Oh What a Slaughter
Massacres in the American West: 1846—1890
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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!"
McMurtry's powerful prose captures the gritty essence of this tumultuous and pivotal era, and the fascinating and remarkable men and women-American and Indian, celebrated and forgotten-who shaped the West, and would kill to keep it.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 1, 2005 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781400121953
- File size: 125785 KB
- Duration: 04:22:03
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Of massacre, the noun, the Oxford Dictionary suggests butchery, general slaughter, or carnage. Thus starts the latest of Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry's books about the taming of the American West. In his rich and graphic prose, he details the most famous and violent killings between 1840 and 1890. Both settlers and American Indians were victims. Narrator Michael Prichard keeps himself unemotional as he describes women's private parts being made into hatbands and Sitting Bull being shot, along with dozens of other Sioux, during his surrender at Wounded Knee. Listeners hoping for a little disgust or even excitement from the reader will never hear it. Although Prichard's distinct voice keeps a pleasant pace, he misses a sumptuous opportunity to embellish McMurtry's skill. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine -
October 10, 2005
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. Agent, Andrew Wylie.
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