Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier

Battles and massacres are intimate affairs for combatants and others involved, their physical and emotional violence often stemming from fervor and fear. Although mass killing characterizes both battles and massacres, the two are profoundly different. Battles take place between armed forces; massacres are one-sided events in which most of the dead are innocent victims. Yet the fog of war shrouds both massacres and battles in a functional amnesia. Participants remember what exactly happened during such a violent encounter only imperfectly, and later clarity cannot always rectify accounts thus rendered. Even naming the events as battles or massacres already imposes an interpretive framework upon them. This unique study centers on four critical engagements between Anglo-American and American Indians on the southwestern frontier: the Battle of Cieneguilla (1854), the Battle of Adobe Walls (1864), the Sand Creek Massacre (1864), and the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857). Editors Ronald K. Wetherington and Frances Levine juxtapose historical and archaeological perspectives on each event to untangle the ambiguity and controversy that surround both historical and more contemporary accounts of each of these violent outbreaks. Both disciplines, the contributors make clear, yield surprisingly similar narratives and interpretive agreement; and the lessons learned from these nineteenth-century killing fields about wartime reporting and command failures remain relevant today. Ronald K. Wetherington is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University. Among his numerous articles and books in both physical anthropology and archaeology are Readings in the History of Evolutionary Theory and Ceran St. Vrain: American Frontier Entrepreneur. Frances Levine, Director of the New Mexico History Museum, is the author of Our Prayers Are in This Place: Pecos Pueblo Identity over the Centuries and Telling New Mexico. With contributions by T. Lindsay Baker, J. Brett Cruse, Will Gorenfeld, Shannon Novak, Lars Rodseth, Douglas D. Scott, and Joe Watkins