Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890 [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Larry McMurtry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 29, 2005

In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked -- and marred -- the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today.

Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres -- Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children.

McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small -- Custer's famous defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead -- yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

In Larry McMurtry's own words:

"I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites -- the Sacramento River massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live nearby. None of the massacres were effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River massacre was overlooked for a very long time.

"But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood -- in time, and, often, not that much time -- will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.

"The 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, particularly the diary-literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnap."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) recounts six Western frontier massacres in this meandering mixture of memoir, literary criticism, jeremiad and history. "In most cases," McMurtry acknowledges, "the only undisputed fact about a given massacre is the date on which it occurred." Rightly enough, such disputes don't keep him from approaching these subjects with strong opinions. "Whites killed whites" at Mountain Meadows (1857); "a camp of one hundred percent peaceful Indians" was attacked at Sand Creek (1864). At Marias River (1870), Blackfeet Indians "dying anyway" of smallpox were slaughtered, and at Camp Grant (1871) "all the people killed—excepting one old man and a 'well-grown' boy—were women and children." McMurtry's easygoing voice and hop-and-skip pace leave comprehensiveness to the many books to which he refers, but his own volume would have been stronger, and more accessible to readers unfamiliar with frontier history, if it had been organized more systematically. As is, the book feels tossed off, and his passing references to contemporary massacres—in Rwanda, New York and Iraq, for example—don't add much resonance.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

A recurring theme in McMurtry's works, both fiction and nonfiction, is the difficulty in bridging the gap between myth and reality in comprehending the settlement of the West. Here, he utilizes a healthy skepticism, sharp analytical skills, and a strong sense of moral outrage to examine six massacres in the trans-Mississippi West. Five involved the slaughter of Native Americans by whites, and one involved the slaughter of whites by other whites. Several, including the Sand Creek, Mountain Meadows, and Wounded Knee massacres, are well known to aficionados of western history. Others, while more obscure, are equally as gripping in their carnage and brutality. But McMurtry is no bleeding heart out to trash white settlers or soldiers. His accounts are balanced and scrupulously fair. Although acknowledging that the truth regarding some essential details will never be known, he leaves us with the inescapable reality of the rotting corpses of men, women, and children and a gnawing sense of justice denied. This is, of course, a deeply disturbing work; however, these things happened and are part of our history. This book will make an outstanding addition to western history collections. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (November 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 074325077X
• ISBN-13: 978-0743250771
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #215,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-nine novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received an Academy Award. His most recent novel, When the Light Goes, is available from Simon & Schuster. He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A slight history of some massacres in the American West., January 31, 2006

By 

Kevin M Quigg (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890 (Hardcover)

A previous reviewer stated this correctly--this is a slight history. There is not much meat in this book, although it describes the massacres as meat shops. This is sad because the author is accomplished and this is a subject that many Americans are not familiar with. The author could have made this a better book but maybe he didn't think it was worth the time or money.

The subject of the book are six massacres in the American West. Five of these massacres had Indians as the victims and one was against a wagon train of immigrants. Who was responsible--the American settlers of the West and the American government. The author gives a very BRIEF history of each incident, and then tells us how horrible it was. I believe these were horrible events and that is why they need a more thorough research than what the author provided. That is where there needs to be a more telling story line.

This could have been a great book, but as such it is just a mere summary of some very troubled periods in the history of the American West.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice introduction to unknown western massacres., November 27, 2005

By 

lordhoot "lordhoot" (Anchorage, Alaska USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890 (Hardcover)

Larry McMurty in his latest book, retell the stories of several unknown "massacre" incidents that took place in the Americna West during the years of 1846 to 1890. The six massacres were Sacramento River in 1846 where whites wiped out whole host of California Indians, Camp Grant where hundreds of Apache Indians were wiped out in 1871, Marias River in 1871 where whole lot of Blackfeet Indians were wiped out, Sand Creek in 1864 where hundreds of Cheyenne Indians were killed off and finally Mountain Meadow where 130 whites were wiped out by other whites. There is also a coverage on Wounded Knee as well.

