’t Know About Rock Art

NEVADA Hickison Summit

On U.S. 50, 24 miles east of Austin, a historical marker titled “Hickison Summit” tells about nearby petroglyphs left by prehistoric people: “About one mile northwest lies a natural pass between two buttes which, prehistorically, the aborigines may have used as a site of ambushing migratory deer herds. Three petroglyph panels are located in this pass.” Unfortunately, the marker then tells us what the petroglyphs mean: “Petroglyphs suggest magical or ritual connections with hunting activities. They were added seasonally by the group’s religious leader, or shaman, as omens to insure a successful hunt.”

Actually, no one really knows what the petroglyphs mean. In the 1960s many archaeologists believed that petroglyphs were done to “insure a successful hunt,” but few believe it now. Today most think that the art was created by shamans who were high on hallucinogenic drugs rather than tribal leaders before a hunt. But there isn’t much evidence to support either hypothesis.

Although no tribe in the area today preserves a tradition of interpreting Nevada rock art, contemporary Native American names for these petroglyph sites do include “shaman’s cache,” “shaman’s spirit helper place,” and the like. Another bit of evidence comes from cultures in South Africa. There, drugs do cause people to “see” forms that have some commonalities with the images in some Nevada petroglyphs. On the other hand Robert Bednarik, petroglyph expert from Australia, points out that rock art there, which also has images that resemble some similarities to the images in Nevada, is “conspicuously non-shamanistic.” Indeed, “the Hickison petroglyphs,” according to Nevada historian Ron Powers, “are mostly female genitalia.”

In The Imprint of Man: Rock Art of the North American Indians, Campbell Grant sums up what he calls “a number of plausible explanations.” In addition to the hunting and hallucinogenic hypotheses, Grant suggests that petroglyphs may be clan symbols (“signatures” of, for example, the turtle clan), images connected with religious rituals or puberty and fertility rites, drawings of constellations, references to important events, maps to mark hunting areas, or simple doodling by children or adults. To this list I would add that they just may be “art”!

Archaeology is a difficult undertaking. Archaeologists must understand not only a society’s technology, occupations, and kinship, but also its religious beliefs, architecture, the botany of the plants it used, even its disease history. Indeed, archaeologists must be experts on every aspect of the society they study—but they can’t be. Moreover, they face the task of trying to reconstruct all the foregoing from the faintest evidence—those few objects that have survived for hundreds or thousands of years. On top of that, since most ideas come into a culture from other cultures, archaeologists need to be experts on more than one society.

Are these Hickison petroglyphs signatures (“Kilroy was here!”)? religious images? constellations? history? symbols of ownership? doodling? art?

The result is that archaeologists often end up projecting ideas from our culture onto the largely blank slate of the distant past, and this is why new hypotheses sweep the field from time to time. Rock art is particularly hard to decipher; Charles Lock concludes in “Petroglyphs In and Out of Perspective” that he is “less than enthusiastic about the possibility of learning anything about petroglyphs, even with the help of the most advanced technology.”

This Hickison marker is not only out of favor with current thinking in archaeology, then, it is also far too sure of itself. Archaeologists cannot now date petroglyphs within several thousand years—radiocarbon dating doesn’t work because organic material is the first to weather off the rocks. Nevertheless, this marker author knows the rock paintings were “added seasonally” ! A more accurate marker would present a summary of the changing interpretations of petroglyphs. Thus it would teach visitors to be skeptical of all archaeological hypotheses—whether of the Bering Strait crossing, the “disappearance” of “the Anasazi” (14), or the purpose of petroglyphs. Unfortunately, historic sites routinely present a single view of the past, with no room for ambiguity about the nature of the event itself or uncertainty over the evidence for differing views of it.¹

