american-holocaust

126 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTMassacres of this sort were so numerous and routine that recountingthem eventually becomes numbing-and, of course, far more carnage ofthis sort occurred than ever was recorded. So no matter how numbed--oreven, shamefully, bored-we might become at hearing story after storyafter story of the mass murder, pillage, rape, and torture of America'snative peoples, we can be assured that, however much we hear, we haveheard only a small fragment of what there was to tell.The tale of the slaughter at Wounded Knee in South Dakota is anotherexample too well known to require detailed repeating here, but what isless well known about that massacre is that, a week and a half before ithappened, the editor of South Dakota's Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer-a gentlesoul named L. Frank Baum, who later became famous as the author ofThe Wizard of Oz-urged the wholesale extermination of all America'snative peoples:The nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a packof whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law ofconquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent,and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the totalannihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their gloryhas fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they shoulddie than live the miserable wretches that they are. 108Baum reflected well the attitudes of his time and place, for ten dayslater, after hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at WoundedKnee had been killed by the powerful Hotchkiss guns (breech-loading cannonsthat fired an explosive shell) of the Seventh Cavalry, the survivorswere tracked down for miles around and summarily executed-because,and only because, the blood running in their veins was Indian. "Fully threemiles from the scene of the massacre we found the body of a womancompletely covered with a blanket of snow," wrote one eyewitness to thebutchery, "and from this point on we found them scattered along as theyhad been relentlessly hunted down and slaughtered while fleeing for theirlives. . . . When we reached the spot where the Indian camp had stood,among the fragments of burned tents and other belongings we saw thefrozen bodies lying close together or piled one upon anotheL" 109 Otherwomen were found alive, but left for dead in the snow. They died afterbeing brought under cover, as did babies who "were found alive under thesnow, wrapped in shawls and lying beside their dead mothers." 110 Womenand children accounted for more than two-thirds of the Indian dead. Asone of the Indian wimesses-a man named American Horse, who had beenfriendly to the American troops for years-recalled:They turned their guns, Hotchkiss guns, etc., upon the women who were inthe lodges standing there under a flag of truce, and of course as soon as they