(Looks like I’m no longer writing reviews for INDenverTimes, as the book editor I was going through is no longer with the paper. So, following is the last review I had written and ready to send. Recalling that the INDenverTimes was once the Rocky Mountain News, you’ll probably get exactly where I was going with this.)

Larry McMurtry’s Oh, What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890 is an odd little book.  Weighing in at 192 pages, it’s reminiscent of the gift books that line the shelves of big box bookstores — books for people who don’t really like books — only aimed at the aspiring comparative genocide scholar as opposed to the amateur cocktail mixologist or political humorist.  It is exactly what its size and title suggest: a brief overview of six massacres tied together by a couple of common themes, including one that should be fairly recognizable in our own era:

President George W. Bush has recently revived the doctrine of the preemptive strike, a doctrine far from new in military or quasi-military practice. Most of the massacres I want to consider were thought by their perpetrators to be preemptive strikes, justified by the claim that the attacks were punishment for past harassments by the native tribes.

It’s not the first time that point has been made, not even for the massacres McMurtry describes.  In his criminally neglected Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Extermination, David Svaldi pursues the same thread, detailing the campaign by territorial governor John Evans and Rocky Mountain News founder William Byers to drum up an extermination campaign against the local Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians.  Byers lead the charge with editorials entitled “Exterminate Them!” and the like, and between the two of them, they managed to work the Denver public into a frenzy with conspiracy theories of a pan-Indian uprising.  By the time all was said and done, the Third Colorado Volunteer Cavalry Regiment had butchered hundreds of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians at Sand Creek, and then returned to Denver, their saddle pommels, hats, and weapons adorned with the trophies they’d taken from the Indians – trophies that included scalps, hacked up genitalia, and at least one fetus.  These trophies were displayed to an adoring Denver public in a parade, a tour of the local saloons, and at Denver’s premiere opera house, The Apollo Theater.

It’s one hell of a story, and, as laid out by David Svaldi, a case study in the application of carefully coordinated hysteria in the service of genocide.  In McMurtry’s hands, however, it’s barely even interesting.  From the first paragraph of his closing remarks in the section on the Sand Creek Massacre:

I am not sure that Sand Creek admits of any conclusion.  Two peoples with widely differing cultures were rubbing against each other, constantly and insistently.  The Indians were trying to defend their cherished way of life, the whites to make that way of life vanish so they could go on with their settling, farming, townbuilding, etc.

That seems anemic, to put it mildly, as if McMurtry just ran out of steam somewhere along the way. Likewise, his choice to close the section with a comparison of the Sand Creek massacre to the mutilation visited upon Captain William Fetterman’s men at Fort Kearney by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors is disappointing.  Besides corpse mutilation, the two events have nothing in common, the most glaring difference being that all of Fettermen’s men were soldiers – soldiers who had, not incidentally, attacked the warriors who ended up decimating them— not the women, children, and elders overwhelmingly representing the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre.

I’m probably not being entirely fair to Oh What a Slaughter by reading too closely, however.  Nor by measuring it against the likes of Svaldi’s book.  I’m a long-time fan of McMurtry’s, but as a fan, I’ve noticed that some of his works are better considered as, say, conversations, or diversions.  This one definitely falls into that category.  It is a slight thing, not always as considered as it could be, but it is also erudite and entertaining — at least for those of us who are entertained by massacre.  And if Hollywood is any indication, that’s a number that includes most of us.