Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (32 page)

In Massacres
of the M ountains,
an early history of the Indian wars of the Far West by J. P. Dunn, published in 1886, the author took pains to distinguish the mores of the Plains Indians, on the run and highly victimized by whites, from the mores of the eastern

Indians in less desperate times. He quoted a Captain Johnson regarding the treatment of women ( white, Mexican, or Indian ) by the Apaches: "Women when captured are taken as wives by those who capture them. . . . The most unfortunate thing which can befall a captive woman is to be claimed by two persons.
In
this case she is either shot or delivered up for indiscriminate violence." This system of adjudication, Dunn said, was the standard Apache method of preventing quarrels. "Other property was similarly treated.
If
a horse was claimed as booty by two
·
warriors, they must adjust their diff erences speedily or the animal was shot."

Discussing the causes that led to the Sand Creek Massacre, in which the Colorado cavalry slaughtered a village of Cheyenne and sexually mutilated the bodies of men, women and children, Dunn wrote:

There is a certain amount of justice in the theory of meting
to
a man in his own measure [italics mine], and the people of Colorado had old scores to pay in the accounts of murder, robbery and rape. The treatment of women by any Indians is usually bad, but by the Plains Indians especially so. When a woman is captured by a war party she is the common property of all of them, each night, till they reach their village, when she becomes the special property of her in dividual captor, who may sell or gamble her away when he likes.
If

TWO
srunms
IN AMERICAN mSTORY
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she resists she is "staked out,"* that is to say, four pegs are driven into the ground and a hand or foot tied to each, to prevent strug gling. She is also beaten, mutilated, or even killed for resistance.

To support his argument Dunn quoted from the sworn state ment of Lucinda Ewbanks, twenty-four, as taken down by two cavalry officers. Mrs. Ewbanks' story and those of Laura Roper, seventeen, Mrs. Martin, and Mrs. Snyder, who hanged herself before the cavalry arrived to rescue her, were well known to the people of Colorado and their misfortunes were used to inflame the troops to commit similar atrocities against Indian women at Sand Creek in the name of vengeance.

Lucinda Ewbanks was captured in August, 1864, when a Cheyenne war party attacked a frontier settlement on the Little Blue River in Kansas. She was taken to the lodge of an old chief whose name she could not remember. According to her sworn statement, "He forced me, by the most terrible threats and men aces, to yield my person to him. He treated me as his wife. He then traded me to Two Face, a Sioux, who did not treat me as a wife, but forced me to do all menial labor done by squaws, and he beat me terribly. Two Face traded me to Black Foot, a Sioux, who treated me as his wife, and because I resisted him, his squaws abused and illused me. . . . I was better treated among the Sioux than the Cheyennes; that is, the Sioux gave me more to eat. With the Cheyennes I was of ten hungry."

Lucinda Ewbanks' short statement, notarized by the two cavalry officers, was appended to an apologia by Governor Evans of Colorado for the Sand Creek Massacre.

The most famous captivity rape of the West, the story of Josie Meeker, Arvilla Meeker and Flora Ellen Price, was printed as a government report by the U.S. House of Representatives. Their reluctant testimony, given under emotional duress, formed the explosive core of the White River Ute Commission Investigation, an investigation that sealed the fate of the Utes in Colorado.

*
In
1971
one of the Vietnam veterans interviewed by Lucy Komisar told her, "We were recons and we went into a village in Quang Tri Province and they had ARVN's working there. They captured a medic, as they called her, and her boyfriend, who was with her. Automatically they killed him. They just kind of staked her out on the stakes, you know, on pungi stakes, and just everybody repeatedly raped her, even some of the GI's from my platoon."

146
AGAINST OUR WILL

Nathan Meeker, a newspaperman, poet and agrarian reformer, took a job as Indian Agent in Colorado with the messianic aim of turning the Utes into farmers. When the Utes resisted Meeker's attempts to "civilize" them, the thwarted agent grew increasingly sympathetic to the Colorado mining interests that desired the removal of all Indians from the gold-rich territory. Distrust and minor skirmishes multiplied on both sides, and Meeker finally sent a telegram to Washington calling for the cavalry as a show of force. The cavalry marched to the edge of the Ute reservation at Milk River and met with several bands of armed Utes who demanded to know why they had come. Tensions rose, a shot was fired and general fighting broke out. News of the battle quickly spread to White River, where Meeker had his Agency compound. The White River Utes descended on the unarmed compound on Sep tember 29, 1879. They murdered Meeker and his workmen and carried off the three women. The Utes surrendered their female captives twenty-three days later.

Government Agent Charles Adams, who arranged the rescue, conducted the interrogation of the three women. He drew forth the story of their outrage on his second try. The women had compel ling reasons for their initial unwillingness to testify. Flora Ellen Price's husband had been murdered in the massacre. Lef t a widow with two small children at the age of sixteen, she maintained that if the story of her rape became public knowledge it would kill her chance for remarriage. Arvilla Meeker, sixty-four, the murdered Indian Agent's wife, was a devoutly religious pioneer woman who was used to keeping her own counsel. As an example of the sexual mores of the time, her own husband had never been able to mention the subject of obstetrics to her, although she had birthed five children. Yet it was she, and not her solemn daughter, Josie, who eventually demanded that the women's full story be told. Josie Meeker, twenty-two, was perhaps in the greatest conflict. She felt a strong allegiance to many of the local Utes who had studied at her Agency school. Possessed of unquenchable social conscience, she, more than the others, understood the political implications of a public admission of rape, and to what ends the admission would be used.

The three women -gave their testimony to Adams in secret, and for a full year af terward they continued to deny it in public to any reporter who questioned them. Their denials did them little

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good. The press had a field day with innuendos and Josie was a special target. The Denver Tribune hinted that Josie's captor had been a lovelorn admirer and a story circulated that she had con tracted syphilis during her captivity.
In
fact this may well have been the case for she died three years later in Washington, where the government had given her a secretarial job as indemnification. During the last three years of her life Josie Meeker managed to maintain her social values. On her own time she taught a Sunday School class for black children. Her students went to her funeral.

Recorded in the newly developed Pitman shorthand and set in type by the Government Printing Office, the women's testimony comes through in all of its ambivalence, fear and modesty.

Josrn
MEEKER :
When our room filled with smoke we ran out. The Indians were so busy carrying off blankets and goods that they did not see us at first. We ran across the street and through the gate into the field.

Q.-Were the Indians on foot or horseback?

A.-On foot. They lef t the blankets and called to us to stop. One called to me and said, "Come to me. No shoot you." I said, "Going to shoot?" he said, "No." I said, "Better not," and then he took me down to the camp.

Q.-Who was that?

A.-Pah-sone. I looked back. One had hold of Mrs. Price and one hold of Mother.

Q.-How long did Pah-sone keep you? A.-All the time.

Q.-Did Pah-sone treat you well while you were with him? A.-Well? I do not know. No better than what I expected.

Q.-This of course is an official investigation and I must get at all the facts.
It
is not to be published in the newspapers or anything of that kind. I wish to hear the full truth in regard to the matter.

A.-Of course we were insulted a good many times; we expected to be.

Q
.
-What do you mean by insult, and what did it consist of? A.-Of outrageous treatment at night.

Q.-Am I to understand that they outraged you several times at night?

A.-Yes, sir.

Q.-Did they threaten to kill you if you did not comply?

A.-He did not threaten to kill-Pah-sone did not-only on one occasion. I asked him if he wanted to kill me. He said, "Yes." I said,

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