The Last Full Measure (26 page)

For the indigenous peoples, colonial warfare was defined by possibility in the face of inevitability: the possibility of localized victories set against the certainty of eventual defeat. Those
local successes, however, could be spectacular, like the massacre of Spanish troops by Aztecs on July 1, 1520—
La Noche Triste—
the Little Big Horn in 1876, the Zulu victory over the British at Isandlwana in 1879, the annihilation of Anglo-Egyptian forces by Dervishes at El Obeid in the Sudan in 1883, the Italian disaster at the hands of Ethiopian tribesmen at Adowa in 1896, or the catastrophic defeat of Spanish troops by Riffian irregulars at Annual, Morocco, in 1921.

And these extraordinary victories were crafted because indigenous forces had advantages denied to the invader. By playing to a superior knowledge of local terrain, they could outwit, surprise, and ambush the enemy. In 1883, Hicks “Pasha” (William Hicks), a British officer and a general in the Egyptian Army (although Hicks was essentially a British appointee), marched ten thousand troops (mainly Egyptian, but with a handful of European officers) out into the Sudanese desert to confront a Dervish army under the Mahdi. Hiding within the folds of wadis and hummocks at El Obeid, the Mahdists let the government troops come on and then fell on the unsuspecting invaders and killed every man jack of them, including the unfortunate Hicks, whose head was presented to the Mahdi (and through the years, now thoroughly mummified, became a powerful totem—a wiser head, one might say). “England was horrified and astonished. Lord Fitzmaurice told the House of Lords that there had not been such a complete destruction of so large an army since ‘Pharoah’s host perished in the Red Sea.’ ”
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Defeating in detail was another tactical option available to the native, and a successful one. Colonel Richard Dodge of the US Army notes with some exasperation:

The success of guerrilla bait-and-switch tactics is predicated on the willingness of someone to take the bait. The enemy has to be enticed, invited, drawn to his death. And that willingness is itself based on a convergence of factors, one of which is contempt for the “uncivilized” enemy; another is a thirst for the glory that is being denied by these “cowardly” tactics. And this aggressiveness turns around and gets him killed, as Captain W. J. Fetterman, US Cavalry, discovered.

Fetterman was stationed at Fort Phil Kearny in northeastern Wyoming, and during the latter part of 1866 the post had been involved in a series of frustrating actions with hostile Sioux, usually in the form of ambushes on the fort’s woodcutting teams. Fetterman’s commanding officer, Colonel Henry B. Carrington, was a prudent and defensive soldier who refused to rise to the bait, much to the irritation of junior officers such as William Fetterman, who, according to anecdotal accounts, “offered with eighty men to ride through the whole Sioux nation!” Fetterman shared a general contempt for natives that was echoed by a contemporary soldier, J. E. Welch, writing of the warfare of 1869: “I have never seen Indians face the music like white men.… I think it just as
impossible to make a civilized man of the Indian as it would be to make a shepherd dog of a wolf, or a manly man of a dude. They do not in my opinion possess a single trait that elevates a man above a brute.”
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On December 21, 1866, yet another logging detail from the fort was ambushed and Fetterman begged for command of the relief force. His request was granted, and as irony would have it, eighty-one men—almost the exact number with which he had previously boasted he would subdue the whole Sioux nation—rode out. Instead of going directly to the aid of the wood train, as he had been strictly commanded to do, Fetterman, desperate to make a decisive impact and, perhaps, enraged by the mocking warriors who stood on their horses and mooned him, was lured farther and farther up a valley to be ambushed by a much larger Indian force. Everyone in Fetterman’s command, armed mainly with muzzle-loading muskets, was killed with what might be called “extreme prejudice.” For this was a powerful way in which the invaded might “dissuade” the invader: by leaving a horrific calling card in the shape of mutilated bodies. Fetterman’s men had “eyes torn out and laid on the rocks; noses cut off; ears cut off; chins hewn off; teeth chopped out … brains taken out and placed on rocks with other members of the body; hands cut off; feet cut off.”
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One body was reported to have more than one hundred arrows in it (ironically it was that of James Wheatley, one of two civilians who had joined the Fetterman party in order to demonstrate the lethality of their new Henry repeater rifles).

The mutilation of bodies and the torture of prisoners, although obviously not an exclusive characteristic of colonial warfare, played a particularly important role in an imperial context. Among the colonizing nations it provided proof positive that the indigenous enemy inhabited a realm of savagery beyond the pale of the rules of civilized warfare. Native warriors became at once both utterly terrifying and completely contemptible. They were
nothing but ravening beasts, and wars of conquest could now be recast as wars of moral necessity—the crusade of light and reason against the bloody and black heart of barbarism.