1. Sue Ann Monteleone, “Who Made NV Rock Art? and When? That is What Rock Art Specialists are Trying to Find Out,” N V State Museum Newsletter 25 no. 2 (1997): 2; David S. Whitley, “Shamanism and Rock Art in Far Western North America,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 2 no. 1 (1992): 91; Robert Bednarik, “On Neuropsychology and Shamanism in Rock Art,” Current Anthropology 31 no. 1 (2/90): 77 - 79; cf. J. D. Lewis-Williams and Thomas A. Dowson, “Reply,” Ibid: 80 - 83; Ron Powers, conversation, 1/99; Campbell Grant, The Imprint of Man: Rock Art of the North American Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 13 - 14; Charles Lock, “Petroglyphs in and out of Perspective,” Semiotica 100 no. 2/4 (1994): 405; Robert F. Heizer and Martin A. Baumhoff, Prehistoric Rock Art of NV and Eastern CA (Berkeley: U. of CA Press, 1962), 225.

11. Don’t Criticize Big Brother

NEVADA Nye County

At the junction of U.S. 95 and the road to Mercury, Nevada, is the historical marker for the “Nevada Test Site”—surety after Las Vegas, one of Nevada’s most famous places. The site certainly merits a marker: larger than Rhode Island, it is surrounded by additional land larger than Connecticut “withdrawn from the public domain,” as its Web site euphemistically puts it. Moreover, what happened here had worldwide significance.

The marker’s text, written in 1971, seems straightforward enough:

NEVADA TEST SITE

Testing of weapons for defense and for peaceful uses of nuclear explosives is conducted here. The nation’s principal nuclear explosives testing laboratory is located within this 1, 350-square-mile, geologically complex area in the isolated valleys of Jackass, Yucca, and Frenchman Flats. Selected as on-continent test site in 1950, the first test took place on Frenchman Flat in January, 1951.

Unfortunately this text conceals far more than it reveals. Its matter-of-fact tone is not appropriate for such a controversial site. No one would infer from this marker that nuclear tests detonated here gave leukemia to scores of residents in towns like St. George and Cedar City, Utah, and may be causing the premature deaths from cancer of hundreds more. No one could guess that among the places hit hardest by radiation from this site would be counties in the Midwest and upstate New York. No one would accuse the United States government of knowing about these dangers before the first 1951 test and taking care to protect its own workers at nuclear laboratories while neglecting to even measure carefully the radiation dangers to citizens living downwind of the tests. And no one would imagine that all the while, the government was conducting a disinformation campaign to reassure westerners that there was no danger when it knew better. As Richard Lamm, former governor of Colorado, and Michael McCarthy summarized in 1982, “the government acted recklessly and carelessly... [and then] covered up news of rising cancer rates in desert towns. When finally confronted with evidence that its tests were responsible, it began a long litany of denial.”

The marker also fails to convey what the explosions were like. Political scientist Howard Ball describes the above-ground blasts as seen in southern Utah: “Days sometimes began with bright white early-morning atomic explosions, followed by brownish-purple mushroom clouds...; and children played in the grey radioactive dust as they would in snow.” This aerial photo shows subsidence craters from some of the 828 below-ground blasts, one of which, the Sedan crater, is nearly a quarter-mile wide and 320 feet deep and has been declared a national historic site.

Below-ground explosions continued through September 1991.

From 1951 to 1962, 126 atmospheric “tests” of atomic “devices” took place at the Nevada site in addition to 828 below-ground blasts. More than forty of the underground tests vented radioactivity into the atmosphere, sometimes creating large mushroom clouds. Political scientist Howard Ball describes the scene: “Days sometimes began with bright white early-morning atomic explosions, followed by brownish-purple mushroom clouds...; and children played in the grey radioactive dust as they would in snow.” The explosions were seen and heard in San Diego, San Francisco, and southern Idaho; near the site they knocked people off their feet.

In 1953 sheep ranchers in the area lost thousands of their animals to the blasts. Elevated levels of strontium 90, a radioactive isotope from the fallout, began showing up across the United States and became a political issue in the 1956 presidential campaign. Protestors demonstrated at the site beginning in 1957, and in 1964 the Wall Street Journal reported that the fallout from Nevada had reached Canada. Thus this 1971 marker, whose content might have been written by the Atomic Energy Commission itself, amounts to a whitewash on the federal government’s behalf. Its tone is anachronistic—a product of 1950s thinking when most Americans trusted the government and distrusted its critics. Such views lasted longer in Nevada and Utah, but by 1973 the Watergate scandal and continuing Vietnam quagmire would make this mindset passe even in the Great Basin.

