MOUNTAINS AND PLAINS STATES
12. Circle The Wagons, Boys—It’s Tourist Season
IDAHO Almo
The Almo marker, decorated with Christmas lights.
Opposite the post office in the little town of Almo stands a beautiful slab of stone carved into the shape of the state of Idaho. It memorializes a horrifying incident in the history of the West:
ALMO, IDAHO
Dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in a horrible Indian massacre, 1861. Three hundred immigrants west bound. Only five escaped.
—Erected by S & D of Idaho Pioneers, 1938.
The local grocery store sells a pamphlet giving more details about this extraordinary event. Not only was it the most important incident in Almo’s past, it was by far the most brutal massacre of white pioneers in all the history of the West. At Almo, more European Americans died than in Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn and the Fetterman Massacre in Wyoming combined!
The only trouble is, it never happened.
Proving that an event did not occur can be difficult. Regarding the Almo massacre, however, based on “over forty years of research,” historian Brigham Madsen makes a compelling case. First, Madsen shows that the earliest mention of the massacre was in 1927—66 years after 1861! He notes that other much smaller hostile incidents won extensive newspaper coverage when they occurred. “Even the slightest Native American disturbance along the road received immediate notice from these various western newspapers,” wrote Madsen. “The lack of any reference to an affair at Almo Creek can only mean that there was no ‘Almo Massacre.”’
Next Madsen confirms that the records of the Indian Service, the War Department, and state and territorial bureaucracies reveal no mention of the event. “A massacre involving the deaths of 294 emigrants would have engendered a massive amount of material,” he argues. “There is none.”
Then Madsen looks into the origin of the 1927 account. Its author, Charles Walgamott, cited “an old trapper who gave us a detailed account” when Walgamott had visited Almo some fifty years earlier. And in 1927 Walgamott talked with a “Mr. W. M. E. Johnston, whose family bought the land in 1887,” when it “still bore evidence of the hard-fought battle.” Johnston also claimed to have heard a version of the massacre “from an old Indian,” which Walgamott incorporated into his story.
According to Walgamott’s account, the Indians surrounded the train of more than sixty wagons, causing the pioneers to circle their wagons in traditional Hollywood style. The emigrants settled in for a siege, digging a trench under each wagon and throwing the dirt to the outside. Meanwhile they tried to dig a well, but found no water. “Men who undertook to bring water from the creek were shot down. Occasional shots from the Indians killed or badly wounded some white man, woman, or child, which threw the members of the besieged party into greater confusion and grief.”
Walgamott added details to construct a scene out of Dante’s Inferno: “The excitement grew intense as panic-stricken horses in their struggles broke their fastenings and ran frantically around the inclosure, while others in their attempt to break loose were snorting, rearing, and trampling the earth from which rose great columns of dust through which frantic women and children darted hither and thither in their aimless attempt for relief. This, with the constant yelling of the Indians and howling of their dogs, made a scene too wild and awful to contemplate.”
As with any good massacre, there must be survivors to tell the story, and Walgamott told of six. First came a young couple: “It was on the fourth night that the guide employed by the train gave up all hopes and planned his escape. He was accompanied by a young woman who had displayed great courage and marksmanship. Under the protection of the darkness they crawled through the sagebrush, making their way to the mountain.” The other four made for even better copy. “In the after part of the same night one man and two women, one with a nursing baby, secretly stole from the doomed camp, crawling for miles on their hands and knees. The mother of the child, in her anguish and endeavor to keep in company with the others as they crawled through the brush, was compelled to take the garments of the child in her teeth and carry it in that manner.” Later the four “lived on rosebuds and roots” until rescued by Mormons, who then found all the rest slain. The Mormons buried these unfortunates “in the wells which they had dug.”
Madsen finds it hard to believe that in three or four days, while under siege, these people dug wells deep enough to accommodate 294 bodies. He also notes that no one has ever been able to come up with any information about the 300 emigrants before the attack or the six survivors afterward.
With all these inconsistencies in the “old trapper/old Indian” account, how did it get memorialized on the landscape? It fit with white Americans’ stereotype of “savage Indians,” of course. Historian John D. Unruh Jr. painstakingly compared emigrants’ diaries with their letters to friends and found that throughout the Western migration, pioneers embellished and invented hostile Indians for the folks back East. Unruh also found a rash of fictional massacre reports in newspapers in the 1850s.
By the 1930s these stories resonated with the familiar American archetype of whooping Indians racing their horses around the ring of wagons. Of course, Indians rarely circled like that—such action would merely expose them and their horses to danger. In fact, the “tradition” of circling Indians does not begin in the West, but in 1883 in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where Indians had to circle because they were riding in a circus ring! Buffalo Bill became the biggest show business act in the world; by 1893 fifty imitators were touring the United States. Hollywood picked up the tradition, and the rest was history—or, rather, myth. One third of all Hollywood movies made before 1970 were westerns! Today, as western novelist Larry McMurtry put it, “Thanks largely to the movies, the lies about the West are more potent than the truths.”
Madsen researched the specific genesis of this marker. Two Idaho newspaper editors, striving to put this part of Idaho on the map, concocted an “Exploration Day” set for October 17, 1938. They wanted tourists to visit the “City of Rocks,” an interesting nearby formation of rock pinnacles, which they were trying to get designated as a national monument. They were also trying to interest government officials in diverting Snake River water to a huge irrigation project. The Almo Massacre marker was a way to draw visitors.
When “Exploration Day” dawned, a mix of rain and snow dampened enthusiasm for the Almo Massacre marker dedication, which ended up being attended mainly by its donors, the Sons and Daughters of Idaho Pioneers. Over time however, even though the event never happened, the massacre marker won a place in the hearts of Almo citizens. A few years ago the Idaho State Historical Society tried to remove it, but “was met with firm resistance” according to Larry Jones, state historian. “Apparently, the majority of the fifty or so permanent residents still consider the marker to be accurate.” The historical society placed its removal attempt on hold.
According to the Hollywood myth, now cast in stone at Almo, Native Americans were the foremost obstacle pioneers faced. Actually, though Natives did defend their homes and lands against intruders, on the whole they proved more help than hindrance to westering white pioneers. Peter Boag studied the diaries of emigrants who passed through this part of Idaho, scene of more conflicts between Native residents and newcomers than any other part of the Oregon trail. He found 105 references to Native Americans in 32 journals written between 1835 and 1850. Boag classified 41 as clearly positive, 35 as neutral (“saw an Indian”), and 29 as negative. The unfriendly comments were mostly disparaging physical descriptions of Native Americans or reactions to annoying trade relations. Only two diaries referred to actual or rumored attacks or nearly violent encounters. Instead, journals tell how Indians offered salmon in trade and helped whites ford rivers.
Relations did worsen over time. As more newcomers came they became a burden to the Natives, disrupting their hunting patterns and threatening their sovereignty. The trade nexus wore thin; later in the emigration, whites had less need for Indian guides or interpreters or even for Indian foods. Native Americans meanwhile had grown more dependent upon European technology, leading them to beg and even steal to get it. European Americans became more careless in their dealings with Native Americans: they refused to pay tributes, for example, and “physically abused the Indians,” in Boag’s words. Even so, according to Unruh, throughout the entire West between 1842. and 1859, of more than 400,000 pioneers crossing the plains, fewer than 400, or less than .1 percent, were killed by American Indians. And no one massacred anyone in Almo.1
1. Brigham Madsen, “The ‘Almo Massacre’ Revisited,” ID Yesterdays 37 no. 3 (fall 1993): 59; Susan L. Franzen, Behind the Facade of Fort Riley’s Hometown (Ames, IA: Pivot Press, 1998), 23, 27; Larry McMurtry, “Broken Promises,” New York Review of Books 10/23/97: 16; Larry Jones, correspondence, 3/96; Lonn Taylor, “Frontiers Real and Mythical” (Houston, TX: ALHFAM, 1996), 8; John Unruh Jr., The Plains Across (Urbana: U. of IL Press, 1979), 156, 176, 185; Peter G. Boag, “‘The Indians of This Place are Snakes in the Grass’—the Overlander Perspective on Native Americans in Southern ID, 1836—1860,” ID Yesterdays 37 no. 3 (fall 1993): 17–23.
