6 Degrees of Tombstone

[truepenny]

I'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:

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.

Comments

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

Being originally from Colorado Springs (I live in Canada, now), I've studied the Sand Creek Massacre. Hideous piece of work that was.

[dreamyraven.livejournal.com]

I've been watching a rather excellent documentary (We Shall Remain by Ric Burns) lately, that made me hate among other things organized religions, capitalism, white Americans, imperialism and war. I thought I had years ago become cynical enough that massacres done in the 17th century wouldn't bug me (my major is comparative religion and minor history, so I pretty much wade through bloodshed, greed and ignorance on a daily basis) but boy was I wrong.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

If you're interested, there's a great deal about the self-aggrandizing and self-protecting lies told about the Sand Creek Massacre, both in books and the public record. One of the key figures in the Army was Silas Soule, a Captain who refused to play along: he wrote agitating letters to friends in Denver and to the War Dept., and then testified before the Army commission on the topic that winter -- and was assassinated in the street before he could testify before a similar civilian commission in the spring.

Soule's letter to his friend Ned Wynkoop and circulated therefrom, written a few days after the massacre and detailing what he witnessed, was much referred to in the Army records and was probably the thing that got commissions moving. (It was remarkably blunt, i.e. it attests the fact that "snatch" was a slang word for a woman's privates already in 1864.) That letter and another one by a Lieutenant named Cramer were lost at some point, before the commissions so they could not be read into the record. A woman in Colorado found copies of those letters in her attic in 2000, and brought them to the Colorado Historical Society, which published them in full. And you know what, 150 years later, those letters were as alive with anger as the day they'd been written.

(In contrast to Breakenridge and Bursdal's remembrances, the commission testimony includes the live white people who were in the Cheyenne camp when attacked, who would certainly have been killed had Soule's company not protected them. They were US soldiers and Army-affiliated civilians, who'd received Army permission to trade in the village only a few weeks before the massacre. Even if it hadn't been a cynical genocide, the Sand Creek Masssacre would still have been a huge fuckup.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

There's a reason I've started using the tag "clusterfucks of the old west."

Thank you for the information!

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

A while back I posted an LJ entry about George Bent (http://voidmonster.livejournal.com/241433.html).

It's really odd to be related to the Bents. Since Sand Creek, the family fortunes haven't precisely risen. Family lore says William lost his house and land (a giant plot in what is now Kansas City's plaza) in a poker game. They blew up the fort in Nebraska. By the time it got down to my generation, no one is even quite certain which Bent we come from. A lot of things got lost in the Depression, including family history, but looking at it this far out it looks an awful lot like Sand Creek is where it started to fall apart.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Even as I may cringe over what he's writing about, I love the elegance that Connell applies to his writing. Notice that he does not call Chivington or any of the others a lying sack of shit in that exerpt. He just shines the light on things so that it's very hard not to see that Chivington probably was a lying sack of shit--at least in this instance.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Just today, this (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8636830.stm) popped up on one of my feeds (original documents from the OK Corral aftermath found in courthouse storeroom). It does appear that copies are extant, and the only hope for something really exciting is if faint marginal notations not visible on the copies exist and are readable on the originals.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link!

Yeah, sadly, it isn't Billy Claiborne's testimony we need the original documents for. But it's really cool that they found it.