The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (34 page)

After cutting through the last underbrush and Indians, Aguirre reemerged into Spanish territory on the other side of South America, and almost immediately stole Margarita Island on the Caribbean coast from the Spanish garrison. While trying to establish an independent empire on Margarita, he saw plots and schemes everywhere, and he ended up killing almost everyone in his entourage. When he tried to expan
d his operation into Panama, the authorities moved in and rooted him out. As the Spanish forces closed in, Aguirre’s last act was to kill his daughter so no one else could have her. The authorities cut Aguirre’s body into four parts and distributed them for display all over Spanish America.

North America

By the time the English, French, and Dutch began to stake out colonies in North America, the worst was over for the main centers of native civilization. In the grand scheme of things, the centuries of continuous wars between the North American Indians and the Anglo-Americans were secondary to the devastation wrought on the densely populated Meso-American, Andean, and Caribbean heartlands. Be that as it may, the United States is the world’s current hegemon, and the eradication of the Native Americans is generally considered America’s greatest national sin, so people argue about Wounded Knee more than they argue about Atahualpa.

A quick rundown of the sixteen deadliest events of the Anglo-American frontier should give the flavor of who did what to whom:

March 22, 1622:
The Powhatans killed 347 English settlers—men, women, and children—a third of the Virginia colony’s population, with coordinated attacks up and down the James River.

1623:
After negotiating a peace treaty with the rebellious Chiskiack tribe on the Potomac River, the English brought out wine to toast the end of hostilities. It was poisoned, and 200 Chiskiack leaders keeled over dead. The English slaughtered the survivors.
¹⁷

May 26, 1637:
Connecticut militia surrounded a Pequot town on the Mystic River, setting fire to the houses and burning the trapped villagers. Around 600 Pequots, mostly women and children, died in the flames or were shot down as they tried to escape.
¹⁸

1675–76, King Philip’s War:
In the usual pattern of frontier warfare, one killing led to three killings, which led to a full raid, until everyone was killing someone. Entire villages were wiped out, and captives were skinned, scalped, burned, and dismembered by both sides. Three thousand Indians and 600 settlers were killed, and the head of Metacom, the Wampanoag leader known to the settlers as King Philip, was displayed on a pole in Plymouth for many years afterward.
¹⁹

August 8, 1757:
After being surrounded by overwhelming force, the British-American garrison of Fort William Henry in New York agreed to surrender its fort and weapons to the French in exchange for safe passage home. The native Abenaki allies of the French didn’t like those terms, so they attacked the unarmed British column in the open, killing a couple of hundred of the easier targets—women, children, the sick, the wounded, and so on.

July 1778:
A raid by Loyalists and Iroquois into the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania killed 360 settlers.
²⁰

November 4, 1791:
Miami and Wabash Indians under Little Turtle attacked a column led by Arthur St. Clair in the Northwest Territory, killing 623 U.S. soldiers and two dozen civilian camp followers.
²¹

August 30, 1813:
Creek Indians of the Red Stick faction captured Fort Mims in Alabama and massacred up to 500 frightened white settlers and noncombatant Creeks of the rival White Stick faction who had taken refuge there.
²²

March 27, 1814:
General Andrew Jackson’s soldiers killed more than 500 Creek warriors in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama.
²³

1837–38, Trail of Tears:
President Andrew Jackson expelled all of the Indians still living east of the Mississippi River and herded them into new lands in the West. Because the Cherokee had recently lived in peace with the Americans and were still numerous and prosperous, they had much more to lose and were especially hard hit in this ethnic cleansing. Some 18,000 Cherokee were cast out of their homeland in and around Georgia, and at least 4,000, possibly 8,000, died of cold, hunger, exhaustion, or disease before they got to Oklahoma.
²⁴

August 18, 1862:
Santee Sioux attacked small family farms up and down the Minnesota frontier, killing and mutilating 400 settlers in the opening raids. Altogether, some 800 settlers died as fighting continued over the next month. As punishment, 38 Indians were hanged in the largest mass execution in American history.
²⁵

January 29, 1863:
California militia killed about 250 Shoshoni villagers, including 90 women and children, on Bear River in Idaho.

November 29, 1864:
Colorado militia attacked a peaceful village on Sand Creek suddenly at dawn and massacred 163 Cheyenne.
²⁶

January 23, 1870:
The U.S. Army attacked a village of Piegan Blackfeet in Montana, killing 173, including 90 women and 50 children.
²⁷

June 25, 1876, Battle of the Little Bighorn:
While attacking a large Indian encampment, Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was driven off, cornered, and wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne. The toll was 267 U.S. soldiers killed.

