May 4, 2019, 2019 Book #13: ‘Big Sycamore Stands Alone: The Western Apaches, Aravaipa, and the Struggle for Place’ by Ian Record. This is the third modern historical work that I’ve read that discusses the Camp Grant Massacre, what once was viewed as an obscure vigilante perpetrated massacre against reservation Apache Indians that has now received extensive review. Thanks to this 2008 book, and the other two, I feel I have a comprehensive view of what happened there and why, and the enduring consequences of the Massacre, what my great great grandfather, Royal Emerson Whitman called a “most vile transaction.” (The other two books are Karl Jacoby’s ‘Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History’ (focusing on the event from the perspectives of the four different ethnic groups involved, the Tohono O’odhams, the Mexicans, the Anglos, and the Apaches) and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh’s ‘Massacre at Camp Grant; Forgetting and Remembering Apache History’ (each chapter addresses a different perspective of historiography on the event, with the final chapter providing perspectives on justice and reconciliation and the benefits and detriments of both remembering and forgetting history).) In Big Sycamore, the author, Record, approaches the event as an ethnographer, weaving together the lives of the Western Apache, present and past, focusing on the Western Apaches’ view of place, the Aravaipa Canyon, and how their relationship with “Arapa” (their name for this land), their sacred homeland, continues to evolve and shape Western Apache society. The central event of Western Apache history, and the focus of the book is the Camp Grant Massacre. Leading to it and from it, Record provides a review of the historical record of the event, contemporary oral histories of individuals from the San Carlos reservation (where the Western Apache were relocated after the massacre), and detailed reporting of Western Apache economic, political, and social organization in pre-reservation times. It should be noted that the Western Apaches were more agrarian than the Eastern Apache bands which were far more involved in the Indian Wars (e.g. Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahua Apaches). The book provides detailed insights into Western Apaches’ complex subsistence strategies of farming, hunting, and gathering, and provides background on the various forces fueling the Anglo, Mexican, and Tohono O’odham vigilantes’ decision to attack the Western Apaches resident at the make-shift Camp Grant reservation. The book probably has the best explanation of the economic forces driving the hostilities of Tucsonites against US Army policy, propelling locals toward encouraging, planning, perpetrating and defending the Massacre. One interesting fact reported by Record is that at the time of the Massacre 1/10th of the entire US Army was stationed in the Arizona Territory, trying to keep the peace and/or round up or eradicate the various Apache bands off reservation.
rwb historically speaking 