13. Bad Things Happen In The Passive Voice
UTAH North of St. George
In 1990, 28 miles north of St. George off Utah Highway 18, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the state of Utah, along with descendants of the victims, dedicated a major monument to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The memorial is a broad tablet of white granite made of several panels set into a hillside above a valley. Although it has many words, none say who put it up. In fact, no words tell
who did anything; the key verb is in the passive voice:
IN MEMORIAM
In the valley below, between September 7 and 11, 1857, a company of more than no Arkansas emigrants led by Capt. John T. Baker and Capt. Alexander Fancher was attacked while en route to California. This event is known in history as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
The monument lists the names of those who were killed and goes on to say, “The following children survived and were returned to their families in Northwest Arkansas in September 1859.” Again, there is no clue as to who returned them to their families. “Historic Sites View Finders” direct your view “toward the historic campsite” and the “massacre site.” The latter says “Most of the Baker-Fancher Party were killed on September 11, 1857, as they were being escorted out of the valley heading north.” Once more, the monument is silent on who did the killing and who did the escorting.
It’s not that historians are in the dark. Years before the monument went up, Juanita Brooks examined the event closely in her book The Mountain Meadows Massacre. She concluded as have others that Latter-day Saints did it with help from their Paiute allies. In the words of historian Kenneth Foote, the Mountain Meadows Massacre was “the most shameful event in Mormon history,” murdering more “gentiles” than all the Mormons killed by gentiles along the entire path of their exodus from New York through Missouri and Illinois to Utah. Latter-day Saints still dominate Utah however, especially southwest Utah. Hence the passive voice.
It is lamentable that the church and civic leaders who organized what proved to be a memorable reunion between descendants of attackers and victims in 1990 could not bring themselves to be more candid on the landscape. When coupled with the passive voice, the term “massacre,” while perfectly appropriate, guarantees that most tourists will infer that Native Americans did the grisly work. Across the United States historic markers and monuments use “massacre” when Native Americans kill European Americans, even when as few as one white died! Utah alone has at least five historical markers that use “massacre” for Indian attacks on whites and none for any white attack. Latter-day Saints know this. According to historian Will Bagley, “There is a perverse and persistent attempt in Utah history to lay the blame for this atrocity on the Paiutes, but as Nephi Johnson, who led the slaughter of the women and children, confessed, ‘white men did most of the killing.”’
How did it happen that Latter-day Saints, themselves European American pioneers, would engage in the mass slaughter of other European American pioneers? To understand this event we need to examine the prickly relations between the Mormon Church hierarchy, which was also the government of Utah Territory, and the United States in 1857.
For eight years, beginning with the 1849 California gold rush, Mormon settlers in Utah had hosted emigrants from the East. Often the relationship was mutually beneficial: wagon trains got new oxen and supplies, and Mormons got household valuables not likely to make it over the mountains to California. But often the relationship was acrimonious: Mormons abused emigrants from Missouri and Illinois in revenge for having themselves been mistreated in those states, and wagon trains drove their cattle through Mormon towns and farms without regard for damages caused while trespassing. When disputes went to court, the judicial system inflamed rather than settled the quarrels because non-Mormons felt they received no justice from Mormon judges and juries.
Most Americans have no idea that among the official actions of the United States Army is the Utah War or Utah Expedition of 1857-58. The Buchanan administration was upset that many federal appointees in Utah Territory—judges and Indian agents—found it impossible to function in the theocracy that Brigham Young had created. The army took its campaign quite seriously. To an even greater extent, so did the Latter-day Saints. According to the
Encyclopedia of Mormonism, A large contingent of United States troops was marching westward toward Utah Territory in the summer of 1857. Despite having been the federally appointed territorial governor, Brigham Young was not informed by Washington of the army’s purpose and interpreted the move as a renewal of the persecution the Latter-day Saints had experienced before their westward hegira. “We are invaded by a hostile force who are evidently assailing us to accomplish our overthrow and destruction,” he proclaimed on August 5, 1857. Anticipating an attack, he declared the territory to be under martial law and ordered “[t]hat all the forces in said Territory hold themselves in readiness to March, at a moment’s notice, to repel any and all such threatened invasion.”
Young, head of the Mormon Church, preached on the need for Mormons to declare independence from the United States and ordered Latter-day Saints not to sell “gentiles” a grain of wheat. He even made contingency plans to abandon and burn Salt Lake City and evacuate to the mountains.
Into this cauldron of suspicion came the unfortunate Fancher party en route from Arkansas to California. These emigrants were hardly diplomatic. Mormons refused to sell them supplies, so they “boasted of what they would do when the army came to set these people straight,” according to Brooks. Mormons claimed that some in the Fancher group bragged about being in the mobs that had run the Saints out of Missouri. Probably they hadn’t,2 but these were explosive words in Utah. Latter-day Saint leaders had also been talking with nearby Paiutes, inflaming them to be allies with them against the United States. When the Fancher emigres camped at Mountain Meadows to get their livestock ready for the trek across the dry lands to the west, the Indians and Mormons attacked. The initial assault killed several on each side; then the Fancher survivors hunkered down behind embankments. Several of them tried to dash for help, but Mormons and Paiutes killed them before they got far.
Then came the massacre. Mormon leaders in southwest Utah determined to wipe out the entire group. On the fifth day of the siege they sent John D. Lee and William Bateman under a white flag to talk with the emigrants. Lee said the Mormons would escort the travelers to safety, but they would have to abandon their cattle and horses to the Indians and give up their arms to the Mormons. Desperate, the pioneers agreed. The young children were put in a wagon and driven ahead along with another wagon carrying two or three wounded men. Women and older children then walked out. Last came the unarmed men, each accompanied by an armed Mormon. “At the command ‘Halt! Do your duty!’” Brooks tells, “each Mormon man was to shoot the emigrant at his side, the Natives hiding in the brush were to kill the women and older children, and Lee and the drivers were to finish off the wounded in the wagon.” It went according to plan. Most of the Fancher men fell at the first volley. Within a few minutes it was all over—except the cover-up.
Brooks established that two local Mormon leaders, Col. W H. Dame and Lt. Col. I. C. Haight, had ordered the killing. (They had military titles because the Saints had organized a militia.) But the blame may belong at the top: according to historian David A. White, “Brigham Young cannot escape responsibility for setting the stage for the tragedy.” His interpreter, apparently speaking for Young, promised the Paiutes the party’s cattle in a meeting with Young beforehand, which helped incite them to attack. On the other hand, Young also sent orders to let the emigrants pass without harm, but the directive arrived after the massacre had taken place. Brooks and Bagley show however, that Young ordered and participated in the cover-up.
If the army had kept coming, the United States might have witnessed an attack on a religious sect that would have dwarfed the 1993 assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.3 But that autumn, the crisis eased. An early snowfall coupled with the Mormons’ scorched-earth policies in eastern Utah caused logistical problems for the army. Later, President Buchanan declared the emergency over.
The Latter-day Saints released the orphaned children they had adopted and the United States reunited them with family members back in Arkansas.4 The Mormon leadership concocted a coverup that blamed the Paiutes, but as the United States established more control over Utah, some Mormon had to be held responsible for the Fancher massacre because too many people knew that whites had been involved in the slaughter. In 1870 the Mormon leadership excommunicated Haight, one of the men who had ordered the killings, and Lee, who had negotiated the surrender and directed the murders on site. Four years later the church readmitted Haight, but in 1876, after two trials, John D. Lee was sentenced to death. On March 23, 1877, he was shot to death by firing squad at the scene of the crime. Dozens of other church members in southern Utah breathed a sigh of relief when Lee’s sacrifice appeased the national cry for justice. For decades the event was simply not talked about openly in southern Utah. Juanita Brooks breached that wall of silence; her courageous research proved that Lee was hardly the only Mormon responsible for the massacre but had been made a scapegoat by the church hierarchy. In 1961, respecting her scholarship, the Latter-day Saints reinstated Lee posthumously, to the relief of his family.
