More than perhaps any other incident, the aftermath of the Camp Grant Massacre illustrates the prevailing attitudes that blocked justice for reservation Indians.
This tragedy had occurred in April 1871, when two leading citizens of Tucson led a group of 140 Papago Indians and Mexicans on an Indian hunting foray. The justification of the expedition was a set of attacks falsely attributed to Apaches living in the vicinity of a US military station at Camp Grant. Disregarding the small matter of proof for their allegations, the raiders struck without warning and caught the Apache settlement while most of the men were absent. In fact, only eight of the 144 Indians ‘ravished, wounded… clubbed to death, hacked to pieces or brained by rocks’ were male.
It was typical of the murderous mood in the American West that in their coverage of what one historian has called ‘the blackest page in the Anglo-Saxon records of Arizona’, the Denver News congratulated the killers ‘on the fact that permanent peace arrangements have been made with so many, and we only regret that the number was not double’.
Eastern opinion, however, was far from sympathetic to the action and at President Grant’s insistence, the ringleaders were eventually brought to trial. After a five-day hearing it took just nineteen minutes’ deliberation for the jury to find the murderers not guilty.
Source:
Cocker, Mark. “The Enemy and the People.” Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples. Grove Press, 2001. 220-21. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Thrapp, Conquest of Apacheria, p. 90, 92.
Lockwood, The Apache Indians, p. 178.
Roberts, Once They Moved, p. 74.
Further Reading:
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