Oh What a Slaughter by Larry McMurtry Page A

that barely lasted half an hour. Here is what the troops found when they went out to bring in the bodies after the Fetterman wipeout: the words are those of Henry Carrington, at that time commander of Fort Phil Kearny, whose military career was destroyed by this disaster:
    Eyes were torn out and laid on rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out; joints of fingers; brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; entrails taken out and exposed; hands cut off; feet cut off; arms taken out of sockets; private parts cut off and independently placed on the person; eyes, ears, mouth, and arms penetrated with spearheads, sticks or arrows; ribs slashed to separation with knives; skulls severed in every form, from chin to crown; muscles in calves, thighs, stomach, breast, back, arms, and cheeks taken out. Punctures upon every sensitive part of the body, even the soles of the feet and the palms of the hand.
    Considering the short duration of the Fetterman Massacre, as opposed to the nearly all-day struggle at Sand Creek, the Sioux and Cheyenne made Chivington’s men seem like amateurs of massacre, which indeed they were.
    The same catalogue could be restated for the Little Bighorn, with the addition of decapitation and a few other refinements.Chivington’s hundred-day volunteers were for the most part Sunday soldiers, content with pouches made from scrotums and the like. When it came to making a meat shop they possessed only the crudest skills.
    I am not sure that Sand Creek admits of any conclusions. Two peoples with widely differing cultures were rubbing against each other, constantly and insistently. The Indians were trying to defend their cherished way of life, the whites to make that way of life vanish so they could go on with their settling, farming, town-building, etc.
    On a world scale countless massacres have been perpetrated over those and similar issues. Land is frequently a principal element in these disputes. Is it my land or your land, our land or their land? Time after time, in the Balkans, India, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Middle East, large parts of Africa, the same concerns develop. Peoples don’t seem to be good at sharing land, even when there’s a lot of it to share. Where land is in dispute massacres are just waiting to happen—it’s only a question of time, and usually not much time at that.

The Marias River Massacre,
January 23, 1870

    The massacre of Piegan Blackfeet in their winter camp on the Marias River, in what is now Montana, in January of 1870 is unique among the massacres considered in this book.
    Why? Because this large band of Blackfeet were dying anyway: of smallpox, at the rate of six or seven per day.
    It is not likely that Colonel E. M. Baker, who lead the assault on the Blackfeet camp, knew that the tribe was infected when he set out to eliminate them as a raiding force, but he found out soon enough and went right on with the killing; at the end of the day the army claimed to have killed 173 Indians, a big total.
    What was odd about it—apart from the circumstance that the army chose to kill Indians who were dying already—is that the army claimed to have killed 120 warriors, a proportion of warriors to women and children not seen in any other massacre. J. P. Dunn throws up many statistics in order to suggest that the army’s count couldn’t have been right. There were
always
, in his view, more women and and children to be found in a camp than men.
    Well, if they don’t have smallpox, maybe. The 120 warriors might well have been in camp because they were too sick to be anywhere else.
    But if they were that sick, why bother to kill them?
    Because they were Blackfeet—probably the most feared of all Western tribes—that’s why.
    When Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their great trek across America and back in 1804–1806 they encountered many Indians, some of them ill-disposed