Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History (review)

?o8Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly we might rather avoid. The remains of my own dear parents, dead now more than forty years, reside in urns I have never visited. Yet they are vitally with me in memory. Obviously, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, death bestrides life. Albuquerque, New MexicoJohn L. Kessell Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache Hutory. By Chip CoIwell -Chanthaphonh. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. Pp. 174. Illustrations , maps, figures, notes, works cited, index. ISBN 0816525856. $40.00, cloth. ISBN 0816525854. $17.95, paper.) The Camp Grant Massacre of 1871 took place in the San Pedro Valley of southern Arizona some fifty miles northeast of Tucson. Perpetrated by whites, Hispanics, and Tohono O'odham (Papago) Indians, it resulted in the slaughter of at least one hundred twenty-five Aravaipa and Pinal Apaches and die seizure of more than thirty children who were adopted or sold into slavery in Sonora. The Grant administration and the eastern press erupted in outrage and demanded justice, but the resulting trial was farcical and resulted in the acquittal (on all counts) of the one hundred defendants by ajury of peers who deliberated for nineteen minutes. Like the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado, the Camp Grant atrocity grew from grass-roots sentiment that favored extermination of defiant Indians, especially Apaches, all Apaches. Their depredations angered and terrorized the populace of Tucson, the territorial capital, who railed against the post-Civil War federal peace policy. They were also sure that the military was not providing sufficient protection—and instead was operating a refuge, with rations, for the marauders . Thus, frustrated citizens formed a committee of public safety. Granted, loss of life and property had been considerable, but the guilty were likely Chiricahuas , not die semi-agricultural people on their ranchería near Camp Grant. Another contributing factor was the "Tucson Ring" of federal contractors who did not want the army's presence diminished. These war profiteers, the town's elite, with the concurrence of the territory's governor and arms from the adjutant general, orchestrated the vigilante action. Principal among diem was William S. Oury, a staunch southern Democrat with impeccable Lone Star credentials. He was on courier duty for Travis when the Alamo fell, served with Houston at San Jacinto and with Jack Hays's Rangers, and survived captivity following the Mier expedition. A Forty-Niner, he left California for Tucson, where "Don Guillermo" became a prosperous rancher, civic leader, and outspoken critic of the Republican policy of coddling Apaches. To date, serious scholars have slighted the Camp Grant carnage. Although numerous southern Arizona place-names speak to it, the event represents "phantom history" or "a story at once strangely present and absent . . ." (p. 5). This disregard , writes the author, a museum anthropologist raised in Tucson, stems in part from the Anglo sources that underlie the generally accepted works which 2??8Book Reviews109 appeared between publication of Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor (1881) and Larry McMurtry's Oh What a Slaughter (2005). In presenting the victims ' perspective, the author convincingly analyzes several Apache narratives. Those versions, he concludes, consider the incident in broader context, as but "one episode in a larger saga concerning . . . the loss of an entire way of life" (p. 43). Though little acknowledged, they make clear that history is "multivocal" and they recognize "those lives that have long been excluded" from standard writing (pp. 114, 20). Somewhat mystifying, however, is the failure to mention the Apache accounts in Eve Ball's In the Days ofVictorio (1970). Nevertheless, the narratives undergird a book intended for academics, college students, and even general readers, who might find the social science patois a bit daunting. Extensive research is evident in several statistical tables which complement appropriately placed maps and a useful glossary of people, places, and Apache names. Questionable, however, is the decision to flail the moral judgments in McMurtry's forgettable book and the History Channel's often-ludicrous Wild West Tech series, instead of taking to task state and regional histories. Nevertheless , Colwell-Chanthaphonh has shed considerable light on a tragedy accorded little notice, but which remains all too real to...