The 1990 monument is in fact the third on the site. In 1859, Maj. James H. Carleton of the United States Army was ordered to investigate the massacre and bury the victims. His report blasted the Mormon perpetrators and tells how his men gathered 34 unburied corpses—skeletons by then—and buried them in a mass grave. Above it, his men built a rock cairn fifty feet around and twelve feet high, topped by a twelve-foot cedar cross. Two years later Brigham Young visited the monument and watched as his entourage toppled the cross and destroyed the cairn. United States soldiers rebuilt it a year later, but Mormons tore it down again.
In 1932 the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association and some nearby residents erected a stone marker at this burial site two miles off the highway. It stood until 1990 but was seen by few tourists, who had to brave a steep and narrow track to view it. Although it too used the passive voice and avoided the words “Mormons” or “Latter-day Saints,” this marker admitted that the Fancher train “was attacked by white men and Indians.” In the 1960s the church bought the site and removed road signs telling of the 1932 marker, making it even harder to find. In 1990 it replaced the 1932 marker with a new one that removes any reference to who did it: “This stone monument marks the burial site for some of those killed in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in September 1857.” The new 1990 marker also refers to the very first monument and states that it “was not maintained” —a passive-voice euphemism for “Mormons tore it down.”
The truth about Mountain Meadows has long been available on the landscape—just not in Utah. In Harrison, Arkansas, where the Fancher train began its trek, a marker tells the saga in telegraphic style: “Camped at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in early Sept.—Attacked by Indians directed by Mormons—formed a corral with wagons—Fought several days till ammunition exhausted—approached by Mormons under flag of truce—promised protection—surrendered—all were killed except for 17 small children—found later in Mormon homes—rescued by Army in 1859—taken to Arkansas...” This Arkansas marker tells much more history than Utah’s. Another Arkansas marker at Caravan Spring is clearer still: “The entire party, with the exception of seventeen small children, was massacred at Mountain Meadows, Utah, by a body of Mormons disguised as Indians.” But Arkansas is hardly forthcoming about its own massacres, such as the murder of surrendered black Union soldiers at Poison Spring (see 53). Meanwhile in Virginia, a marker for the Warrascoyack Indian village notes that “their village was destroyed in 1623” —by whom is left obscure. All across the United States, when the dominant group has committed wicked deeds, historical markers either simply omit the acts or write of them in the passive voice.5 Thus the landscape does what it can to help the dominant stay dominant and the rest of us stay ignorant about who actually did what in American history.6
1. These are the Ephraim Massacre, Given Family Massacre, Gunnison Massacre, Pinhook Draw Massacre, and Salt Creek Canyon Massacre. Each of these attacks took the live of between four and eight whites. The markers do not mention the number of Indian casualties, if known.
2. Jacob Forney, U.S. superintendent of Indian affairs in Utah, concluded that the Fancher “company conducted themselves with propriety.” Friction also grew because Mormons refused to sell them food, and the Fancher train felt its cattle had a right to graze on Mormon hay and grazing grounds.
3. I use “sect” in its sociological sense—a small religious group with beliefs and practices distinctively different from the larger society and usually marginalized by it. The Mormon Church today is far too large and mainstream to be considered a sect.
4. Anna Jean Backus claims that her grandmother was an Arkansas child hidden by Mormons and raised in Utah. At the end of the list of survivors on the memorial is the sentence “At least one other survivor remained in Utah.”
5. Lies My Teacher Told Me shows that high school U.S. history textbooks similarly insulate leaders from wrongdoing by putting their questionable acts in the passive voice.
6. Juanita Brooks,
The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Norman, OK, 1991 [1950]), vi-viii, xx, 13, 46–57, 70–75, 110–111, 144, 184–87, 192–97, 290–91; John D. Unruh Jr.,
The Plains Across (Urbana: U. of I L Press, 1982), 252–84; David L. Bigler,
Forgotten Kingdom (Spokane: A. H. Clark, 1998), 161–79; Will Bagley, e-mails 10/31/97, 12/31/98; “Mountain Meadows Massacre,”
Encyclopedia of Mormonism 2 (NY: Macmillan, 1992),
www.mormon.org 4/98; Kenneth E. Foote,
Shadowed Ground (Austin: U. of TX Press, 1997), 246–63; David A. White, ed.,
News of the Plains and Rockies 4 (Spokane: A. H. Clark, 1998), 212–53; “Mountain Meadows Historic Site,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory (DC: National Park Service); Anna Jean Backus,
Mountain Meadow Witness (Spokane: A. H. Clark, 1995), 16–20; Robert W. Coakley,
The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1789–1878 (DC: GPO, 1988), 194–226.
14. Calling Native Americans Bad Names
ARIZONA Navajo Reservation
The names Americans use for many American Indian tribes are derogatory. European Americans often learned what to call one tribe from a neighboring rival tribe. Sometimes whites simply developed their own contemptuous names for groups of Native people. Markers in Arizona are full of these wrong names. Some Native groups have responded to this confusion by accepting their new name even if it originally had negative connotations. Others are mounting determined efforts to be known by the name they call themselves. Arizona offers examples of both.
By far the largest and most populous Indian reservation in the United States is the Navajo reservation, which occupies all of northeastern Arizona and extends into Utah and New Mexico. Navajo is the name given to these once nomadic people by the already-settled Tewa Pueblo Indians.1 It may mean “thieves” or “takers from the fields.” The Navajos came to the Southwest millennia after the Tewas and call themselves Dine, sometimes spelled Dineh, which means “we the people.”2 Most Native American groups call themselves by names that mean “we the people.” Like most societies they were ethnocentric—seeing their own culture as the yardstick of sound human behavior—and these names reflect that certainty.
The name of another famous Arizona tribe, Apaches, means “enemies.” The Zunis named them that. Related linguistically to the Navajos, Apaches too call themselves Dine. In southern Arizona, Papagos means “bean eaters,” a name given by the nearby Pimas. Papagos call themselves Tohono O’otam, or “desert people.” Pimas, another southern Arizona tribe, refer to themselves as Ahkeemult O’odham or “river people.” “Pima” actually means “I don’t know,” apparently their reply when asked their name in Spanish by an early explorer!
Americans have learned to call the people who built the ancient cliff dwellings at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona “the Anasazi.” Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning “ancient enemies.” Since the Anasazis have “vanished” according to anthropologists, we cannot now ask them what they called themselves. In reality the Anasazi didn’t “vanish” but merged into the various pueblo peoples whose descendants still live in Arizona and New Mexico. Most Pueblo Indians prefer to call the Anasazi “ancestral Puebloans” and still know which pueblo includes descendants from which “Anasazi” site.
The use of derogatory names is hardly limited to Arizona. Native people living in far northern Canada and Alaska call themselves Inuits—again, “we the people”—while the Crees to their southeast called them Eskimos, “those who eat raw flesh.” The Sioux call themselves Dakotas or Lakotas, meaning “allies” or “people,” but their ancient enemies, the Ojibwes, called them Nadouwesioux, meaning “little snakes” or “enemies,” and the French shortened it to Sioux. In turn, Ojibwes, sometimes written Chippewas, refer to themselves as Anishinabes, “people of the creation.” “Mohawk” means “cannibal” in Algonquian; they call themselves “Kaniengehagas,” “people of the place of flint.”
Some names take note of physical characteristics of Natives. Thus British Americans called the Salish (“we the people”) the Flathead Indians. The French called two groups of Indians “Gros Ventres,” “big bellies,” apparently derived from their name in Indian sign language. The French also renamed the Nimipus (“we the people”) the Nez Perces, “pierced noses,” because some of them wore nose pendants.
