Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West

Introduction

INTRODUCTION EVERY OTHER FRIDAY, one one, we filed forward, bent over, and took our medicine: one or more "hacks" from a wooden paddle. It was the late 1960s at Lewis and Clark Consolidated, and the students who had been bad were suffering for it. Our teachers, paying homage to a cultural revolution that had filtered down even to rural Clatsop County, Oregon, called these events "happenings." Not many of us feared these women. Our physical education teacher was much more imposing. He administered his infrequent punishments with a bat, behind closed doors-though the sound of hard plastic on taut buttocks resonated across our small gymnasium. The highly public happenings were, by contrast, something of a a peculiar blend of sixties trendiness and old-fashioned discipline, tinctured, I now think, by sadism. The pain inflicted was more apt to be emotional than physical. One of my most vivid from school is of my classmates snickering as Mrs. Gramson daintily returned my ubiquitous packet of tissues after paddling me, implying that I had acted the coward and put them in my back pocket to cushion the blow. Other writers from Clatsop County have occasionally described unremarkable acts of violence. In the 1960s and 19705 Sam Churchill recorded his memories of growing up in an early-twentieth-century logging camp. Churchill depicted a community that was generous but rough, one in which violence flared repeatedly but seldom with results t.hat seemed consequentiaL A crude but big-hearted neighbor woman beat her obstreperous boys. The routinely used their free time to fight each other. Churchill's mother, who hailed from New England, never the ready use of physical force. Her son recorded an instance in which she separated two combative men and demanded to know why they were fighting. 3 4 • Introduction "My God, Mrs. Churchill," blurted one ofthem after an awkward pause, "do we have to have a reason?"1 Other accounts of violence lay folded tightly in filing cabinets crammed in the basement of the county courthouse in Astoria. Charlotte Smith, the daughter ofa prominent Clatsop Native woman and a white father, filed three divorce suits against successive spouses, and in each she described sundry acts of cruelty. Sylvester Ingalls, whom she had married in 1864, would not make a fire for her when she was sick with menstrual cramps, had farted in bed and then held the covers over head, had not sufficiently provided for her, and "swears at me all the time." He had also committed adultery. Three years after this suit, in 1874, Charlotte married Charles Dodge. Just two weeks the wedding he "got mad & cursed me & threatened to leave me." He had "treated me roughly all the time" and had hit and pushed her, at least once because she had tried to keep him from whipping her boy from the first marriage. They divorced in 1879. Charlotte wed Henry Brallier a year later and divorced him in 1892. This third suit's documentation is relatively sketchy, although Charlotte cited an instance in which Henryhad hit her with his fist and a fire steeP Is this the stuff of history? Not according to most historians. Emma Gene Miller's historyof Clatsop County devotes considerable space to schools and lumbering without treatingviolence. She thinks it noteworthy that Charlotte Smith once gave a little girl some material for a dress, but she has nothing to say about her four marriages. Nor have more scholarly accounts of North American history much troubled themselves with prosaic acts of interpersonal violence. Historians ofviolence have largely concerned themselves with collective deeds easily categorized as political, such as riots, strikes, and vigilante movements, although growing numbers are paying attention to homicides . When Kenneth McNaught criticizes historians for overlooking violence in Canada and calls for an approach that is more sensitive to local history, he is not referring to wife beating, rape, or child abuse. When Carlos Schwantes remarks that labor strife seldom turned violent in British Columbia, he cites the absence of riots and gun battles like the handful that erupted in Washington, not whether miners and loggers routinely brawled in saloons and bunkhouses. A child being turned over his parent's knee, a pair ofinebriated men squaring off, a husband slapping his wife; these events are deemed historically inconsequential, a sort of white noise that has, like Introduction • 5 the poor, been with us always, humming quietly during and between explosive...