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ENDURING LEGACY: U.S.-INDIGENOUS VIOLENCE AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN INNOCENCE IN THE GILDED AGE1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2015

Boyd Cothran
Boyd Cothran*
Affiliation:
York University
*
email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Type
Forum: Indigenous Histories of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 562 - 573
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2015 

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Footnotes

1

Adapted from Remembering The Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence by Boyd Cothran. © 2014 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu

References

NOTES

2 Transcript of “Remarks by the President on Osama Bin Laden,” May 2, 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead.

3 Elizabeth A. Harris, “Amid Cheers, a Message: ‘They Will Be Caught,’” New York Times, May 2, 2011.

4 Nicolas Schmidle, “Getting Bin Laden: What Happened that Night in Abbottabad,” The New Yorker, August 8, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/08/getting-bin-laden.

5 Neely Tucker, “American Indians object to ‘Geronimo’ as code name for bin Laden raid,” Washington Post, May 3, 2011.

6 Ledyard King, “Indian Leaders Cry Foul Over bin Laden ‘Geronimo’ Nickname,” USA Today, May 6, 2011.

7 “Native American Activist Winona LaDuke on Use of “Geronimo” as Code for Osama bin Laden: “The Continuation of the Wars Against Indigenous People” Democracy Now!, May 6, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/6/native_american_activist_winona_laduke_on.

8 For a general overview of the Modoc War, see Keith A. Murray, The Modocs and Their War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001); Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

9 Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. 2 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1888), 636.

10 Jeremiah Curtin, Myths of the Modocs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1912), v.

11 For recent works addressing the historical memory of these events and others, see Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Michael A. Elliott, Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Chip Colwell Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007); Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); Kass Fleisher, The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

12 Isenberg, Mining California; Richard White, “It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

13 Heather Cox Richardson, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn.

14 Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850–1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy After the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).

15 Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Eric T. L. Love, Race Over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

16 Klein, Kerwin Lee, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Klein subsequently repackaged this article as well as several others into his book From History to Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

17 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 93–100; 94; John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 78–137.

18 Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 10; Jordana Finnegan, Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory (New York: Cambia Press, 2008), 151–57; Christine Bold, The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

19 I rehearse this argument much more extensively in Boyd Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). See also Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 9, 12; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv–xxvi.

20 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 2009).

21 Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809, in Jefferson, Papers, 1:169; Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14

22 Cutter, Barbara, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized: Hannah Duston and the Nineteenth-Century Feminization of American Violence,” Journal of Women's History 20:2 (Summer 2008): 10–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 37.

23 James Jackson Jackson, “The First Blow—Jack's Expedition” in Northwestern Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1909), 258–65.

24 U.S. Department of the Interior, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1870), 54, 68.

25 F. A. Boutelle, “Boutelle and Scar-Faced Charley” in Northwestern Fights and Fighters, by Cyrus Townsend Brady (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1909), 265–72.

26 For more on the role of women in the Modoc War, see Cheewa James, Modoc: The Tribe That Wouldn't Die (Happy Camp, CA: Naturegraph, 2008).

27 For more on the military aspects of the war, see Erwin N. Thompson, The Modoc War: Its Military History & Topography (Sacramento: Argus Books, 1971); Keith A. Murray, The Modocs and Their War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959).

28 New York Herald, April 13, 1873; Army and Navy Journal, April 19, 1873.

29 Glazier, David, “Precedents Lost: The Neglected History of the Military Commission,” Virginia Journal of International Law 46:1 (2005): 5–81Google Scholar, especially 31–47; John Fabian Witt, Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2013), 330–35.

30 Chomsky, Carol, “The United States-Dakota War Trials: A Study in Military Injustice,” Stanford Law Review 43:1 (Nov. 1990): 13–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 George H. Williams to Ulysses S. Grant, June 7, 1873, “Regarding the Modoc Indian Prisoners” in U.S. House of Representatives, Official Copies of Correspondence Relative to the War with the Modoc Indians in 1872–73, 43rd Cong., 1st sess., Ex. Doc. 122 (Washington, DC: Adjutant-General Office, 1874), 88–90.

32 For more on the trial, see Francis S. Landrum, Guardhouse, Gallows and Graves: The Trial and Execution of Indian Prisoners of the Modoc Indian War by the U.S. Army, 1873 (Klamath Falls, OR: Klamath County Museum, 1988).

33 J. D. Howard interview, Lava Beds National Monument Research Library, transcribed by the author.

34 John S. Parke to Assistant Adjutant General, October 10, 1882, Parke Papers, Lava Beds National Monument Research Library.

35 John S. Parke, “A Visit to the Lava Beds and a Brief Account of the Modoc War of 1873,” 1–18, Parke Papers, Lava Beds National Monument Research Library.

36 SFC, April 13, 1873.

37 Cutter, “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized”; Weis, Ann-Marie, “The Murderous Mother and the Solicitous Father: Violence, Jacksonian Family Values, and Hannah Duston's Captivity,” American Studies International 36:1 (Feb. 1, 1998): 46–65Google Scholar; Humphreys, Sara, “The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston,” Canadian Review of American Studies 41:2 (2011): 149–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Elliott, Custerology, 105–6.

39 This may have been also a reference also to Colonel John Chivington's famous statement that “Nits made lice” when he ordered the deaths of some 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women, and children at Sand Creek in Colorado in 1864. However, this axiom was quite familiar by the 1870s, and it has been documented as uttered by individuals involved the Black Hawk War of 1832 and the Dakota War of 1862; see John Fabian Witt, Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: Free Press, 2013), 330, 332, 336.

40 Uncle Sam Hunting for the Modoc Flea in His Lava Bed,” Harper's Weekly, May 10, 1873; William T. Sherman to John McAlister Schofield, April 13, 1873, in U.S. Adjutant-General's Office, Letters Received, roll 21.

41 Frost, Never One Nation, 22

42 John C. Yoo to William J. Haynes II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, “Memorandum Re: Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States,” March 14, 2003. This memorandum was released to the ACLU in April 2008 and can be located at http://www.aclu.org/national-security/secret-bush-administration-torture-memo-released-today-response-aclu-lawsuit.

43 George H. Williams to Ulysses S. Grant, June 7, 1873, “Regarding the Modoc Indian Prisoners” in Ex. Doc. 122 (Washington, DC: Adjutant-General Office, 1874), 88–90.