A few new names were complimentary. On the east coast the British renamed the Lenape “Delawares.” They didn’t mind once the British explained that Lord De La Ware was a brave military leader. Lenape means —you guessed it—“we the people.”3 The most famous new name of all—“Indians,” coined by Columbus for the Arawaks he met in the Caribbean—was complimentary in a sense: Columbus either thought he was in the East Indies or hoped to convince his supporters that he had reached that important trading destination by using the term.4
Some whites claim that their practice of naming sports teams for Native Americans is complimentary. Thus we have the Florida State University Seminoles, Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, and worst of all, Washington Redskins. Some Indians do consider some of these terms flattering. The Cleveland Indians defend their name on that basis, claiming it stems from a popular member of the team in the 1890s. “Chief Wahoo,” the bucktooth Indian caricature that decorates Cleveland uniforms, offends many Native Americans today however. And Native American newspapers continue to react angrily to the “Washington Redskins.” How long would Americans tolerate the “Atlanta Niggers,” they ask? Or the “New York Kikes?” Even positive terms like “braves” trivialize Native Americans as mascots, some Indians assert.
At least two tribes in Arizona are called by their own names. “Havasupai” means “people of the blue-green waters,” referring to their homeland’s beautiful waterfalls in a side gorge of the Grand Canyon, and “Hopi” means “peaceful ones.” Some other Arizona Indians have given in to the renaming. Apaches now acquiesce to being called “Apaches.” Many Navajos accept “Navajo” rather than insisting on “Diné.” Many Pimas now call themselves Pimas. Papagos, however, are making a concerted effort to be known as Tohono O’otam. In Minnesota some Ojibwes now ask others to call them Anishinabes.
Throughout the world, naming has been a prerogative of power. With colonialism on the wane, calling natives by the name they use for themselves is gradually becoming accepted practice. Thus when leaders in Upper Volta changed its name to Burkino Faso, mapmakers had to make the adjustment.5 Native Americans who care may win similar respect in coming years.6
1. Pueblo means “town” in Spanish and is itself a misnomer as a proper noun; Pueblo Indians call themselves Zunis, Acomas, etc.
2. There is more than one English spelling for many native names, since they are attempted phonetic renditions of non-English words.
3. Some linguists would insist it means “we the proper people.” “Lenape” was somehow repeated as “Lenni Lenape” by an early missionary. Native Hawaiians likewise call themselves “kanaka maoli” or “the real people.”
4. Russell Means and some other Native Americans have claimed that “Indian” is a corruption of “in dios,” “with God,” because Columbus originally thought the Caribbean natives he met were peaceful, had “very good customs,” and seemed religious. I have not found adequate confirmation for this. Columbus did speak positively of Native Americans at first; soon enough, when justifying his wars and enslavement of them, he called the Indians “cruel” and “stupid,” “whose customs and religion are very different from ours.”
5. Unlike Burkino Faso, Native American groups do not have the advantage of statehood. This may explain why spell-check programs in computer word processors still have a long way to go: of the fourteen derogatory names I checked for this essay, nine were in my spell-check program, but of the thirteen positive names, the program recognized only one—Dakota—a state!
6. Bill Bryson,
Made in America (NY: Morrow, 1994), 24; S. L. A. Marshall,
Crimsoned Prairie (NY: Scribner’s, 1972), 8; Barbara A. Leitch,
A Concise Dictionary of Indian Tribes of North America (Algonac, MI: Reference Publications, 1979); Kristen Hartzell, “Anasazi, Other Words Dropped,”
Denver Post, 11/9/97, “Tribal Names: Meanings & Alternative Names,”
http://members.tripod.com/~Philkon/names.html 11/29/98.
15. No Confederate Dead? No Problem! Invent Them!
MONTANA Helena
In 1916 the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a memorial fountain in what is now called Hill Park near the heart of Helena, Montana:
A loving tribute to our Confederate Soldiers
Of course, Montana never had any Confederate soldiers. For that matter, Montana hardly had any Union soldiers. Most of Montana was still Indian country during the Civil War and for some time thereafter, as Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer found out to his sorrow at the Little Big Horn in 1876. The state was not admitted to the union until 1889, a quarter century after the war ended. Montana was not even a territory during most of the Civil War, getting organized in 1864.
The UDC may look silly dedicating a memorial to Confederate dead who never existed, but these ladies knew exactly what they were doing. UDC members used these monuments to demonstrate their own status—indeed, their dominion over the American landscape—and promote the respectability of the Confederate cause. Fifty years earlier most Northerners and many Southerners saw the Confederacy as a failed attempt to break up the United States and perpetuate slavery—which it was. By 1916, this monument declares implicitly that the Confederacy was somehow patriotic and that whites agreed, even this far north, to honor it nostalgically. Thus this monument also reflects the time when it was erected—the nadir of race relations in the United States, from 1890 to 1920, when segregation gripped the nation and lynchings reached their peak. (83 and 84 tell how segregation swept the North as well.) Most Confederate monuments went up during these years. In the nadir, as Charles Royster put it in The Destructive War, [white] “Southerners found it easy, or at least expedient, to forget a great deal of what they had known about the Confederacy, to reshape its history, and to remember things that had not occurred.” And there is a direct connection between the neo-Confederate mythology erected on the landscape and the segregation and lynchings done to African Americans. As Voltaire put it, “If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.”
A Confederate monument in Montana warns us that we need to think about where as well as when monuments are erected. The locations of some other Confederate monuments are equally but less obviously absurd. A Confederate monument dominates the lawn of the east Bolivar County courthouse in Cleveland, Mississippi, for example. It is the usual bronze sentry on a pedestal, on whose base are the words:
BOLIVAR TROOP CHAPTER U.D.C. C.S.A.
To the memory of our Confederate dead
1861-65
Dead upon the field of glory
Hero fit for song and story
But Cleveland, Mississippi, had no Confederate dead either. In fact, Cleveland did not exist during the Civil War or for some decades afterwards. According to the History of Bolivar County, “until 1900 most of the interior of Bolivar County was a vast forest.” The area around Cleveland “was a wild country, abounding in bear, deer, wild turkey, and wolves.”
Just like Montana!
“Through the efforts of the United Daughters, the Southland has become a land of monuments,” boasted UDC Magazine in 1994. “In hundreds of communities, markers, tablets, and monuments have been erected by Divisions and Chapters.” That is true, and to a degree the UDC has been memorializing itself: prominent on the front of the Confederate monument’s shaft in Cleveland, Mississippi, are the words
“Bolivar Troop Chapter U.D.C.”
Many communities now saddled with UDC monuments, even in the South, were predominantly Unionist during the Civil War. As historian George C. Rable put it, the UDC “managed to forget the unseemly parts—especially conflicts within the Confederacy—and eventually rewrote the history of the war.” The Confederate monument in Ellisville, Mississippi, provides an example. In 1912 the UDC erected an imposing monument in front of the courthouse for the southern district of Jones County, even though most residents of Jones County opposed the Confederacy during the Civil War. Newt Knight, a white farmer with a black wife, even led a revolt that briefly took over the Ellisville courthouse and declared the county “The Free State of Jones”; Confederate officials had to dispatch troops to force the county back into line. Ellisville’s Confederate monument is as misleading in its way as those in Cleveland, Mississippi, and Helena, Montana.
In the border states, the UDC and scv (Sons of Confederate Veterans) erected pro-Confederate monuments and markers that make Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri—states that were predominantly Unionist—look predominantly Confederate. Kentucky’s legislature voted not to secede. Early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston occupied Bowling Green, 40 miles east of Todd County, but found “no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility was manifested in Kentucky.” Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States as against 35,000 for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72. Confederate monuments and only two Union ones! West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, yet in 1910 the UDC erected a statue of Confederate Gen. “Stonewall” Jackson on the State Capitol lawn.1 The Daughters are still at it: the only memory of Civil War soldiers at the Charles Town, West Virginia, courthouse is a pro-Confederate plaque the UDC affixed in 1986.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz recorded the impact of the Confederate monument in Todd County, Kentucky. “Todd County wasn’ t rebel country, at least not historically,” he points out. “Most Todd Countians supported the Union in the Civil War.” But this history has been lost. “Almost all whites I spoke to...proclaim[ed] their county rebel territory and believ[ed] it had always been so. As proof, they pointed to a 351-foot concrete spike soaring at the county’s western edge. The obelisk marked the birthsite of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.”
