After the Massacre: The Violent Legacy of the San Sabá Mission (review)

2oo8Book Reviews445 Laboratory near Fort Wingate where Morgan worked examining wool fibers. Willie taught Young die Navajo language in the evenings and this partnership became a lifelong collaboration, which included working on the small book The Trouble at RoundRock that Brill de Ramírez speculates about. The other William Morgan wrote die 1931 American Anthropologist article "Navaho Treatment of Sickness: Diagnosticians ," about which the author also conjectures. The author's claims, such as that Navajo control of research "insures the reliability and accuracy of current work," while politically correct are somewhat optimistic (p. 62). Brill de Ramírez supports uncritically Taiaiake Alfred's assertion that "with very few exceptions, universities are sites of production of imperial values and ethics," which makes one wonder where rightwing critics such as David Horowitz get all their ammunition to accuse universities of being bastions of uncritical liberalism (p. 211). The central message of this book is that the "ethnographic record presents far greater degrees of complexity and obfuscation than has even been realized to date. Well over a century of textualized stories produced via ethnographic scholarship lies in need ofconversive clarity" (p. 21 1). However, thisjargon-and speculation-filled book is a very questionable example of clarity, and while the author writes about the past naivety of readers of "as told to" autobiographies, she does not help her case by admiringly quoting Wilson Follett's 1938 New York Times review of Son of Old Man Hat to the effect "that men of ostensible science . . . can so readily detect all manner of profound, subtle significance in so problematic a document is to the layman a matter of chronic amazement. . . . For the veritable scientist of race, culture, mind—the scientist who derives his generalizations from fixed data through a funnel ofgeneralization—the pertinent attitude would seem tobe that of the dying Goethe's unfulfillable demand, 'More light'" (p. 133). I want to make the same demand for more light after reading all the "profound, subtle significance" that Brill de Ramirez's literary criticism has attempted to bring to Left Handed's life story as recorded by Walter Dyk in Son of Old Man Hat. Northern Arizona UniversityJon Reyhner After the Massacre: The Violent Legacy of the San Saba Mission. By Robert S. Weddle, trans, by Carol Lipscomb. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. Pp. 216. Illustrations, map, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0-896725g6 -o. $32.95, cloth.) With After the Massacre, Robert S. Weddle offers a valuable follow-up not only to his own ig64 work, The San Saba Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas, but also to the documentary collection, The San Saba Papers, edited by Leslie Byrd Simpson and Paul D. Nathan. In this new study, he makes available a translation of a recently discovered diary ofthe 1 759 military campaign sent to avenge the 1758 destruction of Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba by a force of allied Indian nations from across northern Texas and the southern Plains. The diary, written by Capt. Juan Angel de Oyarzún who led a company of fifty men from San Luis Potosí to participate in 446Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril the campaign, came to light in ig7g while Weddle was completing research at the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid, Spain. Beyond the text of the diary which, with two reports written by Diego Ortiz Parrilla at die conclusion of the campaign, constitutes a third of the text, the book puts the events detailed in the diary in perspective with other interpretations from documentary, historical, and archaeological sources. In a series of nine narrative chapters, Weddle carefully highlights the wideranging information made available by the diary itselfas well as contextualizing the decisions and actions ofSpanish participants as events unfolded in 1 758, 1 759, and the years that followed this critical pivot in Texas history. For instance, individual chapters explain die state ofSpanish knowledge, manpower, and preparation, chart the route of the expedition, mine the diary for the natural history of the region, and tell the story of twentieth-century archaeological searches for the sites of San Saba mission and presidio as well as the site of batde at a Taovaya setdement on the...