Oh What a Slaughter (6 page)

The movies, by their nature, favor only a few stars, and only a few real national heroes. Of the thousands of interesting characters who played a part in winning the West, only a bare handful have any real currency with the American public now. Iconographically, even Lewis and Clark haven't really survived, though Sacagawea has. With the possible exception of Kit Carson, none of the mountain men mean anything today. Kit Carson's name vaguely suggests the Old West to many people, but not one in a million of them will have any distinct idea as to what Kit did.

The roster of still-recognizable Westerners probably boils down to Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid, and perhaps Wild Bill Hickok. Theodore Roosevelt, a Westerner manqué, would once have made the list, but not today. Custer, Cody, and Billy the Kid are clearly the top three, generating far more imagery than any of the other candidates.

Skimpy as the image bank is for white Westerners, it is even skimpier for Indians. My guess would be that only Sacagawea, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo still ring any bells with the general public. Crazy Horse, who never allowed his image to be captured, is still important to Indians as a symbol of successful resistance, but less so to whites. Even a chief such as Red Cloud, so renowned in his day that he went to New York and made a speech at Cooper Union, is now only known to historians, history buffs, and a few Nebraskans.

Reward for Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid

Wild Bill Hickok

Buffalo Bill Cody

At the broadest level, only the white stars Custer, Cody, and Billy the Kid, and two tough Indians, Sitting Bull and Geronimo, are the people the public thinks about when it thinks about the Old West.

Sitting Bull

Geronimo

Geronimo driving a car in Oklahoma, 1908

If my argument in the previous chapter is valid, then it should be no surprise that today the Sacramento River Massacre is, of these six tragic events, much the least known. From what I can find, the first historian to give it more than a paragraph or two is David Roberts, in his excellent study of Kit Carson and John Charles Frémont: the book is called
A Newer World
. Carson was Frémont's principal guide on the popular explorer's first three expeditions into the American West.

In 1846, when the massacre occurred, there were no particularly famous Indians. Tecumseh, plenty famous in his day, had been dead since 1813. California produced no famous Indians, then or later, with the exception of the martyred Captain Jack of the Modocs. The battle for the Great Plains hadn't yet started: we are well in advance of Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and the rest.

The men who effected the massacre at the Sacramento River could probably not even have named the tribes their victims belonged to. David Roberts believes that the Indians dancing by the water were a mixture of Maidu, Wintu, and Yana, names that meant not much then and nothing now, except to very close students of Californian Indian life.

Most Indian tribes were largely unknown, except to the explorers or trappers who went among them, but, when it came to
near total obscurity, the California Indians were in a class by themselves. To the whites who slaughtered them they were merely nameless savages, the quicker killed the better. When the Gold Rush started they were swept away in the thousands, with brutal efficiency.

John Charles Frémont, the Pathfinder as he was called (though he found no paths), was aware of the Paiute tribe, to the east of the Sierras, and of the Klamaths, to the north of where he was camped at that time; but it was unlikely that he had even heard the names of the tribes he allowed his men to slaughter. Maidu. Wintu? Yana? It's doubtful that these terms meant a thing to John Charles Frémont.

To this day, for that matter, the California Indians have contributed almost nothing to the popular iconography of the West. There is, as I said, the noble Captain Jack, hero and victim.

Then there was Willie Boy, a Morongo who, mad for love, kidnapped his beloved and led the posse that pursued them on an epic, almost five-hundred-mile chase across the desert. When the game was up he killed both the girl and himself—Robert Redford starred in a movie about him. Willie Boy made his run in 1909.

The movies were revving up by that time, but the movies didn't do that much with California Indian life, although both Mary Pickford and Dolores del Rio played Ramona, from Helen Hunt Jackson's novel of the same name, about a beautiful but ill-starred half-breed girl and her doomed Indian husband.

If David Roberts is right, then it's likely that a great many Maidu, Wintu, and Yana did gather on the banks of the Sacramento River in the spring of 1846, where their numbers and demeanor soon began to frighten the local whites. Possibly the Indians had merely come to the river to practice their own spring rituals.

Willie Boy

The only force handy with sufficient strength to disperse the Indians was the group of men with Frémont, who was in California on his third exploring expedition. His first expedition, four years back, had made Frémont a national hero—he was easily America's most famous explorer, and fame had rather gone to his head.

In fact, by 1846 Frémont's principal achievements were already behind him, but neither Frémont nor anyone else suspected this at the time. Since the massacre is now mainly a footnote to Frémont's career, a word about this third expedition might be in order.