The Kentucky state park system boasts that this monument is “the world’s tallest concrete obelisk.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy raised the money and finished it in 1924 at a cost of $200,000. They consider it “the greatest of all monuments built to the Confederate cause.” The state also puts out an astonishing brochure, “Jefferson Davis State Historic Site,” that is an unabashed apologia for Davis. Every year on Davis’s birthday, Todd Countians converge at it for what Horwitz calls “a bizarre rite: the crowning of a local teenager as ‘Miss Confederacy..”’ UDC and scv members judge contestants on their “poise, hair, hooped skirt, and answers to questions such as, ‘What will you do while holding the title to promote and defend Southern heritage?’”
Thanks to this monument, whites in Todd County invented a past in which their land was staunch rebel territory and their ancestors brave Confederates. Their high school named its sports teams “the Rebels” and took as its mascot two cartoonish Confederates waving the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. One result is racial polarization. On January 14, 1995, four young African Americans pursued a pickup flying a large rebel flag from a pole in its truck bed. An occupant of the truck may have shouted “nigger” at them. Shooting blindly into the cab, seventeen-year-old Freddie Morrow killed the driver, nineteen-year-old Michael Westerman. Since the shooting the races have grown even more polarized in Todd County. The Southern Partisan, official magazine of the right-wing League of the South, calls Westerman a “Southern Patriot and Martyr.” The Ku Klux Klan has marched and recruited in the county. Families of the victim and defendants alike have expressed sorrow and called for reconciliation, but an outpouring of white opposition prevented local officials from changing the high school’s Confederate symbols.
To be sure, not all racial tension in Todd County derives from its obelisk. But the fact that whites choose to celebrate the most racist moment in their past while virtually ignoring their Unionist forebears can hardly help race relations in the present.
Monuments simultaneously symbolize power and have symbolic meaning of their own. Thus the Confederate memorial in Helena is not as senseless as it seems. It was never intended as a “sasha monument,” to use a term defined in “Historic Sites Are Always a Tale of Two Eras.” As that essay tells, sasha monuments help people who knew an event or person remember it, with concomitant emotion. Often sasha Civil War monuments list a community’s dead and sometimes its living returned soldiers by name. That would be quite impossible in Montana, or in Cleveland, Mississippi, for that matter.2 The white Southerners who moved to Helena and put up the granite fountain in 1916 or to Cleveland and erected the bronze soldier in 1908 were not remembering specific dead Confederate soldiers. They were making a statement.
Even in towns that did have Confederate dead, monuments put up in 1908 or 1916 were erected far too late to help most people grieve or remember the dead. These are zamani monuments, intended to instruct residents on how to think about the past. The Helena fountain tells that the Confederacy should be revered even as far north as Montana. The very size of the Cleveland monument tells what (white) residents of that town considered important. In comparison, its monument “Dedicated to the memory of those veterans who made the supreme sacrifice in the World Wars” is a stone slab about the size of the bottom half of a Dutch door. Similarly, the Jefferson Davis obelisk implies by its overt mimicry of the Washington Monument that the president of the Confederacy merits almost as much respect as the father of our country. (Never mind that Davis tried to divide what Washington tried to hold together.)
All across America, Confederate monuments have made their impact. President John Kennedy wrote, “The great enemy of truth is often not the lie... but the myth?—yet the tragically wrong treatment of Reconstruction in his Portraits in Courage shows how he himself (or his ghost-writer) was taken in by the neo-Confederate myth. Karen Cox, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the UDC, summarized the organization’s effect: “By transmitting Confederate culture—the ideology and symbols of states’ rights and white supremacy —the Daughters... helped lay a foundation for massive resistance to desegregation at mid-century.” In the South, Confederate monuments helped cause what Robert Penn Warren called “the witless automatism of fidelity to the Democratic Party” among white voters throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Northerners too believe it proper to display Confederate symbols. In 1995 I talked with a flag vendor at a flea market near Brattleboro, Vermont. He displayed more Confederate flags than any other single item. Embroidered across them were the words, “If the South had won, we’d have no trouble now.” “What does this mean?” I asked him. “I don’t know,” he parried. “It’s my best seller.” Of course, Brattleboro is in southern Vermont.3
1. Unionists retaliated the next year by erecting a Union mountaineer to honor the “Home Guard” who protected West Virginia from Confederate invasion as it seceded from the Confederacy.
2. No doubt, ex-Confederates moved to Montana and Cleveland long after the war. Nevertheless, no dead bodies came home from the Civil War to Helena or Cleveland, and no families in either town mourned casualty reports.
3.
The Monumental Works of the Daughters of the Confederacy (Richmond, VA: Scrapbook at Museum of the Confederacy, c. 1916), 184; Charles Royster,
The Destructive War (NY: Knopf, 1991), 94172; Florence Sillers, compiler,
History of Bolivar County, MS (Jackson: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1948), 225, 282–83; James Chenoweth,
Oddity Odyssey (NY: Holt, 1996), 143; Mrs. Ray Hunter, “South Carolina Division History,”
UDC Magazine (9/94): 111?;
http://www.nps.gov/delta/cwmile4.htm 7/98; Richard Wilson, “KY Treasure—State Historian Laureate is Still Looking to the Future,”
Louisville Courier-Journal, 5/2/94; George C. Rable,
Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: U. of IL Press, 1989), 236–37; Tony Horwitz,
Confederates in the Attic (NY: Pantheon, 1998), 95–105; Martha B. Carson, “World’s Greatest Monument Builders,”
UDC Magazine (2/51: 12; Michael Westerman page,
http://www.dixienet.org/spatriot/vol2n01/westrman.html6/98; Devereaux Cannon, “Michael Westerman: Shot for His Heritage,”
Southern Partisan 14 (10/94): 19; John Winberry, “‘Lest We Forget’” The Confederate Monument and the Southern Townscape,”
Southeastern Geographer 23 no. 2 (11/83): 110; Gaines M. Foster,
Ghosts of the Confederacy (NY: Oxford UP, 1987), 44, 194; Edward A. Pollard,
The Lost Cause Regained, quoted in Rollin
Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1973), 14; Karen Cox,
Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Transmission of Confederate Culture (Hattiesburg: U. of Southern M S, Ph.D., 1997), i; Robert Penn Warren,
The Legacy of the Civil War (NY: Random House, 1961), 14.
16. A Woman Shoulda Done It!
WYOMING South Pass City
Sociologists have long postulated that a scarcity of women raises their status in society. Wyoming offers a case in point. In 1869, Wyoming Territory passed the first law in the United States giving women the right to vote. Since women were relatively rare on the frontier, men may even have advocated suffrage as a recruitment effort! Proud of this accomplishment, when Wyoming became a state in 1890 it took the motto “Equality State.” Women’s suffrage wasn’t a national right until 1920, by which time women were already voting in most western states. Since then, unlike those states that slight the role women played in their past (30, 42), Wyoming has given a woman more space on the American landscape than she deserves.
During the push that led to the women’s suffrage amendment to the United States Constitution, two Wyoming residents decided it would be nice if a woman were recognized for having something to do with Wyoming’s pioneering statute. They chose Esther Morris, who had served for eight months as justice of the peace of South Pass City half a century earlier. Grace Hebard and H. G. Nickerson fabricated and popularized Ms. Morris as a campaigner for suffrage and even coauthor of the suffrage law.1
The landscape reflects their hustle. In 1920 Hebard built a rock cairn in South Pass City to mark where Morris’s cabin once stood, and Nickerson installed an inscribed sandstone slab in front of it. Later an even more permanent granite marker replaced the sandstone slab. It reads: “Home and office site of Esther Hobart Morris. First woman justice of the peace in the world, Feb. 14, 1870. Author with W. H. Bright of the first equal suffrage law. Dec. 10, 1869”. Her reconstructed cabin, a state historic site, stands nearby.
Unfortunately, consensus among historians today is that Esther Morris had nothing to do with the law. Wyoming’s Division of State Parks and Historic Sites has tried to correct matters by putting a bronze plaque nearby. It reads:
ESTHER MORRIS
Controversy exists concerning Esther Morris and woman suffrage.
