american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 129away as much as a third of the region's population in individual assaults),and by the lethal gifts of syphilis and tuberculosis, which rotted away moreslowly from within.l1 6Controlled studies of tribal populations across the Lower MississippiValley, Central New York, and the Middle Missouri region replicate thesepatterns: drastic and often catastrophic population crashes, occasionallyplunging to extinction levels, occurred repeatedly.l1 7 In all these casesandin literally hundreds more of equal magnitude-the observed populationcollapses occurred after previous population declines that are knownto have happened, but whose numbers went unrecorded. Thus, even figuresof 95 and 98 and 99 percent destruction may time and again be toolow. For this same reason, many entire tribes will never even be mentionedin lists of Indian population decline because they disappeared before anywhites were around to record their existence for posterity. In 1828, forexample, the French biologist Jean Louis Berlandier traveled through Texasand noted that of fifty-two Indian nations recorded by members of the LaSalle expedition a century and a half earlier only three or four nationsremained. But we will never know how many of Texas's native peoples ortribes were wiped out by the swarms of violence and deadly infectiousdisease that arrived from Europe, by way of Spanish troops, before LaSalle's expedition appeared upon the scene. For when he was in Louisianain 1682, LaSalle repeatedly questioned whether the maps and chronicleshe had inherited from the earlier De Soto expedition were accurate, sincethey referred to the presence of large numbers of Indian peoples and populationsthat LaSalle could not find, because they already had long sincebeen destroyed. 118Among all these instances of horror visited upon America's native peoples,however, one episode perhaps stands out. It occurred in eastern Coloradoin November of 1864, at a small and unarmed Cheyenne and Arapahovillage known as Sand Creek. It is not that so many Indians diedthere. Rather, it is how they died-and the political and cultural atmospherein which they died-that is so historically revealing. It is, moreover,representative in its savagery of innumerable other events that differ fromit only because they left behind less visible traces.Colorado at this time was the quintessence of the frontier west. Variousincidents had earlier raised tensions between the Indians there and theseemingly endless flow of white settlers who came as squatters on Cheyenneand Arapaho lands. As tempers flared, so did the settlers' rhetoric,which became inflamed with genocidal threats and promises. During theyear preceding the incident that has come to be known as the Sand CreekMassacre, a local newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, launched an incendiarycampaign that urged the Indians' extermination. "They are a dissolute,vagabondish, brutal, and ungrateful race, and ought to be wipedfrom the face of the earth," wrote the News's editor in March of 1863. In