‘Vast Domain of Blood: The Story of the Camp Grant Massacre’, by Don Schellie, foreword by Barry Goldwater. Written in 1968, the first of five books written about the Camp Grant Massacre of which I’m aware, ‘Vast Domain of Blood’ is an account of the massacre and subsequent trial. On April 30, 1871, some 146 men from the Tucson area (six Anglo-Americans, 48 Mexican-Americans, and 92 Tohono O’odham) massacred approximately 130 Apaches from the Aravaipa and Pinal bands, all but two of which (an old man and teen male) were women and children, who at the time were residing at Camp Grant, a make shift US Army reservation in Arizona Territory. The author, using resources available at the time (more have come available since ’68), recreates the event and trial using journals, newspaper accounts, military records, and the trial transcript, taking some fictional liberties for historical flavoring (a la Jeff Shaara). Some 98 men (80 Tohonos, 12 Mexican-Americans, and six Anglos) were put on trial for the massacre at the insistence of President US Grant (who’d vowed to impose martial law if the grand jury failed to delivery an indictment leading to the trial). All defendants were acquitted, in just 12 minutes, by a jury of their peers, their fellow Tucson townsmen. The book’s title, Vast Domain of Blood, is a direct quote from the jury instructions given by the presiding judge, Arizona Territory Chief Justice John Titus, delivered at the end of the December 1871 trial of the defendants (on three counts of conspiracy to commit murder and one count of murder). The penultimate paragraph of the Judge’s instructions, quoted below, reads more or less like judicial justification for the massacre, as if it were justifiable homicide, a type of legalized murder that would make the writers of the Minority Report movie proud (there is nothing fictional about the following quote):
‘… If there ever was a case in which the law of life–Thou shalt not kill–announced in the oldest and most revered of all known codes, and repeated in every one promulgated since, should be most cautiously applied, it is the present one in which the defendants have been schooled to agonizing apprehension, where the blood red line of a “a troubled frontier” is expanded into a vast domain of blood, where the very roads are traced by the gore and the graves of fallen wayfarers, where every copse may shelter its skulking murderers, where the very atmosphere is heavy with death, and where brave and honest men are compelled by stealthy night travel to avoid the light of day, lest it should guide the lead or steel of the assassin to the heart or the brain of his victim. I do not mean that–here or elsewhere–the boundaries of right and wrong should vibrate like a weaver’s shuttle, but in a case such as the present, we should test the motive of the defendants by every actuating circumstance, to ascertain whether that motive was malice, or morbid apprehension, or a maddening sense of wrong, or misconceived right, or intolerable suffering, or gloomy despair, or conflicting impulses, involving these defendants in moral darkness, and impelling them in spite of themselves to do the deed charged in the indictment…’
rwb historically speaking 