Title:        Oh What I Slaughter

Author:     Larry McMurtry

Genre:      Early American History

Format:    4 CDs (Unabridged)

Synopsis:

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 currently 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 defeat 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 horror they had committed. Nephi Johnson, one of the participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, died crying, "Blood, blood, blood!"

Review:

A suitably cheerless tour of several 19th-century massacres, guided by the increasingly gloomy master of all things Wild West. Having written of Blue Duck, the Texas Rangers, Billy the Kid and others handy with a gun, McMurtry (The Colonel and Little Missie, 2005, etc.) is well versed in the business of slaughter: "What massacres usually do," he writes by way of welcome, "is reduce human beings to the condition of meat, though the bits of meat will be less tidily arranged than the cuts would normally be in a decent butcher shop." Such is the spirit in which McMurtry visits the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where, in 1857, a mixed group of Mormons and Paiute Indians slaughtered 140 westbound settlers from Arkansas, both to get at their fat cattle and to chase away "gentiles" from Utah. The male settlers were shot by Mormons, the females and children bludgeoned by Paiutes; either way, they wound up as "in effect a meat mountain." So, too, did the unfortunate "peace Indians," Cheyenne mostly, who were butchered at Sand Creek in 1864 by white militiamen led by a thunderous fundamentalist preacher; and so too did the Apaches slaughtered at Camp Grant, Ariz., in 1871, by a mob of white vigilantes, Hispanic ranch hands and even Indians; and so, too, did the unfortunate Sioux massacred in the snows of Wounded Knee in 1890, who believed that their Ghost Dance would keep away the bullets. (Interestingly, McMurtry remarks, similar ideas were afoot all over the world, always arrayed against white imperialists.) If McMurtry has a thesis, it is to show that the nervous doctrine of the preemptive strike seems always to be a precursor to massacre-a doctrine "President George W. Bush has recentlyrevived." But it needs no real thesis; the mayhem speaks for itself. Minor McMurtry, but, as always, superbly written: dark reading for a Western campfire surrounded by ghosts. – Kirkus Reviews