In 1869 the legislature passed and Governor Campbell signed
a woman suffrage bill authored by William Bright, a South Pass City
resident. As a result, Wyoming became the first territory or state
to allow women the right to vote.
For eight months in 1870, Esther Morris served as South Pass City’s
justice of the peace, making her the nation’s first woman judge.
After her death in 1901, some historians claimed that Mrs. Morris
had helped Bright write the suffrage bill....
However, recent studies indicate that Bright was the only author
of the suffrage bill....
It further turns out that the granite marker does not mark the spot of Morris’s office; she probably held court in the downtown county building. What about the cabin? Built in 1975-76, with the help of the Wyoming Professional Women’s Club and “based on faulty research,” it is located on the wrong lot! It is also much smaller than Morris’s actual dwelling, which was a house, not a cabin.
The plaque concludes that the monument and “nearby 1870 period cabin” do honor Mrs. Morris, “who exemplified the spirit of frontier women.” The plaque may revise the granite marker and errant cabin so gently as to be ineffectual, but we must credit Wyoming with the correction, a phenomenon all too rare at historic sites.
Wyoming has made no such correction on the grounds of its State Capitol however, where a Morris statue stands. She is also the state’s only entry in the National Statuary Hall in the nation’s Capitol. The Hall’s Guidebook credits her as being a good justice of the peace, if only for eight months, and, trying to supply some reason for her inclusion, also notes that “she was present at a dinner in Cheyenne given for Susan B. Anthony” in 1895!2
1. Nickerson was a Republican, and when Wyoming Democrats claimed in 1919 that they had enacted women’s suffrage in 1869, which they had, Nickerson may have settled upon Morris, also a Republica, to claim credit for his party.
2. L. E. Murphy and W. H. Venet, Midwestern Women: Work, Community and Leadership at the Crossroads (Indianapolis: IN UP, 1997); Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (NY : McGraw-Hill, 1994), 144–45, 233–34; Bruce Noble, conversation, 11/96; Todd Guenther, letter to Noble, 8/95; T. A. Larson, History of WY (Lincoln: U. of NE Press, 1965), 89–94; Michael Massie, e-mail, 12/98.
17. Tall Tales in the West
COLORADO Pagosa Springs
Some Westerners are amused or exasperated at the tall stories that people outside the region believe about the West. Others in the West perpetuate larger-than-life events and characters, often in the interests of tourism. In 1955 the Woman’s Civic Club of Pagosa Springs did its part. On U.S. 160 west of town they erected a rock cairn topped with a bronze marker which commemorates an amazing feat that almost certainly never happened:
Near here in 1872, Col. Albert H. Pfeiffer, famous frontiersman,
killed a Navajo in a knife duel. By agreement of watching
Navajo and Ute warriors, Pfeiffer’s victory won the Pagosa
Hot Springs for his Ute friends.
On its face the tale is hardly likely: why would the Utes choose a white man to represent them? More importantly, the story does violence to American Indians’ common practice at places that benefited everyone, like hot springs. Across the country, Native Americans usually made such areas intertribal. If one society dominated such a site, it nonetheless typically declined to shut out others. In 1878, just six years after this alleged incident, Lt. C. McCauley reported to the United States government exactly this policy among the Utes: “All the Ute Indians... have always regarded the Springs with feelings akin to adoration, conceiving them to be the creation of the Great Spirit for the cure of the sick of all tribes.... The pipe of peace is said to have here had an unusual supremacy.” Neither McCauley nor Pagosa historian John Motter mention the knife fight incident, though both discuss the springs at some length.
If the values and policies of the Utes make the knife fight unlikely, so do the facts about the Navajos. In 1863–64, eight years before the alleged fight, General James H. Carleton, Kit Carson, and the United States Army had subdued the Navajos and led most of them on the notorious Long March from their homeland in Arizona to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. Many died on the way. The rest languished on the Bosque Redondo Reservation until 1868 and were then confined to the Navajo reservation, which did not extend into Colorado. No Navajo could possibly think about successfully contesting Ute claims in Colorado after these traumatic events.
In 1868 the United States had already forced Ute leaders to cede much of their Colorado land. By 1870 white miners were moving into the San Juan Mountains, the heart of Ute country. Rather than winning the springs against the Navajos, the Utes were losing them to the whites. The growing white presence thus also dictates against the knife fight story. According to Motter the Utes tried to keep the springs open to all, in accord with Indian values: “The Utes expressed their wish to Commission Chairman General Edward Hatch that the ‘Great Father in Washington [the president, for the United States government] retain possession of the place, so that all persons, whether whites or Indians, might visit it, and when sick come there and be healed.’”
It was not to be, however. European Americans quickly found a way to make a profit from the property by claiming exclusive ownership of the Pagosa Hot Springs in the early 1870s. In May 1877 the United States did set aside from sale a square mile of land, including the Great Spring as its center, “because of the grandeur of the Great Hot Springs, and the medicinal qualities of its waters.” Nevertheless, by 1879 and surely earlier, whites were building small private bathhouses at the springs. By 1881 the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had a station 27 miles away with coach connection to the springs. Two years later various “capitalists,” to use Motter’s term, gained possession of the springs, paying a total of $5.09 for it. They and their various heirs held it until 1910, when it was sold at public auction to a Kansas company and then later to a wealthy Oklahoman.
Ironically, Col. Pfeiffer did play a role regarding ownership of Pagosa Hot Springs. Instead of “winning” it for the Utes, he was appointed to take it from them in 1878 on behalf of the United States. He got the tribe to agree to cede most of their land, including the springs, retaining a reservation east of Pagosa. Congress failed to ratify the agreement, however. Instead the United States confined the Utes to land far to the southwest, leading to resentment that culminated in later violence against whites.
Pfeiffer’s descendants believe the knife fight happened and, I was told, prompted the Woman’s Civic Club to act. I could find no solid evidence to support the story, however. According to David Halaas, chief historian at the Colorado Historical Society, the folder documenting the marker contains nothing but a photograph of the marker itself. “I don’t think it happened,” Halaas concludes.1
1. Lt. C. McCauley, Notes on Pagosa Springs, Colorado, December, 1878 (DC: GPO, 1879), 5; John M. Motter, Pagosa Country: The First Fifty Years (Pagosa Springs, co: no publisher indicated, n.d.), 7–9, 20–21; Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (NY: Bantam, 1972), 350–51.
18. Licking the Corporate Hand That Feeds You
COLORADO Leadville
Most of this book deals with how Americans remember history on the landscape, but once in a while we must go indoors. The National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum, first opened in 1988, cries out to be included in any discussion of how history is distorted in the United States. It is a blatant example of how corporate sponsorship dictates what is and is not presented.
A competent history of mining in the United States would have to consider these issues:
- Exploiting our rich mineral and oil deposits has helped the United States develop its enormous economy and our comfortable standard of living.
- Ethnic and racial groups have often concentrated in mining jobs, flavoring the politics and lifestyle of mining communities.
- Workers have often not shared fairly in the profits from mining, particularly when they have not organized into unions.
- Mining profits have fueled unholy alliances between mining companies and politicians. Results include bribery, tax breaks, legal loopholes, economic colonialism, and archaic mining laws.
- Mining and drilling have caused immense environmental problems, some of which persist.
- Next to firefighting, mining is probably the most dangerous occupation in America; explosions and cave-ins have killed scores and even hundreds of miners at a time.
Of these six points, the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum treats only the first! Its brochure bills itself as “The Showcase of American Mining,” and showcase it is—not a true museum. Its Hall of Fame is equally skewed. Of more than 125 inductees, 35 percent were mining executives, 18 percent acquired vast mining properties, and 35 percent were engineers, geologists, and other scientists. These three categories total some 88 percent of all inductees. Only fourteen people—12 percent of the total—represent individual miners, prospectors and explorers, politicians, labor leaders, philanthropists, and all others.