December 29, 1890, Wounded Knee:
A refugee band of Miniconjou Sioux, mostly women and children, had surrendered to the U.S. Army. While the prisoners were being disarmed, shots were fired. Confusion erupted, and everyone with a gun started using it, including army machine-gunners overlooking the refugees. When the smoke cleared, 128 (officially) or 300 (unofficially) Sioux and 25 U.S. soldiers were dead. It was the last major event of the Indian Wars.
²⁸

For those of you keeping score at home, that comes to:

Massacre or ethnic cleansing by whites against Indians:
7

Massacre or ethnic cleansing by Indians against whites:
4

War or battle in which the Indians badly beat the whites:
3

War or battle in which the whites badly beat the Indians:
2

This indicates that blatant atrocities outnumbered honest warfare by about two to one—and I’m using a
very
loose definition of honest warfare that includes taking no prisoners. Although the North American Indian Wars are too complicated to be explained in a short narrative summary, the most decisive turning point was 1815. Before then, the Indians were players in larger geopolitical conflicts between the French, British, Spanish, and Americans. This gave individual tribes powerful allies, protectors, and sponsors. After 1815, however, all of the white nations had settled their differences, and the Indians were on their own against the advancing Americans.

Amazonia

The Amazonian rain forest became the world’s last haven for unassimilated Indians, but these tribes were largely destroyed in the twentieth century. Out of an original 230 surviving Indian tribes in Brazil in 1900, eighty-seven went extinct by 1957. During the same period, the Indian population of Brazil crashed from 1 million to 200,000.
²⁹
The story for each tribe was usually the same. Some vital resource—gold, oil, rubber, hydroelectric potential—would be discovered deep in the jungle, and civilization would come crashing down on the local inhabitants in order to exploit it. The forest would be tamed and cleared, along with any animal or Indian life that got in the way.

Many of the Indians disappeared without any record, but some genocides happened recently enough to be well documented. The Ache Indians of Paraguay fell to repeated massacre, rape, and robbery when a new road was cut into their territory in 1968. The Yanomami on the border between Brazil and Venezuela were overrun by gold miners in the 1980s and devastated by new diseases, rape, gunfights, and the chemical runoff from mining, which poisoned the streams.

Distemper Tyrannis

European cruelties were responsible for only a fraction of the Indians who died during the conquest of the Americas. Disease took the rest. For centuries the large, intertwined populations of Eurasia and Africa had been exchanging diseases with each other across trade routes, giving the Old World races improved levels of resistance as generation after generation was naturally selected for those who could survive smallpox, measles, and influenza. The Native Americans, however, were biologically naive and totally susceptible. Entire villages died of these new diseases shortly after first contact.

Should we condemn the Europeans for these deaths by disease? It’s a tricky moral point, and naturally you find par
tisans of all extremes.

On one side, you’ll find the argument that most Indians died of disease, and disease isn’t genocid
e, period. The defense rests.

Stephen Katz: “When mass death occurred among the Indians of America . . . it was almost without exception caused by microbes, not militia . . . that is, this depopulation happened unwittingly rather than by design, even transpiring in direct opposition to the expressed and self interested will of the white empire-builder or settler.”
³⁰

In fact, earlier generations saw the land as being swept clean by the hand of God to make way for the newcomers. Tragic, yes, but it was germs not men that killed the Indians. By this viewpoint, European resistance to disease was a manifestation of an innate superiority.

Governor Winthrop of colonial Massachusetts: “God hath therefore cleared our title to this place.”
³¹

On the other hand, some writers want to blame the Europeans entirely for the disease that arrived with them. They accuse the Europeans of being unclean—physically, spiritually, and morally—and the diseases they brought with them would almost seem to be a symptom of thoroughly sick culture:

David Stannard: “Roadside ditches, filled with stagnant water, served as public latrines in the [Spanish] cities of the fifteenth century. . . . Along with the stench and repulsive appearance of the openly displayed dead, human and animal alike, a modern visitor to a European city in this era would be repelled by the appearance and vile aromas given by the living as well. Most people never bathed, not once in an entire lifetime. Almost everyone had his or her brush with smallpox and other deforming diseases that left survivors partially blinded, pock-marked, or crippled.”
³²

Most writers grudgingly accept that we can’t really
blame
the Europeans for being immune to the diseases that killed the natives, but it’s hardly playing fair, is it?

James Loewen: “ ‘One can only speculate what the outcome of the rivalry might have been if the impact of European diseases on the American population had not been so devastating. . . .’ After all, Native Americans had driven off Samuel de Champlain when he had tried to settle in Massachusetts in 1606. The following year, Abenakis had helped expel the first Plymouth Company settlement from Maine.”
³³

Jared Diamond: “Infectious diseases played a decisive role in European conquests . . . by decimating many peoples on other continents. For example, a smallpox epidemic devastated the Aztecs after the failure of the first Spanish attack in 1520 and killed Cuitl[a]huac, the Aztec emperor who briefly succeeded Montezuma. . . . The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600s, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River.”
³⁴

In many ways, it doesn’t matter what killed the Indians because we usually add death by disease and famine into the total cost of wars and repressions anyway. Anne Frank died of typhus, not p
oison gas, but she’s still counted as a victim of the Holocaust. The same standard should apply to the Amerindian population collapse, as long as the deaths occurred
after
their society had already been disrupted by direct European hostility. If a tribe was enslaved or driven off its lands, the associated increase in the number of deaths by disease would definitely count toward the atrocity; however, if someone merely sneezed on a tribe at first contact, it should not count.