Word: odhams
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...This much we know at the outset of Shadows at Dawn, by Brown University historian Karl Jacoby. We also know who these attackers were, for the most part: an unlikely alliance of white settlers, Spanish-speaking landholders known as vecinos and members of an opposing tribe, the Tohono O'odham. But rather than tie these four groups' tales together into a standard history of what became known as the Camp Grant Massacre - one of the most brutal and sensational acts in the American Southwest of the late 19th century - Jacoby breaks them out separately, to better unpack what he calls...
...history as a story of Euro-American progress, the Indian wars had become something of an embarrassment. ... the image of white men [and massacre instigators]married to Mexican women and only able to avenge themselves against the Apache through an alliance with the territory's Mexicans and [Tohono O'odham] fit poorly with the narrative of white mastery. ... The tendency to see Anglos as the primary actors in the region's historical drama not only bleached the polyglot character of the early U.S. borderlands out of many studies; it also rendered an episode like the Camp Grant Massacre a problematic...
...pleasant surprise, then, that much of the rest of Shadows at Dawn is a crisply readable history - four of them, in fact, with the Apache, the Anglos, the vecinos and the O'odham allotted two chapters each. Jacoby does a good job outlining the causes of the massacre from each point of view, whether historical, cultural or geographical. In some cases, maybe too good a job: the litany of abuses attributed to the Apache by their attackers as justification for the massacre reads less like a Southwestern Rashomon and more like Murder on the Orient Express - every hand...
...limits of compassion are also being tested on the Tohono O'odham Nation. About twice the size of Delaware, the tribe's reservation shares 65 miles of border with Mexico. Like the residents of the small Arizona towns just to the east, the Native Americans, many of whom live without running water and electricity, are overwhelmed. The Nation's hospital is often packed with migrants who become dehydrated while crossing the scorching desert, where summertime temperatures reach upwards of 110°. The undermanned tribal police force helps the border patrol round up as many as 1,500 illegals...
Although Julius Elias came out on top with 2,030,000 readers, everyone knew his Herald was losing money and nearly everyone predicted its circulation would slump heavily following the truce. Last fortnight Chairman Elias complacently told Odham's shareholders, in annual meeting, just what was what. Excerpts...
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