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Review: 'Shadows at Dawn,' an Apache massacre
Monday, November 24, 2008
Filed Under: Arts & Entertainment

"In the predawn hours of April 30, 1871, a group of attackers ambushed an encampment of Apaches in Aravaipa Canyon, outside the town of Tuscon. 144 people — overwhelmingly women and children — were slaughtered. This much we know at the outset of Shadows at Dawn, by Brown University historian Karl Jacoby. We also know who these attackers were, for the most part: an unlikely alliance of white settlers, Spanish-speaking landholders known as vecinos and members of an opposing tribe, the Tohono O'odham. But rather than tie these four groups' tales together into a standard history of what became known as the Camp Grant Massacre — one of the most brutal and sensational acts in the American Southwest of the late 19th century — Jacoby breaks them out separately, to better unpack what he calls the "palimpsest of many stories" surrounding the massacre. The goal is to add nuance to the accepted narratives of the American frontier as cowboy vs. Indian, good vs. bad, Manifest Destiny vs. native Americans' ancient claim to the land.

It's a pleasant surprise, then, that much of the rest of Shadows at Dawn is a crisply readable history — four of them, in fact, with the Apache, the Anglos, the vecinos and the O'odham allotted two chapters each. Jacoby does a good job outlining the causes of the massacre from each point of view, whether historical, cultural or geographical. In some cases, maybe too good a job: the litany of abuses attributed to the Apache by their attackers as justification for the massacre reads less like a Southwestern Rashomon and more like Murder on the Orient Express — every hand on the knife with its own, separate grievance. But even better is the way in which he paints a picture of the often intimate relationships and shifting loyalties between each group: a previously straightforward tale of atrocity becomes one shaded by historical grudges on top of intermarriage, tribal mistrust on top of individual friendship, all funneled towards a tragic climax by the shifting ground of history."

Get the Story:
A Massacre Explained (Time Magazine 11/24)

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