Oh The Humanity
Oh What a Slaughter by Larry McMurtry
(Simon and Schuster 179 pp. $25.00)
When Larry McMurtry turns to non-fiction he is as potentially great as any writer in America. When the topic is as near a dear to his heart as the history of How the West was Won, the results can be positively staggering. The author of "Lonesome Dove" and "Terms of Endearment" starts with an overly long introduction -- almost an apology, really, for the grimness of his approaching subject -- and then proceeds to painstakingly document and deconstruct each of the major Indian massacres of the late 1800's. The book refers to Custer's fall at Little Bighorn but has no chapter dedicated to it. It does deal in detail with massacres starting with the Sacramento River massacre and describes every mass killing leading up to and including Wounded Knee. The white man was overwhelmingly the aggressor and many of the body counts were low, but many settlers were indeed scalped and massacred barbarically themselves. McMurtry calls these incidents "perfect meatshops" quoting a long forgotten federal cavalryman; the metaphor of the butcher shop and the slaughterhous are omnipresent.
The cast of characters is impressive and the menu of unprintable attrocities is even more generous. Suffice it to say that every appendage was severed and stuffed into every orifice and every protusion was separated and taken as trophy. Victim's scalps and scrotums were made into tobacco pouches and displayed as staus symbols, OK? Women and children on each side were not spared. It was comparable to Rwanda or the Russian pogroms or the reign of Pol Pot (except for the numbers). It was a rough time.
What counterbalances the almost unrelenting horror of this series of tales is the history and the obvious love of detail McMurtry brings to it; and also the star-studded cast of characters. Here you will learn the actual, documentable history of such quasi-mythical figures as Sitting Bull, George Custer, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Kit Carson, Nelson Miles, Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Running Bear, Lewis and Clark Generals Grant and Sheridan, Buffalo Bill Cody and William Tecumseh Sherman (whose actual quote was "the only good Indian I've ever seen was a dead one").
In short, the action is non-stop and the history is well-researched and documented whilst slightly edging the boundary of excessively "academic" writing; it is history
as novel, and as many have done before. But it is vivid and concise and written with the joie de vive only available to a writer who truly loves his subject. No one gets a pass in this history, neither Indian nor European. By the end of the surprisingly thin book there is enough blood on the pages to merit the description "perfect meatshop."
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Comments
Posted by: wesley kimler | December 22, 2005 11:31 AM
Posted by: John Kruth | January 1, 2006 10:51 AM