White Justice in Arizona: Apache Murder Trials in the Nineteenth Century

Lopsided justice was meted out to offending Apaches in nineteeth-century Arizona Territory according to McKanna, who presents the trials of four San Carlos men to prove his point. Within that framework the author selects rich details acquired by examining trial transcripts to make his case. Overall, however, generalizations abound, assumptions are plentiful, and certain conclusions are one dimensional. For example, in describing the Carlisle School's influence on Indian students, he complains that Superintendent Richard Pratt publicly reported only the good results of the school's outing program. "You do not, however, see or hear the negative side. . . . Indian students sometimes refused to work or were lazy and uncooperative" (p. 99), he writes. Here McKanna omitted an important fact: some farm families took advantage of, or abused the students assigned to them (Adams, Education for Extinction, University Press of Kansas, 1995, pp. 161–162). But did schooling in the white man's way cause some returned students to commit violence because they didn't fit in either world? The author devotes several pages to the possibility of identity confusion as an agent affecting the felons on trial. He also cites former Carlisle students, Asa Daklugie and Jason Betzinez, whom he alleges had difficulty adjusting to life "betwixt and between" (pp. 94–123), but neither of these Chiricahua Apaches ever committed offenses against the legal system.

McKanna's writing skill is sometimes ponderous, redundancies occur, and certain information seems misplaced, but in the epilogue the author nicely reinforces his thesis that white justice in the old Arizona Territory was strongly biased against Apaches. He is correctly critical of many, if not most, judicial authorities and of the system that made no effort to understand the behavior of members of a different culture. And, he points out, but only in passing, the hysteria created among white citizens years earlier by the actions of Geronimo and his band as one possible cause for the belief that Apaches were responsible for continuing depredations. More substantive discussion of that conclusion would be helpful. To his credit, McKanna never uses the word "hate" as a diagnosis of society's desire to punish Indians through its territorial judicial system, but those familiar with certain of the dominant culture's behavior at the time will be able to read between the lines.

The bibliography is weighted with trial transcripts and government documents that are the foundation of this work, along with a list of secondary sources, but I miss any reference to the Apache Kid's biographer, Phyllis de la Garza (The Apache Kid, Westernlore Press, 1995) and the aforementioned David Wallace Adams. Despite its shortcomings, this book is necessary to depict and document the unequal justice that thrived in Arizona. McKanna's unique approach without question indicts a prejudicial and lopsided legal system.