Nevada marker officials are hardly alone in their reluctance to criticize government. Across the United States virtually no historical marker criticizes any government—federal, state, or local—for any act since Reconstruction. Curiously, in this way markers resemble high school American history textbooks, which also make the government, especially the federal government, their biggest hero.

“Curiously” because from newspaper editorials to radio talk shows, post-Watergate Americans make something of a national pastime out of criticizing their governments—but not on markers or in textbooks. Some acts of criticism took place at this Nevada test site—and the marker needs updating to tell about them as well. It never hints that thousands of protesters have been arrested there over the years—over a thousand on single days in 1988 and 1989—while demonstrating for peace and against nuclear testing. Nor has Nevada revised the plaque to include the major lawsuit, Allen v. U.S., that residents of southern Nevada and southwest Utah, harmed by radiation, filed in 1979, won in U.S. District Court in 1984, and then lost on appeal three years later.

Why did the Atomic Energy Commission test in Nevada? Because it was cheaper and easier than testing in the Pacific.¹ For the same reason, the AEC also often detonated at ground level, while Great Britain always used a tower, balloons, or airdrops in its Australian tests to minimize fallout. What American taxpayers saved in logistics, however, may cost much more in health care expenses and premature deaths. In 1997, officials in Western states were still asking for federal money to study “the incidence of thyroid cancers” resulting from the Nevada explosions, quoting Utah’s Senator Bob Bennett. In all, according to Tomas Clark of the Seattle Times, the Nevada test site released 148 times as much radiation as the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union. Rebecca Solnit tells how protesters in Kazakhstan, where the Soviet Union tested its bombs, named themselves the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Antinuclear Movement in solidarity with the protesters in Nevada. In Kazakhstan “more than a million people signed the Nevada-Semipalatinsk statement opposing nuclear testing,” Kazakhstan’s miners threatened to strike, and tens of thousands of Kazakhs demonstrated in October 1989, Solnit writes. Partly in response, the USSR stopped testing later that month and declared a unilateral moratorium on further explosions. President George Bush followed suit two years later with a temporary halt, since extended by his successor but without the force of law of the Soviet shutdown.

Perhaps American protesters never had a chance for equal success. Keeping the public uninformed and misinformed prevented American citizens from making educated choices over how much to test, where to test, and even whether to test at all. In a democracy the people are supposed to learn about and think over such weighty matters. The bland text on this marker hampers that process by treating citizens as children who need to be shielded from all the historical issues related to the site. Governments are bigger and older than any citizen to be sure, but citizens should not be fooled into treating them like godlike parents. Like children, governments make mistakes and must be corrected. Nevada deserves credit for venturing to treat a recent, important, and controversial topic, but its reluctance to criticize the government only continues on the landscape the cover-up that the Atomic Energy Commission started in the 1950s.²

1. Testing in the Pacific was not without hazard to Pacific islanders and to the planet.

2. http://www.em.doe.gov/em94/swnts.html 6/98; http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts/ 11/98; Lorna Arnold, “The Elements of Controversy Project: A Review,” Public Historian 18 no. 1 (winter 1996), 41; Tomas Clark, “50 Years from Trinity; Part 2: Nevada Test Site,” http://www.seatimes.com/6/98; Howard Ball, Justice Downwind (NY: Oxford UP, 1986), 69 - 70, 77, 90, 128, 144, 155 - 61, 197; Richard D. Lamm and Michael McCarthy, The Angry West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.), 154 - 56; Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994), 26, 97, 105, 119; Congressional Record, 9/11/97, online, 59, 110.

2. King Kamehameha 1, The Roman!

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3. The Flat Earth Myth on the West Coast

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4. Exploiting vs. Exterminating the Natives