Where our own barbarities are sanctioned by cultural familiarity, the practices of the “other” are always vile beyond belief. Without stumbling through a maze of moral relativism it is possible to recognize the rank hypocrisy behind this view. The conquistadores, for example, were “men who shared what to us now seems an uneven morality: slaughtering unarmed Indians in battle brought no odium, nor did turning an entire conquered population into gangs of indentured serfs. In contrast, human sacrifice, cannibalism, transvestitism, and sodomy provoked moral indignation and outrage.”
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A conquistador prisoner of war suffered the same ritualized death as did any other captive. Not that it was much consolation. Those Spanish soldiers unlucky enough to be captured during
La Noche Triste
were put to death in a public spectacle that the ancient Romans would have appreciated. Bernal Diaz del Castillo passed on an account he had heard from native witnesses:

The Spaniards also used the bodies of their slain enemies. They found that the fat from newly killed Indians “worked as an excellent salve and healing cream.”
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Slain warriors retained a potency, and sometimes had to be killed again, spiritually, through mutilation, which will ensure that they could not enjoy the pleasures of the afterlife and, more important, would be rendered powerless to revenge themselves when their killer eventually took his own journey to the nether-world.
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Being scalped, for example, condemned a North American Indian warrior to wander the outer shades of the happy hunting ground, and for that reason it was a matter of the highest importance to retrieve a comrade’s body before it could be scalped. Whites adopted the scalping habit quite early on. Peter Oliver, writing in the summer of 1778, declared: “This Scalping Business hath been encouraged, in the Colonies, for more than a Century past. Premiums have been given, frequently, by the
Massachusetts
Assemblies, for the Scalps of Indians.”
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Preventing scalping of Indians by US soldiers was sometimes a troublesome chore for officers. R. J. Smith was a teamster with Colonel Carrington’s Powder River expeditionary force of 1866 and was involved in the historic Wagon Box fight. Writing to Cyrus Brady (the author of
Indian Fights and Fighters
) in 1904, he points out: “As to the Indians carrying off all their dead and wounded, here you are again mistaken, as many of our men carried away with them scalps etc., taken from the bodies of the dead Indians.… The Indians certainly hauled off all their dead and wounded that they could, but did not expose themselves very much in order to get the dead ones near the corral.”
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Sigmund Schlesinger, a scout with Major George Forsyth at the battle of
Beecher’s Island on September 17, 1868, describes a gruesome incident in the aftermath:

The men who died with Custer at the Little Big Horn were thoroughly mutilated after death. Almost all (except George Custer) were scalped; some were decapitated and their heads taken to the Indian encampment (the Indians maintained that no men were tortured) but others were posthumously burned and further mutilated in the ritual celebrations following the battle.
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The wounded were dispatched either by warriors or by the women and youngsters who combed the battlefield afterward—a commonplace of battle in Europe up until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Faces and penises, as might be imagined, were often the centers of attention—the faces bashed in, the penises either cut off or otherwise mutilated.

An interpreter Isaiah Dorman was found, according to George Herendeen, a soldier who viewed the aftermath of the battle, with “his breast full of arrows and an iron picket pin thrusted through his testicles into the ground, pinning him down.… Dorman’s penis was cut off and stuffed in his mouth, which was regarded among the Indians as the deepest insult possible.”
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In the Fetterman massacre, many dead US soldiers were found with their
severed genitals stuffed into their mouths, as were drummer boys of the Twenty-Fourth Regiment killed at Isandlwana.
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All of the British dead had been eviscerated.

To say that the sight of dead colleagues butchered like hogs was dispiriting is an understatement. Saving the last bullet for suicide became part of the imperial mythology. To “go to your Gawd like a soldier” with a self-administered bullet to the head, as Kipling advised, was preferable to falling into the hands of the savage (or, heaven forfend, the savage’s concubine). Caught by a surge of Zulus on a narrow pass at Hlobane Mountain, in South Africa, a small group of British cavalrymen had the unenviable choice of facing certain death by assegai and war club or launching themselves over the cliff. George “Chops” Mossop “dismounted and wormed his way forward to the head of the pass, which was strewn with struggling bodies. He nudged the man beside him, asking if he thought they could get down. ‘Not a hope!’ the man replied, and to Mossop’s horror put the muzzle of his carbine in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His brains spattered Chops.”
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After the Fetterman massacre it was alleged that Fetterman and his second-in-command, Captain Frederick Brown, who, like Fetterman, had been itching and agitating for “one chance at the Indians,” committed joint suicide. According to Cyrus Brady: “Brown and Fetterman were found lying side by side, each with a bullet wound in the left temple [they were presumably both right-handed]. Their heads were burned and filled with powder around the wounds. Seeing that all was lost, they had evidently stood face to face, and each had shot the other dead with his revolver. They had both sworn to die rather than be taken alive by the Indians, and in the last extremity they had carried out their vows.”
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Brady’s account serves two related parts of the colonial mythology. First, Brown and Fetterman’s resolution not to fall alive into the hands of savages marks them as civilized warriors
who chose death over the indignity of probable torture. Their suicide is not cowardly in the sense that they are abandoning their men (Brady infers) because they chose a noble and Roman end rather than accept the disgusting death that would probably have been meted out to them by their barbarian enemy. In creating their own heroic narrative they rob the savages of their victory. Second, it reinforces the powerful idea of the blood brotherhood of the officer class, and it was the officer class that drove the engine of colonial expansion. Positive images of sacrifice were a hugely important part of the colonial story in the nineteenth century. Custer, it appears, either resisted the temptation or was killed before he could have committed suicide (a bullet wound to the temple showed no telltale marks of the powder burns that indicate suicide, and the wound to his side would have been equally as fatal as the head shot). Indian accounts assert that US soldiers did end their own lives on that Montana hillside, but there is little forensic evidence to support it.
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