The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History

PREFACE

PREFACE On January 29, 1863, Union-affiliated California militiamen, with the silent consent of Abraham Lincoln, attacked a band of 450 Northwestern Shoshoni sleeping along the Bear River in southeastern Idaho, slaughtering about 280 men, women, and children. After the fighting, the troops interrupted their pillaging to rape native women, some of whom were dying from their wounds. On first encountering the story of the Bear River Massacre and Rape, most readers are left with one abiding question: Why didn’t we know about this? The reasons for the cultural erasure of one of the worst acts of genocide in the history of the United States are complicated indeed. I will posit that the fault lies with how we make, and how we read, history itself. What you hold in your hands is not a work of “history.” I am not a historian and will not claim to be. I must apologize in advance for the fact that I am (I’m so sorry) a novelist. A language worker. In the first one-third of this book, this novelist will try to lay out for you the story of the massacre and rape, along with the historical context of that event. To this end, I have interpreted, selected and arranged the results of research by people who are historians, anthropologists, and so forth. The remaining two-thirds of the book will seek to understand how this story got away from “us” (I mean U.S. citizens), and what attempts are now being made to reclaim it at a grassroots, local level. I will ask, finally, whether those attempts do in fact have the potential to help us understand who we are, where we have been, and how we might avoid repeating our mistakes. xi I will also ask for whom this story should be recuperated. For instance , I disagree with the European American women activists who say they have struggled to bring this event to national attention “for them”—that is, for the Shoshoni who were the first victims of this slaughter. I tell this story, and ask its inevitable questions, for all of “us.” My primary purpose is not to contribute to the academic realm we call “historical scholarship.” I hope academic historians appreciate my parsing of history as a text, but I cannot expect them en masse to embrace a critique of their industry. My primary concern is for “us,” a nation of citizens, a world of humans. Are we mere consumers of the history that determines who “we” are? I will argue that the way we write history has itself partly doomed us to repeat history. In the 1980s, Patricia Nelson Limerick and others ushered in a “New History” that now allows, they hope, for “multiple points of view”; but, while this was a good first step, our multiple perspectives continue to be structured in ways that encourage reader passivity. In particular, the insistence on the erasure of the makers of history—that is, the absence of historians in history —has made it difficult for us—we citizens and active readers— to participate in that two-step we call “accuracy.” The rhetoric of “objectivity” similarly protects readers from a search for accuracy; as does history’s addiction to the linear, rising narrative, which itself is organized around a false sense of beginning, rising action, climax, and denouement. In summary, I demand from the beginning my reader’s active attention to this assertion: I assume the presence of error in this document. But perhaps it is the obsession with category that has allowed the Bear River Massacre and Rape to evaporate from U.S. political consciousness. Is it U.S. history, Utah history, Idaho history, western history, Native American history, women’s history, Mormon history, Civil War history—or all of the above? Categories simplify things for academic departments and publishing markets, but often do so reductively; the Bear River Massacre is a most complex example of the collisions resulting from that complication our nation calls “Manifest Destiny.” By way of enacting that collision, this work—which, in marketing terms, I call a work of “creative nonfiction”—will cross disciplines, genres, and rhetorical modes. As Paul Metcalf noted regarding the 1996 edition of his collected works, “the method I was developing xii Preface was both creative and scholarly, a fact that must be recognized” (1:vii).1 While I cannot hope to equal the radical breadth...