Product Description

In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked -- and marred -- the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today.

Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres -- Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children.

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 famous defeat at Little Big Horn 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 horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

In Larry McMurtry's own words:

"I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites -- the Sacramento River massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live nearby. None of the massacres were effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River massacre was overlooked for a very long time.

"But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood -- in time, and, often, not that much time -- will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.

"The deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary-literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary-literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnap."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #153748 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
Of massacre, the noun, the Oxford Dictionary suggests butchery, general slaughter, or carnage. Thus starts the latest of Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtrys 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 womens 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 Prichards distinct voice keeps a pleasant pace, he misses a sumptuous opportunity to embellish McMurtrys skill. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
A recurring theme in McMurtry's works, both fiction and nonfiction, is the difficulty in bridging the gap between myth and reality in comprehending the settlement of the West. Here, he utilizes a healthy skepticism, sharp analytical skills, and a strong sense of moral outrage to examine six massacres in the trans-Mississippi West. Five involved the slaughter of Native Americans by whites, and one involved the slaughter of whites by other whites. Several, including the Sand Creek, Mountain Meadows, and Wounded Knee massacres, are well known to aficionados of western history. Others, while more obscure, are equally as gripping in their carnage and brutality. But McMurtry is no bleeding heart out to trash white settlers or soldiers. His accounts are balanced and scrupulously fair. Although acknowledging that the truth regarding some essential details will never be known, he leaves us with the inescapable reality of the rotting corpses of men, women, and children and a gnawing sense of justice denied. This is, of course, a deeply disturbing work; however, these things happened and are part of our history. This book will make an outstanding addition to western history collections. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Great history
Good information. Too bad Larry doesn't do more non-fiction because this is very good.

Random Thoughts
Larry McMurtry, who used to develop his characters in such elaborate ways, seems to have gone to outling his books in the last number of years. "Oh what a Slaughter" is another one of those "is this really a book or a magazine article?" books. Indeed, a collection of his random thoughts on random subjects would, together, make for a rather interesting book. As it is, I wait and buy these later works of his off the sale racks where they are priced more towards their real value. I do so because I still like reading McMurtry; even as often as he's disappointed me lately. However, I did enjoy his observations about massacres in US History.

McMurtry is short on facts and longer on thoughts (nothing really qualifies as "long" in this book). He has discerned a number of traits common to massacres and he shares them with us as they repeat themselves and ignores them when they don't. His thumbnail sketches of 6 particular historic massacres would be helpful to many a student cramming for a test on the subject. Even so, enough trivial facts worked their way into the book to satisfy my need for something more than what I already knew. In fact, I was amazed that the next book I read '"Walker" and "The Ghost Dance"' (by Derek Walcott) had, as one of its' main characters, a person whom I believe I met for the first time in "Oh what a Slaighter". I even knew ahead of time that her son would die and what the cause of death was. For that, and a few other kernels of knowlege, I am glad I read this book. McMurtry and I don't always see eye to eye (I'm sure he's found a way to live with that sad fact) but I guess the only editing I would have done on "Oh what a Slaughter" would have been to remove the word "unfortunate" when he made reference to a particular current group of combatants. This book is so lean on words that there aren't anymore to spare.

A Narrow Audience
Mr. McMurtry has written an extended essay/reflection on "pre-emptive stikes", the moral code we live by as a nation, and then tied it briefly to our current policies in IRAQ and the aftermath of 9/11. His subject is several famous, and not so famous massacres in western lore, and his primary purpose is to draw moral conclusions that connect us to today's events. He doesn't really go into any real explaination of the massacres, so you will need to have know about them from other sources in order to understand his message. I read this book just after completing Hampton Sides' "Blood and Thunder", which gave me the background of most of the massacres mentioned. Had I read these books in reverse order, I wouldn't have understood what Mr. McMurty was trying to say at all.