The Mining Museum doesn’t tell much about those who have done the actual mining in the United States; luminaries it does include are mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men, like most mine owners. In reality, mining has been one of America’s most multicultural occupations. Italian anarchists mined granite in Vermont. Cornish workers dug lead out of Wisconsin. Finnish socialists mined copper in Upper Michigan. Chinese Americans panned for gold across the West. So did some Native Americans, although generally mining wreaked havoc with Indian land and peoples. In the 1970s mines hired women as miners. None of their sagas is recounted in Leadville.
One Native American does make the Hall of Fame—Paddy Martinez, the Navajo who first found uranium in the San Juan basin in northwest New Mexico in 1950. The result was thirty years of frenzied mining “spurred by the world race to develop atomic energy and the United States government’s need to develop new sources of uranium,” according to his plaque. While Martinez cannot be held responsible for what happened to the Navajos who did much of the work in the uranium mines, both the government and the mining company, Kerr-McGee, knew by 1949 that the radioactive radon gas in the mines caused illness. Nevertheless, Kerr-McGee never bothered to ventilate the mines and the government never asked it to. By 1990 more than 450 miners had died of cancer, over five times the expected number. In that year Congress passed a compensation bill; 1,100 Navajos filed claims related to uranium exposure. The museum has not a word on any of this at the Martinez plaque or anywhere else; the plaque ends with the assertion that Martinez will be “remembered for his contribution to mining and to mankind.” Nor does the museum mention the perils that mining has visited upon other miners across the country—silicosis, black lung disease, and the like.
Even if killing miners one at a time isn’t worthy of notice, I had imagined that a few major mine disasters would get some attention. After all, mining company executives would agree with labor that mining disasters are to be mourned and learned from. Several disasters happened in Colorado, including the Hastings Mine Explosion in Ludlow, which killed 121 men in 1917. The museum is silent on the subject, however.
Organized labor is likewise largely missing from the Mining Museum. Only two labor union leaders are among the more than 125 plaques in the Hall of Fame—and one was a conservative labor leader whom mining executives liked. The plaque honoring John L. Lewis, long-time president of the United Mine Workers of America, is the only one in the museum to honor labor’s side of the issues—hardly an accurate representation of labor’s huge role in the mining industry. According to Carl Miller, executive director of the museum, Lewis was the Hall of Fame’s most controversial inductee. In 1943, asserting that miners were not getting a fair share of the nation’s wartime prosperity, Lewis called a strike. “Many mining executives consider him a traitor because of what he did during World War II,” Miller told me.
In fact, terrible working conditions in the mining industry led to some of the most radical labor unions and best-known labor leaders in U.S. history, all of whom are absent from the hall of fame. The most famous was Big Bill Haywood, who began as a miner when fifteen years old. He joined the Western Federation of Miners and in 1900 became its national secretary-treasurer. He gave militant leadership to the union from its national office in Denver, and in 1904 led the nearby Cripple Creek strike. The next year Clarence Darrow won Haywood’s acquittal on the charge of assassinating the former governor of Idaho; that year Haywood also helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (iww). Sentenced to twenty years in jail for sedition during the Woodrow Wilson administration, he skipped bail and lived the last seven years of his life in the Soviet Union. Haywood is better known than any member of the National Mining Hall of Fame except perhaps Lewis. So is iww leader Joe Hill, executed in neighboring Utah in 1915 and subject of the famous labor song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.” Nevertheless, they are not even mentioned.
Then there are the legendary conflicts between miners and owners. One of the best known happened in the museum’s home state of Colorado. In 1914 John D. Rockefeller prevailed on the governor to get the Colorado National Guard to fire on a camp of striking mine workers and their families. They killed thirteen babies and children along with seven adults. The “Ludlow massacre” as it is called today made national headlines—but goes unmentioned at the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum.2 Even closer to Leadville was the 1927 confrontation near Fort Collins, in which Colorado State Police fired on hundreds of unarmed men and women at the Columbine Mine. Six miners were killed and many others wounded, a tragedy that led mine owners to finally sign contracts with the United Mine Workers of America. In The Great Coalfield War, Senator George S. McGovern and historian Leonard F. Guttridge call these Colorado events “the most hard fought and violent labor struggle in American history,” but the National Mining Museum ignores them. In 1896, Leadville itself was the scene of a “labor war,” but the museum never mentions it. Indeed, the museum does not even show a peaceful picket line. On the other hand, several company executives won their place in the Hall of Fame because they opposed labor. According to their plaques, Samuel Warriner, president of Lehigh Coal, “left his mark on the anthracite industry through strong leadership and with a tough stance on unions,” while George Wingfield “acted to suppress the mining unions in the riotous labor troubles in 1906–07.”
Probably the most famous bribery scandal in U.S. history is Teapot Dome, which might have toppled Warren G. Harding’s presidential administration if he hadn’t died first.3 Teapot Dome is an oil reserve in neighboring Wyoming, not far from Leadville, but the museum never mentions it. Nor does it treat what Colorado ex-governor Richard Lamm calls “the destructive effects of colonialism” all over the West. Indeed, the museum’s only treatment of government and mining is an exhibit that lobbies for continued easy access to minerals on public land, and this exhibit never mentions that management of those minerals is still governed by a mining law passed in 1872! Like the Homestead Act and the railroad land grants of the nineteenth century, Congress passed this law to promote settlement of the West by European-Americans. Settlement is long past. Nevertheless, for a pittance companies can still claim they have found minerals on public land and therefore “patent” this land more cheaply because it is more valuable! Areas patented under the 1872 mining law become private land, forever withdrawn from the public domain. According to William C. Patric, an authority on mining policy, “the fate of the mining law is one of the most controversial natural resource issues of the day.” Not at the Mining Museum, however, which never mentions the controversy, surely because its sponsors like the law just as it stands.
The Mining Museum does mention the environmental problems of mining, but only to locate them in the distant past. One exhibit stresses the beautiful results from reclamation. “Such efforts are important on some sites,” Patric acknowledges. Now the industry faces even larger challenges, however. Patric goes on to note, “Meaningful reclamation is simply impossible given the scale of mining today.” The museum brags that companies now mine lower-grade ore “using new techniques.” It never hints that these new techniques can cause new damage to the environment. On the contrary, the executive director of the museum blandly assured me, “That’s all in the past. Today mining is an environmentally conscious industry.”
Is it? On July 16, 1978, what historians Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen call “the biggest expulsion of radioactive material in the United States,” bigger even than Three Mile Island, occurred on the Navajo reservation. More than 1,100 tons of uranium mining wastes and 100,000,000 gallons of radioactive water gushed through a ruptured dam near Church Rock, New Mexico. Piles of uranium tailings also may cause lung cancer among nearby residents in the Southwest.
Back in Colorado, the Summitville Mine, on patented land that had been part of Colorado’s Rio Grande National Forest, shows the environmental dangers inherent in modern gold mining. At least two engineers earned their plaques in the Hall of Fame by pioneering the cyanide process to separate minute particles of gold from ore. A large modern gold mine may use one million pounds of cyanide in a year. Cyanide is extremely poisonous—hence its prominence in murder mysteries. In 1988, Galactic Mining opened the Summitville Mine, which quickly turned into an environmental disaster. Galactic declared bankruptcy in 1992 and abandoned Summitville. “American taxpayers have now spent more than $100 million attempting to prevent 170 million gallons of cyanide- and acid-laden waters from further damaging the Alamosa River,” Patric reports.
But visitors need not stray beyond Leadville for evidence of mining’s environmental damages. The city itself is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund cleanup site! Aluminum, cadmium, copper, iron, lead, manganese, and zinc from years of mining now pollute the soil in some Leadville neighborhoods and enter into the Arkansas River. Miller knows this, because in addition to being executive director of the museum he is Leadville’s elected state representative. In that capacity he led a campaign to “get the EPA out of Leadville.” He has not succeeded, but he has kept any mention of the EPA out of the National Mining Museum.
