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6 Degrees of Tombstone
Apr. 16th, 2010 11:14 amI'm reading Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (which, incidentally, is making me hate nineteenth-century white Americans--particularly, but not exclusively, the U. S. Army--like a slow burning fuse) and, hey, look! There's Billy Breakenridge!
Breakenridge was Cochise County Sheriff John Behan's deputy in 1881, and he published a book called Helldorado which is notable for being the print source of a lot of the misinformation about Wyatt Earp--and at least some of that misinformation is deliberate. (My post about Allen Barra's Inventing Wyatt Earp mentions Breakenridge's most egregious and outright lie: the insertion of a sentence into an article from the Nugget.) And on November 29, 1864, Breakenridge was present at the Sand Creek Massacre, in which two regiments of Colorado militia led by Col. John Chivington annihilated a Cheyenne village--a Cheyenne village, we should add, which had been promised safety. When junior officers pointed this out to Chivington, he "roared: 'I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians!'" (Connell 176).
Connell's account of the massacre reads to me a lot like atrocities such as My Lai. Chivington's men murdered women and children with obvious sadistic pleasure. They took trophies. Not just scalps, which whites and Indians both collected in the second half of the nineteenth century, but cutting off fingers to get rings, cutting off ears to get earrings. Lieutenant James Connor testified that "'I heard one man say he had cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition. . . . I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks'" (177). Robert Bent (a son of the white trader William Bent and the Cheyenne woman Owl Woman) testified "'I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them'" (177).
But wait! cried the righteous. There were Caucasian scalps in the village! A surgeon named Caleb Bursdal testified that "he had been treating wounded soldiers in a Cheyenne lodge when a trooper came to the entrance with five or six Caucasian scalps" (177). Bursdal was certain they were Caucasian because of the color of the hair, and he was certain they were fresh because "the skin and flesh attached to the hair appeared to be yet quite moist" (178).
This is where Billy Breakenridge comes in, for he corroborates Bursdal's testimony: "There were a lot of scalps of white men and women, some very fresh, found in the teepees" (178). Connell doesn't go into the question of Breakenridge's reliablity (he may or may not know just how unreliable Helldorado is), but his next paragraph is worth quoting in full:
In plain, Breakenridge here is associated with the same kind of inflationary, self-exculpating misinformation that he will later spread about Tombstone in 1881. He may, or may not, be telling the truth--we have no way to know--but somehow? I doubt it.
Breakenridge was Cochise County Sheriff John Behan's deputy in 1881, and he published a book called Helldorado which is notable for being the print source of a lot of the misinformation about Wyatt Earp--and at least some of that misinformation is deliberate. (My post about Allen Barra's Inventing Wyatt Earp mentions Breakenridge's most egregious and outright lie: the insertion of a sentence into an article from the Nugget.) And on November 29, 1864, Breakenridge was present at the Sand Creek Massacre, in which two regiments of Colorado militia led by Col. John Chivington annihilated a Cheyenne village--a Cheyenne village, we should add, which had been promised safety. When junior officers pointed this out to Chivington, he "roared: 'I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians!'" (Connell 176).
Connell's account of the massacre reads to me a lot like atrocities such as My Lai. Chivington's men murdered women and children with obvious sadistic pleasure. They took trophies. Not just scalps, which whites and Indians both collected in the second half of the nineteenth century, but cutting off fingers to get rings, cutting off ears to get earrings. Lieutenant James Connor testified that "'I heard one man say he had cut out a woman's private parts and had them for exhibition. . . . I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks'" (177). Robert Bent (a son of the white trader William Bent and the Cheyenne woman Owl Woman) testified "'I saw the body of White Antelope with the privates cut off, and I heard a soldier say he was going to make a tobacco pouch out of them'" (177).
But wait! cried the righteous. There were Caucasian scalps in the village! A surgeon named Caleb Bursdal testified that "he had been treating wounded soldiers in a Cheyenne lodge when a trooper came to the entrance with five or six Caucasian scalps" (177). Bursdal was certain they were Caucasian because of the color of the hair, and he was certain they were fresh because "the skin and flesh attached to the hair appeared to be yet quite moist" (178).
This is where Billy Breakenridge comes in, for he corroborates Bursdal's testimony: "There were a lot of scalps of white men and women, some very fresh, found in the teepees" (178). Connell doesn't go into the question of Breakenridge's reliablity (he may or may not know just how unreliable Helldorado is), but his next paragraph is worth quoting in full:
Chivington himself talked about a white scalp in one of the lodges, and although it was never displayed as proof of Cheyenne barbarity it reproduced itself until Denver citizens knew beyond doubt that his men had found dozens of auburn and blond trophies. Worse yet, they saw a blanket woven of human hair--hair from the heads of white women. Everybody knew this to be a fact. Still worse, according to an editor of the Rocky Mountain News, William Byers, the troops found a white woman's skin stretched across an Indian saddle.
(178)
In plain, Breakenridge here is associated with the same kind of inflationary, self-exculpating misinformation that he will later spread about Tombstone in 1881. He may, or may not, be telling the truth--we have no way to know--but somehow? I doubt it.
