Quotes about the Baker Massacre

Quotes about the Baker Massacre by Bob Juneau“Will the Indians remain quiet now, do you think?” Asked an anxious settler of Lieutenant Doane, of the Cavalry, when the expedition was returningfrom the Marias. “Well, I can’t say,”returned the Lieutenant,”but there are certainly one hundred and seventy-three very good arguments in favor of their remaining quiet, lying out on the Marias!”-Death, Too, For The-Heavy-RunnerBy Ben Bennett “The people of the European race in coming into the New World have not really sought to make friends of the native population, or to make adequate use of the plants, or the animals indigenous to this continent, but rather to exterminate everything they found here and to supplant it with plants and animals to which they were accustomed. -Ethnobiologist Melvin Gilmore, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire “This world here belongs to us, they add. God, in refusing the first inhabitants the capacity to become civilized, has destined them in advance to inevitable destruction. The true owners of this continent are those who know how to take advantage of its riches. Satisfied with this reasoning, the American goes to church, where he hears a minister of the Gospel repeat to him that men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being, who has made them all in the same mould, has imposed on them the duty to help one another.” -Alexis de Tocqueville, Flyboys by James Bradley “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races willalmost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” -Charles Darwin, Flyboys by James Bradley “Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion….That the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world hold sway.” -Teddy Roosevelt, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hatingand Empire Building by Richard Drinnon “In spite of certain most objectionable details….it was on the whole as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.” -Teddy Roosevelt, commenting on the Sand Creek Massacre from Flyboys by James Bradley “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” -Teddy Roosevelt, from Flyboys by James Bradley“What has miserable, inefficient Mexico-with her superstitution, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many-what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!” -Walt Whitman, from Flyboys by James Bradley By the time of Ieyasu Tokugawa’s ascension as Shogun, Portuguese and Spanish missionaries had made more than 300,000 converts in Japan. But Tokugawa noticed something was very Different about this barbarian religion from the West. Shintoism, the native animist religion of Japan, and Buddhism, which had been imported from India via China, were inclusionary faiths. Christianity excluded other beliefs. Tokugawa soon became suspicious of a religion whose very First Commandment required loyalty to one jealous, non-Japanese god. Tokugawa has also heard stories of how other Countries had been subjugated after allowing missionaries in. As one Japanese writer observed, “When those barbarians plan to subdue a country they start by opening commerce and watch for a sign of weakness. If an opportunity is presented they will preach their alien religionto captivate the people’s hearts. Once the People’s allegiance has been shifted, they can be manipulated and nothing can be done to stop it.” Convinced that he could not establish a stable peace if the people’s allegiance was to a gaizin god, in 1614, Tokugawa ordered all missionaries banished. -from Flyboys by James Bradley George Combe, who was the most influential Phrenologist in the United States as well as Great Britain, stressed the importance of Genetic inheritance.,Combe said at the end of the 1830s that the Existing races of native American Indians show skulls inferior in their moral and intellectual development to those of the Anglo-Saxon race, and that, morally and intellectually, these Indians are inferior to their Anglo-Saxon invaders, and have receded before them.-from Race And Manifest Destiny By Reginald Horsman The German Friedrich Tiedemann (as well as the American Samuel George Morton) used millet seed and shot to demonstrate the differences or similarities between the skull capacities of the different races. From this brain size and intelligence were deduced. -from Race And Manifest Destiny by Reginald Horsman To calculate brain size he sealed all but oneof a skull’s openings and filled it with mustard seed, then weighed the seed. He then correlated the amount of mustard seed with intelligence, morality, cultural development, and national character. Morton’s experiments proved that “eighty-four cubic inches of Indian brain had to compete against, and would eventually succumb before, ninety-six cubic inches of Teuton brain [which] comforted many Americans, for now they could find God’s hand and not their own directing the extinction of the Indian.” In fact, the White skulls Morton examined “nearly all belonged to White Men who had been hanged as felons.”-from The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley The history of the border white man’s connection with the Indians is a sickening record of murder, outrage, robbery, and wrongs committed by the former as the rule, and occasional savage outbreaks and unspeakably barbarous deeds of retaliation by the latter as the exception….The testimony of some of the highest military officers of the United States is on the record to the effect that, in our Indian Wars, almost without exception, the first aggressions have been made by the white man, and the assertion is supported by every civilianof reputation who has studied the subject. -Board of Indian Commissioners, Nov. 23, 1869 Report, from Celluloid Indians by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick In addition to the class of robbersand outlaws who find impunity in their nefarious pursuits upon the frontiers, there is a large class of professedly reputable men who use every means in their power to bring on Indian Wars, for the sake of the profit to be realized from the presence of troops and the expenditure of government funds in their midst. They proclaim death to the Indians at all times, in words and publications, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. They incite the lowest class of men to the perpetration of the darkest deeds against their victums, and, as judges and jurymen, shield them from the justice of their crimes. Every crime committed by a white man against an Indian is concealed or palliated; every offense committed by an Indian against a white man is borne on the wings of the post or the telegraph to the remotest corner of the land, clothed with all the horrors which the reality or imagination can throw around it….In his most savage vices the worst Indian is but the imitator of bad white men on the border. -Board of Indian Commissioners, Nov.23, 1869 Report from Celluloid Indians by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick “The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. …The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent. But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm.” -Standing Bear of the Sioux from Celluloid Indians by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick Two days later, on March 5, the Chicago Tribune further reported that General Sully had written to the Indian Bureau “expressing grave doubt Whether the band surprised and murdered had taken any part in the late depredations,” and adding new figures from Lt. Pease to the effect that “the lives of eighteen women and nineteen children, none of them more than three years of age, and many of them much younger, some of whom were wounded, were not spared by the soldiers.” Wrote the paper:”The affair is looked on at the Interior Department as the most disgraceful butchery in the annals of our dealings with the Indians.” -from Death, Too, For the-Heavy-Runner By Bill Bennett “I endorse the order of General Phil Sheridan,” he told the House. “I endorse the act of General Hancock. I endorse the conduct of Colonel Baker.” “I desire to ask the gentleman,” interrupted Congressman George Hoar of Massachusetts,”if he means to say that he approves the killing of these women and children in cold blood, when there were no arms in their hands.” “I will answer the question fairly and squarely,” replied Cavanaugh, “in the words of General Harney after the battle of Ash Hollow, years ago…they are nits, and will become lice. I endorse…the act of Colonel Baker.” -Montana Congressman James T. Cavanaugh,from Death, Too, For The-Heavy-RunnerOn January 23, 1870, Maj. Eugene M. Baker and two squadrons of the Second Cavalry attacked and all but obliterated a Piegan village on Montana’s Marias River. Humanitarians branded the affair a deliberate and unprovoked massacre of peaceful Indians, women and children as well as men. Sherman and Sheridan defended Baker, pointing out that these Peigans were demonstrably guilty of depredations and that the casualty figures belied the charge of massacre. Of 173 killed, 120 were men and 53 were women and children, while 140 women and children were taken captive and later released. The army’s protestations, however, were overwhelmed by columns of sensationalism that filled eastern newspapers, and Baker stood convicted by public opinion of unspeakable barbarism. -from Frontier Regulars by Robert M. Utley