The distortions in the “history” presented at the National Mining Museum are so flagrant that the only lesson to be gleaned here is that historic sites may falsify history owing to their sponsorship. At least the museum is honest about its corporate sponsorship—logos of Phelps Dodge, AMAX, Conoco, and other mining and petroleum companies adorn its entry. This frankness offers an important lesson, because every historic site, from the elegant Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge to a lowly wooden highway marker, has sponsors, corporate or not, and sponsors’ agendas usually have the potential to distort history. A responsible historic site, however does not let its funders prevent it from telling its history. The National Mining Museum fails even to make clear how Americans mine, perhaps because some modern mining techniques are so destructive. Backers of the museum hope to lift Leadville by its tourist bootstraps; the town has been economically depressed since its large mines shut down several years ago. The museum would attract more visitors if it told more actual history, however. Spending an hour watching an industry pat itself on the back is, ultimately, boring.4
1. I categorized each person once, but many could be listed in two or three categories: for example, engineers helped companies decide which mineral rights to buy and became high executives in the process.
2. The United Mine Workers has put up a memorial at the site in Ludlow.
3. In return for a large bribe, Harding’s secretary of the interior Albert Fall persuaded the secretary of the navy to transfer Teapot Dome to Fall’s department, who then leased it to Sinclair Oil.
4. “Tails of Woe”,
Mining Journal 325 no. 8341,
http://www.info-mine.com 5/98; Richard D. Lamm and Michael McCarthy,
The Angry West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 9; Daniel Pinchbeck, “Guyana Gold,”
http://www.word.com/place/guyana/eco/ecobod.htm 5/98; Donald A. Grinde and Bruce E. Johansen,
Ecocide of Native America (Santa Fe: Clear Light, 1995), 211–18; William C. Patric, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,”
Inner Voice 5/97:
http://www.afsee.org/publications/inner_voice/mayjune97/pg14.html 5/98; “A Look Back at 1997,” Leadville
Herald Democrat, www.leadvilleherald.com/1997.html 6/98; Charles N. Alpers, “Responsibilities and Activities of the U.S. Geological Survey Related to Mining and the Environment,”
U.S. Geological Survey Mine Drainage Interest Group Newsletter no. 4 (12/95):
http://water.wr.usgs.gov/mine/sep/forum.html 6/98; George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge,
The Great Coalfield War (Niwot, CO : UP of CO, 1996 [1972]), xi; Jim Carlton, “Mining Fans Seek to Rescue Industry from History’s Pits,”
Wall Street Journal, 10/11/93.
19. The Footloose Statue
NEW MEXICO Alcalde
In the rear patio of the Oñate Monument Visitors Center northeast of Española on New Mexico 68 stands the 1991 bronze statue of conquistador Juan de Oñate. In 1998 New Mexico celebrated the 400th anniversary of his arrival. Pueblo Indians and their partisans chose not to join the party. Instead, they marked the quadricentennial by cutting off the statue’s right foot. Why his foot?
The artist represents Oñate heroically—even his horse is sculpted to hieratic scale, bigger and stronger than Spanish horses ever were with a triumphal, flowing, larger-than-life tail.
Oñate was the original conquistador of New Mexico. In 1598, in the words of a New Mexico historical marker, “the viceroy of New Spain appointed Juan de Oñate as governor of New Mexico and directed him to settle the area along the upper Rio Grande.” Oñate proceeded into what is now New Mexico with a sizable force: “some 200 settlers, including soldiers, families, and priests, and over 7000 head of livestock,” the marker relates. He made San Juan Pueblo his base and from there sent out parties seeking gold, good land, and a route to the Pacific. They comported themselves as Spaniards usually did in the Americas: they assumed the right to tell the Natives what to do in return for bringing them the benefits, to their way of thinking, of Christianity and Spanish trade goods.
Some Indians tired of their subservient role, and most in the Acoma Pueblo decided not to put up with the Spanish any longer. When Oñate’s nephew Juan de Zaldivar went to Acoma again desiring to trade, the Indians told him to camp nearby and wait. On the assigned day, half of Zaldívar’s men were in small groups trading in the pueblo when the Indians attacked with stones and clubs. They killed Zaldivar and some other Spaniards; the survivors staggered back to San Juan.
Oñate declared “war by blood and fire” and sent another nephew, Vicente, and 72 well-armed men to conquer the Acomas. Although about 400 Acoma men opposed them, Spanish arms were superior and included two cannons loaded with grapeshot. Hundreds died, only one of them a Spaniard, and Vicente brought a number of captives toward San Juan Pueblo. Oñate met them at another village, Santo Domingo, proceeded to put the captured Natives on trial, and ordered the Acoma to hand over all children under twelve for a Christian upbringing. According to Oñate’s biographer, Marc Simmons, 60 small girls were sent to Mexico City and raised in convents there; “none ever saw their homeland or relatives again.” Everyone over twelve years of age Oñate enslaved for twenty years. In addition, he ordered one foot cut off every man over age 25, some two dozen in all. Oñate had the punishment carried out at Santo Domingo, so villagers there would know what happened to men who dared question Spanish rule and tell other Indians. Later the Spaniards sacked two other pueblos, also as exemplary punishment.
What happened to Juan de Oñate in 1998 was thus, from a Native American viewpoint, fitting tribute.
The sculptor, Reynaldo Rivera, managed to recast the foot based on the statue’s left foot. In May 1998, close inspection still showed the unweathered seam. The incident symbolizes a larger conflict: groups in New Mexico today look at what happened in New Mexico 400 years ago from different perspectives.
Juan de Oñate “is the George Washington of New Mexico,” says biographer Simmons. “Everything starts from there.” Not so according to television newsman Conroy Chino, a member of Acoma Pueblo. “He inflicted tremendous pain and suffering, death, and destruction, especially among Acoma people.” “From our viewpoint, we would prefer that it never did happen,” says Herman Agoyo, a member of the San Juan Pueblo tribal council. Nevertheless, “good, bad, or indifferent, it’s still part of our history.”
The dismemberment of Oñate’s statue outraged the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. It called the maiming “a cowardly act against art” and asked, “has art-loving Northern New Mexico become a place whose citizens must fear for every unguarded work?”—deliberately downplaying the history and revenge that this act symbolically expressed. In a sense, so long as the statue is complete, the story it tells is incomplete. The statue honors Oñate, but honoring Oñate this way tells only one side of what he did. The historical marker for the Española Valley hardly makes good the omission; it says merely, “Juan de Oñate established New Mexico’s first colony here in 1598.” The pamphlet that the Oñate Monument Visitors Center distributes is even less satisfactory, saying nothing negative about him on any of its eight pages.
Some commentators charge that critics judge Oñate unfairly by applying the standards of our very different time. Actually, although many Hispanics praise Oñate unreservedly today and his monument reflects their political influence, the Spanish in the area at the time did not praise him. At the end of his term as governor of New Mexico he faced his residencia, or performance review. Charged with, among other things, abusing the natives, he was fined and sentenced to perpetual banishment from New Mexico.1
After the statue’s amputation, several newspaper writers suggested leaving Oñate maimed. His missing foot symbolically presents the Acoma side, they pointed out. Certainly the maiming increased people’s knowledge of the statue and the past. Before the amputation the monument often went unnoticed; the perpetrators even had to contact the local newspaper to get the public to notice their deed! Afterwards, “a lot of people have come up just to see the destruction of it,” according to the artist. They saw two views of Oñate: honoring and dishonoring. They also saw that people still care passionately about how the man and his enterprise are portrayed on the New Mexican landscape 400 years later.2
1. He appealed and years later won partial reinstatement.
2. Marc Simmons, The Last Conquistador (Norman: U. of OK Press, 1991), 125–46; Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Patriot Chiefs (NY: Viking Press, 1958), 82–83; Donald A. Grinde and Bruce E. Johansen, Ecocide of Native America (Santa Fe: Clear Light, 1995), 60–61; “Group Releases Photo of Oñate’s Foot,” Albuquerque New Mexican, 1/14/98; Thomas E. Chávez, “La Historia de la Nueva México,” El Palacio 102 no. 2 (winter 1997), 37–43; Richard McCord, “The Scars of History Take Time to Heal,” unidentified newspaper clipping in Onate Monument Visitors Center, n.d.; Rick Romancito, “Oñate’s Foot and the Changing Face of History,” Taos News 1/22/98.