The author avoided the more popular and well known massacres such as Custer's Last Stand, Fetterman Massacre or the Alamo. This is a short book. I think the author intent was give an introductionary look at some these incidents and hoping that the readers will move on into greater study. Some of the massacres he wrote about, like the ones at Camp Grant, Sacramento and Marias Rivers remain relatively unknown even to this day. Their description are short. The two more well known one, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee are given bit more closer study but the book seem to be dominated by the author's coverage of Mountain Meadow Massacre where white Mormons cold-heartedly murdered 130 or so white Arkansans and looted their wagon train. This seem to interest the author the most, probably because in all other massacres, there was a common racial motivation between whites and Indians. But in Mountain Meadow, there were theology, greed, revenge and murder in the hearts of the Mormons who took part of the massacre. Author's coverage into this incident will probably incite many of the readers who are not familiar with Mountain Meadow to read deeper in other books. (After all, it took Timothy McVeigh to finally surpassed the death toll of Mountain Meadow with his bombing of the Federal Building at Oklahoma City as the worst American terrorist act in our nation's history.)

Overall, I thought the book was pretty well written, an introduction to some of these subject matters and a good starting point for future studies. The book isn't without some errors, one of them which states that Parley Pratt, a popular Mormon missionary who was murdered in Arkansas around that time period, an incident that may have led to the hard feeling against the people of that state among the Mormons of Utah, was described by the author as a "prophet" couple of times. LDS only have one prophet and he's the leader of their church. In that time period, that prophet would have been Bingham Young. This and several other minor errors marks this book. But overall, its an interesting, somewhat educational reading material that should be regarded as a quick read.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brevity not always the soul of wit., April 21, 2006

By 

Monty Rainey (New Braunfels, TX) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846--1890 (Hardcover)

Prolific fiction novelist Larry McMurtry takes a break from his usual venue with a look into some of the American West's' more infamous massacres with OH WHAT A SLAUGHTER: MASSACRES IN THE AMERICAN WEST 1846 - 1890. This is a slight work at under 200 pages, but is good, easy reading that might serve to promote further examination by the reader on the subject matter covered. And of course, as always, McMurtry's writing style is its usual prize winning form.

McMurtry begins by putting the legendary massacres of the old west into perspective by first defining what might constitute a massacre. Here, he has focused only upon massacres with over 100 victims. All totaled, massacres of this caliber in the American West equal far less than the number of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When considering the 2002 vicious mutilation of over 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, it makes the killing fields of North America look like a playground. These facts alone, at so early an entry in the book, will undoubtedly turn away revisionists from giving credibility to the work, but the facts do indeed, speak for themselves.

McMurtry lends a degree of balance to his work by presenting the subject matter (massacres) for what they are and avoids, as some reviewers have indicated, making it a "white man - bad, red man - good" politically correct portrayal. His first presentation is that of the Mountain Meadow massacre, in which, Mormons and Paiute Indians slaughtered somewhere around 125 - 140 whites of the Francher party whose families were in covered wagons traveling through southern Utah.

Each of the other massacres involve white on red atrocities. Some might ask why McMurtry did not include the annihilation of Custer and the 7th at Little Big Horn. In the opening chapter, McMurtry differentiates this as this was face to face battle between opposing armies, not the attack of innocents such as at Sand Creek.

Sand Creek is the next entry in the book, and like all of the massacres studied, they are lacking depth. This is a most enjoyable read, but throughout, it seems to have been a rushed piece of work. McMurtry writes so well, its impossible not to like reading his work, but these essays are more about the consequences and debates centered around the events than they are about the events themselves. I don't necessarily find fault in that, because by setting the readers curiosity in motion, the reader is spurred towards further investigation of the subject matter. And for that, McMurtry has supplied an ample bibliography on each of the events studied.

This is a very enjoyable book. Shakespeare said, "brevity is the soul of wit", but in this case, brevity hurt the final outcome. I would have certainly rated this book as a must read had it only contained more critical detail.

Monty Rainey
www.juntosociety.com