american-holocaust

134 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTshocked at what they found. One of them, a senator who visited the siteof the massacre and "picked up skulls of infants whose milk-teeth had notyet been shed," later reported that the concerned men of Congress haddecided to confront Colorado's governor and Colonel Chivington openlyon the matter, and so assembled their committee and the invited generalpublic in the Denver Opera House. During the course of discussion anddebate, someone raised a question: Would it be best, henceforward, to tryto "civilize" the Indians or simply to exterminate them? Whereupon, thesenator wrote in a letter to a friend, "there suddenly arose such a shout asis never heard unless upon some battlefield-a shout almost loud enoughto raise the roof of the opera house-'EXTERMINATE THEM! EXTER­MINATE THEM!'" 129The committee, apparently, was impressed. Nothing ever was done toChivington, who took his fame and exploits on the road as an after-dinnerspeaker. After all, as President Theodore Roosevelt said later, the SandCreek Massacre was "as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took placeon the frontier." 130IVMeanwhile, there was California to the west, the last stop before the holocaustthat had begun on Hispaniola in 1492 would move out across thePacific, in the wake of eighteenth-century voyages to Australia, Polynesia,and beyond by Captains Cook, Wallis, Bougainville, and others. Spanishtroops had entered California overland early in the sixteenth century, whileCortes and Pizarro were still alive and basking in the glory of their conquestsof the Aztecs and the Incas. Indeed, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, whoheard stories of Spanish troops and violence in California while he wassailing off the coast in 1542, probably had been with Cortes at the fall ofTenochtitlan and with the infamous Alvarado further south. 131 In any case,wherever there was Spanish violence there was bound to be disease. Inraping native women and merely breathing on native men, the marchingSpanish soldiers spread syphilis and gonorrhea, smallpox and influenza,everywhere they went. And Cabrillo was not likely innocent himself: hiscrews were mostly conscripts, the dregs of the Spanish settlements in Mexico;there can be little doubt that diseases festered in those men that becameexplosive epidemics when spread among the natives.It once was thought that syphilis did not arrive in California until DonJuan Bautista de Anza's introduction of the "putrid and contagious" plaguein 1777, but there is no longer any doubt that the disease was presentthroughout the region well before de Anza's visit. 132 As for smallpox, influenza,and other lethal infections, they spread early and they spread far.Martin de Aguilar explored the northern California and Oregon coasts forSpain in 1603, following by twenty-four years Sir Francis Drake who had