Oh What a Slaughter, by Larry McMurtry

By Allen M. Jones, 12-05-05

Seems to me that the art of writing lies largely in the ability to disguise your efforts, fade into the authorial background, make it look easy. Like most other forms of personal expression (ballet to beadwork), if you can see the sweat then somebody’s doing something wrong. When he’s hitting on all cylinders, nowhere is there a more deceptively accessible writer than Larry McMurtry. He’s a pal hunkering down over his heels, blowing into his coffee, spinning a good yarn. His best novels – Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers – are all ambushes of emotion, everyman oomphs of grief and redemption. No flourishes of purple prose, no narrative strutting. Here’s just a handful of people you can care about, and here are some of the bad (and good) things that happen to them. His life’s masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove, is a staggering achievement of invisible research and camouflaged, authorial labor. Anyone who can read about the death of Augustus McCrae without threatening tears has a chunk of vulcanized rubber for a heart.

In addition to his art however, McMurtry is also a businessman, perching over his typewriter every morning to peck out a living. His weakest books – sequels to Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, and Lonesome Dove – have all been written, Hollywood-like, toward previous successes. Alas, calculations of accounting rarely allow for artfulness. (When McMurtry peremptorily killed off his character Newt Dobbs in the first pages of The Streets of Laredo, it damn near made me want to go down to Texas and stand up on the poor kid’s behalf: “Yo, McMurtry. Getcher ass out here.") His most recent book, the slim and dismissible Oh What a Slaughter (Simon & Schuster, $25), while gifted with a great title, and valuable as a timely reminder of tragedy, has about it the distinct air of contract-fulfillment, of an author anxious to add one more book to an already mammoth personal bibliography.

McMurtry’s purpose here is to recount, in distilled form, a half-dozen Western massacres (Sacramento River, 1846; Mountain Meadows, 1857; Sand Creek, 1864; Marias River, 1870; Camp Grant, 1871; Wounded Knee, 1890). He describes, he compares, he makes generalizations. He tries to show us ourselves, and our own human potential for violence. Early on, he writes, “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."

Sounds good. Indeed, if you were pitching this book to a publisher, should be a slam dunk. Since Wallace Stegner’s death, there is perhaps no one better qualified to make sweeping statements on Western culture and history than Larry McMurtry. From his familial background (Texas homesteaders) to his own experiences in cowboying, bookselling, writing and research, McMurtry is pedigreed like nobody’s business. This is a book he should have been able to write in his sleep.

Maybe he did. Reading through these brief 160 pages of blood-letting, you have a distinct impression of authorial shortcutting, of value judgments in the interests of economy, a rushing past certain events to linger on others. The Marias River Massacre of the Blackfeet (1870), for example, receives a desultory four pages. In driving close to the site of the Sand Creek Massacre, he describes how he didn't care to pester the landowner in order to visit the site itself. Meanwhile, the events surrounding Mountain Meadows (1857) and Wounded Knee (1890) together take up almost half the book. Mountain Meadows in particular – perhaps because of a contemporary controversy involving the Mormon church (they still seem intent on obscuring their own involvement) – makes for a compelling read. McMurtry is careful to present his own work as a distillation, a summing up. He writes,

“All these books attempt to describe what happened on that dreadful September day in 1857, when a large wagon train on its way from Arkansas to California was massacred by a force composed of local Mormons and Paiute Indians. (Even here body counts differ: I thought 121 people were killed, but Sally Denton puts the count at 140.)

“These various studies also attempt to determine why the massacre happened, and – biggest and most intractable question – who, if anyone, in the Mormon hierarchy ordered the killing. For nearly 150 years the finger of inquiry has been pointed at Brigham Young; it’s an issue still very much in debate."

A few chapters later, McMurtry’s treatment of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee (familiar to us all through Dee Brown’s canonical Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee) is given a similar, thoughtful handling. He begins with the kind of generalization that only a learned student of Western history might feel confident in making:

“The two decades between the Camp Grant Massacre in 1871 and the final carnage at Wounded Knee Creek at the very end of 1890, were years in which the Indians of the West, from southern Arizona and northern Texas all the way north to Canada and west from the Missouri River to the lava beds of northern California, where the Modocs mounted their final, futile resistance, slowly lost their freedom, their land, and their way of life."

He goes on to vividly describe that infamous slaughter of innocents at Wounded Knee, a result of white jitters (just how “settled" were the Sioux?) paired with the coincidental rise of an Indian messianic cult (the Ghost Dance). It was a cold winter day, a blizzard on its way. There were over one hundred warriors camped with the Sioux chief, Big Foot. A Ghost Dancer named Yellow Bird might have blown an eagle-bone whistle. In the process of confiscating weapons, a rifle was fired, perhaps accidentally. A white officer might have been wounded or killed. And then...

“Once the soldiers began to fire into the crowd, a frenzy developed that was not much different from the killing frenzies at the other massacres. Fear, nervousness, blind rage all contributed to a force that was soon unstoppable. The Sioux either fought or fled, and were hunted down in either case. Some got as far as two miles from the point of eruption before they fell...The point, if there is one, is that in situations of high tension it takes only one vague, perhaps accidental, action to start a violent spasm of killing."

Unfortunately, most of the rest of this slim book fails to live up to this same level of authorial care and respect. As a memorial and an attempt to roil the pot of history, to bring certain lamentable chunks of Western record back to the surface, Oh What a Slaughter is a successful book. As an exercise in scholarship, however, it is largely unnecessary (most of what McMurtry contributes is readily available elsewhere). And as an exercise in narrative, it is mostly a missed opportunity. Given the level of writing that we might have expected from this particular author (his very real ability to bring events alive through character and setting), and given the richness of the subject matter, we mostly come away from Oh What a Slaughter feeling, oh so disappointed.

[End of article]