I’m reading Larry McMurtry’s 2005 history, Oh What a Slaughter Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890, which is, as the title suggests, a history of massacres – mostly by white settlers against natives – in the old west. None of the slaughters he covers includes a death count that rises above 200. Compared to the slaughter of Armenians by the Turks, the Cleansings of Stalin, the Holocaust, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, and the recent genocide in Rwanda – which include death counts ranging from 800,000 (Rwanda) to 20,000,000 (Stalin) – these Massacres of the Old West seem minor incidents. They were not minor incidents to the victims. Also, the events he covers often involve family men with no real history of pathological violence. These massacres were not the products of men who seem to embody evil the way Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot do. McMurtry’s own grandparents pioneered Archer County, Texas, in the 1870’s. He writes about the constant threat of attack they faced from Kiowa and Comanche raiders, or from bands of Indians drifting south from Fort Sill. They homesteaded just 15 miles from the infamous Warren Wagon Train Raid, in which several teamsters were dismembered and burned by Kiowas. His grandparents did not have a waking moment (or even a sleeping one) which was not clouded over, to some degree, by this sense of dread. The tension must have been unimaginable.
Something of it is captured, I think, in the opening scenes of John Ford’s classic Western, The Searchers, (and captured even better, I think, in Alan LeMay’s novel). It is sunset. And the sunset over the desert is breathtaking. But the sun sets amidst dread because rancher Aaron Edwards hears an owl’s hoot that is not quite an owl’s hoot. His dog sniffs something and whimpers, and He knows – they are about to be attacked.
It is this constant tension and dread that McMurtry feels is the hidden factor behind much of the carnage he considers. He writes: “This deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary literature of the pioneers…In my opinion this grinding, long-sustained apprehension played its part in the ultimate resort to massacre.” (p.6).
This helps me understand. It wasn’t just greed, racism, religious zealotry, or bloodthirstiness – although each person who participated in group slaughter may have been motivated, to a degree, by a mixed bag of factors. It seems to me McMurtry is right. The constant, unrelenting dread that weighed upon natives and settlers brought events to the tipping point.
In the same way, learning about the Great Awakening (1720-1750) helped me understand how we sustained a lengthy, painful revolution against the British crown. It is one thing for men educated at William & Mary, Harvard, and the College of New Jersey to read Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and formulate ideas about democracy which lead them to believe Independence is necessary – but what about the farmer, the cooper, the tinker, the printer, the apothecary who only reads the Bible and the newspaper if he reads anything at all? These men and their wives heard preaching every Sunday. Most of them were members of denominations who were here because of religious oppression in the mother country. So when men like Muhlenburg, here in Virginia, preached that “Tyranny is Idolatry,” their message resonated and was received. Without this religious factor, I don’t understand the American Revolution.
These hidden factors are like air we breathe– not readily noticeable, but ubiquitous, and necessary.
There are so many things I don’t understand about “people” (the species), and I know that my lack of understanding is caused by my inability to identify the hidden factor – the constant influence of that thing I haven’t perceived yet. Why do people touch something they know will burn them? Why won’t drivers merge in a timely manner? Why do the Detroit Lions still have fans?
The great mystery to me, though, is how someone can continue to refuse the Grace of God. I couldn’t wait till my tenth birthday before receiving it in baptism, and rarely wait till 10 am each day before I have to access it through repentant prayer. When it comes to Grace I have to have instant gratification. And so, as a communicator of the Gospel I am at a great disadvantage – because I am completely clueless as to why a person who knows she (or he) is in need of baptism would refuse so simple an act for so great a gift. This hidden factor is almost certainly something different for each person – but I’d still like to know. If you are such a person would you tell me why?
Understanding why Pioneers and Indians massacred each other – after the fact – doesn’t make any of them less dead. But if I knew why you resist the gift of eternal life I (or someone wiser than I am) might be able to tip things the other way.
